Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign (Studies in Continental Thought)
David Farrell Krell
Language: English
Pages: 196
ISBN: 0253009332
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Jacques Derrida’s final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty―the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida’s late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life.
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others not. In his view, bêtise is the very authenticity of humankind—if “authenticity” is a translation of the “proper,” das Eigentliche, in Heidegger’s sense. Humankind is properly bête in that its philosophers always try to appropriate for the species qualities that they claim to be “proper” to it, belonging to it exclusively, pertaining to it alone among all living entities. To attempt such a massive distinction—human versus animal—is itself a bêtise, declares Derrida, so that, imagining such
cited here were, to repeat, among those that intrigued Derrida over decades. It is no accident that they are among the notes that most attracted Heidegger’s attention during the 1937 and 1939 lecture courses on Nietzsche, that is, those on eternal recurrence of the same and will to power as knowledge. Furthermore, one has to recall the central role that Nietzsche’s account of differential forces played in Derrida’s “Différance,” principally in Nietzsche’s reflections on will to power. Although it
Menschen, to be sure, but since the days of King Gilgamesh of Uruk and his friend Enkidu, whose beautiful temple-priestess taught him to drink wine, eat bread, and make love, and thus to become human, the ways of language pass through the vineyard. It is as though language were the gift not of Apollo but of Dionysos, so that, in spite of the young Nietzsche’s worries, music 126 Derrida and Our Animal Others and the word need not strive against each other, but may accompany and mutually grace
only three-quarters of the way along the path that is “far.” The path? Have we been on it all the while? Presumably, although only presumably, even if Heidegger’s next paragraph begins with this question: “Do we wander off the path if . . . ?” If what? If we think the logos as the laying that gathers or gleans, as we have been doing right from the start. Yet something new enters on the scene, to wit, a new and unexpected attention to the word Πάντα, as though in Heraclitus’s fragment we could
poetry in a different way. It is not simply a matter of Celan versus Hölderlin. Celan is always with Hölderlin. The “uses” of poetry—foolish expression!—in Heidegger and Derrida are of course only part of the problem. For Derrida, fiction and fable, novel, short story, and drama play a role that is closer to Schelling’s conception of narrative (Erzählung) than to Heidegger’s notion of poesy (Dicht ung). This is easy to see, but its consequences are hard to think through. It needs, if I may say
