Inhuman Fiction: Derrida

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Inhuman Fiction Derrida the Question of the
AnimalUnit Two Animal Ethics

• February 20, 2007
• ENGL 4310 - SMU
• Professor Zeigler

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A Response to The Animal That Therefore I Am
(More to Follow)

• A Genre I Own
• Naked Philosophy
• In the Beginnings
• Friends, Not Food
• Modern Subjects
• Homework Hypothesis 2

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1. A Genre I Own

• Why does Derrida adopt an autobiographical stance
  in this essay?

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Animal autobiography?

• JD begins by professing a desire to speak from
  the heart (369).
• The audience he thanks has been involved in his
  career since he first spoke at Cerissy in 1959.
• This 1997 conference is the third event devoted
  to Derridas work.

• If youre interested in Derrida and
  autobiography, take a look at Robert Smiths book.

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• By recollecting the conferences on The Ends of
  Man (1980) and Border Crossing (1992), he
  traces a path of thought and conversation up to
  the current topic of LAnimal autobiographique
  (1997).
• He claims to hear in these three themes the
  outline or temptation of a single phrase (371),
  as if the third conference brings the others into
  a single logic a syllogistic concerto.
• As his essay proceeds, he will insist that the
  question of the animal has always been integral
  to his work. Re-reading the figure of the animal
  in essays that have been recognized for other
  topics, Derrida crafts an intellectual
  autobiography. His memoir of his own work
  produces a new significance that now appears
  always already to have been in place.

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The autobiographical dimension of Derridas essay
teaches us about the animals that have been
present in many of his texts prior to what some
call the ethical turn in his work and which
Deutscher narrates in chapter seven as his new
orientation toward the unconditional.
Re-reading his own work, he argues that his
interest in animals has been continuous from the
beginning. As you will see in Thursdays
reading, he does not expect you to accept this
position on the basis of his identity as the
author. He makes a case through close reading.
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Derrida also plays with the conventions of
autobiography

• He frets in his third paragraph about the
  sincerity or authenticity of his personal
  expressions of thanks. He does not want his
  statements of gratitude to give the appearance
  of training.
• In its reflexive (I write about me) and temporal
  qualities (I recall who I was), autobiography
  seems emphatically unlike any communication
  attributed to non-human animals. (see 371)

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Derrida also raises a serious question about the
history of autobiography

• I am trying to speak to you from within that
  time frame, of myself in particular, in private
  or in public, but of myself in particular. That
  time frame would also be that which, in
  principle, supposing it were possible, separates
  autobiography from confession. Autobiography
  becomes confession when the discourse on the self
  does not dissociate truth from an avowal, thus
  from a fault, an evil, and ill. And first and
  foremost to a truth that would be due, a debt in
  truth that needs to be paid off. Why would one
  owe truth? Why would it belong to the essence of
  truth to be due, and nude? (390)

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Before moving on from the nudity of confession to
the embarrassment of the cat that gives us our
second response to Derrida, lets consider how
genre mediates animal ethics.

• If Derridas autobiographical essay is properly
  confessional, then what kinds of truth may we
  expect him to admit?
• And how might we take whats true of animals for
  him as a point of comparison contrast with the
  truth of animals in Haraways manifesto and/or
  Coetzees metafiction?

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2. Naked Philosophy

• How is Derrida ashamed to be seen naked by his
  cat?

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• Ms. Cayenne Pepper and Willem in the final
  anecdote of Haraways Companion Species Manifesto
  enjoy sex independent from ostensibly natural
  urges for procreation. We saw them as like human
  animals in their sex play.
• But, they are also shameless in their PDA.

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Derrida Is a Cat Person

• Animals are naked with no inkling of being so,
  or so it is thought (373).
• Human animals dress like speech or reason,
  clothes make the man.
• Removed from knowledge of naked or not as well as
  good and evil, his cat is also a real cat.
  Derrida swears that his cat is not
  representative she is particular (374).

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Two Questions on Nudity

• Why is Derrida ashamed to be seen naked by his
  cat? How does he describe the shame?

• Why does he derive from his lesson on naked
  animals the conclusion that we would therefore
  have to think shame and technicity together as
  the same subject? (374) (And why is subject
  in quotes?)

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In his double experience of shame, Derrida
entertains two possibilities the cat reacts the
cat responds. With the latter, he suggests he
has been seen seen by the animal, which
distinguishes him from Descartes, Kant,
Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas.
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3. In the Beginnings

• Why does Derrida contrast the two accounts of
  creation from Genesis?

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Genesis Engenders?

• In the first account of creation, authority over
  the animals is bestowed on them (ctd. 384)
• In the second account of creation, Adam names the
  animals before Eve exists and before original sin
  makes the couple ashamed to be naked.

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4. Friends, Not Food

• How does Derridas ethics of infinite obligation
  toward the other compare with Costellos,
  Smutss, Haraways, and Hearnes arguments for
  non-human companionship?

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Elizabeth Costellos Taxing Animal Ethics

• In response to praise for her exacting commitment
  to animal well-being, Costello rebukes herself
  for wearing leather. Her expectations for
  relations between human and non-human animals
  would seem to be impracticable. The stories end
  with her acknowledging that she cannot come to
  terms with the disjunction between human
  kindness and animal exploitation. John can only
  console her with an embrace and these words
  There, there. It will soon be over (69).

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• Costellos most expansive claim for the
  possibility of human and non-human animal
  relations comes in her response to Thomas Nagels
  essay about the subjectivity of bats. What does
  Costello claim for human imagination, and if true
  what does that claim mean for human/animal
  difference?

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Barbara Smuts supplements Elizabeth Costello

• What observation motivates Smutss response to
  Coetzee/Costello?
• What is her thesis?
• How does she affirm her thesis by discussing
  orangutans and her dog?

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Donna Haraways Natureculture

• Like Smuts, Haraway contends that human and
  non-human animals can be friends. Such
  friendship requires translation work. Is her
  vision of a common language different from
  Costellos? Smutss?

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Vicki Hearnes Can an Ape Tell a Joke?

• Q Where do monkeys like to get their hair cut?
• A Vidal Baboon
• (For more jokes, visit.)

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In one way or another, most animals do give
their trainers the finger a great deal of
animal humor is coarse, to put mildly (Hearne 8).

• Today, at a time when the habitats of wild
  animals are rapidly disappearing, the terms of
  this relationship need to be reinvented, not
  abjured. We need to learn what we can from
  Berosini and other trainers but particularly
  the wild-animal trainers about how this might
  be done.
• Why is Hearne so committed to learning from
  wild-animal trainers?

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• As you read for Thursday, consider whether
  Derrida would have any reservations in principle
  to Haraways formulation of companion-species?
• In the next topic, we will see his conviction
  that friendships between human and non-human
  animals have become uniquely strained in the era
  we call modernity.

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5. Modern Subjects

• Whats the matter with Descartes how has it
  been our problem for 200 years?

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Cogito Ergo SumJe pense donce je suisI think
therefore I am

• The title of Derridas essay alludes to
  Descartess most famous slogan of modern thought.
  Recall from the excerpts distributed on day one
  of our class that it is Descartes who insists
  animals lack all reason and, therefore,
  experience pain in the same way as machines.

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The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)

• We know from the first footnote, that Derridas
  title plays on Descartess deduction of human
  identity by articulating at once both an animal
  identity and an identity distinct from (coming
  after) that of the animal.
• Modern European thought emerges from and has been
  dominated by a Cartesian account of reason.
  Derrida prefers Benthams contribution to animal
  ethics. Why?

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How does Derrida describe modernity as animal
history?

• First hypothesis for about two centuries,
  intensely and by means of an alarming rate of
  acceleration, for we no longer even have a clock
  or a chronological measure of it, we, who call
  ourselves men or humans, we who recognize
  ourselves in that name, have been involved in an
  unprecedented transformation. This mutation
  affects the experience of what we continue to
  call imperturbably, as if there were nothing
  wrong with it, the animal and/or animals.
  (392-393)

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What is the animal for Derrida?

• Read well, the animal disrupts exceptionalist
  humanism as theoretically untenable, which means
  that its practice ought not be justified as
  natural. (Animal identity)
• The possibility of interpersonal relations with
  animals indicates, against Descartes, that human
  subjectivity exceeds consciousness. Such
  identity difference entails responsibility.
  (Animal ethics)
• The animal is currently (200 years) a telling
  index for the rapacious exploitation of resources
  that comprise the conditions of possibility for
  life, human and otherwise. (Animal planet)

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Homework for Thursday Hypothesis Two

• Read the rest of Derridas essay
• Read chapter eight of Deutscher
• Prepare an explanation of the following
• What does Derrida means by limitrophe? What is
  his hypothesis regarding abyssal ruptures? How
  does that second hypothesis relate to the essays
  three-point conclusion?