The Animal That Therefore I Am Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Richard Kearney Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman John D. Caputo, series editor PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY JACQUES DERRIDA The Animal That Therefore I Am Edited by Marie-Luise Mallet FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 2008 Copyright ᭧ 2008 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. The Animal That Therefore I Am was originally published in French as L’animal que donc je suis ᭧ 2006 Éditions Galilée Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Derrida, Jacques. [Animal que donc je suis. English] The animal that therefore I am / Jacques Derrida ; edited by Marie-Luise Mallet; translated by David Wills. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2790-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2791-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Animals (Philosophy) I. Mallet, Marie-Luise. II. Title. B2430.D483A5513 2008 194—dc22 gauny 2008007491 This work has been published with the assistance of the National Center for the Books—French Ministry of Culture. Ouvrage publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre—ministère français chargé de la culture. Contents Foreword ix Marie-Luise Mallet 1 The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) 1 2 “But as for me, who am I (following)?” 52 3 And Say the Animal Responded? 119 4 “I don’t know why we are doing this” 141 Notes 161 vii Foreword MARIE-LOUISE MALLET Jacques Derrida often expressed his intention to one day put together in a large work the texts he had written on ‘‘the animal.’’ Although he had his heart set on such a project, various pressing tasks persistently pushed it aside. In 1997, for the ten-day Cerisy conference on his work whose title, ‘‘The Autobiographical Animal,’’ he had expressly chosen, he wrote a long lecture or, rather, taking into account its approximately ten-hour duration, a kind of seminar. The introduction only was published in the conference proceedings, under the title of the whole lecture—‘‘The Ani- mal That Therefore I Am’’—with the annotation ‘‘to be continued [a` sui- vre],’’ announcing his intention to publish what followed.1 Finally, in 2003, he decided to publish a text from near the end of the same lecture under the title ‘‘And Say the Animal Responded?’’ to be included among the unpublished texts he provided for the special issue of Les Cahiers de L’Herne that was to be dedicated to him.2 As Derrida himself recalled during his lecture, the question of ‘‘the ani- mal’’ is very present in many of his texts. The insistence of this motif throughout his work derives from at least two sources. The first is no doubt a special and keen sensitivity, a certain aptitude for sentiments of ‘‘sympathy’’ with the aspects of animal life that have been most forgotten or scorned by philosophy. Whence the very great importance he gives to the question Bentham asks concerning animals: ‘‘Can they suffer?’’ Ben- tham’s question is not whether they can reason or whether they can speak but whether they can suffer. This is a seemingly simple question but a ix very profound one for Jacques Derrida. He comes back to it several times in his texts. The suffering of animals never leaves him indifferent. Yet, and this is the second source, Bentham’s question also seems to him to possess enormous philosophical relevance, being capable of surprising from be- hind—by means of the nonfrontal opposition of a digressive approach— the most constant and tenacious tradition of thinking in the history of philosophy. Even when that tradition defines the human as zo¯on logon echon or as rational animal, as an ‘‘animal’’ therefore, but one endowed with reason, it has always in fact opposed us to all the rest of animalkind, going so far as to erase all animality in us and, conversely, to define the animal, in an essentially negative way, as deprived of whatever is pre- sumed to be ‘‘proper’’ to the human: ‘‘speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pre- tense [feinte de feinte], covering of tracks, gift, laughing, tears, respect, etc.’’ And, Derrida emphasizes, ‘‘the most powerful philosophical tradi- tion in which we live has refused the ‘animal’ all of that.’’3 Philosophical ‘‘logocentrism,’’ inseparable from a position of mastery, is in the first in- stance ‘‘a thesis regarding the animal, the animal deprived of the logos, deprived of the can-have-the-logos: this is the thesis, position or presuppo- sition maintained from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Descartes to Kant, Levinas and Lacan,’’ he writes elsewhere.4 Moreover, the violence done to the animal begins, he says, with this pseudo-concept of ‘‘the animal,’’ with the use of this word in the singular, as though all animals from the earth- worm to the chimpanzee constituted a homogeneous set to which ‘‘(the hu)man’’ would be radically opposed. As a response to that first violence Derrida invents the word animot, which, when spoken, has the plural an- imaux, heard within the singular, recalling the extreme diversity of ani- mals that ‘‘the animal’’ erases, and which, when written, makes it plain that this word [mot] ‘‘the animal’’ is precisely only a word. As a result, the different occurrences of this animot in his text function as so many alarm signals, wake-up calls designed to prevent the usage or unavoidability of the term the animal, in the singular, from soothing us into an all-too- ordinary and all-too-little-noticed dogmatic slumber. Finally, the stakes of a deconstruction of the philosophical tradition that has maltreated animals in this way concerns more than just animals. Far from bringing about a simple reversal of perspective and, for example, restoring to ‘‘the animal’’ in general everything that the tradition has al- ways deprived it of; far from substituting for the classical opposition the confusion of a no less deceptive failure to differentiate, such a deconstruc- tion patiently multiplies the differences, bringing to our attention the fra- gility and porosity of the supposed frontiers of the ‘‘proper’’ upon which x Foreword we have presumed for so long to found the traditional opposition between ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘animal.’’ In so doing, however much it may disturb all those assurances concerning the ‘‘animality’’ of the animal ‘‘in general,’’ it is no less disturbing for any assurance concerning the ‘‘humanity’’ of the human. As Derrida is careful to emphasize, it is less a matter of asking ‘‘whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power . [than of] asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigor- ously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution.’’5 Given that, we can better understand why the question of ‘‘the animal’’ occupies such an important place in his thinking and why he was so attached to this book project. What that book would have been had he been given the time to bring it to fruition, alas, we shall never know. But it seems to us that we are being faithful to his wishes by collecting within this work, along with the two separately published pieces from the long Cerisy conference, those parts that have not yet seen the light of day. The latter fall within two categories: first, a long text that corresponds to the part of the lecture that was delivered between the two published frag- ments, and within which he follows from Plato to Levinas the ‘‘tracks,’’ as it were, of similar recurring philosophical schemes concerning ‘‘the ani- mal.’’ This text, like all of Derrida’s lectures, like every session of his regu- lar teaching seminars as well, was written out perfectly and in toto. It has therefore been included without any modification other than minimal correction of typographical errors and the addition, in the form of notes, of certain references (or details of references) to works that he cites. Second, one will find at the end of this work the last part of Derrida’s lecture, which takes up the question of the animal in Heidegger. Its status is somewhat different and posed a number of specific problems in the context of its publication. The whole lecture, which began on July 15, 1997, continued the following day and, including discussion, lasted more than nine hours. The conference continued with the other programmed lectures, but participants were still expecting more: the question of the animal in Heidegger, which had been pointed to many times during the lecture, remained in abeyance. On the last day, therefore, July 20, at the end of the proceedings, Derrida agreed to improvise a response to that expectation. There remains only a recorded version of that improvisation, which was not written and was organized solely on the basis of a few notes and page references in Heidegger. We nevertheless believe that that Foreword xi sketch, however extemporaneous, has its place in this publication as the beginnings of what constitutes one of the major directions of his whole trajectory. We have provided here as faithful a transcription of it as possi- ble, with our corrections limited to a few inevitable inconsistencies arising from the ad hoc oral presentation.