Content
1. Scheme
1.1. Metaphorology
2. Order
2.1. Metaphorology
3. Strategy
3.1. Metaphorology
4. Animot and biographical animal
Bibliography
Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), claims that our conception of animals is grounded in literature; in particular, it is embedded in the historical writing of philosophy, mythology, and religion. These anthropocentric writings always give figure to the animal by analogy to the human. In order to give representation to the figure of the animal, to find its limit, and by challenging anthropocentrism, Derrida exposes the deconstruction operative in the historical analogy that binds the pair. Derrida’s activity in exposing the performative deconstruction could be seen as negation of humanism, and within a reflexive animality –as if he is like a cat or dog that follows a trail by sniffing and scratching through an embedded texture/textuality, without reward –without an idealisation. He begins his exploration by attempting to give up his personhood and seeking his biometric reflection in the cat that he shares his home with –by thinking himself into the opinion the cat may have of him in seeing him naked, without the dressing of the ideology of humanism. In linguistic terms, Derrida returns to, or unearths the signifier and not the idealised signified. His textual strategy negates the idealisation and metaphysics of humanism and explores constructivism, the linguistic devices that shape the image of the animal. Derrida (2008:7) locates the erased image of the animal in the translation between philosophy and poetry; for “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. It is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking.” The activity of deconstruction would presuppose that the animal as poetic configuration stands in for, or translate something else such as philosophical concept or idea. Derrida’s (2010: x) deconstruction of the animal “involves taking [it] apart in a way that heeds the logic of its own architectural plan and thereby exposes the internal tension that both enable and vex it.” The animal, therefore, seems to be an analogy, a metaphor, a translation within a conceptual scheme. I shall now describe how Derrida deconstructs the animal.
(Throughout, my essay reference Derrida’s ((2008: 1-51)) The Animal That Therefore I Am {More to Follow}. In addition, for order and strategy, I draw references from the first, twelfth, and thirteenth sessions of Derrida’s (2009) seminar titled The Beast & the Sovereign. Moreover, for theoretical understanding of analogy, I reference Derrida’s ((1982: 207-271)) White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. The diagram Scala Naturae will serve throughout as illustration, as configuration for the theme or trope of my essay. We all know this diagram from high school in studying natural science. It shows a movement from left to right, from ape to man. Modern man walks upright, out of the composition, towards nothing, while the four legged animal, in degrees of so called evolutionary development, follows him.)
First, we begin by identifying a conceptual scheme that names the animal. We follow some historical markers that span the period from ancient Greek philosophy, the Biblical Genesis, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and through modern philosophy. An apparently irreducible pair, the human and the animal, surfaces in the scheme. The pair shows philosophical analogy. Second, we determine the order of the analogy by highlighting hierarchy. The pair shows temporal ordering. Third, we establish the ideological strategy of the analogy by inverting its temporal order. This will show the anthropocentrism at work in the construction of the animal. Fourth, we read the third term Derrida invents for the animal analogy –his theory of the animot –that serves as intervention in the way we see the configuration of the animal. Last, I will attempt a brief evaluation of the intervention.
1. Scheme
The Animal. All the philosophers we will investigate (from Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas), all of them say the same thing: the animal is deprived of language. […] Men would be first and foremost those living creatures who have given themselves the word that enables them to speak of the animal with a single voice and to designate it as the single being that remains without a response, without a word with which to respond.
That wrong was committed long ago and with long-term consequences. It derives from this word, or rather it comes together in this word animal, which men have given themselves as at the origin of humanity, and which they have given themselves in order to be identified, in order to be recognized, with a view to being what they say they are, namely, men, capable of replying and responding in the name of men. (Derrida 2008:32)
The Scala Naturae would have no place in a cyclical scheme of time. In a scheme that does not host the idea of a beginning, the figure of animals would be entirely different from that in our anthropocentric framework of time. In our dominant culture, few traces of cyclical schemes remain. For example, Greco-Roman mythology (Glotfelty 1996: 9) does not contemplate stories of creation; the image of man and animal merges as one, as one suffering. Aristotle names the animal zoe; the term holds all the natural living creatures inclusive of humans and gods in one fold. Without calculating temporal order, he names the additional capacity humans have for political life as bios (Derrida 2009: 330). Similarly, in the animistic cultures of paganism the animal, or nature, shares the concept of suffering with humans, without hierarchical order. For example, the concept of the sacred grove is a historical marker of a natural world that is seen as inspirited. Animals and plants are “perceived as being articulate and at times intelligible subjects, able to communicate and interact with humans for good or ill” (Glotfelty 1996:15). At first suppressed as heretic for his left-wing radicalism against the monarchical Latin translation of the Greek Bible, Saint Francis of Assisi also saw a suffering animal. Francis preached the Gospels to animals because he believed they have souls and, equally to humans, deserves burial in consecrated ground (Glotfelty 1996: 13).
In Antiquity, which was essentially a Greco-Roman world in terms of our cultural heritage, man and animal did not have separate symbolic representations. Both were represented as one in the Greek word zoe. With the establishment of Western literacy, the Middle Ages mark a distinct transformation in the conceptual scheme of the animal. As the sphere of influence of Greek Orthodox Christianity moved from Greek east to Latin west, pagan animism in Europe dissipated. Moreover, together with Arabic and Greek scientific texts, Biblical Scriptures were translated from Greek to Latin (Glotfelty 1996: 7), with the word zoe lost in translation. Genesis, the Judeo-Christian story about creation transforms the Western framework of time. While the Scala Naturae is a later secular diagram, we can see in its medieval predecessor, a triangular diagram called “Great Chain of Being” (Glotfelty 1996: 21) that humans occupy a temporal position, without cyclical movement. While humans are represented in the middle, within the existence of linear time, both natural life below and God at the pinnacle of the triangle exist outside of time. Representation of the animal, zoe, now excludes humans. This new scheme is also recorded in the transition of Western calendars during the Middle Ages. New Frankish calendars replaced months shown as passive personifications with drawings of “men coercing the world around them –plowing, harvesting, chopping trees, butchering pigs. Man and nature are now two things, and man is master” (Glotfelty 1996: 8). This scheme of the zoe body that is irreducibly torn apart and divided between animality and humanity, according to Gnostic doctrine and illustrations in a medieval Hebrew Bible in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, will only lasts until the end of history –the end of linear time. The illustrations depict the last day, during the messianic banquet for the righteous, and portray humans with animal heads. Scholars interpret the manuscript to suggest that at the end of the current dispensation, “the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature” (Agamben 2004: 3).
The Renaissance invented our version of the Scala Naturae and the diagram eventually became a representation of our modern conceptual scheme of humanism and Enlightenment (Glotfelty 1996: 20), in which the human has his back turned on the animal. Up until the late eighteenth century, the canon of Western scientists and philosophers explained their motivations in religious terms; even “Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist” (Glotfelty 1996: 11). The philosophical concept of a suffering being in time is now the exclusive domain for human society. For example, complementing the Biblical stance, Kant, the founder of critical philosophy and author of The Critique of Pure Reason, claims that the animal exists for human ends (Ferenz 2007:146). Descartes, founder of modern philosophy, wrote in the 17th century that animals do not suffer; and since they do not possess language, they do not possess reason and are not feeling beings. He pronounces animals as mere automata (Singer 2006: 58). Heidegger, the 20th century existentialist and author of Being and Time, claimed in part four of the Discourse on Method: “I think therefore I am” (Derrida 2008: 46). He followed a metaphysical approach to the animal by attempting to identify the essential nature of animal life. He homogenised all animals, from amoeba to the great apes, claiming the animal is instinctual and poor in the world (Ferenz 2007:145).
The modern concept of animal, in the general singular, is now a philosophical right that represents itself as common sense; it now represents all the individual creatures that Adam named in the story Genesis, “It applies to the whole animal kingdom with the exception of the human” (Derrida 2008: 41).
1.1. Metaphorology
Among the ancient Greeks, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry define the inception of philosophy. Philosophy distinguishes itself for the first time as an autonomous form of intellectual inquiry when Plato calls for the banishment of the poets from the philosophical republic. He fears the non-rational activity of poetics and the capacity of linguistic devices in literature would engage and incite our emotions and bypass our rational faculties, and thereby stain the metaphysical aspirations of philosophy (Mulhall 2009: 1). The metaphor is a prominent literary device in poetics. In White Mythology, Derrida (1982: 232) argues that “the entire surface of philosophical discourse is worked by a metaphorics.” When Derrida (1982: 209) says the linguistic device of metaphor is central in the text of philosophy he means metaphysics is always constituted by a metaphorisation. In other words, where an idea of metaphysics would struggle as a long elaboration, the metaphor would express the idea aptly; “metaphor brings us closer to the thing’s essential or proper truth” (Derrida 1982: 247). Derrida (1982: 223) seeks out to establish what these ideas were before the activation of metaphorisation. He seeks to find the natural figure before it was idealised into an abstract meaning. Philosophical constructions rely on conceptual pairs that are held together by a scheme. In the scheme above, section one, we see the metaphorical nominalisation of a pair. Man and animal are both idealised metaphors, both are without physical properties and assume metaphysical acceptation.
2. Order
Since time.
For so long now, it is as if the cat had been recalling itself and recalling that, recalling me and reminding me of this awful tale of Genesis, without breathing a word. Who was born first, before the names? Which one saw the other come to this place, so long ago? Who will have been the first occupant, and therefore the master? Who is the subject? Who has remained the despot, for so long now? (Derrida 2008: 18).
The Scala Naturae resembles a hierarchical representation of man. Man, leading, walks confidently upright while the almost crawling pack of animals behind him follows. What is he following in this open space at the end of the composition? What else but an idea, a religio-philosophical ideal at the centre of his consciousness – his thought is his ‘evidence’ of superiority over the procession of animals behind him, above zoe. Man is now a Cartesian who says, ‘I think, therefore I am’. In this justification of self, man has the God-given right to kill these animal that follow him, as God had shown preference to Abel’s sacrifice, “the very animal that he has let Adam name” (Derrida 2008: 42). To name another means that one is a superior elder, in the way that a father names his children, his followers. In both philosophical and scientific terms, this leading man in the Scala Naturae is perceived as being the paragon of animals and the torchbearer of evolution (Glotfelty 1996: 24). The animal is now man’s object of study, to dissect and exploit as he pleases, because, it is a lower form of life without consciousness and without language –it does not respond to suffering. For the man with the superior size brain in the Scala Naturae, the animal is something that is seen, but is unable of seeing. From Descartes to the present time, philosophy has addressed and looked at the animal, but there is no thematic, theoretical, or philosophical account that it has ever been seen by the animal (Derrida 2008: 13-14). This hierarchy reminds one of a relationship between a sovereign and his subjects. The sovereign speaks, looks his subjects up and down, but the subject never addresses the sovereign, never addresses him directly. Man, as sovereign, is above the law of God that says, “Thou shalt not kill” (Derrida 2008: 62). Man has the right of death and power over the animal (Derrida 2009: 331) because the animal perishes but never dies, it has no relation worthy of the name of death (Derrida 2009: 308).
The ideology of humanism structures an indivisible limit between human and animal realms. Animality is seen a-historical, non-political, reactive, and without reason. Humanity is seen as being driven by historical change, as political, responsive, and rational. Justification for the hierarchical order has its roots in metaphysics, the belief that the essence of man, his moral judgement, assigns to him properness and brings all humanity together as one force (Lucy 2004: 78), and in opposition to the animal that lacks speech, thought and moral value. Central to metaphysics is its phonocentrism, the political voice and speech through which man makes his thought and historical truth be known. When Cartesian philosophy says “I think, therefore I am” (Derrida 2008: 46), it gives privilege to mind over body, thought over speech. It literally means that the foundation of man, of “I” is an idea that drives his thought to an image of self. In addition, the animal, as an idea belonging to man, is conceptualised by man and rendered as a universal image through the language, discourse, reason, or calculation of powerful men –logos names the animal. Logocentrism, that is what Derrida (2009: 338) means when he writes that man violently imposed sovereignty of logos as force of reason to produce the historico-political translation of the animal, of zoe. Moreover, we find the quasi-canonical keys of logos within our abrahamo-philosophical (Derrida 2009: 314) tradition which, “really is the whole of history of the Western world that is in play in these operations of translation, and thus in the definition of the relations between the beast and the sovereign, since the relations between the beast and the sovereign are also relations between an animal, a zoon supposed to be without reason, and a zoon supposed to be rational, the sovereign being posited as human, on the divine model, and as a human who naturally has reason, responsibility, etc.” (Derrida 2009: 339).
2.1. Metaphorology
The metaphor ‘Animal’ has no sensory meaning, such as ‘cat’ or ‘lion’. ‘Animal’ has no concrete image; its natural dimension has been exchanged for an abstraction that accumulates all the creatures of the animal kingdom, with the exception of the human. The analogy is based on the essence of man, his political and spiritual properties that lack in all the other creatures. The word animal signifies absence of metaphysics. It has a negative spiritual meaning, while ‘man’ has a positive spiritual meaning. The philosophical construction of the metaphor ‘Animal’ rely on the hierarchical ordering of the conceptual pair. The philosophical hierarchy submits the natural figure to idealisation. The philosophical metaphor is never a signifier; instead, it gives privilege to the signified. The idealising metaphor means one thing, and only one (Derrida 1982: 248).
3. Strategy
[T]he minimal feature that must be recognised in the position of sovereignty is […] a certain power to give, to make, but also to suspend the law; it is the exceptional right to place oneself above right, the right to non-right, if I can say this, which both runs the risk of carrying the human sovereign above the human, towards divine omnipotence (which will moreover most often have grounded the principle of sovereignty in its sacred and theological origin) and, because of this arbitrary suspension or rupture of right, runs the risk of making the sovereign look like the most brutal beast who respects nothing, scorns the law, immediately situates himself above the law, at a distance from the law […], sovereign and beast seem to have in common their being-outside-the-law […]: criminal, beast, and sovereign strangely resemble each other while seeming to be situated at the antipodes, at each other’s antipodes. (Derrida 2009: 16-17)
Who comes before and who is after whom? (Derrida 2008: 10)
By inverting the temporal order of the Scala Naturae, the ideological strategy of the analogy comes to the fore and we will see anthropocentrism at work in the construction of the animal. Let us imagine the hierarchical Scala Naturae as a progression from right to left, instead of left to right. Man stands at the right outer edge, with his back to the end of the composition, facing the animals that came before him –his ancestors in zoe that he in fact follows, by sequence. He now has his backed turned on the idea –‘I think, therefore I am’ –that he had followed in the original left to right progression of the diagram. Looking at the spectrum of animals, he would be able to see that the animal societies can see him, in his nakedness, fragility, and vulnerability within one ecosystem. From the biosphere’s perspective, hominids “dwell at the outermost fringes of important ecological processes such as photosynthesis and the conversion of biomass into usable nutrients. No lofty language about being the paragon of animals [Scala Naturae] or the torchbearer of evolution [humanism] can change this ecological fact” (Glotfelty 1996: 24). The inverted Scala Naturae shows man as a defect creature that falls behind, trailing at the back of the zoe procession. Derrida (2008: 20) situates the time of the fall, the fault or defect of man, at the intersection of the Genesis tale and Greek myth of Prometheus, (let’s remember the Protagoras and the moment when Prometheus steals fire, that is to say, the arts and technics, in order to make up for the forgetfulness or tardiness of Epimetheus, who had perfectly equipped all breeds of animal but left “man naked,” without shoes, covering, or arms), it is paradoxically on the basis of a fault or failing in man that the latter will be made a subject who is master of nature and of the animal.
From within the pit of that lack, an eminent lack, a quite different lack from that he assigns to the animal, man installs or claims in a single stroke his property (the peculiarity of man whose property it even is not to have anything that is proper to him), and his superiority over what is called animal life. This latter superiority, infinite and par excellence, has as its property the fact of being at one and the same time unconditional and sacrificial.
In the translation of zoe from Greek to Latin, in the intervention of the abrahamo-philosophical tradition, and in the invention of the Scala Naturae, man ‘walks out’ on zoe, breaks away, declares the remnant zoe as an homogenous inferior entity, and claims it as his property. Man no longer follows zoe, he now follows an idea of what he ideally ought to be – ideally, the opposite of the ‘inferior’ zoe, which he names collectively, with the exclusion of himself, Animal. Man transfers his inferiority onto the remainder of zoe – he exchanges his defect for that of an idea. Derrida (2008: 45) puts it like this,
what is proper to man, his subjugating superiority over the animal, his very becoming-subject, his historicity, his emergence out of nature, his sociality, his access to knowledge and technics, all that, everything (in a non-finite number of predicates) that is proper to man would derive from this originary fault, indeed, from this default in propriety, what is proper to man as default in propriety –and from the imperative necessity that finds in it its development and resilience.
The strategy of the Scala Naturae is to present us humans as if we have immunity against zoe by means of a sacred idea, a philosophical thought, that we follow. The strategy immunises us against that which ‘follows’ us, which is behind us in the diagram, which we name Animal. The Scala Naturae invents the name Animal in order to disguise man’s animality, to immunise him from that which he is inferior to, which he is at fault with. The sacred idea and philosophical thought that man follows, immunise him against his natural defect. In turn, in order to cover his tracks of inferiority, in order to erase the terrifying biocentric perspective of the hominid, a sequence, a consequence, or a persecution follows. Man has to broadcast his vulnerability to the animal in order to justify his persecution of the animal, in order to counter “the risk of making the sovereign look like the most brutal beast who respects nothing” (Derrida 2009: 17). Man enters an autoimmunitary strategy by giving the animal an anonymous invisibility, a terrifying beast with undetermined origin, a singularity that has no face, “Autoimmunity produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity it claims to overcome” (Borradori 2003: 99). To put it differently,
this movement of shame, this reticence, this inhibition, this retreat, this reversal is, no doubt, like the immunizing drive, the protection of the immune, of the sacred (heilig), of the separate (kadosch) that is the very origin of the religious, of religious scruple. […] [T]his terrible and always perversion by means of which the immune becomes auto-immunizing, finding there some analogical or virtual relation with auto-biography. (Derrida 2008: 47)
By inverting the Scala Naturae, man and animal, or Beast and Sovereign, we see how the one resembles the other. We see that there is no essential difference in the pair; instead, we see the force of ideological strategy in an autoimmunitary process. The concept of autoimmunity acts as strategy for disavowal. Renunciation is a necessity for the self-preservation of the ‘blinding’ concept of man. To put it differently, the one becomes the host for the other. Borradori (2003: 151) puts it like this, “One function of the concept of autoimmunity is to act as a third term between the classical opposition of friend and foe. As we have seen, to identify a third term is a characteristically deconstructive move aimed at displacing the traditional metaphysical tendency to rely on irreducible pairs.”
3.1. Metaphorology
Gradually, the metaphorical element disappears, and by custom, the word changes from metaphorical to literal expression; image and meaning can no longer be distinguished (Derrida 1982: 225). By inversion, or displacement, we see the resemblance between the two signs, ‘animal’ designates ‘man’, and ‘sovereign’ designates ‘beast’.
The philosophical metaphor is an imperfect metaphor; due to its loss of natural figure and artificial construction, it does not transport a clear and certain definition, it becomes obscure and passes outside the range of sensation. The ‘Animal’ is a forced metaphor that represents us with a non-true figure (Derrida 1982: 253). The word ‘Animal’ is an analogy for the mythical figure Chimera. It is a metaphor of a metaphor, a picture without activity.
Analogy is metaphor par excellence; it is the replacement of properties for one another, extraction and exchanges of attributed properties. Moreover, in the metaphysical analogy, one of the terms is missing, and has to be reinvented (Derrida 1982: 242-243). By inventing new terms for the generalised image, Derrida (1982: 258-267) replaces the philosophical phantom with a ‘word’, a signifier that does not seduce reason, and without metaphysical illumination that blinds clarity and pushes towards an autonomous kind of thought.
In the section that follows we see Derrida’s new terms ‘animot’ and ‘autobiographical animal’ as replacements for the metaphors ‘Animal’ and ‘Man’. Derrida sets out to reconstitute the grammar of these metaphors in order “to articulate its logic, meaning of concepts, and the order of reason as trope” (Derrida 1982: 266).
4. Animot and biographical animal
The animal, what a word! (Derrida 2008: 23)
The idealisation of the Scala Naturae represents the creatures that are not man in the figure of the Animal. The animal is a metaphysical metaphor of which the natural figure has been erased; it is a concept without ground. Literally, the word animal represents a multiplicity of creatures in one image –the chimera, a flame spitting monster, undifferentiated in sexuality, it has a head and chest of a lion, entrails of a goat, and a tail of a dragon (Derrida 2008: 42). It is a blinding concept that at one stroke annihilates all the living creatures of zoe. If one were to call for the animal, to inquire if the animal can suffer, it would be impossible for a natural creature to answer the calling. To deconstruct the disavowal, Derrida, by means of poetic thinking, invents the word ‘animot’ – a theory of animots, or chimerical discourse. When spoken in French, one hears the plural animaux within the singular, “recalling the extreme diversity of animals that ‘the animal’ erases, and which, when written, makes it plain that this word [mot] ‘the animal’ is precisely only a word” (Derrida 2008: x). Derrida exchanges a pseudo-concept for a word that has reflex to being a word, mot, in French. ‘The Animal’ now confesses to being a word, a word of human language, and, simultaneously, counters the trope of anthropocentrism.
Who or what is at the head of the movement in the Scala Naturae? What is it that makes that figure different from zoe, and what is the figure of man following? In order to answer, let us return to the famous statement by Descartes, the one that Derrida uses as trope in his title. Let us imagine the Cartesian figure in the Scala Naturae says: I think, therefore I am. First, he means that he himself also falls, like animal, under a singular and general noun, that of ‘I’. We can see here the analogical relation between ‘Animal’ and ‘I,’ “The ‘I’ is anybody at all; ‘I’ am anybody at all, and anybody at all must be able to say ‘I’ to refer to herself, to his own singularity. Whosoever says ‘I’ or apprehends or poses herself as an ‘I’ is a living animal” (Derrida 2008: 49). Second, he thinks the creatures behind him into the idea of animal; he names it, and this name follows him, distinguishes him as in I am –the name-thinking serves as self- recognition for man himself, to being I am. It is his work that follows him –the animot is his work. Animots are animated word-things, creatures of language (Fellenz 2007149). In turn, he follows the idea of his difference, the I am, as signified by his work. He thinks the animot into a pseudo-existence in order to construct his own pseudo-existence –he follows the metaphorica of philosophy. He follows a metaphor in order to give figure to himself –his thinking of the animal is the writing of himself. Derrida (2008: 39) puts it succinctly, “We are following, we follow ourselves.” He means that it is as if the political animal, the bios in zoe, is writing an autobiography that becomes a poisonous auto-template for the making of his own image:
Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living, would be an immunizing movement (a movement of safety, of salvage and salvation of the safe, the holy, the immune, the indemnified, of virginal and intact nudity), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing, like every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, autonomous, auto-referential movement. Nothing risks becoming more poisonous than an autobiography, poisonous for oneself in the first place, auto-infectious for the presumed signatory who is so auto-affected. (Derrida 2008: 47)
The new term autobiographical animal returns us to the Greek concept of zoe, in which Homo sapien is an animal with the additional capacity for bios, for auto-bio-graphy –it returns man to the fold of animal. It foregrounds ‘man’ as a Foucauldian fictional character of recent invention. The term exposes the protocols of humanism, in which its disciplinary formation use its “own output as input in an ongoing process of ‘self-making’ or ‘self-production,’ and [it] constantly (re)produce the elements that in turn produce [it]” (Wolfe 2010: 111).
The new term animot exposes our anthropocentrism by making us self-aware of the idealism at play in the signified animal; in addition, it dissolves the signified essence in zoe; it gives reflexivity to our metaphors of analogy, moreover, animot return us to the signifier. Animot serves as reminder of the constructivism at play in Animal. Animot acknowledge the limits of the philosophical animal and protects us “from dogmatism as well as from excessive self-assurance and injects into it a healthy sense of systematic incompleteness and doubt” (Borradori 2003:139). Animot calls on us to re-evaluate the limits of thought in the wording of our literatures, for example, the wording in the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights (Derrida 2008: 169-170).
In combination, the new terms return us to a cyclical scheme, in which the terms animot and autobiographical animal follow each other, without metaphysical order. The terms remove the philosophical interpretation of there being a limit “between what is called man and what is improperly and in the general singular called the animal” (Derrida 2009:xiv). The terms inhabit, house, and follow each other without a strategy of disavowal.
Bibliography
Agamben, G. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Borradori, G. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press.
Derrida, J. 2009. The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume I. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. 2010. Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Fellenz, M.R. 2007. The moral menagerie: Philosophy and animal rights. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Glotfelty, C and Fromm, H. (eds). 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press.
Lucy, N. 2004. A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Macey, D. 2000. Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin.
Mulhall, S. 2009. The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the difficulty of reality in literature and philosophy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Singer, P. (ed). 2006. In defense of animals: The second wave. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Wolfe, C. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.