Author | Jacques Derrida |
---|---|
Original title | L'animal que donc je suis |
Translator | David Wills |
Language | French |
Subject | Philosophy |
Publisher | Éditions Galilée, Fordham University Press (English translation) |
Publication date | 2006 |
Publication place | France |
Published in English | 2008 |
Media type | |
Pages | 176 (English translation with translator's notes) |
ISBN | 978-0-8232-2791-4 (English-language edition) |
The Animal That Therefore I Am (French : L'Animal que donc je suis) is a book based on the ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" given by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida at the 1997 Cerisy Conference and subsequently published as a long essay under the title, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)". The book has gained notability as signalling Derrida's turn to questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals. Derrida's lecture has come to be a foundational text in Animal Studies within the fields of literary criticism and critical theory. [1] Whilst the text is often seen as marking the "animal turn" in Derrida's oeuvre, Derrida himself said that his interest in animals was in fact present in his earliest writings. [2]
The address was first partially published in English in the Winter 2002 issue of the journal Critical Inquiry . In 2008 it was republished in a book entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am, which reprinted the address along with an essay entitled "And Say The Animal Responded", and two previously unpublished essays. All of the essays were taken from Derrida's various addresses at the 1997 Cerisy conference. [3]
Tobias Menely suggests that "Derrida is straining after something that is unusually difficult for him to conceptualize", namely the question of pathos that binds the human and nonhuman animal. Menely, in his analysis of Derrida's argument, positions Derrida in a tradition of thinkers that include Thomas More and Jeremy Bentham who, according to Menely, elide the question of the ways in which suffering might be equivocal between species and instead turn to "creaturely passion" for an account of animal ontology. [4]
Donna Haraway in When Species Meet praises Derrida for understanding "that actual animals look back at actual human beings", yet, crucially does not "seriously consider an alternative form of knowing something more about cats and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately." Although largely complimentary of his attempt to address the question of the animal, Haraway surmises that Derrida "failed a simple obligation of companionship" to the specific animal other. [5]
As Derrida himself notes, the question of the animal and animality has been a concern within his writing long before the 1997 Cerisy Conference. Most notably, Derrida talks about the animality of the letter in Writing and Difference (1967), Heidegger's pronouncement on the animal being "poor in world" in Of Spirit (1989) and, in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy entitled "Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject" (1989), Derrida discusses the ethics of eating meat. Derrida's final seminars, from 2001 to 2003, extensively discuss animals and animality, and were posthumously published in two volumes under the title The Beast and the Sovereign.
Jean-Luc Godard's 2014 experimental essay film Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage) quotes from The Animal That Therefore I Am several times. [6]
In an early scene from Michael Mann's 2015 action thriller Blackhat , The Animal That Therefore I Am can be seen on the prison-cell bookshelf of protagonist Nicholas Hathaway, a convicted hacker played by Chris Hemsworth. [7]
Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. Posthumanization comprises "those processes by which a society comes to include members other than 'natural' biological human beings who, in one way or another, contribute to the structures, dynamics, or meaning of the society."
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disavowed the word "postmodernity".
Jean-Luc Godard was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork.
Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.
Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre, a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L'Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger.
"A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review. In it, the concept of the cyborg represents a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine." Haraway writes: "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator. Lacoue-Labarthe published several influential works with his friend Jean-Luc Nancy.
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies is a 1925 essay by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss that is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange.
The following is a bibliography of works by Jacques Derrida.
Animal studies is a recently recognised field in which animals are studied in a variety of cross-disciplinary ways. Scholars who engage in animal studies may be formally trained in a number of diverse fields, including art history, anthropology, biology, film studies, geography, history, psychology, literary studies, museology, philosophy, communication, and sociology. They engage with questions about notions of "animality," "animalization," or "becoming animal," to understand human-made representations of and cultural ideas about "the animal" and what it is to be human by employing various theoretical perspectives. Using these perspectives, those who engage in animal studies seek to understand both human-animal relations now and in the past as defined by our knowledge of them. Because the field is still developing, scholars and others have some freedom to define their own criteria about what issues may structure the field.
Jean-Luc Marion is a French philosopher and Catholic theologian. He is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy.
Ontotheology means the ontology of God and/or the theology of being. While the term was first used by Immanuel Kant, it has only come into broader philosophical parlance with the significance it took for Martin Heidegger's later thought. While, for Heidegger, the term is used to critique the whole tradition of 'Western metaphysics', much recent scholarship has sought to question whether 'ontotheology' developed at a certain point in the metaphysical tradition, with many seeking to equate the development of 'ontotheological' thinking with the development of modernity, and Duns Scotus often being cited as the first 'ontotheologian'.
Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher.
Karen Michelle Barad is an American feminist theorist and physicist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. The concept aims at addressing a variety of questions, including ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity.
David Robert Wills is a noted translator of Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death, Right of Inspection, Counterpath, and The Animal That Therefore I Am. Currently, Wills is a professor of French at Brown University.
Goodbye to Language is a 2014 French-Swiss narrative essay film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Héloïse Godet, Kamel Abdeli, Richard Chevallier, Zoé Bruneau, Jessica Erickson and Christian Grégori and was shot by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. It is Godard's 42nd feature film and 121st film or video project. In the French-speaking parts of Switzerland where it was shot, the word "adieu" can mean both goodbye and hello. The film depicts a couple having an affair. The woman's husband discovers the affair and the lover is killed. Two pairs of actors portray the couple and their actions repeat and mirror one another. Godard's own dog Roxy Miéville has a prominent role in the film and won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Like many of Godard's films, it includes numerous quotes and references to previous artistic, philosophical and scientific works, most prominently those of Jacques Ellul, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Mary Shelley.