Sean’s Post: Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)” Jacques Derrida was the most influential philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. For our purposes, it is vital to note that, despite his placement in the new materialism section of the course, Derrida was not a new materialist. In fact, new materialism represents a rejection of the linguistic theories that Derrida helped to install at the center of western thought. Derrida is primarily a philosopher of language, and he takes language to be, if not the fundamental substance of reality, at least one fundamental substance of reality, and arguably the only one we really have access to. Language names things (Derrida uses the terms “nomination” and “appellation,” which mean “naming” and “calling”) and thus produces a two-level perception of the universe (there are names, and there are things, and the names in some ways “transcend” the things). Such a worldview is anathema to Deleuze and Guattari’s monist sensibility, which plays a decisive role in new materialism. Derrida refers warmly to Deleuze in this text, but their philosophies were very different. This is not to say that Derrida had no influence on new materialists. Derrida had an influence on just about everybody. But we’re really looking here at a kind of alternative approach to the one we’ve seen developing in D & G and Latour and that we will see unfolding in the other texts we read this semester. As is clear from what Derrida says, this was the first in a series of lectures. Some of the allusions only make sense in the context of what happened over the course of the lecture series. So, as usual, don’t expect to understand everything. Incidentally, the lectures are gathered together in a book called The Animal that Therefore I Am. Pay close attention to the translator’s note on p. 369, which explains that je suis can mean both “I am” and “I follow” in French. That pun is central to what Derrida does throughout this text. Linguistic confluences like this are, in fact, central to Derrida’s whole philosophy. I said above that words name things. But because language produces resonance like the one with je suis, that naming can always go awry. This is the core principle of Derrida’s method, which is called deconstruction. For Derrida, it tells us something about how we construct the world that these ambiguities constantly arise in the language that we use in attempting to describe things. It’s a good idea to note that whenever the text says “I am (following),” Derrida actually said the simpler je suis. Derrida himself talks about this pun on pp. 371-372. pp. 372-4 Asking about the experience of shame before the look of his cat, Derrida is playing on something that comes up again later: the story told in Genesis about the “fall of man.” In that story, after eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve discover that they are naked, get ashamed, and cover themselves. You aren’t really naked, then, until you know it. So animals, though unclothed, are not naked. From there, Derrida begins what will be a sustained investigation of what separates humans from “animals,” starting with clothing. He points out that clothing “derives from technics,” or technology. He thus concludes that “we therefore need to think shame and technicity together, as the same ‘subject.’” That will also come to fruition later. p. 375 A metonymy is a rhetorical figure in which one concept is used to stand in for another concept that is “close to” it or associated with it (compare with metaphor, when the substitution is based on similarity rather than association). Saying “boots on the ground” when you mean “people wearing boots” is a metonymy. Using a name like “Descartes” for a set of concepts that Descartes articulated is also metonymy (and thus we almost always use theorists’ names metonymically in this class). pp. 377-380 This section introduces the distinction between a reaction and a response. It plays a big role in the rest of the book but is not really elaborated here. René Descartes, a sixteenth century philosopher who will come up again, basically said that animals can react but not respond. This is, I suppose, a way of saying that they don’t have language, though of course there are responses that are not linguistic. Alice’s remark about cats is consonant with this attitude: purring is a reaction, but cannot differentiate itself into a coherent response (like a response to a question). Derrida is calling this the “question” of the animal, which is of course also a kind of pun. A question demands a response, so the “question” of the animal is also the question directed to the animal: do you respond? The mirror stage (377) is a Lacanian concept that basically says that humans get their sense of what they are by means of reflections encountered in the world. The cat in Alice’s story is a kind of negative mirror, a not-like by which Alice can determine what she is. Unlike the cat, Alice can say “yes” or “no” in response to a question. When Derrida says “the letter” (378) he means the literal word and the way that word can mean in multiple ways. Resonances associated with the letter often come out in translation, as with the strange fact that the French word répondre (to respond) appears in some French translations of Through the Looking Glass even though that word does not appear in the English original. Derrida also points out that, a., humans in Wonderland also don’t respond in any normal ways and, b., the Cheshire cat does respond. In fact he’s the one who tells Alice not to expect any real responses from the people and creatures she encounters in Wonderland. So this whole way of negotiating the animal/human distinction turns out to be pretty tenuous. Fort/da (379) refers to presence and absence (fort means “here” in German, da “there”). The term comes from Freud, who describes a child playing a game that hinges on these words (it works sort of like peek-a-boo). Not super important to us. There’s more of Derrida’s working with the letter when he starts engaging the relationship between responding and following. He plays with the concept of “following” when he talks about feeling chased out of the room by the cat looking at him naked. He associates that with the fact that a “response” necessarily has to “follow” something. And that leads to the whole idea of being near someone. Here Derrida says an important thing: “it isn’t certain that these modes of being [i.e. those associated with being near something else] come to modify a preestablished being” (379). Derrida is questioning whether there is a “me,” an identity, before that me is “next to” someone else. Maybe there is no me except in relation to others. If identity is so deeply indebted to the other, then we are much closer to the others who are animals than we think (depending on them, in fact, to exist ourselves). Thus all those puns on the root “pres,” both in French (auprés means “next to,” après “after,” etc.) and in English (pressure, compress). Here we are on somewhat familiar ground. When Weheliye says that black female flesh is “vestibular” to Man, he is making a related point. p. 381 This play on the word “passion” refers to the experience of passivity (of being seen) that Derrida associated with nudity, to passionate feeling, to “passing” from one place or position to another, and to what Christians call the passion (the crucifixion and death) of Jesus. Emma has been trying to jam a word about passive voice into our conversation for the last two meetings. This may be a good time to say a word or two about that. pp. 383-387 Derrida returns to the Genesis story to talk about the naming of the animals. Most contemporary scholars on Genesis claim that the creation story had two authors and that the narratives got mixed together in some way. I’m not a Bible scholar, but I think Derrida is tracking one of the differences between the two when he notes that the story of the creation of people gets told two ways. In one story, God creates humans as male and female. Then when the story is repeated he creates Adam first and then Eve from his rib, after Adam has named all the animals. So there is a huge bundle of issues in play here: questions of naming, of dominion and power, and of sexual difference. Did the animals come before Adam? They are created before Adam in the whole seven-day description of what gets created, but they do not become what they are (by being named) until after they come before Adam to be named. As Derrida puts it: “these living things that came into the world before him but were named after him, on his initiative according to the second narrative. In both cases, man is in both senses after the animal . . . This ‘after,’ that determines a sequence, a consequence, or a persecution, is not in time, nor is it temporal; it is the very genesis of time” (386). Derrida is trying to diagnose how animals figure in fundamental conceptions of priority in time, in power, and in space. He also notes that the fact that God sticks around while Adam names the animals “in order to see” means that God himself does not know ahead of time what names Adam will give, so he is also in certain ways vulnerable or passive in this story. But the “in order to see” also refers to the very idea of “order,” of putting things in order. The animals come in turns for Adam to name them, so there is a certain ordering there. pp. 388-389 Benjamin returns here, though Derrida’s refers to a text we haven’t read. Following St. Paul, Benjamin says that the natural world is melancholic because it lacks speech. It is “protesting in silence against the unacceptable fatality of that silence” (388). Or, maybe nature lacks speech because it is sad (“it is nature’s sadness or mourning that renders it mute” (389)). Derrida’s point is exactly that one does not “follow” the other; they are simultaneous and they both originate from the experience of having been named by someone else. The sadness comes from following, from having been “called” by something that came first: following both in sense of being “after” in time and in the sense of having to come when you are called. He also points to the sadness that inheres in names in that they stay behind when you die. That is why we all have “last” names, which are really the names of dead people that we are chained to. pp. 390-2 Much of this refers to what Derrida will do later in the lecture series. I don’t want to get bogged down in it. The term “Dasein” (391) comes from Heidegger. It basically means “being,” or “there-being” (which is a literal translation), but in order to have Dasein you need some degree of self-consciousness. So animals basically lack it, and in the lecture dedicated to Heidegger Derrida puts some pressure on this idea that animals “lack” being. pp. 392-397 The remainder of the reading for today is given over to elaborating Derrida’s “first hypothesis,” which refers to the intense increase in the scale of how humans have interacted with animals over the last couple of centuries. Some quick notes on this hypothesis: • 393 Whenever Derrida talks about historical processes (like the one he’s getting at here), he always has to complicate that because he has read Benjamin and therefore does not believe in progress. The “autos” that he uses here refer to the fact that thinking in terms of progress is part of the self-definition of humans, but also that that is caught up in the “auto” of the mechanical, of technology. Humans auto-define in reference to a certain automation, and that automation is also supposed to mark a particular moment in human “progress.” • 394 This has also transformed humans’ relationship with animals, who are “called” animals exactly because they are supposed to be “automatic” or instinctual. The enmeshing of animals with certain technologies thus echoes humans’ conceptions of animals. We are talking, of course, about what Latour would call “moderns.” The “premoderns” may have thought about animals rather differently, having not “yet” purified themselves of animality. • 396 The Bentham mentioned here is the same person who came up with the panopticon. He was a utilitarian, which means he thought social decisions should be made so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain (so if you had to make one person suffer a lot in order to make a bunch of people feel better, that was morally acceptable). Derrida notes that Bentham’s approach shifts from emphasizing the question of whether or not animals have language (“logos” means “word,” and is used philosophically to describe a certain mastery over language. To be able to name the animals is to have logos). If you shift to the question of whether animals can suffer, you are introducing “a certain passivity . . . a sufferance, a passion, a not-being able.” In other words, suddenly the question of whether to value a life has to do not with a strength (the ability to respond, to have language, to name things, and to assert coherence on the world), but rather with a weakness (the capacity to undergo suffering). • The “cogito” is the famous declaration from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” pp. 397-400 Derrida immediately introduces a second hypothesis. As with the first, I’ll delineate some of its features: • The discussion on the Greek phoneme tropho has a characteristically Derridean complexity. Tropho refers to nourishment or feeding. So if he’s going to talk about limitrophy, his topic will be what feeds the limit between humans and animals. He spends a bunch of time here denying that he is trying to reject the human/animal distinction, calling on his own long history of insisting on difference as the central concept in his philosophy. His use of the term calls also on the disproportionate relationship between humans and animals having to do with feeding: humans feed and otherwise care for animals, and also eat them, and both practices are components of how the human/animal distinction is performed. • Derrida acknowledges a difference between humans and animals (it’s obvious, as his puns on “asinine” keep emphasizing). But he is interested in “what happens once [a limit] 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” (399). “Abyssal” occurs a lot in theoretical language. It’s literal meaning is as the adjectival form of “abyss,” but it usually speaks to the way two “sides” that are separated by an “abyss” tend to reflect, refract, and complicate one another. You can see how the human/animal distinction becomes “abyssal” almost immediately given that humans are, of course, animals. So they’re actually on both sides of this particular abyss. • Now Derrida produces a numbered list (399-400) that constitutes his “thesis”: 1. Basically, the rupture between humans and animals is abyssal. 2. That rupture has a history. Derrida has begun addressing that history in his first hypothesis about the last 200 years. He points out that history emerges from the human side of this abyss (the “anthropocentric,” or human-centered, side), and that history constitutes the “autobiography” of humanity. He emphasizes the “bios” or life side of things, one suspects, because “life” represents one of the complications in the abyss. Life exists on both sides, as the distinction between bios and zoe (source of the word “zoo”) makes clear. 3. Derrida will insist in the strongest terms on the multipiclity that characterizes the “animal” side of the abyss. That’s why he insists that saying “the animal” in a way that claims to take in all animal life is stupid. He’s punning on the French word translated here as “asinine,” bêtise (literally, animal-like). When you try to separate yourself from “the animals” you are “uttering an asinanity” and thus collapsing the very distinction you are trying to establish by becoming an ass. He will return again and again to this point. “The animal,” as the counterpart to “the human,” is a completely unacceptable term for Derrida What follows is a long list of allusions to Derrida’s previous texts. There are lots of wonderful things buried in there, but we will pretty much ignore this section unless you have particular questions. Two upshots of this discussion: 1. the question of the animal consistently implicates questions of sexual difference (we saw this also in D & G’s discussion of wolves and anuses); 2. “philosophers have always judged and all philosophers have judged that limit [between humans and animals] to be single and indivisible, considering that on the other side of that limit there is an immense group, a single and homogenous set that one has the right . . . to distinguish and mark as opposite, namely, the set of the Animal in general, the animal spoken of in the general singular” (408-409). The general singular is used to refer to many things with one singular word, “the animal,” “the student body,” “the press,” etc. So Derrida says the whole philosophical tradition has consistently committed the asinanity of treating “the animal” as a single undifferentiated substance. p. 409 Derrida was very fond of producing neologisms (i.e. made-up words). L’animot is one of those, a combination of the word animal (French and English use the same word) and mot, which means “word.” The idea is to point out that “animal” does what words often do: it yokes many entirely different things together. Ecce is a Latin word meaning “here is.” In the Latin translation of the book of John, when Pontius Pilate offers Jesus up to be crucified, he says ecce homo, which means “here is the man.” Nietzsche has a book by the same name. Next comes a series of engagements with narratives from antiquity. These are designed to help Derrida trace out the relationships among animality, shame, identity, and following from the earliest moments of the western cultural tradition. Derrida offers pretty good rundowns of each, I think. Some quick notes: • pp. 409-410; 413-414 The Chimera story is triggered by the chimerical nature of the word l’animot, which, like the mythical Chimera, is made up of pieces of others things. The important takeaway here is that the animal quality of Chimera is characterized by its being hunted, and the “humanity” of Bellerophon is linked to his status as hunter. When Derrida returns to this story on p. 413, it will be to point out that Bellerophon is also a figure of erotic restraint (i.e. of capacity for shame). • pp. 411 The Cain and Abel story links animals, shame, and being-hunted yet again. God refuses Cain’s vegetable sacrifice in favor of Abel’s animal, Cain kills Abel out of jealousy, and then Cain finds himself hunted down like an animal and seeks to hide himself out of shame. This story introduces the concept of sacrifice. We can recall from Mbembe’s discussion of Bataille that sacrifice is a means of projecting the consequences of shameful behavior elsewhere. • 413 The upshot of all these discussions: “what is proper to man, his superiority over and subjugation of the animal, his very becoming-subject . . . [and] everything that is proper to man would derive from this originary fault, indeed from this default in propriety, what is proper to man as default in propriety—and from the imperative that finds in it its development and resilience.” There is some fundamental link, in other words, between the “superiority” of humans over animals on one hand and humans’ capacity for shame on the other. And that is in part that you cannot have shame if you haven’t failed or done wrong in some way. That’s the “fault” he’s talking about. pp. 415-416 Here Derrida lays out three features of l’animot 1. The first point is the one he’s been repeating from the beginning: a refusal to think of animals in the general singular. He calls this kind of thinking a “crime” and make that provocative move of asking whether only humans can be the victims of crimes. 2. He emphasizes the mot part of animot here, calling back to the fact that Adam is supposed to have “named” the animals and also that animals are supposed not to have language. 3. He opens up the possibility of thinking “the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation [i.e. lack, inadequacy].” pp. 416-418 In describing humans as “autobiographical animals,” Derrida again performs the abyssal relationship between animals and humans. Humans may be the only animals who generate self-reference in the complex mode of autobiography, but they do so on the backs of animals. The auto- of auto biography depends on the animal. There are some other crossovers. He notes that the word “I” as another kind of “general singularity,” since its referent can be anybody. He also points out that we generally distinguish animal life from other matter by its capacity to move itself about, its “auto-motricity.” So, in some ways, when they exhibit self-actualized movement, animals themselves are performing autobiographies; they are doing the thing that shows they are what they are. Finally, Derrida talks about how autobiography always promises to show the I “in his totally naked truth,” without shame. He thus returns us to the scene of Derrida standing naked in front of his cat and being ashamed. He doubts there’s any such thing as nudity without shame. He introduces the mirror (the kind of mirror called a psyché) to generate some thinking about how the fundamentally specular (i.e. determined-by-another-in-a-mirroring-relationship) nature of human selfhood gets inflected when the other being confronted is not another human, nor an image in a mirror (that’s what Lacan’s mirror stage talks about), but rather an animal. When Derrida stands there naked seeing himself being sees by a cat, in what way is he looking at something that is like him, and in what way is looking at something that is different?