The Place of the Animals in Adorno and Derrida | American Comparative Literature Association 9/7/15, 6:31 PM

The Place of the Animals in

Adorno and Derrida

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Organizer: Osman Nemli, Emory University Co-Organizer: Mukasa Mubirumusoke, Emory University Contact the Seminar Organizers (mailto:[email protected], [email protected])

Towards the end of his Theodor W. Adorno Prize speech, “Fichus”, Jacques Derrida ruminated upon seven essays he would have liked to write on Adorno – each numbering approximately 10,000 words. This seminar proposes to be a prolegomena to the last of those essays, on the Animal. By bringing negative dialectics and deconstruction together, and posing the question of the animal, this seminar hopes to facilitate a fresh conversation between Adorno and Derrida.

Whether approached via political theory, literature, aesthetics, metaphysics, or the natural sciences, in the Western tradition of thought the animal has been, if not a constant thorn in the human’s side, than at the very least a prolonged question, and counter-point, for the human and its place. As different popular definitions of the human have emerged – e.g., human as political animal (while recognizing the political aspect of other animals), rational animal (while recognizing the voice of other animals), or even the laughing animal (while recognizing the laughter of some animals) – philosophy has consistently attempted to domesticate animality – the animals as well as the humans – in the name of some higher rationality. Recognizing this tendency, the work of negative dialectics and deconstruction highlight the unintended irrational, extra-rational, and properly (in-) humane consequences of these different attempts at domestication and the manner in which animal domestications and

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dehumanization become tandem-concepts inextricably linked to the human-animal pair.

Some questions we hope to address include:

How do negative dialectics or deconstruction approach the question of the animal in literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and the history of philosophy? How do Adorno and Derrida refer to the animal, animality, or animals in their texts, and for what purposes? How might Derrida read Adorno, and Adorno respond to Derrida’s work? What roles has the animal played for Western thought and literature, and what responsibilities does it place upon thought and action today? In what ways do Adorno and Derrida partake in their own domestication of the animal? What is the proper name for the animal?

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