Demenageries: Thinking (Of) Animals After Derrida

267 Pages·2011·3.139 MB·English

by  Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Marta Segarra

Demenageries
Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida
http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield
Critical Studies
Vol. 35

General Editor
Myriam Diocaretz
Tilburg University
Editorial Board
Anne E. Berger, Cornell University
Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University
Marta Segarra, Universitat de Barcelona
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Demenageries
Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida
Edited by
Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Marta Segarra
Cover Image: © Jordi Esteva, “Miko se bebe mi agua”.
Cover Design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3350-4
Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS

Thoughtprints
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra 3

1. Animal Writes: Derrida’s Que Donc and Other Tails
Marie-Dominique Garnier 23

2. On a Serpentine Note
Ginette Michaud 41

3. Ver(s): Toward a Spirituality of One’s Own
Claudia Simma 73

4. When Sophie Loved Animals
Anne E. Berger 97

5. Deconstruction and Petting:
Untamed Animots in Derrida and Kafka
Joseph Lavery 125

6. Say the Ram Survived: Altering the Binding of Isaac
in Jacques Derrida’s “Rams” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Adeline Rother 145

7. Crowds and Powerlessness: Reading //kabbo and Canetti
with Derrida in (South) Africa
Rosalind C. Morris 167

8. “Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
James Siegel 213

9. Meditations for the Birds
David Wills 245

Contributors 265
Thoughtprints

Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra

I admit to it in the name of autobiography and in order to confide in you the
following: […] I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation
of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole of
history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or
microscopic. My sole concern is not that of interrupting this animalist
“vision” but of taking care not to sacrifice to it any difference of alterity, the
fold of any complication, the opening of any abyss to come.1
The Animal That Therefore I Am 92

We might begin like this: “The recent concern with animals or ‘the animal’
may be the latest if not the ultimate form of the anti-humanism that started to
develop after World War II, in a turning of the Western intellectual tradition
against itself. The attack on anthropocentrism as a necessary correlate of
humanism may have been fueled if not provoked by the new consciousness of
the damage inflicted upon the earth and its living creatures (humanity
included) by ‘men.’ Such a turn of the Western tradition around and against
itself, sometimes deemed an ethical turn, would mark if not the end, at least
the limit of the Enlightenment project in its Cartesian version: for man to
become the master and owner of Nature. Derrida’s latest and last move, his
“turn” toward ‘the question of animality’ would point in that direction.”
This is what cultural and intellectual historians might say (and indeed
have said), and for the most part, rightly so. The set of questions triggered by
the thought of and on animals is timely; humanism seems to have exhausted
itself and is giving way to “posthumanism”; ecological disaster looms. Two
interdisciplinary fields of inquiry have recently emerged to try to address
these issues: “ecocriticism” and “animal studies.” Derrida’s two long lectures
on the “autobiographical animal” given in 1997 and later collected in The
Animal That Therefore I Am2 played a groundbreaking role in the latter’s
development. In 2007, the Oxford Literary Review published a special issue
on Derridanimals that called on philosophy, literature, and cognitive sciences
if not to provide answers, at least to help frame questions in the wake of
Derrida’s work. The present volume, also interdisciplinary, follows this
collection of essays.3 Its editors claim no special expertise in the vast field of
“animal studies.” But they recognize its importance and appreciate the chance
that such a field offers for a new dialogue between what one calls the
“Humanities” and what one calls hard science. They admire the work done in
this respect by Donna J. Haraway and Cary Wolfe, among others. Above all,
4 Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
they are readers of Derrida, a thinker who taught them to interrogate
conceptual borders and to work at/on the limits. As members of the board of
Critical Studies, a series which aims to promote transdisciplinary approaches
and (self)critical displacements in the fields of the humanities and social
sciences, they believe this new tribute to the promises held by thinking of
animals after Derrida is timely.
So what about Derrida’s seminal contribution to the growing field of
“animal studies”?
Any careful reader of Derrida knows that such a direction in his work is
all but new. Animals have been lurking in his texts from early on. Their
appearances have been numerous and varied if sometimes brief. It takes
Derrida no less than three full printed pages (35-38) to enumerate all the
animals he can recall following from the time of his first writings up to The
Animal That Therefore I Am. In particular, animals, or more precisely “the
animal(s) that Derrida is/follows,” show up each time Derrida’s discourse
shifts to an “autobiographical” mode (and each time in a different guise or
species), from the most furtive reference to his or one’s “habitat” – an animal
mode of dwelling – in “Unsealing (‘the old new language’),” a 1983
interview in which Derrida, among other personal disclosures, evokes his
dream of an idiomatic language,4 to the extended self-unraveling of the
silkworm in A Silkworm of One’s Own.
Most importantly, as Hélène Cixous reminds us in “Co-Responding Voix
You,” animals have made their way between if not before the lines from the
beginning, that is as soon as the first trace of a thinking about “trace”
appeared in Of Grammatology. Cixous remarks:

Thus, with the first trace of the thinking of the trace in Of
Grammatology, the whole machine that tends to replace the word
“writing” in the ordinary sense by “trace” or the word “speech” by
trace, had as its final purpose that writing, speech, trace are not the
proper characteristic of the human. There is animal trace, animals
write. (H.C.’s emphasis)5

If animals “write,” then they cannot be said to be “mute,” even though they
don’t “speak,” that is, even though they don’t have what we call articulate
language. This is why, following the animal that he also is, Derrida strives to
“[accede] to a thinking […] that thinks the absence of the name and of the
word otherwise, and as something other than a privation” (48),6 a sentence or
rather the statement of a “thought” rightly singled out by Donna Haraway as
crucial to an understanding of the import of Derrida’s “thinking” in the wake
– or the furrow – of animals.7
In his attempt to “think” of what he carefully calls “the absence of the
name” (rather than animals’ inability to name) as “something other than a
Thoughtprints 5
privation” or a lack, Derrida coins the word “animot.”8 Not only, as he says,
because it rhymes with “animaux,” therefore recalling and reinscribing the
plural in the singular in order to resist the erasure of animals’ vast differences
that takes place with the use of the reductive generic singular “animal”; not
even in order to “give speech back” to animals in a simple reversal of the
prevailing philosophical order; but rather, as the proximity between the
seemingly contrary words “mot” and “muet” (mute) suggests in French, in
order to insist that words (mots) can be spelled out without a word – the
French language uses the pseudo-Latin word “motus” to try and impose
silence – so that a cat, for instance, “might be […] signifying in a language of
mute traces, that is to say without words” (18).9
If animals “write,” or to put it in Derrida’s words, “if there is differance
(with an ‘a’) as soon as there is a living trace”10 – “differance” and writing are
co-terminus in Derrida’s thinking and the very word “animal’ refers to the
most basic trace of life, i.e. animation – then it means that when or since
humans write, they do it in their capacity as animals, living traces leaving
traces.
If animals “write” and humans write qua animals, then the link usually
made between autography, speech and self-consciousness is put in question.
If animals “write,” it is ultimately the basic correlation between subjectivity,
self-reflexivity and human language that needs to be rethought and
reformulated.
Derrida’s thought “after” and around the (animal) trace has far reaching
implications, not only for thinking anew the difference(s) between human(s)
and animal(s), differences which the Western philosophical tradition has
mainly articulated and summarized in terms of the generic opposition
between the speaking and the non-speaking living being, but also for thinking
anew “thinking” itself.
Readers cannot but have noticed our insistent use of the word “thinking”
and its affiliates as we try to say something about Derrida and animals. We
have just been merely recording what is one of Derrida’s most heavily used
words (or set of words) in The Animal That Therefore I Am. True, thinking is
not “writing.” But it follows from it. There can be no thinking without
differantial tracing. Which means, to follow Derrida’s thought tracks in The
Animal…, that thinking follows from following the/an animal. And it does so
in more than one way. Let us sketch out briefly the stakes of this meditation
on thinking.
Talking about the ongoing “war” between those who not only violate
animal life but are immune to pity and those who start from this irrefutable
feeling of pity – and empathy – at the sight or thought of animals’ suffering,
Derrida invites “us” to “think this war” in solemn terms: “I say ‘to think’ this
war because I believe it concerns what we call ‘thinking.’ The animal looks at
us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there” (29).11 Thus,
6 Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
Derrida asks us to weigh our words, and particularly the word “penser” (“to
think”). The word “penser” carries a special weight in French, the weight of
weight, since, as Derrida reminds us in Béliers, there is a lexical affinity, what
Derrida calls a friendship, between “penser” and “peser,” to think and to
weigh, which both come from the verb “pensare” in Latin. When one thinks
(in French), one has or should have what one calls in French, “scrupules,”
that is, one should feel the weight of what one ponders over, as if one was
loaded with little stones that prevent us from moving forward easily and
hurriedly. In Béliers (2003), a meditation on friendship dedicated to his late
friend, the German philosopher Gadamer, Derrida calls our attention to the
semantic proximity between “tragen” – to carry in German – and “penser” in
French. In order to weigh something, one has to carry it; weighing is a mode
of carrying, of taking on oneself rather than of taking in oneself, interiorizing,
comprehending. As a manner of “taking on,” thinking involves a form of
responsibility, a responsibility toward what one weighs and carries, therefore
also a form of respect toward it. “Thinking” in this sense is not only or not
primarily an intellectual process (and one reserved to humans), it is an ethical
stance (and one an animal could take). And this is one reason why Derrida
insists on the distinction between “thinking” and what one too easily deems
its equivalents, “philosophizing” and “theorizing,” a distinction nowhere
more sharply and repeatedly drawn by Derrida than when he follows animal
trails.
But what does it mean that “thinking” perhaps, begins “there,” that it is
there where an animal “nous regarde,” looks at us and concerns us, requires
us to be concerned by her/him as she/he looks at us, while we are naked
before her/him? Philosophers, says Derrida at the beginning of his meditation,
have merely been theoreticians, at least from Descartes on. They practice
“thinking” and think of “thinking” as a specifically human mode of
“contemplating” (“theorein”) things, of seeing them and seeing through them
thanks to their own representational power – hence a certain “nakedness” of
the thing seen “as such.” They treat the animal as a “theorem,” as “something
seen and not seeing,” sums up Derrida (14).12 The animal, any animal, exists
only in “theory,” counts only as “theory” like anything else for most if not all
the philosophers who define themselves as such. If philosophers could see an
animal see them, as “Derrida” sees the cat look at him naked in the bathroom
and thus sees himself being seen by her, then animals would cease to be mere
objects of representation. If philosophers took into account their “point of
view,” without being able to name what it consists of, then they would start to
experience animals’ unsettling otherness, opening themselves to the
experience of any other’s otherness. In its totalizing scope and apparent
simplicity, Derrida’s argument with philosophy and philosophers may seem
almost banal or otherwise exaggerated. The reversal and displacement of the
gaze that he seems to advocate and operate (from the theorizing philosopher