Augustine's repeated returns to Genesis allow him to revisit
and readdress vexing topics. One of these is the question of the animal.
He predominantly focuses on animals as tools for training human virtue
(e.g. poisonous animals) or as examples of the incomprehensibility of
divine mystery (e.g superfluous animals). Yet Augustine's returns to Genesis
also lead him to acknowledge a commonality between humans and animals,
namely the experience of bodily pain (cf. Cizewski 1993). This paper
explores the transgressive limits of physical pain and animality as it
is addressed in his three Genesis commentaries and The City of God.
I bring Augustine's interpretations into conversation with Deleuze and
Guattari's concept of “becoming animal,” or affective non-identity. I
argue that his analyses of Genesis cause him to develop a concept
of physical pain that can be more properly understood as affect, or the
capacity to affect and be affected that precedes emotion and
subjectivity itself. In this fashion, Augustine's understanding of
bodily pain is unlike [a] the traditional Stoic passions (e.g.
distress), which are preceded by internal stimuli, or [b] propatheiai,
reflexive reactions that stem from a cognitive source, which for him
was doubt (Byers 2013). Bodily pain has no antecedent and is shared
between human and animal alike; it causes a disintegration of the unity
of the soul and body, the self-dissolving reaction of “becoming animal.”
This shared capacity raises questions about the limits of Augustine's
own categories of human and animal, as well the concept of the self as
such.
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