Cuts

the rhythms of "healing-with" companion animals

Elizabeth Pattinson

pp. 95-112

in: Dominik Ohrem, Roman Bartosch (eds), Beyond the human-animal divide, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Contemporary human existence is often characterised as a kind of living peppered by technological intervention: our state of being a state of suspension between animality and technology. Yet the corporeal embodiment of human existence and that of the nonhuman animals cannot be subsumed by the avatars or memes of the online world. This paper theorises the reality of physical fragility and corporeal existence through devising a way of writing the powerful and healing capacity of coexisting with companion animals. Through writing, this paper performs and describes the coexistence of humans, animals, and pervasive media devices. The paper takes as focal material an auto-ethnography of the experience of the researcher in recovering from surgery to remove a section of damaged intestine due to Crohn's disease. Paralleling the training and coexistence of a young dog with the worlding of the diseased human body, the paper traces the affective resonance of the companion animal as an integral part of the assemblage of contemporary life. The writing here breaks simple barriers of autoethnography and the limits of what might be a subject, a self.