Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign

Others

INTRODUCTION

Not of shoes and ships and sealing wax, though cabbages may apply, but of beasts and kings, and principally of animals other than the human, our animal others: the final years of Jacques Derrida’s teaching, 2001–2003, recently published in two volumes under the title The Beast and the Sovereign, were devoted to the questions of animal life and political sovereignty. These questions shaped the ninth in the set of seminars Derrida conducted (from 1991 until his death in October of 2004) under the general rubric Questions of Responsibility. Derrida fully intended to continue his seminar on the beast and the sovereign into the next academic year, 2003–2004.

The apparent incongruence of the themes—animals and political sovereignty—is soon dispelled when we read the published volumes of the seminar transcripts: Derrida is able to show that the twofold exclusion from the human public realm of beast and king, with kings and gods hovering above the law while animals grovel below, is in fact revelatory of Western humanity’s self-conception. The present book offers a close reading of Derrida’s texts on the theme of the beast and the sovereign, including his previously published The Animal That Therefore I Am, and a critical response to Derrida’s theses. The response is largely, though not exclusively, cast as a close reading of Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course on world, finitude, and solitude, the second half of which is devoted to theoretical biology.

The present book opens—after this brief Introduction—with an account of Derrida’s 2001–2002 seminar. The transcript of the course is well over four hundred book pages long, so that a detailed presentation of the themes in some forty pages may itself be an achievement of sorts. Among the themes discussed are the animal imagery of kingship and sovereignty in terms of wolf, fox, and/or guard dog, Hobbes’s Leviathan as the monstrosity of a divinely contracted secular commonwealth, and Carl Schmitt, who understands the original sense of Leviathan and who develops an ontotheology of the modern aggressive nation-state, that is, the state that devotes itself to killing its enemies in order to assure itself of its friends. Both Hobbes and Schmitt, argues Derrida, base their political theories on a pessimistic anthropology, which punishes both humans and other animals, all the while proclaiming the superiority of the human over the animal. Already in this first year of the seminar Derrida discusses in considerable detail Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course on the essence of animality. Derrida’s critique of Heidegger with respect to both essence and animality is trenchant—and calls for a response.

The second year of Derrida’s final seminar, 2002–2003, discussed in chapter 2, focuses on two texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course and—Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The juxtaposition, seemingly far-fetched, is in fact astonishingly apt. Whereas Heidegger hopes to distinguish sharply between the worldless stone, the world-poor animal, and the world-shaping human being, Robinson is faced with the practical tasks of subduing inanimate nature, killing or taming animals for food, and, finally, having to grapple with both savage and civilized human beings. Whereas Heidegger selects the word Einsamkeit, solitude or loneliness, as the third word of his subtitle—world, finitude, solitude—Defoe’s Robinson lives this island solitude for eight and twenty Years (RC 256). Derrida’s deconstructive readings of his two very different authors, focusing above all on their experiences of solitude and loneliness, are perceptive, as always, and his analyses of their narratives, arguments, themes, and obsessions telling. Even so, or precisely for that reason, his readings and analyses call for a careful response.

Derrida’s dissatisfaction with Heidegger’s theoretical biology is foreshadowed in a book that Derrida worked on but never published. It was released only after his death under the title L’animal que donc je suis. Chapter 3 of the present book is devoted to this text. The title of the English translation, The Animal That Therefore I Am, unavoidably fails to capture the homonymous sense of suis as I follow, from suivre, rather than the more readily understood I am, from être. Derrida focuses on the fact that in evolutionary history and even in the biblical account of creation human beings come after the animals they are forever chasing and subduing once they are expelled from paradise. Following is therefore of the essence, and of being. In addition, this text of Derrida’s offers a description of some famous biblical scenes—above all, those scenes of Genesis involving the temptation of Eve by either the serpent or Yahweh as well as the story of Cain and Abel—scenes that the longer seminars do not recount in such critical detail. Derrida’s own highly compressed treatment here of the themes of animality and sovereignty enables us to state the theses of Derrida’s project, principally the thesis that the exclusion of animals from the human public realm reveals better than any other thought or deed the highly problematic nature of the claims that human beings make about themselves. Finally, chapter 3 considers some authors who are either merely alluded to or altogether overlooked in these three Derridian texts. It considers, albeit quite briefly, the remarkable parallel between the second half of Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course (on theoretical biology) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1942 The Structure of Behavior, a text that Derrida unfortunately ignores; the chapter then examines an aspect of Nietzsche’s biography that is directly related to the question of animal suffering—the famous incident of Nietzsche’s breakdown in the streets of Turin in 1889. Nietzsche is of course in Derrida’s view the autobiographical animal par excellence, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau as his only competition.

Chapter 4 asks, if only indirectly, whether it is possible to respond to Derrida’s criticisms of Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course without succumbing to mere Heideggerian apologetics. I believe that it is. For it is fair to say, and Derrida would be the first to say it, that Derrida does not capture all the nuances of Heidegger’s remarkable course. One of those nuances is Heidegger’s sudden and surprising reference to a certain fable, or a kind of fabulation, that extends the notions of human melancholy and languishing to everything that lives. The principal bone of contention between Heidegger and Derrida is what Heidegger once called the difficult problem of death, adequate discussion of which he also called the touchstone of all philosophy. Virtually all of Derrida’s prior books and essays on Heidegger, especially Of Spirit and Aporias, challenge Heidegger’s insistence on the distinction between animal perishing (Verenden) and human dying (Sterben). One might have thought that these earlier works by Derrida had clinched the argument and closed the subject. Yet the most astonishing aspect of Derrida’s final seminar is that he returns to Heidegger’s accounts of perishing and dying over and over again. Whether or not the discussion of death and the shrine of the nothing (das Nichts) can serve as the touchstone for all philosophy may have to remain an open question. That death constitutes a difficult problem may well be the understatement of a lifetime.

Chapter 5 asks whether Heidegger understands apophantic discourse—that is, predication, assertion, and the capacity to make statements and arguments—to be the touchstone of all philosophy. Or is there a Heidegger beyond assertions and assertiveness? One of Derrida’s major complaints about Heidegger’s treatment of the essence of animality is the acceptance—without much research or reflection—of the assertion that animals lack language. Lacking language, animals presumably have no relation to thinking and no sense of beings as beings. This as is what Heidegger, citing Aristotle, calls the apophantic-as. For the Heidegger of the biology course, apophansis is crucially important: the fact that animals do not make statements and assertions about beings as such, beings as being, death as death, and world as world indicates that they lack language and thought and a world-relation. Or, to say the least, it indicates that the animal world is poor, and that animal behavior is somehow dazed or benumbed, benommen. Yet Heidegger does not always view language as apophantic. In fact, his magnum opus, Being and Time, subordinates the apophantic-as to what Heidegger calls the existential-hermeneutic-as. Furthermore, his principal contributions to the philosophy of language, even before the 1950s, challenge always and everywhere the language of assertion. Chapter 5 focuses on Heidegger’s essay from the early 1950s, Logos: Heraclitus B50, which Jacques Lacan took the trouble to translate into French. His translation deviates in one significant way from the German text, and so demonstrates, perhaps to Derrida’s possible yet never expressed delight, that there may be a Heidegger beyond assertion, that is, a Heidegger beyond the assertiveness of insistent unification and gathering, in other words, a Heidegger of radical difference. For the word that Lacan will (mis)translate in the direction of radical difference and even dispersion is Versammlung, gathering. Astonishingly, Lacan renders this word—which is perhaps the word in the Heideggerian vocabulary that rankles Derrida more than any other—as répartition, sharing out, dividing, and distributing. It is as though Lacan, as cantankerous and anachronistic as ever, has been reading Derrida on Heidegger. To be sure, Derrida’s critique of Lacan on the theme of animality remains an issue that divides them. Yet on the theme of language as the Heraclitean Logos, and Logos as dispensing and disseminating, Lacan appears to be working at Derrida’s side, as it were.

Chapter 6 tries to formulate a number of conclusions that we may take from Derrida’s encounter with the beast and the sovereign, and especially with our animal others. It also sketches out some tasks for future research and reflection in the areas of metaphysics, ethics, philosophical anthropology, and critical animal studies. Some of these concluding questions are directly relevant to critical animal studies, it seems to me, whereas others will speak more to specialists in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. Among the former set are questions concerning that pessimistic anthropology which, Derrida argues, lies behind much of our political theory and its cruelty toward animals. How are we to confront that pessimism in our time, which does not give us grounds for good cheer? In Derrida’s view, issues of sexual difference and especially the deeply rooted misogyny of so much of our thought and practices are bound up with prejudices concerning animality and bestiality. Why? And how are we to approach these questions at a deeper level, that is, without collapsing back into slogans? The problem with slogans is that they speak the very same language that has done so much harm to humans and other animals. There is no way to escape the necessity of learning a new way to speak and think. Heidegger and Derrida alike were good at this. Not many are. Plato, one of the best at it, dreamed that once upon a time humans and other animals spoke together, which is to say that they listened to one another. Is there room for such a dream today?

Among the questions for specialists in contemporary European philosophy are the following. How are we to develop and integrate more fully the psychoanalytic discourses of desire and anxiety into Heidegger’s thought concerning our own benumbment in the face of anxiety and the benumbed behavior of animals in general? Does Derrida’s emphasis on the phantasm and on the human drive for sovereignty and mastery—the drive to attain power—take us in a helpful direction? And is his thought of auto-immunity the key to his thinking of the phantasm? Especially the auto-immunity or double-bind of a phantasmatic solitude, which, according to Heidegger, is one of the three fundamental concepts of metaphysics? It seems to me that Derrida’s way of taking up this question of solitude as loneliness, which is something far more dire than solipsism, is the most creative and exciting philosophical adventure of our time. It demands that we think of the ways in which our animal others—indeed, all living things—are essential to what Heidegger called the worldhood of the world, as well as what Merleau-Ponty at first called form but later celebrated as the flesh of the world. It demands of us too that we learn a new language, a more supple, less assertive language. I hope that the present book contributes to the creative solitudes of readers who are willing to take up such issues, especially readers of the two remarkable volumes titled The Beast and the Sovereign.

1. The Beast and the Sovereign I

Imagine yourself standing outside the corner show window of one of the few academic bookstores left in Paris, this one on the rue des Écoles itself. Filling the window are twenty-five books on animal life considered from various philosophical points of view. The book jackets are all colorful—Dürer’s hare, Bosch’s uncanny monsters, Dutch-interior dogs—and the subtitles are all titillating: Should We Kill Them? Should We Eat Them? Are They Human? There, translated into French, is Jeremy Bentham’s treatise on the question of animal suffering. And at the bottom of this bibliolithic mountain, off a bit to each side, left and right, lying flat, apparently too heavy to be propped up, are two very plain, very thick, very oddly titled tomes: volumes one and two of Jacques Derrida’s Séminaire: La bête et le souverain. So many books! as an American tourist once complained to Derrida in a foreign-language bookstore in Tokyo. What is the definitive one? Is there any? (UG 71).

Even faithful readers of Derrida, especially those who have read his posthumously published L’animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am), will want to know whether the 870 book pages of the two-volume transcription of Derrida’s final seminar, devoted to questions concerning animals and political sovereignty, are definitive books and will repay the time spent studying them. The answer is of course yes, emphatically, and for more than one reason. The initial reason is simply the brilliance of the lecturer and the diligence and care with which Derrida always prepared his seminars. Such diligence and care are remarkable, especially these days, as overworked university lecturers have to get away with off-the-cuff teaching and on-the-wing classes, for the sake of spontaneity, as we like to reassure ourselves before dashing off to the next pointless meeting. It is nevertheless important for us to see every now and then how serious teaching is done. Clearly, the world has lost one of its great lecturers and masterful teachers. Also one of its greatest philosophers. These two volumes, like all of Derrida’s texts, are filled with multiple forms of the expression if only we had sufficient time; they are therefore both monuments of loss and mountain streams of gain, both mournfully sad and pleasurably refreshing. They show us what philosophy has lost and what, if and when it is smart, it will try to resuscitate and retain—what it must continue to study with the greatest application.¹

The seminar is stereoscopic. It examines both an entire range of issues in philosophical treatments of animal life and classical questions concerning the meaning of political sovereignty in the human sphere. Yet the seminar’s vision is seamless: Derrida manages to convince us that these two apparently disparate sets of questions involving beings that represent two very different links in the great chain of being are and always have been in fact inseparable. If as Aristotle avers only gods and beasts can be nonpolitical, whereas you and I are political animals, well then, ontotheology and ethology are and must be intimate with one another in all matters political and philosophical—if only by way of telltale exclusion.

In the present chapter, dealing with the 2001–2002 seminar (as in chapter 2, which treats the seminar’s continuation in 2002–2003), I will do little more than offer a précis of Derrida’s seminar text, listing the principal sources and themes of each session. Only occasionally will I pause to reflect on some of the matters in question—not a lack of engagement on my part but a result of the massive amount of material to be reported. Later chapters in the book will be more thematic and more selective; here I want to stay as close as possible to the structure and flow of the seminar. The present report itself will be minimal and inevitably unjust: I will, to repeat, merely list the primary sources for each of the thirteen sessions (ten in the second volume) and offer a succinct restatement of the themes and theses of each.

Derrida’s own retrospective description of the first year of his course for the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) yearbook, as one might expect, is quite helpful:

We pursued the research that in previous years, centering on the problem of the death penalty, had led us to study sovereignty, the political and ontotheological history of its concept and its figures. This year we deliberately privileged what intertwined this history with that of a thinking of the living being (the biological and the zoological), and more precisely with the treatment of so-called animal life in all its registers (hunting and domestication, political history of zoological parks and gardens, breeding, industrial and experimental exploitation of the living animal, figures of bestiality and bêtise, etc.). The point was not merely to study, from Aristotle to contemporary discussions (Foucault, Agamben), the canonical texts surrounding the interpretation of man as a political animal. We had above all to explore the logics organizing both the submission of the beast (and the living being) to political sovereignty, and an irresistible and overloaded analogy between a beast and a sovereign supposed to share a space of some exteriority with respect to law and right (outside the law; above the law; origin and foundation of the law).

We studied a great many philosophical, rhetorical, political, and other indices of this overdetermined analogy (La Fontaine’s Fables and the tradition that precedes and follows them, texts by Machiavelli, Schmitt, etc.). We also attempted a sort of taxonomy of the animal figures of the political, notably from the point of view of sovereignty (always outside the law; above the laws). Alongside the lion, the fox, etc., the character of the wolf (in many cultures) and often the werewolf (in Europe) interested us a great deal, from Plautus to Hobbes and Rousseau.

On the permanent horizon of our work were general questions about force and right, right and justice, of what is proper to mankind, and the philosophical interpretation of the limits between what is called man and what is improperly and in the generic singular called the animal. As bestiality and bêtise are supposedly proper to man in his relation to his own kind, and foreign to the animal, we began from this point of view a problematizing reading of certain texts by Lacan on bestiality, by Deleuze (Difference and Repetition) on bêtise, and by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) on the becoming-animal of man. (1:13–14)²

The thirteen sessions of the first year of the seminar, their principal sources, themes, and theses, are summarized quite roughly in what follows.

1. Principal sources: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; La Fontaine, Fables, especially The Wolf and the Lamb; Pascal, Pensées; Louis Marin, La Parole mangée et autres essais théologico-politiques (1986); Plautus, Asinaria; Rousseau, Social Contract and Émile; Ernst Kantorowicz, The Two Bodies of the King (French edition, 1989); Noam Chomsky, Rogue States (2000); Aristotle, Politics; Plutarch, Three Treatises for the Animals; the Books of Job and Isaiah, and the Psalms; Hobbes, Leviathan; Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932); Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

The session opens with the lilting refrain La . . . le, emphasizing the gender or sexual difference(s) implied in the very title of the course—the feminine beast and the masculine master or sovereign. This first session, which has every appearance of being chaotic because of the massive number and variety of texts with which it intends to deal, proceeds with a wolf-like pace.³ Yet as Derrida immediately assures his listeners, it will try to proceed also with the dove-like footfall of thinking (Nietzsche). The seminar must proceed with caution, inasmuch as the pas de loup is also a negation, the pas of pas possible. Insofar as the question of the beast and the sovereign will inevitably involve force and violence—the violence of might making right—caution is no doubt called for. If, as Plautus tells us, homo is homini lupus, if every human being is at least potentially a werewolf to the others, the seminar itself will engage in lycology, or lycanthropology, and even genealycology. For the sovereign himself, according to Rousseau, is often a wolf toward his own people. And yet here too gender differences apply: the wolf is also the she-wolf, the mother who suckles the feral founder-twins of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

Among the themes that have long interested Derrida, indeed since his Of Grammatology, has been incest prohibition, and this is one of the questions that ties human sociality to issues of ethology, and indeed to issues of bestiality. Such ties do not bind, however; they are not securely tied; they are not firmly drawn boundaries, neither in human societies nor in those of the higher apes. What intrigues Derrida most is the porosity of boundaries and limits in all these cases, especially in that of the nature/culture distinction on which the very title of the course is based, la . . . le. What the beast and the sovereign share is their outlaw status, that is, their being below or above or in some way outside the law. The figures of the beast and the sovereign are therefore joined by that of the criminal. As there are rogue wolves, banished from the pack, so there are rogue sovereigns and even rogue states—at least according to the overwhelmingly powerful enemies of those states, which insist that their own might makes right. International terrorism will therefore play a role in the seminar, as will the terror that at least some beasts and some sovereigns and sovereign states appear to represent.

If Plutarch insists that animals employ reason and display the finest virtues, the prevailing Western and Eastern traditions alike have insisted that animals think only how they may devour us, so that we must eat them before they eat us. That is common sense, at least among the animals that have speech as well as meat in their mouths. Such common sense has not only philosophical but also religious authority behind it: Yahweh breaks the skulls of all Leviathans, sings Psalm 78 (13–14), except for the monstrously powerful Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. For the Common-wealth itself, as Leviathan, is in some highly problematic way instituted by the creator God. Leviathan is an artificial creature with a sovereign soul and with the Godlike power to punish those who desire the state’s protection but disdain its laws. Derrida’s reading of Hobbes is perhaps the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced reading of this first session. He brings Hobbes’s text into connection with Carl Schmitt’s ontotheological political theory, following the lead of Schmitt himself, who wrote on Hobbes: the sovereign has the exceptional right to punish the evildoer, and even to tear his heart out, if such be necessary. For political foes, beyond personal enemies, are always lurking within and without the sovereign nation-state.

One could readily relate all this lycanthropic political imagery to Freud’s Wolfman, and especially to the sense that the father is always, at least in part, the wolf, but Derrida prefers to end the session with a reading of The Malaise within Culture, which we know as Civilization and Its Discontents. In the seventh chapter of that work Freud poses the question as to why other animals, which are obviously related to us, have not struggled to found a culture. Freud speculates that the primal human being may have been propelled by a new drive (Vorstoss der Libido) to organize; yet that erotic propulsion, he further speculates, may have triggered a new form of recalcitrance by the drive to destroy (ein neuerliches Sträuben des Destruktionstriebes). The wolf is not merely at the door of culture but at home with us.

2. Principal sources: Hobbes, Leviathan; Schmitt, The Concept of