Political Lament: Extinction,Grief,and Embodied Silence

The Tragic and the Elegiac

Unamuno’s conceptualization of the tragic is connected to his understanding of lived existence being mapped out in embodied feeling. He writes, “I…am immediately my living body” (Unamuno, 2016: 84). This embodied co-feeling is the fruit of consciousness, which is not the result of what he calls the anti-vitalist dominance of the intellect. Rather, it is a sense of interconnection with the ongoing, evolutionary process of what he calls the personalization of the universe. This is not a teleological reading of the cosmos such as those found in grand narrative accounts of the emergence of religious consciousness (see Haught, 2017. For a critique, see Sideris, 2017). For the Spanish poet and philosopher, “Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, co-feeling, and co-feeling is compassion” (Unamuno, 2016: 139). This co-feeling which brings together love and pity extends to all that is both living and non-living. This is particularly true with the experience of pain. He writes, “On hearing my brother [or sister] give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive…we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live” (Unamuno, 2016: 141).

The evolutionary history of suffering is the process from which personalization emerges, though the risk of the process entails the outcome was never sure. Nonetheless, the emergent properties of suffering gave rise to the personal and so, in Unamuno’s reading, personalized the universe as God. The inquirer “discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness…[a]nd this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God” (Unamuno, 2016: 139). For Unamuno (2016), then, all of nature is “an infinite society” where living animals and plants and even individual cells comprise a living community (2016: 150). The intimacy of this community arises in not only the emergence of life, but in the constant warp and weft of life giving rise to death. This is an embodied co-feeling of suffering experienced between selves and within each self. “In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their sudden and violent death constitutes our pain” (Unamuno, 2016: 149). This constant production of life and death likewise has a reciprocal relationship with divinity where Unamuno writes that God is simultaneously producing and being produced. Here he writes poetically that our galaxy is but a molecule and the universe is the body of God (Unamuno, 2016: 148).

The intimacy generated in suffering is particularly poignant in the relationship between predator and prey. Being combatants, consuming and being consumed, “establishes an association” wherein individuals and whole groups are brought together in suffering and its role in a world of co-feeling (Unamuno, 2016: 111). Unamuno sees this in the militaristic endeavors of nations but also in the economic commerce that leads one to consume another. When viewed in light of the preceding discussion, capital’s extractive and unending consumption of the earth and its inhabitants is also a consumption of God. However, this consumption is not the Eucharistic practice of humility which mediates divine connection, but rather the exploitative pathologies where the personalization of the world, other species, and even ourselves is denied, objectified, and relegated to a product that will become waste. In this sense, the petro-state has made God a waste product to be discarded along with the co-feeling of sympathy which might generate alternative modes of relating.

For those who protest this, the elegiac mode has both public and personal resonance. It establishes a public where lament is not merely a discourse but an embodied practice intended to subvert our consumptive tendencies. Conservation ethicist Ben Minteer (2019) notes the role of the elegiac in countering the triumphalist tendencies of positive Anthropocene narratives (2019: 109–112). It is not a matter of engendering a paralyzing guilt-complex, writes Minteer but rather somber reflection aimed at “absorbing the moral lessons of extinction” within a “boisterous anthropocentric ethos” (2019: 110). For scholars of religion, this opens the question of how does one embody the elegiac in public spaces. In light of the ongoing antipathy of political institutions and the populist animus aimed at degrading ecological communities, what role has the academic?

Charles Matthewes (2007) asks the question of the type of public life theology has. In his work, he argues for an Augustinian understanding of the eschatological role of the church and the inadequacy of temporal institutions to respond. In this regard, he states that “all political entities are failed churches” (2007: 175). Matthewes recognizes the failure of political institutions to curb their own destructive tendencies and that each one must be recognized as penultimate within an Augustinian framework. However, this same framework, epistemologically shielded with an ever-present eschatological caveat, fails to grapple with the fundamental ways the church has participated in those same consumptive practices and the populist sentiment against both the scholarly investigations and political movements aimed at recognizing the integrity of natural life in its myriad forms. It fails to recognize that the church is also a failed church. Matthewes’ (2007) emphasis on dogmatic clarification and discursive practices neglects the type of embodied lament illustrated in Unamuno’s thought. Matthewes is cognizant of the complexity and turmoil of living in dark times. He argues (Matthews, 2010) for an ambivalence toward the failed political workings of our modern world in favour of pursuit of the Augustinian virtues of hope and love. The ambivalence of Augustine toward a life full of ambiguity and shortfalls, according to Matthewes, is difficult not because we are more connected with the world, but because we are more adept at distracting ourselves from it (2010: 10). He argues that in turning Augustinian hope into untenable utopias, cynicism – rather than virtuous ambivalence – has become the societal modus operandi. However, he proceeds to describe the current nature of the world as a training ground in the virtues that lead practitioners of those virtues toward the eschatological kingdom of God. Therefore, while this might lead Christian persons to be present in the world and sensitively attuned to its political shortcomings, from the perspective of this argument it does not overcome the type of antipathy to the Earth outlined here. It does not because the world remains instrumental to human concerns. For Matthewes, the world has instrumental value in training for the virtues of an eschatological reality while the current petro-state views it as instrumental for its extractive potential. To be sure these are not the same thing. However, in Matthewes’s viewing the world in instrumentalizing ways it is difficult to see how the underlying anthropocentric problem is overcome. In each case, the intrinsic integrity of the Earth and its inhabitants is negated. Matthewes has at his disposal ample conceptual resources to critique the ecocidal tendencies of the current politics, but in maintaining the eschatological caveat for the Church he neglects the vital role of lament and the embodied, evolutionary connections between religious persons and the natural world and perpetuates the very same instrumentalizing imaginary for the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. How might a religious scholar embody grief and lament, not as passive resignation, but as a subversion of the petro-state and capital’s consumption? To respond I will briefly sketch some ideas gleaned from the work of Merleau-Ponty and embodied silence in public spaces.

Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Silence

At the close of his magnum opus on perception, Merleau-Ponty (2012) turns to a reflection on the nature of freedom. In considering the embodied realities that humans inhabit one with another, Merleau-Ponty concludes that with the confrontation of another, particularly one who is enslaved, “it is precisely here that we must remain silent, for only the hero fully lives his relation…with the world, and it is hardly fitting for another to speak in [another’s] name” (2012: 483). As with Unamuno, here too, consciousness is understood in embodied, relational terms. Consciousness of one’s own limitations only arises when one is confronted with a lack of impediments in others (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 458). Thus, a realization of freedom is what gives rise to impediments and limitations upon that very freedom (2012: 464). Philosopher Glen Mazis (2016) reflects on this portion of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and argues that such silence is “the prelude to a truly meaningful act: to pause, listen, and inhabit the silence that permeates the world” (2016: 7).

For Merleau-Ponty, meaningful acts arise not from the cacophony of media chatter or the goading of disingenuous disputes that were never the portend of being a dialogue. Instead, they are what occurs between articulations. In a societal public where the scholar is deemed elitist for the use of too many words, Merleau-Ponty (1964) offers an alternative view to the articulation of meaning. In an essay on indirect speech and silent voices he argues that “we must uncover the threads of silence that speech is mixed together with” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 46). Here expression and meaning are conveyed not so much in words as what is between words (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 45). He thus launches into a reflection on the nature of painting as a silent, yet embodied, expression and acknowledges that all language is in some sense silence (1964: 43). Mazis (2016) argues that this notion of silence in Merleau-Ponty does not fall into a simple binary with sound. It is a silence that “requires a certain openness of encounter with the world” and is an embodied, “co-emergent process” of “enfolding” with another being (Mazis, 2016: 10–11). The co-emergence expressed in the intertwining of flesh entails a relationship between the world’s expressiveness, articulation in language, and physical gesture (Mazis, 2016: 22). The silent world of painting is a type of flesh where the world gestures toward us and we emerge in embodied relation with it (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 54).

Mazis’s (2016) argument that embodied silence is not a mere oppositional binary of sound ensures that the kind of silence proposed in this argument does not become a silencing of those who are marginalized. Rather, it becomes a mode of political subversion that listens and seeks to enhance the lives of other species as they live in their own environs: domestic, pastoral, urban, industrial and wild. Hence, the silence before the enslaved admonished by Merleau-Ponty has acute resonance when faced with the enslavement of other species and the destruction of their habitat. The silence that occurs between words is not simplistically the exclusion of words, but rather is what Karen Bray (2020) calls “grave attending.” The turn to the melancholic and grief seen in grave attending is a refusal of the societal demands for wounded people to be heroically resilient and also operates as a critique of the unrelenting optimism of positive Anthropocene narratives with their uncritical affirmation that human ingenuity – with its anthropocentric foundations – will save the living world. Bray (2020) speaks of an “unceasing demand for perpetual hearing” that critiques the false necessity felt by dominant groups to speak (2020: 172). She writes, “Grave attending is a caring for the gravity, the pulling down to the material world, listening for what all its myriad emotions have to tell us, and where they have to lead us…the ghosts that haunt us and so gift us a sense of what we might have been and an imagination of what we might become” (Bray, 2020: 56). Grief becomes subversive in refusing to participate on the terms set by triumphalist or extractive narratives of what constitutes politically valid speech. Silence is an acknowledgment of the necessity of listening to the more-than-human world and learning from the movements of other species and the Earth in the throes of ecocide.

What does this possibility of a plurality of meanings, expressed in embodied silence, entail amid mass extinction of animal and plant species or the personal encounters with animal suffering witnessed by the scholar? In grieving the ecocidal tendencies of the current politic and in mourning that which is deemed unworthy of grief – such as a wounded elk – the scholar subverts the terms of public participation set by the petro-state. As with Bray’s work on melancholic affect and the notion of haunting, Merleau-Ponty (1993) writes in an essay on Cézanne, “[A]ssociated bodies must be revived along with my body – ‘others,’ not merely as my congeners, as the zoologist says, but others who haunt me and whom I haunt; ‘other’ along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal ever haunted those of his own species, territory, or habitat” (1993: 160). Humans both haunt and are haunted, though not in equivalent ways. Humans have come to haunt all species and the habitats that allow for their sustenance. Humanity’s predatory ingenuity has nurtured its own ecocidal publics through the consumptive practices that turn both earth’s inhabitants and divinity into by-products of waste. However, in grief we are also haunted. The liveliness of what once was and the extinction of earth’s biodiversity remain and are ever-present. Conservation efforts constantly reflect upon the loss of the heath hen, the Thylacine, or the passenger pigeon, the latter whom Aldo Leopold (1989) lamented as “the funeral of a species [that] symbolizes our sorrow” (1989: 108).

To be haunted in the face of such loss is to invite silence and grief. This is not the grief of a lengthy obituary, but the silence borne out in the body in what occurs between words, and between my flesh and the flesh of the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 138–145). Such a silence is not political passivity, but rather a subversive embodied practice that refuses to participate on the terms of the neoliberal petro-state. It identifies the terms set by such publics as illegitimate and ecocidal. In refusing to participate on terms set by such publics, it bears witness to new types of practices and new publics to embody. It is less the parade of human ingenuity and more a funeral procession of the pathos arising from extinction. As such it bears witness to new terms of practice and what might be necessary for new modes of being to arise. It grieves in a public space where only triumphalist narratives of human technical prowess are welcome in a positive spin on Anthropocene narratives. Just as Merleau-Ponty argues that silence is what occurs between words and gives rise to meaningful action, embodied silence as a public act of political subversion changes what it means to act. “Thus, the idea of action disappears: nothing can pass from us to the world, since we are nothing determinate and since the non-being that constitutes us could not slip itself into the saturated world” (Merleau-Ponty, 2016: 461). And yet in this mode of inaction, this silent expression, comes the possibility of newness. In refusing to converse on the triumphalist terms of the petro-state and with a public that extols only human ingenuity, silent lament is a public, embodied practice that exposes the need to grieve and the loss that continues to haunt.

Conclusion

Unamuno (2016) argued that “from the depth of unhappiness springs new life” (2016: 57). This sense of the tragic is a mode of embodying what happens between the scholar of religion and the politics of the petro-state, and what occurs between the scholar of religion and bearing witness to the consuming of God. This lament embodies the affective response to the extractive and consumptive animus that resulted in the loss of the passenger pigeon, the collapse of insect populations and their central role in healthy ecosystems (see Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019), or the suffering of an individual elk. In each case, the scholar of religion and the public theologian offer a unique framing of this loss as a loss of the divine within the material. Lament denies itself a way to avoid the confrontation with extinction insofar as it denies itself triumphal locution. It also denies itself the eschatological caveat of a triumphalist ecclesiology. It inverts whole political processes and narratives of growth and technical salvation. Grief already experiences loss and embodied lament refuses participation in such heroic structures. Yet, political lament is also generative. It reminds those structures that they are haunted, and that they are predatory. Indeed, they are haunted because they are predatory. Embodied silence as an act of political subversion allows the scholar of religion to reorient the direction of the societal gaze from a cacophony of populist refusal in order to look toward what has been lost and what is now threatened. It sees the transcendent in the imminent and acknowledges the divinity present in natural processes and beings. It denies an inward turn and recourse to narratives of human ingenuity. It points a way forward by pointing outward. In looking outward, it finds relational capacities in our own animality connected with the animality of diverse species. It does not subvert with anything like a sure hope of real change (De la Torre, 2017), but it gestures to new life from the depths of unhappiness.