Off Centre.

16 This discussion of eccentricity begins, and this is already an indication of its technique, with a quotation from the textual productions of the “centre,” for what could be more central than science, here employed to contemplate the demarcation lines between animal and human? But all is not as it should be, for while a reference to the impressive size of the human brain may be counted among the standard markers of human superiority over animals, this first quotation already veers off into a rather uncategorizable investigation of the value of human dental equipment which, we are told, “in some cases, differ[s] in the order of succession” from animals. So it is dentistry that is to establish human “anatomical pre-eminence,” a claim which must appear patently absurd in the face of shark teeth, mosquito sucking devices, or the elegant (but nearly toothless!) equipment of poison snakes.

17 The second attempt “from the centre,” which now seeks its grounding in primatology, fares no better and leads to an even more profound questioning of the centrality of human beings. Humans, we are told, have travelled to visit the “backward nations” of the apes in order to learn their language (in keeping with the spirit of an age – 1933 of all years! –marked by a “new and friendly interest that is shown between nations”). But the question as to what and who is central here and what “outside” is immediately complicated beyond our power to disentangle it: humans, it seems, need to move into a cage if they want to observe the apes in safety, thus leaving the apes free to roam the countryside and the humans – like apes? – in cages. Traditionally human attributes like self-determination, liberty, control, etc. are assigned to the apes while the humans – in “centered” misrecognition of their true condition – try to reduce the cage to a “practical invisibility” with the help of their “imaginative and idealistic minds.” Without a doubt humans are “inside” here and the apes “outside”: but this is a reversal of what would normally be positioned as “inside” the centre and “outside” it. If anything, it is the “outside” which appears as a centre in the sense that it is assigned the qualities of the human, but this centre is given over to the apes. This scrambling of the relative locations of “inside” and “outside,” of centre and non-centre, and finally of the direction from which we are supposed to observe these positionings is precisely what we would call a technique of eccentricity which this text deploys in order to thoroughly upset the place of the human in terms of animal-human differentiation by shifting the parameters without actually creating a new centre of perception.

18 Are the apes here safe from human idiocy because they cannot pronounce the word “Mamma”? After all, this is what protects them from this text’s curiously reformulated version of the Oedipus complex which diagnoses in every human male a desire to be the only son of a widow (a conclusion from the proposition that the Oedipus complex would make every male want to sleep with his mother, kill his father, and tolerate no siblings in the vicinity). This Oedipal desire, which takes the linguistic form of someone saying “Mamma,” is held to be responsible for human males seeking to kill each other in large numbers in recurring historical cycles: after all what better way to reduce the number of siblings and fathers and leave as many widows behind as possible?

19 While we are on the topic of defining the human, what should we make of the story of Mary Clark’s little daughter who was diagnosed – again by science – to have been in perfect health for five days while there was “not the least indication of either cerebrum, cerebellum, or any medullary substance whatever”? One might be tempted to see this as a simple satire directed at incompetent medical doctors. But in the passage’s further development, it is precisely the direction which this story should be looked at which causes problems. For surprisingly, it is not the stupidity of doctors which forms the nucleus of the story (after all, this would just confirm ex negativo their relevance as centres of knowledge and power). Rather, the perspective moves to the brain-deprived baby, “whose supreme ordinariness and resemblance to other human beings was proved by the fact that it did not know that is was alive,” and it is this baby that is given the last word on eccentricity, somehow crookedly embodying eccentricity in its off-centre view of the world: “a dumb but pregnant comment on life.”

20 What exactly is the import of this “dumb but pregnant comment on life” is made to remain enigmatic, imprecise, and this too is one of the techniques of eccentricity. To name the point of attack unambiguously and thus free the reader from having to solve the riddle of eccentric perception would be precisely taking up a definite position (for example ”humans are dead in life,” “being without consciousness is desirable, “ ”matter is real beyond the diagnoses of medics”, etc.). Naming a precise point from which this observation is launched would mean to once again locate the critique within the everyday regimes of logic and of meaning. Instead of this, the passage projects a place from which this critique may not so much be understood as intuited, a place outside, without speech and “dumb,” a hypothetical point from which the dead baby (or the baby living without a cerebrum) may voice a damning condemnation of the centre – of any centre of meaning – whose very condemnation consists of an indifferent turning away rather than an antagonistic mooring in an identifiable oppositional stance.