This is the sort of post that blogs are basically made for: an intuitive argument that I believe is right but that I haven't dotted all the Ts and crossed all the Is yet. So, this is something I am putting out there to see if people think I should keep working at or if there are some obvious objections I am ignoring here.
This post makes use of a distinction between early Derrida and late Derrida. Such a distinction is, of course, obviously problematic and overly schematic. Simon Critchley, for example, categorically rejects such a distinction, stating that, "In my experience reading Derrida, the closer one looks, the harder it is to find any substantial difference between earlier and later work" (Critchley; Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity p. 96). My argument is not that there exists some clear demarcating line between early and late Derrida, or that elements of one doesn't exist in the other. But, I also believe that an ahistorical reading of an author, that doesn't take into accounts changes that occur during a thinker's long and productive career is a particularly good reading, either.
There are two elements that I feel are particularly worth paying attention into understanding a shift from an early Derrida to a late Derrida is (1) his relationship to Heidegger and (2) the centrality of resisting certain disavowals. These two points are not unrelated, but are held together through what Derrida called the question of the animal. As the question of the animal intensifies in Derrida's thought we see a continued distance being placed between Derrida and Heidegger, and so often and repeatedly over the question of the animal (from the 1968 The Ends of Man, to his 2001-2002 lectures The Sovereign and the Beast). And if we are to take Derrida at his word, that the most fundamental disavowal for him is the disavowal of the animal, then it should come as no surprise to us that his more political and ethical writings should become more central in his work at the same time that the question of the animal enters his work with a stronger and greater frequency. The argument here isn't just that you can't understand Derrida without understanding his work on animals, though that is part of my argument, it is also that you can't understand the specific shift of his work away from a strong heideggerianism and towards a strong political and ethical focus without understanding the way the question of the animals plays in the economy of Derrida's writing.
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7 comments:
This is really interesting!
I'm not nearly familiar with Derrida enough to defend or criticize this thesis, but it seems like something worthy of a dissertation, or at least a legnthy paper. I'd be interested in reading posts that point to critical junctures in his writing that you imagine highlight this geneology.
Thanks Adam.
While Derrida is a major part of my dissertation work, I doubt this argument will find itself in there. But, hopefully a longer and stronger argument can be worked out in a conference paper, and then maybe an article to try and publish somewhere.
I think one of the major beliefs that guide my argument has to do with Derrida's Of Spirit. This book, derived from lectures given in 1987, seems to be the fulcrum by which I think most people seem to see a distinction between early and later Derrida. It, in itself, is a beautiful text that seems to perfectly stand at the cusp between the two. And, at the center of the book, is an analysis of Heidegger's treatment of animals as being a key to understanding his connection to national socialism. I could try to explain it more here, but Matthew Calarco's Zoographies contains an excellent analysis of Derrida's argument in Of Spirit.
There are enough dissertations/books on Derrida (Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan - even the Agamben growth industry will soon reach the peak of market saturation). Article is better.
(If you are looking to present it in the fall somewhere, I put in an abstract on animals, law and the inhumanities for the "Law and Humanities" conference in Ottawa. The CFP is on my site.)
Scu, I'm excited by this proposed idea of yours. Please keep us posted on your continuing thoughts on this in future posts.
I'm about to enter a doctoral program in philosophy. As I've been getting into Derrida (who is still very new to me) I have been interested in learning more about his views on animals.
If you wouldn't mind, could you let me know where in his dauntingly huge corpus he discusses animals? I know about The Animal That Therefore I Am, as well as a chapter in For What Tomorrow, The Beast and the Sovereign and a brief passage in Force of Law, but is there anything else?
Thanks, and keep up the good work with this blog.
Craig: Thanks for the conference suggestions, I'll look at it. Though I am moving to FL (my partner got into medical school at the University of Miami), so I would have to fly there, and that seems financially unlikely.
EJ: Good luck in your program! I think your question would make a good blog post, so I am trying to work on it now.
This is a great post, and I totally agree about the emphasis on the animal in Derrida's later work. (And that this is central to D's metaphysical and political distancing of himself from [aspects of] Heidegger.) Throwing out a thought: to me the shift to the later stuff has two aspects. Where the earlier work is very involved in the quasi-transcendental double-movement stuff, the later work tends to push much harder in more 'positive' [not quite the right word, but good enough as a gesture] directions. To me, there's a conflict between different aspects of that push: on the one hand there's the undeconstructible spectrality/hauntology/messianic side of things; on the other hand there's animality. It's frustrating to me that the former has been picked up and run with so much, in recent work on Derrida, with a corresponding relative neglect of the latter. [Not that I'm particularly abreast of the literature...] The work that treats of animality is, to my mind, richer, more promising, and more correct. In other words, I'm not saying this to criticise the post - I'm saying it because I like your emphasis on this side of the later Derrida.
Thanks Duncan.
I agree that there hasn't been as much focus (particularly at the level of the monograph) on Derrida's relationship to the question of the animal. Most of the scholarship that does exist is done almost exclusively by critical animal studies people. (An important exception to this would be J. Hillis Miller's new book For Derrida. While not done with it, it has continued to resist an easy anthropocentrism that Derrida also resisted).
You are also right that there are many themes that are explored in late Derrida, what you put as "spectrality/hauntology/messianic" and I might add friendship, autoimmunity, etc. And I agree, these terms exist in a relationship with each other in Derrida's work. And further, the question of animality and how it relates to such terms are often being totally ignored (even among most of the critical animal studies folks). Lippit's Electric Animal does some work in this direction, but we are missing any sort of solid synthesis on this front. For example, in the French edition of The Politics of Friendship there is included as an appendix or supplement the essay/lecture "Heidegger's Ear." Coming from an author like Derrida, who was always so concerned about marginalia and the ways texts connected to each other, we should take seriously how close together these texts are. That it would be hard, maybe even senseless, to try to incorporate Derrida's notion of friendship in The Politics of Friendship without also taking into account "Heidegger's Ear" filled with arguments about friendship, animals, and sacrifice.
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