Paul Livingston
Draft: June 15, 2008
Political Animals: Derrida on Sovereignty and Animality
The question of the place of what are called “animals” does not seem, at first, obviously to capture the deepest or most important imperative of a deconstructive politics devoted to challenging the constitutive structures of war, mastery, violence and sovereignty in the ‘contemporary scene’ of
‘globalization,’ or what Derrida often described as the ever more problematic and contested
“mondialisation” or ‘becoming world’ of the world. And yet, as Derrida said in 1967 with respect to the
“question of language” (which is, as I shall argue, at bottom the same question) the question of the life of the simply living (what a longstanding tradition, still operative at the very foundation of contemporary politics, understands as that of the animal) has certainly never been simply one question among others.
1 Indeed, as we shall see, the vanishing trace of an undeterminable “animal” life runs across Derrida’s own text from beginning to end, as it does, in a way that is at once silent, massive, and decisive, across the onto-theo-logically structured reality of contemporary “global” politics that this text attempts ceaselessly to decipher. This trace or track of a non-human life that crosses this global scene and unsettles its most profoundly orienting axioms cannot in fact be determined as that of “animals,”
“an animal” or of “the animal” in general – for as Derrida has ceaselessly reminded us, there is not and has never been any such thing; the first and most essential imperative of a deconstructive reading committed to discerning difference and non-identity is to protest the universalizing gesture of the term or syntagm that, ignoring all of the vast differences of type, function, and characteristic, simply groups and indifferently unites all that is living and not human or plant under a single common term. Yet the deconstructive reading that tracks the trace of a non-human life across the discourses and practices of contemporary politics is nevertheless, as I shall argue, such as to call into question the political, social, theological and metaphysical privilege of the human, everywhere this privilege underlies and supports the axiomatics of what it is to speak or answer, what it is to ask or question, what it can mean to take up the life, community, or identity, of what can perhaps no longer, traversing it, be determined as that of the being that speaks. Thus, in 2001, in response to an interviewer’s question, Derrida said that “[‘the question of animality’] represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, as well as the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence and the future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ ‘genocide,’ etc.”
Above all else, it is in following or attempting to follow the strange, uncanny track of a life that is not even determinable as animal that one might begin to unsettle the privilege of sovereign power in all of its politically, theologically, ontologically and metaphysically determined forms, up to and including that of the “sovereign subject,” man himself.
1 “However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.
But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogenous discourses…” (Of Grammatology, p. 6)
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As I shall attempt to show, this relation of this consideration of whatever draws and defines the boundary between animal and human to the politics of deconstruction is neither fortuitous nor superficial. Its consideration of the complex limit between “man” and “animal” neither an external addition to the practice of a deconstructive reading nor a mere “application” of its methods to positive political actions or decisions. Rather, it is precisely at the contestable place of the limit between animal and man that the most profound political imperatives of a deconstructive reading can today be located.
For it is precisely here that the task of an “infinite” deconstructive reading overlaps most completely with the practice of a determinate and strategic deconstructive intervention on the constitution of the political itself and as such. More specifically, it is here – at the site of the very axiomatic that links the privilege of sovereign power and the human being that exercises it to this being’s mastery of language, to its capacity to say or speak, to question or respond -- that a textual or “interpretive” practice of deconstructive reading most centrally and profoundly calls for intervention in the specific structures and forms of politics that are still able, seemingly with ever-growing effectiveness, to guard the privileged certainties and assumed capacities of sovereign man in his lordship over the earth. This questioning is not simply (though it is also) a question of the reading of texts (even if these be the privileged texts of the tradition in which is discernible all that has authorized the power of man, all that has made it possible for sovereignty to manifest and preserve its strategies); nor it is simply (though it is also) a question of alliance with the movements and initiatives that would intervene, within a constituted political economic, and technological reality and in the name of the rights, dignity, or entitlement of the animal, to protest or interrupt the massive and massively undeniable reality of suffering caused by the complex of contemporary practices with respect to animals that David Wood has termed, appropriately enough, the “animal holocaust.” Rather, it is a question of everything that has historically linked the privilege of man to his supposed difference from “the animal,” a difference that is not extra to or a consequence of the political life of man but whose simultaneous definition and repression is, instead, retrospectively discernible as the central engine of modern politics itself.
As Derrida made clear on several occasions near the end of his life, the complex linkage between the question of animality and the sovereignty of man had in fact long been a central problematic – even perhaps the central problematic – of the deconstructive reading of the “logo-centric” tradition that he began in his very first published texts. It remained central to his ongoing interrogation of the privilege accorded to the logos in defining the place of man when this interrogation took on a more explicitly political tone, raising the question of the relationship of sovereignty to law and justice, and of the unsure foundations of the law’s problematic force. Indeed, in Derrida’s very last seminar, offered in
2002 and 03 and entitled “The Beast and the Sovereign,” he sought to interrogate the long and complex history of “forms and genres” within the literature and rhetoric of the political that link the figure of sovereignty, in its very ontological, theological, and political foundations, to the reciprocal figure of the animal or the beast. According to a longstanding and fateful rhetoric and practice that the seminar sought, in part, to discern and document in texts on the political, ranging from those of Aristotle and
Bodin to Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt, the positions of the beast and the sovereign mirror each other in their exceptionality with respect to the normal (human) order of the political or the law; both the sovereign and the beast are thus stand, in a certain sense, “outside the law.” Inquiring into the linkage
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I. and difference of these reciprocal positions of exceptionality thus allows the deconstructive reading to track the exceptional and problematic foundations of law and right themselves in what has long been thought of as the “proper to man:” the capacity for language or speech. For the deconstructive reading makes the capacity to speak and respond – and thus to enunciate the law, to name the common of being that has always been thought as the basis of a human community grounded in the responsibility of response – discernible as the privilege of a sovereign being that will always have been determined as exceptional through its complex linkages to, and distinctions from, the merely animal life that it paradoxically includes and excludes. This privilege is visible in the ancient definition of man as zoon
logon echon, the animal having language or logos, and remains marked, as well, in all of the philosophical readings and ordinary practices that presuppose it, take it up, or attempt to challenge or unsettle it. Interrogating this definition, the deconstruction of the onto-theological tradition challenges the whole axiomatics that has defined the sovereign subject as that which is assured in its possession of language itself on the ground of its own animal life. Yet how can those who seek to take up the imperatives of a deconstructive reading, and its politics, today seek to make out and follow the track of a language no longer human and capable of no law?
In May 1968, at an international colloquium on the topic of “philosophy and anthropology” held in New
York, Derrida opened an explicit deconstructive interrogation on the subject of man. The address “The
Ends of Man” ventured to open to questioning the hidden axiomatics and teleology of an anthropology or humanism that has repeatedly determined man as the animale rationale, and the role of this teleological axiomatics in producing and assuring the “we” of community, to whose assured possibility metaphysics and philosophy will always have had reference. Derrida’s own deconstructive gestures in
“the ends of man,” are explicitly and irreducibly located in the geopolitical scene: the address begins with an intervention on the processes of inclusion and exclusion through which a colloquium can be constituted as both “philosophical” and “international,” and Derrida has occasion, in the course of his opening remarks, to express solidarity with those in the United States then seeking to contest and oppose the contemporary war in Vietnam. But he moves quickly to a more radical consideration of the teleological privilege accorded to man throughout the unity of a metaphysical tradition whose complex limit deconstruction would attempt to trace. Derrida’s concern is, first and foremost, with the teleology involved in the traditional definition of man as animale rationale; this teleology, for instance in Kant and
Hegel, situates man’s animal life as the bearer of reason’s infinite historical and political tasks. The definition is at the center of an “humanism or anthropologism” that has dominated French thought
(particularly under the influence of Sartre) since World War II, and which had organized, rightly or wrongly, an “anthropologistic” reading of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger that sought to ally philosophical ontology and phenomenology with the “human-reality” of an assured project of humanity. Yet significantly, Derrida devotes the largest part of the lecture not simply to criticizing this definition of the human or the privilege that it accords, but to the text of a thinker who had already criticized it in the
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most radical terms, and on the grounds of what was already an incipient deconstructive re-thinking of the privilege of man, namely Heidegger.
Here, with respect to a Heideggerian reading of the text of metaphysics that already sought to challenge and interrogate the privilege traditionally accorded, within the tradition, to an “anthropological” or even
“zoological” definition of man as the ‘animal having language’, Derrida performs a complex deconstructive intervention on humanism that is at once a repetition and a profound displacement of the Heideggerian critique. On multiple occasions throughout his career, with an insistence that marks it as one of the most fundamental gestures of his attempt to re-open the question of Being, Heidegger had in fact challenged, on the most fundamental grounds of his ontology, the “metaphysical” definition of man as the rational animal and sought an explicit critical return to the original Greek definition of man as zoon logon echon upon which it rests. Heidegger’s challenge even to this original definition is of a piece with his profound reconsideration of logos and its meaning; it attacks what he called in Being and
Time an “ontologically insufficient” understanding of logos “handed down to the present” by ancient ontology. At the same time, in opposing this ‘insufficient’ conception of the logos as a positive capacity or possession of the animal “man,” Heidegger’s critical attention bears just as deeply against the
“animality” attributed to man by the ancient definition. His contention is that no definition of the human grounded in the attribution of properties or qualities – even that of possessing or having the
logos – to what is otherwise simply an animal life can suffice to express the particular position of what he nevertheless terms “human Dasein,” the kind of being that has its own being as an issue.
2 For as
Heidegger asserts, no such “anthropological” or “metaphysical” definition can capture Dasein’s particular and definitive capacity to have concern for its own kind of being, to be ontically and ontologicaly distinctive in its ability to take up the question, concern, or thought of its own way of being.
Yet as Derrida notes, this rejection of an “anthropological” and “zoological” definition of man does not, nevertheless, exclude Heidegger’s attribution to man of a certain priority, grounded in a fundamental
proximity of man to himself that makes it possible for him to be taken as the phenomenologically and hermeneutically “exemplary” being with which the hermeneutic of being can begin. For, as Derrida notes,
…[Heidegger’s] determination of the exemplary being is … governed by phenomenology’s principle of principles, the principle of presence and of presence in self-presence, such as it is manifested to the being and in the being that we are. It is this self-presence, this absolute proximity of the (questioning) being to itself, this familiarity with itself of the being ready to understand Being, that intervenes in the determination of the factum, and which motivates the choice of the exemplary being, of the text, the good text for the hermeneutic of the meaning of Being. (p. 126)
Marked in the Da of Dasein itself, this proximity of self to self governs, as Derrida argues, the entire
Heideggerian discussion of man and the human, even when, as in the Letter on Humanism of 1947,
2 “Life is not a mere being-present-at-hand, nor is it Dasein. In turn, Dasein is never to be defined ontologically by regarding it as (ontologically indefinite) life plus something else.” (S&Z, p. 75)
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Heidegger seeks explicitly to break with all metaphysically determined “humanism” as well as to distance himself from any “anthropologism” or any definition of man that begins explicitly from the animal.
3 For even here, where Heidegger would break as completely as possible with a substantialist or dualist definition of man as the unity of animality and reason, the privilege of man is nevertheless, and incessantly, marked as that of the being that, in proximity to Being itself, possesses the capacity to speak, question, and refer to itself: to say or think “I” in the assured possibility of a grounding reference or access to its own being. As formal and grammatical as this structure may be, it continues to guarantee the being of man as an ipseity formally and structurally defined by its presence to itself. But this presence to itself is, as Derrida argues, still governed in the Heideggerian text by the assumption of man’s being capable, in a privileged way, of speaking, thinking, or questioning himself in a language, the accessibility of which, to Dasein, Heidegger (despite his resistance to the ancient definition that makes the logos a being present-at-hand) never seriously doubts. As such (although Derrida does not refer explicitly to sovereignty here), this structure is the structure of sovereign man, and one that rigorously excludes life of ‘the animal,’ that which is presumed never to speak, think, question or respond, never to name itself or be able, in the assuredness of self-reference or reflection, to say or think “I.” This privilege still accorded to man by Heidegger, this residual thinking of man as defined by the ipseity of self-reference, marks, according to Derrida, Heidegger’s continued complicity with the very axiomatics , and teleology, of man’s presence to self that his own critical de-structuring or deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence would like to oppose. Put another way: Heidegger will have replaced the teleology of the animale rationale, the openness of man’s animal life toward the infinite horizon of reason, with the other end of man that is, in Being and Time, also man’s “highest ownmost possibility,” namely his death. But he will also have said, in a way that is, as Derrida points out, strictly contradictory to other declarations and determinations throughout the Heideggerian corpus, that the animal does not properly or really die, that the animal perishes but does not have a relation to death as such, and that this non-relation to death is linked to the animal’s (presumed) lack of access to language, to the “as such” of language and apophantic demonstration. In response to this twofold exclusion that still grounds the life of man in its privileged relation to an auto-telic end that assures the being of da-sein in the integrity of its presence to itself, Derrida seeks to follow the undecidable track of the distinction between an animal life and rational logos, between what is thought, both in the traditional definition and in the Heideggerian ontology that seeks to refute it, as animal in man and what is thought as human in language, onto a wholly other terrain.
II.
3 Derrida quotes Heidegger commenting on the ‘traditional definition’ of man as zoon logon echon: “But we must be clear on this point, that even when we do this we abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas even if we do not equate him with beasts but attribute a specific difference to him. In principle we are still thinking of homo
animalitas – even when anima is posited as animus sive mens, and this in turn is later posited as subject, person or spirit. Such positing is in the manner of metaphysics. But then the essence of man is too little (zu gering) heeded and not thought in its origin, the essential provenance that is always the essential future for historical mankind…Metaphysics thinks of man on the basis of animalitas.”
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Like “The Ends of Man” twenty-one years before it, Derrida’s address “Force of Law” (delivered at the opening of a colloquium on “deconstruction and the possibility of justice” at Cardozo law school in 1989) has been taken to mark a decisive moment in the application of deconstruction’s practice of reading to the larger questions of justice and politics. In this address, Derrida for the first time affirms the
“undeconstructibility” of justice and suggests that fidelity to this undeconstructible essence of justice requires an infinite deconstruction of the founding concepts, origins, and structure of the law in its actual construction and enforcement, even venturing to assert that, since it is this structure of the law that itself assures the possibility of any deconstruction, deconstruction itself “is justice.” This more explicitly political or ethical register of Derrida’s description here has prompted some to speak of an
“ethical” or “political” turn in Derrida’s thought at this time; in truth, as we have already seen, the geopolitical and even bio-political register of deconstruction’s interrogation of what links the law of language to the simple presence of a life was already an integral part of Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence from its first moments (even beginning with his inquiry into the privilege accorded by Husserl to the “living present” of the ego cogito). Notably, however, Derrida here takes the deconstruction of the law to require a fundamental inquiry into the aporetic foundations of its authority and force, and thus into the paradox of origin whereby the law, lacking any original foundation by itself, must have recourse to a founding and “mystical” violence. This violence, Derrida suggests, remains active in ensuring the force of law even in its most ordinary application or enforcement.
4 It is, in fact, the originary violence of institution itself, a violence that is always, and indissociably, not only a matter of force or power but also of reason and language. Indeed, speaking of the “injustice” that is done, in the rendering of the imperatives of law or the dictates of a presumed justice, to those who do not speak the same language or understand in a common tongue, Derrida again evokes the privileged place, assumed by a fundamental and pervasive axiomatic, of man as the sovereign individual capable of instituting language and speech. Once again, the basis of this axiomatic is the production and exclusion of the animal, with all the violence and suffering this operation implies:
The violence of this injustice that consists in judging those who do not understand the idiom in which one claims, as one says in French, that “justice est faite [justice is done, made]” is not just any violence, any injustice. This injustice, which supposes all the others, supposes that the other, the victim of the injustice of language, if one may say so, is capable of a language in general, is man as a speaking animal, in the sense that we,
4 “…the operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying law, to making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and previously founding law, no preexisting foundation, could, by definition, guarantee or contradict or invalidate. No justificatory discourse could or should ensure the role of metalanguage in relation to the performativity of institutive language or to its dominant interpretation.
Discourse here meets its limit—in itself, in its very performative power. It is what I propose to call here the
mystical. There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language. Here is the sense in which I would be tempted to interpret, beyond simple commentary, what Montaigne and Pascal call the mystical foundation of authority. One will always be able to return upon – or turn against – what I am doing or saying here, the very thing that I am saying is done or occurs … at the origin of every institution. I would therefore take the use of the word mystical in a sense that I would venture to call rather Wittgensteinian.” (pp. 241-42).
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men, give to this word ‘language.’ Moreover, there was a time, not long ago and not yet over, in which “we, men” meant “we adult white male Europeans, carnivorous and capable of sacrifice.”
In the space in which I am situating these remarks or reconstituting this discourse one would not speak of injustice or violence toward an animal, even less toward a vegetable or a stone ... The opposition between just and unjust has no meaning as far as it [‘the animal’] is concerned. Whether it is a matter of trials of animals (there have been some) or lawsuits against those who inflict certain kinds of suffering on animals (legislation in certain Western countries provides for this and speaks not only of the “rights of man” but also of the rights of the animal in general), these are either archaisms or still marginal and rare phenomena not constitutive of our culture. In our culture, carnivorous sacrifice is fundamental, dominant, regulated by the highest industrial technology, as is biological experimentation on animals—so vital to our modernity. As I have tried to show elsewhere, carnivorous sacrifice is essential to the structure of subjectivity, which is to say to the founding of the intentional subject as well as to the founding, if not of the law [loi] at least of right [droit], the difference between law and right [la loi et le droit], justice and right, justice and law [loi], here remaining open over an abyss.” (pp. 246-47)
Here, Derrida’s interrogation of the force of law, the origin of language and whatever is “proper to man” is again in close critical dialogue with Heidegger, who (more than once) declared man and animal to be separated by such an “essential abyss.” Two years earlier, in his rigorous and remarkable analysis of the privilege of descriptions of “spirit,” “world,” and “life” in Heidegger’s texts (particularly in the 1930s),
Derrida had devoted a rigorous critical deconstruction to the place of the animal in Heidegger, and particularly to the guiding thesis on animality that Heidegger makes the basis of his reflection on “world, finitude, and solitude” in 1929 and 1930. According to this thesis, the animal is to be distinguished from both the worldless stone and the world-opening human by its being “Weltarm” or “poor in world,” lacking full possession or access to the world as such and to the apophantic and linguistic “as such” that opens this access. Here, though, Derrida’s emphasis is not only on the essential and originary violence involved in what Heidegger call the “open,” the privileged place of the access to world of a being assured of this access, in Heidegger’s axiomatic, by his possession of what Heidegger does not hesitate, at least for a time, to call “spirit,” but rather on what links this violence to the mysticism and obscurity of the origin of law and language (itself, of course, an essential Heideggerian theme). Throughout the texts of Western articulations of law and justice, indeed in the deconstructible structure of law itself, the violence of force and the mysticism of origin are linked, Derrida suggests, in the imperative of sovereign man, assured of himself by the same linguistic or peformative structure of enunciation that also, as we have seen, assures the presence of man to himself in the ipseity of his constitutive self-relation. It is in response to this assumption of presence, what itself authorizes a whole history of responsibility conceived as the capacity of speaking man to respond, that Derrida calls, in the name of deconstruction, for a more “excessive” responsibility, indeed a responsibility “without limits,” one which would also
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interrogate “the whole network of connected concepts (propriety and property, intentionality, will, freedom, conscience, consciousness, self-consciousness, subject, self, person, community, decision, and so forth)” (p. 248) that, on the basis of the sovereign privilege of man, have regulated this history.
If the practice of deconstruction, in service to a different and “more excessive” responsibility, must thus ceaselessly deconstruct the law by way of a ceaseless interrogation into the privilege accorded to the sovereign speaking subject in its “mystical” and paradoxical act of originary, founding violence, how shall deconstruction nevertheless think the paradox of an originary force that cannot ground itself? It is in response to this question that Derrida turns, in “Force of Law,” and, much more fully, in the 1989 seminar “Politics of Friendship,” to the juridico-political analyses of the German political scientist and
Nazi jurist, Karl Schmitt. For Schmitt, the place of the sovereign with respect to a founded juridical and legal order is marked by a fundamental structural paradox of origin and institution: in order to be sovereign in the actual application of law, the sovereign must hold the power to institute and oversee the whole legal order, but such a power also implies the power, for instance in exceptional moments, to suspend this order in toto. The position of the sovereign is thus constitutively exceptional with respect to the juridical order that it also founds; in a certain essential sense, the sovereign stands outside the law that it, itself authorizes. The paradox of this exceptionality is the same as that of the institution of law, or of the imagined or mystical (in any case, obscure) origin of language itself. It marks the position of the sovereign as that of he who has the “right to suspend the right,” the essential and mystical capacity to call into question, by way, again, of a fundamentally auto-referential (or auto-immune) structure, all that it, itself, authorizes.
For Schmitt, this paradox is resolved only by appeal to a power of sovereign decision that is “absolute” and without further grounding, the total imperative of an absolute power to render judgment on the institution and dissolution of the law itself. And although Derrida will not, of course, ultimately follow
Schmitt simply in positing such an absolute subject of decision, the problem of institution and force to which it responds is central to the deconstructive reading of language and law from beginning to end. It is the problem of the relationship of origin, founding, or institution to the structure (any structure) that repeats it, defers it, and iterates it. In the classical thinking of responsibility within which Schmitt operates and to which Derrida responds, this problem is always solved, again, by the appeal to the essentially autonomous figure of sovereign man, capable in the assurance of his own ultimate selfpresence of giving the law to himself and thus providing, through an absolute power of decision, its original foundation. And the imposition of this figure in all the classical discourses of politics is, again, grounded on the elevation of the ipseity of sovereign man in his presumed power of speech and the simultaneous exclusion of the animal, understood as the simple life of a living being incapable of this power.
In 1997, Derrida devoted a long, ten-hour address to the Cerisy conference entitled “The
Autobiographical Animal,” tracing the decisive position of what is called “the animal” in the discourses of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas. All of these philosophers, despite the vast differences in their philosophical approaches, projects, and results will have been united, as Derrida argues, in their failure to take account the possibility of being seen by an animal or the possibility of being addressed by
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one; they have thus made a certain disavowal of the animal’s possibility of response an “axiom” for their discourses. The unity of this disavowal and the thought that it structures, Derrida suggests, amounts to something like “a general topology and even, in a somewhat new sense for this term, a worldwide anthropology, a way for today’s man to position himself in the face of what he calls ‘the animal’ within what he calls ‘the world’” (p. 54). In venturing to interpret this philosophical symptom of a disavowal that is more than simply philosophical, Derrida begins by recalling the biblical story of Adam’s naming of the animals, a story that takes place only in the “second” creation narrative of Genesis and figures the originary moment of a sovereign, human naming as the first imperative of the human, under the watchful gaze of a God who has granted this power of naming to the human in order that He may watch,
Himself, to “in order to see what” the first man will call them. The story thus figures the origin of language as the divine inception of human power, the divinely granted power of man over the animals as the power of language to name. Derrida confesses to being made “dizzy” by this “awful tale of
Genesis:”
God thus lets Ish do the calling all alone; he accords him the right to give them names in his own name – but just in order to see. This ‘in order to see’ marks at the same time the infinite right of inspection of an all-powerful God and the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short,
God doesn’t yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such…This powerful yet deprived ‘in order to see’ that is God’s, the first stroke of time, before time, God’s exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy. (p.
17)
This dizziness or vertigo of the original right of man, the original propriety of sovereign man as his divinely granted power over the name, is the same as that of the animal’s gaze, what can open up whenever the animal’s gaze – whenever an animal’s gaze – calls for a response or, more abysmally, invite the possibility of an animal calling or responding, what has simply been excluded from an entire philosophical and theological tradition. And if the originary, paradoxical sovereignty of man, with all of its implications for the “proper to man” and everything that organizes a whole language, philosophy, theology and ontology, is interpretable in this creation myth that accords to the first man the divinely granted power to call the animals and name them, then its deconstruction means, quite simply, thinking the possibility of the animal’s response. As Derrida argues, in fact, the whole of the tradition, however it has thought of animals and language, has been unified in assuming that the animal, though it may react, does not respond, that the animal, though it may vocalize or make signs, even “communicate” in a sense, does not speak. The whole task of a patient and infinite deconstruction of sovereignty and everything that it subsumes on the ever-more complex scene of a “world” whose worldhood and becoming has itself, as Derrida ventures to suggest, only ever been thought on the basis of the priority of the human subject, his secure possession of language, and his originary power over the name, then
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becomes the rigorous tracing of all of the abysses opened by, and implicit in, the question that Derrida makes the title of the third part of his address: “And say the animal responded?”
The deconstruction that takes up the reading of the privilege of the ipseity of man interrogates systematically into what authorizes its structure, what guarantees the applicability and limits of the auto-reflection or auto-nomy that is supposed to render man, alone, capable of presence to himself.
Here, then, the central question for the deconstruction of sovereignty is identical to the question that
Derrida has pursued at least since his reading of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, the question of the
“auto-affection” by which the ego cogito, in pure self-reflection, constructs and temporalizes itself in the
“living present” of its own self-presence. Here as there, the deconstructive reading demonstrates that such an ipseity is never, in fact, pure, that it is always also affected, even in the most intimate center of what it thinks as its life, by a heterogeneous element, by a necessary contamination of heterogeneity and difference. But in relation specifically to “the animal” as it has traditionally been thought, the reading ventures to think the complex topology of another limit, one within auto-affection itself, the limit between what is simply capable of self-relation (as auto-motion or the power to look after one’s own ends) and what is conceived as capable of self-reflection or deixis, response to oneself as language and demonstration:
This would perhaps be the place or moment to clarify once more the both subtle and decisive stakes of this power of the ‘I.’ No doubt it will not simply be a case of the relation to self, nor even of a certain automotion, an auto-kinetic spontaneity that no one, not even the most negative of minds vis-à-vis the animal, not even Descartes, disallows in the animal. Let me repeat it, every living creature, and thus every animal to the extent that it is living, has recognized in it this power to move spontaneously, to feel itself and relate to itself. However problematic it may be, that is even the characteristic of what lives, as traditionally conceived in opposition to the inorganic inertia of the purely physico-chemical. No one denies the animal auto-affection or auto-motion, hence the self of that relation to the self. But what is in dispute – and it is here that the functioning and structure of the ‘I’ count so much, even where the word ‘I’ is lacking – is the power to make reference to the self in deictic or autodeictic terms, the capability at least virtually to turn a finger toward oneself in order to say ‘this is I.’ (p. 94)
As Derrida points out, the problem of the difference between these two forms of auto-affection, what is supposed to simultaneously assure the pure, auto-telic self-identity of man and also to mark the difference of this identity from the merely living auto-affection of the animal, is also the problem of the difference between what would then be two forms of iteration or essential iterability, two forms of automaticity. It is thus the problem, once again, of the relationship between singularity and repetition, between what founds the originality of the living present and its always already being taken up, subjected to law, iterated and repeated. As two forms of auto-affection, both the simple life of the animal and the presumed auto-deixis of the human would be threatened, commonly, by such a law of mechanistic repetition. For an anthropological discourse that, following Descartes, has often thought of the animal’s behavior simply as the automatic or the instinctual, a discourse that has multiplied
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automata and animals as ultimately indistinguishable forms of the less-than or not-quite human, this problem is not, as Derrida suggests, a simple one to solve. Yet if the privilege of the human cannot, in truth and purity, be assured by the purity of an auto-deixis that is the pure auto-affection of the living present, if every auto-affection (the auto-affection of mere life as well as that of auto-deixis) must already be contaminated by the trace of heterogeneity, of another life to follow or to come, then the line between human and animal, along with the whole privilege of speaking man it organizes, becomes harder and harder to draw.
III
If what we may grasp, or anticipate, as the “question of the animal” indeed unsettles or disturbs all that still shelters the privilege of man and organizes the logic of sovereignty, the strategies of power and the onto-theo-logical precedence that still articulates the “proper to man” on a geo-political scene, then the political task of a deconstruction of this privilege thus merges with a tracing of the abyssal limit that has systematically been opened and closed by the historical discourse and political mechanics of humanism in all of its forms. In many of these forms, as we have seen, philosophical humanism has rigorously constructed “the human” through a simultaneous production and exclusion of the bare life of the simply living. It is thus helpful, in tracing the continuing imperative and legacy of this deconstructive task, to turn to the thought of the post-Derridean thinker who has most deeply looked into this abyss and ventured to describe the historical and political strategies that have opened and closed it: Giorgio
Agamben. In the three parts of Homo Sacer as well as in the more recent (2002) text The Open: Man
and Animal, Agamben has sought to trace the complex topology of the relationship of the law to life as it this topology has organized, and problematized, the political strategies and imperatives of the West, culminating in today’s increasingly pervasive regime of what Foucault called “biopower.” In this regime, the state and its institutions construct and maintain their sovereignty as their power and dominance over the simple life of their subjects, what Agamben calls “bare life.” In a reading that, like Derrida’s, draws deeply on Schmitt’s discussion of sovereignty, Agamben describes the history that culminates in the dominance of this regime as the history of the paradoxical relationship between law and life, as the law has successively taken up and captured the bare life of the simply living. As Agamben recognizes, the original foundation of this relationship is the originary paradox of institution, the same paradox that
Derrida follows Schmitt in recognizing at the basis of the sovereign, enunciative power of man. Thus, the original basis of the application of law to life, the power of the sovereign practiced and renewed in each instance of the rendering of concrete legal judgment, is identical with the paradox of exceptionality by which the sovereign is constituted as that which is, paradoxically, both inside and outside the law.
The paradoxical position of the sovereign is also that of an original indeterminacy or ‘zone of indistinction’ between fact and law, one which, Agamben suggests, tends in recent times to become more and more pronounced, culminating in a growing indistinction or ‘state of exception’ that increasingly characterizes politics on a global scale.
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In The Open, Agamben reads the complex history of the West’s definition and articulation of the relationship between law and life as it has constructed the “human” as such, a topology, logic, and politics that, in its development and promulgation through historical strategies of colonialism, interpolation, repression, and self-recognition, amounts to a kind of “anthropological machine of humanism” a logico-political structure for the production of the “human” out of the simultaneous construction and exclusion of the simple life of what is called the animal.
5 As Agamben notes, when
Carolus Linneaus, in 1735, founded modern taxonomy in his Systema Naturae, he did not, uniquely, grant the generic species Homo any specific defining trait, rather recording in the entry for Homo simply the adage nosce te ipsum (know yourself).
6 It is this definition of the human essence as without essence, as the pure ipseity of the being simply capable of knowing itself, that, as Agamben suggests, (following, as we have seen, the suggestion that Derrida already made in 1968) underlies the anthropological machine in its production of all that has been defined as the “proper to man.” And paralleling Derrida’s own readings in Of Spirit as well as the final seminar “The Beast and the Sovereign,” Agamben here seeks to discern the ongoing effects of this formal privilege of man as ipseity in the complicated text of
Heidegger, which while rigorously avoiding the “anthropologism” and “zoologism” of the traditional definition of man, nevertheless (Agamben follows Derrida in holding) replicates the structure of the anthropological machine of humanism in its exclusion of the animal from the apophantic structure of the “as such,” assumed and held by Heidegger to be the privilege of Dasein. The Heideggerian thesis of the animal’s “poverty in world,” Agamben suggests, is itself the mark of a more fundamental and paradoxical gesture of exclusion and inclusion at the root of Heidegger’s discourse of Dasein and its openness to world, a gesture that Agamben sees as particularly clearly marked in the 1929-30 course wherein Heidegger develops his most detailed analysis of the “animal” in its essential “captivation” in an
“environment” that is not yet, and can never be, the “open region” of the world that Da-sein alone can open.
Animal captivation and the openness of the world … seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge. (p. 59)
It is only, Agamben suggests, by constructing the life of the animal as the “closed” of its relation to an environment that can never be, for it, a world, that Heidegger is able to describe the constitutive structures of human Da-sein in their being-in-the-world at all. Only by way of this structure of inclusion and exclusion of an animal life is Heidegger able to think the definitive structure of the openness of
Dasein, an open that is, a Lichtung that, as Agamben suggests “truly is a lucus a non lucendo,” an openness that is essentially “the openness to a closedness.” 7 It is this paradoxical structure of a human open that operates by secretly capturing and exposing the secret of an animal closedness that marks the
5 “The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to
Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human…” (p. 29)
6 The Open, p. 25.
7 The Open, p. 68.
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specific limit, Agamben suggests, of Heidegger’s discourse on the being of the “world,” as well as, we may add, all those discourses that mark (in Christian fashion, or under the aspect of a cosmopolitan
‘secularization’ and ‘globalization’ that, more often than not, simply reverses an essentially Christian rhetoric and axiomatic of universality, reconciliation, and justice) the worldhood of the world, of being in the world or a fall into the world, of the becoming-world of world or globalization, that it resembles, exemplifies, or inherits.
For Agamben, the “anthropo-genesis” or construction and definition of sovereign man as such is, therefore, simply the complex historical outcome of the successive operation of the
“anthropological” machine that operates by constructing and excluding, in the articulation of the human, the bare life of the animal assumed simply to live, without language or the capacity to speak. As in the original paradox of sovereignty articulated by Schmitt, the operation of this machine is possible only on the basis of an original indistinction or paradoxical zone of indifference, an originary point at which it is impossible any longer to make a decision between law and the life that it captures, or between the animal and the human. This is the presumed position of the sovereign, from which alone his essential capacity of language and decision is defined:
Both machines [the anthropological machine of the ancients, which “produces the nonman by the humanization of an animal” as well as that of modernity, which works by
“isolating the nonhuman within the human”] are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which – like a ‘missing link’ which is always lacking because it is already virtually present – the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself – only a bare life. (pp. 37-38).
It is this empty zone of indistinction that, Agamben suggests, under the condition of the exhaustion of the historical dialectic of the capture of law and life, and the epochal demonstration of the previously hidden paradox at the origin of law and language in their power over life which itself marks the final halt of the anthropological machine of humanism, that, tending to become ubiquitous, today reveals the pure potentiality of an “irredeemable” life, neither human nor animal, the life that remains, at the end of the human, still to come.
8
8 “The anthropological machine no longer articulates nature and man in order to produce the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman. The machine is, so to speak, stopped: it is ‘at a standstill,’ and, in the reciprocal suspension of the two terms, something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor man settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in the mastered relation, in the saved night.” (p. 83). … “It is not easy to think this figure – whether new or very ancient – of the life that shines in the
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IV.
If, as I have attempted to show, the deconstruction of the onto-theological foundations of sovereignty and contemporary politics is always, simultaneously, the deconstruction of the privilege of man, and so of the historical production and exclusion of what is called the “animal,” then the tracing of its track has always already entered into the political tasks of deconstruction. Derrida confirms this, by way of an auto-biographical note, in the 1997 Cerisy conference:
Let me note very quickly in passing, concerning intellectual autobiography, that whereas the deconstruction of ‘logocentrism’ had, for necessary reasons, to be developed over the years as deconstruction of ‘phallogocentrism,’ then of ‘carnophallogocentrism,’ its very first substitution of the concept of trace or mark for those of speech, sign, or signifier was destined in advance, and quite deliberately, to cross the frontiers of anthropocentrism, the limits of a language confined to human words and discourse.
Mark, gramma, trace, and différance refer differentially to all living things, all the relations between living and nonliving. (p. 104).
The necessity of interrogating the privilege of man, and thereby evoking the “play” of a “trace,” beyond or before language and logos, which “no longer belongs to the horizon of Being, but whose play transports and encloses the meaning of Being” (p. 133) had therefore already imposed itself, within
Derrida’s own thought, as early as 1968. This paleonym or mark (which is neither a name or a concept), in its effects of play, graft, and dissemination, already not only destabilizes the privilege of Being and its meaning in the Heideggerian and other texts of philosophy, but calls into question, as I have argued, the very privilege of man and the human, as this privilege continues to constitute the onto-theological foundations of sovereignty and politics. Tracking or following this arche-trace, which produces itself as its own erasure ceaselessly in the text of metaphysics, or in the most ordinary forms of language, therefore requires that those who would inherit the politics of deconstruction take up the portent or challenge of a transformed thinking of language, one that also involves transformations in everything that Western thought has thought as the life of man and its relation to the language that it takes up. If, as Derrida and Agamben have both suggested, the linguistically based distinction between human and animal has in fact long organized, in subtle but systematic ways, the politics of the West, then those twentieth-century discourses that have systematically interrogated the being of language (“analytic” philosophy as much as hermeneutics and deconstruction) become obviously and deeply relevant to the possibility of any intervention in this politics, or to any resistance to the claims of power that it subsumes. This relevance involves, clearly, a transformed conception and practice of the relationship of
‘saved night’ of nature’s (and, in particular, human nature’s) eternal, unsavable survival after it has definitively bid farewell to the logos and to its own history. It is no longer human, because it has perfectly forgotten every rational element, every project for mastering its animal life; but if animality had been defined precisely by its poverty in world and by its obscure expectation of a revelation and a salvation, then this life cannot be called animal either.”
(p. 90)
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language and the human life that, according to the ancient anthropological definition, would be specified as human only through its inclusion of and linguistic difference from what is simply living, the animal.
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What might this thinking and practice involve, for the discourse or thought that today inherits the twentieth century’s unprecedented encounter with language, seeking to better understand, and intervene in, the politics it portends?
1) Another thinking of the paradox of auto-deixis. We have seen that, in necessarily ambiguous forms and according to problematic gestures of distinction, the politics of the West constantly traces the privilege of man, and hence the sovereignty of the subject, as resting upon the supposedly unique human capacity for auto-deixis or self-reference. This capacity confirms the “proper to man,” in texts from Aristotle to Heidegger, as the ipseity of that which is capable of reference to itself. Even more generally, we may say, it is the unique logic of deixis or the demonstrative (what Benveniste called the
“shifter”) that has always defined the relation of language to presence, that has allowed language to figure itself and so to phenomenalize itself as the positive being within the world that it, in truth, never will have been.
10 At the same time, as we have seen, this capacity of auto-deixis or self-reference is marked and contaminated, from its origin, by the paradox of an exceptionality and a heteronomy that marks every self-reference as impure and that disrupts every assurance of the secure autonomy of man, to be marked in the privilege of the “I think.” 11 Here, a tracking of the trace of the animal, the mark of the heteronomy of an other that interrupts the logic of the pure self-reference of man, would lead along the vanishing trace of what are otherwise called the pure paradoxes of self-reference (e.g. Russell’s paradox). Such a tracing might demonstrate that in reality these paradoxes are never simply “logical” or
“formal” but rather have held open the complex topology of law, application, and praxis that has itself,
9 This is why following the trace of what still gives itself to be read in the text of deconstruction’s consideration of
“the animal” cannot simply mean (although it may certainly involve), as Leonard Lawlor has recently argued it does mean, our preparing a kind of “recipe” or plan for a “more sufficient response” to the suffering of animals (one that involves, Lawlor argues, “naming” animals in their singularity, and thus recognizing “that the animal must be eaten well, with the least amount of violence.” (pp. 109-110)). This suffering, as Derrida’s syntagm
“carnophallogocentrism” implies, is (as massive, undeniable, and urgent as it is) the outcome, symptom, and manifestation of an even more originary violence, one inscribed (sacrificially and economically) in the everyday life of language itself. (a violence that founds life on earth as the war of species, as war itself) To respond to it, or even to follow its trace, would therefore require fundamental transformations in the way we live our relation to the language and concepts we take up, a transformed life beyond the distinction between animal and human.
10 Agamben: Language and Death
11 “…it is not just a matter of giving back to the animal whatever it has been refused, in this case the I of
automonstration. It is also a matter of questioning oneself concerning the axiom that permits one to accord purely and simply to the human or to the rational animal that which one holds the just plain animal to be deprived of. If autoposition, the automonstrative autotely of the ‘I,’ even in the human, implies the ‘I’ to be an other that must welcome within itself some irreducible hetero-affection (as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere), then this autonomy of the ‘I’ can be neither pure nor rigorous; it would not be able to form the basis for a simple linear differentiation of the human from the animal. Besides all the differences that are reintroduced and taken into account in this way (among humans, among animals, between humans and animals), the question of the ‘I,’ of ‘I am’ or ‘I think,’ would have to be displaced toward the prerequisite question of the other, the other me that I am
(following) or that is following me.” (p. 95)
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up to what Agamben calls the suspension of the anthropological machine in the totalization of its constitutive zone of indistinction, made anything like a human politics possible to begin with.
2) Another thinking of “world;” another origin of language. As we have seen, the onto-theological discourse that has articulated the privilege of sovereign man has always had in view, as well, the openness of man to world; it has constantly aimed to consolidate and confirm the access of man to the totality of the world in the assumed form of his capacity for language. The attempt to guarantee this connection through a thinking of the auto-teleology of man reaches its high point and limit in
Heidegger’s discourse of Dasein as being-in-the-world, as opening the world to the apophantic structure of demonstration and as dwelling in this open in a privileged way; and the continuing anthropomorphism of this definition is marked in the Heideggerian thesis of the animal’s “worldpoverty.” Following the trace that today crosses the scene of global geo-bio-politics therefore means attempting to pick up the signs of a language that no longer yields access to a world, a language that intimates the originary violence and dissimulation that remains inscribed in the reality of every process of globalization or the “becoming world” of the world. The trace of this language-to-come might be that which, far from “opening” a world in necessary and disclosive “strife” with earth (as that which guards and conceals), precedes and haunts, in its play, the law of the very openness/closing that is aletheia, demonstration, or language itself. For the very openness of the world, the very possibility of its demonstration, achievement, or security, is thinkable, as we have seen, only on the basis of the assurance of man’s originary capacity for disclosive language, his secure possession of language and the apophantic structure of the “as such.” But this capacity is paradoxical in its origin and can be assured only through the mystification of an original violence that is nevertheless repeated in every subsequent gesture and word of a language that would, in its own repetition, grasp the world as such.
3)Another (non-)relation: language and life. In a suggestive but enigmatic text from 1996, Agamben adopts the Wittgensteinian term of art Lebensform (form-of-life) to mark the potentiality of a “life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.” (pp. 2-3). Such a life would be one that is no longer regulated by the metaphysical distinction between life and language, no longer an operator of the anthropological machine. Its pursuit would no longer involve the teleology, autarchy, or autonomy of an assured linguistic or demonstrative form of self-relation; rather it would combine auto-affection of deixis with the automaticity of the simply living in an irreducible unity. The life of such a being, existent, or “simply living thing” would no longer be conceivable in terms of the combination or tension of language with life, in terms of the everrenewed uptake of mortal life into the eternality of the structure of language and law. In so existing, it would take place in the empty place of indistinction between animal and human, where the paradoxical being of language might constantly be taken up as the simple breath of life itself. But by what means, and to what end, could it be possible to envision such a life, to conceive it, to inhabit it?
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