kvarterakademisk - Akademisk kvarter - Aalborg Universitet

akademiskacademic quarterkvarterDolphins Who Blow BubblesCatherine Lordless it is specially farmed, as globally, sea animals need their fish.The consumption of fish by economically privileged humans needsto be radically reduced. But intellectually, I cannot ignore The Cove’sneo-colonialist discourse. According to the film, at the IWC (InternationalWhaling Convention), the Japanese have allegedly boughtvotes from Third World countries in return for development money.One white western critic describes this as prostitution. But this isa sanctimonious accusation from a participant in the very economiesthat historically and even now, are responsible for much of thedamage done to Third World economies. There needs to be a critiqueof postcolonial economics and an activist agenda to addressthese problems. Japan is an odd case in point. It is not a Third WorldCountry but maintains its cultural practices around dolphin killingand whaling. O’Barry meets Japanese citizens who are unaware ofthe degree to which their packaged fish contains dolphin meat. Norare they aware of the mercury counts. The film allows such contradictionsto bubble to the surface.As spectators, Psihoyos’ film takes us into a world of paradoxeswhich inevitably implicate us. If Agamben theorises a zone of indeterminaciesand exceptions between animal and human, I have arguedfor the three terms - native, animal, human – which can findtheir own zones of conflict and overlap. The spectator as a humanely-natively-cetaceanbeing can enter the film’s spectacular zones ofblue. But this glorious blue will turn into a horrifying, thick andalmost pure red when the camera reveals the slaying of those dolphinsthat will not be shopped to the dolphinarium. The aerial shotsof the red water and the horrible dying sounds of the creatures leaveme in tears at each of my viewings. In “Eating Well”, Derrida doesnot pull his punches when it comes to the issue of exploiting animals.He compares the contemporary carnage of animals and DNAexperimentation to an act of producing new concentration camps.For him, abattoirs are camps where victims are not eliminated butreproduced for ever more extensive experimentation, torture andextermination (p. 39).Derrida meets Agamben on the territory of the entirely de-humanisedanimal. The strength of Psihoyos’ shocking visuality in thefilm’s worst scene, horrifying in its bloodied simplicity, is to allowthe human to identify as a native informant. She/he can then psychicallyfuse with the animals and discover the horrible indeter-Volume03 117