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.