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Notes on Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am
Published in French in 2006, two years after his death, this book is a long lecture (which actually turned into a ten-hour seminar) that he wrote for the 1997 Cerisy conference on his work titled “The Autobiographical Animal.”
Here Derrida sets his sights on the philosophical problematic of the animal. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the limits of that interstitial space between that which we call animal and that which we call human. He coins the neologism “Limitrophy” to describe this exploration, “Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiple.” (29) He predicates this line of inquiry on his assertion that the entire history of philosophic discourse from Aristotle to Heidegger is guilty of misrepresenting or misinterpreting the basic ontological difference between that which we call animal and that which we call human.
He opens with a discussion of the Genesis myth, focusing on the way in which Adam is naked in the garden until he eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Instead of the typical reading of this action as a fall from grace, Derrida sees this as the inciting incident for the creation of humanity. Recognition of nudity, and the shame associated with it, is particularly interesting to Derrida because, as he puts it, “In principle, with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to dress itself. [Thus] clothing would be proper to man, one of the ‘properties’ of man. ‘Dressing oneself’ would be inseparable from all the other figures of what is ‘proper to man,’ even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, etc.” (5) These “properties of man” are the sites he wants to push against in this lecture.
In his trademark elliptical, recursive, persistently deferring style, he raises this issue of being naked in front of that which we call animal, what it means to be naked, how that which we call animal cannot be naked, what it means to be seen by that which we call animal, and what it means for a human to see themselves in the eyes of that which we call animal.
N.B. this phraseology “that which we call animal” instead of the simpler term “animal.” This is purposeful. For Derrida, the fact that we refer to all living creatures that are not human as “animals” is absurdly reductive. He makes a good point. Lumping together the cricket and the whale, the mountain lion and the parakeet, the giraffe and the marmot, seems lazy and dismissive, yet, as Derrida points out, this is exactly what philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger are guilty of doing. And part of his project is to shine a light on this unexamined assumption.
Take Heidegger, for example. As Derrida shows, Heidegger delineates three ontological positions: the living being (which is separated into the animality of the animal and the humanity of the human) and the nonliving being. So, for Heidegger, you are either a nonliving being (the example he uses is a stone) or a living being, of which there are only two kinds: animal and human. According to Heidegger, the determining distinction between the animal and the human is the ability to die. Animals, Heidegger argues, come to an end but do not die. By the same token, “A dog does not exist but merely lives.” Humans, on the other hand, have “the living character of the living being,” by which he seems to mean logos and/or the awareness of mortality and/or the ability to manipulate existence and/or the ability to choose death. Heidegger’s specific wording for these distinctions are, “the stone is wordless, the animal is poor in the world, man is world-forming.” Of the various objections Derrida raises to Heidegger’s argument, the one that resonates most powerfully with his project of limitrophy is his assertion that the binary division between human and animal falls vastly short of representing the multiplicity of difference between various species. (On a personal note: I read Derrida’s argument regarding the need to move beyond the univocal signifier “animal” as akin to the annoying error so often made when someone generalizes about “Africa”: not taking into account the immense geographic, historic, political, social, and cultural diversity of the continent.)
Another site for Derrida’s limitrophy is Lacan’s position vis-à-vis the difference between that which we call human and that which we call animal. For Lacan, it should be no surprise, what separates the two is language. It is a difference between response and reaction. Animals, Lacan argues, do not respond to questions; they react to stimuli. They do not have a language, rather, they use a coded system of signaling, which is a fixed program, as opposed to the dynamic, symbolic interaction of the human. He uses bees as an example: the dance of the bee who returns to the hive to direct others to where they might find nectar. Lacan claims that this dance is not an exchange in need of interpretation, as would be the case with humans, but is instead a kind of exchange of data from one (as Derrida puts it) Cartesian machine-animal to another Cartesian machine-animal. For the most part, Derrida is not as interested in refuting Lacan’s claim as much as he is interested in making porous the distinctions, again, exploring the limits, the threshold between response and reaction.
In terms of application, Derrida’s idea of limitrophy is of particular interest to me as a potential guiding methodology for exploring the posthuman (one of my current fields of inquiry) – and more specifically, for my major ongoing research interests, as a way to think and talk about experimental literature. If posthuman discourse can, in some ways, be considered an exploration of the categorical boundary separating the human from the non-human, I don’t see why that discourse can’t be grafted onto a discussion of the categorical boundary separating conventional realism and non-conventional realism. Aren’t both programs reliant on the power engendered by the exclusivity of their (perceived) unique characteristics in order to demarcate them as foundational, separate, autonomous, sovereign? In other words, that which we call human seems analogous to that which we call conventional realism. Perhaps, as posthuman discourse shows us the inherent flaw in such molar classification of the human, so too can this discourse show us the inherent flaw in conceiving of conventional realism as a molar classification. Both that which we call human and that which we call conventional realism are porous, malleable, molecular — while at the same time they seem to present legible boundaries. Limitrophy offers a strategy for questioning the validity of those perceived boundaries by identifying gaps, spaces, discontinuities, through surveying the interstitial space between that which constitutes and that which deviates.
Jacques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham University Press, 2008)
Tags: heidigger, jacques derrida
this is right up my mind anus. thank you chris.
this is right up my mind anus. thank you chris.
Yes. Thank you!
Yes. Thank you!
This is interesting, Chris. I believe that Derrida realized most of deconstruction’s potential with “tout autre est tout autre,” and this is a complex elaboration on the latter. Nietzsche and Deleuze I think would be very important to Derrida’s thesis, with, obviously, Heidegger’s reactionary fear of technology, i.e. the inhuman, being the antithesis. Merleau-Ponty has done good work on the issue of animality and the “one flesh,” too.
Looks like we have similar interests in this regard, Chris. I’m working on an essay about Derrida, Judaism, and literature–the Book to come.
This is interesting, Chris. I believe that Derrida realized most of deconstruction’s potential with “tout autre est tout autre,” and this is a complex elaboration on the latter. Nietzsche and Deleuze I think would be very important to Derrida’s thesis, with, obviously, Heidegger’s reactionary fear of technology, i.e. the inhuman, being the antithesis. Merleau-Ponty has done good work on the issue of animality and the “one flesh,” too.
Looks like we have similar interests in this regard, Chris. I’m working on an essay about Derrida, Judaism, and literature–the Book to come.
Glad you dug it, Jereme.
Glad you dug it, Jereme.
You bet, you bet…Deleuze or De Landa is next!
You bet, you bet…Deleuze or De Landa is next!
Oh, man, it’s been about six years since I read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, but I was really captivated by it at the time — maybe I’ll go back to him — thanks for that tip. Would be very interested to read your thoughts on Derrida, Judaism and literature.
Oh, man, it’s been about six years since I read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, but I was really captivated by it at the time — maybe I’ll go back to him — thanks for that tip. Would be very interested to read your thoughts on Derrida, Judaism and literature.
alec, not too sure if this book will be a help to you or a hindrance exactly but it may be worth a look, is definitely one of the most interesting things ive read on derrida in a while – it’s called radical atheism: derrida and the time of life by martin hagglund.
chris, thanks for this, really superb layout and engagement, much dug. i liked this book when i read it, especially the points raised about heidegger, the condition of animal-being and the exploration of animals lacking the ability to die. that’s been really powerful stuff for me. the point on lacan is interesting. language does differentiate humans for lacan but not necessarily absolutely for his thing about the bees is intended to show that bees theorize. language may be symbolic, dynamic, in need of interpretation but even in language, the space of communication is theoretical, which is to say, abstract, a fixed program, and this is what Lacan would mean by data-exchange. i think derrida reads down lacan on this point. derrida has always driven me just a little mad when he does this, reads down philosophy. like, his supposed demystification of the animal into the varieties of species is a little lazy itself in that it, overlooks the quite specific metaphorical and modular inspirations particular kinds of animals have provided the history of philosophy (it hasn’t been just a history of logocentrism toward “animals” but a tussle with the creatureliness that encompasses the total plurality of beings and the vexed question – and trauma – of how that applies to humans). also, too, in insisting on our limitrophy with ‘that which we call animal’, he speaks as though there were a ‘world spirit’ of animals, a sum of them, that interperforates the human — when he’s just finished telling us such a summation is a violence and a mistake. i sympathise with his ethical aim here but his own terms of deconstruction find it impossible to think specific kinds of animal beyond a moment of example, in which their singularity is only illustrative of animality. and this puts him not quite in the same boat as those he criticises but nowhere near the far shore either. part of posthumanism, I would argue, is also figuring out not only the ways in which animality is something humanism insists man is apart from but also what humanism insists is interior and anterior to man – Darwin etc – and thus already liminally and instructively constitutive to its existence. posthumanism can’t really just turn to the animal as a marginalised antidote to the human in that sense for that would only extend the human faculties to the animal world or locate the animal in us. it’s still anthropocentric. posthumanism must instead delineate a post-animal understanding on its own terms, one that is against the special exemptive violences of the human while also insisting on some form of univocity to the being of all, across species, so as it is able to think the animal and think itself as animal. i think that would require a philosophy where a limitrophy takes place between the humans that therefore we aren’t and the animal that therefore they aren’t, in a universality of ontological properties based on the shared discrepancies in the being of both. if you find the chance, you might want to check out the work of Graham Harman whose philosophy insists upon objects as the fundamental ontological category – inclusive of animals, humans but also of rocks, hats, Mars, werewolves, ice and so on. his work is rising pretty meteorically in philosophy right now and is definitely worth the read.
alec, not too sure if this book will be a help to you or a hindrance exactly but it may be worth a look, is definitely one of the most interesting things ive read on derrida in a while – it’s called radical atheism: derrida and the time of life by martin hagglund.
chris, thanks for this, really superb layout and engagement, much dug. i liked this book when i read it, especially the points raised about heidegger, the condition of animal-being and the exploration of animals lacking the ability to die. that’s been really powerful stuff for me. the point on lacan is interesting. language does differentiate humans for lacan but not necessarily absolutely for his thing about the bees is intended to show that bees theorize. language may be symbolic, dynamic, in need of interpretation but even in language, the space of communication is theoretical, which is to say, abstract, a fixed program, and this is what Lacan would mean by data-exchange. i think derrida reads down lacan on this point. derrida has always driven me just a little mad when he does this, reads down philosophy. like, his supposed demystification of the animal into the varieties of species is a little lazy itself in that it, overlooks the quite specific metaphorical and modular inspirations particular kinds of animals have provided the history of philosophy (it hasn’t been just a history of logocentrism toward “animals” but a tussle with the creatureliness that encompasses the total plurality of beings and the vexed question – and trauma – of how that applies to humans). also, too, in insisting on our limitrophy with ‘that which we call animal’, he speaks as though there were a ‘world spirit’ of animals, a sum of them, that interperforates the human — when he’s just finished telling us such a summation is a violence and a mistake. i sympathise with his ethical aim here but his own terms of deconstruction find it impossible to think specific kinds of animal beyond a moment of example, in which their singularity is only illustrative of animality. and this puts him not quite in the same boat as those he criticises but nowhere near the far shore either. part of posthumanism, I would argue, is also figuring out not only the ways in which animality is something humanism insists man is apart from but also what humanism insists is interior and anterior to man – Darwin etc – and thus already liminally and instructively constitutive to its existence. posthumanism can’t really just turn to the animal as a marginalised antidote to the human in that sense for that would only extend the human faculties to the animal world or locate the animal in us. it’s still anthropocentric. posthumanism must instead delineate a post-animal understanding on its own terms, one that is against the special exemptive violences of the human while also insisting on some form of univocity to the being of all, across species, so as it is able to think the animal and think itself as animal. i think that would require a philosophy where a limitrophy takes place between the humans that therefore we aren’t and the animal that therefore they aren’t, in a universality of ontological properties based on the shared discrepancies in the being of both. if you find the chance, you might want to check out the work of Graham Harman whose philosophy insists upon objects as the fundamental ontological category – inclusive of animals, humans but also of rocks, hats, Mars, werewolves, ice and so on. his work is rising pretty meteorically in philosophy right now and is definitely worth the read.
this was awesome to read chris, thanks.
personally, i have a hard time thinking about trying to binarily differentiate humans and non since a guiding ethic for me is rooted in evolutionary biology. my perceptions of human and animal are so blended because i rarely think of them outside of deep-time. i kind of see any distinction a human has that a non doesn’t can be rectified by a potential, eventual evolution.
i mean i can always drive these arguments down, i think, like the naked argument. i mean no animal feels shame (maybe) but what is the purpose of shame? its so that there will exist a fear of not being accepted by a group, which is common to all social animals. shame and language are all just a matter of degrees that only are as they are right now because this is where we are within the scope of human evolution. anyway these are just always the arguments i come back to.
again, great post.
this was awesome to read chris, thanks.
personally, i have a hard time thinking about trying to binarily differentiate humans and non since a guiding ethic for me is rooted in evolutionary biology. my perceptions of human and animal are so blended because i rarely think of them outside of deep-time. i kind of see any distinction a human has that a non doesn’t can be rectified by a potential, eventual evolution.
i mean i can always drive these arguments down, i think, like the naked argument. i mean no animal feels shame (maybe) but what is the purpose of shame? its so that there will exist a fear of not being accepted by a group, which is common to all social animals. shame and language are all just a matter of degrees that only are as they are right now because this is where we are within the scope of human evolution. anyway these are just always the arguments i come back to.
again, great post.
I also read this post from the perspective of a biologist-by-training, something which always colors my reading. For example:
“So, for Heidegger, you are either a nonliving being (the example he uses is a stone) or a living being…”
Every student of Bio 101 recalls “self-replicating” as part of the “Is it living?” question. Is a virus “alive”? (it has genetic material, uses host cell machinery to replicate) What about retroviruses? Viroids? Prions? Using a stone as an example of nonliving (let alone the thought that it may be on a “boundary” or in a “space” or at some “limit”) seems way, way overly simplified, to the point of being ludicrous. Where IS the boundary between living and nonliving? The distinctions are much more subtle, and interesting.
The “shame of nakedness” issue as defining human/non-animal is also weak. Have most “humans” that have existed over the eons felt shame at nakedness (darby’s deep-time thought)? The question to me would be more along the lines of “What mutation(s) caused humans to lose most of their body hair? What were the evolutionary advantages to this?” A hairless mate was more sexually attractive? Sure, maybe. And I for one do not feel shame when I am naked. My dogs have no idea I’m wearing clothes. And they don’t feel embarrassed for me when they see me get out of the shower.
And: “no animal has ever thought to dress itself…”
I imagine that even our still-somewhat-furry forbearers wore animal pelts or felted fleece to protect themselves from the elements long before the more sophisticated technologies of textiles and clothing construction evolved.
Shame, clothing, social behavior, etc, etc, etc, have all evolved side-by-side, with many, many divergences and yes, many dead ends, over many, many, many, many years.
OK. Just a few thoughts about an interesting post on a beautiful Saturday morning. Have a great weekend!
I also read this post from the perspective of a biologist-by-training, something which always colors my reading. For example:
“So, for Heidegger, you are either a nonliving being (the example he uses is a stone) or a living being…”
Every student of Bio 101 recalls “self-replicating” as part of the “Is it living?” question. Is a virus “alive”? (it has genetic material, uses host cell machinery to replicate) What about retroviruses? Viroids? Prions? Using a stone as an example of nonliving (let alone the thought that it may be on a “boundary” or in a “space” or at some “limit”) seems way, way overly simplified, to the point of being ludicrous. Where IS the boundary between living and nonliving? The distinctions are much more subtle, and interesting.
The “shame of nakedness” issue as defining human/non-animal is also weak. Have most “humans” that have existed over the eons felt shame at nakedness (darby’s deep-time thought)? The question to me would be more along the lines of “What mutation(s) caused humans to lose most of their body hair? What were the evolutionary advantages to this?” A hairless mate was more sexually attractive? Sure, maybe. And I for one do not feel shame when I am naked. My dogs have no idea I’m wearing clothes. And they don’t feel embarrassed for me when they see me get out of the shower.
And: “no animal has ever thought to dress itself…”
I imagine that even our still-somewhat-furry forbearers wore animal pelts or felted fleece to protect themselves from the elements long before the more sophisticated technologies of textiles and clothing construction evolved.
Shame, clothing, social behavior, etc, etc, etc, have all evolved side-by-side, with many, many divergences and yes, many dead ends, over many, many, many, many years.
OK. Just a few thoughts about an interesting post on a beautiful Saturday morning. Have a great weekend!
Hi David, Darby, and Mimi. Sorry I didn’t respond sooner, I’ve been swamped this weekend. Thank you all for your thoughtful and engaged remarks.
David – I am aware of the burgeoning field of object oriented philosophy: Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, etc. I keep telling myself I’m going to familiarize myself with it, but I never seem to have any time. Bruno Latour intersect this filed somehow, right? I’m interested in Latour b/c he seems to incorporate or utilize Deleuzian concepts I use frequently.
Darby – I read Origin of the Species for the first time last week and have now started Descent of Man. Evolutionary biology is pretty interesting conceptually, but the prose is hard for me to engage with. I like what you say about “deep-time” — in literary criticism there’s a trend right now toward this idea: thinking about periods in long duration rather than brief duration. so you’ll hear someone talk about how they study the long 19th century, meaning 1776-1910 or some such.
Mimi – I must confess, I don’t think I ever had Bio 101, or if I did it was so long ago and so many brain cells ago that I have no recollection of it. Your point about the reductiveness of Heiddie’s living/nonliving binary is certainly well taken. i think that’s what Derrida is after here: attempting to bring to the surface the subtleties.
Hi David, Darby, and Mimi. Sorry I didn’t respond sooner, I’ve been swamped this weekend. Thank you all for your thoughtful and engaged remarks.
David – I am aware of the burgeoning field of object oriented philosophy: Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, etc. I keep telling myself I’m going to familiarize myself with it, but I never seem to have any time. Bruno Latour intersect this filed somehow, right? I’m interested in Latour b/c he seems to incorporate or utilize Deleuzian concepts I use frequently.
Darby – I read Origin of the Species for the first time last week and have now started Descent of Man. Evolutionary biology is pretty interesting conceptually, but the prose is hard for me to engage with. I like what you say about “deep-time” — in literary criticism there’s a trend right now toward this idea: thinking about periods in long duration rather than brief duration. so you’ll hear someone talk about how they study the long 19th century, meaning 1776-1910 or some such.
Mimi – I must confess, I don’t think I ever had Bio 101, or if I did it was so long ago and so many brain cells ago that I have no recollection of it. Your point about the reductiveness of Heiddie’s living/nonliving binary is certainly well taken. i think that’s what Derrida is after here: attempting to bring to the surface the subtleties.
[…] HTML Giant ran a review of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am on Friday. A translation of Derrida’s 1997 lecture at the Cérisy conference titled “The Autobiographical Animal,” the book ruminates on the distinction between humans and animals. Derrida philosophizes through the eyes of his cat, who followed him into the bathroom each morning. He wondered what the cat saw and thought when presented with his body. “In his trademark elliptical, recursive, persistently deferring style, he raises this issue of being naked in front of that which we call animal, what it means to be naked, how that which we call animal cannot be naked, what it means to be seen by that which we call animal, and what it means for a human to see themselves in the eyes of that which we call animal.” (HTML Giant) The assertion that philosophers have always misinterpreted the ontological difference between man and animal serves as the backbone of the book. […]
Don’t know if this would be interesting to you:
http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/
I recently read “Out of Our Heads” and enjoyed it very much. Otherwise, I’m not much well-read in philosophy, literary criticism, etc. and get just a little bit confused when reading about this stuff. (But I’m trying!)
For some reading on evolutionary biology that is much more accessible, try Stephen Jay Gould’s essays.
And re: the Fordham blog’s reference to Lucy the chimpanzee, have you read the hilarious and bleak “Those of Us in Plaid” by Seth Fried in “The Panorama Book Review”?
Don’t know if this would be interesting to you:
http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/
I recently read “Out of Our Heads” and enjoyed it very much. Otherwise, I’m not much well-read in philosophy, literary criticism, etc. and get just a little bit confused when reading about this stuff. (But I’m trying!)
For some reading on evolutionary biology that is much more accessible, try Stephen Jay Gould’s essays.
And re: the Fordham blog’s reference to Lucy the chimpanzee, have you read the hilarious and bleak “Those of Us in Plaid” by Seth Fried in “The Panorama Book Review”?
i enjoyed this book ok but if you want to read a really bitchin book on animals that is at once fairly accessible and so very fiercely theoretically penetrative read cary wolfe’s ANIMAL RITES if you haven’t already. wolfe knows derrida inside and out. fordham’s picp series has put out so many great books in the past few years; i own most of them bc i wait until the last minute at mla right before they’re about to shut down the booth and then buy every book left for like 70% off. my favorite of all might be catherine malabou’s WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH OUR BRAIN?
i enjoyed this book ok but if you want to read a really bitchin book on animals that is at once fairly accessible and so very fiercely theoretically penetrative read cary wolfe’s ANIMAL RITES if you haven’t already. wolfe knows derrida inside and out. fordham’s picp series has put out so many great books in the past few years; i own most of them bc i wait until the last minute at mla right before they’re about to shut down the booth and then buy every book left for like 70% off. my favorite of all might be catherine malabou’s WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH OUR BRAIN?
[…] contrast, post-modern critic Derrida’s neologism ‘Limitrophy’ within his text The Animal That Therefore I Am challenges the misrepresentation human […]