There are two things upon which Derrida insists that I found particularly useful. First, he emphasizes that his project is not to efface or ignore the rupture between humans and animals or to develop a continuum. Instead, he is trying to call into question the homogeneity of that which lies on either side of the rupture – man and animal – in order to think more interestingly about “what a limit becomes once it is abyssal, once the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line but more than one internally divided line; once,as a result, it can no longer be traced, objectified, or counted as single and indivisible” (30-1). Second, he insists on the violence of anthropomorphism, and as such refuses to 'grant' animals speech, agency, or a being 'as such'. Instead, he emphasizes the heterogeneity of response, and calls into question the ability of humans for speech, agency, and being 'as such'. Both of these insistences are useful because they refuse to deny difference, instead emphasizing the need to thicken limits and ruptures, to draw them in multiple places, and to account for differences in doing so; the challenge here is to proliferate our thinking about (and so our ability to) response (and so responsibility) in relations with animals, but also, to complicate the assumptions we have in responding to other people. Hence Derrida's other insistence: on having the time required to do justice to a text.
By confronting his own nudity, and resultant shame, with the gaze of a cat—a particular and real cat that he insists, on the contrary, cannot be naked—Derrida explores the place attributed to “the animal” in philosophy, examining/deconstructing Descartes, Kant, Levinas, Lacan, and Heidegger. It is interesting how Derrida starts his lecture by drawing continuously upon that scene in which he stands face-to-face with a “representative” of the theme he poses to address: the animal in its singular form. Even if he says that it is not his intent to give to “the animal” all the things it has been considered to lack (the “I”, a face, death, existence, unconsciousness, a capacity to pretend to be pretending or responding, or to cover its tracks, or erase them, etc.), Derrida still wonders what would it happen if we let “the animal” regard us—that is, give it one of man’s most precious and cultivated senses: vision. He proclaims: Think of the animal that sees, instead of the animal that is seen! Indeed, how are we are confronted, and pushed to our limits, by rescuing the “point of view of the absolute other,” without giving it “voice” as anthropology has taught us to do with our famous “Other.” If we have defined our human nature by making reference to what it is not—an animal in most cases—what would a reconceptualization of our nature look like as begun from a questioning of the premise that allows humans to have what others lack? Do we need to become more a living thing and less a rational animal?
With Derrida, the project of decentering the human seems to call again for attending to plurality. The strategy is to pluralize, concludes Derrida. He argues for apprehending things as they are, for us to pretend that we were not there to give them meaning, to just appreciate them in their multiple forms! Yet aren’t these forms deeply transformed by our interaction in the world? Is it not, as Mol says, that the multiplicity lies in practice, in the way things are enacted? It is hard to come to grips with Derrida’s urge to pluralize, as he denies that it is a return to essences or something of that sort. There is violence in the singular category, he argues, yet does he find any redemption in the plural?
Of course, I don’t have a cat. I wish I had a cat. I wish I had a cat that would (or at least could), like Derrida’s, remind me daily of the strangeness of being a human animal, a strangeness Derrida thinks through and with in The Animal That Therefore I Am.
I don’t quite know what to make of his rich, complex, playful, and deadly serious book, especially within the context of our seminar. It aligns to some extent with the critique of Cartesian epistemology that we saw in Barad and Jullien, it engages with the phenomenology that seemed to undergird the work of Mol and Lingis, it resonates in different ways with nearly everything else we’ve read (including the citation of Heidegger citing Uexkull), and in fact the three theses that structure this course come in to Derrida’s final hurried chapter on Heidegger; the problem is not one of disconnection between the text and the seminar. Rather, my problem is that I find it here nearly impossible to get outside of philosophy, or more specifically Derrida, or even more specifically Derrida’s “animalism” and Nietzschean perspectivalism.
When Derrida admits on pages 91-92 that his motivation in attempting to grapple with “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, as a single living body” is perhaps an attempt to “gain… a sufficiently expert or knowledgeable purchase on what might touch the nervous system of a single animal body,” like trying to grab a cuttlefish without either hurting it or being covered in its ink (which I just now realize is a typically Derridean metaphor-pun), and that he admits this in order to confide “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic,” which recalls his indirect quotation of Nietzsche on page 3 that man “was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself,” I can’t help but agree, yes, the human is an animal, even while I have to wonder about what it means not only to grasp a cuttlefish but to devour one. One thing I always admire about Derrida is his lightness of touch.
This question of devouring, which resurfaces here and there in terms of vegetarianism, animal suffering, instrumental reason, and even the Holocaust, comes up again in the end when Derrida contrasts Nietzsche to Heidegger in order to favor both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his (here unnamed) will-to-power—when Derrida says “everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the ‘truest,’ the most ‘objective,’ that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation,” he leaves unspoken the violence in Nietzsche’s animal relations, the cruelty of the “blond beast” to the slave and the disdain of the “higher man” for the “herd,” the difference expressed in hierarchy—he leaves out specifically, precisely, the “will-to-power” in all its aspects (160). Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is no mere relativism, but an issue of power and force. Derrida is right to point out that the stakes are “radical.”
This was something that struck me with Barad, as well, and her marvelous image of the creature that was an eye: intersubjective agential realism is great, but some animal has to eat. And at this point, thinking about the anthropos in philosophy and the theoria of anthropology, I don’t know what is being devoured by whom. As for me, I wish I had a cat.
The Animal That Therefore I Am marks a distinct departure from Lingis’ felt poetics, embodied movements, sensualities. From animals, we move to “the animal”, which “is a matter of a word, only a word” (41). Indeed, also away from the empiricism of perceptive qualities in Uexkull: from the different space-times figured in the material experiences of different animals to Heidegger’s ontological problem of “knowing if the animal has time” (22). The book is an exploration of thought, and Derrida’s naked shame is (ironically? aptly?) it’s most animalistic moment.
The question of the philosophical treatment of animals is at the same time, indeed primarily, the question of how we constitute ourselves, as beings which are not-animal, which think, which are “world-forming”: “it is not just a matter of giving back to the animal whatever it has been refused…it is also a matter of questioning oneself concerning the axiom that permitted one to accord purely and simply to the human or to the rational animal that which one holds the just plain animal to be deprived” (95). Derrida’s argument is, of course, pushing towards the de-centering, de-totalizing of the human; a pluralizing challenge to “anthropocentric” phenomenological logic. The cat staring at him, he insists, is a “real cat”, not just the figure of one, not just the sign of a lack, the not-human.
And yet Derrida’s objects are philosopher-animals - “from Aristotle to Lacan” (32) – his ultimate question: “Who am I, therefore?” (5). Anthropology has already told us that othering is in fact self-constitutive; how might accounting for materialities, commensurabilities, lived relationships take us in a new direction? Can ethnography make an intervention in the question of animal life that is positioned somewhere in-between Uexkull’s claim to the scientific truth of animal perception and Derrida’s interrogation of the ethics and logic of subject formation?
In 'The Animal That Therefore I Am', Derrida attempts to explore the demarcation between humans and animot (the animal) by confronting its divisive Cartesian lineage. Self awareness becomes a tenet for justifying Being in Humans and challenging that of the Other. Encompassing the concepts of temporality, truth, or sexuality is the question of the animal being autobiographical - concerned with the exhibition of witnessing. Derrida writes, “The auto-biographical does not have to occur to an “I”, living or dead, that would come to speak of itself. The auto-bio-graphical derives from the fact that the simple instance of the “I” or of the autos can be posed as such only to the extent that it is a sign of life, of life in presence, the manifestation of life in presence…” (56)
The confession encounters disruption as the animal is wordless and the human cannot conjecture its witnessing. In a particularly delicate passage, Derrida poses, “But in forbidding myself thus to assign, interpret or project, must I for all that give in to the other violence or asinanity, that which would consist in suspending one’s compassion and in depriving the animal every power to manifestation, of the desire to manifest to me anything at all, and even to manifest to me in some way its experience of my language, of my words and of my nudity?” (18) It is the disparity of equivocated words or signs that exclude the animal from testifying to its motivation, manifesting its questioned Being.
However, on page 60, even with the biblical framework, when Derrida prescribe nudity with shame and sexual posturing which he has observed in the animal, thereby giving it an awareness of its own nakedness, is he not assigning? Could shame in nudity be an entirely cultural tenet and the shared sexual performance a manifestation of performativity (especially in the Other)?
There is a cat that comes to the window of my first floor apartment a few times a week and meows until Francesca, one of the cats that I live with, notices and runs over. They stare at each other through the glass; sometimes they meow, sometimes they run back and forth, usually the outside cat remains totally calm while Francesca expresses her agitation in a variety of ways. This has been happening for several weeks. For the most part, I have been as interested in this cat as Francesca has, and as interested as it is in her. The cat is not at all interested in me. So, for more hours than I’d like to admit, I have sat next to Francesca and stared, mesmerized by this figure on the other side of the glass, who comes to visit Francesca and not me. At first, I worried about this cat on the other side. It was cold outside and I thought it might be hungry. On the second day that the cat came, I wondered if he would come inside if I opened the window, so I did. It ran away and Francesca jumped out after it. I followed suit, chasing (following?) a cat chasing a cat. Needless to say, it was absurd. In those first few weeks, I anguished over how to think about these regular exchanges. Was the cat friend or foe? To me or to Francesca? What did it /want/? How could I even begin to think about its wants? My main job in the world is to think about how to think about difference, and all I could conclude was that this cat was my radical Other. And staring out the window alongside Francesca with the same inexplicable fixation, we bonded over a shared obsession. What did she want? The question wasn’t as pressing. Francesca has been my roommate for almost three years; she is not my radical Other in the same way, she is a good (albeit sometimes manipulative) companion. She is walking on my keyboard right now, insisting that I stop contemplating “the Animal” to attend to her.
It has been a while, so now when the other cat comes, I no longer sit transfixed next to Francesca. I pause for a moment or two and go about my day. The cat is no longer an alien visitor, the site of intense mystery. I dare not assign it the emotions and conceptual apparatus that feel available to me, and I don’t purport to place it on some kind continuum. “But in forbidding myself thus to assign, interpret or project, must I for all that give in to the other violence or /asinanity/, that which would consist in suspending one’s compassion and in depriving the animal of every power of manifestation, of the desire to manifest /to me/ anything at all, and even to manifest to me in some way /its/ experience of /my/ language, of /my/ words and of /my/ nudity?” (18). Derrida’s meditations on the autobiographical animal are compelling for his simultaneous insistence on the difference between “humans” and “animals” and his engagement with the powerful worldly effects of such categorizations. Indeed, my immediate impulse to read him alongside Francesca and her regular visitor comes out of his insistence that his own inspiration is the very real little cat who causes him shame every morning in the bathroom, while at the same time pointing to the ways in which “the animal” participates pervasively in the conceptual apparatus that allows him to /be/ him as he is, and to think himself /as such/. Proliferating, multiplying, thickening the limits of radical difference that divide “human” and “animal”, such that the abyss between them is taken deadly seriously while also stripped of its tenacious naturalness, Derrida prompts us to engage genuinely, nakedly, with response and responsibility, with the very possibility that the “absence” of the /logos/ might not be a lack. And I, in response, continue to engage with this visiting cat, with Francesca, and with Pierre (who cowers in his corner during all of this), as we are (following?) with each other, taking seriously such exchanges in all of their far-reaching and banal implications.
Derrida's cat poses an interesting question for anyone considering the perceptive and receptive abilities of animals that are not human. To transfer embarrassment, shock, or voyeurism upon a cat may assume too much about the transferability of human beliefs or values (though to say that cats judge us might not be too much of a stretch...). Yet, as Derrida discusses, the very human sense of what is decent and what is lude informs our behavior toward the cat.
I am reminded of an old "Outlands" comic strip, in which a woman covers up in the bath tub, laughing at her modesty in front of her dog; meanwhile the dog stares at the woman in shock. His thought bubble shows confusion over the purpose of her bosom--what could she possibly store in there? The rest of the strip continues the theme of humans wondering what the dog really thinks about particular situations
(Little girl: "I wonder what he is thinking about right now?" Dog: "I wonder if she tastes like chicken?")
The significance of animals in human lives cannot be overlooked--they live in our homes as members of the family, or they guard herds of other animals, help with hunting, learn tricks for our entertainment. Humans eat other animals, lock others away in zoos, and control the influx of certain animals into human residential areas. Comical commentaries aside, animals are integral to the interaction of human lives with other living things and some objects. That Derrida should feel ashamed to be nude in front of a cat, or that a cartoonist should discuss similar scenarios (in a more comic tone, of course) is not surprising, and displays a blurred reality separating human and non-human lives.
Even the term non-human implies a lack of ability or agency, a reduced ascription of normativity of life. Non-humans are somehow lacking the qualities of humans that define sentience. Derrida does not claim that Animals are essentially human, but rather, he explores the possibility that to say "animals" are creatures disparate from "humans" is perhaps an overstatement of human sovereignty over other forms of life. By substituting the word "animot" (soul-word) for the French homonym "animaux" (animals), Derrida attempts to remove the connotation of "non-human" from the word "animals." In effect, "animot" asks us, the reader/audience, to think of "animals" as individual sentient life forms that are not human, but potentially perceive the world structurally in a way that may not be the same way as humans, but constructs a coherent universe for the animal that it can share with others of its kind, and perhaps with other kinds of animals, including humans.
Of course, humans use animals within our own basic understanding of "humanity", and they exist in many ways as a part of our social grammar, through which we communicate and perceive the world. What Derrida asks of us is that we consider animals as existing for us referentially, and he suggests that for animals we exist in a similar state of reference, though we cannot know for certain.
“let me know in passing that that grand work on writing, indeed on autobiographical writing and on “Know yourself”, is also a great work on the animal” (Derrida, 53) “I philosophize’ can mean that as a man I am cicada, I recall what I am, a cicada who remembers having been a man” (ibid). What is Derrida saying? I imagined Derrida saying something such as the following: Yes we know that we are animals, but, and listen to me very carefully, we really are animal(s) (animot). Therefore “I hiss”. I am not sure, and this is me (Eric) talking, how to connect this but somehow I found myself relating this to the Indian Bhagavad-Gita. As quickly as I can relate this, in this text Krishna (a god, or better the God) advises Arjuna (a warrior) to go on with his duty as a warrior. There is an incredible moment in this text toward the end where Krishna is just about to reveal his true nature to Arjuna (by giving him the divine eye), but puts this on hold to reveal his omnipresence in words first. Some selected statements are as follows: “I am the self abiding in the heart of all creatures; I am their beginning, their middle, and their end. I am Vishnu striding among sun gods, the radiant sun among lights; I am lightning among wind gods, the mood among stars…I am the mind of the senses, the consciousness of creatures…I am the ocean of lakes…I am the vowel a of the syllabary, the pairing of words in a compound…I am the seed of all creatures, nothing animate or inanimate could exist without me” (as trans by Miller, 92-4). This goes on for pages and Krishna, the “I”, penetrates all. Derrida discusses a fantasy of his on page 66, where he dreams of “an unheard-of grammar and music in order to create a scene neither human, nor divine, nor animal”. This is revolutionary thinking, no, it is beyond that, something beyond thinking, or perhaps different from thinking. This is, as I imagined is, perhaps, Krishna or something such as super string theory. Also, in regards to Derrida quoting Heidegger, there is another Gita relation I made. Heidegger writes, “In other words, the animal lives with us but we don’t live with it” Again, not really an analysis but an interesting comparison, Krishna says in the Gita, “The whole universe is pervaded by my unmanifest form; all creatures exist in me; but I do not exist in them [my italics] (Miller, 82).
[Note: So I’ve been working on this project for about a year involving ethology as a technique of observation, embedded within some rapturous, polyvalent discursive network that propagates a distinct representation of ‘Nature’, and I couldn’t help but to relate it to the text.]
“Not one of them [Descartes, Kant, et al.] has ever taken into account, in a serious and determinate manner, the fact that we hunt, kill, exterminate, eat, and sacrifice animals, use them, make them work or submit them to experiments that are forbidden to be carried out on humans. Apart from Lacan- but this, however, in no way changes the traditional axiomatics of his work- not one of them takes into account animal sexuality. Not one of them really integrates progress in ethological or primatological knowledge into his work. (...) Other invariants: along with Decartes, Kant,...[et al.]- lets say the signatory subjects who carry or are borne by those names- never evoke the possibility of being looked at by the animal that they, for their part, observe, and of which they speak [my italics].”- J. Derrida; pg. 90-1
In a (shockingly) clear deconstructionist dialogue, Derrida engages, and yes- interrogates to the utmost- the historical trajectories that have dominated our human representations of the animal (within the canon of philosophy’s history)- and with it ‘the animal’ itself. Harsh, inflammatory words; fighting words, as it were. But as it seems to me (and I think any reader that can follow the nuances of his argument will agree), completely warranted. Through Derrida’s method (which, like geneology, seems to proceed through descent to open new conceptual space- or simply just new space to question and carpet bomb) we see a ‘continuity of error’ that buffers the metaphysical distinction between what properly represents the human and the animal: reaction vs. response, generative (human) language vs. the fixed (animal) linguistic program, recognition of self and Other, banalities, banalities, et al. Binaries across the board. But as it seems to me- and moreover to anyone who has any familiarity with animal cognition (e.g. theory of mind)- these errors, the errors enacted by human mediation and intervention, have always pervaded animal representation, conceptualization, and recognition. Always, and after Derrida’s surgical use of deconstructive textuality (I mean, this was an admirably close reading of a dense philosophical ‘sequence’) there seems to be no question: none of the figures mentioned had ever really considered the creature, as thing-in-itself or whatever, as looking at them- through its own eyes, own experiences, desires, etc. Thusly, it seems clear that the historical intervention of philosophical inquiry into a representation of ‘the animal’ does not- can not- properly grasp hold of its subject. Too much dead weight I suppose. So where to go methodologically? Derrida does point us in one particular direction (so very briefly- I wish he would have pursued it)- a discipline, the practice mentioned in the quotation above: ethology as a productive method of [animal] representation formation- or at least a positivist attempt at naked sight (like undressing the ball of wax). Amongst a variety of reasons, an appeal to ethology is interesting here because it is quite literally (and you’ll have to give me some latitude with language) the ‘scientific practice (or technique) of becoming other’- of seeing through the eyes that are seen; so this seems like a very promising space of inquiry to pursue given the limitations of something like deconstruction. To ‘become other’, ethological praxis (e.g. the practice of observing ‘animal/ nature’ within a natural context or setting) seeks a suspension of the self (in particular, the collective human self) in the act of observing/ recognizing the Other. In other words, embedding oneself within the ‘milieu of the animot’, which in turn facilitates a breakdown in the ‘indivisible line’ that separates humans and ‘animals’, such that the presence, or trace, of the observer has been erased. But this suspension of self, this ‘becoming other’, is not achieved just by a simple act of topographical deterritorialization (e.g. by just being in nature to see ‘the animal seeing you’ or ‘see as the animot I’). Instead, what allows the ethologist to ‘become other’ is precisely his human eyes; eyes trained to make standardized judgments, to recognize/ delineate/ parse phenomena into discrete units of meaning (or not meaning). In this way, the ethologist crosses the threshold of alterity vis-a-vis his own recognition of alterity (e.g. so ‘the animot’ can not ‘speak’ to the ethologist unless the ethologist has learned to observe how ‘the animot’ speaks and what it speaks). What we then see is more of a performance than a conversation between observer and other; ‘the animal’ remains ‘the animal’ and the human the human, and the baseline for recognition is human mediation. Behavior then functions like (or takes the place of) human language: couched within a human perceptual system equipped to negotiate and recognize what is being ‘said’ (or performed via behavior). So at base, however deterritorialized one may be with respect to observation in nature, ethology is still a schematized system of human judgement that the ‘animot’ speaks to. The same ills as before- just laid out within a differing strata of human epistemology (the ‘natural sciences’ as opposed to the philosophies Derrida explores). The last thing I’ll say is this: I think then ethology is a dead end, just like much of what philosophy has said regarding ‘the animal’ who is ‘poor’: they both seem guilty of the same crime- ‘enframing’ the ‘animot’ in a certain light, such that it always remains within the exclusive grip of human perception.
“I was walking along a eucalyptus-lined avenue when a cow sauntered out from behind a tree. I stopped and we looked each other in the eye. Her cowness shocked my humanness to such a degree – the moment our eyes met was so tense – I stopped dead in my tracks and lost my bearings as a man, that is, as a member of the human species. The strange feeling that I was apparently discovering for the first time was the shame of a man come face-to-face with an animal. I allowed her to look and see me - this made us equal - and resulted in my also becoming an animal – but a strange even forbidden one, I would say. I continued my walk, but I felt uncomfortable . . . in nature, surrounding me on all sides, as if it were . . . watching me.” Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, 1957-1961[elipses in original]
Encounter and entanglement, two different tropes of talking about the non-human.
Derrida focuses on the encounter and his attention is drawn to the role of the gaze, this tense moment when eyes meet. (Notably this is a trope, which informs much of the critiques of anthropology.) The philosophers he criticizes frequently look, but do not allow themselves to be looked at; a kind of scopic violence we might say. They “never evoke the possibility of being looked at by the animal that they, for their part, observe, and of which they speak” (90). Moreover, in looking, they tend to construe an abstract category of “the animal,” thus denying individuality to animals that might not be able to say “I” but can be “I” or to do “I” (92). Lumped together into a singular “animal” the animals are made to serve to underscore the human exceptionality. Derrida’s cat is an encounter with radical alterity.
But I wonder what kind of work would it do to not talk about encounters anymore, but focus on the entanglements. If we recognize the constant presence of different animals in our world, animals which constantly are “I” and do “I”, then no interaction can be singled out as a discrete encounter. Following Donna Haraway, we would then talk about intimacies, or knottings.
In Meditations on Hunting (1942), Jose Ortega y Gasset writes on the inevitable ethical unease that accompanies the killing of any animal: "Nor can it be otherwise, because man has never really known exactly what an animal is. Before and beyond all science, humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely. The animal remains too close for us to not feel mysterious communication with it" (88). This sense of irreducible "ontological difference" between "the human" and "the animal" has been mobilized again and again to reflexively autobiographize in philosophical theorizing and in common sense (not two different kinds of thinking, really, Derrida tells us). Animals have been the screens upon which humans project their self-constructions - hence the crucial emphasis of the word "therefore" in the title, to mark the comparison to other as the inauguration of "I." In instrumentalizing animals in this way, Derrida suggests, humans presume far too much and also far too little about animals-in-themselves - and disallow ourselves to be disarmed by animals who gaze at us in response.
Derrida asks, "Is being-with-the-animal a fundamental and irreducible structure of being-in-the-world, so much so that the idea of a world without animals could not even function as a methodological fiction?"(79). If we take it that humanity defines itself as against a homogeneous animality, while at the same time encapsulating that imagined animality within an imagined humanity, then a world without animals would be an unintelligible one - an impossible one - indeed. Certainly Derrida's task is not to argue that animality is something out of which humans emerge, but to point to the irreducible multiplicity of beings and the ways in which so much of what is human is defined against a projection of what we want to be or think we are in relation to what we want or think animals to be. Taking away any certainty about the latter also deconstructs the sensibility of the former. Derrida's strategy, then, critically assigns to animals as well as to humans a "privation that is not a privation" (160) - that is, a recognition that neither a specific human nor a specific animal can assume to "know" the other. Moreover, attending to the simultaneous acts of seeing, being seen by, and being seen seen over the abyss between self and other is a way of being responsible to the mutual incomprehensibility of being-in-the-world together, of living with others who are also living.
“That is the track I am following, the track I am ferreting out, following the traces of this wholly other they call ‘animal,’ for example, ‘cat’.” (14) I can't do justice to this text in so few words. Its subtle plays on logic are fascinating, and I gather that it has resonance with people in many ways: consider Julienne’s, Eric’s (the other Eric), Halawa, and Emily’s responses. As for myself, I will put it out there that at first I could not help but read this text through my readings of Edmund Leach, particularly his essay on “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, and some of his other recursive work on biblical interpretation. What Leach’s writings on taboo (or more precisely, his argument that the unspoken, inhibited, is the repression of “boundary precepts that lie between” semantically distinct verbal concepts: namely human and nonhuman ones in Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse), tries to get at a very logic that constructs our being-in-the-world and mirrors to some extent what Derrida is trying to de-construct.
The figure of Lewis Carol in this whole thing is also interesting. When Derrida said that “although I don’t have time to do so, I would of course have liked to inscribe my whole talk within a reading of Lewis Carol” (7) I was lead to read that as ‘within a reading of Charles Dogson’, the logician who (1) married his first cousin, (2) was rumored to be a pedophile and (3) came up with some really interesting logical statements that were precursors to computer algebra and three-valued logic (which, I will admit, and with some shame, is quite a fascination of mine).
To some extent, Derrida is exploring many of the same themes we have discussed thus far about the semantic availability of knowing what it is like to be animal-in-the-world, as opposed to human-in-the-world. And, as other have pointed out, that we seek to understand how it is that we can come face-to-face with the animals in ourselves. But, as I think Derrida argues, we cannot just say something along the lines that “we are animals” because as soon as we do we cover our nakedness with words, our very animality becomes clothed in our logic – not necessarily ‘theirs’. Nor can we reduce theirs to a mechanistic-responsive-being.
This text so far, for me (“But as for me, who am I?”), gets more at what it means to be human-in-the-world through an understanding of those encounters with the other. The encounter with the animal goes far in revealing the cloths we wear, and the metaphorical baggage that we carry with us into the final waiting room which awaits us after the “time we don’t have” in our life which “will have been so short” (forward:xiii). In a way, Derrida is inviting us into his life, inviting us to witness his animality. Although he insists in the beginning that his little cat is a real cat, I cannot help but sense that we are the little cats looking in upon him as he disrobes before us. Or maybe, death is what stares him in the face (considering some of his earlier meditations and the trickster role of the Cheshire cat of Lewis Carol’s imagination)? Or rather, are we seeing ourselves through the looking glass he offers?
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"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin, "thought Alice; but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"
Christina Kim “The animal would be in non-nudity because it is nude, and man in nudity to the extent that he is no longer nude,” (p. 5).
Derrida insists that the animal is not Animal and that “Animal” only makes sense next to Man. Recognition of Animal simultaneously recognizes Man. Derrida thus severs Man’s relation (the oppositional relation) to the animal by this distinction between “Animal” and the animal. We can no longer imagine “Animal” as a single representative of animals. We can only imagine “Animal” as that which is not a man but is Man “to the extent that” it is not the animal; because “Animal” only becomes “Animal” through Man.
As such, thinking about “Animal” becomes an autobiographical work. But who/what is ‘staring back’ when I ‘look’ into a mirror? How does this recognition of “Animal,” as that which does not subsume animals in a singular term/form, open up a space of potentials for thinking about an animal?
There are two things upon which Derrida insists that I found particularly useful. First, he emphasizes that his project is not to efface or ignore the rupture between humans and animals or to develop a continuum. Instead, he is trying to call into question the homogeneity of that which lies on either side of the rupture – man and animal – in order to think more interestingly about “what a limit becomes once it is abyssal, once the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line but more than one internally divided line; once,as a result, it can no longer be traced, objectified, or counted as single and indivisible” (30-1). Second, he insists on the violence of anthropomorphism, and as such refuses to 'grant' animals speech, agency, or a being 'as such'. Instead, he emphasizes the heterogeneity of response, and calls into question the ability of humans for speech, agency, and being 'as such'. Both of these insistences are useful because they refuse to deny difference, instead emphasizing the need to thicken limits and ruptures, to draw them in multiple places, and to account for differences in doing so; the challenge here is to proliferate our thinking about (and so our ability to) response (and so responsibility) in relations with animals, but also, to complicate the assumptions we have in responding to other people. Hence Derrida's other insistence: on having the time required to do justice to a text.
ReplyDeleteThe animal, what a word! (23)
ReplyDeleteBy confronting his own nudity, and resultant shame, with the gaze of a cat—a particular and real cat that he insists, on the contrary, cannot be naked—Derrida explores the place attributed to “the animal” in philosophy, examining/deconstructing Descartes, Kant, Levinas, Lacan, and Heidegger. It is interesting how Derrida starts his lecture by drawing continuously upon that scene in which he stands face-to-face with a “representative” of the theme he poses to address: the animal in its singular form. Even if he says that it is not his intent to give to “the animal” all the things it has been considered to lack (the “I”, a face, death, existence, unconsciousness, a capacity to pretend to be pretending or responding, or to cover its tracks, or erase them, etc.), Derrida still wonders what would it happen if we let “the animal” regard us—that is, give it one of man’s most precious and cultivated senses: vision. He proclaims: Think of the animal that sees, instead of the animal that is seen! Indeed, how are we are confronted, and pushed to our limits, by rescuing the “point of view of the absolute other,” without giving it “voice” as anthropology has taught us to do with our famous “Other.” If we have defined our human nature by making reference to what it is not—an animal in most cases—what would a reconceptualization of our nature look like as begun from a questioning of the premise that allows humans to have what others lack? Do we need to become more a living thing and less a rational animal?
With Derrida, the project of decentering the human seems to call again for attending to plurality. The strategy is to pluralize, concludes Derrida. He argues for apprehending things as they are, for us to pretend that we were not there to give them meaning, to just appreciate them in their multiple forms! Yet aren’t these forms deeply transformed by our interaction in the world? Is it not, as Mol says, that the multiplicity lies in practice, in the way things are enacted? It is hard to come to grips with Derrida’s urge to pluralize, as he denies that it is a return to essences or something of that sort. There is violence in the singular category, he argues, yet does he find any redemption in the plural?
Nietzsche, Kant’s Holocaust, and My Cat’s Face
ReplyDeleteOf course, I don’t have a cat. I wish I had a cat. I wish I had a cat that would (or at least could), like Derrida’s, remind me daily of the strangeness of being a human animal, a strangeness Derrida thinks through and with in The Animal That Therefore I Am.
I don’t quite know what to make of his rich, complex, playful, and deadly serious book, especially within the context of our seminar. It aligns to some extent with the critique of Cartesian epistemology that we saw in Barad and Jullien, it engages with the phenomenology that seemed to undergird the work of Mol and Lingis, it resonates in different ways with nearly everything else we’ve read (including the citation of Heidegger citing Uexkull), and in fact the three theses that structure this course come in to Derrida’s final hurried chapter on Heidegger; the problem is not one of disconnection between the text and the seminar. Rather, my problem is that I find it here nearly impossible to get outside of philosophy, or more specifically Derrida, or even more specifically Derrida’s “animalism” and Nietzschean perspectivalism.
When Derrida admits on pages 91-92 that his motivation in attempting to grapple with “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, as a single living body” is perhaps an attempt to “gain… a sufficiently expert or knowledgeable purchase on what might touch the nervous system of a single animal body,” like trying to grab a cuttlefish without either hurting it or being covered in its ink (which I just now realize is a typically Derridean metaphor-pun), and that he admits this in order to confide “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic,” which recalls his indirect quotation of Nietzsche on page 3 that man “was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself,” I can’t help but agree, yes, the human is an animal, even while I have to wonder about what it means not only to grasp a cuttlefish but to devour one. One thing I always admire about Derrida is his lightness of touch.
This question of devouring, which resurfaces here and there in terms of vegetarianism, animal suffering, instrumental reason, and even the Holocaust, comes up again in the end when Derrida contrasts Nietzsche to Heidegger in order to favor both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his (here unnamed) will-to-power—when Derrida says “everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the ‘truest,’ the most ‘objective,’ that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation,” he leaves unspoken the violence in Nietzsche’s animal relations, the cruelty of the “blond beast” to the slave and the disdain of the “higher man” for the “herd,” the difference expressed in hierarchy—he leaves out specifically, precisely, the “will-to-power” in all its aspects (160). Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is no mere relativism, but an issue of power and force. Derrida is right to point out that the stakes are “radical.”
This was something that struck me with Barad, as well, and her marvelous image of the creature that was an eye: intersubjective agential realism is great, but some animal has to eat. And at this point, thinking about the anthropos in philosophy and the theoria of anthropology, I don’t know what is being devoured by whom. As for me, I wish I had a cat.
The Animal That Therefore I Am marks a distinct departure from Lingis’ felt poetics, embodied movements, sensualities. From animals, we move to “the animal”, which “is a matter of a word, only a word” (41). Indeed, also away from the empiricism of perceptive qualities in Uexkull: from the different space-times figured in the material experiences of different animals to Heidegger’s ontological problem of “knowing if the animal has time” (22). The book is an exploration of thought, and Derrida’s naked shame is (ironically? aptly?) it’s most animalistic moment.
ReplyDeleteThe question of the philosophical treatment of animals is at the same time, indeed primarily, the question of how we constitute ourselves, as beings which are not-animal, which think, which are “world-forming”: “it is not just a matter of giving back to the animal whatever it has been refused…it is also a matter of questioning oneself concerning the axiom that permitted one to accord purely and simply to the human or to the rational animal that which one holds the just plain animal to be deprived” (95). Derrida’s argument is, of course, pushing towards the de-centering, de-totalizing of the human; a pluralizing challenge to “anthropocentric” phenomenological logic. The cat staring at him, he insists, is a “real cat”, not just the figure of one, not just the sign of a lack, the not-human.
And yet Derrida’s objects are philosopher-animals - “from Aristotle to Lacan” (32) – his ultimate question: “Who am I, therefore?” (5). Anthropology has already told us that othering is in fact self-constitutive; how might accounting for materialities, commensurabilities, lived relationships take us in a new direction? Can ethnography make an intervention in the question of animal life that is positioned somewhere in-between Uexkull’s claim to the scientific truth of animal perception and Derrida’s interrogation of the ethics and logic of subject formation?
In 'The Animal That Therefore I Am', Derrida attempts to explore the demarcation between humans and animot (the animal) by confronting its divisive Cartesian lineage. Self awareness becomes a tenet for justifying Being in Humans and challenging that of the Other. Encompassing the concepts of temporality, truth, or sexuality is the question of the animal being autobiographical - concerned with the exhibition of witnessing. Derrida writes, “The auto-biographical does not have to occur to an “I”, living or dead, that would come to speak of itself. The auto-bio-graphical derives from the fact that the simple instance of the “I” or of the autos can be posed as such only to the extent that it is a sign of life, of life in presence, the manifestation of life in presence…” (56)
ReplyDeleteThe confession encounters disruption as the animal is wordless and the human cannot conjecture its witnessing. In a particularly delicate passage, Derrida poses, “But in forbidding myself thus to assign, interpret or project, must I for all that give in to the other violence or asinanity, that which would consist in suspending one’s compassion and in depriving the animal every power to manifestation, of the desire to manifest to me anything at all, and even to manifest to me in some way its experience of my language, of my words and of my nudity?” (18) It is the disparity of equivocated words or signs that exclude the animal from testifying to its motivation, manifesting its questioned Being.
However, on page 60, even with the biblical framework, when Derrida prescribe nudity with shame and sexual posturing which he has observed in the animal, thereby giving it an awareness of its own nakedness, is he not assigning? Could shame in nudity be an entirely cultural tenet and the shared sexual performance a manifestation of performativity (especially in the Other)?
There is a cat that comes to the window of my first floor apartment a few times a week and meows until Francesca, one of the cats that I live with, notices and runs over. They stare at each other through the glass; sometimes they meow, sometimes they run back and forth, usually the outside cat remains totally calm while Francesca expresses her agitation in a variety of ways. This has been happening for several weeks. For the most part, I have been as interested in this cat as Francesca has, and as interested as it is in her. The cat is not at all interested in me. So, for more hours than I’d like to admit, I have sat next to Francesca and stared, mesmerized by this figure on the other side of the glass, who comes to visit Francesca and not me. At first, I worried about this cat on the other side. It was cold outside and I thought it might be hungry. On the second day that the cat came, I wondered if he would come inside if I opened the window, so I did. It ran away and Francesca jumped out after it. I followed suit, chasing (following?) a cat chasing a cat. Needless to say, it was absurd. In those first few weeks, I anguished over how to think about these regular exchanges. Was the cat friend or foe? To me or to Francesca? What did it /want/? How could I even begin to think about its wants? My main job in the world is to think about how to think about difference, and all I could conclude was that this cat was my radical Other. And staring out the window alongside Francesca with the same inexplicable fixation, we bonded over a shared obsession. What did she want? The question wasn’t as pressing. Francesca has been my roommate for almost three years; she is not my radical Other in the same way, she is a good (albeit sometimes manipulative) companion. She is walking on my keyboard right now, insisting that I stop contemplating “the Animal” to attend to her.
ReplyDeleteIt has been a while, so now when the other cat comes, I no longer sit transfixed next to Francesca. I pause for a moment or two and go about my day. The cat is no longer an alien visitor, the site of intense mystery. I dare not assign it the emotions and conceptual apparatus that feel available to me, and I don’t purport to place it on some kind continuum. “But in forbidding myself thus to assign, interpret or project, must I for all that give in to the other violence or /asinanity/, that which would consist in suspending one’s compassion and in depriving the animal of every power of manifestation, of the desire to manifest /to me/ anything at all, and even to manifest to me in some way /its/ experience of /my/ language, of /my/ words and of /my/ nudity?” (18). Derrida’s meditations on the autobiographical animal are compelling for his simultaneous insistence on the difference between “humans” and “animals” and his engagement with the powerful worldly effects of such categorizations. Indeed, my immediate impulse to read him alongside Francesca and her regular visitor comes out of his insistence that his own inspiration is the very real little cat who causes him shame every morning in the bathroom, while at the same time pointing to the ways in which “the animal” participates pervasively in the conceptual apparatus that allows him to /be/ him as he is, and to think himself /as such/. Proliferating, multiplying, thickening the limits of radical difference that divide “human” and “animal”, such that the abyss between them is taken deadly seriously while also stripped of its tenacious naturalness, Derrida prompts us to engage genuinely, nakedly, with response and responsibility, with the very possibility that the “absence” of the /logos/ might not be a lack. And I, in response, continue to engage with this visiting cat, with Francesca, and with Pierre (who cowers in his corner during all of this), as we are (following?) with each other, taking seriously such exchanges in all of their far-reaching and banal implications.
Derrida's cat poses an interesting question for anyone considering the perceptive and receptive abilities of animals that are not human. To transfer embarrassment, shock, or voyeurism upon a cat may assume too much about the transferability of human beliefs or values (though to say that cats judge us might not be too much of a stretch...). Yet, as Derrida discusses, the very human sense of what is decent and what is lude informs our behavior toward the cat.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of an old "Outlands" comic strip, in which a woman covers up in the bath tub, laughing at her modesty in front of her dog; meanwhile the dog stares at the woman in shock. His thought bubble shows confusion over the purpose of her bosom--what could she possibly store in there? The rest of the strip continues the theme of humans wondering what the dog really thinks about particular situations
(Little girl: "I wonder what he is thinking about right now?"
Dog: "I wonder if she tastes like chicken?")
The significance of animals in human lives cannot be overlooked--they live in our homes as members of the family, or they guard herds of other animals, help with hunting, learn tricks for our entertainment. Humans eat other animals, lock others away in zoos, and control the influx of certain animals into human residential areas. Comical commentaries aside, animals are integral to the interaction of human lives with other living things and some objects. That Derrida should feel ashamed to be nude in front of a cat, or that a cartoonist should discuss similar scenarios (in a more comic tone, of course) is not surprising, and displays a blurred reality separating human and non-human lives.
Even the term non-human implies a lack of ability or agency, a reduced ascription of normativity of life. Non-humans are somehow lacking the qualities of humans that define sentience. Derrida does not claim that Animals are essentially human, but rather, he explores the possibility that to say "animals" are creatures disparate from "humans" is perhaps an overstatement of human sovereignty over other forms of life. By substituting the word "animot" (soul-word) for the French homonym "animaux" (animals), Derrida attempts to remove the connotation of "non-human" from the word "animals." In effect, "animot" asks us, the reader/audience, to think of "animals" as individual sentient life forms that are not human, but potentially perceive the world structurally in a way that may not be the same way as humans, but constructs a coherent universe for the animal that it can share with others of its kind, and perhaps with other kinds of animals, including humans.
Of course, humans use animals within our own basic understanding of "humanity", and they exist in many ways as a part of our social grammar, through which we communicate and perceive the world. What Derrida asks of us is that we consider animals as existing for us referentially, and he suggests that for animals we exist in a similar state of reference, though we cannot know for certain.
“let me know in passing that that grand work on writing, indeed on autobiographical writing and on “Know yourself”, is also a great work on the animal” (Derrida, 53)
ReplyDelete“I philosophize’ can mean that as a man I am cicada, I recall what I am, a cicada who remembers having been a man” (ibid).
What is Derrida saying? I imagined Derrida saying something such as the following: Yes we know that we are animals, but, and listen to me very carefully, we really are animal(s) (animot). Therefore “I hiss”. I am not sure, and this is me (Eric) talking, how to connect this but somehow I found myself relating this to the Indian Bhagavad-Gita. As quickly as I can relate this, in this text Krishna (a god, or better the God) advises Arjuna (a warrior) to go on with his duty as a warrior. There is an incredible moment in this text toward the end where Krishna is just about to reveal his true nature to Arjuna (by giving him the divine eye), but puts this on hold to reveal his omnipresence in words first. Some selected statements are as follows:
“I am the self abiding in the heart of all creatures; I am their beginning, their middle, and their end. I am Vishnu striding among sun gods, the radiant sun among lights; I am lightning among wind gods, the mood among stars…I am the mind of the senses, the consciousness of creatures…I am the ocean of lakes…I am the vowel a of the syllabary, the pairing of words in a compound…I am the seed of all creatures, nothing animate or inanimate could exist without me” (as trans by Miller, 92-4).
This goes on for pages and Krishna, the “I”, penetrates all. Derrida discusses a fantasy of his on page 66, where he dreams of “an unheard-of grammar and music in order to create a scene neither human, nor divine, nor animal”. This is revolutionary thinking, no, it is beyond that, something beyond thinking, or perhaps different from thinking. This is, as I imagined is, perhaps, Krishna or something such as super string theory.
Also, in regards to Derrida quoting Heidegger, there is another Gita relation I made. Heidegger writes, “In other words, the animal lives with us but we don’t live with it” Again, not really an analysis but an interesting comparison, Krishna says in the Gita, “The whole universe is pervaded by my unmanifest form; all creatures exist in me; but I do not exist in them [my italics] (Miller, 82).
[Note: So I’ve been working on this project for about a year involving ethology as a technique of observation, embedded within some rapturous, polyvalent discursive network that propagates a distinct representation of ‘Nature’, and I couldn’t help but to relate it to the text.]
ReplyDelete“Not one of them [Descartes, Kant, et al.] has ever taken into account, in a serious and determinate manner, the fact that we hunt, kill, exterminate, eat, and sacrifice animals, use them, make them work or submit them to experiments that are forbidden to be carried out on humans. Apart from Lacan- but this, however, in no way changes the traditional axiomatics of his work- not one of them takes into account animal sexuality. Not one of them really integrates progress in ethological or primatological knowledge into his work. (...) Other invariants: along with Decartes, Kant,...[et al.]- lets say the signatory subjects who carry or are borne by those names- never evoke the possibility of being looked at by the animal that they, for their part, observe, and of which they speak [my italics].”- J. Derrida; pg. 90-1
In a (shockingly) clear deconstructionist dialogue, Derrida engages, and yes- interrogates to the utmost- the historical trajectories that have dominated our human representations of the animal (within the canon of philosophy’s history)- and with it ‘the animal’ itself. Harsh, inflammatory words; fighting words, as it were. But as it seems to me (and I think any reader that can follow the nuances of his argument will agree), completely warranted. Through Derrida’s method (which, like geneology, seems to proceed through descent to open new conceptual space- or simply just new space to question and carpet bomb) we see a ‘continuity of error’ that buffers the metaphysical distinction between what properly represents the human and the animal: reaction vs. response, generative (human) language vs. the fixed (animal) linguistic program, recognition of self and Other, banalities, banalities, et al. Binaries across the board. But as it seems to me- and moreover to anyone who has any familiarity with animal cognition (e.g. theory of mind)- these errors, the errors enacted by human mediation and intervention, have always pervaded animal representation, conceptualization, and recognition. Always, and after Derrida’s surgical use of deconstructive textuality (I mean, this was an admirably close reading of a dense philosophical ‘sequence’) there seems to be no question: none of the figures mentioned had ever really considered the creature, as thing-in-itself or whatever, as looking at them- through its own eyes, own experiences, desires, etc. Thusly, it seems clear that the historical intervention of philosophical inquiry into a representation of ‘the animal’ does not- can not- properly grasp hold of its subject. Too much dead weight I suppose. So where to go methodologically?
Derrida does point us in one particular direction (so very briefly- I wish he would have pursued it)- a discipline, the practice mentioned in the quotation above: ethology as a productive method of [animal] representation formation- or at least a positivist attempt at naked sight (like undressing the ball of wax). Amongst a variety of reasons, an appeal to ethology is interesting here because it is quite literally (and you’ll have to give me some latitude with language) the ‘scientific practice (or technique) of becoming other’- of seeing through the eyes that are seen; so this seems like a very promising space of inquiry to pursue given the limitations of something like deconstruction. To ‘become other’, ethological praxis (e.g. the practice of observing ‘animal/ nature’ within a natural context or setting) seeks a suspension of the self (in particular, the collective human self) in the act of observing/ recognizing the Other. In other words, embedding oneself within the ‘milieu of the animot’, which in turn facilitates a breakdown in the ‘indivisible line’ that separates humans and ‘animals’, such that the presence, or trace, of the observer has been erased. But this suspension of self, this ‘becoming other’, is not achieved just by a simple act of topographical deterritorialization (e.g. by just being in nature to see ‘the animal seeing you’ or ‘see as the animot I’). Instead, what allows the ethologist to ‘become other’ is precisely his human eyes; eyes trained to make standardized judgments, to recognize/ delineate/ parse phenomena into discrete units of meaning (or not meaning). In this way, the ethologist crosses the threshold of alterity vis-a-vis his own recognition of alterity (e.g. so ‘the animot’ can not ‘speak’ to the ethologist unless the ethologist has learned to observe how ‘the animot’ speaks and what it speaks). What we then see is more of a performance than a conversation between observer and other; ‘the animal’ remains ‘the animal’ and the human the human, and the baseline for recognition is human mediation. Behavior then functions like (or takes the place of) human language: couched within a human perceptual system equipped to negotiate and recognize what is being ‘said’ (or performed via behavior). So at base, however deterritorialized one may be with respect to observation in nature, ethology is still a schematized system of human judgement that the ‘animot’ speaks to. The same ills as before- just laid out within a differing strata of human epistemology (the ‘natural sciences’ as opposed to the philosophies Derrida explores). The last thing I’ll say is this: I think then ethology is a dead end, just like much of what philosophy has said regarding ‘the animal’ who is ‘poor’: they both seem guilty of the same crime- ‘enframing’ the ‘animot’ in a certain light, such that it always remains within the exclusive grip of human perception.
“I was walking along a eucalyptus-lined avenue when a cow sauntered out from behind a tree.
ReplyDeleteI stopped and we looked each other in the eye.
Her cowness shocked my humanness to such a degree – the moment our eyes met was so tense – I stopped dead in my tracks and lost my bearings as a man, that is, as a member of the human species. The strange feeling that I was apparently discovering for the first time was the shame of a man come face-to-face with an animal. I allowed her to look and see me - this made us equal - and resulted in my also becoming an animal – but a strange even forbidden one, I would say. I continued my walk, but I felt uncomfortable . . . in nature, surrounding me on all sides, as if it were . . . watching me.” Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, 1957-1961[elipses in original]
Encounter and entanglement, two different tropes of talking about the non-human.
Derrida focuses on the encounter and his attention is drawn to the role of the gaze, this tense moment when eyes meet. (Notably this is a trope, which informs much of the critiques of anthropology.) The philosophers he criticizes frequently look, but do not allow themselves to be looked at; a kind of scopic violence we might say. They “never evoke the possibility of being looked at by the animal that they, for their part, observe, and of which they speak” (90). Moreover, in looking, they tend to construe an abstract category of “the animal,” thus denying individuality to animals that might not be able to say “I” but can be “I” or to do “I” (92). Lumped together into a singular “animal” the animals are made to serve to underscore the human exceptionality. Derrida’s cat is an encounter with radical alterity.
But I wonder what kind of work would it do to not talk about encounters anymore, but focus on the entanglements. If we recognize the constant presence of different animals in our world, animals which constantly are “I” and do “I”, then no interaction can be singled out as a discrete encounter. Following Donna Haraway, we would then talk about intimacies, or knottings.
In Meditations on Hunting (1942), Jose Ortega y Gasset writes on the inevitable ethical unease that accompanies the killing of any animal:
ReplyDelete"Nor can it be otherwise, because man has never really known exactly what an animal is. Before and beyond all science, humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely. The animal remains too close for us to not feel mysterious communication with it" (88). This sense of irreducible "ontological difference" between "the human" and "the animal" has been mobilized again and again to reflexively autobiographize in philosophical theorizing and in common sense (not two different kinds of thinking, really, Derrida tells us). Animals have been the screens upon which humans project their self-constructions - hence the crucial emphasis of the word "therefore" in the title, to mark the comparison to other as the inauguration of "I." In instrumentalizing animals in this way, Derrida suggests, humans presume far too much and also far too little about animals-in-themselves - and disallow ourselves to be disarmed by animals who gaze at us in response.
Derrida asks, "Is being-with-the-animal a fundamental and irreducible structure of being-in-the-world, so much so that the idea of a world without animals could not even function as a methodological fiction?"(79). If we take it that humanity defines itself as against a homogeneous animality, while at the same time encapsulating that imagined animality within an imagined humanity, then a world without animals would be an unintelligible one - an impossible one - indeed. Certainly Derrida's task is not to argue that animality is something out of which humans emerge, but to point to the irreducible multiplicity of beings and the ways in which so much of what is human is defined against a projection of what we want to be or think we are in relation to what we want or think animals to be. Taking away any certainty about the latter also deconstructs the sensibility of the former. Derrida's strategy, then, critically assigns to animals as well as to humans a "privation that is not a privation" (160) - that is, a recognition that neither a specific human nor a specific animal can assume to "know" the other. Moreover, attending to the simultaneous acts of seeing, being seen by, and being seen seen over the abyss between self and other is a way of being responsible to the mutual incomprehensibility of being-in-the-world together, of living with others who are also living.
“That is the track I am following, the track I am ferreting out, following the traces of this wholly other they call ‘animal,’ for example, ‘cat’.” (14) I can't do justice to this text in so few words. Its subtle plays on logic are fascinating, and I gather that it has resonance with people in many ways: consider Julienne’s, Eric’s (the other Eric), Halawa, and Emily’s responses. As for myself, I will put it out there that at first I could not help but read this text through my readings of Edmund Leach, particularly his essay on “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, and some of his other recursive work on biblical interpretation. What Leach’s writings on taboo (or more precisely, his argument that the unspoken, inhibited, is the repression of “boundary precepts that lie between” semantically distinct verbal concepts: namely human and nonhuman ones in Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse), tries to get at a very logic that constructs our being-in-the-world and mirrors to some extent what Derrida is trying to de-construct.
ReplyDeleteThe figure of Lewis Carol in this whole thing is also interesting. When Derrida said that “although I don’t have time to do so, I would of course have liked to inscribe my whole talk within a reading of Lewis Carol” (7) I was lead to read that as ‘within a reading of Charles Dogson’, the logician who (1) married his first cousin, (2) was rumored to be a pedophile and (3) came up with some really interesting logical statements that were precursors to computer algebra and three-valued logic (which, I will admit, and with some shame, is quite a fascination of mine).
To some extent, Derrida is exploring many of the same themes we have discussed thus far about the semantic availability of knowing what it is like to be animal-in-the-world, as opposed to human-in-the-world. And, as other have pointed out, that we seek to understand how it is that we can come face-to-face with the animals in ourselves. But, as I think Derrida argues, we cannot just say something along the lines that “we are animals” because as soon as we do we cover our nakedness with words, our very animality becomes clothed in our logic – not necessarily ‘theirs’. Nor can we reduce theirs to a mechanistic-responsive-being.
This text so far, for me (“But as for me, who am I?”), gets more at what it means to be human-in-the-world through an understanding of those encounters with the other. The encounter with the animal goes far in revealing the cloths we wear, and the metaphorical baggage that we carry with us into the final waiting room which awaits us after the “time we don’t have” in our life which “will have been so short” (forward:xiii). In a way, Derrida is inviting us into his life, inviting us to witness his animality. Although he insists in the beginning that his little cat is a real cat, I cannot help but sense that we are the little cats looking in upon him as he disrobes before us. Or maybe, death is what stares him in the face (considering some of his earlier meditations and the trickster role of the Cheshire cat of Lewis Carol’s imagination)? Or rather, are we seeing ourselves through the looking glass he offers?
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"Well! I've often seen a cat without a
grin, "thought Alice; but a grin
without a cat! It's the most curious
thing I ever saw in all my life!"
Christina Kim
ReplyDelete“The animal would be in non-nudity because it is nude, and man in nudity to the extent that he is no longer nude,” (p. 5).
Derrida insists that the animal is not Animal and that “Animal” only makes sense next to Man. Recognition of Animal simultaneously recognizes Man. Derrida thus severs Man’s relation (the oppositional relation) to the animal by this distinction between “Animal” and the animal. We can no longer imagine “Animal” as a single representative of animals. We can only imagine “Animal” as that which is not a man but is Man “to the extent that” it is not the animal; because “Animal” only becomes “Animal” through Man.
As such, thinking about “Animal” becomes an autobiographical work. But who/what is ‘staring back’ when I ‘look’ into a mirror? How does this recognition of “Animal,” as that which does not subsume animals in a singular term/form, open up a space of potentials for thinking about an animal?