Hanging together in a touch
friendship and mourning in the melancholic limits of man
pp. 63-91
in: Dominik Ohrem, Matthew Calarco (eds), Exploring animal encounters, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
Reading Chris Clarke's Walking with Zeke with and against Martin Heidegger's philosophical project, especially key moments of anxiety and uncertainty around the human-animal distinction, this essay explores and seeks to rework the thematics of friendship, mourning, and melancholia. Taking seriously the claim that philosophical thought should let go of the human-animal distinction, this essay explores those instances in which things touch, of the even most minimal degree of distance within indistinction which provides the conditions of possibility for touch. In the course of this analysis, I forestall and complicate the potential of touch to be a reparative gesture, concluding that the work of mourning can, in the end, be the problem for an ethics of letting go.
