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Derrida and His Cat: The Most Important Question

2012; Routledge; Volume: 16; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17409292.2012.739442

1740-9306

Suzanne Guerlac,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

Abstract This essay presents a critical reading of Jacques Derrida's essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am." It examines Derrida's claim that deconstruction has always been concerned with the question of life and livingness and attempts to displace the question of the limit between man and animal to the question of boundaries between the living and the non-living. It rephrases the latter question in relation to issues concerning technology and proposes that the displacement of the question of the animal toward the issue of life (and its technological boundaries) broadens and intensifies the political dimension of the question. Keywords: The AnimalDeconstructionLifeTechnologyJacques DerridaInformation Notes 1. In Sartre, Being and Nothingness (part three, chapter one, section four, "The gaze"). I use the masculine pronouns because the issue of gender, in relation to questions of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, will be addressed by Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, precisely as a problem of non-reciprocity. 2. See Nathan Van Camp, "Between the Species," who refers us to Bernard Stiegler's claim that Derrida "based his concept of the grammé on what Leroi-Gourhan calls the liberation or exteriorization of programmes"; he writes that "grammé does not only concern genetic inscription" but also electronic card indexes and reading machines, noting that the program "is operative on both sides of the human/animal divide" (75). 3. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson on Sloterdijk's information ecologies in "The Transfiguration of Existence and Sovereign Life." 4. Animots is the term Derrida invents to put in the place of the singular term the animal that marks the philosophical tradition's constitution of the human subject through exclusion of, and domination over, the animal considered as a general singular category. 5. Here the dialogue between Derrida and Bernard Stiegler is particularly important. See Nathan Van Camp, "Between the Species." 6. Derrida characterizes deconstruction as a work of deconstituting metaphysical terms in "Structure, Sign, and Play" in Writing and Difference. 7. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson on Sloterdijk's information ecologies in "The Transfiguration of Existence and Sovereign Life." Concerning a related distinction between sustainability and emancipation see Guerlac, "Bergson, the Void and the Politics of Life." 8. Concerning this acceleration see Guerlac, "Humanities 2.0."