Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign
192
Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign
192Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253009333 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/18/2013 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Derrida and Our Animal Others
Derrida's Final Seminar, "The Beast and the Sovereign"
By David Farrell Krell
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 David Farrell KrellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00933-3
CHAPTER 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.
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)
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." 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 nationstate.
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 the Political; Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République (1583); Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil" (ca. 1580); Plato, Republic and Phaedrus; Plautus, Asinaria.
Derrida begins with the eh sound of the conjunction et in the title La bête et le souverain. Because et and est cannot be distinguished by the ear, which hears only eh? it may be that the beast is the sovereign, or, more likely, that the sovereign is a beast, as fairy tales and fables often tell us. The fables concerning beasts are not restricted to La Fontaine, however; for the organized media of nation-states today fabulate as never before. Fox, too, fabulates, although Derrida does not refer by name to this particular U.S.-American media animal. Yet the session of December 19, 2001, begins by reflecting on "the fabulous use of information" in government and the media in all "advanced" nations, above all in the United States. Two months have sufficed to show how "information" is used to manipulate the citizenry and to mobilize for war. Derrida's account of the "jubilant pain" of the images of the collapsing twin towers of the World Trade Center, broadcast over and over again, and of "the experience of the vulnerability of the invulnerable" (1:64), is nothing short of stunning. The auto-censorship that was immediately enforced in the United States after 9/11—the banning, to take an example not mentioned by Derrida, of John Lennon's "Imagine" from virtually all radio stations—and the immediate development of techniques for inducing fear and terror in one's own populace, submitting both the enemy and the homeland to the force of "shock and awe," as one administration officer put it: these events enable Derrida and us to read Hobbes with renewed energy. For, as Hobbes concedes, fear is at the heart of the Common-wealth portrayed in Leviathan, the fear that motivates citizens to obey the law and to submit to the will of the sovereign. "Sovereignty makes us afraid, and fear makes the sovereign," writes Derrida in the voice of Hobbes (1:68–69). "We serve and protect," says the writing on the Chicago city police cars, but if you are a Chicago bartender never refuse to serve an off-duty policeman. For, even inebriated, he is Leviathan, the force of law, and you are a fool not to feel fear.
Carl Schmitt tells us more about the philosophical tradition than he would like to concede when he says, "Protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state" (CS 54; 1:74–75). I protect—and therefore obligate—you. Why the need to obligate? Both Hobbes and Schmitt, notes Derrida, found their politics on "a pessimistic anthropology" (1:75). It is Schmitt who cites La Fontaine's fable of the wolf and the lamb as an example of "the problem of aggression." Derrida focuses on the problematic situation of the institution of political power by obligatory covenant, whereby the sovereign, an "image" of God, is in some sense the author of the covenant. Even though the sovereign Judeo-Christian God is not himself a signer, and even though no one dare speak or write in his name, that God looms behind and above the covenant as its transcendent authority. Yet the very exceptionalism of the sovereign—serving as God's lieutenant by making the law while being above the law—interrupts the embrace of subject and sovereign in the Commonwealth; that interruption becomes apparent when the beast is excluded from the covenant and the polity. Hobbes wants to avoid any direct reference to a religious or sect-based covenant, since there is more than one sect in play, all the while incorporating a Judeo-Christian foundation for the Common-wealth. To repeat, one does not contract with either God or brute beasts, if only because we do not speak the language of either. Derrida remarks on the precise wording of Hobbes's text here, which is identical in its exclusions of both beast and God from the covenant. What gets excluded willy-nilly along with all the other beasts is in fact the sovereign beast that is God, so that the covenant is destined to crumble, or at least to tremble throughout its lifetime. In Derrida's view, however, it is not a matter of reclaiming for either dog or god what Hobbes denies them. Rather, it is a matter of putting into question the claim that the human subject or citizen properly possesses the qualities ascribed to them, qualities that grant them their privileges, powers, and authority. This is the gesture that dominates Derrida's inquiries into "animality" from start to finish, namely, the gesture that challenges the confidence philosophers always seem to place in the specifically human capacity to respond and to be responsible rather than merely to react.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Derrida and Our Animal Others by David Farrell Krell. Copyright © 2013 David Farrell Krell. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. The Beast and the Sovereign I2. The Beast and the Sovereign II3. How Follow the Animal . . . That I Am?4. Is There a Touchstone for All Philosophy?5. Is Apophantic Discourse the Touchstone?6. Conclusions and Directions for Future ResearchIndexWhat People are Saying About This
David Farrell Krell offers Derrida's last seminar the response for which it calls. He invites readers to consider a number of questions that have not yet been adequately broached, either in continental philosophy or in critical animal studies, that may well move both fields forward. It would be difficult to overestimate the book's importance here.
David Farrell Krell presents Derrida's work on animality in an interesting and precise way. His major contribution, however, is in response to Derrida's criticisms of Heidegger. Krell gives us new insights into how to understand Heidegger. That Krell is able to do this is no surprise, since he is one of the world's leading scholars on Heidegger's thought.