In his The Animal That Therefore I am, Jacques Derrida notes, there has historically been a tremendous ambivalence about the possibility of animal language usage in philosophers from Heidegger to Lacan, with language or even lying constituting our difference from non-human animal others, defining the human as such. Yet it is clear from recent research that many animals can and do communicate in ways we understand to be complex and nuanced, and that these increasingly make ethical demands upon us in the context of human-authored climate change amd what scientists have called the Sixth Mass Extinction. So how might we think animal address in the Anthropocene, and what might that tell us about our ethical responsibilities to the non-human?  

In this paper, I will turn to Nietzsche's work in The Genealogy of Morals, where he suggests that the bad conscience of the Christianity he abhors aims at removing "the animal in us" (229). This is an animality associated with the senses, instinct, nature, the biological and truth-telling about the earth. Nietzsche says that bad conscience produces "earth-calumniating ideals," lies about the earth. The Nietzschean subject, therefore, is one in which language assumes a particular relation to animality, that animal language, in effect, tells us something about the phenomenological experience of being alive on the earth. I argue that the pre-eminent source of bad conscience in the Anthropocene is no longer what Nietzsche calls the slave morality of Christianity, but rather the bad conscience of the capitalist consumer subject, which is anti instinct, nature, and biology, obscuring our shared human and non-human relation to the world around us. In particular, this bad conscience allows us to ignore the dire situation of our collapsing ecosystems amid natural disaster, species extinction and the destruction of sustainable food production, and to continue the behaviours that are intensifying this crisis.

Using an archive of animal address drawn from footage of koalas reaching for water in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfires, I will suggest that animal address allows us to see a shared relation to the earth premised not on this bad conscience but something else–an affirmation about what it means to be alive in a warming world, and a recognition of human moral culpability for creating the conditions in which such an address needs to be made. This need not create a politics of yet another bad conscience, a paralysing politics of environmental guilt, but rather a joyful politics that affirms the animal in us alongside the non-human animals who address us.

Animal Drag analyses the potential for critical and conscious acts of adornment and embodiment that is entangled with the nonhuman animal to rupture humanist and problematic binary thinking. It proposes that Animal Drag is a political weapon, employing multiple academic disciplines and 'minority' studies. Animal Drag presentations might be used to foreground feminist discourses, issues of race, disability, gender variance and class, let alone issues of species hierarchy.

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) wrote poems and children's books. Although mostly unappreciated during his lifetime, his works gained significant popularity after his death. He also taught agricultural science and then became a farmer, focusing on social activism to help impoverished farmers by providing free instruction on fertilizer use in his native Iwate, northern Japan. His agricultural activities had hardly succeeded, which motivated him to produce more writings.

Miyazawa was strongly moved by reading the Lotus Sutra. The Scripture became a lifelong cornerstone of his faith, inspiring him to seek a synthesis between agriculture, art, science, and religion. He was very well-educated, a member of the Meiji intelligentsia, who were influenced by Transatlantic Romanticism. His works are characterized by the use of many terms from natural sciences, such as meteorology, mineralogy, botany, geology, and physics. 

This study examines how humans and non-humans—an Ayrshire cow, a brass moon, pulp factory fires, the roaring sea, his recently deceased beloved sister, etc.—are interrelated and depicted as equal beings in Miyazawa’s works. His characters reveal his nonbinary, materialistic worldview that everything is interchangeable and entangled with each other. 

While dairy farming was established by Miyazawa’s time, it was mainly carried out further north, where the climate was too cold and dry for growing rice. Since then, bovine–human relationships have become more complicated because of global capitalism and technological advances, including factory farming and animal welfare science. Recognizing Miyazawa’s worldview and how it changed over time will contribute to reorienting how to address current environmental issues we are confronted with.