Notes on Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (Higgs 2010)
Published
in French in 2006, two years after his death, this book is a long
lecture (which actually turned into a ten-hour seminar) that he wrote
for the 1997 Cerisy conference on his work titled “The Autobiographical
Animal.”
Here Derrida sets his sights on the philosophical problematic of the
animal. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the limits of that
interstitial space between that which we call animal and that which we
call human. He coins the neologism “Limitrophy” to describe this
exploration, “Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at
the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what
feeds the limit, generates it, raises, and complicates it. Everything
I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in
multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing,
folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and
multiple.” (29) He predicates this line of inquiry on his assertion
that the entire history of philosophic discourse from Aristotle to
Heidegger is guilty of misrepresenting or misinterpreting the basic
ontological difference between that which we call animal and that which
we call human.
He opens with a discussion of the Genesis myth, focusing on the way
in which Adam is naked in the garden until he eats the fruit from the
tree of knowledge. Instead of the typical reading of this action as a
fall from grace, Derrida sees this as the inciting incident for the
creation of humanity. Recognition of nudity, and the shame associated
with it, is particularly interesting to Derrida because, as he puts it,
“In principle, with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to
dress itself. [Thus] clothing would be proper to man, one of the
‘properties’ of man. ‘Dressing oneself’ would be inseparable from all
the other figures of what is ‘proper to man,’ even if one talks about it
less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning,
burial, the gift, etc.” (5) These “properties of man” are the sites he
wants to push against in this lecture.
In his trademark elliptical, recursive, persistently deferring style,
he raises this issue of being naked in front of that which we call
animal, what it means to be naked, how that which we call animal cannot
be naked, what it means to be seen by that which we call animal, and
what it means for a human to see themselves in the eyes of that which we
call animal.
N.B. this phraseology “that which we call animal” instead of the
simpler term “animal.” This is purposeful. For Derrida, the fact that
we refer to all living creatures that are not human as “animals” is
absurdly reductive. He makes a good point. Lumping together the
cricket and the whale, the mountain lion and the parakeet, the giraffe
and the marmot, seems lazy and dismissive, yet, as Derrida points out,
this is exactly what philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger are guilty
of doing. And part of his project is to shine a light on this
unexamined assumption.
Take Heidegger, for example. As Derrida shows, Heidegger delineates
three ontological positions: the living being (which is separated into
the animality of the animal and the humanity of the human) and the
nonliving being. So, for Heidegger, you are either a nonliving being
(the example he uses is a stone) or a living being, of which there are
only two kinds: animal and human. According to Heidegger, the
determining distinction between the animal and the human is the ability
to die. Animals, Heidegger argues, come to an end but do not die. By
the same token, “A dog does not exist but merely lives.” Humans, on the
other hand, have “the living character of the living being,” by which
he seems to mean logos and/or the awareness of mortality and/or the
ability to manipulate existence and/or the ability to choose death.
Heidegger’s specific wording for these distinctions are, “the stone is
wordless, the animal is poor in the world, man is world-forming.” Of
the various objections Derrida raises to Heidegger’s argument, the one
that resonates most powerfully with his project of limitrophy is his
assertion that the binary division between human and animal falls vastly
short of representing the multiplicity of difference between various
species. (On a personal note: I read Derrida’s argument regarding the
need to move beyond the univocal signifier “animal” as akin to the
annoying error so often made when someone generalizes about “Africa”:
not taking into account the immense geographic, historic, political,
social, and cultural diversity of the continent.)
Another site for Derrida’s limitrophy is Lacan’s position vis-à-vis
the difference between that which we call human and that which we call
animal. For Lacan, it should be no surprise, what separates the two is
language. It is a difference between response and reaction. Animals,
Lacan argues, do not respond to questions; they react to stimuli. They
do not have a language, rather, they use a coded system of signaling,
which is a fixed program, as opposed to the dynamic, symbolic
interaction of the human. He uses bees as an example: the dance of the
bee who returns to the hive to direct others to where they might find
nectar. Lacan claims that this dance is not an exchange in need of
interpretation, as would be the case with humans, but is instead a kind
of exchange of data from one (as Derrida puts it) Cartesian
machine-animal to another Cartesian machine-animal. For the most part,
Derrida is not as interested in refuting Lacan’s claim as much as he is
interested in making porous the distinctions, again, exploring the
limits, the threshold between response and reaction.
In terms of application, Derrida’s idea of limitrophy is of
particular interest to me as a potential guiding methodology for
exploring the posthuman (one of my current fields of inquiry) – and more
specifically, for my major ongoing research interests, as a way to
think and talk about experimental literature. If posthuman discourse
can, in some ways, be considered an exploration of the categorical
boundary separating the human from the non-human, I don’t see why that
discourse can’t be grafted onto a discussion of the categorical boundary
separating conventional realism and non-conventional realism. Aren’t
both programs reliant on the power engendered by the exclusivity of
their (perceived) unique characteristics in order to demarcate them as
foundational, separate, autonomous, sovereign? In other words, that
which we call human seems analogous to that which we call conventional
realism. Perhaps, as posthuman discourse shows us the inherent flaw in
such molar classification of the human, so too can this discourse show
us the inherent flaw in conceiving of conventional realism as a molar
classification. Both that which we call human and that which we call
conventional realism are porous, malleable, molecular — while at the
same time they seem to present legible boundaries. Limitrophy offers a
strategy for questioning the validity of those perceived boundaries by
identifying gaps, spaces, discontinuities, through surveying the
interstitial space between that which constitutes and that which
deviates.
