Demenageries
Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida
Critical Studies
Vol. 35
General Editor
Myriam Diocaretz
Tilburg University
Editorial Board
Anne╯E.╯Berger, Cornell╯University
Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University
Marta╯Segarra, Universitat╯de╯Barcelona
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Demenageries
Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida
Edited by
Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Marta Segarra
Cover Image: © Jordi Esteva, “Miko se bebe mi agua”.
Cover Design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3350-4
Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Thoughtprints
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
3
Animal Writes: Derrida’s Que Donc and Other Tails
Marie-Dominique Garnier
23
On a Serpentine Note
Ginette Michaud
41
Ver(s): Toward a Spirituality of One’s Own
Claudia Simma
73
When Sophie Loved Animals
Anne E. Berger
97
Deconstruction and Petting:
Untamed Animots in Derrida and Kafka
Joseph Lavery
125
Say the Ram Survived: Altering the Binding of Isaac
in Jacques Derrida’s “Rams” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Adeline Rother
145
Crowds and Powerlessness: Reading //kabbo and Canetti
with Derrida in (South) Africa
Rosalind C. Morris
167
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
James Siegel
213
Meditations for the Birds
David Wills
245
Contributors
265
Thoughtprints
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
I admit to it in the name of autobiography and in order to confide in you the
following: […] I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation
of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole of
history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or
microscopic. My sole concern is not that of interrupting this animalist
“vision” but of taking care not to sacrifice to it any difference of alterity, the
fold of any complication, the opening of any abyss to come.1
The Animal That Therefore I Am 92
We might begin like this: “The recent concern with animals or ‘the animal’
may be the latest if not the ultimate form of the anti-humanism that started to
develop after World War II, in a turning of the Western intellectual tradition
against itself. The attack on anthropocentrism as a necessary correlate of
humanism may have been fueled if not provoked by the new consciousness of
the damage inflicted upon the earth and its living creatures (humanity
included) by ‘men.’ Such a turn of the Western tradition around and against
itself, sometimes deemed an ethical turn, would mark if not the end, at least
the limit of the Enlightenment project in its Cartesian version: for man to
become the master and owner of Nature. Derrida’s latest and last move, his
“turn” toward ‘the question of animality’ would point in that direction.”
This is what cultural and intellectual historians might say (and indeed
have said), and for the most part, rightly so. The set of questions triggered by
the thought of and on animals is timely; humanism seems to have exhausted
itself and is giving way to “posthumanism”; ecological disaster looms. Two
interdisciplinary fields of inquiry have recently emerged to try to address
these issues: “ecocriticism” and “animal studies.” Derrida’s two long lectures
on the “autobiographical animal” given in 1997 and later collected in The
Animal That Therefore I Am2 played a groundbreaking role in the latter’s
development. In 2007, the Oxford Literary Review published a special issue
on Derridanimals that called on philosophy, literature, and cognitive sciences
if not to provide answers, at least to help frame questions in the wake of
Derrida’s work. The present volume, also interdisciplinary, follows this
collection of essays.3 Its editors claim no special expertise in the vast field of
“animal studies.” But they recognize its importance and appreciate the chance
that such a field offers for a new dialogue between what one calls the
“Humanities” and what one calls hard science. They admire the work done in
this respect by Donna J. Haraway and Cary Wolfe, among others. Above all,
4
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
they are readers of Derrida, a thinker who taught them to interrogate
conceptual borders and to work at/on the limits. As members of the board of
Critical Studies, a series which aims to promote transdisciplinary approaches
and (self)critical displacements in the fields of the humanities and social
sciences, they believe this new tribute to the promises held by thinking of
animals after Derrida is timely.
So what about Derrida’s seminal contribution to the growing field of
“animal studies”?
Any careful reader of Derrida knows that such a direction in his work is
all but new. Animals have been lurking in his texts from early on. Their
appearances have been numerous and varied if sometimes brief. It takes
Derrida no less than three full printed pages (35-38) to enumerate all the
animals he can recall following from the time of his first writings up to The
Animal That Therefore I Am. In particular, animals, or more precisely “the
animal(s) that Derrida is/follows,” show up each time Derrida’s discourse
shifts to an “autobiographical” mode (and each time in a different guise or
species), from the most furtive reference to his or one’s “habitat” – an animal
mode of dwelling – in “Unsealing (‘the old new language’),” a 1983
interview in which Derrida, among other personal disclosures, evokes his
dream of an idiomatic language,4 to the extended self-unraveling of the
silkworm in A Silkworm of One’s Own.
Most importantly, as Hélène Cixous reminds us in “Co-Responding Voix
You,” animals have made their way between if not before the lines from the
beginning, that is as soon as the first trace of a thinking about “trace”
appeared in Of Grammatology. Cixous remarks:
Thus, with the first trace of the thinking of the trace in Of
Grammatology, the whole machine that tends to replace the word
“writing” in the ordinary sense by “trace” or the word “speech” by
trace, had as its final purpose that writing, speech, trace are not the
proper characteristic of the human. There is animal trace, animals
write. (H.C.’s emphasis)5
If animals “write,” then they cannot be said to be “mute,” even though they
don’t “speak,” that is, even though they don’t have what we call articulate
language. This is why, following the animal that he also is, Derrida strives to
“[accede] to a thinking […] that thinks the absence of the name and of the
word otherwise, and as something other than a privation” (48),6 a sentence or
rather the statement of a “thought” rightly singled out by Donna Haraway as
crucial to an understanding of the import of Derrida’s “thinking” in the wake
– or the furrow – of animals.7
In his attempt to “think” of what he carefully calls “the absence of the
name” (rather than animals’ inability to name) as “something other than a
Thoughtprints
5
privation” or a lack, Derrida coins the word “animot.”8 Not only, as he says,
because it rhymes with “animaux,” therefore recalling and reinscribing the
plural in the singular in order to resist the erasure of animals’ vast differences
that takes place with the use of the reductive generic singular “animal”; not
even in order to “give speech back” to animals in a simple reversal of the
prevailing philosophical order; but rather, as the proximity between the
seemingly contrary words “mot” and “muet” (mute) suggests in French, in
order to insist that words (mots) can be spelled out without a word – the
French language uses the pseudo-Latin word “motus” to try and impose
silence – so that a cat, for instance, “might be […] signifying in a language of
mute traces, that is to say without words” (18).9
If animals “write,” or to put it in Derrida’s words, “if there is differance
(with an ‘a’) as soon as there is a living trace”10 – “differance” and writing are
co-terminus in Derrida’s thinking and the very word “animal’ refers to the
most basic trace of life, i.e. animation – then it means that when or since
humans write, they do it in their capacity as animals, living traces leaving
traces.
If animals “write” and humans write qua animals, then the link usually
made between autography, speech and self-consciousness is put in question.
If animals “write,” it is ultimately the basic correlation between subjectivity,
self-reflexivity and human language that needs to be rethought and
reformulated.
Derrida’s thought “after” and around the (animal) trace has far reaching
implications, not only for thinking anew the difference(s) between human(s)
and animal(s), differences which the Western philosophical tradition has
mainly articulated and summarized in terms of the generic opposition
between the speaking and the non-speaking living being, but also for thinking
anew “thinking” itself.
Readers cannot but have noticed our insistent use of the word “thinking”
and its affiliates as we try to say something about Derrida and animals. We
have just been merely recording what is one of Derrida’s most heavily used
words (or set of words) in The Animal That Therefore I Am. True, thinking is
not “writing.” But it follows from it. There can be no thinking without
differantial tracing. Which means, to follow Derrida’s thought tracks in The
Animal…, that thinking follows from following the/an animal. And it does so
in more than one way. Let us sketch out briefly the stakes of this meditation
on thinking.
Talking about the ongoing “war” between those who not only violate
animal life but are immune to pity and those who start from this irrefutable
feeling of pity – and empathy – at the sight or thought of animals’ suffering,
Derrida invites “us” to “think this war” in solemn terms: “I say ‘to think’ this
war because I believe it concerns what we call ‘thinking.’ The animal looks at
us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there” (29).11 Thus,
6
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
Derrida asks us to weigh our words, and particularly the word “penser” (“to
think”). The word “penser” carries a special weight in French, the weight of
weight, since, as Derrida reminds us in Béliers, there is a lexical affinity, what
Derrida calls a friendship, between “penser” and “peser,” to think and to
weigh, which both come from the verb “pensare” in Latin. When one thinks
(in French), one has or should have what one calls in French, “scrupules,”
that is, one should feel the weight of what one ponders over, as if one was
loaded with little stones that prevent us from moving forward easily and
hurriedly. In Béliers (2003), a meditation on friendship dedicated to his late
friend, the German philosopher Gadamer, Derrida calls our attention to the
semantic proximity between “tragen” – to carry in German – and “penser” in
French. In order to weigh something, one has to carry it; weighing is a mode
of carrying, of taking on oneself rather than of taking in oneself, interiorizing,
comprehending. As a manner of “taking on,” thinking involves a form of
responsibility, a responsibility toward what one weighs and carries, therefore
also a form of respect toward it. “Thinking” in this sense is not only or not
primarily an intellectual process (and one reserved to humans), it is an ethical
stance (and one an animal could take). And this is one reason why Derrida
insists on the distinction between “thinking” and what one too easily deems
its equivalents, “philosophizing” and “theorizing,” a distinction nowhere
more sharply and repeatedly drawn by Derrida than when he follows animal
trails.
But what does it mean that “thinking” perhaps, begins “there,” that it is
there where an animal “nous regarde,” looks at us and concerns us, requires
us to be concerned by her/him as she/he looks at us, while we are naked
before her/him? Philosophers, says Derrida at the beginning of his meditation,
have merely been theoreticians, at least from Descartes on. They practice
“thinking” and think of “thinking” as a specifically human mode of
“contemplating” (“theorein”) things, of seeing them and seeing through them
thanks to their own representational power – hence a certain “nakedness” of
the thing seen “as such.” They treat the animal as a “theorem,” as “something
seen and not seeing,” sums up Derrida (14).12 The animal, any animal, exists
only in “theory,” counts only as “theory” like anything else for most if not all
the philosophers who define themselves as such. If philosophers could see an
animal see them, as “Derrida” sees the cat look at him naked in the bathroom
and thus sees himself being seen by her, then animals would cease to be mere
objects of representation. If philosophers took into account their “point of
view,” without being able to name what it consists of, then they would start to
experience animals’ unsettling otherness, opening themselves to the
experience of any other’s otherness. In its totalizing scope and apparent
simplicity, Derrida’s argument with philosophy and philosophers may seem
almost banal or otherwise exaggerated. The reversal and displacement of the
gaze that he seems to advocate and operate (from the theorizing philosopher
Thoughtprints
7
to the gazing cat) recall similar moves made within the field of what has been
narrowly and perhaps self-ironically defined as “theory” in the last decades,
for instance, and this is not fortuitous, the move to shake gender roles or
positions traditionally defined in terms of the difference between (male)
subject and (female) object, gazer and gazed at.
But one could also say that it is precisely the enormity of the stakes
conjured up by the scene of thinking as Derrida outlines it, that makes it
compelling. Moreover, and as usual, Derrida’s argument is not couched in
categorical language and sweeping statements. Rather, it makes its mark
subtly in writing.
In Derrida’s primal scene of thinking, the cat is granted the initiative of
the look, and therefore initiates the process of thinking: the animal looks at
us… and thinking, perhaps, begins there. Derrida does not say who thinks or
starts thinking thanks to this encounter. He uses an impersonal phrase:
thinking begins there. Which could mean two things at once: 1) that the cat
herself may begin to think there as well as the human, 2) that “thinking,”
contrary to what Descartes and most of the philosophers think, does not
necessarily or uniquely involve a thinking “I.”
In a move that borders or rather toys with what one might call a
“performative contradiction” – but which should perhaps better be seen as a
way of taking the bull by its horns (“prendre le taureau par les cornes”), that
is a confrontation head on, from inside the very arena of its occurrence, of the
problem addressed – Derrida launches a deconstructive attack against the
seemingly “subjectifying” function of thinking from within an
“autobiographical” hence apparently self-referential (but disturbingly hetero“referential”) perspective. It is against the idea that thinking implies and
depends on an “I,” against the idea that, as Descartes thought, an “I think”
must accompany all representations, and that this self-reference is the
condition of thinking if not the very essence of thinking,13 that Derrida
situates “himself” on the side of the/an animal. Derrida objects to the essential
link between thinking and the notion of “the subject” supported by the Cogito
(I think = it is an “I’ who thinks) in at least two ways. On the one hand, he
argues that there is no such thing as a rigorously autonomous and single “I”:
thinking begins at the point when an other “me regarde” (not only looks at
me but concerns and therefore affects “me”), at the point when not subject
and object but self and other meet, or rather, since no self-constituted self
precedes the encounter with an other, at the point of their “irreducible”
entanglement. To go back to what Derrida makes the primal scene of
“thinking,” thinking happens (or follows) “between” the gazing/gazed at
“cat” and the gazing/gazed at “human,” at the site of their encounter, that is at
the condition of a certain experience of the/an other. Thus Derrida writes:
8
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
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 […] then this autonomy of the “I”
can be neither pure nor rigorous; it would not be able to form the
basis for a simple and linear differentiation of the human from the
animal.14
On the other hand, Derrida questions the restricted notion of language that
underlies what he calls the “autoposition, automonstrative autotely of the ‘I.’”
It is because, or as long as, one thinks of language as essentially “deictic,”
that is as a means to point to things, to designate or “refer” to them, and
because of course one thinks in language that the “thinking” predicated on
such an understanding of language becomes bound to the autotelic self-deictic
self-positioning of the “I.” Anytime I refer or point to something, the gesture
of reference points back to me. As Emile Benveniste has shown, the effect of
deixis is to point to the/a subject of enunciation at the very moment that
he/she points to an object. Animals, Derrida remarks, are usually granted selfmotion and self-affection. But they are denied the power to refer to
themselves through deixis, the power to point to the world and to themselves
in the same thrust in order to “say”: Here I am.
The “here it is therefore here I am” of the deixis links “thinking” to
speech. Even if one doesn’t say it, such a statement is implied. This “deictic
power” is bound up with linguistic power defined as the power to name.
Anytime something is called, and only if it is designated by a name,
somebody (a “subject”) speaks.
Moreover, “naming,” “donner des noms” – that is, as the words “nom”
and “name” indicate in French and in English, to lay down the law (nomos)
on and over the real – is indeed an act of demiurgic power, even of abuse
(force of law) on the part of the namer. Hence Derrida’s repeated and critical
emphasis on the phrase “what they call” or “what we call” – “what they call
the animal,” “what we call thinking”15 – and his insistence that he feels no
“entitlement” (that is no stated, no named or nameable “right”) not only to
call an animal “animal,” thus packing together in one herd entirely different
kinds of living beings, but even to call an animal his neighbor or his brother
as if he alone could decide the terms of their relation, their distance or their
proximity, their resemblance or their dissimilitude.16 Hence again his defiant
claim that he is or wishes to be an “île d’exception,” an “island of exception”
in the general philosophical landscape regarding the human right to name
animals and to name them animals, a right that “ils” (they, the philosophers,
the so-called authorized speakers for humankind) grant themselves.17
Through the differancial play between “île” and “ils” in French – a difference
the English translation cannot record and which, as in the word differance,
you can read in writing but cannot hear stated – a sexual or gender difference
Thoughtprints
9
at that, since the “e” traditionally indicates the process of feminization of
names in French, so that “île” appears like the feminine of “ils,” Derrida
registers his differing and his difference, and links his questioning of animals’
naming and maiming (the latter a structural consequence of the former) to the
deconstruction of what he termed long ago “phallogocentrism.” 18
Derrida wants to resist the conflation between thinking and “naming,”
which excludes animals from the “realm” of thought, hence his caution
against thinking of the absence of the name as a lack or a deprivation. And
this is perhaps where he departs most strongly from Heidegger. For if
“thinking” does not necessarily involve the “I” of the Cogito for Heidegger as
well as for Derrida, for the former, thinking does imply “naming.” For
Heidegger, one cannot think about anything unless it appears in and as
language. Moreover, to quote Derrida paraphrasing Heidegger, only the
“word named a noun […] opens onto the referential experience of the thing as
such, […] such as it appears in its being” (48).19 One cannot think about
thinking “as such” without addressing the call of its name, without asking
“Was heiβt denken?” (What is called thinking?).
Indeed, isn’t Derrida’s stated desire to counter the “naming” effects of
human deixis self-defeating since one cannot but “name” the names one
wants to resist and since Derrida himself has shown that one cannot rely on
the stable distinction between the “use” and the “mention” of words or names
to escape that predicament? Does the indictment of the act of “naming” in
general and of naming the animals in particular in the wake of animals’
thoughtprints not contradict Derrida’s otherwise proffered love of language,
his attention to what he calls an “idiom”? Isn’t the “île d’exception” where
and that he wants to be “merely” a utopia, as are all islands found only in the
sea of fiction? Or to put it differently, is there a way to do justice to animals’
thinking in human language? Derrida has, if not an answer, at least the dream
of an answer to these questions.
To the question: does an animal dream? Derrida answers: “I am
dreaming, therefore, in the depths of an undiscoverable burrow to come” (63).
And the dream of this animal that therefore he is, is a dream about language,
about a language that would not assign, discipline, in one word domesticate
(animals and animal thinking), but one that would undo human language in
language, that would escape logocentric programs, in short, that would
underwrite animal traces in the strange idiom of the dream itself:
I am dreaming through the dream of the animal and dreaming of the
scene I could create here […] I dreamed that I gave myself
incompatible commands, hence impossible tasks. How to have heard
here a language or unheard-of music, somewhat inhuman in a way,
yet not so as to make myself the representative or emancipator of an
animality that is forgotten, ignored, misunderstood, persecuted […];
10
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
rather, to have myself heard in a language that is a language, of
course, and not those inarticulate cries or insignificant noises,
howling, barking, meowing, chirping, that so many humans attribute
to the animal, a language whose words, concepts, singing, and
accent can finally manage to be foreign enough to everything that, in
all human languages, will have harbored so many asinanities
concerning the so-called animal. (63)
It is the “same” musical dream of an absolutely “foreign” or idiomatic
language that he dreams of in “Unsealing (the old new language),”20 in
“Choreographies” where he dreams of other ways of “singing” and
“choreographing” sexual difference,21 and above all in The Monolingualism
of the Other. In the latter as well as in “Choreographies,” the dream takes
shape at the end of a deconstructive course, after Derrida has both uncovered
and undone the relations between language, subjectivity, ownership and
hominess (chez soi). Derrida then “dreams” of a wholly other language, of an
undomesticated or “de-domesticated,” unfamiliar and unfamilial “entirely
other prior-to-the-first language” (“toute autre avant-première langue”)22 that
is yet to be invented rather than recovered. And this dream of a wholly other
notion and use of language dreamed by Derrida in 199223 is or was already an
animal dream, the dream of the felicitous and violent graft of an animal
language onto the so-called “human” language, which only writing, the play
with differantial traces and graphs, might effect. Describing his attempt to
leave tracks that “recall” this wholly other language in the French language,
Derrida characterizes such a gesture as “coup de griffe et de greffe,” “[qui]
caresse avec les ongles, parfois des ongles d’emprunt.” It is as if the “coup de
greffe” depended on the “coup de griffe” that announces the former in the
course of almost spelling it out in French,24 a stroke or mark, the swift graph
of a graft made by nails or claws that are “borrowed claws,” cat claws
perhaps. Indeed, Derrida’s “cat-nails” can only be grafted, and the “preoriginary language” they thus imprint, prosthetic, not only because this is a
dream (which is different from an illusion25), but also because, following the
peculiar animal that he is, Derrida is careful not to confuse all living beings in
one single fantasy, not to recreate the myth of “the animal” from the animal
side as it were, by affirming that all living beings truly and originally speak
one and the same animal language. All traces differ.
• • •
Thoughtprints
11
The first three essays of the volume focus on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal
That Therefore I Am, in which he argues against the Western philosophical
tradition that separates animal from man by excluding the former from
everything that was considered “proper to man”: thinking, laughing,
suffering, mourning, and above all, speaking. Animals have traditionally been
considered the absolute Others of human beings, a radical otherness that
serves as the rationale for their domination, exploitation and slaughter. What
Derrida called “la pensée de l’animal” (which can be translated as “thinking
concerning the animal” but also as “animal thinking”) is a “poetic” and
“prophetic” way of thinking differently about animality and humanity.
“Animal thinking” may help us to think of the world – or imagine the
possibility of thinking about it – in an unexclusively human fashion, “for it is
not said that the essence of things hath reference to man alone,” as Montaigne
writes in his famous “Apology of Raymond Sebond.”
The first essay, by Marie-Dominique Garnier, is a close reading of
Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, beginning with its title. The
expression “que donc” in the original French, L’Animal que donc je suis,
evokes for the author “a becoming-animal (that) affects the writing or the
tongue of philosophy.” Garnier tracks the “infection” of this Deleuzian
concept (which she prefers to translate as “turning-animal”) throughout
Derrida’s text, especially in the Derridean term “animot.” Additionally, the
ambiguous use of the French verb suis (meaning both “I am” and “I follow”)
in this title suggests a performative way of writing the turning-animal. The
use of the present tense is also relevant, as it defies temporality, which is a
common feature of autobiographical texts – a genre to which this text
apparently belongs. The present tense also introduces the element of survival
(survivre)… in a posthumous text.
Marie-Dominique Garnier continues the analysis of Derrida’s title by
pointing to the significant prosody of the expression “que donc,” with its two
k’s, a sound usually related in French to naturalized words with foreign
origins. This k is considered here an “animal phoneme,” which can also be
spelled fauneme, an utterance of the muted “animal tongue.” Moreover, the
que donc introduces the donkey, an animal that already has a place in
Derrida’s bestiary.
Garnier’s analysis also focuses on Derrida’s word animot, which unites
the plural animaux (its homophone in French), and the word mot, meaning
precisely “word.” Animot can also be related to nemo (“nobody”) and to
nomos (“name”), in an aporia that links anonymity to the proper name.
Derrida has written at length on the proper name, and Garnier notes that the
philosopher’s name itself, “Derrida,” begins with the syllable der, which in
Middle English meant “animal” (related to the modern German word for
animal: Tier). The crossbreeding produced in the German language is indeed
spotlighted in the last part of The Animal That Therefore I Am, a lecture given
12
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
by Derrida on Heidegger’s conception of animality. Derrida’s reading lets
loose a pack of animots, “crossbred” from both French and German. It is also
interesting to remark that the sounds d and k are shared by Derrida’s and
Descartes’ names. Derrida rereads Descartes through his title, which rewrites
Descartes’ most famous expression, I think, therefore I am.
Finally, Garnier remarks that the fact that some animals are not
considered as individual beings but rather as belonging to a “herd” or a
“pack” is also reflected in Derrida’s writing, which thus becomes a
“performative writing.” Opening Derrida’s thinking on animals to other
“nomads,” the author concludes that the philosopher himself belongs to a
“pack” – with Deleuze, Cixous, Adami… – of “nomads” living on the same
“plateau.”
Ginette Michaud’s essay is also centered around The Animal That
Therefore I Am, beginning with one crucial scene, in which the narrator
describes his embarrassment about being seen naked by his cat. Following
Derrida’s interpretation, this scene can be understood as the “beginning of
thinking,” of a new thinking about animals. This reflection on animality takes
into consideration an affect, usually considered of less value in philosophy
than thought or speech (which animals lack, according to most philosophers).
In particular, suffering has been traditionally regarded as a “privilege” of
human beings, and thus a feature that characterizes humanity. However,
Bentham’s question “Can they suffer?,” referring to animals, misses its mark,
erasing all differences between a “protozoon” and a “chimpanzee,” as Derrida
points out. This question is nonetheless fundamental in that it attempts to
speak to what is “proper to man,” therefore to all great questions of human
rights, ethics, and so on.
Michaud then describes how Derrida “reverses” (we find here the crucial
ver (worm) in Derrida’s work) an agreement reached by “all philosophers” –
that animals are deprived of language. If philosophy has reduced animals to
silence, the author of this essay suggests that animals have found a refuge in
literature: from Kafka – who describes the animality or even the bestialization
of human beings, and at the same time humanizes animals – to Derrida’s
“autobiographical” animals (the silkworm, the ant, the hedgehog, the
mole…). “Poetic thinking” can give language to animals without
appropriating them, without falling into the trap of the “fable” – a genre
which pretends, according to Derrida, to make animals speak but only in
order to speak solely of men.
Ginette Michaud’s essay analyzes another text by Derrida, “A Silkworm
of One’s Own,” as a philosophical-autobiographical piece in which these
animals, “cultivated” by the narrator as a child, are in fact the ones who
“cultivate” him, initiating the adolescent to sexual difference and to writing.
Ginette Michaud wonders about the genre of this text: is it a dream or a “true
memory,” as its author states? But in French, rêve [dream] and vers [worm]
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13
form an anagram, suggesting, perhaps, that dream and memory are not
opposite but complementary. In any case, the worms provide for the child an
“originary scene,” Michaud points out, as she comments on the ironic
sentence, “At the beginning there was the worm.” Besides, who knows if the
worms are looking at him, instead of simply being observed by the human
being? We can conclude with Michaud that the worm itself is a
“deconstructive” animal, in the way it blurs the limits between inside and
outside, beginning and end, face and bottom, etc., becoming an
“animetaphor.” However, Michaud postulates that the image of the silkworm
exceeds the metaphorical and becomes a sort of “antimetaphor,” as a figure of
the work of mourning.
For her part, Claudia Simma focuses on the religious echoes of Derrida’s
text, especially as they relate to “le mal” (“evil”), which can also be found in
l’animal, as the philosopher himself states. The word bête, “beast,” which
appears in the title of the first volume of Derrida’s seminars, La bête et le
souverain (2009), also has religious connotations, as “the Beast” alludes to
the devil. Simma first turns to Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge”; in this text,
the latter examines the so-called “return of the religious” that seems to be
taking place in our contemporary world. It is also related to evil, and therefore
to the animal. Claudia Simma states, following The Animal That Therefore I
Am, that humans tend to consider everything that is not easy to understand or
assimilate as bad or malicious. This also concerns philosophy, since
traditionally some themes have not been considered good enough to become
philosophical objects of thinking. Simma also links The Animal That
Therefore I Am to “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” where the silkworm invoked
by the author as a childhood memory can be seen as an image of the biblical
snake, a figure of evil. The word “animot” is thought of as a way to introduce
the world of “word(s)” (mot(s) in French), from which animals are said to be
excluded. It is also a way of erasing the harm (the mal present in the word
animal) done to animals by speaking of them in the singular, “the animal”
(because animot is a homophone of the French plural animaux for “animals”).
The scene of the The Animal That Therefore I Am in which the
philosopher is seen naked by his cat (commented on in the previous essay)
places the animal as a subject able to perceive, understand, or maybe even
judge the human being. This reversal of common sense, which dictates that
only men can comprehend and judge animals, engenders not only the
possibility of thinking otherwise about animals, but also the chance for us,
human beings, to see ourselves naked. To recognize the pertinence of the
cat’s viewpoint implies recognizing as well a certain “blindness” in human
nature. And this recognition can lead to another way of seeing, that is to say
of thinking, without taking for granted the “evidence” produced by human
intelligence.
14
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
The next three chapters are devoted to literary texts that deal with
animals, analyzed in light of Derrida’s philosophical arguments on animality.
In the first, Anne E. Berger reads a novel by the “Victorian” woman writer,
the Countess of Ségur, in connection with Derrida’s The Animal That
Therefore I Am. This connection may seem inappropriate or even whimsical,
since this famous French author of children’s literature is known for her
Christian moralistic point of view, but Berger thinks that the works she
analyzes in her chapter – two of them largely autobiographical, and the third
the memoirs of a donkey in the first person – although they may seem naive
and outdated, establish a relation between autobiography and the animal.
First, Anne E. Berger remarks on the use of the term bêtes, a more childish
word, but also more ambiguous than “animal” – and gendered in the
feminine, la bête – in the Countess’ novels. However, the sole fact that the
writer includes animals as characters in her stories is a sign of her time; one
scarcely finds any animal in classical narrative, or in sentimental or libertine
novels – except for children’s literature, such as fairy tales. In this sense,
Berger points to the need for the writing of a history of literature from the
animal’s point of view, because this absence implies a certain conception of
the subject, based on the centrality of the anthropos, a conception which has
been problematized in modern times. The Countess of Ségur belongs to
modernity because she includes animals “as such” in her novels, that is to say,
animals who do not speak the human language, who are not humanized as in
fables or fairy tales. This does not mean that they are deprived of
comprehension; in the Countess’ stories, animals can understand humans, but
they must struggle to make themselves understood by these human beings – a
problem of “communication through difference,” in Berger’s words.
In the Countess of Ségur’s literary world, therefore, animals are not
metaphors of the human condition, as they are in fables, but they are linked
“horizontally” or “metonymically” to human beings, especially to children.
This link blurs the limits between animality and humanity; thus, all other sorts
of borders between categories fade. Besides, animals – and small children –
do not share the strict Christian and bourgeois morality preached by these
stories. For instance, they practice retaliation – or seek justice, in a “political”
move – instead of meekly offering “the other cheek.” Animals sometimes
play the role of the third party in a conflict; they figure as a “witness” in the
Derridean sense, which is to say, as the possibility of doing justice. And
animals can also be linked to the “proletarian,” not only due to the
etymological origin of this word (proles meaning “litter” in Latin), but also
because for both groups the only means of survival possible in a world run by
their “masters” is through physical strength and the capacity to reproduce.
However, Berger observes that in the Countess’ time, animals were displaced
by women in the opposition with men that defined the human condition. The
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15
writer’s siding with beasts can thus be seen as a feminist gesture, even
without her knowing.
The next chapter, by Joseph Lavery, turns to Franz Kafka, examining,
through the concept of “domestication,” how this writer relates animals to the
family house and to the figure of the Father. Starting from an analysis of the
place of pets and animals in general in the household and the “family,”
Lavery offers a critique of “humanism,” wondering for example what “having
an animal” means.
The author of the essay relates Derrida’s text “Che cos’è la poesia?” in
which the philosopher “defines” poetry as a hedgehog, to one of Kafka’s
short stories, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” which includes a strange character
named Odradek, and is considered by many critics as a “microcosm” of
Kafka’s entire oeuvre. Odradek is, according to Lavery, a sort of “hedgehog,”
a creature that throws itself onto the road, risking everything. Furthermore,
Odradek immediately provokes the reader’s curiosity. In contrast to other
readings of animality within the same text – made by other critics such as
Deleuze and Guattari or Žižek – Lavery wonders if Kafka’s creature is an
animal, a human, a machine, or maybe an “animal-cyborg.” In any case, we
must infer that Odradek is a perfect case of animot.
The author offers a close philological reading of the mot (word) Odradek,
from multiple points of view, reflecting on Kafka’s obsession with the/his
proper name, and the central role of the letter K in Kafka’s world. Finally,
this text by Kafka – and this strange word, Odradek – also raises the question
of translation and untranslatability, a question which is at the core of
Derrida’s reflection on alterity, and therefore on animality.
In the following chapter, Adeline Rother connects Disgrace, a novel by
the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, well known for his interest in
animality, with Derrida’s essay, “Rams.” These two texts show a similar
melancholic consciousness of life coming to a close, and are also linked by a
common ethical perspective regarding the concept of sacrifice. For Derrida,
as he makes clear in his title, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, every
human or animal death means “the end of the world,” the world as it was seen
by the being who has disappeared. Derrida rewrites in “Rams” the story of
Isaac’s being replaced by the ram, transforming the sacrifice of the animal in
a “near-sacrifice,” instead of an accomplished slaughter.
As for Coetzee’s Disgrace, sacrifice takes place in a final scene where
the main character has to put a beloved crippled dog to death; but, remarks
Rother, his action remains unfinished and this “sacrifice” – which parallels a
previous scene of near-rape involving the same character and one of his
young female students – is replaced by another possibility. This other
possibility consists of listening to and knowing the other, while respecting his
or her secrets, something that Coetzee’s character only begins to learn at the
end of the novel. Before the final sacrificial moment, he resists
16
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
acknowledging the complexity of other people – mostly women, including his
daughter – and tends to simplify them in one stroke. Rother also describes the
intertextual relationship between Disgrace and Nabokov’s Lolita, whose main
character, Humbert Humbert, has the same problem of not understanding, and
thus not respecting, “the fullness of the other’s world,” which results in
treating others as “minor characters” within a single, more important life.
In Rams, Derrida also applies this relation to the other to writing and
interpreting poetry, the ram being the poem that stands between the poet and
the reader. The poem resists being sacrificed or reduced to one single
meaning. Far from bringing an end to communication with the reader, this
resistance to interpretation ensures the survival of the poem for other readers
yet to come. It is in this sense that, according to Derrida, the reader and
interpreter “countersigns” the text, while the other “signs” it. This preserves
the singularity of the text, as well as the singularity of the other, concludes
Rother.
Rosalind C. Morris, although also referring to Coetzee’s oeuvre, turns
away from literature, for her intention is to apply the notion of animality to
the conception of Africanity in current South Africa. She begins with an
analysis of the cruel attacks on so-called “foreigners” that took place in 2008,
mostly in Capetown’s poor townships. There are different interpretations of
this xenophobic violence. Some critics think South African people (and
Africans in general) lack tolerance towards difference; others call to mind the
history of South Africa, a country that has employed and integrated workers
from many different origins. Although poor economic conditions can make
people feel threatened by “the others,” Morris wonders who were considered
the “others” during these riots. One cannot identify them as “foreigners,”
because European and Asian people were left aside, and some people of
South African origin, without “papers” to prove it, also suffered from these
attacks. Morris concludes that the violence seemed to originate from the
necessity to create a visible difference, precisely where it was difficult to tell
who belonged to a certain category and who did not.
This massacre is linked to animality in that the victims claimed they were
treated like “animals” (because they were denied citizenship), but they also
compared the perpetrators to “animals,” based on their lack of compassion.
Animality was thus used to qualify people who do not feel compassion
toward others, and who treat those others as if they are incapable of suffering.
Derrida reminds us how important Bentham’s question about animals (“Can
they suffer?”) was in displacing the border between animals and humans,
understood to be the capacity for language and reason, onto the capacity to
suffer. Morris wonders what treating the other as an animal means. She
evokes the devastating expeditions and epidemics that nearly extinguished the
/Xam, thought to be the originary people of the South African region, and
Elias Canetti’s interest in this culture. Canetti was attracted to the /Xam’s
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17
capacity for magical identification with animals, thus blurring the boundaries
not only between animality and humanity, but also between the self and the
other. For instance, it is difficult to translate “animal” – as a single and
general category – into /Xam language, which does have, however, a term for
naming human beings. This term also encompasses some animals thought to
have been human in a former ancient life.
Morris asks why the postmodern fading of the radical difference between
animality and humanity coincides in time with the acknowledgment of the
human rights of Black Africans. She turns to Derrida to note that the
philosopher does not deny difference between animals and humans, but
argues that this difference is plural, shifting, always moving. This is what
makes it impossible to define humanity as opposed to animality, as has
traditionally been done. This question is at stake in the claim, made by South
African politicians and intellectuals, of a new “African renaissance.” As an
example, Morris confronts the defenders of the so-called traditional African
animal sacrifices, with those who defend the animals’ rights out of pity for
their suffering. In this case, people from both sides agree that animals do
suffer in these sacrifices; but they differ in valuing this suffering. In all these
contradictions or aporias (the victims’ claim of being treated as “animals” as
they call those who mistreated them “animals”; their belief in a non-radical
divide between animality and humanity, but their lack of opposition to animal
slaughter…), Morris sees a glimpse of another conception of the world, one
not based in a radical opposition between humanity and animality – a view
that is also developed in two novels by J.M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello,
which stages Derrida’s theses on animality, and Disgrace, studied in the
previous essay by Adeline Rother.
In the following chapter, James Siegel looks to The Animal That
Therefore I Am in order to examine how Western identity is no longer
challenged by its confrontation with peoples from other ethnicities, as it was
during the period of colonization and, especially, of decolonization. Still, this
identity has yet to produce social change. Siegel first ponders the evolution of
ethnography as a discipline, reflected in the creation of the Musée du Quai
Branly in Paris. In this museum, the same objects that were exposed in the old
Musée de l’Homme are considered artistic pieces with an aesthetic value
instead of as exotic curiosities or as objects that have only a scientific interest
for their viewers. This artistic consideration is meant to “honor” the cultures
to which these objects belong, but Siegel points out that this new gaze is not
devoid of ambiguity.
In the second part of his essay, the author focuses on the border between
animality and humanity throughout history. Domestic animals were often
treated with affection on the farm, in the old agricultural-based Western
societies, but their slaughtering was contemplated or carried out without guilt
or resistence, by the same people who cajoled them and sometimes even
18
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
talked to them. Arriving in our society alongside the development of the
bourgeois family, with its separation from manual work, pets occupy a certain
role in the familial structure; for instance, they are the perfect siblings
because there is no rivalry between the family’s children and their pets.
Children – and some adults – have close transferential relations with pets,
which allows them to communicate, or to imagine communication. But,
according to Siegel, pets’ responses are always reassuring as they never
challenge their human owners.
On the contrary, the cat who looks at the naked philosopher in the
opening of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am does not speak to him,
nor does he embody a symbolic cat, “the cat.” The author of this chapter
reminds us that this cat represents “any other,” and thus “all others,” in
Derrida’s words. Following Siegel’s interpretation of this scene, being seen
naked by the cat does not embarrass the narrator; what embarrasses him is
precisely his lack of embarrassment. In Siegel’s view, this situation implies,
for the man confronted by an other, a sort of embarrassing self-consciousness
and the loss of his social identity. The author states that the cat who
challenges the philosopher’s social identity is not a “radical other,” in the
sense that it would be the first time he is confronted with it, but “any other”
who comes from the familiar. It is also a “singular” other. Regarding the sans
papiers in Paris’ streets, Siegel concludes, following his interpretation of
Derrida, that they can no longer be understood through their former
“savagerie” – but the new Musée du Quai Branly does not help them either.
In the last chapter, David Wills thinks about the “definition of life” and
its relation to the mechanical, in the footsteps of Derrida, who thought that
another relation to animality could lead humans to “another thinking of life,
of the living,” and thus also “to death, to technics or to the mechanical.”
Descartes had already distinguished three possibilities in life: the human, the
animal, and the mechanical. However, as the author of this essay points out, it
is difficult to ascertain which one comes first, for the philosopher, in the
hierarchy of beings. Descartes also questioned the limits of perception –
especially vision – in judging if someone we see belongs to one of these
categories, stating that the mind is needed to distinguish between “real”
beings and automatons. On the other hand, Wills argues, the human hierarchy
of the senses, in which vision prevails over all, can be different in animals, for
whom scent and sound acquire other perceptual and cognitive functions than
for human beings. For instance, birds sing to mark their territory in a way that
human reason cannot understand, and which cannot be compared to human
communication through language. This difference not only undermines
Descartes’ well-known conception of animals as “machines” – because they
are not capable of thinking – but also suggests that sound is a powerful means
of deterritorialization, in the sense of making territory “flexible” and
“changeable.” Deterritorialization, a concept coined by Deleuze and Guattari
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19
(also commented upon by Marie-Dominique Garnier in the first chapter of
this volume), would here be close to Derridean differance. But sound –
especially reiterative sounds – can also be used to reterritorialize, to mark my
territory by means of strict repetition. This “fascist” possibility is undermined
by “improvisation,” one aspect of bird song.
The main distinction between animals and humans, from this perspective,
has traditionally been – from Descartes to Lacan – that only humans can give
a “response” to a sound, while animals are only capable of “reaction” (for
instance, birds sing in reaction to a recorded bird sound, but we, humans, do
not usually respond to a recorded voice). Derrida does not oppose this
distinction between response and reaction, but suggests that we may instead
take into account the differance between them, as a way of thinking
differently about the living, about death, and about the “technical” or the
“mechanical.” The opposition established by Descartes between body and
mind, which sees the first as a machine and the latter as the origin of
animated life, is often blurred by the examples given by the philosopher
himself; thus, mechanics seem to invade the mind, as Wills puts it. Descartes
foreshadows another thinking of the mechanical, of “artificial intelligence,”
and a new questioning on the limits between humanity, animality and the
machine brought by cybernetics, all of these being seminal issues in Derrida’s
last works.
The editors want to thank Laura Hughes, who infused her editorial work with
talent, warmth, enthusiasm, and tact. This unusual combination is much
appreciated. And they would like to thank Myriam Diocaretz and Rodopi for
their unfailing support.
NOTES
1
“je l’avoue au titre de l’autobiographie et pour vous confier ceci: […] j’ai une perception et une interprétation très animalistes de tout ce que je fais, pense, écris, vis,
mais aussi de tout, de toute l’histoire, de toute la culture, de toute la société dite humaine, à toutes les échelles, macro- ou microscopiques. Mon seul souci n’est pas
d’interrompre cette ‘vision’ animaliste, mais de ne lui sacrifier aucune différence,
aucune altérité, le pli d’aucune complication, l’ouverture d’aucun abîme à venir”
(L’Animal que donc je suis 129).
2
The French version, L’Animal que donc que je suis, was first published as a book in
2006.
3
When we started gathering the present collection, this special issue hadn’t yet come
out.
4
See Points… Interviews 1974-1994 119: “You dream, it’s unavoidable, about the
invention of a language or a song that would be yours […] I’m not talking about a
20
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
style, but an intersection of singularities, habitat, voices, graphism, what moves with
you and what your body never leaves” [our emphasis]. The motif of dwelling, that is
of the animal mode of dwelling, comes up frequently in Derrida’s autobiographic
musings. In “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” another “interview” with
Jacques Derrida published by Derek Attridge in 1992, Derrida comments on his wish
to find a dwelling place suited to his need to “invent (language and in language)” in
the following terms: “this irrepressible need […] would refuse to show itself so long
as it has not cleared a space or organized a dwelling-place suited to the animal which
is still curled up in its hole half-asleep” (Acts of Literature 40).
5
See Hélène Cixous, “Jacques Derrida: Co-Responding Voix You” 43.
6
“accéder à une pensée qui pense autrement l’absence du nom ou du mot, et autrement que comme une privation” (L’Animal 74).
7
See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet.
8
He (re)invents it “after” Hélène Cixous, who made this pun in “Writing Blind,” first
published in TriQuaterly 97 (1996) and republished in Stigmata: Escaping Texts
(2005). See page 186.
9
The whole passage reads as follows: “[…] there would even be the risk that domestication has already come into effect, if I were to give in to my own melancholy. If, in
order to hear it in myself, I were to set about overinterpreting what the cat might thus
be saying to me, in its own way, what it might be suggesting or simply signifying in a
language of mute traces, that is to say without words [une domestication même risquerait d’être à l’œuvre si je cédais à ma propre mélancolie; si je m’engageais, pour
l’entendre en moi, à surinterpréter ce que le chat pourrait ainsi, à sa façon, me dire, ce
qu’il pourrait suggérer ou simplement signifier dans un langage de traces muettes,
c’est-à-dire sans mots]” (The Animal 18, L’Animal 37).
10
See For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue 21.
11
“Et je dis ‘penser’ cette guerre parce que je crois qu’il y va de ce que nous appelons
‘penser.’ L’animal nous regarde, et nous sommes nus devant lui. Et penser commence
peut-être par là” (L’Animal 50).
12
“[…] ils [font] de l’animal un théorème, une chose vue et non voyante” (L’Animal
32).
13
See The Animal 94; and L’Animal 132.
14
“Si l’autoposition, l’autotélie automonstrative du je, même chez l’homme, impliquait le je comme un autre et devait accueillir en soi quelque hétéro-affection irréductible […], alors cette autonomie du je ne serait ni pure ni rigoureuse; elle ne saurait
donner lieu à une délimitation simple et linéaire entre l’homme et l’animal” (L’Animal
133).
15
“[…] there where I am, in one way or another, but unimpeachably, near what they
call the animal” (The Animal 11). See L’Animal 29. “If I began by saying ‘the wholly
other they call ‘animal’ and, for example, ‘cat,’ if I underlined the call [appel] and
Thoughtprints
21
added quotation marks, it was to do more than announce a problem that will henceforth never leave us, that of appellation – and of a response to a call” (The Animal 13).
See L’Animal 30. “That is the track I am following, the track I am ferreting out [la
piste que je dépiste], following the traces of this ‘wholly other they call ‘animal,’ for
example, cat’” (The Animal 14). “I say ‘to think’ this war because I believe it concerns
what we call ‘thinking’” (The Animal 29). See L’Animal 50.
16
“Wholly other, like the every other that is every (bit) other found in such intolerable
proximity that I do not as yet feel I am justified or qualified to call it my fellow, even
less my brother” (The Animal 12). “Tout autre, le tout autre qui est tout autre mais là
où dans sa proximité insoutenable, je ne me sens aucun droit et aucun titre à l’appeler
mon prochain ou encore mon frère” (L’Animal 29. Our emphasis).
17
“Je vous dis ‘ils,’ ‘ce qu’ils appellent un animal,’ pour bien marquer que je me suis
toujours secrètement excepté de ce monde-là […]. Comme si j’étais l’élu secret de ce
qu’ils appellent les animaux. C’est depuis cette île d’exception, depuis son littoral
infini, à partir d’elle et d’elle que je parlerai” (L’Animal 91. Our emphasis).
18
On this issue, see Derrida’s passing assertion that “logocentrism is first of all a thesis regarding the animal” (The Animal 27) and his analysis of the initial subjection of
animals by Adam in the second narrative of Genesis. God gives authority to man and
to man alone over animals: “The original naming of the animals does not take place in
the first version. It isn’t the man-woman of the first version but man alone and before
woman, who, in that second version, gives their names, his names, to the animals”
(15).
19
“[Le] mot nommé nom […] ouvre à l’expérience référentielle de la chose comme
telle, comme ce qu’elle est dans son être, et donc à cet enjeu par lequel on a toujours
voulu faire passer la limite, l’unique et indivisible limite qui séparerait l’homme de
l’animal, à savoir le mot, le langage nominal du mot, la voix qui nomme et qui nomme
la chose en tant que telle, telle qu’elle apparaît dans son être […]” (L’Animal 74).
20
Points… 119.
21
“At the approach of this shadowy area it has always seemed to me that the voice
itself had to be divided […] I have felt the necessity for a chorus, for a choreographic
text with polysexual signatures” (Points… 107).
22
See The Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin 62-65.
23
The first version of The Monolingualism… dates back to that year.
24
This shift from “griffe” to “greffe” is a “coup” or stroke of writing the English translation cannot reproduce. The English version of this passage, translated by Patrick
Mensah, reads as follows: “[It] is also a scratch and a grafting. It caresses with claws,
sometimes borrowed claws” (Monolingualism 66).
25
“Does the dream itself not prove that what is dreamt of must be there in order for it
to provide the dream?” asks Derrida in “Choreographies” (108).
22
Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra
WORKS CITED
Badmington, Neil, ed. Derridanimals. Special issue of The Oxford Literary
Review 29-1 (2007).
Cixous, Hélène. “Writing Blind.” Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Stigmata: Escaping
Texts. London: Routledge, 2005. 184-203.
— “Jacques Derrida: Co-Responding Voix You.” Derrida and The Time of
the Political. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009. 41-53.
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992.
— Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
— Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée,
1996.
— The Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans.
Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
— Béliers: Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème. Paris:
Galilée, 2003.
— L’Animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006.
— The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008.
— and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff
Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Animal Writes:
Derrida’s Que Donc and Other Tails
Marie-Dominique Garnier
This chapter proposes a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore
I Am from a four-fold angle: first, it attempts to revise or revisit the Derridean animal
in the language of the Deleuzian “becoming-animal,” or, as this essay claims, in the
light of the “turning-animal” (my suggested retranslation of Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept). Second, it follows with a close ear the k-ridden resonating marks left
throughout Derrida’s text by the uncouth, clanging middle part of the book’s pregnant
title, “que donc.” Thirdly, it ties the question of the animal to that of opening, reopening, re-defining, the proper name. Lastly, it opens up the territory of Derridean
animal-thinking by inviting into it a number of contemporary residents – nomads
belonging in the same “plateau,” ethos, or pack-formation – among whom Hélène
Cixous and Valerio Adami.
At the stroke of two words – “que donc” – a post-Cartesian syncopation
affects the title of L’Animal que donc je suis. A guttural beat with ghosting
and goading effects, the dual core of “que donc” is an invitation to read “à
plus d’un titre,” entitled, caught in the double grip of a title. Derrida’s que
donc is both an intimation to “follow,” to resume the colloquy and keep up
with a familiar train of thoughts, and a form of impeachment or impediment,
an interrupted flow, a stuttering, a muting. A becoming-animal1 affects, one
might argue, the writing or the tongue of philosophy.
In a two-voiced plateau on the becoming-animal,2 Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari have warned their readers against the dangers of analogical
representation when conceptualizing the animal. Nature, they explain, “is
conceived as an enormous mimesis” (A Thousand Plateaus 234) while natural
history has remained trapped in a mesh of resemblances, analogies and
filiations. Instead of differential relations between species, and of sacrificial
or totemic thinking (from Bachelard to Jung and Levi-Strauss), the
philosophers of the “becoming-animal” are interested in “involution,” in what
runs a line “between” and “beneath.” They believe in “the existence of very
special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away,
affecting the animal no less than the human” (237).
Deleuze and Guattari’s “devenir-animal” unfortunately loses its efficacy
in translation, as “becoming-animal” lacks the frontal, dental force of
“devenir,” neutered and re-ontologized into a counterproductive “be/coming.”
Part of the strength of “devenir” (a turning, a troping) radiates, one might
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tentatively argue, from its chance, post-Mallarmean initial “d” – from the
lucky throw of a dé or dice that has spawned a line of d-rived, d-driven
names, from Deleuze to Derrida, between difference and différance.
One of my starting hypotheses is that the “becoming-animal” or, in the
case of this essay, the “turning-animal,” has found its most effective and
affective translation in the anti-ontology of a Derridean suivre, in the thin
verbal, rhizoming line which Derrida inscribes at the utter limit of “je suis” in
the title of L’Animal que donc je suis. Deleuze and Guattari have written
about (the) becoming-animal. Derrida writes the becoming-animal, writes it
into a turning-animal, particularly in L’Animal que donc je suis. In the
philosophy of becoming, “writers are sorcerers because they experience the
animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle”
(Plateaus 240). An animal population affects, in every sense of the verb,
Derrida’s writing.
Derridanomal
As productive as Derrida’s desistent, undecidable “je suis” (I am/I follow),
the luxation or syncopation of “que donc” in the title of L’Animal que donc je
suis both invites and prevents close inspection. An animal tongue is released
in the two k’s which it collides and disseminates. As noted at the letter entry
in The Oxford English Dictionary, k often characterizes “foreign words of
recent adoption, many of them imperfectly naturalized.” Imperfectly
naturalized, the k’s in Derrida’s animal hand make out a strong case for the
animal-in-philosophy.
“Que donc” introduces, parasitically, a form of phonemic resistance in
Derrida’s title – an “anomal” moment, taking anomal in its Greek sense of
uneven, rough or irregular. Que donc not only creates a local prosodic
resilience in the flow of a title, it also acts as a turning, pliant double pivot
one can easily inverse, turn on its head or reverse-engineer; it beckons to be
read backwards, in an echoic formation or an invitation to retrace one’s steps.
Read as an imperfect chiasmus, or as a vertical chiral pattern (q/d), the phrase
in “itself” makes neither heads nor tails. What’s in “que”? At the back of
“donc”? After a “queue,” a q, or a cue? In the wake of a sonorous “donc”?
What Derrida calls “the course of an animal” is what orients itself “by
ear or by smell” (L’Animal 82). One way of accessing the animal “course” in
or of philosophy – one way of scenting it out of discourse – is to lend an ear
to Derrida’s “que donc,” to sense or scent it (after Derrida’s own defense and
illustration of the force of flair). At this stage, gnosis gives way to noses – on
the trail of a volatile “air” in and out of Derrida’s name.
Among the key-concepts in L’Animal, the animot (65) is, Derrida
explains, a disparate montage or chimera, in which he “allies” in one body a
Animal Writes
25
plural name (animaux), a mot, and thirdly, a tentative frame of thought in
which the absence of speech would not be a lack. A tail is added to the
chimera, a fourth part, in which the question, “But I, who am I?” is posed, as
a paired, double question (a “deux fois deux”), twice two, a question to which
two forms of answers are given: an autobiographic animal (as one would
speak of a political animal), and a tentative definition of what lives (the
living) in terms of self-motricity (L’Animal 73-75).
Becoming-animot
Another, tentative way in which Derrida’s animots can be both harnessed and
given free rein is to envisage them in writing, to give ear to them (both in the
sense of to listen to, and to take part in their newly acquired faciality) in the
language of philosophy. Que donc, given ear (or tongue) shapes up into an
animal-formation, an “animot.” Derrida’s creative “animot” possesses the
uncanny capacity to speak “in tongues,” to become a nemo, anonymous, and
yet to affect, to touch the name.
Derrida has stressed the liminal importance of naming, “the sole and
unbreakable limit between man and animal” (L’Animal 74). In the
commentary that follows, an animal tongue can be heard at work or at play,
slowly forming, submitting language to a thickening, tongue-tied
reorganization: “Le suffixe mot, dans l’animot, devrait nous rappeler au mot,
voire au mot nommé nom” (“the suffix mot in animot should draw our
attention back to the word, namely to the mot named name”).3 In the
“monommenom” towards which Derrida’s tongue is being pulled, something
like a stuttering syllabication is forming, an energetic lingo speaking or
spoken beneath or at the back of the sign. In that lingo (possibly a lingot or
ingot) lies a nugget of animal speech, of the same glial, agglutinative type as
what follows in the same paragraph, between the folds of
“cemotkonommenom.”
In Derrida’s “mot” a “meute” lies in wait, a patient pack endowed with
performative power. An active substance, an animot or animeute that urges
on, prodding reading, sending word-tight, logocentric, philosophical readings
“packing.” No beast of burden, the animal-philosopher follows instead the
collective nose of a metamorphic pack.
The mobile colony of Derridean writing circulates a complex yet
traceable chain of philosophical scents or pheromones. The term, if one
follows the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a substance that is secreted
and released by an animal (usually in minute amounts) and causes a specific
response when detected by another animal of the same (or closely related)
species.” What is animal reading, if not a response to elements of “animal”
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secretion in writing (freed of the controlling forces implied in the concepts of
“detection” and “species” which the OED circulates and supports)?
Read on the nose, with one’s (its) nose to the ground, Derrida’s “own”
name (although “own” at this stage deserves to be disowned) follows close on
the heels of an initial animal-syllable. It “starts” (with) an animal, of all
syllables the most animalized or anomal: der. The word Der in Middle
English designates a beast, an animal (not specifically the “deer” or the
reindeer) akin to the modern German Tier. A starting beginning, Derrida’s
Middle English animalized syllable “der” plays heads and tails, and will not
stay put in frontal position. Acting as a mock-origin, the syllable quickly
shifts into a tail-end rather than an origin – hinting at an animal’s hind parts, a
derrière or a back, displayed up front.
Derrida’s proper “anomal-name” beckons to be followed in a paradoxical
way – to be caught by its frontal syllable, which happens to be a tail, akin to a
que or a queue or queue. A defacing procedure affects the propriety and
“property” of the name. Following Derrida-the-name involves experimenting
with animal/anomal affects in reading – reading back to front, reversibly,
having to catch the name by its mane (or a name by a mane). At the back-tofront of Derrida’s name, the hind of a hind (a female deer) begins
reading/writing.
Under the der entry, OED dismisses the hypothesis of a connection
between the Middle English word (deer) and the Greek Θήρ (a wild beast, a
poisonous reptile, at the root of “theriac” and of the pharmacy to follow). The
connection, according to the lexicographer, should not be made, although no
explanation is given. A stubborn phonetic complicity, regardless of
lexicographic assurance, links the initial der to Derrida’s name, to the
German Tier, and to the Greek ther- or Θήρ. In spite of “proper” philological
lineage, a noise affects the stray syllable. Unleashing the animal genes
contained within a signature, releasing the metamorphic force it contains,
Greek, German and French enter a common nomos, a plateau or wasteland of
collective, hypo-linguistic formations, what could be called a “grazing”
territory, in both acceptations (in which the logos is grazed, scathed in the
process).
Donkey-work
The force of L’Animal que donc je suis rests partly in its capacity to circulate
and defy territorial markings, to toy with language, to interrupt the flow of
discourse and disturb signals. The insistent, nagging presence of Derrida’s “je
suis” (haunted by the ghost of Descartes, from whom the phrase is partially
imported and modified) sends mixed, compounded territorial signals, between
being and following, between following and flowing (“suivre”). The dogged
Animal Writes
27
present tense of je suis defies temporality, the unwritten rule of
autobiography. In defiance, also, of territorial markings, Derrida’s Animal
book positions itself as a discourse of nagging presence, dogged survival, pigheaded returns. A survivre unfolds from a suivre.
The Animal is not only “about” re-animation and survival: it performs it,
in the discrete, deferred temporality of its successive stages prior to its
posthumous publication, in the different stages of its existence as a mutant,
accretive, secretive editorial object. The Derridean editorial animal haunts the
borders, the footnotes, the margins and outer limits of the corpus (like
Lovecraft’s uncanny anomal or “outsider”4). At the opposite end of the
spectrum of Derrida’s publication history, an earlier case of edge-haunting
occurs with one of the first insects to creep in the Margins, in the coils of a
prose-poem by Michel Leiris which supplements “Tympan”: an earwig
appears, rubbing pincers with a “coup de donc.”5
Reversing the book’s intimation to “follow,” much in The Animal casts a
series of backward glances, calls for re-readings and reversed readings, for
boustrophedonic returns, in the overlapping languages of retrospection and
de-reading. Returned, the infra-lexical part of Derrida’s title hovers on an
unstable border between French and English – begging to be reverseengineered into a philosophical animal: in the middle voice of Derrida-andDescartes’ collective “que donc,” a maverick don/key roams untethered, if
one grants reading the right to turn tail. The donkey belongs to Derrida’s long
retrospective bestiary (where it is connected to the Ja Ja of Zarathoustra and
returns on the following page, a figure of the over-burdened animot, made to
“to carry the load of a master on its back” (L’Animal 63).
Beyond the seduction of cheap verbal play, the initial, embedded “que
donc” sets an example of what reading “animots” involves: the newly
acquired freedom, the leeway, to resist a left-to-right rule of reading, and to
speak in one or several tongues – to kick against rule and rider. Like the
pharmakon, to which Derrida compares the beast of burden, the donkey must
“overturn power” (63). A figure of reversibility, it calls for reversal and
displacement, for translation and reverse engineering, beyond slapstick and
spoonerism, between languages (into, possibly, an “ass,” always already
mobile, phonetically unstable, ready to subvert the “as” of Heidegger’s “as
such” into an “ass” of generative impropriety).
With or without the intimation of a hidden “donkey” or an asinine “as”
(en tant que), a flickering signal calls for attention at the back of Derrida’s
“que/donc”: a local agon opposes the two rival syntactic forces pulling the
two words left and right: hypotaxis (que) versus parataxis (donc). Instead of a
smooth arrangement, the syllabic assemblage is filled with animus. At the
local, syntactic level, a war is underway, a “war between species” (“une
véritable guerre des espèces,” L’Animal 54).
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Animus
Derrida’s Animal writes and rides in the productive margins of an open
territory or philosophical “warren,” in a textual “lair.” Each entryway into
Derrida-territory (or a-territory), is sign-posted, one might argue, by the
flickering presence of an “animot” (taken in the sense of a stray syllable).
Such is the case, for example, of “war” or “war-,” a loose animal syllable
or streak that crosses the corpus’ specific animotic force. Comparable to a
territorial signature, the syllable leaves its (paw)print in Derrida’s most
dissimilar and distant texts: in “he war,”6 the phrase Derrida isolates for
close-reading from Finnegans Wake; in the statement that he is “at war with
himself”;7 in “Scribble’” (which concludes with a quotation from Finnegans
Wake), prefacing or post-facing or de-facing the Essay on Hieroglyphs by
Warburton, of all names the one which begins, to animot-ridden ears, with an
attention-grabbing syllable, almost a syllabus by itself. Derrida sets out on the
trail of what he calls Warburton’s “combat”: “une sorte de combat est engagé
au moment (quant au moment) de l’obscurité tombée sur l’histoire.”8
Warburton’s essay lists the “origin of the cult of animals” as one of the
benefits to be reaped from the study of hieroglyphic writing in ancient Egypt.
Language as an instrument of control would be assembled, crafted out of
permutable animal names. In order to glorify a “Hero,” Warburton explains,
Ancient Egyptians “would form an assemblage out of different animal parts”
(199) (the opposite, one might argue, of Derrida’s disassembled donkey-part,
or counter-hieroglyph – another word for an animot).
The title page to the 1977 Warburton volume yields an unusual editorial
assemblage, which reveals the combative, agonistic status of writing: the
book’s title fills an extensive page headed with the author’s name, William
Warburton (or Warburthon), followed by the full title of his essay; the 1744
translator’s name (Léonard des Malpeines); the contemporary annotator’s
name (Patrick Tort); followed by Derrida’s SCRIBBLE (pouvoir/écrire), with
capital letters and a bracketed appendage; and, finally, a text by Patrick Tort,
“Transfigurations.” Writing about writing results in what could be called a
“catty,” “bitchy” form of aggressive textuality, involving a muted yet
uncurbed form of violence which is unleashed from the cover page of the
book: there, at war, four names (author, translator, annotator, scribbler, and
transfigurator) enter into what could be called a “plateau” of warring, rival
enunciations. The cult of animals (in writing) becomes reversible as the
“animus” contained in the cult (any cult). The “animus” or animosity is
unleashed from the “proper” names themselves, peddled between Warburton,
des Malpeines (pain) and P. Tort (wrong), followed by a “ridder,” a
trailblazer.
Animal Writes
29
Derrida’s animus turns against itself, it seems, in an isolated melancholy
declaration in L’Animal que donc je suis, in what seems to be a moment of
helpless recognition:
Je rêve, donc, au fond d’un terrier introuvable et à venir.
Like the book’s title, however, such a statement can be read in an undecidable
manner, and translates either as “I dream, therefore, at bottom, of a lair to be
nowhere to be found,” or as “I dream therefore at the bottom of a lair to be
nowhere to be found” (L’Animal 92).9 “Au fond” belongs in Derrida’s
“animotive,” restless, mobile tongue. The “terrier” or “terre,” as Hélène
Cixous has remarked,10 is never far from a dumbfounded “taire” (to keep
quiet). Like Derrida’s war/warren, Cixous’ terre/taire is an animal formation
or an animot gifted with the power to speak in the non-voice of the animal or
in the loud silence of deconstruction – in which a “muting” takes place, both
muted and undergoing (or suffering) a mutation each time it must come to
“terms.”
Derrida’s dreamed-up warren, “terre promise,” or hol(e)y land reads both
as gaping grave and gaping ground. The “terrier” divides up between the
melancholy of the burial ground and the energies of a burrowing tongue or
“tairier,” an animal tongue strong or weak enough to bore through occlusive
concepts (of the sort that is heard in Kafka’s last, unfinished story, Im Bau).
The animalized tongue of The Animal takes the improbable form of sudden
syntactic traps, bore-holes and burrows, cut-ups and stray adverbs or
conjunctions, such as “au fond,” dislocated between hermeneutics (truth
finally disclosed) and utopia (Where on earth…? Mais où est […] donc?).
Derrida’s dream “burrow” lies in the dystopia afforded by linguistic
burrowings and borrowings, between languages.
At the back of Heidegger’s Rohr
The last part of L’Animal que donc je suis transcribes, as Marie-Louise Mallet
explains, a supplement, a last-day gift: the recording of Derrida’s added
conference at Cerisy, itself enlivened with additional “rires.” At this stage,
another “turn” is taken, an about-face occurs, as the book (silent by
definition) mutates into a speaking-and-laughing-animal. The oral aspect of
those final pages questions their status as printed matter: they were
improvised from notes, from “scratch.” Scratching is also their subject matter
(“Can an animal scratch out?” L’Animal 217).
Derrida devotes these additional scratch pages to the question of the
animal in Heidegger, taking to task Heidegger’s statement that an animal, by
definition, must be envisaged in osmotic terms, as insuperably caught in the
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environment of a surrounding world – a mode of existence comparable to life
in the space of a hose-pipe. Bound to its immediate surroundings, to the
constraints of a coded behavior, of biological determination and territorial
limits, as if caught in a mobile cage, the Heideggerian animal is “enfermé
comme dans un tuyau,” trapped inside a pipe: “in einem Rohr” (L’Animal
218). Thus trapped, an animal is “weltarm” – knows no world, being literally
“world-poor,” worldless, deprived of a world.
Between the chapter’s initial “rires,” and Heidegger’s “Rohr,” the
possibility of a parasitical, animal relay, transpiring in the muting syllable of
a transitional “roar,” threatens to disturb the course of philosophical
speculation. Derrida reads Heidegger with the lithe motion of a feline
“jumping” from one prey to the next (“je saute d’un bond […]” “I here jump
over to […] [204]), to get at Heidegger’s unanswered question: “Was ist
Welt?” (What does “world” mean?). Derrida’s reading of Heidegger liberates
a number of animots, crossbred between German and French; in the same
sentence, Dasein breeds “dessein,”11 as if a process of phonetic translation
affected the page. The adjective used by Heidegger to characterize the animal,
“weltarm” returns to haunt the final line of the book, in Derrida’s
metamorphic reformulation of what he calls “toute l’armature du discours
heideggerien” – where the spectral syllable arm leaves its animal trace or
imprint, with the effect of animalizing Heidegger.
An animot (understood as a mutant, perturbed signal, of which the word
itself is a living example) always operates on the outer reaches of a territory.
Animal-writing here involves, much along the lines found in the works of
Deleuze and Guattari, a process of alteration (rather than alterity) – a
metamorphic principle that would include the possibility of linguistic
alteration within a given linguistic territory.
A feral “roar” can be heard in the plural “herd” of Derrida’s animalized
writing. Secreted in and released from Heidegger’s “Rohr,” the roaring
possibility of an animal tongue overheard in the very words of the
philosopher of Dasein leaks out, invalidating the tubular metaphor of
Heidegger’s animal philosophy. Animal writing bites back, in feral fashion
(where “feral” branches out into two semantic fields, pertaining to the ferality
of the wild, untamed beast, or, on the other hand, to the fatal, the deadly, the
funereal, and the possibility of dying, about which the end of The Animal
revolves.)
Feral philosophy
The Animal is written in two voices, between the jubilating, creative mode of
the conference devoted to the “animot” (and its repeated punning on such
words as “bête” and “pense-bête”) and the darker resonance of the word
Animal Writes
31
“animal,” in which Derrida hears “mal” (evil or pain): “animal, quel mot […]
le mal est fait” (L’Animal 54). From the first, jocular Ecce Homo
reformulated as an Ecce Animot, a voice in L’Animal moans that it is “waiting
to be put to death” (“attendant d’être mise à mort,” 65).
Equally ambivalent effects operate in the glottal arrests of the two k’s
contained in the book’s animalized title. The arresting middle tongue of
“L’Animal que donc je suis” conveys its double “coup de donc” or “glas,”
sounding a death-toll, a tale of pain and physical aching. The double
occlusion in “que donc” generates a productive syncopation – pushing
utterance in the contradictory directions of breathless (in)articulatedness on
the one hand, and the jouissance of repetition on the other. A multiplicity of
equally (equine?) productive cases of colliding /k/-sounds recurs in Derrida’s
kaleidoscopic corpus, from the stroke of an initial pharmakos to his readings
of Kafka, of Valéry’s Quelle, without forgetting the “coup” of Glas and the
fascination of Bellerophon for Chimera (L’Animal 70). Hélène Cixous’ recent
essay “Ce qui a l’air de quoi” has unearthed a spateful of “k’s” and “qui’s”
from a number of key texts.12 Derrida’s early essay “Force et signification”
can be read as a form of early k-tropic text, asymptotically drawn towards
(and tuned to) a quotation which it seems to have been sparing for the end, in
which Zarathoustra is wondering how to carve his tablets “into hearts of
flesh” – “dans des cœurs de chair.”13
In the packed, productive traces that escape from the title of Derrida’s
animal book, one finds a tail (“queue”), a donc-key, a Cixousian “que,” “qui,”
or “key,” and the signature of two consonants (q/d) that uncouthly fit both
Jacques Derrida and Descartes’ names, assembling their discordant voices
into a weird philosophical chimera, a “pas de deux,”14 algebraically
suspended between one and two.
Descartes after Derrida: a cart-ride
Before being published as L’Animal que donc je suis, the Decade conference
bore the simpler title L’Animal que je suis. “Que donc” is a sure Cartesian
give-away, a trademark of Cartesian speculation, traceable, for example, in a
number of questions posed in Méditations métaphysiques: “Qu’est-ce donc
que je suis?” (“What is it therefore that I am?” 103-105). Following close on
the heels of the original Latin, the Duc de Luynes’s translation of Descartes’
Sed quid igitur sum matches its guttural quiddity to perfection (de Luynes, no
doubt, possessed “de l’ouïe,” good hearing). As Derrida makes clear, “donc”
has two Latin equivalents: igitur and ergo. The conjunction occurs, therefore,
at a “junction”: a (near-imperceptible) line of fault seems to separate
Descartes’ rational “ergo” from his bewildered “what I am?” and from
“Mallarmé’s mad igitur” (Igitur ou La folie d’Elbehnon), both of which
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Marie-Dominique Garnier-
resort to igitur. But which one is the expletive? Which one the syllogistic
pivot?
Although Derrida explains that the conjunction he adds to his title is an
“ergo” rather than an “igitur” (L’Animal 108), a logical hinge rather than a
mere filler (which positions the volume as a treatise against the animalmachine, which it is, partly), the issue seems more complicated. One of the
reasons why Derrida infers an “ergo” beneath his own “donc” might be a
matter of numbers, both words containing four letters. Derrida is explicit
about this apparently minor point, adding, “quatre lettres entre quatre ou cinq
mots,” four letters in the middle of four or five words (108). The volume also
numbers four parts, in counter-Trinitarian fashion.
To the “minor” figure of donc Derrida adds three metaphorical touches:
the word, he says, is “furtive”; it is a lightweight “prosthesis” (108); it is also
a “charnière,” a hinge (108-109). Donc, it follows, is (therefore) as furtive as
an animal, and as prosthetic as an animal-machine: so far, the semantic field
matches the implications of Descartes’ de-animalizing philosophy to
perfection. Beneath the technical meaning of charnière, however, at a
distance from the pivotal, mechanical device the word implies, the ghost of a
chair, of flesh (dead or alive) shared between animal, animal writer, and
animal rider (a second skin) begins to emerge. Donc fleshes out an otherwise
bony, dry, cadaverous title. As a charnière, (never far from a charnier) donc
cleaves (both severs and unites) the texts of Descartes and Derrida – a cart,
and a rider. Donc is a “mot” – the only italicized occurrence of the word
“word” in the book, which endows it with the status of an animot. Derrida’s
close reading of Descartes results in a re-writing, in a re-animalizing of the
donc – getting, one might say, the donc in gear. While Descartes
“animadverts” from the animal, Derrida calls attention to the question of the
lack of “anima” in Descartes’ cogito, after the close-reading of a letter in
which Descartes explains that “I breathe, therefore I am” offers no guarantee
of existence (121). Derrida revises Descartes’ thinking subject as, possibly, a
dead subject, a thinking soul – “une âme pensante” – whose cogito might
bear the “signature of a dead man” (121-122). He adds: “je suis ne dépend
pas de l’être en vie” (122). Against Descartes’s “deadly” je suis, Derrida’s
bifocal je suis requires, at all costs, a being-alive, a becoming-animal.
Hearing the herd
More than one animal is heard scampering across Derrida’s textual “wordrides.” Commenting on his choice of the title “l’animal que donc je suis,”
Derrida insisted that it should be read as a “breathless race,” an animal chase,
a “kinetics” or “cynegetics,” not as an “immobile representation” or a static
self-portrait.
Animal Writes
33
Among the animals hiding in and out of Derrida’s text, the “reader/rider”
will have traced several cats (Lucrèce, Carroll’s Cheshire cat, kittens), horses
and cigadas, Valéry’s snake, Descartes’ bees, donkeys from Abraham to
Nietzsche and an open-ended series of silkworms, squirrels, monkeys,
hedgehogs and ants from previous publications. “Mes figures animales
s’accumulent” –“my animal figures are accumulating” (L’Animal 58), he
says, thus following up on Nietzsche who has “re-animalized, if one can say
so, the genealogy of the concept,” and has attempted to “teach us to laugh
again by premeditating to set all his animals at large across philosophy, as it
were – to laugh and to cry, for, as you know, he was mad enough to cry at the
side of an animal, against a horse’s muzzle or mouth. Sometimes I think I can
see him take the horse to witness, but not until he has taken the horse’s head
between both hands for a witness of his compassionateness” (58, I
translate).15
Derrida’s signature sets free not one but several post-Nietzschean horses
that form an audible herd – syllabic horse formations unleashing a rider and a
da(-da), with an ante-positioned “hind” riding shotgun. The syllables of
Nietzsche’s equally animalizing name ride along in the same free pack or
horde, in the vicinity of horsiness and horseplay, neighbor to a philosophical
“neighing” or “Nietzsching.”
Derrida’s cat’s cradles
Much caterwauling is involved in the soundtrack of Derrida’s The Animal, a
text that reads as an invitation to “ride” on the wavelength of a Nietzschean
“rire” – never a far cry from its melancholy opposite. Out of the name of his
cat Lucrèce, traces proliferate, generating kith and (cat)kin in catachrestic
chains: “cas,” “chutes,” a clinamen of oblique writing (L’Animal 20-28).
Derrida’s pussycat Lucrèce leaves its oblique phonetic patter on a dense web
of affiliated forms, proximate terms and metamorphic moments. A patter
rather than a pattern, Derrida’s animal tongue operates “by proxy,” dispersing
glial, stray homophonic formations that connect one phonetic trace to another
in a reversible series of cat’s cradles or linguistic string games.
Lucrèce/Lucretius (cat and philosopher) offers quick access to Derrida’s
animal-writing, by leaving a stray succession or derivation of k-ty phonemes
and cat-inspired words across the text: “cas” (28), “chasse,” “se cacher” (8889), “champ” (112), “castration” (191), Ecce animot. On the last page, where
Derrida analyzes Heidegger’s complex ways of refusing to grant being to the
animal, by resorting to the “as such” of essential difference, a sentence, the
last one in the book, follows:
34
Marie-Dominique GarnierIl n’y a pas de “en tant que tel” pur et simple […] L’enjeu, je ne le
cache pas, est tellement radical qu’il y va de la “différence
ontologique,” de la question de l’être, de toute l’armature du
discours heideggerien. (219)
There is no such thing as a pure and simple “as such” […] What is at
stake, I must confess [I’m not hiding it], is radical enough to engage
“ontological difference,” the question of being, as well as the entire
scaffolding of Heideggerian discourse.
In the narrow limit of an off-hand confession, Derrida’s “je ne le cache
pas” unleashes a half-hidden animal, catty-corner from the opening pages of
the volume, where much is made, from the start, about hiding, hiding one’s
nakedness from an on-looking cat. “Je ne le cache pas” is the hinge or
“charnière” on which Derrida’s essay has been turning from the start. To hide
or not to hide (from one’s cat) was one of the “starting” points in the book,
embracing the trophic and tropic question of hiding from the gaze (but do cats
gaze?) of “another” who is neither quite “an” (but always a pack) nor quite
indubitably “other.” A philosopher in the nude – bashfully hiding from his
peeping cat (though reassuringly no peeping tom-cat), and who, by his own
admission, is ashamed of his own bashfulness – metamorphoses on the last
page into one who “won’t hide it,” who will agree to confess, or “allow it.”
Derrida’s confession or “non-hiding” must, like the que donc ingrained in the
title, be read backwards, with the beginning of the book in mind. The
linguistic turn of “je ne le cache pas” harks back to the book’s beginning, to
that bashful, primitive and mock-primal scene in which a veil and yet no veil
is lifted – on the missing and yet conspicuous, muted and yet sonorous part
which the title disseminates in the double béance or abeyance of a missing
part supplemented in the title, between two words, beneath que and donc.
Derrida’s “je ne le cache pas” at the end of L’Animal que donc je suis
confesses and yet keeps covering. It signals, in circular fashion, the book’s
own circularity (to be linked, also, to Derrida’s comments on Heidegger’s
own circular moments in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics16), in
what seems to follow a series of animal tracks coming back to the same lair of
buried, and yet utterly disclosed, signification.
Derrida’s side-remark might read, possibly, as one of the book’s cat flaps
– an entry-way, bringing reading back to its beginnings, inviting a reshuffling
of the purloined (purr? loined?) letters between man and animal: chat/cache.
What filters through the textual cat flap is the (partial) truth of a shared or
shed piece of common skin or hair between cat and man, as the stray syllable
“cat” infiltrates the philosopher’s “cache,” along with the “animalséance” of
a queue/dong.
Animal Writes
35
Hiding, in the book’s animalized tongue, entails another sort of subtext
or common skin, an animal hide, as Derrida’s “hiding” (or not-hiding)
becomes translatable into a “hide-ing” – a shared “hide,” a common animal
skin. A paradoxical, marginal logic “affects” the proper name, “imps” it,
pushing mimesis to its less-than-significant, utter limits (the limits of
utterance). Submitted to this type of “monkey-linguistic-business,”
Heidegger’s own name unleashes, beneath its thick philosophical “hide” or
hideaway, an open warren (Heide, in German) – in which Derrida’s reading
starts one or several hares.
One of the ways in which Derrida’s writings-about-the-animal(s) break
new ground is by making it possible to overturn one of the strongholds of the
subject: the proper name. In Glas, Hegel’s name is animalized into an eagle,
or estranged in the guise of a French “aigle.” Most names unleash not one,
but several animals (such as “Genet,” both cat and Spanish horse). The
“donkey” (far-)fetched from the middle of Derrida’s animalized title and
reassembled from the spare parts of Cartesian philosophy (que donc) is not a
pack animal destined to carry the load of a logos, an articulation, but a pack
of mobile a-significant language “molecules” (to quote a word Deleuze and
Guattari have made abundant use of,17 in which a “mole” plays the animot).
The fauneme
There is no such thing as an animal. Animals come in packs, swarms, crowds,
flocks, schools, herds, hordes and bevies – animot, we have been told, should
always be understood as a plural. Animalizing contemporary philosophy
involves, similarly, a collective, dove-tailing perception of its “followers” –
not so much subjects as overlapping lines assembling in and out of a mobile,
collective, fluctile body. Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène
Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adami (and other plural names)
belong to the same pack, and move beneath the common skin of shared
becoming-animals; their territories resonate with similar calls (similar
“ritournelles,” to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s concept).
Derrida’s “que donc” is, for example, of a “species” closely related to
Hélène Cixous’ already quoted “Ce qui a l’air de quoi,” which circulates,
besides a Joycean skeleton-key, the -kie of Jackie Derrida as a child, a cheeky
“coup du Q” (emulating, as stubborn as a mule, Derrida’s “que”) and a “cat”
metamorphosed into a “ça,” in the recreation of a cat-napping collective
tongue which links animal to any-man woman cat child and mule.
To Hélène Cixous’ key-text is added, as in the case of Derrida’s
L’Animal que donc je suis, an oral supplement, an outgrowth: the “little
conversation of November 2002,” entitled Quiquoire? (a coinage or chimera
colliding, against a muted “Qui croire?” – Whotobelieve – a nonsensical,
36
Marie-Dominique Garnier-
Joycixousian Whotowhat). In the supplement of Quiquoire (a short text
bringing up, among other things, the question of foreign tongues as giving
access to the unconscious), the figure of Kafka looms in the background, a
Derridean body double, haunting the conversation with the force of a foreign
“key” or k-word:
H.C.: Il me fait penser à toi dans le tourmentage
J.D.: C’est moi en plus grand et plus maigre.
H.C.: Ça, c’est vrai
J.D.: En plus grand tout court.
[H.C.: “He reminds me of you for the nagging.” J.D.: “Yes, it’s me,
taller, and thinner.” H.C.: “How true.” J.D.: “Taller, for short”]18
In a final bottom-line (or punch line), the final twist of Derrida’s “for short”
tilts the scales to his own advantage, as the reputedly taller or (greater) one,
Kafka, is upstaged by the foreshortened figure of J. D. Derrida’s witty “plus
grand tout court” which releases a knife-sharp K – the philosopher’s cut. The
cutting edge of a “k-sound” (a long-distance traveler, from the pharmakos via
The Postcard and Glas to the coup of “tout court”) operates at the level of
what could be called an “animal phoneme” (to be spelled, perhaps, a
fauneme): K, the nearest phonetic approximation to a guttural break, a refusal
to breathe or to swallow; K: a voiceless animal utterance. K, or the voice of
the limit. In a digression on the semantics of “trephô” (the limit, in Greek),
Derrida recalls that he does not set out to “erase the limit,” but to “multiply its
figures.” As implied by the Greek verb trepho (to transform by a thickening
process), as in to “curdle milk” (“faire cailler du lait”) (L’Animal 51), K is
what curdles language. So do cats.
DerridAdamiAnimal
Jean-Luc Nancy’s À plus d’un titre follows an animal path into Adami’s
portrait of Derrida – with cat. Adami’s portrait, he explains, represents “le
manque de la parole,” a visual equivalent to lacking the power of speech. For
Jean-Luc Nancy, the “lack of speech” becomes, precisely, the condition of
writing. Writing is for him “a shriek,” a “crying out loud,” “passant dans
l’aigu, le suraigu, l’ultrasonore, l’écriture toujours à nouveau” (rising into
the high, the shrill note, the ultrasound, writing still anew).19
Adami’s allegorical portrait of Derrida with cat comes, at one “stroke” (a
caress, the stroke of a painter’s brush, a streak of luck) very close to Derrida’s
tactile rewriting of philosophy – written, one might argue, at the tip of a cat’s
Animal Writes
37
whiskers. Nancy approaches his subject (the cat’s whiskers) by a whisker, in
the flicker of a “salut” (both a greeting and a parting word). Looking at the
allegorical portrait by Adami, Nancy comments: “Il nous regarde” [he’s
looking at us/he concerns us],20 a statement that takes after, grows from,
Derrida’s remark in L’Animal que donc je suis: “Les animaux me regardent”
(58). The “Derridanimal” is what looks at/concerns us – or perhaps, in one
word, what “affects.” Shifting shifters, the possibility of an overlapping,
plastic skin extends from the “animal” to the “DerridAdamiAnimal” (or the
DerridAdamiAnimall, with a plural marker).
Adami’s name, Nancy comments in an aside, means “divided man.” The
portrait-with-cat (both Adami’s and Nancy’s) is a divided portrait, a “cloven”
or double portrait of Derrida with Lucrèce (which one is the philosopher?
which one is the cat?). The cleft in Adami’s portrait also provides a “clef” or
key to the derridanimal, to its borderline, fuzzy state of existence.
The “derridanimal” is after non-textual, non-monologic linguistic or
visual models. If writing is a “shriek,” drawing or painting resorts in
dovetailing, scaly techniques (of the sort used in Valerio Adami’s 1975
“Study for a drawing after Glas,”21 published in “+R.” There, another animal
tackles or “tickles” the subject: beneath “Ich” Derrida hears the rhizoming,
fishy series Ich, Ichtos, Ichnos, Ishm, ictus – subject, fish, trace, Hebraic man,
and a “coup.” A “queue” returns in Derrida’s final catch in the next paragraph
of “+R,” in which emerges “une queue lamée” (a gilled tail).22 Similar
lamellae or scales affect Adami’s 2004 portrait, where Jean-Luc Nancy sees
what he calls “les pans, les lames, les masques, les peaux et les éclisses” (79).
A lamella, a scale, is a lamina (which, when read or stroked backwards,
reverses into an animal).
Donkey-business
A portrait of Derrida in Tourner les mots23 shows him up a tree at age fifteen
in Algeria, bow and arrow in hand, with the legend: “a profile of the
artefactor as a young monkey.” Unbidden, the donkey returns in defiance of
evolution theories, an improbably close lexical relative of the monkey. The
open territory of English dictionaries connects the donkey and the monkey in
a curious lexical assemblage, a strange animot: the diminutive suffix of the
donkey was “influenced by monkey” (American Heritage Dictionary) or
possibly “rimed with monkey” (Oxford English Dictionary).
In defiance of propriety and of grammatical rules, an unacknowledged
animal zooms across a sentence destined to be read at the burial ceremony,
which Jean-Luc Nancy records in À plus d’un titre. Derrida’s “je vous souris
d’où que je sois” (“I smile to you from wherever I am”) leaves in or at its
wake the floating grin of a Cheshire cat, as Nancy remarks.24 Built into the
38
Marie-Dominique Garnier-
melancholy of the sentence, one might add, between “j” and “ois” which
rehearse the first and last phonemes in Jacques Derrida’s name, the faint or
feint figure of a “souris” (mouse) uncouthly pops up, ratting on. As in
Hamlet, something – whether a mouse or “not-a-mouse” – stirs behind the
wainscoting.
NOTES
1
A “becoming-animal” borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (232 and following), is at work in the open, unstable lexico-phonetic
space of Derrida’s “animot.”
2
A Thousand Plateaus 233-309.
3
In David Wills’ translation, published after this essay was submitted, one finds: “The
suffix mot in l’animot should bring us back to the word, namely, to the word named a
noun [nommé nom]” (The Animal 48), in which the translation deems it necessary to
retain the significantly stuttering phrase, nommé nom, between brackets.
4
Quoted in A Thousand Plateaus, page 244: “The anomal is neither an individual nor
a species; it has only affects […]; Lovecraft applies the term ‘Outsider’ to this thing or
entity, The Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear and yet multiple.”
5
Margins of Philosophy xiii, xxix.
6
“He War,” Ulysses Gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce 35-53.
7
“‘I Am at War with Myself.’ Interview with Jean Birnbaum.”
8
William Warburton 29. I translate: “a sort of combat is waged at the moment (about
the moment) of the darkness that has befallen history.”
9
In David Wills’ translation: “I am dreaming, therefore, in the depths of an undiscoverable burrow to come” (63), followed with this footnote: “also ‘I am dreaming
therefore, at bottom, of an undiscovered burrow to come’ (note 9, 167).
10
“Taire! Terre!” is a recent example, in Le Voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett, 23.
11
I quote, page 218: “Est-ce qu’on peut libérer le rapport du Dasein (pour ne pas dire
l’homme) à l’étant de tout projet vivant, utilitaire, de mise en perspective, de tout dessein vital, de telle sorte que l’homme puisse, lui, ‘laisser être’ l’étant ? [I translate :
“Can the relation of the Dasein (man, for short) to being be detached from the project
of living, from day-to-day, applied living, from the design to live, in such a way that
man alone could ‘let be’?].”
12
Hélène Cixous, “Ce qui a l’air de quoi” 11-71.
13
Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence 49.
14
Anne E. Berger, “Pas de deux” 357-362.
Animal Writes
39
15
In Wills’ translation: “My animal figures multiply […] Nietzsche ‘reanimalizes’ the
genealogy of the concept [….] tries to teach us to laugh again by plotting, as it were,
to let loose all his animals within philosophy. To laugh and to cry, for, as you know,
he was mad enough to cry in conjunction with [auprès de], under the gaze of, or cheek
by jowl with a horse. Sometimes I think I see him call that horse as a witness, and
primarily in order to call it as a witness to his compassion, I think I see him take its
head in his hands” (35).
16
The Animal 155; “I would have liked to insist on the moments of vertigo and circularity of this text.”
17
A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 10, “becoming-molecule”; “All becomings are already molecular” (272).
18
L’Événement 71.
19
À plus d’un titre: Jacques Derrida 59. My translation.
20
À plus d’un titre 54.
21
Jacques Derrida, “+R (par-dessus le marché)” 179.
22
“+R” 183. My translation.
23
Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film, Illustration 13.
24
À plus d’un titre 37.
WORKS CITED
Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle. “Pas de deux.” Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet
and Ginette Michaud. Paris: L’Herne, 2004. 357-362.
Cixous, Hélène. “Ce qui a l’air de quoi.” L’Événement comme écriture:
Cixous et Derrida se lisant. Ed. Marta Segarra. Paris: Campagne
Première, 2007. 11-71.
— Le Voisin de Zéro: Sam Beckett. Paris: Galilée, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967.
— “Scribble (pouvoir/écrire).” Preface to William Warburton. Essai sur les
hiéroglyphes des égyptiens. Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1977.
— “+R (par-dessus le marché).” La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion,
1978.
40
Marie-Dominique Garnier-
— Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1982.
— “He War.” Ulysse Gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée,
1987. 35-53.
— “‘I Am at War with Myself.’ Interview with Jean Birnbaum.” Trans. Pascale Fusshoeller, Leslie Thatcher, and Steve Weissman. 3 November
2004 <http://www.studiovisit.net/SV.Derrida.pdf>.
— L’Animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006.
— The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York : Fordham University Press, 2008.
— and Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film. Paris: Galilée/Arte
Editions, 2000. Illustration 13.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. À plus d’un titre, Jacques Derrida: Sur un portrait de Valerio Adami. Paris: Galilée, 2007.
On a Serpentine Note
Ginette Michaud
Taking its starting point from Jacques Derrida’s statement in “The Animal That
Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” where he affirms that only poetic thinking can truly
host the question of the animal (what he coins in French by the untranslatable and
idiomatic “animot”), this paper looks into the reconfiguration given by Jacques
Derrida to this major theme of the animal and to an animal-like signature. It takes this
“reconfiguration” in all senses, and also literally, at its word: first, by a swift survey of
some of Derrida’s most crucial theoretical propositions regarding the limit between
man and the animal; second, by investigating and presenting the full extent of the
Derridean inquiry as it reproblematizes everything we think we know about the animal
in the figure – if it still responds to this name – of the animetaphor of the silkworm, in
the primitive and infinite writing scene closing “A Silkworm of One’s Own”; and last
but not least, this serpentine note is followed or traced through one of Derrida’s latest
texts, his Seminar, La bête et le souverain, where, in an improvised and most moving
session, he comments on D.H. Lawrence’s poem, Snake.
With its whole gaze
a creature
looks out at the open.
But our eyes
are as though turned in
and they seem to set traps
all around it
as if to prevent
its going free.
We can only know
what is out there
from an animal’s features
for we make even infants
turn and look back
at the way things are shaped
not toward the open
that lies so deep
in an animal’s face.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies1
42
Ginette Michaud
Neither gods nor animals, men say of themselves today,
self-satisfied,
When in truth they should be pitied for having come to lose
so easily god in the animal and the animal in god
and in themselves one and the other.
Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Singes.”2
“The animal looks at us (nous regarde), and we are naked before it. Thinking
perhaps begins there” (The Animal 29). Through these powerful statements,
Jacques Derrida enjoins us to reconsider everything we think we know.
Among the most remarkable features of his reconfiguration of this major
theme of the animal (not only the animal but, more importantly, animality and
the many and varied limits between it and humanity, “humanimality” to
borrow Michel Surya’s term – but perhaps Derrida would have felt slightly
reticent about this figure that, while keeping the human and the animal
inseparable, insists on preserving the priority of precisely this “human” it
brings into question…) – three crucial propositions retain our attention. The
first one relates to pity, to the animal’s suffering and therefore to affect, a
devalued or repressed element that Derrida places at the heart of his
reflection, recognizing it as the very condition for examining these relations:
suffering, then, contrary to speech or reason, which philosophers have always
considered man’s exclusive peculiarity – or rather, his privilege, his power,
his sovereign prerogative. That which is proper to man – never-closed list of
predicates, drawing attention to its indeterminate nature, its fragility to
establish unshakable foundations, be it just one – a series of properties that
are supposed to differentiate man from animals, starting with language, logos,
history, laughter, ritualization, burial, the gift, “dressing oneself,” modesty
(“From that point on, naked without knowing it, animals would not be, in
truth, naked” [The Animal 5]): without the knowledge of their nudity, they
would not be (self)conscious and fit to distinguish between good and evil.
Therefore, Derrida reformulates everything based on Jeremy Bentham’s
question, “Can they suffer?,” this question of suffering and pity displacing all
head-on opposition between “man” and “animal,” the latter having always
been relegated to the other side of the limit as a single, homogeneous
category, “the Animal in general, the Animal spoken of in the general
singular” (40), “in spite of the infinite space,” writes Derrida, “that separates
the lizard from the dog, the protozoon from the dolphin, the shark from the
lamb, the parrot from the chimpanzee, the camel from the eagle, the squirrel
from the tiger or the elephant from the cat, the ant from the silkworm or the
hedgehog from the echidna” (34).
The second question also concerns the limit, but more specifically this
time the line that man himself draws. “The ‘question of animality,’” Derrida
On a Serpentine Note
43
says in For What Tomorrow…, “is not just one more question among others
[…] [it] also represents the limit upon which all the great questions are
formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit
what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence and future [avenir] of humanity, ethics,
politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ ‘genocide,’ etc” (63).
This line of questioning, which like all lines is as likely to be traced as to be
erased, changes the very ground of the matter:
Limitrophy is therefore my subject. Not just because it will concern
what sprouts or grows [croît] at the limit, around the limit, by
maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it,
raises it and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly
not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, complicating,
thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by
making it increase [croître] and multiply. (The Animal 29. Derrida’s
emphasis.)
Thus, Derrida reverses – and here I am already insisting on the figure (more
and something other than a simple “figure”) of a certain “ver” (worm) I will
speak of a little further – what the most powerful philosophical tradition felt
entitled to refuse the animal: “speech, reason, experience of death, mourning,
culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense [feinte de
feinte], covering of tracks [effacement de la trace], gift, laughter, crying,
respect, etc.” (135). Struck by the fact that all (it is Derrida who stresses this
all) philosophers, “from Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant,
Heidegger and Levinas” (32), are in perfect agreement – an agreement too
perfect to escape suspicion – when affirming that the animal, singular general,
is deprived of language, Derrida overturns this limit traced by them as a
unilinear and indivisible line (ironically, homogeneity is more likely a trait of
these living beings called philosophers, too certain of what “humanity” is), to
ask, rather, “whether what calls itself human has the right to rigorously
attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he
refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous,
indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution” (135. Derrida’s emphasis).
The fact that Derrida relentlessly raises this question, remarking that it opens
onto “the future of humanity,” shows as clearly as possible the great
importance he attaches to this question of “the living” in all its forms and
species, with all its differences – throughout his philosophical work and
evidently even more intently in the last decade, when his “zoo-auto-biobiblio-graphy” (34) invokes a “heterogeneous multiplicity of the living [de
vivants]” (31), qualified as animots even before they are given a name.
And it is obviously through this third trait, which leads Derrida to
reconfigure the question of the animal in animot, that what he advances
44
Ginette Michaud
becomes more inventive. Because what is at stake in the question of the
animal is not limited, for Derrida, to this or that motif, nor to themes such as
asininity (bêtise) or stupor (hébétude), any more than to the double move of
humbling and animalization (abêtissement) to which the animal is so often
subjected, although even this animalization can be refuted by an author like
Kafka, for example, who succeeds in complicating things considerably, as
Michel Surya clearly sees:
Abêtissement should be taken to mean strictly: that which renders
beast-like [bête] what is. Better still, that which reattributes it to the
beasts. Which reattributes it at least in this sense: that there is
nothing that is which does not share this origin, and does not remain
tied to it. Which does not remain tied to it forever. The humbling
move [abaissement] to which Kafka subjects all that is, is essentially
a move of bestialization of man – bestialization because it is not
enough to describe it simply as a move to animalize [...]; Kafka
alternately performs a bestialization of man and a hominization of
the animal, either because he wants in the bestialized human man to
triumph still, or because he wants to preserve the dominance of the
animal in the hominized beast (as is the case for the Ape in A Report
to an Academy). Kafka upholds these two contradictory possibilities:
the bêtise of man and the humanity of the animal (always, however,
deprived of stupor). In the end, everything is much more
complicated: nothing ceases to be what it is, although it can become
its opposite in every way.3
Indeed, all of Derrida’s work constantly confirms that everything is “much
more complicated,” as he delves into these two contradictory possibilities of
the animalization of man, of his “asininity” (asininity, Derrida often points
out, can only be ascribed to man) on the one hand, and the hominization of
the animal, its humanity, on the other hand – a category just as problematic,
since he sees all these relations, these exchanges, as still too deeply steeped in
anthropomorphic projections. And it is precisely these projections that his
thinking intends to question and displace, without escaping them. To reflect
on the question of the animal, a question “which thinking has avoided in a
cowardly manner,”4 means ceasing to run away from what is shameful, and
this is precisely how Derrida begins the analysis of this unforgettable scene
where, in his bathroom, he lets himself be seen, he sees himself seen naked
under the undecipherable gaze of his cat.5 In this “primal scene”
(“primal” intended here not only in the psychoanalytic sense but more in the
sense of “a radical primacy of the animal, that might well be what remains to
be conceived,” Asselin 70), what Derrida suggests is not “to think in place of
the animal, as philosophy has too often contented itself with doing, but to
On a Serpentine Note
45
think its place or, better still, to let ourselves think from the place the animal
has always held in our thoughts” (Asselin 70).
In Le Versant animal, Jean-Christophe Bailly remarks that “there is no
reign, either of man or beast, but only passages, furtive sovereignties,
occasions, flights, encounters.”6 This expression, “furtive sovereignties,”
alludes perhaps to a certain rhizomatic line of flight of the Deleuzian
becoming-animal, but it interests me above all because it has the obliqueness
of a certain vertiginous versant that Derrida attributes to the wholly other that
is the animal, whose perception of him he can never fathom:
Seeing oneself seen naked under a gaze behind which there remains
a bottomlessness [sans fond], at the same time innocent and cruel
perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad,
uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret. Wholly
other, like the every other that is every (bit) other found in such
intolerable proximity that I do not as yet feel I am justified or
qualified to call it my fellow, even less my brother. (The Animal 12)
From the (masculine) “Ant” of the sexual differences zigzagging across the
page to the “Silkworm of One’s Own” from Veils still undifferentiated,
bearing all possibilities, to the hedgehog (hérisson), heir and witness to the
poetic catastrophe, or Hamlet’s mole in Specters of Marx, that ploughs its
furrow underground and returns from the other world into the blinding light –
to mention only a few of the animals that concern Derrida (le regardent),
each time in a singular manner, “Whether in the form of a figure or not,” as
he writes: “They multiply, lunging more and more wildly in my face [figure]
in proportion as my texts seem to become autobiographical
[autobiographiques7], or so one would have me believe” (The Animal 35).
Thus, Derrida endlessly asks himself if it is possible to think “the absence of
the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation”
(48). Whence the importance of this third aspect that calls for another way of
conceiving the fable – a fable which would avoid fabulation, which “remains
an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication.
Always a discourse of man […]” (37) – or again a prosopopeia, this figure
that has always lent the animal a certain voice,8 deserves to be pointed out as
an attempt to react to the philosophical mistreating of the animal, never
unique enough, by granting it a possible poetic shelter in literature, perhaps
the only place, in a way, that can offer hospitality to this animality, to that
aspect of it which is threatened with extinction. Fiction might perhaps be
“called upon from now on to be this place of memory where we would have
to remember this loss and take in the survivors, even if this means: recording,
confirming their actual disappearance” (Asselin 76), as Jean-Christophe
Bailly (90-91) also notes regarding his “Singes”:
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Ginette Michaud
On the premises of art that are the place where we remember this loss
And where we try to change it into something
Something good
To greet the apes in one way or another
Is, beyond a silent ecological act,
To try to shift the border, to erase it
By following the apes on the uncertain path
On which they advance, like complete philosophical objects
And perhaps like philosophers as well,
That is, like unfathomables.
Only poetic thinking concerns itself with the animal without appropriating it,
from Montaigne to Kafka, and including Alice, the Autobiogriffures of the
“Cat Murr” or L’Amour du loup (The Love of the Wolf) by Tsvetaïeva and
Cixous, each time, as Montaigne says of his cat, by “chang[ing] the idiom
according to the species.”9 In my view, this is where Derrida shows the
greatest daring, when he declares, after acknowledging that what is specific to
psychoanalysis is the treatment of suffering and cruelty, and that literature is a
privileged domain for the culture of the secret, that “the difference between
philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking” holds onto this question of the
animal: “For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives
from poetry (revient à la poésie). There you have a thesis: it is what
philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of” (The Animal 7). In an
article entitled “Saint-Je Derrida” that obviously monkeys around Hélène
Cixous’ work Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif, Laurent
Milesi reminds us of a remark made by Derrida in his interview with Derek
Attridge, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature”’: “Confessing to a
penchant for a certain practice of fiction, ‘the intrusion of an effective
simulacrum or of disorder into philosophical writing’ (rather than reading novels
or the telling and invention of stories), Derrida then points out that this
‘irrepressible need […] would refuse to show itself so long as it has not cleared a
space or organized a dwelling-place suited to the animal which is still curled up
in its hole half asleep.”’10 Seizing upon this “confession,” Laurent Milesi
glimpses a connection with the “configuration of the trace, simulation and
autobiography,” that we should “investigate and extend in relation to the
Derridean reproblematization of the animal” (55). These are the traces I would
like to pursue in the serpentine notes that follow, on the theme of this “animallike signature” that Derrida affixes in “A Silkworm…,” certainly one of the most
affirmative answers he has given to the statement: “It would not be a matter of
‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking,
however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the
name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation”
(The Animal 48).
On a Serpentine Note
47
•••
“A Silkworm,” or the faceless vis-à-vis of the living
“A Silkworm of One’s Own” irrefutably marks a passage at the limit in
Jacques Derrida’s work. Like Blanchot’s fragment called “A primal scene?”11
in The Writing of the Disaster, quite close to it in terms of its subject and its
analytic tone, “A Silkworm…,” and particularly the passage in italics at the
end, takes the form of an “enigmatic poem in autobiographical prose”12 that
questions all these “categories of the scene and of the secret, of primitivity, of
fiction, of myth even” (Lacoue-Labarthe 216). Childhood memory (true or
forged, authentic or “screen”: place of one of the secrets of the text) and,
above all, metaphor of writing that stitches together in a lightning-quick
condensation several textual traces of Derrida’s philosophical work, this short
text presents not a secret to be uncovered, but rather a meticulous analysis of
the “secret of the secret” being weaved before the eyes of a young boy
observing “in the heat of holidays in El-Biar” (A Silkworm 90) the slow
metamorphosis of the bombyx, silkworms he grows in a shoebox. What
strikes us immediately in this scene, contrary to a certain logic of the secret as
dissimulation/unveiling, is that this “childhood memory” already appears as
the discovery of a secret, and not a small one at that, since it pertains to the
question of sexual difference, to the initiation of the little boy to “the Thing,”
a complex initiation that, from the beginning of the text, goes in several
directions: the child cultivates silkworms, but this relation will soon be
inverted: they are the ones who will “cultivate” him, as it were, by initiating
him to sexuality and creation (and therefore to writing, to metaphor and to the
poem); prior to this, he was thus himself initiated to this cultivation by an
indefinite someone (“on m’y avait initié”: that could be any “who” or “what”)
whose identity he keeps secret: “In the four corners of a shoebox, then, I’d
been shown how, I kept and fed silkworms” (88).
From the start then, Derrida reverses this expectation of what will be
revealed: it is out of the question to beat about the bush, or to avoid
calling “un chat un chat” (unlike Freud, who uses this expression in French to
avoid speaking literally of sex). Derrida, on the contrary, offers up the
question of sex at once and makes no mystery of this secret, displayed out in
the open, in plain sight of the reader – although it must be remembered that
this could indeed be the best way to encrypt it and blind the reader to the
singularity of the child’s experience (“involvement,” rather, taken in its most
literal sense) with these “voracious little creatures [vivants]” (88). So, rather
than simply hiding or exhibiting the secret, the entire narrative of this
“childhood memory” consists of succeeding in walking the line of the
incommunicable nature of “‘true’ confessions” described by Blanchot:
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However, the drama – and the force – in all “true” confessions is that
one only begins to speak in view of this moment at which one will
no longer be able to continue: there is something to say that one
cannot say; it is not necessarily scandalous; it is, perhaps, more than
banal, a gap, a void, a region that cannot bear light because its nature
is its inability to be illuminated – a secret without a secret whose
broken seal is muteness itself.13
Therefore, the secret is not so much something to know, since to “penetrate”
it means losing it at once, but rather something to “touch” upon while
preserving it intact. In Pierre Alferi’s words (162), “we are then dealing not
so much with the secret, but with the secret of the secret, with the secret
without secret of the small difference.” This is indeed the spinning, the very
remarkable fingere of this quasi-tale that stands in the “imminence of an
unanticipated event” (Malabou 24), and that, under pressure from narration
itself, makes or lets the event arrive in the unwound arabesque created by the
intricate silk threads of writing. The nature of the event is such that it can
always remain almost undetected, as suggested by the apparent neutrality of
the little boy, his patient and passive acquiescence before the intensity of this
experience, of the vision of overabundant life in these caterpillars “impatient
to nourish their secretion” (A Silkworm 88), that did not know they were
being observed (but can we be certain of this? We would be wise to look
more closely into this matter). Here, the theme of hospitality, so pervasive in
Derrida’s thinking, finds radical expression: the child, by “sheltering” these
worms, themselves passive inhabitants or helpless occupants of this utterly
enclosed space,14 offers them an infinite hospitality that crosses all
boundaries, and which could indeed be called, in his terms, unconditional. His
remarkable passivity is thus the sign of a welcome open to the absolute
surprise of the stranger, to that which makes this animal (the most domestic
of all, according to ethology) an absolute “arrivant,” bearing in its very form
the utmost unpredictable difference, the most unassimilable one: the worm as
the “wholly other, […] the figure without a face [figure], with the
unpresentable visage of the arrivant” (Malabou 234).
•••
This “true childhood memory” disclosed at the end of “A Silkworm of One’s
Own” – just a few pages, set in another type, the italics embodying
typographically the birth of this wholly other text – makes the same strong
impression (an imprinting of sorts?) at each reading. Its impact seems to be
inversely proportional to its apparent briefness and we could be tempted to
On a Serpentine Note
49
take it, as Derrida does The Instant of my Death, not for the key “but at least a
prescription for reading Blanchot’s entire work” (Demeure 70): it is indeed a
text that has the power – the force and potential, the virtuality: the worm [ver]
is this very virtuality – to contain the entire work, this childhood memory
figuring, like oneirographic imaging does, the workings of all of the work.
This childhood memory also fascinates, among other reasons, in the way
it speaks of a certain “voyeurism/exhibitionism,” whose effect is multiplied
by the fact that it already holds centre-stage, since the narrator is watching the
young boy he once was watching his silkworms at the bottom of a shoebox,
watching himself watch15 in a kind of hypnotic reverberation that spills over
onto the reader – just one among the powerful effects produced by this dream
account. Mirroring mirror recessing into infinite reflections, this text opens
onto the dizzying questions of the who and the what (that of the what coming
much before that of the who). For who is observing whom here? Who (qui) is
watching whom (qui)?16 And to be even more radical, who is this who? These
questions make one’s head spin,17 particularly when they involve this animot,
ver/vers, worm/word for which the question of a face keeps taking on a
different turn, as Derrida will point out in his critique of Levinas’ (non-)
response to the discussion of the snake (a snake presenting an altogether
different configuration, in relation to the visage, than a silkworm). Reacting
to Levinas’ statement that he cannot answer this question, “that of knowing
whether the animal, in this case a snake, has a face” (The Animal 109),
Derrida then makes this comment:
[Levinas] responds but by admitting that he can’t respond to the
question of knowing what a face is, and he can thus no longer
answer for his whole discourse on the face [visage]. For declaring
that he doesn’t know where the right to be called “face” begins
means confessing that one doesn’t know at bottom [au fond] what a
face is, what the word means, what governs its usage; and that
means confessing that one didn’t say what responding means. (109)
Indeed, in this originary scene – “At the beginning there was the worm (Au
commencement, il y eut le ver),” the narrator remarks ironically, truncating no
less than the all-mighty inaugural word Ver/be, Logos and Be (the Word
curtailed, as it were, into the Worm, by the twist of only one letter), rather
high stakes where the animal is concerned… – who scrutinizes (dévisage)
whom? Is it certain that it is the silkworms who are caught, unbeknownst to
them, in their auto-affective activities (feeding themselves, eating themselves,
making love to themselves)? What if it was really the child who didn’t know
he was being observed, becoming an object for them, their Thing? What if
these faceless creatures (we will come back to this question that haunts
Derrida throughout this critique of Levinas: what exactly is a face? where
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does it begin, where does it end?) were the ones who were scrutinizing the
child’s face, envisaging it altogether differently from their point of view?
Does this reversal, at the limit of the impossible, not bear the trace of the
“estrangement” captured so intently in this scene? Even more than the
silkworms, is it not this child given to dreaming, “heavily charged with a
secret unknown to him” (Circumfession 257) absorbed into the “indefatigable
surprise before the fact of what [he] will never really understand or accept”
(Malabou 23), immobile, paralyzed voyeur who analyzes without even
knowing it “what befalls his body” (13), who is the very enigma in this text?
Is it not this child, on the threshold of a jouissance of which he will never
know anything, who diverts and turns away attention from himself, stepping
forward only to make himself invisible – at least as much as the worms who
appear to be the object of his curiosity – who transports the secret without
knowing it?18
There is reason to think so, and the exchanges between the child and his
silkworms are more complex (more perverse?) than a superficial reading
reveals. In fact, the limits are cleverly disguised in this dream narrative – let
us call it that although we know that this category is only half suited to this
text that comes from another world, from a watchful wakefulness, wake or
trance. But is this really the “narrative of a dream”? “A true childhood
memory,” declares Derrida, immediately adding, to further complicate things,
“the opposite of a dream [l’envers d’un rêve]” (A Silkworm 87). Here, the
words “vers” and “rêve” are already inversed twice, between these two words
that form an anagram, by placing them back to front, head to tail, making it
impossible to differentiate truth from fiction, memory from fabulation. If this
“true” memory (by contrast to the false or screen memory Freud warned us
about?) is “the opposite of a dream,” what does this mean? Which one comes
first, which one originates from the other? The truth is that both are
inextricably woven into the same fabric and that by saying “envers”19 rather
than “contraire,” Derrida invites us to think this two-sidedness together…
“You’re dreaming of taking on a braid or a weave, a warp or a woof, but
without being sure of the textile to come, if there is one, if any remains and
without knowing if what remains to come will still deserve the name of text,
especially of the text in the figure of a textile” (24). The question is, in fact,
worth asking: what kind of text is this “Silkworm...”? A dream of a text or a
dream text? Or something else still, something harder to identify, indefinable
perhaps, like a dream that would start to dream itself and would make
something happen to language?20 If “In the beginning, there was the worm
that was and was not a sex, the child could see it clearly, a sex perhaps but
which one?” (90), we can foresee that it will not be easy to decide about this
question of genus, sexual and textual gender, gestation occurring sui generis
in this text, at the exact time when the narrator – the adult carrying the child
On a Serpentine Note
51
inside him, the child giving birth to the adult: “for the child that I was but that
I remain still” – is telling himself “a story, this story [cette histoire-ci]” (90).
How, then, should we interpret this “true childhood memory” whose
witness assures us that he has not dreamed it? Is he a conscious or
unconscious witness when he sets this limit? Who will tell the difference,
here, between dream and reality? Placed at the end, the account of the
memory appears to be the source of the text, but their borders are shifting, as
imprecise as the relation between inside and outside, front and back,
masculine and feminine, that the silkworms enact more than represent. In the
same way, this childhood memory is less a reminiscing, a remembrance of the
past, than the anticipation of an event still-to-come: does it come before or
after, to be recorded or erased, is it early or late, premonition or afterthought?
It can be read both ways, or in several ways, as this passage shows:
[…] all that goes before has not been dreamed, it is the narrative of
a true dream I’ve only just woken from. A “bad” dream, enough to
make you thrash about like a wounded devil in an invisible
straitjacket, when you can’t stop crumbling the sheets around you to
make a hole in the violence and find a way out. Far from Europe,
from one ocean to another, over the Cordilleras de los Andes, weeks
of hallucinatory travel during which I was dreaming of the
interruption of the dream, the sentence of life or death, the final
whistle blown by a verdict that never stopped suspending its
moratorium and stretching out its imminence. It has not yet taken
place but I am almost awake. I am writing with a view to waking up
and the better to prepare myself for the reality of the verdict, or
better, for the verdict when it will have become reality itself, that is
severity without appeal. (86. My emphasis.)
It’s obvious: it is impossible to re-establish the tangled temporality of this
passage, that slips imperceptibly from a “true dream” to being “almost
awake,” without ever giving up the possibility that this writing is itself only
the overspilling of the dream into reality, or the infinite awakening of a
waking dream… Just like the young boy cannot distinguish between the
different metamorphoses of the caterpillar in invisible transit (but just as
paradoxically: without transition) in the four moltings that rename it
(larva/worm, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly/moth), the reader cannot
determine the narrator’s state of consciousness, fluctuating to say the least, in
fact literally suspended between earth and sky, in the air, in the airplane
carrying him back between two worlds, neither underworld nor above-theworld, perhaps already from a place inside the outside, the other or outer
world from where he writes this text.
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In a chiasmatic movement contrasting with that of “Savoir” – Hélène
Cixous’ text that precedes it and registers the different traumatic experience
of the irreversible passage from “not seeing” to “seeing” – this memory of
Derrida’s is dedicated to yet another experience, that of seeing the invisible. It
is, in fact, this process of invisible transfiguration that is the object of the
half-scientific (the narrator will allude with a touch of amusement to this
“philosophy of nature for a shoebox,” 90), half-dreamy observation of the
young boy who grows his caterpillars: “I would observe the progress of the
weaving, of course [certes21], but basically [au fond] without seeing anything.
Like the movement of this production, like this becoming-silk of a silk I
would never have believed [crue] natural, as this extraordinary process
remained basically [au fond] invisible, I was above all struck by the
impossible embodied in these little creatures [vivants] in their shoebox” (88).
The child watched, he saw but without seeing anything, also doubtless
without knowing what he was gazing at while surveying so attentively these
worm-caterpillars when he “drank in with [his] eyes” these “voracious little
creatures” (89). The question of devouring with one’s eyes is indeed
significant for grasping what is at stake in this scene that concerns
transference, the transformation of the eye into a mouth (the child’s gaze,
under the pressure of his devouring curiosity, literally becomes a mouth), of
the mouth into an eye (the insatiable mouth of the worm-caterpillar is also an
eye that looks at the child and absorbs him). And this drinking in, this
swallowing, this throwing of oneself in front of oneself is taken very far in the
figure of this silkworm that ingurgitates, spits and swallows the secretion
pushed out, “outside itself, before itself ” (89).
•••
We cannot but underline here the great extent to which the choice of this
animal is over-determined from a “deconstructionist” viewpoint. The worm is
unsettling not only because it dissolves all differentiation of the limits
between subject and object, before and behind, head and tail, perceptible and
intelligible, he/it disturbs “the very concepts of opening and closing, interior
and exterior. The difference between inside and outside is never given, it
always remains to be produced” (Malabou 161-162). One can also say of the
worm as a figure of deconstruction that he/it “always in a certain way falls
prey to its own work [emport[é] par son propre travail]” (163). Just as
humble and “down-to-earth” as the hedgehog that, in “Che cos’è la
poesia?” represents the image par excellence of the poetic event, the
silkworm also keeps “very low, close to the earth” (Counterpath 270): he/it
straddles in its box hanging onto a thread “which is not a pathway, not a
On a Serpentine Note
53
Bewëgung, not opening onto any sense,” his journey remains without a
sound/silent, “of little meaning” (270, 272). Moreover, “animetaphor”22 of
deconstruction par excellence, the silkworm, as a figure of the sendingof/from, “does not form a unity and does not begin with itself, although
nothing present precedes it; it emits only by already sending back; it emits
only on the basis of the other, the other in itself without self. Everything
begins by referring back [par le renvoi], that is to say, does not begin” (Envoi
127. Derrida’s emphasis). Like the hedgehog, the silkworm carries the
poematic secret. Itself a formless form, or a thing hardly contained by a form,
the silkworm could be seen as a non-figurable figure of the khôra which
“does not possess anything as her own [en propre],” “neither metaphor nor
literal sense; no first sense which, in, by, or through it, could let itself figure
as something that would become a concept” (Malabou 144). Thus the worm,
as a figure carrying and deconstructing all figures, can be seen as always
alluding to this khôra, which “can also refer to the origin, the source of what
is; it could even designate the very basis [fond même] of being, its cause,
principle, the taking – or being – place of every place. […] Indeed, by means
of its impassiveness or neutrality it resists all foundational logic. Mother of all
forms […], it remains itself foreign [étrangère] to form” (144. My emphasis).
The worm is working his/its way out of all the oppositional couples forming
philosophical theory: in this scene belonging neither to “the scenic space of
presentation (Darstellung) or to that of representation,” he/it deforms/
transforms all the lines supposed to delineate mimêsis and imitation; he/it
opens a “structure still foreign to representation”: no longer an objective
“being-in-front-of,” but a “pre-ontological sending [that] does not gather
itself together.” For one might easily venture to say that the silkworm never
presents itself: “‘Before’ all these pairs [“production/reproduction,
presentation/representation, original/derived, and so on”], there will never
have been presentative simplicity but another fold, another difference,
unpresentable, unrepresentable, jective perhaps, but neither objective, nor
subjective, nor projective. What of the unpresentable or the unrepresentable?
How to think it?” (Envoi 115, 127. Derrida’s emphasis). This, again, sheds
some light on the kind of figure – disfigured, transfigured – the silkworm is,
or rather never is, in its ever-splitting self.
•••
Let us analyze this scene from another angle. What do we watch – what
concerns us – when we see nothing? Or rather, to put it differently: when we
see the materialization, the manifestation of no thing, or perhaps even
nothing. Once again, it is difficult to draw a line separating the subject from
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the object, but it is conceivable that in this “primitive scene” an
“unnatural” alliance, a transgression (in the literal sense of “passing through”)
between two species, the child and the animal, is occurring. Commenting on
Freud’s texts that deal with animals, Akira Mizuta Lippit underlines that “the
mixed cryptography of dreams forges a passage between the human and the
animal world”:
“According to Freud, the dream is, in short, like a regression to the
earliest past of the dreamer, like a reviviscence of his childhood. […]
Behind this individual childhood, we glimpse phylogenetic
childhood, the development of the human species, in which the
development of the individual is, in fact, only an abbreviated
repetition.” In this light, the animals’ wish-fulfillment dreams can be
seen as a primitive scene of the work of the dream; the dreamer
carries the trace of animality. (182)
It is clear that this phylogenetic aspect is inscribed – even pre-inscribed – in
the primitive animal form embodied by the worm. In Derrida’s childhood
memory, this “animetaphor” becomes the “site of a primitive truth and the
origin of dreams” (185), and it seems obvious that the choice of this animal
figure is all but arbitrary: extreme form of the other, of the other in oneself,
“something comes from the animal and inscribes the trace of its otherness in
language” (186). The worm is also essentially movement, transport and
transference, “originary translation: [it] tells what it means in another system”
(182). Moreover, while according to Freud the unconscious is “unable to keep
a secret,” Derrida’s worm also represents a figure of resistance, that keeps to
himself and in himself its/his secret: the worm incorporates “the possibility of
a preverbal or simply a non verbal secret” (Comment ne pas parler 550).
Indeed, the insistence throughout the narrative on the bottom (fond)
clearly indicates exactly what is turned bottom-up, if I may put it this way, in
this scene. Because although the child was unable to distinguish the sex of
this worm – “There was indeed something like a brown mouth but you could
not recognize in it the orifice you had to imagine to be at the origin of their
silk. […] But basically without seeing anything (Mais sans rien voir, au
fond)” (A Silkworm 88-89): is it milk, saliva or sperm in the secretion of this
silk thread, erection or detumescence in this “little fantasy of a penis,” or is it
“feminine ejaculation” (89)? The narrator does not exclude any sexual
difference, he prefers not to lift the veil from whatever is not defined between
them, without sex or gender yet, that which is still trying to engender itself,
which is molting and stirring between them, crossing from one to the other –
that which carries the secret of this primitive scene, precisely this question of
the fundus, bottomless bottom that pierces and shows through all mysteries of
the origins (and in Derrida’s work these are, as we know, always “pulled up
On a Serpentine Note
55
by the roots,” the entire arkhê de-posited like this “caving in of the
foundation at the bottom,”23 bottomless bottom of the origin).
“Sans rien voir au fond”: this expression, “au fond,” is, in fact, repeated,
varied throughout the text, and we might say that in this variation is operated
the véraison imperceptibly at work here, the one that matters to Derrida when
he declares: “My sole concern is not that of interrupting this animalist
‘vision’ but of taking care not to sacrifice to it any difference or alterity, the
fold of any complication, the opening of any abyss to come” (The Animal
129). The expression impresses us as the very figure of this experience of the
invisible consisting of “getting to the bottom” (as one says “see in secret [voir
dans le secret]”), The Gift of Death 88), at the bottom of an “absolute
invisibility, the absolutely non-visible” (90) that no longer depends on seeing,
but on hearing, on the vocal, the phonic. Throughout the text of “A
Silkworm…,” this “fond,” heard at once as a noun and as an adverbial
expression meaning “fundamentally,” “basically,” “in truth,” resurfaces, with
a discrete but nonetheless strange insistence. When the narrator writes that he
“sees nothing at the bottom,” is he speaking of a background that escapes his
scrutiny,24 no matter how intense, or is this just a manner of speaking? These
slight fluctuations of language are very frequent in Derrida’s texts, and this
one is no exception, since in the repetition of this fragment of a sentence,
seemingly perfectly identical each time, we can discern a slipping that is not
clearly visible but makes it all the same possible to glimpse, merely through
an inflection of the voice, another way of hearing this phrase. We could in
fact say that the word “bottom” (fond) always opens onto another
indistinguishable bottom, just like the mouth (bouche) of the worm that
obstructs (bouche), in a way, the child’s view. We begin to notice the
“invisible progress of the weaving” (A Silkworm 89) that takes place in the
figure itself, in the way it works language, smoothes it, creases it, stretches it
out, cuts it, in short, animates it poetically: literally like a worm.
•••
In truth and paradoxically, with this infinitesimal phonetic play (trans)ported
by the worm that goes almost unseen, we touch bottom. The secret event of
the “Silkworm” is perhaps, in fact, taking place here, at the surface of the
phrase, in a nuance, an imperceptible nuance of a nuance, in this movement
of the smallest difference that lets itself be less seen than heard, and that
performs without representing the infinite differentiation process also at work
in the worm: literally, figuratively, with no definite verdict ever being
pronounced. Perhaps there is nothing to “look for,” nothing to disclose in this
text with no stunning revelation other than this subtlety of difference, this
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movement of the “there is” (il y a), these micro-events that materialize almost
invisibly, almost carrying away the secret with them.
What we stumble upon here at the microscopic scale of linguistic
material, the silkworms play out more overtly by enacting, while the narrator
unfolds what at first appears to be an extended metaphor, a “spun metaphor”
(une métaphore filée), a fundamental questioning about the identity of the
rhetorical figure at stake in this scene that does not decide between literal and
figurative, but instead, makes one rub against the other, flow into the other, as
the intricate figures of metaphor and metonymy do here. Because, although
there is no doubt that the silkworm is a metaphor – and even twice rather than
once, since by its transmutations from worm to caterpillar to butterfly it is the
perfect image of transport, of the transformation of the word into poetic
object, taking flight – it also functions in the narrative as a metonymy (but at
what point does a “spun” metaphor extend out of its spinning to become a
metonymy?), that is, like this figure which, stitch by stitch, step by step,
tirelessly advances the narration in its “invisible progress” toward the
unfathomable figure that stirs it and draws it in but which it never explicitly
names. Is it not this transfiguration that the child, the future philosopher and
writer, recognizes as his own (“propre” although not proper) auto-graphical
“crossed-truth” (“transvérité”) (Circumfession 5) in this worm that so
intimately resembles him, not through a mimetic likeness, but through an
altogether other and true likelihood:
I would observe the invisible progress of the weaving, a little as
though I were about to stumble on the secret of a marvel, the secret
of this secret over there, at the infinite distance of the animal, of this
little innocent member [verge], so foreign yet so close in its
incalculable distance. I cannot say that I appropriated the operation,
nor will I say anything other or the contrary. What I appropriated for
myself without turning it back on myself [sans le retourner vers moi:
one should patiently analyze the effect of these prepositions – vers, à
travers – reverberating throughout this text], what I appropriated for
myself over there, afar off, was the operation, the operation through
which the worm itself secreted its secretion. It secreted it, the
secretion. It secreted. Intransitively. It dribbled. It secreted
absolutely, it secreted a thing that would never be an object to it, an
object for it, an object it would stand over against [auquel il ferait
face en vis-à-vis]. It did not separate itself from its work. The
silkworm produced outside itself, a thing before itself, what would
never leave it, a thing that was no other than itself, a thing that was
not a thing, a thing that belonged to it, to whom it was properly due.
It projected outside what proceeded from it and remained at bottom
at the bottom of it [au fond, au fond de lui] […]. (A Silkworm 89)
On a Serpentine Note
57
It is necessary to quote the text at length in order to let the reader hear,
through the twists and turns of the winding sentences, their starts and stops,
the subtle rhythmicity that produces the effect of a secret. Because the crucial
event of “A Silkworm…,” if there is one, takes place right there, on the
filament of this phrasing, of this writing that, like the secretion of the worm,
is always fleeing forward, under “the pressure of the narration itself, the
marvelous and terrible movement that the act of writing exerts on the truth,”25
as Blanchot puts it. The rhetoric of nuance, of the slight touch, that requires
so many foldings and unfoldings, can never be more explicit than in the
process of infinitesimal differentiation played out in this passage, and
particularly in the figure of the ver that keeps the little boy constantly on the
edge of understanding, of believing what he sees (he is, and we with him,
always “on the verge,” the English term echoing “this little fantasy of a
penis,” this “member” [petite verge] not so “innocent” after all). For, as we
foresaw from the start of the narrative, these worms in their box could very
well be a “true” memory, but they could also be nothing more than a figure,
an image pointing to another, even more secret secret that remains in the
shadows, the secret of poetic creation or of “the ambiguity [équivoque] of the
sexual experience at its birth” (The Animal 36). Moreover, the worms in the
shoebox might also be interpreted as an insertion of the meditation developed
in “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” a way to place the philosophical reflection
on another level, that of poetic narrative, the childhood memory acting, as it
were, like a miniature box, a “shoebox” fitted into the philosophical text
containing it, but able to reflect the entire work, and even perhaps to contain
it in turn. For although it is specified that “It was not impossible, of course
[certes: again...], to distinguish between a head and a tail26 and so, virtually,
to see the difference between a part and a whole” (A Silkworm 88), is it not
precisely this distinction that this text, “this story,” certainly makes it
impossible to ascertain (“certes”: like the worming out of its very secret,
clearly heard here, of course)?
“Marking the difference”: this is, in a sense, the sole concern of this
dream-like narrative. And Derrida warns us elsewhere that “It does not
suffice to know the difference; one must be capable of it, must be able to do
it, or know how to do it – and doing here means marking” (Circumfession
167). While the child is still able to differentiate between a part and the whole
when he observes these worms, things are infinitely more complex for the
reader in the text: how can he be sure that this “memory” is only a part of “A
Silkworm of One’s Own,” which explains and elucidates the title? The
childhood memory might tend, on the contrary, to make one think that it is
always possible, even virtually, for a part to become greater than the whole.
In the same way, how can we decide if the silkworm is used here as a
metaphor or a metonymy? When we read this passage describing the
secretion of the worm, that suddenly illustrates almost too transparently the
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question of writing in its utmost intransitivity, what figure of speech are we
dealing with? A metaphor, a metonymy, a hybrid mix? Crisis of the ver(se)
illustrated by the worm, “crisis of the versus” played out most intimately in
this miniature théâtre de poche, brushing up against one another, verse
against worm. The question – question of rhetoric far from being merely a
“rhetorical question” – was already anticipated in The Postcard where the
narrator exhorted his feminine interlocutor to follow him and to “have
confidence” in him regarding these delicate questions: “Of course it will be
difficult to decide, to sort out, to separate on the one hand and the other: when
is it a question of all this directly, or ‘literally’; and when by means of a
detour, a figure or presupposition? Have confidence in me for once” (177).
Far from being specious, this question, on the contrary brings us to the heart,
the very nucleus of the text.
Hence, though at first we might have thought, rather naively, that this
silkworm is a metaphor, even an “animetaphor,” when we follow more
attentively its “invisible progress of the weaving,” we realize that the figure
of the metaphor is insufficient to explain what is happening here – for
example, the secretion between what writes itself (s’écrire) and what conceals
itself (sécrire) – and that this worm, that also weaves the metaphor of writing
at a certain level, is not simply a figure, and even less an illustration. No
zoomorphic fable here – unless it be Pongian: Derrida’s relation to the
animot and to the bestiary is of a totally different nature, and we clearly feel
that recourse to the metaphor is too narrow a perspective and does not do
justice to the process at work in this spinning that takes place by engendering
itself, originating from the figure, extending from it while remaining attached,
coming back to it. In a way, we are, like the child, divided between seeing
and believing: “For the child could not believe what he was seeing, he could
not see what he thought he was seeing, he was already telling himself a story,
this story […]” (A Silkworm 90). We can always believe that the text
functions under the régime of the metaphor, but we see in fact something
entirely other at work, we witness the production, the gestation, through
minute displacements, of another figural labor, a disfiguration (or
“deconstruction”) of the figure that, by analogy with the metamorphosis of
the worm, is being embodied before our eyes, attempting to bring into being,
out of the old rhetoric with its worn out corpus, “like a bark with holes in it”
(91), an entirely new figure.
•••
As we have said, in “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” what gives particular force
to the primitive scene is the tête-à-tête – strange tête-à-tête without head-on
On a Serpentine Note
59
confrontation – between the child and the animal, this unnamable “vis-àvis” (83). Let us return for a moment to the extraordinary mouth fantasy
exposed in this text, a mouth less seen as an opening, an orifice (from the
Latin os, oris, “bouche”) than as blocking the view, a fantasy mouth larger
than life of course, in which the child’s gaze is absorbed in an almost
hallucinatory vision of pure manducation. This “brown mouth” – that blurs all
delimitation between before and behind, the silk-producing glands of the
caterpillar being either labial or rectal, specifies the narrator, who has just
learned this detail – this “brown mouth” whose bottom the child neither sees
nor could ever see, reminds us of certain concepts proposed by Maria Torok
and Nicolas Abraham concerning the work of mourning at work in the
metaphor. We all remember the major distinction between introjection and
incorporation that marks their conceptual reinterpretation:
Even when denied introjection, not every narcissistic loss is fated to
incorporation. Incorporation results from those losses that for some
reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In these special cases the
impossibility of introjection is so profound that even our refusal to
mourn is prohibited from being given a language, that we are
debarred from providing any indication whatsoever that we are
inconsolable. Without the escape-route of somehow conveying our
refusal to mourn, we are reduced to a radical denial of the loss, to
pretending that we had absolutely nothing to lose. […] The words
that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears
that cannot be shed—everything will be swallowed along with the
trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved [emphasized in
French: mis en conserve]. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret
tomb [emphasized in French: caveau secret] inside the subject. (115116)
In fact, Torok and Abraham connect the metaphor with the mouth in a
manner very pertinent for our discussion, noting that “the metaphor ends
where it began – in the mouth,” as Akira Lippit aptly puts it (192). In
“Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” they propose
the term “antimetaphor” to describe the figure of destruction of the
representation that occurs when “the subject is confronted with an
inconsolable loss, […] the loss of the very possibility of loss” (Lippit 192).
We could, of course, think that this primitive scene trying to expose – and to
keep silent – an unrepresentable mouth that eats itself only to excrete itself
and return to itself again in a never-ending process is suited to this definition
of the metaphor as a figure of mourning. This mouth, this orifice in which it is
impossible to discern either sex or sense, is the limit of the unnamable,
located at the limit of that which cannot be symbolized. Does not this mouth
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that eats itself without ever swallowing itself without a remnant signal the
collapse of metaphoricity? Is this figure not “consumed literally rather than
figuratively,” asks Lippit, when “the concept becomes an edible metonymic
thing” (194)? The “ver à soi” constantly superimposed over the “ver à
soie,” at the edge of the eye and of the ear – the ear perceives no signifying
difference, only a silent letter retains the trace of the smallest visual
difference – is a troubling figure because it de-structures and undermines the
metaphor; “soi” and “soie” keep calling to each other, coming close,
becoming ever closer, without ever coinciding perfectly. In other words, the
metaphor does not stabilize; it oscillates and vibrates between words,
maintaining the separation between them – and this, despite the fantasy of
non-separation that is elaborated in the narrative (“It did not separate itself
from its work,” A Silkworm 89). This work of mourning in the figure also
resonates with the definition of “antimetaphor” given by Abraham and Torok
from a psychoanalytical perspective on mourning: “If we are determined to
see a form of language in the processes governing this type of fantasy, we
will need a new figure of speech in our traditional inventory, namely the
figure of the active destruction of representation (figuration)” (132). In their
view, this antimetaphor is not related to the process of introjection or of
melancholic bereavement of the subject who refuses to mourn, but rather to
incorporation, where “it is not simply a matter of reverting to the literal
meaning of words,” they write, “but of using them in such a way – whether in
speech or deed – that their very capacity for figurative representation
(figurabilité) is destroyed” (132).
Is this not what takes place in this primitive scene where, through the
worm’s mouth-work, through the literally invisible secretion of the silk and of
the textual thread, we can witness such a phantasmatic process of
incorporation, the actual elaboration of a secret crypt? The question of the
work of mourning is certainly worth investigating here, and perhaps even
more importantly the question of the “mourning of mourning,” of the desire
to put an end to mourning, to kill death as it were, as we see in another of
Derrida’s phantasms, this one appearing in several different texts and
expressing the wish to finally be able to cross to the other side “without
wearing or making anyone else wear mourning” (A Silkworm 42). The
silkworm is, in any case, an extraordinary figure for the work of mourning,
especially, perhaps, because it seems not to lose anything, but appears, on the
contrary, to be (re)born constantly to itself in endless unforeseen beginnings
where each time, in its four moltings, nothing remains, or almost nothing (a
pierced shell) of its previous life. And yet, in the seemingly so innocent
curiosity of the child, such an attentive witness but also so absent from
himself, an attentive ear could detect the trace of an inconsolable mourning, a
figure forbidden here to signal its presence, be it ever so slightly. Because this
primitive scene is that of narcissistic loss, rather than that of construction of
On a Serpentine Note
61
the self: in its ceaseless activity of construction, in its tireless productivity, the
worm is the locus of a loss that does not avow itself as loss; except for
leaving a filament, a trace in the writing, and particularly in the figure. For
when we look more closely, it seems that the silkworm undermines the figure
that produces it: we might say that it disfigures the metaphor, not in view of
introjection (which would again be a narcissistic re-appropriation, albeit
mournful, of the self), but in view of incorporation, that is, of a
transfiguration that “implies the phantasmal destruction of the very act that
makes metaphor possible” (Lippit 193. His emphasis). In our view, the
silkworm’s mouth-work would then be linked with such a literal, and not
merely figurative, incorporation of the secret. In this childhood memory, in
this cryptic fantasy, what is at stake is not so much “to put into words the
originary oral void” (193. Lippit’s emphasis) – that would be introjection –
but to displace oneself invisibly to the place of the secret, through this mouth
that both keeps the secret and spits it out, leaves it be and produces it, in
short, incorporates it in the most literal and performative sense of the word.
And, as Abraham and Torok say, it is the “figure of the active destruction of
representation” at work in the phantasmatic process of incorporation that
“produces a secret, a non figurative path to the topography of loss, of
absence, of death” (193). Although at first sight this childhood memory
seemed to focus on “life,” we come to see that the force of the experience
described resides just as much, if not more, in the way it ties life to death, and
therefore to this “psychoanalytic economy of secrecy as mourning or of
mourning as secrecy” (The Gift of Death 22) which is cultivated in this scene.
To put it yet another way: the silkworm swallows the secret, it swallows itself
completely like the secret of the text and the opus, and it is this process of
invisibility of the self, infinitely kept in reserve, concealed and sealed while
the worm continues to spell out in black and white, “wrapping itself in white
night” (A Silkworm 90), that produces the secret event of the secret in this
text.
Hence, the silkworm is a primordial, primitive figure of the double logic
of the secret as theorized by Derrida, who finds support, in turn, in the theory
of Torok and Abraham. This topological displacement constituting the
essential operation of the worm – where the secret subjected to the pressure of
repression is itself repressed, encrypted in incorporation – might also evoke
the difference discussed in Archive Fever, where Derrida elucidates once
again the crucial distinction between the operations of repression
(Verdrängung: in French, refoulement) and suppression (Unterdrückung: in
French, répression) which become compressed as it were (as was the case for
the processes of introjection and incorporation in the work of mourning,
before Abraham and Torok’s conceptual redefinition):
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Unlike repression (Verdrängung), which remains in its operation and
in its result, suppression (Unterdrückung) effects what Freud calls a
“second censorship” – between the conscious and the preconscious –
or rather affects the affect, which is to say, that which can never be
repressed in the unconscious but only suppressed and displaced in
another affect.27
Between repression and suppression, there is a major shift in topos in which,
similarly to what happens between introjection and incorporation, the passage
to another scale, from one system to the other, takes place. The secret of the
silkworm is derived from this double logic: its secret is certainly not more
readable once it is exposed; it could even be said that it is its very visibility
that renders it invisible. The secret, or rather the secrets of the silkworm –
concerning creation, coupling, death and rebirth – are no longer a matter of
something hidden or forbidden (the secret is not related to unattainable
information, nor to some lure or bait – although a worm might well suggest
this!), any more than they lead to revelation or unveiling. The secretion of the
worm that swallows itself, that “prepar[es] itself to hide itself,” that “lik[es] to
hide itself, with a view to coming out and losing itself” (A Silkworm 90),
reminds us of another topic, much more unfigurable and uncanny in its
effects, because we must never forget that the only thing that does not let
itself become secret is affect.
Indeed, “A Silkworm of One’s Own” confronts us with an unheard-of
secret. The silkworm has nothing to hide, to display, to conceal or to show:
“art that does not decipher, but is the cipher of the undecipherable,” to quote
Blanchot once again.28 The worm draws all its phantasmatic prégnance from
its infinite relocation to the place of the secret. Always shifting within the
four walls of its enclosure, but overexposed to the gaze, itself the one who
oversteps boundaries, always in transit through the four phases of its molting
in which he resembles himself so little every time, the worm is the stand-in
(figurant) for the secret, its mute prosopopeia rather than its figure or
metaphor, a pre-figuration that always only announces itself.
What, then, (or who) makes the difference? Where does the silk thread
pass (between real and virtual, factual and fictional, truth and pretense, the
literal and the figural, etc.)? And what makes one believe, against all odds,
ignoring probability and likelihood, in the chance that everything might be
“true” in this memory, and that “here, so affirms the narrator, [he]
embroider[s] no longer” (A Silkworm 87)? What convinces us that a laying
bare is actually taking place in this cryptography, and that what is uncovered
is a “cross-truth” of the narrator, or perhaps even of the author? No
confirmation is given, except the voice, a certain tone, an intonation, an
intensity of accent that despite being totally indefinable and unpresentable,
suddenly carries off our faith. If, as we intimated, “A Silkworm…” brings to
On a Serpentine Note
63
life – in the figure of this worm that devours, erases and subtilizes itself – a
topos and a topology of the secret, this does not go without a rhetoric and a
tropology, and this is one of the most compelling aspects in the Derridian
approach to animality.
•••
Coda: “…as if thrice adream”
One last scene, in the very head-for-tail logic I have been following here.
Better still: a poetic, enigmatic dream image to trail off without closing. It
comes from a poem depicting the chance encounter between a man and a
snake. Together with “A Silkworm of One’s Own” and Valéry’s text,
“Ébauche d’un serpent/Silhouette of a Snake” that Derrida was to comment
thrice,29 this Snake, a long narrative poem by D.H. Lawrence, is the third
serpent to surface in the bestiary of the philosopher. Derrida commented on it
in an improvised session of the Seminar La bête et le souverain, recognizing
in the fleeting meeting between man and animal the archetypal scene of
hospitality at the well, on a “hot, hot day” in July, in Sicily, in the “intense
still noon,” a volcano smoking in the background (the poem is signed
“Taormina,” and mentions Etna). The serpent arrived first to “drink at my
water-trough,” says the man recounting the scene before chasing it away in a
reckless, violent gesture: letting his unexpected visitor pass before him at
first, the man soon heeds, out of “pettiness” he says, the “voice of [his]
education” urging him to kill his guest. More than a figure
anthropomorphized by the poet, who resists the temptation of making the
animal speak through prosopopeia, as Valéry does in his “Ébauche d’un
serpent,” Lawrence’s snake is a poetic figure altogether relevant in the
context of the questioning introduced by Derrida, because it is at the
crossroads of several heterogeneous worlds, both animal and divine (“And
looked around like a god”), animal and sovereign (“like a king”), and,
moreover, an uncrowned king who is also blind (the poem says: “unseeing,”
which can be taken to mean both blind and unable to see, who uses a sense
other than sight, another vision – the snake’s secret likeness with the poet’s
voyance, precisely because of his blindness). “For he seemed to me again like
a king,/ Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,/ Now due to be
crowned again”: this snake is then directly related to the question of
sovereignty, since he is presented as a king in exile, a king without a crown
waiting to recover his kingdom, a king who exerts his priority, his precedence
and his privilege by arriving first to drink at the well (archetypal scene of
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hospitality, as noted, but also an ironic rereading by Lawrence of the Fall in
the Genesis, as Derrida astutely points out30).
This scene between the man and the animal holds Derrida’s interest
because of this encounter that is also a missed opportunity, a scene where two
worlds, two sovereignties are suddenly brought face-to-face. In his
commentary, Derrida insists on the three-fold nature of this “like a king”: the
snake is like a king only if we compare it to the world of men, and not to the
“underworld” that is his domain (the world of the man and the animal remain
wholly separate, incommensurable: the one and the other do not inhabit the
same world except for the lightning moment of this furtive encounter). This
poem is also of great interest to Derrida, because in it he finds a striking
reformulation of the haunting question of the visage that has preoccupied him
since Levinas’ hesitant response to this question. In the poem, Laurence gives
a straight answer on this subject, his snake having not only a head, a throat,
eyes (and even a gaze, albeit unseeing), but also a tongue, lips (“seeming to
lick his lips”), gums, a mouth (“his straight mouth”), a neck, shoulders
(“snake-easing his shoulders”) and even a back. Moreover, the poet does not
stop at the serpent’s “face,” he also depicts him dreaming and meditating,
looking at the world around him like a sovereign, after he has drunk; he goes
even farther, extending these “human” traits to the place itself, a sort of
“matrice” (a khôra?) serving as the site of this scene, in which even
seemingly inanimate elements are given “facial” animation (for example, the
wall into which the snake disappears is described as “the earth-lipped fissure
in the wall-front,” as if the wall itself had the structure of a face in which the
“horrid black hole” (twice evoked, “dreadful hole”) can only represent the
mouth… or female genitalia, a black hole that at once horrifies and fascinates
the narrator, overcome by the sight: “I think it did not hit him, / But suddenly
that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste / Writhed
like lightning, and was gone / Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in
the wall-front, / At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with
fascination.”).
Throughout this improvised session, Derrida himself carries out a
fascinating exercise of “explication de texte,” line by line, delivered briskly –
a rather rare experience for him, an on-the-spot reading that is at once
masterly lesson, translation, commentary, and something else, somewhat
resembling a secondary process of some sort, like someone who recounts a
dream and starts to “associate” more or less freely using the raw material
provided by the text of his dream. Derrida’s commentary/translation becomes,
in this instance, both sinuous and halting, the workings of a liaison and
déliaison, a connection/cut interruptive process not unlike that of analytic
reading itself, and which also implies from the outset, in its slippery and jerky
manner, a “mimetic” response to this very snake, in its slithering move, both
undulating and abrupt (the poem says he “writhed like lightning”). Several
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aspects of this scene deserve detailed and attentive analysis, but for the
moment I will look more closely at one in particular. The poem in fact
contains a verse fragment that is especially wonderful and that evokes the
meditative, dreamy mood of the snake. All along, Derrida remains very
attentive to the nuances of the different dream-states in this scene that is, in
fact, all dream-like mainly because of a certain slowness that gives it its
phantasmatic dimension, while bringing to mind a certain rituality, a
melancholy sacredness, perhaps that of the god not yet withdrawn, not yet
chased away in the beast. Thus, Derrida insists in his commentary of the
scene on the fact that this snake (it is his singularity), while drinking from the
water-trough, “mused a moment” (word translated into French as “rêva”).
Derrida specifies: “‘rêva,’ ‘mused,’ that is, he meditated, not dreamed in the
sense of dream, Traum; it’s ‘rêvassa,’ ‘mused,’ meditated a moment.” Then
just before the violent gesture that Derrida calls attempted murder, before the
man gives in to this death-driven “instinct” called forth by his “accursed
human education” that orders him to kill this snake who (for it is clear that,
since the narrator calls him “someone,” “Someone was before me at my
water-trough,” the snake is never a “what” but always a “who”), who, then, is
his “honored” guest, we read these lines:
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flicked his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black;
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
Derrida points out once more the difference between dream and reverie (“this
time it’s the dream, dreamily”), insisting on this line “as if thrice adream,”
that seems to give him particular delight and even to make him fall into a
dream right away, as he utters these words very quickly, in an impulsive/
compulsive manner of his own, as if perhaps he glimpses, as he is saying the
words, “the meaning move along the phrase like the rings of a snake”
(Rogues 4): “the dream again, ‘as if thrice adream,’ thrice adream three times
adream in a dream, three times in a dream, adream in one word, n’est-ce pas,
thrice adream, three times in a dream.” What is particularly moving here, at
this moment of his reading where he seems to espouse “the animated or
animal body” (4) of the poem, is the all-mighty (toute-puissante)
performativity of the formula that comes to him, that opens the dream not
only onto yet Another Scene, but onto a bottomless depth, an infinity beyond
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all measure and all reckoning (thrice: from this point on, the scene divides
and re-divides infinitely). But what is moving as well, and most moving of
all, is that Derrida dreamily repeats this expression “as if thrice adream” in a
murmur, as though to himself (and, of course, this “as if,” in French “comme
si,” could only address him as the Analyst, the secret elect one31 of this
scene)… three times: as his own magic wish, his oblique offering for the
animal.
(Translated by Agnès Jacob.)
NOTES
1
This passage is taken from Rilke’s Eighth Elegy (141, 143). Further, Rilke writes of
the animal that it is “Free from death,” and also the following, which sheds light on
the question of death for the animal, as Derrida will so closely scrutinize it: “Always
when we face // the creation / we see only / a kind of reflection // of the freedom / that
we ourselves have dimmed. / Or it happens // that an animal / some mute beast / raises
its head // and imperturbably / looks right through us. / That’s what fate means: // to
be facing each other / and nothing but each other / and to be doing it forever” (Rilke
145, 147).
2
Bailly 90. This text was read at an event organized by Gloria Friedman at the Paris
Museum of Modern Art on June 19, 2003.
3
Surya 25-27. In a note to his essay, Surya points out the “violent” use that Kafka
makes of the word “croaked.” These quotations find a powerful echo in the context of
the debate between Derrida and Heidegger on the question of dying, to which the
animal presumably has no access: “‘croaked’: Kafka uses the word with a suggestion
of violence, when he could have simply said ‘dead.’” In A Report to an Academy
(251, 253), the protagonist, a humanized ape, says of another who had become almost
as human as himself: ‘the performing ape Peter, who died [crevé: croaked] not so
long ago and who had some small local reputation…’; speaking of his own conditions of captivity, he says: ‘All the time facing that locker – I should certainly have
perished [je serais sans nul doute crevé: I would certainly have croaked]’” (Surya 63.
His emphasis). [The English translation misses altogether both distinctions, the Heideggerian one between “to die” and “perish,” and the one between “to perish” and “to
croak” (Translator’s Note).]
4
Michel Surya writes: “This work will be done one day, when thinking will stop
running away from what shames it. That is to say, when thinking will no longer be
ashamed of what it fled and will no longer flee what it had always been ashamed of
(because, as I implied, it is not that thinking is not ready to conceive what Bataille
proposes, it is rather that thinking itself is not ready for it, discards it, feigns, presents
itself as this experience that in fact it disavows)” (52. His emphasis).
5
Of this autoalloportrait, Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “He lays bare his very modesty
completely. This is the nakedness reflected in the depth of the cat’s eyes, in the depth
On a Serpentine Note
67
of its narrowed pupils reduced to dash-like slits. The other of the same is there, in
secret, the allos of the autos, the allautos of an allautegory” (77).
6
Quoted by Asselin (65).
7
Derrida’s emphasis. Just like in “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in which Derrida lists
all the words/worms crawling with homonyms of “ver” that traverse the fabric of his
work’s both close- and loose-weaving, he displays in “The Animal That Therefore I
Am (More to Follow)” the parade of his “fabulous bestiary” (63) – “heavenly bestiary” (62), says he – which has been under way since the beginnings of his work: an
inventory less like that of Noah’s ark (where the animals went two-by-two in view of
reproduction and “salvation”), than like that of a much more fabulous zoê’s ark.
8
Prosopopeia that Derrida releases (as he does with so many other rhetorical figures)
from the confines to which it seemed to be limited, in order to give it a much larger
scope, literally undefined and unheard-of. We are, of course, reminded of what he
writes in “Tête-à-tête,” about the apes in/of Camilla Adami’s painting Primati, that go
beyond all simian mimicry, or any “mimetic monkeying.” “Each ‘ape’ looks at you,
unique, all alone, mortal, from its singular place, each of them takes you aside, refuses his name, apes nothing, lets you know, in his absolute idiom, he apes you undeniably.” And here is these apes’ “answer,” “calling out to you without saying a word,”
addressed to “a great thinker of the century” (Heidegger remaining unnamed), who
considered the animal to be “poor in world” [weltarm]: “I am neither beast nor person, I am someone but no one: neither person nor subject, nor the subject of a portrait.
I cannot be tamed, you cannot set me up in your house, nor in your museums, not
even, as so many painters have done, in a corner of a scene or a painting. I might
seem to lack sovereignty, as I lack speech, but no. I understand myself otherwise, try
to understand. Your speech is not something I miss, I don’t have it but I give it to you,
and I touch you, and this, believe me, I who speak to you in tongues, is not one of
these figures (the absent one, the dead, the ghost, the personified thing, the man or the
‘animal’), the totem that a puppeteer makes speak out in what you, humans, you rhetoricians, would asininely call a prosopopeia” (Tête-à-tête 14-15. Derrida’s emphasis).
9
Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Book 2, Chap. 12, 331. Quoted by
Derrida (The Animal 6). Derrida’s emphasis.
10
“‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”
35, 34, 39-40.
11
The Writing of the Disaster 72, 114. We will at times prefer the term “primitive” further along.
12
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s expression (216), used to refer to Blanchot.
13
“Battle with the Angel” 130-131.
14
In a passage of The Lost (242-243), Daniel Mendelsohn draws a striking parallel
between boxes and arks, noting that Noah’s ark, vessel of salvation in which “the
humans and the animals are utterly helpless, cast about in the waters without any
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Ginette Michaud
control over their fate,” is not without similarity to the “box of life tossed about in a
violent universe that is breaking at its seams.” Both the ark and the box, this rectangular “blank object,” connect “things to their opposites, creation to destruction, destruction to rebirth [...]”; both share a persistent image of “infantile helplessness,” notes
Mendelsohn with remarkable insight.
15
Experience similar to that of “seeing oneself see,” or to the textual operation illustrated and reflected, in its turn, by the silkworms: “Love made itself make love right
next to the watching dreaming child” (A Silkworm 90). One can’t help thinking of the
“ça me regarde” felt by Derrida when he avows a certain fear: “I’m afraid because
it/id concerns me [ça me regarde], because the other thing is watching what I do […].
It is I who am being read first of all by what I write [...].” (Ja, or the faux-bond II 66).
16
In French, the indistinction between the “who” and the “what” is enforced by the
grammar, the same pronoun designating the subject as well as the object. (Translator’s Note.)
17
In a passage transcribed from a recording in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida notes that “the vertigo is unheimlich but that it is necessary [il faut le vertige].
This vertigo is that of an interrogation into the animal and, finally, it’s the concept of
world itself that becomes problematic and fragile” (The Animal 155).
18
Cf. this passage from Counterpath: “Most often I watch myself traveling without
changing places, an immobile voyeur who would analyze what befalls his body in
movement in the world. Movie camera without a camera, kinetoscope for a sort of
errance that is forever encrypted: the always incognito displacement of a secret that I
transport without knowing. Even when I speak in front of large crowds. I feel that I
transport this secret (I can hear its heartbeat like a child in the womb) but don’t understand anything about it” (13). Like the silkworms that engender themselves by
secreting themselves, the child carries and is carried by the secret, like a mother with
her child, he is at once delivered of and delivering the secret.
19
“Envers” in French conveys many meanings, all present at once in this occurrence:
wrong side, inside, reverse, underside, underneath, haywire, upside down, and “Purl
one, one plain,” a knitting term. (Translator’s Note.)
20
This phantasm also surfaced in Monolingualism of the Other, where “the dream,
which must have started to be dreamt, at that time, was perhaps to make something
happen to this language” (51). This scene calls up images very close to those in “A
Silkworm…,” particularly the one related to the tattooing of the tongue, “a splendid
form, concealed under garments in which blood mixes with ink” (52), resembling “an
unknown blood, a red almost black, [which] came from within to soften and penetrate
the skin, then open the way for the moth’s wings [les ailes du papillon]” (91). The
translator rightly chooses here “moth” over a more predictable “butterfly,” as an invisible phonic thread makes its way between “mouth” and “moth”): as if, this allmighty as if of fantasy and fiction, from one text to the other, the dreamer was following his dream by varying it (one of the poetic operations of véraison).
On a Serpentine Note
69
21
“Certes” is the anagram in French of the word “secret,” which is lost in translation
in this passage: each occurrence of this adverb in Derrida’s text, but also beyond the
range of this particular text, in all the folds of his work considered as a “whole,” thus
marks a virtual re-inscription, even effaced or silenced, of the secret in the making,
there, under our noses so to speak, “at the moment called the instar ” (A Silkworm
88), at the instant, then, when the word is pronounced, be it out loud or softly, or even
only thought, without being uttered. “Certes” is another way of saying “without saying.”
22
Lippit 183. His emphasis.
23
Derrida “Mais qu’est-ce donc qui arrive, d’un coup, à une langue d’arrivée?” (i). In
my copy, Derrida had added himself by hand the last words of this sentence, stressing
again this question of the “bottom” (fond).
24
Verse fragment from Mallarmé: there is indeed also the question of “scrutinizing
the Origin” (scruter l’Origine) in this new version of a “crise de vers.”
25
Quoted by Alferi 153.
26
We are reminded here of Baudelaire’s letter-dedication in Petits Poèmes en prose,
where, starting with a serpent cut into pieces, he introduces this new concept of fragmented/unfinished work that “has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both tail and head, alternatively and reciprocally” (129).
27
Archive Fever 28. Derrida’s emphasis.
28
Quoted by Alferi 159.
29
Jacques Derrida comments on this poem twice in The Animal That Therefore I Am
(65-68, 110), and again, he alludes to it briefly in the “envoi” preceding “The Reason
of the Strongest” (Rogues 5). Derrida’s ninth session (February 27, 2002) of his Seminar La bête et le souverain was devoted to this poem. All quotations, as well as the
lines from the poem “Snake” by D.H. Lawrence, are taken from this session.
30
In the Seminar, Derrida insists on the fact that there is no woman in the entire rewriting of this biblical scene, but in his essay “The Reason of the Strongest,” he will
give a more subtle turn to this apparent absence, noticing her return as a rêvenante,
hearing the silent call of a woman’s voice “deep within the voice of the poet”: “Deep
within the voice of the poet, it is no doubt a woman who says ‘I’ in order to call for its
return: ‘And I wished he would come back, my snake’” (Rogues 5).
31
This is how he wants to be seen by them, these beings who are watching him: “I am
saying ‘they,’ ‘what they call an animal,’ in order to mark clearly the fact that I have
always secretly exempted myself from that world, and to indicate that my whole history, the whole genealogy of my questions, in truth everything I am, follow, think,
write, trace, erase even, seems to me to be born from that exceptionalism [exception]
and incited by that sentiment of election. As if I were the secret elect of what they call
animals. I shall speak from this island of exception, from its infinite coastline, starting
from it [à partir d’elle] and speaking of it” (The Animal 62. My emphasis). I stress
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Ginette Michaud
this “as if” that, once again, like the “like a king,” “like a god” of Snake, bears the
mark of another sovereignty, poetic, furtive and fragile.
WORKS CITED
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection
versus Incorporation.” The Shell and the Kernel. Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Alferi, Pierre. “Un accent de vérité: James et Blanchot.” Revue des sciences
humaines. “Maurice Blanchot” 253 (1999). 27 May 2010,
<http://remue.net/cont/alferi3.html>.
Asselin, Guillaume. “Pense-bête.” Cahiers littéraires Contre-jour. “La littérature et l’animalité” 13 (fall 2007). 65-77.
Bailly, Jean-Christophe. “Singes.” Cahiers littéraires Contre-jour. “La
littérature et l’animalité” 13 (fall 2007). 81-91.
Baudelaire, Charles. “To Arsène Houssaye.” The Parisian Prowler. Le
Spleen de Paris. Petits Poèmes en prose. Trans. Edward K. Kaplan.
Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989. 73.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Battle with the Angel.” Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 129-139.
— The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. “Comment ne pas parler. Dénégations.” Psyché. Inventions
de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. 535-595.
— The Postcard. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. and ed. Alan
Bass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
— “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida.” Jacques Derrida. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge.
New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 33-75.
— “Circumfession.” Jacques Derrida. With Geoffrey Bennington. Trans.
Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1993.
— The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
On a Serpentine Note
71
— “Ja, or the faux-bond II.” Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth
Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995. 30-77.
— Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
— Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick
Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
— Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. With Maurice Blanchot, L’Instant de
ma mort. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
— “Mais qu’est-ce donc qui arrive, d’un coup, à une langue d’arrivée?” Preface to Georges Veltsos. Humus. Trans. Blanche Molfessis and Catherine Collet. Athens: French Institute of Athens, 2000. i-x.
— “A Silkworm of One’s Own: Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil.”
Veils. With Hélène Cixous. Drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest.
Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001. 17-108.
— “Tête-à-tête.” Camilla Adami. Milano: Gabriele Mazzotta, 2001. 5-15.
— Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
— “Envoi.” Psyche. Inventions of the Other. Vol. I. Ed. Peggy Kamuf and
Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
94-128.
— The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David
Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
— Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume I (2001-2002). Eds. Michel
Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Paris: Galilée,
2008.
Derrida, Jacques and Catherine Malabou. Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Trans. David Wills. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
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Kafka, Franz. “A Report to an Academy.” The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum
N. Glatzer. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken
Books, 1971.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “Fidélités.” L’Animal autobiographique: Autour
de Jacques Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée, 1999.
215-230.
Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “L’Animal magnétique.” L’Animal autobiographique:
Autour de Jacques Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée,
1999. 181-195.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost (A Search for Six of Six Million). Photographs
by Matt Mendelsohn. New York: Harper, 2006.
Milesi, Laurent. “Saint-Je Derrida.” Oxford Literary Review. “Derridanimals”
29 (2007). 55-76.
Montaigne, Michel. “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Essays: The Complete
Works of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1957. Book 2, Chap. 12. xxvi-1094.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. À plus d’un titre – Jacques Derrida. Sur un portrait de Valerio Adami. Paris: Galilée, 2007.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Eighth Elegy. Duino Elegies. Trans. David Young. New
York: Norton, 2006. 140-153.
Surya, Michel. Humanimalité: L’Inéliminable animalité de l’homme. Engravings by Nathalie-Noëlle Rimlinger. Paris: Éditions du Néant, 2001.
[Reprinted under the title Humanimalités. Paris: Léo Scheer, 2004.]
Valéry, Paul. “Ébauche d’un serpent/Silhouette of a Serpent.” Charms: The
Collected Works of Paul Valéry: vol. I, Poems. Ed. Jackson Mathews. Trans. David Paul. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1971. 184-185.
Ver(s): Toward a Spirituality of One’s Own
Claudia Simma
The following is the beginning of an enquiry into the ways Jacques Derrida
mischievously, considerately, carefully animalizes the language and words we think
and believe in and with. We start by turning our thought toward the word “animot”
coined in The Animal That Therefore I Am and toward the ways Derrida brings this
“mot,” this “word,” into play with the word “animal.” He seems to make the syllables
“-mal” and “maux” wiggle into and out of different meanings so as to prompt a
reflection on what is considered “mal,” i.e. “evil.” A reflection that, cautiously
following the tracks indicated by language, may move toward other scenes of “mal”
than the ones that have been conceptualized as such in religion (the knowledge of
good and evil, for example) or in philosophy. Thus, for instance, our memories of the
scene of naming the animals in the Old Testament are reanimated. This scene may be
thought of as prefiguring and instituting at the same time man’s wrongdoings, the
harm, the hurt, the “mal” he inflicts on animals – be it only by using words
inconsiderately: a generic singular like the animal, for example, effacing infinite
differences between animals with the stroke of just one word. But what we would like
to show here is also that the play on the signifier “mal” opens up toward a reflection
about what philosophy as we know it traditionally finds “good” or “bad,” (mal) to
think about. From here we turn our attention to one “animot” in particular: “ver,” the
silkworm operating on the concept of truth in “A Silkworm of One’s Own.”
– Je mets en question tous les crédits, à commencer par les dits et
autres vouloir-dire, et avant de commencer, à commencer par les
mots.
Hélène Cixous, Insister: À Jacques Derrida
[…] l’animal est inévitable, et avant lui, l’animot.
Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis
Pardon, prayer, faith, confession, conversion, circumcision, revelation,
sacrifice, resurrection… and even “bête” (in the sense of animal, beast1):
there is an open list of words, notions, concepts that seems to belong to a
religious vocabulary and that gives Derrida’s thought a certain religious tint –
but who would believe it is religious really? Isn’t it something else –
something not devoid of its very own spirituality – reflecting on religion,
disputing with it but also carrying off something about it, “resurrecting” it
elsewhere and as something else?
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Claudia Simma
As Martin Hägglund demonstrates in his book on Derrida, Radical
Atheism, it seems difficult to maintain the idea of an ethical or a religious turn
in Derrida’s work. But while Hägglund concentrates on the way Derrida
deconstructs metaphysical concepts right from the beginning of his work by
“reading them against themselves,” we will hereafter try to wonder about how
Derrida handles precisely the thought of turning or returning in certain texts
that take issue with religious concepts. Hägglund shows according to which
proceedings Derrida turns the logic of concepts against itself. He insists on
how this deconstructs the condition of Presence/Oneness/Wholeness/
Unscathed Completeness/Totality, etc. Any concept must be based on and
opens, within the concept, what may be called “spacing”: something that,
while making the concept possible, also may be shown to contradict and ruin
its logic from within. Hägglund calls this “radically atheist” because, as it
seems, “God” may be considered as a kind of metaphor for everything that is
Present to itself as One/Whole/Unscathed/Complete/Total, etc. Thus it can be
called “radically atheist” to show that such an idea of Presence is liable to be
deconstructed wherever it surreptitiously imposes its conceptual necessities
on thought. We may marvel at the following question, though: is it really
deconstruction, then, that is “radically atheist” (to keep the name Hägglund
gives it) for having laid bare the mechanisms hidden within the way a
philosophical tradition conceptualizes? Admittedly, Derrida uses a
deconstructive method to read the concepts he deconstructs against
themselves. But should this incite us to conclude that it is his thought that
follows a “radically atheist” logic when he insists so repeatedly – and from
the beginning of his writings – on the way metaphysical concepts work? After
all, the fact that over and over again he makes us patiently aware of the way
concepts function neither means that deconstruction works (only) this way
nor that Derrida’s thought must be identified with what is called
deconstruction. It means that metaphysics works this way. Should we not be
wary of simply identifying deconstruction(s) and Derrida’s thinking with the
mechanism it/they help(s) us to recognize and read? And while they are
philosophically rigorous and deconstructive, don’t Derrida’s writings also
suggest universes of things “unthought of” for us, to read and explore? But in
his writings those journeys into thought happen in language. Let us look for
example at the play with the French word animal: in a scene that stages a
strange replay of the biblical fall at the beginning of L’Animal que donc je
suis, we are both jokingly and seriously made to hear evil, harm and sin in it:
ani-mal, -mal, le mal.2 Then mal, or rather its plural maux, disappears visually
from the word animal, although it can still be heard echoing through another
word: mot, pronounced just like maux, the word for word in the new word
Derrida coins in this text: animot. So what has happened to evil and to all that
supposedly follows it or follows from it, religiously? What is it that evil
follows from? Or as Derrida asks, at the beginning of “Faith and
Ver(s): Toward a Spirituality of One’s Own
75
Knowledge”: “Now where is evil [le mal]? Where is evil today, at present?”
(2).
• • •
Derrida’s contribution to the Capri seminar on religion held in 1994, “Foi et
savoir,”3 translated into English as “Faith and Knowledge,” warns the reader
not simply to believe and believe in the label, the name, given to the
contemporary phenomenon commonly baptized “the return of religions,” “the
return of the religious”: “le retour du religieux” in French. In this essay,
contributing to a 1992 seminar, Derrida wanted to turn thought onto what
today is commonly called “the return of religions.” He was one of the
organizers of this seminar,4 titled, appropriately, La Religion. In his paper, he
invites us to long and scrupulous – in other words: religious – halts,5 calling
into question what we believe we have a name for, what we believe we know
and mean when we say “return” or “religion,” allowing for the following
detour into “Faith and Knowledge” and L’Animal que donc je suis. We shall
then turn from those texts toward a particular animot, the ver à soie or
silkworm operating in Veils.
Talking religion? Parler religion – parler cru
If we admit that thinking with “Faith and Knowledge” about what we call
“religion” or the “religious fact” mobilizes – of course not only but also – the
question of what we believe we do when we believe (in) something, then
reflecting on what we believe we are saying when we speak of it amounts to
calling our watchful attention to those movements of believing twice: once
when we go about “talking religion,”6 and again when we question what we
believe religion (and/or its so-called return onto the contemporary
geopolitical scene) to be. Yet if it is true that the question of belief seems to
strike a particularly sensitive key when it comes to wondering about how to
talk religion in these times preoccupied with religion’s so-called return, we
might also want to remember that Derrida’s approach to thought doesn’t go
without what could be called discussing, debating, arguing with or “disputing
belief,” disputing what is belief and what is believed, also in a much wider
and more universal sense.
In hesitating between “disputing belief,” disputing what is believed, or
belief and disputing the believed, I am hesitatingly borrowing from the
beginning of “Circumfession,” in order to move toward what, in reading the
first period of “Circumfession” in Portrait of Jacques Derrida As a Young
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Claudia Simma
Jewish Saint, Hélène Cixous calls Derrida’s “profession of faith in
incredulity, always this quarrel looking to pick a fight with itself at the heart
of all believing.”7 Transporting into English the echo of the French disputer
le cru as it is played out at the beginning of “Circonfession,” in the first
période: “Le vocable cru, lui disputer ainsi le cru, comme si d’abord j’aimais
à le relancer, et le mot de ‘relance’” (7), the dispute is already very much
eased. Indeed, the homophonic play on the French cru immediately enacts
and performs from within this little word the desire for dispute expressed in
the quote above before we can even begin to suspect what may be meant by
le vocable cru. To begin with, we observe that at least three different
meanings are quarreling over the sense we ought to give to what the text calls
cru. Derrida makes us hear and feel how cru is torn between those different
possibilities of meaning, belief being only one of them and apparently not
even the first one he puts at stake here: 1) Cru may be what is raw, bloody,
uncooked, crude: “comme si je tenais à lui pour lui chercher querelle quant à
ce que parler cru veut dire” (my emphasis); 2) Cru may also be what evokes
belief, confession, faith, credulity (cru as in the verb croire which we usually
translate as to believe) – it’s the meaning I have chosen to privilege above: “le
cru auquel je ne crois pas, et le mot cru laisse affluer en lui par le canal de
l’oreille, une veine encore, la foi, la profession de foi ou la confession, la
croyance, la crédulité” (my emphasis); 3) Cru also sounds like crû or crue:
what grows, increases, matures or swells as in a flood (crû/crue as in croître,
“to grow”): “la surabondance d’une crue après le passage de laquelle une
digue devient belle comme la ruine qu’elle aura toujours au fond d’elle-même
emmurée” (my emphasis). According to each one of these possibilities
between which we must hesitate here without deciding, disputer le cru of this
vocable cru may be read in various ways, and opening up different directions
for thought – within “Circumfession,”8 but also spreading beyond and
echoing with the question of belief in other texts. To try to listen to some of
those indications with respect to what they may help us think about our
apparently ever-growing preoccupation with the religious theme – the socalled “return of the religious fact” having become ever more insistent in
recent years, just as the necessity to try to analyze what it makes happen to
the world we live in – is what prompts the reflection I would like to begin
here.
If, for the time being, we authorize ourselves to confer a certain value of
example to a textual moment where we are summoned to hesitate about what
to believe of this “cru,” we might begin by suggesting that it draws attention
to the theme of dispute that enters the scene as soon as we start wondering
about what to believe of what is believed, in the sense of what is generally
understood: cru. We might furthermore suggest that, in beginning
“Circumfession” with these words (or in his words: vocables), Derrida seems
to point to something that, if we follow his pointers, has necessarily to do
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77
with believing: being torn, disputed, specifically from the inside – not only
from the outside. Does this mean that the most difficult and tricky disputing is
not to take place between different beliefs or between the believers and the
unbelieving of one belief or another, as we might have thought? This is also
something “Faith and Knowledge” reminds us of, contradicting the ambient
discourse of opinion obsessed with religions and their supposed return in a
fanatical, integrationist, or fundamentalist form that would only have them
fight one another.
One could say that in “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida disputes le cru of
what we do when we think we are talking religion. He calls into question the
way we believe religions imply, for instance, belief or faith (croyance, crédit,
foi, le fiduciaire…). Let us consider an example. If, he tells us, belief or faith
is one of religions’ sources, one of the conditions for their possibility,9 it is
not only that. Before and besides meaning what we believe it does with
respect to religion, croyance, belief or faith is also already necessarily
implied in the sheer possibility of relating to, addressing the other, in what
Derrida calls an “acte de foi élémentaire”: an act of elementary faith.10
Without such elementary credit given to any other, social links, therefore
societies, and therefore their different religions would not exist. He shows
how this “act of elementary faith” also conditions the possibility of something
that is generally opposed to religions, especially when we speak about their
so-called return, namely teletechnoscience, and how therefore the opposition
between religion on the one hand and rationality, science, technology on the
other, becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. This increase in difficulty
may remind us of the image of a flood (crue) as used in the first period of
“Circumfession” in one of the examples quoted above: a dam of separation is
flooded over, but other differences, other separations need to be thought
through. If Derrida analyzes faith as one of the two sources for religion, this
does not mean, he tells us, that we must understand faith as a source of
religion only or as belonging only to religion:
But religion does not follow the movement of faith any more
necessarily than the latter rushes towards faith in God. For if the
concept of “religion” implies an institution that is separable,
identifiable, circumscribable, tied trough its letter to the Roman ius,
its essential relation both to faith and to God is anything but selfevident. When we speak, we Europeans, so ordinarily and so
confusedly about a “return of the religious,” what do we thereby
name? To what do we refer? (Faith and Knowledge 32)
Let us turn to cru to try to understand something about what Derrida lets or
makes happen to faith and to the religious sense we believe it to be endowed
with. From within what we had believed (cru) belief to be, he makes us hear
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another cru more cru, more crude: the sense of something naïve, nude or raw,
disputing and affecting the religious sense’s prevalence. So belief has grown,
crû, to echo with something which continues to reverberate within it,
preceding it and making it possible, estranging its familiar ring, disputing
how it had grown (crû) to be understood. Thus, in order to talk religion,
Derrida reanimates the language he has shown it to speak – Latin – and
makes it undergo a kind of invisible yet resounding metamorphosis.
Why stop and listen to this dispute echoing from within croire, crédit, foi,
faith, belief? I do it to try to think toward a way of thinking that would defend
something within religion, defend it en lui disputant le cru, by disputing with
it, making it less sure of the sense it gives to believing. This challenges
religion spiritually, perhaps on behalf of another spirituality, one not confined
to religious exercise and not limited by any religion’s laws. True, spirituality
may not be the right word. Anticipating L’Animal que donc je suis,11 we
could try Respirituality, giving breath12 to the thing we are trying to think
about. This would have the advantage of making the syllable re- resound, a
syllable which is, according to Derrida, indicative of the capacity for selfaffection the living are endowed with. For now, let us think of it as a spiritual
exercise that, escaping what we believe religion to be, metamorphoses
something about belief. Maybe we could say that it would be more “down to
earth” as one says in English, but nevertheless – or rather therefore – of great
difficulty: the “earth” being sometimes, as is humbly shown in “Faith and
Knowledge,” the language we think and the words we believe in and with.
Let us stop for a moment and note that in French, when we want to express
that something gives us pain and difficulty, we say: j’ai du mal à… When
Derrida speaks about having difficulty, having trouble repressing a movement
of shame when naked in front of a little cat’s gaze, it is this expression he
uses, mischievously playing on the religious implications of mal:
[…] j’ai du mal, oui, du mal à surmonter une gêne.
Pourquoi ce mal?
J’ai du mal à réprimer un mouvement de pudeur. Du mal à faire taire
en moi une protestation contre l’indécence. Contre la malséance
qu’il peut y avoir à se trouver nu, le sexe exposé, à poil devant un
chat qui vous regarde sans bouger, juste pour voir. Malséance de tel
animal nu devant l’autre animal, dès lors, on dirait une sorte
d’animalséance: l’expérience originale, une et incomparable de cette
malséance qu’il y aurait à paraître nu en vérité, devant le regard
insistant de l’animal (L’Animal 18. My emphasis.)
[…] I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment.
Whence this malaise?
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79
I have trouble repressing a reflex of shame. Trouble keeping silent
within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety
[malséance] that can come of finding oneself naked, one’s sex
exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving,
just to see. The impropriety of a certain animal nude before the other
animal, from that point on one might call it a kind of animalséance:
the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety
that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the
insistent gaze of the animal. (The Animal 4)
The malaise here consists in discreetly putting forward a human tendency to
consider that which gives us trouble and difficulty, that which is not easy to
think and analyze, in other words to comprehend and therefore to take in, as
not good, as evil, harmful, bad, mal. In the passage quoted above it would be
a scene of animalséance that, as L’Animal que donc je suis sets out to show,
has always given trouble to philosophy – to the point of having been
foreclosed, erased, from its discourse. But it is from this mal and from what
this scene demands of philosophy as we think we know it that Derrida sets
out to follow the traces of this foreclosure in the philosophical discourse on
the animal according to Descartes, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, among
others. So the play on the signifier mal in the French word animal opens up
onto a reflection about what philosophy traditionally finds “good” to think or
not.
This scene of animalséance is not about Adam and Eve ashamed of their
nudity, hiding from God’s gaze and covering their shame with fig leaves. So
it is not about a supposedly universally human desire to hide, cover or veil
human nudity. A desire that, according to the Bible, would have started with
knowledge about good and evil after eating the famous forbidden fruit. Or
maybe we should say it is not only about that desire, for there may be also
that. The insistence on the uniqueness, the inimitability, of his experience in
Derrida’s text seems particularly intriguing here. In the quote above he calls
it: “l’expérience originale, une et incomparable de cette malséance”: “the
single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would
come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the
animal” (my emphasis). Indeed, at first glance there is nothing universal
about this scene, and it cannot be universalized in any way, for as an
experience it is entirely personal and unique. It belongs to one man only, and
it belongs to him as his own (even though it is also the experience of a certain
dispossession): there is no first human couple, no man and woman; only one
naked man alone, gazed at by one little cat. This strange “single,
incomparable and original experience” apparently engages only the one
single man who had it – and, although differently, the cat. But as a
philosopher it engages Derrida on a long journey through what philosophy
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has to say about “the animal” – and we will come back a little further on to
this generalizing singular “the animal” Derrida deconstructs on this journey.
The fact is that in L’Animal que donc je suis every move of thought relates to
the singular scene of animalséance that triggered this journey through
philosophy; it is this scene that commands and orients thinking. Now, the
insistence on a very own and inimitable experience may be surprising on
behalf of a thinker whose work is so constantly turned toward the other and
who so patiently alters and deconstructs le propre in his writings. Yet, if we
read more closely, there is something differently, strangely or paradoxically
universal in the experience of animalséance. For while claiming the
uniqueness of it as his very own, Derrida lets the little cat in his text gaze out
at “vous”/you, in other words at we who read: “Contre la malséance qu’il peut
y avoir à se trouver nu, le sexe exposé, à poil devant un chat qui vous regarde
sans bouger, juste pour voir.” In English: “Against the impropriety
(malséance) that can come of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark
naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see” (my
emphasis). While gazing only at the one naked man who goes on to describe
the scene, the cat is also made to gaze out at “you” from his text. On the one
hand, we may read this as a way of playing with the text to underscore that
l’animal nous regarde as one would say in French: it looks at us, meaning it
concerns us. Then again, this sudden possibility of an address the text turns
toward us may also read like a question. It may make us wonder about how
we are concerned personally by what happens in this scene. Which is our –
yours, mine – very own, single, incomparable experience? Where is it, our
comparably incomparable experience of our own that would operate on a
philosophical tradition of blindness to the animal, taking its cue from the
scene of animalséance? So the affirmation of “the single, incomparable and
original experience” of this malséance is not an exclusive one. Rather, it calls
for answers; it addresses the possibility of others.
Thus we may also become aware of our responsibility in the
philosophical foreclosure of what is considered good or bad, mal, to think.
This operates a shift in the question of good and evil, even if this question
remains linked metonymically to the figure(s) it takes religiously. But in
L’Animal que donc je suis, Derrida returns to before the biblical scene of the
fall, before what the Bible calls mal and toward another scene: the one where
in the second version of Genesis, man before the creation of woman, and thus
before nudity or shame in a biblical sense, gives “leurs noms, ses noms aux
animaux”: “their names, his names to the animals” (The Animal 15) – with
God looking on “pour voir,” “in order to see.” It is this scene toward which
we will be toward hereafter.
For now let’s keep in mind that while this strange kind of spirituality
seems to talk religion, it is at the same time talking, or rather writing and
animating, its very own spirituality in its very own language. How can trying
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81
to follow this and read it, for instance in L’Animal que donc je suis, help us to
think otherwise what we believe we know about spirituality? If we now
follow the animal, it is because in L’Animal que donc je suis they – for they
are legion – seem to wrench away from religion or disputer le cru of what we
call God.
Being “bête”
The French word bête, as an adjective, means “stupid, dumb, lacking
intelligence.” As a feminine noun it can be used in a generic way to designate
any animal as opposed to the human being: une bête. Dictionaries treat it as a
more suggestive, commonplace, crude synonym of animal. Finally, in a
religious and more specifically Christian sense, by antonomasia, “la Bête” is
also what names absolute evil, as in the Beast with a definite article.
Philosophical knowledge tells us that one has to be bête not to believe
that the animal has no access to religion, for instance – among many other
self-understood truths. How could we bêtement not comprehend that, we who
as humans have access to knowledge, especially of good and evil? But this
problem of comprehension seems to be precisely one of the things L’Animal
que donc je suis is about: as soon as we comprehend, as soon as we grasp in
order to take in, take into our way of seeing and as soon as we look from our
point of view, how can we be faithful to those ways of seeing, those points of
view we simply cannot ever pretend to adopt since they can never be ours? So
we need to adopt a certain kind of incomprehension rather than
comprehension. We may need incomprehension, but not in a negative,
exclusive way: not to close our eyes or our hearts to something, but rather to
continue to follow thoughtfully the mystery of what resists comprehension
and conceptualization thoughtfully.
If we follow Derrida as he leads his audience into L’Animal que donc je
suis, we may hear the motif of faith in the verb confier13: “Au commencement
– je voudrais me confier à des mots qui soient, si c’était possible, nus.”14 In
French there is something about this motif of faith that sounds a little odd, a
little unfamiliar. For we would expect to read a more consecrated expression
like: “je voudrais me confier en des mots […] nus,” meaning, “I would like to
make a confidence using words that would be […] nude/naked.” Formulated
this way, the sentence would mean that the person speaking or writing intends
to use words that are as bare, as unadorned as possible, shunning elaborate
rhetoric – in order to be truthful, we may suppose. But we read: “I would like
to entrust myself to words,” as the English translation states more boldly
because it cannot play on the difference between confier en and confier à.
There is a subtle conversion at work, right from the beginning of this text on
the autobiographical animal – and besides, its beginning – “Au
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commencement” – must also be heard with all the weight of Genesis. It is as
though the words Derrida entrusts himself to instead of using them to make
autobiographical confidences were handed over through a kind of strange rule
or command over an author who thus abandons and entrusts himself to them.
But this rule or command (that would then presumably dictate (to) him) is
conditioned by the possible nakedness of the words – words spoken or written
by him on the one hand but writing and “saying” him on the other. This
possibility of nakedness is not positively asserted in the first sentence of
L’Animal que donc je suis. Rather, it seems suggested with a nostalgia that
gives it a touch of the unreal – fictional or a fabricated, even. “In the
beginning, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible,
would be naked,” can therefore be understood as an expression of the desire
to obey the fictional law or fabric of these words rather than the law of
autobiography. Academically defined, traditional autobiography would have
the author pose in the nude and make confidences in words that promise to
paint him naked in an autobiographically truthful way. This is what allows us
to believe him. To raise the question of the possibility – ever so fictional – of
words’ nakedness converts the autobiographical enterprise into an experience
of another kind. The question of the author’s nakedness is not evacuated. The
scene of animalséance we have begun to muse about above shows just that.
But in L’Animal que donc je suis the philosophical reflection also turns
around the question of what we believe nakedness to be. Truth is called
naked, as Derrida reminds us. Philosophically, truth is conceptualized as
something that must be unveiled, revealed, uncovered or disclosed: cloth,
textile, fabric are for that reason closely related to truth’s conceptual
appearance. Of course, unveiling or revealing truth is religiously connoted:
revelation is also and above all religious. Philosophy and religion appear
together at the beginning of L’Animal que donc je suis:
Au commencement – je voudrais me confier à des mots qui soient, si
c’était possible, nus.
Nus en premier lieu – mais pour annoncer déjà que sans cesse je
parlerai de la nudité, et du nu en philosophie. Depuis la Genèse.
(L’Animal 15)
In the beginning, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it
possible, would be naked.
Naked in the first place – but this is in order to announce already that
I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy.
Starting from Genesis. (The Animal 1)
But, to begin with, the emphasis is on words. And, as we have tried to
indicate above, the emphasis is also on a kind of fiction or fabric Derrida’s
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83
dream seems to be made of. Everything expresses a kind of impossible,
dreamy possibility in this beginning, as if dreaming about conjuring up
another creation and another universe. There is the conditional form of the
verb vouloir in je voudrais, “I would want to/I would like to.” Then there is
the subjunctive form of the verb être (to be) in the relative characterizing
mots (words): “des mots qui soient […] nus” (“words that would be […]
nude/naked”). There is also the hypothesis expressed in the inserted syntagm
“si c’était possible” (“were it possible”), and in the concordance of the
conditional mode affecting the verb être: “était” (“were”) in this case.
Everything is imbued with what may be, but let us note in particular the
occurrence of the subjunctive affecting the verb être: “soient.” This not so
much because it may have a biblical echo,15 but because of the homophones
soient (be), soie (silk), and soi (oneself).
I would like to link up these homophonic possibilities with the play
between soi and soie in the title of “Un ver à soie.” It sounds a little
surprising, perhaps, to link “(l)es mots qui soient […] nus” at the beginning of
L’Animal que donc je suis to the play between soi and soie. But the ver à soie
can be read as a strange and only apparently inoffensive version of the snake
in paradise, one that carries difference instead of becoming the instrument of
an opposition between, for instance, being naked or not, or between good and
evil. In the childhood memory Derrida recalls at the end of “Un ver à soie”
(“A Silkworm of One’s Own”), the silkworm seems all the more naked for
being a “petit phantasme de pénis,” a little phantasm of a penis (83). It
resembles a sex, Derrida says – but which one? There is no way to know or
tell, especially since the sex of this little secretive being preoccupied with
secreting its very own silk textile also remains a secret. A secret secreting a
silk textile, neither there to clothe nor to reveal whatever nudity there might
seem to be, from a human point of view. A textile not involved in a process of
revealing, but part of the being it unwinds itself from, allowing it to become
itself in the process of its metamorphosis. Derrida takes up this play between
masculine and feminine in the sound he makes render the French word for
silk, soie: it sounds like soi, like oneself, and in Derrida’s case that would
seem to be a masculine self, just as the “autobiographical animal” silkworm
would seem to point to a certain masculinity. The playful but intentional
insistence on the self, on the very own, in the title “Un ver à soie” brings back
to mind the “single, incomparable and original experience” of the scene of
animalséance as encountered above. Either one of these texts goes about
fabricating its textual tissue, its soie or silk, by calling into question what we
believe text and textile, and their relation to truth and revelation, to be. In “Un
ver à soie,” Derrida indicates how the child’s observation of the silkworm’s
play on sexual difference has taken command over his writing. He does so by
showing how an -e muet, the letter that silently marks the feminine in French,
adds itself to his – supposedly – masculine self through his very own
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experience of sericulture. An experience that occurred before he was thirteen
years old, before he received his very own tallith and became a man in the
eyes of religion. And the tallith, as religion would have it, always there to
remind the male believer of God’s law and commands, becomes a kind of
textile and animal “incarnation” of the ver à soie. Thus it keeps calling its
owner back to the secret laws that command him.
If we come back to the nude words at the beginning of L’Animal que
donc je suis, we may wonder why there should be the expression of this
dreamy desire for words’ nudeness if those words were not caught up, woven
or clothed into sentences, clad in text and implicated in all the textual, textile,
tissue metaphors this traditionally implies, right from the start of the text
about to begin. Escaping the text or, paradoxically, dreaming the nude text
also seems to be the nude silkworm’s dream and we can already hear the
animot ver “worm” expressing the dream of this dream “rêve” when read à
l’envers, backwards, as an anagram: rêve – ver.
First there is the dream of “words that, were it possible, would be
naked.” Then nudity reappears in L’Animal que donc je suis when we are told
about the scene with which thinking begins: “I” seeing himself being seen
naked by a little cat, a “real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat,” Derrida insists
(6). This scene is told smilingly, for it does have a tender and comical touch.
But through its comic and realistic aspects it also tells the tale of the human
condition with the stuff tragedy is made of: I, a human being, cannot, myself,
see myself. I cannot see who I am and see what I don’t see about myself. On
the tragic theatrical scene I can be seen by others, I not seeing, blind to who I
am, thus making the spectators see and reflect on the power, the authority, the
control I am stripped of, structurally – even though in everyday life this is not
visible. This tells the spectators about their own human blindness as to who
they are. We might think of Sophocles’ king Oedipus, whom we watch, blind
to his own blindness, while everything – his own name16 and history, the
oracle, the way he has come to sovereignty, the blind soothsayer Tiresias –
tells him who he is.
But there are additional twists and turns in the scene of the naked I
seeing himself seen naked by a cat. It is not about human spectators seeing
themselves blind in another human. It demands that we weigh how the eyes
of a non-human being, whose point of view is absolutely out of reach for our
thought and comprehension, also affects what, as humans, we believe we are.
Thus, part of the importance of the nudity in this scene and its significance is
also the experience of being stripped absolutely of the possibility of seeing
what the other sees through his/her/its eyes from his/her/its point of view.
Nothing even allows us to think that the use of these possessive pronouns
(his/her/its) or the image hidden in the expression point of view are
appropriate. There is no access, however partial, imperfect, limited and
illusionary it may be, as there would seem to be with another human being.
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85
So we must reflect not only upon human blindness, but also perhaps on
humanity as a kind of blindness we can but recognize. In a certain way, to
acknowledge the point of view of this little cat means to bar human sight and
insight altogether and to recognize a certain blindness. Then again, this
recognition of blindness may indicate other ways to return toward seeing. For
if we are to continue thinking, we must do so without the help of seeing and
of light, which we generally assume to symbolize the possibility of
intelligence. It must be done “bêtement,” dumbly, blind to all the so-called
evidences of intelligence. At first this may sound as if we could think no
further – but it is in fact quite the contrary, at least if we follow Derrida, since
thought would only deserve to be called thought if it thinks where it cannot
think, thus thinking past its own impossibility: “The animal looks at
us/concerns us and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.”17
Tracking spirituality
But my purpose here is not to detail how Derrida patiently dispute le cru of
philosophical beliefs and knowledge about the animal (in general) as opposed
to man (in general) in L’Animal que donc je suis. Let us dwell for a moment
still on the idea of blindness and on the other kinds of intelligence blindness
demands, looking to hearing for the time being.
Indeed, the exchange of -mal for mot in animot reverberates with another
dream, a dream mentioned at the beginning of the second chapter in L’Animal
que donc je suis. It is the dream of a language that would change the tonality,
the sound, and the music, of philosophical as well as ordinary human
discourse about the animal (63-64). It is a dream about not causing the animal
evil, hurt, harm, mal: “Comme si je rêvais, moi, en toute innocence, d’un
animal qui ne veuille pas de mal à l’animal” – “As though I were dreaming, I
myself, in all innocence, of an animal that didn’t intend harm to the animal”
(64). The coining of the animot may seem like a first move away from the
evil caused, the hurt and harm inflicted both by philosophical as well as by
common sense discourse on the animal to the animal – especially through the
abuse implied in the generic singular term: the animal. As we remember, in
L’Animal que donc je suis, Derrida shows the violence hidden in the
conceptual shortcut consisting in the forced inclusion of all animals,
regardless of their multiple differences with each other and of their multiple
differences with man, into one single generalizing singular which in fact
denies them any singularity: the animal, then opposed to man. So, replacing
mal by mot seems like taking a first step out of harm’s way, the harm caused
by this abusive singular the animal. But is it really that simple to avoid mal?
We may observe that the newly coined animot sounds at first itself like a
singular. But, as pointed out in our opening paragraph, if we listen to it play,
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there is a singular shifting to the plural of the French word mal: les maux,
pronounced just like mot – or its plural form mots. How can we read this?
Could it mean that we should be wary of the multiple risks of harm (maux)
caused by words (mot(s))? Perhaps by words themselves not naked,
defenseless, exposed or vulnerable enough? The animot would thus sound
like a warning. But we may also notice that the echo of mot(s)/maux makes
the animot sound just like the plural of the French word animal: animaux.
Now this move toward acknowledging the plurality of animals would, in turn,
sound like something we are looking for when we follow the tracks of
L’Animal que donc je suis. Maybe this is what we are encouraged to admit:
there is confusion and dispute at work as to what should be considered as mal
with regard to the animal – mal in all the different senses it can take in the
French language. Mal is becoming increasingly impure as these other
meanings crisscross its tracks. Good and evil mingle in the animot.
In order to pursue the different, crisscrossing tracks that lead our
thoughts, let us keep in mind for now that, even if we can’t be sure we are
moving out of harm’s way, if we at least follow what Derrida seems to
suggest, we are invited to wonder about more than just one -mal. As pointed
toward above, in L’Animal que donc je suis we are requested, for instance, to
consider more than one biblical “scene of mal” in addition to the one where
one animal, the snake, would cause the first human couple to fall, making
them henceforth know the difference between good and evil.
There is the scene of animalséance mentioned above: a little cat staring
at the naked male philosopher “juste pour voir” (Derrida’s emphasis), just
like that, just in order to see:
Et pourquoi cette honte qui rougit d’avoir honte? Surtout, devrais-je
préciser, si le chat m’observe nu de face, en face-à-face, et si je suis
nu face aux yeux du chat qui me regarde de pied en cap, dirais-je,
juste pour voir, sans se priver de plonger sa vue, pour voir, en vue de
voir, en direction du sexe. Pour voir, sans aller y voir, sans y toucher
encore, et sans y mordre, bien que cette menace reste au bout des
lèvres ou de la langue. (L’Animal 19. Derrida’s emphasis.)
And why this shame that blushes for being ashamed? Especially, I
should make clear, if the cat observes me frontally naked, face to
face, and if I am naked faced with the cat’s eyes looking at me from
head to toe, as it were just to see, not hesitating to concentrate its
vision – in order to see, with a view to seeing – in the direction of
my sex. To see, without going to see, without touching yet, and
without biting, although that threat remains on its lips or on the tip of
the tongue. (The Animal 4. Derrida’s emphasis.)
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87
The particular sound of the French “juste pour voir” that Derrida emphasizes
here is quite difficult to keep in English. The particularity it has consists in
not letting the pour, “to,” be followed by a grammatical element that would
complete it in the sentence as in, for example, to see… completed by …what
will happen. Also, were it not for the idiomatic play with a French expression
here, pour would usually indicate some kind of purpose, some intention or
aim that should be expressed in the sentence in order to make it
grammatically complete: “pour voir,” to see, yes, but “pour voir quoi,” to see
what? Because of the play on the idiom, we shall never know the intention
behind this particular seeing, operating just like that, and apparently there
simply to see. There is seeing, but as the elliptic French expression suggests,
it is absolute, cut from us, and we can’t follow it as far as to see what prompts
it. Something about this seeing remains out of reach. As we have said above,
it is from this scene that Derrida sets out to reread what philosophy says about
the animal. As for us, let us follow the echo of this “pour voir,” of this
idiomatic expression without follow-up and thus all the more intriguing in a
text where the accent lies on the double sense of “je suis,” I am or I follow,
and where we are brought to wonder whether the possibility of following, of
chasing, of being after on the one hand, and the possibility of being seduced,
of being chased after on the other, are not what conditions the possibility of
being – instead of the contrary: being conditioning the possibility of
following and/or being followed.
If we follow the echo of “pour voir” in L’Animal que donc je suis, we
encounter another “scene of mal” – at least, we are incited to reconsider it in
such a way. Derrida recalls the moment in the second version of Genesis
where, “pour voir,” which we may find in different translations of the Bible
Derrida quotes (The Animal 15-18), God makes man give their names (or
rather his names, according to Derrida, as we have indicated above) to all the
animals of paradise. As Derrida insists, this moment is recorded only in the
second version of Genesis, the one where God is not said to have
distinguished between male and female right away. The second version is the
one in which we are told that man is first created male – to be given a female
only later. So the nomination scene takes place before the creation of woman.
Therefore this “calling the animals names,” as in turn we might call it
jokingly, apparently concerns the male human being only and seems to take
place before there could be any question of good, of evil, of original sin and
of falling from grace in a biblical sense. Before the creation of woman all this
has always been related to the irruption of evil into paradise still seems quite
a long way off. And yet, Derrida makes us wonder, is this biblical scene of
naming really before mal and before another kind of fall? Isn’t his text
suggesting that evil or harm is not (only) what or where – or even when – we
think it is? Isn’t it implying that something takes place there, which humanity
may never have thought to see evil or harm in, but which nevertheless has
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been the cause of mal, harm, hurt to the animals subjected by naming to
human control? The text insists on the fact that in the second version of
Genesis the human male is the one who takes power over the animals by
putting his names on them: it seems as though the reader was secretly urged
to draw the parallel with all those philosophers who have also given their
name, the animal, to the animals without taking the plurality of animal life
into account. True, there is a difference between giving each animal man’s
name and giving man’s name – the animal – to all animals in general. What is
unvarying, however, and encourages the parallel between these scenes of
nomination, is that in both cases the animals are denied the possibility of
responding. As Derrida puts it, those who use the generic singular the animal
“ont sans doute vu, observé, analysé, réfléchi l’animal mais ne se sont jamais
vus vus par l’animal […] ils n’ont tenu aucun compte du fait que ce qu’ils
appellent ‘animal’ pouvait les regarder et s’adresser à eux depuis là-bas,
depuis une origine tout autre”– those who “have no doubt seen, observed,
analyzed, reflected on the animal but who have never been seen seen by the
animal […] They have taken no account of the fact that what they call
‘animal’ could look at them and address them from down there, from a
wholly other origin.” (The Animal 13.) A little later in the text we read:
Le mal est fait depuis longtemps et pour longtemps. Il tiendrait à ce
mot, il se rassemblerait plutôt dans ce mot, l’animal, que les hommes
se sont donné, comme à l’origine de l’humanité, et se sont donné afin
de s’identifier, pour se reconnaître, en vue d’être ce qu’ils disent, des
hommes, capables de répondre et répondant au nom d’hommes.
C’est d’un certain mal qui tient à ce mot que je voudrais essayer de
parler, d’abord en balbutiant quelques aphorismes chimériques.
(L’Animal 54. My emphasis.)
That wrong was committed long ago and with long-term
consequences. Il derives from this word, or rather it comes together
in this word animal, which men have given themselves as at the
origin of humanity, and which they have given themselves in order to
be identified, in order to be recognized, with a view to being what
they say they are, namely, men, capable of replying and responding
in the name of men.
I would like to try to speak of a certain wrong or evil that derives
form this word, to begin with, by stammering some chimerical
aphorisms. (The Animal 32. My emphasis.)
But let us come back to “pour voir,” for through this idiomatic expression
Derrida establishes other parallels yet: there is one between the little cat
looking at the naked philosopher “pour voir” and God looking on “pour voir”
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89
as the first man names the animals of paradise. It’s a way to indicate that
neither an animal’s stare nor God’s gaze are within the grasp of human
comprehension and that, with regard to human beings, this is something they
share. We may distinguish another parallel, one between God and the
animals, this time, when we consider that through the biblical expression
“pour voir” to which Derrida has called our attention, God, while seeming
all-powerful, seems at the same time to be stripped of power:
Ce “pour voir” marque à la fois l’infinité du droit de regard d’un
Dieu tout-puissant et la finitude d’un Dieu qui ne sait pas ce qui va
lui arriver avec ce langage. Et avec les noms. (L’Animal 36.
Derrida’s emphasis.)
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. (The Animal 17. Derrida’s emphasis.)
So, as it happens to the animals, this naming happens also to God, and we are
made to understand that this exposure to the event of language is another
point animals and God have in common. These two parallels between the
animal and God are superposed in the following quote, a few sentences down
the same page:
Je me demande souvent si ce vertige, quant à l’abîme d’un tel “pour
voir” au fond des yeux de Dieu, ce n’est pas celui qui me prend
quand je me sens si nu devant un chat, de face, et quand, croisant
alors son regard, j’entends le chat ou Dieu se demander, me
demander: va-t-il appeler? va-t-il s’adresser à moi? Comment va-t-il
m’appeler, cet homme nu, avant que je lui donne une femme, avant
que je la lui prête en la lui donnant (L’Animal 36. Derrida’s
emphasis.)
I often wonder whether this vertigo before the abyss of such an “in
order to see” deep in the eyes of God is not the same as that which
takes hold of me when I feel so naked in front of a cat, facing it, and
when, meeting its gaze, I hear the cat or God ask itself, ask me: Is he
going to call me, is he going to address me? What name is he going
to call me by, this naked man, before I give him woman, before I
lend her to him in giving her to him (The Animal 18. Derrida’s
emphasis.)
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Discreetly, God is animalized. This animalization is not bluntly stated, it is
suggested rather, and what is also suggested is that it has to do with God’s/the
animal’s expectation of an address, of a call, and of names to come. But here
it is a matter of names to come from a human who sees himself being seen by
the cat, by God, by the animals in their plurality. His very unique experience
of seeing himself being seen thus, in other words seeing himself be concerned
in this particular way, translates itself here into a philosophical response to
what he hears: the silent call for a language yet to be invented. But, if we
listen again to what the animot may tell us about such moments on the brink
of responsive invention, Derrida’s response calls into question language as
something (purely) human: the animot doesn’t just make us wonder about
knowledge of good and evil as we have tried to indicate above – it animalizes
language. What does that mean? If we think in terms of animalized language
here, this also puts the philosopher under the gaze of his own text: a gaze in
which everything, every word of his writing, gazes at him as his own, as
coming from him and having been produced by him. But it is a gaze just as
impossible for him to follow (suivre as in je suis) to its source and to make
his own as an animal’s or God’s stare. At the same time, though, this
impossibility doesn’t prevent him from being (être as in je suis) the source of
that which gazes out at him. And is it a gaze, even? Or should this kind of
return from the animots be thought about in other terms, on other terms?
The word animot appears in L’Animal que donc je suis (60)18 right after a
detour into “Un ver à soie” (59-60). Let us return to this text now and to what
it says about turning and returning.
“Un ver à soie” names the silkworm, but it also shows us right away how
this animal turns into an animot and vice versa. On the one hand, the
indefinite article un introduces a silkworm, one (un) single silkworm, and
insists on its singularity. On the other hand, countless words in this text are
turned into animots because parts at least of the words that form the French
silkworm turn up in them. The ver à soie itself wiggles into and out of
different meanings as we have seen above: we can also read it as the very
own direction it gives, the very own direction the experience of cultivating
silkworms gave, to the thought of the thinker reflecting on his own text,
textile, soie, in “Un ver à soie.”
What we may notice right away is that our gaze is drawn to a subtle play
on seeing and blindness between the title and the subtitle “Un ver à soie:
Points de vue piqués sur l’autre voile.” To perceive it, we must remember
first that ver is also the Spanish or the Portuguese word we translate as to see
– and we are quite actively reminded of it because “Un ver à soie” is
addressed to its reader from a journey through Latin America. Indeed, the title
of the first of the three chapters that form “Un ver à soie” reads “Vers Buenos
Aires,” (Toward Buenos Aires, my emphasis), “24 November – 29 November
1995.” The indication of the direction, vers, toward, is one of the many
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91
homophonies that echo with ver in “Un ver à soie”: for now we may simply
observe that, by echoing with it, the little preposition vers underlines the
importance of ver. The subtitle “Points de vue piqués sur l’autre voile” takes
up the motive of seeing, but it is done in so equivocal a way that we cannot
follow: are those points of view taken from, stolen from (piqués sur) the other
veil or are they given to, stitched unto (piqués sur) the other veil? And whose
is the “other veil”? Is it mine or not? We could muse for a long time on all the
implications this has with respect to seeing, especially since – as said above –
“Un ver à soie” enters into a long dispute with the religious and/or
philosophical figure of the veil and what it has to tell about our point of view
on truth as something that needs the veil to be revealed in the movement of
unveiling. But we can also observe that, no sooner has the twinkling title of
this text made us notice that it will have to do with seeing, ver, that it opens
the theater of the animot ver only to make us watch it turn away from seeing
and turn toward turning: vers as in “Vers Buenos Aires,” Toward Buenos
Aires. Now this is also a way to return toward the ver à soie or silkworm
since it is the movement of turning, turning toward and returning that
etymologically gives the worm its name and also accounts for the meaning of
the little preposition vers. This movement of turning and returning, of indirect
direction, is not that far away from the to-and-fro movement of weaving,
determining the metaphor of text as tissue, as textile. But it is not so easy to
integrate into the enveloping metaphor of textile as something that has to be
done away with, that should disappear as such, to let naked truth be revealed.
There is something differently nude or crude or naked about the animot ver
already. How can we read it?
A first intuition may be that of all the animots the autobiographical
animal ver à soie turns into, the missing one is poetic verse: vers in French.19
As we can see, vers in the sense of toward and vers in the sense of verse are
spelled exactly alike and both are pronounced the same way ver is
pronounced. All three of those words also keep the trace of a certain,
particular kind of locomotion directed toward turning and returning. In a very
secret way Derrida seems to encourage his readers to notice that he hasn’t
mentioned poetic verse in a text about truth, ver-ité, that plays with all the
possibilities of the little syllable ver. He does it by showing us how in Hélène
Cixous’ text “Savoir” – a text he calls a poem – there is secret turning from le
voile, veil, to la voile, sail, without the word for it ever being explicitly
deployed (Un ver à soie 56-57). So if we follow him, we happen upon the
word metonymically characterizing his own text as a poem, vers, verse.
To come to a very preliminary conclusion, we might suggest that “Un ver
à soie” defies text and textuality where it strives to be the veil that lifts itself
off of truth, that would reveal a truth independent from it. In “Un ver à soie,”
truth, ver-ité, appears bound up with the blind ver of the ver à soie, and the
one unique experience of one unique person also striving for truth but not
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“seeing” it, as belonging to the domain of what can be revealed. This
experience can be poetically followed and shared, but it will only have
touched and shaped the one who has lived it and who has lived it in his very
particular way. It is a way that doesn’t ignore the inscription of sexual
difference: like the scene of “animalséance” in L’Animal que donc je suis it is
an experience only a human male could make – even if, as an experience, it is
very far from what is generally believed to be male. As Hélène Cixous shows
in Insister, it is also the experience of someone who is Jewish and yet very far
from being Jewish according to what one might believe that means. As the
opening paragraph of “Un ver à soie” states, this poem, if we may call it that,
sets out to leave, to go as far away as possible, as far as the end of the world
and from this great distance it defies what we believe a text to be:
Avant le verdict, le mien, avant que, tombant sur moi, il ne m’attire
avec lui dans la chute, avant qu’il ne soit trop tard, ne point écrire.
Point final, un point c’est tout. Avant qu’il ne soit trop tard,
s’éloigner au bout du monde comme un animal blessé à mort. Jeûne,
retrait, départ, aussi loin que possible, s’enfermer avec soi en soi,
tenter de se comprendre enfin, seul et soi-même. Ne point écrire ici,
mais de très loin défier un tissage, oui, de très loin, ou plutôt veiller à
sa diminution. (25)
Before the verdict, my verdict, before, befalling me, it drags me
down with it in its fall, before it’s too late, stop writing. Full stop,
period. Before it’s too late, go off to the ends of the earth like a
mortally wounded animal. Fasting, retreat, departure, as far as
possible, lock oneself away with oneself in oneself, try finally to
understand oneself, alone and oneself. Stop writing here, but instead
from afar defy a weaving, yes, from afar, or rather see to its
diminution. (21)
Maybe the spiritual exercise of “Un ver à soie” consists in turning belief
toward one’s very own experience, an experience that is situated before a
certain fall after which, for instance, good and evil are to be thought
separately. This would make spirituality appear like a poetic response to
something that could happen only once, to this one self, soi, and which this
self is therefore responsible for – his response here being a text that becomes
soi-e and says something about this self’s truth. This self’s truth is not to be
universalized. It can be recognized as deconstructing the concept of naked,
revealed truth. But if we now started all over again and reread Veils, “Savoir,”
and “Un ver à soie” together, or if we opened Hélène Cixous’ book Messie,
for instance, and read closely how it operates on the concept of seeing, there
would be certain elements we might recognize. We could recognize the
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93
encounter with the cat, for example, the motive of blindness or the
importance of the Bible. Yet, even if the concepts of revelation or of truth
were also “deconstructed” (if that is the right word) in Messie, this happens in
an entirely different way that registers its very own poetic traces of “talking
religion.”
NOTES
1
“Bête” appears particularly in the first published volume of Derrida’s seminars.
2
The “original experience” (18) from which Derrida makes us start thinking in
L’Animal que donc je suis stages a little cat looking at a naked human male, in this
case one might say the naked philosopher (for more information on who is the “I”
speaking in L’Animal, according to Derrida, see 86). The sensation of shame felt by
the naked philosopher in front of the little cat’s gaze is transformed into a questioning
around what he will call animalséance, a pun that contracts into one word the French
words animal and malséance, malséance being already a word of Derrida’s creation,
formed on the model of bienséance (decency) and thus meaning something like “indecency, crudeness, impropriety” but also letting the word séance (session) and its philosophical echoes resonate: “J’ai du mal à réprimer un mouvement de pudeur. Du mal
à faire taire en moi une protestation contre l’indécence. Contre la malséance qu’il
peut y avoir à se trouver nu, le sexe exposé, à poil devant un chat qui vous regarde
sans bouger, juste pour voir. Malséance de tel animal nu devant l’autre animal, dès
lors, on dirait une sorte d’animalséance: l’expérience originale, une et incomparable
de cette malséance qu’il y aurait à paraître nu en vérité, devant le regard insistant de
l’animal” (18. My emphasis). In English: “I have trouble repressing a reflex of shame.
Trouble keeping silent within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety [malséance] that can come of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark
naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see. The impropriety of a
certain animal nude before the other animal, from that point on one might call it a kind
of animalséance: the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety
that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the
animal” (4). We will come back to this quote further on.
3
In French, the title of this paper is: “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’
aux limites de la simple raison.”
4
See “Circumstances,” title of the introduction to Religion by Gianni Vattimo: looking for a theme, Derrida on the one hand, Gianni Vattimo and Maurizio Ferraris on the
other, had felt the same urgency to turn to religion.
5
In the section number 34 of his paper “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida calls the
reader’s attention to the etymological hesitation that characterizes the word religion. It
is commonly linked to the Latin verb religare “to link, connect, relate, oblige.” There
is, however, another etymological hypothesis linking the word religion to the Latin
verb relegere, “take up again, collect anew, come back to,” whence a sense of scrupulous halting, of patient cautiousness, respectful carefulness. It is in this sense that
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Derrida’s way of questioning what we mean when we say religion may itself be called
religious.
6
“How ‘to talk religion’?” (“Comment ‘parler religion’”) is the opening sentence of
“Faith and Knowledge.”
7
Parts of the chapter “The dream of naïveté” are dedicated to a close reading of the
first période of “Circumfession” (see pages 39-49 for example). One can also reread
the beginning of Insister: À Jacques Derrida for more on the first période of “Circonfession” (17-20 for example).
8
“Le vocable cru, lui disputer ainsi le cru”: Since we are turning around the question
of the name, of what we do when we give something a name, let us observe first that
the word vocable which is given the preference over the word word here, reinscribes
the motif of the call, of the voice: voc- and thus of what we do when we call something. Now, if the first cru in this sentence means raw, then le vocable cru can either
mean that we are talking about a raw or crude word or that we are talking about the
word raw. In either case, disputing its cru would not necessarily mean the same thing
and would first of all depend on whether we choose to give the same sense to the first
and the second occurrence of cru in this quote. Are we disputing the rawness or
crudeness of any vocable? Or the rawness, crudeness of cru itself? Or are we disputing
what is believed (cru) to be the rawness, crudeness of one of these? Or of both? Many
more questions may grow and swell around this tiny bit of sentence, and that is perhaps what the puzzling ainsi (thus) in “le vocable cru, lui disputer ainsi le cru” points
to as if mocking us for having to think more than twice about what ought to be evident.
9
“Faith and Knowledge” 32, for example. The experience of faith, belief (le croire,
credit, le fiduciaire…) on the one hand, and the experience of the sacred, the saint, the
“indemne” on the other are analyzed as the two sources of religion.
10
For example: “On the one hand, the ‘lights’ and Enlightenment of teletchnoscientific critique and reason can only suppose trustworthiness. They are obliged to
put into play an irreducible ‘faith,’ that of a ‘social bond’ or of a ‘sworn faith,’ of a
testimony (‘I promise to tell the truth beyond all proof and all theoretical demonstration, believe me, etc.’), that is, of a performative promising at work even in lying or
perjury and without which no address to the other would be possible. Without the
performative experience of this elementary act of faith, there would neither be ‘social
bond’ nor address to the other, nor any performativity in general: neither convention,
nor institution, nor constitution, nor sovereign state, nor law” (Faith and Knowledge
44).
11
L’Animal que donc je suis was first published as one of the contributions to a conference dedicated to Derrida’s oeuvre, titled L’Animal autobiographique.
12
Respirer means “to breathe” in French. It is formed of the Latin re- indicating a
backward movement and of spirare (to breathe). Spirare is to be found again in spirituality, from the imperial Latin spiritualis (concerning what breathes), in turn derived
from classical Latin spritus (breath, air, respiration, spirit, divine inspiration).
Ver(s): Toward a Spirituality of One’s Own
95
13
Like the English word faith, con-fi-er (confide) belongs to the Latin family of fides
(trust, belief) related to fidere (to trust, to confide in).
14
L’Animal 15, my emphasis. For my purpose here, the translation of the sentence
could be modified as follows: “In the beginning – I would like to confide in words that
are, if it were possible, nude/naked.” David Wills’ translation reads: “In the beginning,
I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked” (1).
15
The imperative and subjunctive forms of the verb être overlap in French, and God’s
first order to create the world may be translated into French by Que la lumière soit!
(Let there be light!).
16
As Jean-Pierre Vernant shows, in Oedipus the King Sophocles plays out all the
possible puns Oedipus’ name allows in order to make the spectator hear and understand everything that tells Oedipus that which he believes he doesn’t know, namely,
who is the murderer of Laïos. Oedipus’ name means “swollen feet,” but Oedipus,
although prompted by the question of his own identity when he first consults Apollo’s
oracle, never thinks of wondering about the reason for his name. Oida can also mean
“I know,” thus making us hear that Oedipus is the one who knows about feet, -pous.
And indeed he is the one who resolves the Sphinx’s riddle, which is all about feet. In a
certain sense the riddle demands the answer to the question: what is man? And Oedipus whose name contains two feet: -di-pous, in other words the key to what is considered to be man’s property, his upright position on two feet, doesn’t have to think long
before knowing the answer. So he is the man who knows man and knows what man is
– and yet he is blind and deaf to who he himself is.
17
The Animal 29. Translation slightly modified.
18
The Animal 37.
19
There is the word “versification,” though: it appears in a footnote on page 84, almost at the end of the text, at a moment where in parentheses in the text there is an
enumeration of “tous les morceaux grouillants de mots en ver [all the squirming bits
of words on ver]: vert lui-même, et verdure, et verdir, et ver, et vers, et verre, et vérité,
vérace ou véridique, pervers et vertu, tous les morceaux grouillants de mots en ver en
plus grand nombre encore qu’il célébra plus tard et rappelle ici, une fois de plus, sans
voile et sans pudeur.”
WORKS CITED
Cixous, Hélène. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Trans.
Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
— Insister: À Jacques Derrida. Paris: Galilée, 2006.
Cixous, Hélène and Jacques Derrida. Voiles. Paris: Galilée, 1998.
— Veils. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001.
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Derrida, Jacques. “Circonfession.” Jacques Derrida. With Geoffrey Bennington. Paris: Le Seuil, 1991.
— “Circumfession.” Jacques Derrida. With Geoffrey Bennington. Trans.
Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
— “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the limits of
Reason Alone.” Religion. Ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo.
Trans. Samuel Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
— L’Animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006.
— The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
— Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume I (2001-2002). Paris: Galilée,
2008.
Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008.
Mallet, Marie-Louise, ed. L’Animal autobiographique. Paris: Galilée, 1999.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Mythe et tragédie en Grèce
ancienne. Paris: La Découverte, 1986.
When Sophie Loved Animals
Anne E. Berger
This is an attempt to read the Countess de Ségur, a famous mid-nineteenth-century
French woman writer of children’s literature known for her Christian outlook and
moralistic views, alongside Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. Examining the
Countess’ peculiar and conflicted zoophilia as it manifests itself in her most clearly
autobiographical novels, this piece tries to show how the modern notion of
autobiography is indeed both informed and inflected by an equally new notion of
animality. The paradoxical links between “autobiography” and “animality” beget a
rewriting of the history of Western literature from an animal vantage point, which this
paper only begins to sketch. Drawing attention to the ambiguous textual and
discursive treatment of animals in Ségur’s novels, I suggest that the mix of “love” for
animals and violence directed at them exhibited in her novels is not only a faithful
reproduction of infantile psychological tendencies aimed at satisfying a young
audience but perhaps as much a reflection of a cultural crisis characterized by an
unprecedented epistemological narrowing of the distance between animals and
humans, and consequently by a violent reassertion of species borders. Finally, by
showing the link between a certain female viewpoint (that of the little girl and of the
grandmother) and what one might call an animal viewpoint in her novels, I argue that
the turn to – and turn out of – animals in her novels not only undermines the Christian
and moral message the Countess strives to deliver; it also provides an interesting locus
for the analysis of the modes and stakes of the “animalization” of women that
occurred in the European cultural discourse of the nineteenth century. It is as if the
ontological difference between human and animal was being questioned and displaced
only to find itself both recast and reaffirmed in the difference between the human
sexes.
Prologue
I read the Countess of Ségur’s novels when I was a child. Indeed, hers are the
first real books I ever read, the first my mother gave me. I, in turn, started
reading her works with my own daughter. Very quickly I began to ask myself
what was inherited, what was passed on to one’s daughter, to a daughter
today, when one reads those narratives or rather some of these narratives
among the twenty novels that make up the Countess of Ségur’s work. Are
these works indeed “girls’ reading[s],” readings that take place or call to take
place between mother and daughter, and if so, in what respect(s)?
While rereading Les Malheurs de Sophie (Sophie’s Misfortunes) and Les
Mémoires d’un âne (A Donkey’s Memoirs), I was plunged into Jacques
Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. Written on the occasion of a
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conference held around Derrida’s own work on the theme of the
“autobiographical animal,” The Animal That Therefore I am questions,
among other things, the discourse of a “subject” defined as “anthropos,” and,
conversely, the notion of “anthropos” as the only living being capable of
becoming a subject, hence a potential autobiographical writer, since
autobiography in its broader definition starts with an “I am” and consists in
the (re)tracing and transcribing of an “I am.”
This double scene of reading prompted me to want to take a closer look
at three of the Countess’ novels, two of which (Les Petites Filles modèles and
Les Malheurs de Sophie) mark the beginning of her literary career, and the
third one, Les Mémoires d’un âne, immediately follows what one could call
Sophie’s Trilogy. No doubt my own autobiography, however virtual, is
implicated in this choice. Les Mémoires d’un âne (A Donkey’s Memoirs) were
my mother’s favorite “Segurian” novel, and Les Malheurs de Sophie
(Sophie’s Misfortunes), remains for me the strongest experience of this early
reading journey. But what, will you ask, justifies reading Derrida and this
somewhat “Victorian” writer of children’s literature together? Indeed, each of
these three novels raises, in a singular fashion, a question never addressed nor
even posed by literary critics interested in “the autobiographical discourse,”
namely, that of the relation between autobiography and something like “the
animal.”
In various and different respects, these three novels are the most
explicitly autobiographical writings of the Countess of Ségur. Not only does
the heroine of the Malheurs [Misfortunes] bear their author’s first name (the
Countess of Ségur was born Sophie Rostopchine); not only does the Countess
“settle for good” into literature with Sophie’s adventures – before that
(exactly one year before), she had only published a collection of fairy tales –
but in the dedication to her granddaughter in which she sums up the moral
scope of her narrative, she hints with a mixture of slyness and naivety at the
closeness of her character with its “author”: “Grandmother has not always
been good. There are many children who, like her, were naughty and who,
like her, amended their ways. Here are the true adventures of a little girl your
grand-mother knew very well as a child” (my translation).1 What then is the
connection between “Sophie’s” quasi-autobiography and the question of the
animal? Nous l’allons montrer tout à l’heure.2
As for A Donkey’s Memoirs, is it by chance that the only novel in the
first person in the work of the Countess happens to be an animal
autobiography? The book also casts the “grandmother,” that is, the character
who stands for the author’s persona in Ségur’s works and who usually does
not step over the threshold of the preface, much like the “grandmother” who
knew Sophie very well in her childhood. This “grandmother,” who sits
enthroned at the top of the family pyramid and who owns the castle where all
the children of the story gather, just as the Countess shelters the characters in
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her narrative, steps in at two critical moments to decide the fate of Cadichon.
And each time it is in order to keep him at her side. The first time, in a
chapter called “The Punishment,” she defers the punishment Cadichon
allegedly deserves and announces to the children and their parents who have
gathered around her to hear her verdict that she will not send him away from
the castle. The second and last time occurs in what is given as the last chapter
of the book, followed by a “conclusion.” The chapter stages a long
conversation between the grandmother and her grandson Jacques on the
future of Cadichon. At the end of the conversation the grandmother
conditionally wills Cadichon to her grandson, much as a writer would entrust
the work that will survive her to her beneficiaries:
“Grandmother,” [Jacques said], “will you give me Cadichon?”
The Grandmother – “I will give you everything you want, my dear
child, but you will not be allowed to take him to Paris with you.”
Jacques – “No, it is true; but he will be mine and when Papa has a
castle, we will have Cadichon brought there.”
The Grandmother – “I give it to you on this condition, my child.
Meanwhile, he will live here and he will probably live longer than
me. Don’t forget that Cadichon belongs to you and that I leave him
in your care so that he may live happily contented.” (My emphasis.)
I will return later to this sharing of narrative authority between the ass and the
grandmother. For the time being, let me begin my reading.
• • •
“Sophie aimait les bêtes” (Sophie loved animals3). This sentence looks every
bit like an incipit. At once scant and cursory, it seems to promise in summary
fashion later narrative developments. The “imperfect” tense in French
(“Sophie aimait les bêtes”) is used to describe a state of things in the past that
is incomplete, that has no clear temporal boundaries, and which stands at the
threshold of action, calling for ulterior precisions. The generic collective noun
“animals” also begs to be unpacked. And yet, if the sentence is indeed the
first statement of a chapter, it appears not at the beginning of the novel but
five pages before the end of the book, in the penultimate chapter of Sophie’s
Misfortunes. And that is not the only incongruity. Sophie’s Misfortunes tells
of the violent deaths of one animal after another: small fish, the black
chicken, the bee, the squirrel, the cat, the bullfinch, the donkey, and, to close
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the matter, the turtle, which finds her death at Sophie’s hands in the chapter
beginning with the declaration of her love for animals. All this, then, is
Sophie’s fault or rather, as the title would have it, her “misfortune”
(malheur). The word “malheur” is semantically and morally ambiguous. It
means “bad luck,” an accidental happening, and not simply or truly guilt. It
blurs the line between the involuntary and the deliberate. It suggests
irresponsibility and fatality, an animal (bête)’s fate of sorts. Indeed, the
“misfortunes” recounted in this strange story are at least as much, if not more,
the misfortunes of animals (“les bêtes”) as those of Sophie. If Sophie has
misfortunes, these perhaps are then the misfortunes of the little girl as
‘‘bête.”4
I keep repeating the word “bête(s)” in seemingly thoughtless fashion, like
the Countess of Ségur, but one should really ask about the ways this term is
used in these stories and in the other animal-filled narratives of our author.
More precisely, one should reflect on the meaning of the alternation between
the word “bête” and the word “animal,” a less childish and also less
pejorative term in French; “animal” is a more neutral term than “bête,” all the
more since unlike “la bête” which bears the mark or burden of the feminine in
French, it is gendered masculine.
As for love and all the more “the love of animals” (l’amour des bêtes),
this also requires some thought. The Countess’ assertion is short and
unqualified: subject, simple form of the verb, complementary object. Such a
minimalist sentence resembles the first phrases one learns to write in primary
school when one scarcely knows how to write or think. By way of irrefutable
proof of this love, the Countess enumerates in the following sentence all the
animals that Sophie has “had,” as if “having” meant “loving” (“she had
already had a chicken, a squirrel, a cat, a donkey”). What does “love” mean,
and animal love at that, when Sophie’s love literally ends in slaughter?
Moreover, what does a declaration of love do in a narrative not much given to
a discourse of love, whether in the first or in the third person? Sophie “loves”
animals. But does she also “love” her mother; does she “love” God, to whose
images she is summoned to liken herself? The narrative does not tell us.
Nothing, then, is self-evident in this short sentence whose grammatical
simplicity had seemed to promise and guarantee the simplicity of its meaning.
To start with, this declaration of love and the parade of animals that
underwrites it date and situate a narrative otherwise lacking temporal and
spatial markings, suspended as it is in the present of its enunciation, without
any identifiable location beyond the mere mention of a castle, a garden, a
forest, a chicken run or a pond, all impossible to find on any map, just like in
a fairy tale, even though the Countess’ story differs substantially from that
genre in important respects: there is no initiatory trajectory to be discerned,
no transformation of the condition of the heroine, no magical help or
obstacles in the form of fantastic objects or persons, and so on.
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But how does a statement such as “Sophie aimait les bêtes” contribute to
dating the text? That is because only in the nineteenth century, in France at
least and perhaps generally in Europe, does the animal enter literature “as
such” (I will return to this “as such”), and particularly novelistic literature.
There are no more animals in the novels called “sentimental” than in the
libertine novels of the eighteenth century. There are scarcely any animals in
the great romantic Balzacian or Stendhalian narratives but for the horses who
caper on the battlefield and who lead the carriages that bring the lovers
toward each other or pull them apart. Unless passions play themselves out in
the desert, outside the confines of Europe, that is, beyond the boundaries of
Western humanism.5
From the point of view of the animal – my point of view here – one can
no longer oppose the sentimental novel and the libertine novel and thus too,
perhaps, women’s novels (or novels that have a “feminine” outlook) and
men’s novels (or novels that take a “masculine” stance on gender relations).
From the animal’s viewpoint these novelistic genres belong to the same
literary and philosophical epoch.
From the point of view of the animal, moreover, one can hardly oppose
moralism and realism in any simple way; or, more generally, idealist and
naturalist traditions. It would therefore be very difficult to classify the work
of the Countess of Ségur beyond its definition as “children’s literature” (and
even the terms of the address to children are complicated.) Thus I am rather
surprised, Anne or ass (âne) that I am, to see her deemed a “realist” by some
critics, a “moralist” by others. To hold on to either of these characterizations
and to think one knows what one means by either of them, one has to ignore
the presence and effects of the animals and other beasts (bêtes) in these
narratives.
What do these animals (bêtes) do there? Certainly they run on the heels
of children who all dream of riding on the back of donkeys and of sleeping
hand-in-paw with a rabbit. Thus the work of Rimbaud, child-poet and poet of
childhood, a work radically different in genre, language and world from that
of the Countess’ is also full of bêtes: not just animals proper, but “bêtes.”6 We
know that what marks the entrance into adulthood – one could borrow the
Christian idiom of the Countess and call it a conversion to adult humanity – is
not only the stepping from a presumed state of nature into a presumed state of
culture, not only the evolution from sexual polymorphism to genital sexuality,
but at least as much the giving up of a zoophiliac animism, forgotten,
repressed or denied in favor of a full-blown “anthropo-crato-centrism.”
Love of animals in literature would thus be a childish feature, indeed,
some form of “infantilism.” Fairy tales, archetypical genre of children’s
literature, are full of animals. And yet their animals are not the same as the
“second empire” animals (those of the Countess or, once again, of Rimbaud)
that concern me here. Not only are the animals of fairytales endowed most of
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the time with magical powers, but they also speak, most of the time, at least
in French, in the French literary tradition. Puss in Boots and the wolf who
eats the grandmother are excellent rhetoricians, closer in that way to the
animals of La Fontaine than to the animals of the Countess or those of
Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s “wolf” “cries out from under the leaves [or pages
(feuilles)].”7 The Countess’ donkey does indeed write his memoirs, but,
crucially as we will see, he does not speak. In the end, the notion of children’s
literature is not enough to account for the literary presence and treatment of
animals. It does not allow us to account for the difference between classical
animals and modern animals, between the triumphant rhetoricians of Perrault,
and the mute, badly treated “beasts” of the Countess. The latter belong to
another era of the apprehension, the conception and the figuring of animality.
Might the Countess of Ségur be more scrupulously realistic in her literary
treatment of the animal, in keeping with the literary trends of her time? The
work of the Countess, it is true, seems to obey a principle of verisimilitude.
Despite the apparent lack of historical consciousness or indifference to
history (to which the absence of temporal marks in her stories seems to
attest), the settings, the manners and the objects of her novels reflect her time.
And one sees many more animals – wild, domestic or half domesticated – in
the countryside settings of Les Petites Filles modèles, Les Malheurs de
Sophie or the Mémoires d’un âne than in the narratives which take place in
cities, such as Les Deux Nigauds or François le bossu. But if the presence of
numerous animals can index the rural world in realistic fashion, and if from
this point of view the quasi-absence of the animal universe in the peasant
novels of George Sand, a close contemporary of the Countess, may seem
surprising and indeed remarkable,8 one could not easily call Mémoires d’un
âne an example of literary realism, even if the narrative announces itself as an
ordinary account, as if unconscious of – or indifferent to – its exceptional,
indeed fairylike device.
Another history of literature, one that does not rely on the generic
distinctions, historic periodizations or aesthetic categories usually invoked is
thus necessary to account not only for the appearance but also for a certain
stubborn presence of what I call the “animal as such” in modern literature.
And, in this respect at least, the Countess’ work belongs to modernity.
What do I mean by this? The “animal as such” is first of all the animal
who does not speak. More exactly, who does not speak our language, human
language. The animals of La Fontaine, like those of Aesop, speak French,
which is to say Greek – they are zooi logoi, reasoning and reasonable
animals, in the traditional philosophical sense of the term. Like the humans
who are the masters of the world, they reign alone in the fable. They are or
think they are amongst themselves. As reasonable beings they have neither
sex nor gender. They are abstract by essence, and that is the condition of their
universality. Their grammatical gender in French notwithstanding, who can
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say that La Fontaine’s field rat is male or that his ant is female?9 The fabulous
Western zoon logon thus marks the triumph of anthropo-(crato)-centrism as a
process of colonization and tropological conversion of animality.
Colonization and conversion historically go together, as we know. A figure of
the human, of humanity’s identity and self-sameness, the fabulous zoon logon
reasserts and reinforces man’s “humanity,” i.e. his sovereignty as “master and
possessor of nature.”
Now, not only do the animals of the Countess’ narrative not speak, but
their muteness is even an insistent topos. In Chapter XVII of Sophie’s
Misfortunes, which announces itself deceptively as a fable in the manner of
La Fontaine (it is entitled “The Cat and the Bullfinch”), Sophie’s mother
holds a double discourse to Sophie suggesting, on the one hand, her closeness
to the little cat found lost in the forest and affirming, on the other, their
radical difference:
The mother – “The little cat is too young to have found his way […];
If some wicked men led you far off and left you in a corner of the
forest, what would you do? Do you think you could find your way
all by yourself?”
Sophie – “[…] I would give them my name and ask that they lead
me there.”
The mother – “You can talk and you could make yourself
understood! But do you think that if the poor cat came into the house
one would be able to understand what he wanted? One would chase
him away, beat him, kill him perhaps.”
In the same way, Cadichon complains repeatedly in his Memoirs that it is
impossible for him to make himself understood by men even though he
himself understands their language. In the chapter about his conversion
(XVIII) one can read a version of his complaint:
What can be done? I asked myself sadly. If I could speak I would
say to them all that I repent, that I ask everyone I have wronged to
pardon me, that I will be good and sweet tempered in the future; but
[…] I cannot make myself understood […] I do not speak.
However, if the non-speech of the animal is the sign of an irreducible gap
between animality and humanity, it does not exactly correspond to the
Cartesian distinction between the reasonable animal (man as “zoon logon”)
and the beast deprived of the faculty of reason. Whatever Sophie’s mother
thinks of the matter, the Ségurian animals are endowed with linguistic
abilities and do understand men. It is men who can’t comprehend them. The
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problem here is one of communication through difference, not one of
essential language deprivation. The muteness in this case is at the same time
the means by which the animal resists being assimilated by man or to man
and the cause of its misfortune. If, at first, Sophie and her mother take the
little cat lost in the forest into their castle, the kitten will end up meeting the
sad animal fate tentatively described to Sophie by her mother. A remorseless
gobbler of birds, incapable of explaining his impulse since he does not speak,
the cat will never be understood nor domesticated. Sophie will beat him with
a rod the way she herself will be whipped later on by her stepmother. And in
the end, Sophie’s father will kill him after he has eaten up her mother’s
bullfinch. A bullfinch which, like a properly brought-up maiden, reduced to
captivity after having been abruptly taken out of the forest by human
violence, sang traditional French airs in its golden cage.10
No, “The Cat and the Bullfinch” is certainly not a fable by La Fontaine.
And not only because the animal remains an animal, chased after as such by
men. It is also because the relation of man and animal in these stories is not
metaphorical, as it is in La Fontaine’s fables, but metonymical. In La
Fontaine’s fables, substitution, thus the conversion (or turning) of animality
into humanity is complete. The animal functions as a metaphor for man and
the fable is built as an allegory: the animal story is a figure for human history;
one has to rise above the animal literalness of the fable to have access to its
human meaning. Even though, as soon as writing meddles with it, allegory
risks being “done in,” to parody Derrida’s famous formula,11 allegory
tradtionally calls for a “vertical” reading, a reading which implies
subordinating the figure (and the figural in general) to the proper meaning
which exceeds it.
There is no such pattern in the Countess of Ségur’s stories. “Silly
compositions” (“compositions nigaudes”), as she herself qualified them (and
a “nigaud,” the French dictionary tells us, is a “bêta” or a “dadais”: literally,
a simple-minded ass), her stories put the animal’s “misfortunes” and the
“misfortunes” of children, even the “misfortunes” of some inferior human
categories (servants or thieves for instance) who might threaten the social
order, on the same narrative plane. Sometimes, animals’ misfortunes and
human misfortunes occur within the same chapter. Most of the time, though,
such episodes belong to different chapters. Sometimes the narrative of the
animal’s story precedes that of the human; sometimes it is the opposite. There
is no order of precedence between them. Each one (animal or human) has the
ability to “prefigure” the other.
In Les Malheurs de Sophie, Sophie attacks her own self, cutting her
eyebrows (Chapter VIII) after having cut off the head of a bee “to punish it
for all the stings it made” (Chapter VI). Mémoires d’un âne, the story of two
scrounging dogs who, attracted by the perspective of a good meal, hurl
themselves onto the young Auguste, follows the narrative of an attempted
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break-in of the castle by two escaped convicts with canine-like names (Finot
and Pataud). In Les Petites Filles modèles, the sad story of the robin who
“became angry in his prison” (Chapter XVIII) follows Sophie’s anger in the
penance closet (Chapters XVI and XVII). Sophie, who has offered the rebel
robin to her model friends, proposes a reading of this concatenation in a rare
moment of autobiographical reflexivity: “Alas, he acts the way I did before,”
she remarks about the robin: “He became angry in his prison as I was angry
in mine and he tried to destroy everything the same way I tore up the book,
the paper and broke the pen. I hope he will repent as I did.” But most of the
time neither the narrative voice nor the characters seem to notice the
closeness of the human and animal episodes or states. One could thus easily
overlook the similarity of the description of the gluttonous wolf, eager to
devour Sophie in the chapter of the Malheurs called “The Wolves” (“an
enormous wolf with sparkling eyes, mouth open, stuck his head out of the
woods”) with that of the greedy Sophie, eager to devour “the candied fruit” in
the chapter that bears their name (“the eyes of Sophie sparkled; she passed
her tongue over her lips”).
The syntagmatic contiguity linking humans and especially, but not
uniquely, children and animals doubles itself in their spatial contiguity.
Invincibly attracted by the spaces that lie outside the park, the children
venture into the forest, the living quarters of numerous savage beasts. The
undomesticated animals find their way into the castle, either breaking in
themselves or because they are trapped by the humans. In Chapter XVIII of
Mémoires d’un âne, Cadichon, who is neither a wild animal, nor any longer a
domestic one from the time that he has been on the run, overhears a
conversation between the temporary “master” he has given himself, the wife
of that man and their child. The conversation takes place inside an inn’s
room. Cadichon’s head “rests on the window ledge” of the room, that is on
the very threshold between inside and outside, between the human and the
animal world. The child is unable to count the money earned thanks to
Cadichon’s tours and is called “bête,” then “animal” by his father who starts
to beat him: “The boy started to cry; I was angry. If this poor boy was dumb
[bête], it was not his fault,” writes the animal memorialist. Note the
distribution of affects allowed by the spatial position of the donkey, very
close to the boy: the boy cries, the donkey is angry, as if he himself had been
called “bête” and treated accordingly. And it is indeed both on the child’s
account and on his own as an animal that he revolts against this insulting and
erroneous use of the word “bête.”
This horizontal treatment of the relation between humans and animals,
this blurring of boundaries between their worlds does not only threaten their
distinction. Because the distinction between human and animal is perhaps the
oldest and most fundamental hierarchical scheme, at least in the Judeo-
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Christian world,12 all the hierarchical oppositions constitutive of the social
and moral universe of the Countess are affected by this species trouble.
The Countess’ view of things, we know, is Manichean. Her world
divides itself between good and bad people, along a moral rather than a social
axis, even though the moral order always upholds the social one. There may
be good servants and mean masters, as well as good masters and mean
servants. Whatever the case, conversion to goodness is the necessary
condition of social harmony, that is, of a shared and cordial understanding of
class and status hierarchies. This ideological construct finds its justification
and its rhetorical tools in religion. In many novels, Christian morality is the
basis for the plot. Every novel, with the notable exception of Les Malheurs de
Sophie, stages a conversion, which is literally the turning point in the
narrative, changing the course of the characters’ lives. In this sense, the
Countess’ novels aim to edify as much as to educate her readers. Whether in
its founding texts or in its historical forms, Christianity, as we know, relies on
a strict partition between humanity and animality. Yes, Jesus asks small
children to come to him; yes, he refuses to condemn the woman who has
committed adultery and he claims that the last on earth will be the first in
heaven. But he doesn’t seem to count the animals among his herd of
redeemed souls. Indeed, animals, the animal in general, including Jesus
himself, must be sacrificed to God, for God, as is suggested by Christ’s
antonomastic designation in numerous prayers as “God’s lamb.” The “lamb”
is a discreet but clear allusion to the story of Abraham, whose “sacrifice”
seals the anthropotheocratic pact between God and men, at the expense of the
lamb. The practice and benefits of love and fraternity are reserved to human
creatures, as if goodness and the care for others were or should be human
characteristics. Wickedness and cruelty would then belong to the realm of the
in- or a-human, to the beast that threatens man from outside or from within.
In order to access the human realm of brotherhood, one would only have to
extirpate or expel the beast. This scheme or logic, however, is actually greatly
complicated in the Ségurian narratives I am focusing on.
Sophie’s story, as it unfolds between the Malheurs and Les Petites Filles
modèles, can indeed be read as a narrative of progressive domestication, a
domestication which entails the little girl’s subjection to the Christian logic of
sin, punishment, and repentance and which also requires that she give up her
strange “love for animals” (amour des bêtes), that makes up the bulk of her
“misfortunes” (malheurs). The manifestations of that “love” are much less
frequent in Les Petites Filles modèles, which picture a Sophie older by a few
years, thus confirming the growing apart of humans and animals, as the
former get “bigger.” I have already mentioned the main episode involving an
animal in Les Petites Filles modèles, namely the story of the robin Sophie
gives to Madeleine, after the bird has been chased away from his nest by his
own mother. Full of a wild and cumbersome love for his little mistress, the
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bird refuses to be put in a cage. Confined against his will, he becomes
enraged, and avenges himself by breaking everything around him when he is
allowed to get out. Shortly after, he manages to flee and returns to the forest,
where he meets a violent death at the claws of a predator. In its main features,
this story repeats that of the cat in the Malheurs. “The Cat and the Bullfinch”
also features a wild kitten taken in by Sophie after he has been abandoned or
lost by his mother, and who turns out to be untamable. The difference
between the two episodes, though, lies in Sophie’s reaction. In Les Petites
Filles modèles, Sophie sides with her “role models” and their mother against
the bird: “Comme il est bête d’être méchant” (how dumb of him to be so
wicked), exclaims Sophie who situates wickedness on the side of dumbness
and bestiality (du côté du bête et de la bête), thus suggesting that wickedness
is a manifestation of the (dumb) beast as such (relève de la bêtise de la bête).
By contrast, in the Malheurs, Sophie sheds tears for her wild and cruel kitten
when he is put to death by her father. She secretly or rather mutely opposes
the unanimous verdict of her parents and her cousin Paul, who have all sided
with the happily encaged bullfinch: “Sophie didn’t dare say anything, but she
cried bitterly over her poor cat, whom she loved in spite of his flaws.” As we
noted earlier, if, on the level of fiction, Les Petites Filles modèles follows Les
Malheurs de Sophie, in the actual order of these novels’ writing, it is the
reverse, as if the Countess couldn’t help going back to the stage of animal
love which the Sophie of Les Petites Filles modèles was in the process of
overcoming, under the guidance of God and a good mother figure.
Little Sophie loves animals (les bêtes) then, even cruel ones. She loves
them cruelly, with animal-like love (d’un amour de bête). I have already
mentioned the decapitation of the bee that had stung her, or the cutting up,
with no intention to kill them, of the live goldfish that belonged to her
mother. The conflation of “love” with its presumed opposite is particularly
salient in Chapter VIII of Les Petites Filles modèles. Three little girls
(Marguerite and the two model sisters) take the side of three little hedgehogs,
which the gatekeeper threatens to drown after he has killed their mother. The
little girls take their grievance to their mothers. Unfortunately, the little
hedgehogs have already been thrown into the pond. Sophie comes in. One of
the little hedgehogs is still alive and Sophie suggests that they sink him
deeper in the water with a stick in order to abbreviate his ordeal:
Sophie – “What if we sank him with a stick so that he dies more
quickly? This poor thing is suffering.”
Marguerite – “You are right! Poor thing (Pauvre bête)! Here he
comes near us.”
Sophie – “Here is a big stick; slap him on the head and he will
sink.”
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At this point, Marguerite refuses to finish off the hedgehog or even to get
closer to the pond. Sophie steps in and strikes him repeatedly while the
narrative describes the hedgehog’s death. The hedgehog “sinks” (“enfonce”),
Sophie falls into the pond and “sinks” (“enfonce”) herself. Two aspects of the
scene interest me here: on the one hand, there is the communality of affects
and fate of the victim and its executor, a communality emphasized not by
stressing the obvious specular connection between the motherless Sophie and
the orphaned hedgehog but through the mere succession of the hedgehog’s
drowning and Sophie’s near drowning. On the other hand, there is the
intertwining of cruelty and compassion. Sophie wants to abbreviate and to
increase the hedgehog’s suffering in one stroke. She suffers from its misfortune and enjoys striking him. Between “loving” and “murdering” the
animal, it is hard to see the difference.
Yet, this cruel love or loving cruelty has nothing to do with hatred for the
hedgehogs, such as is expressed rationally by the gatekeeper Nicaise. The
latter wants to annihilate “their race.” After he has killed the mother, Nicaise
argues slyly, resorting to sophistic reasoning with a kind of Kantian solemnity
(note the use of a quasi-Kantian categorical imperative at the beginning of the
following sentence): “One must (il faut bien) kill them, miss. The hedgehog is
bad; it destroys little rabbits, little partridges. Besides, they are too young.
They wouldn’t survive without their mother.” Thus the murder of the mother
is used to justify another crime (“they wouldn’t survive without their
mother”). As for protecting rabbits and partridges, the aim is obviously to
make sure that they end up safely on our plates. Nicaise concludes: “The
hedgehog’s race is wicked; it must be destroyed.” The racialist profiling of
the hedgehog is performed grammatically, as well as lexically, through the
use of the generic singular in French (“c’est une méchante race que le
hérisson”). The generic singular denies at once the plurality of hedgehogs and
the irreplaceable singularity of each of them. This is the logic of the global
and thus final solution. The mother of the little girls, who acts as a judge
between the two parties (the accused Nicaise on the one side, the three little
girls representing the claim of the three hedgehogs on the other), grants
Nicaise the right to kill. “What can we do my little ones, but to forget these
hedgehogs? Nicaise thought he was doing the right thing when he killed
them. Indeed, what would you have done with them?”
Recent critics of the Countess’s work have stressed the cruel vein of her
narratives. But “animal” cruelty and human cruelty take different forms and
have different sources. One is amoral and unconscious of itself. The other is
essentially moral, even moralistic, and always “justified”: one kills animals or
makes them suffer in the name of the good and the true.
Sophie’s turtle, the last unfortunate object of her love for animals in Les
Malheurs, is actually condemned in advance to an abject fate by Mme de
Réan’s principled stance regarding its kind: “What foolishness! I was joking
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when I mentioned a turtle. That’s a horrible beast (bête), heavy, ugly, boring;
I do not think you can love such a dumb animal.” Sophie will love her
anyway; that is, in a dumb way, such that will lead to her death. Her mother,
who expresses her repulsion toward that disgusting animal in a spate of
deictics, will have the turtle thrown into a pit: “One must throw away that
turtle [Il faut jeter cette tortue]. Lambert, come and take away that dead
animal, and throw it in a pit” (my emphasis. Note once again the recourse to
the categorical imperative, a rhetorical device of grown up language).
Beau-Minon’s death at the hard-hitting hands of M. de Réan is at least as
violent as that of the bullfinch in the cat’s mouth and much more detailed.
Above all, it is “justified”:
Beau-Minon leapt on the floor with the poor bullfinch still fluttering
her wings in his mouth […] M. de Réan, who was just coming in,
seized a pair of tongs and tried to hit Beau-Minon […] M. de Réan
chased him from one room to the next, from one hall to the next
[…] Finally, he managed to catch Beau-Minon with the tongs. The
blow was so hard that he opened his mouth and let the bird fall.
While the bullfinch was falling on one side, Beau-Minon fell on the
other. He had two or three convulsions and then he stopped moving.
The tongs had hit him on the head; he was dead.
“I punished the guilty one, but was not able to save the innocent,”
M. de Réan commented. And he concluded: “The bullfinch died
strangled by the wicked Beau-Minon, who will not kill anyone
anymore, since I killed him without meaning to do so.”
The cat receives a post-mortem condemnation while M. de Réan acquits
himself. A good Christian, the Countess of Ségur does not apply the main
commandment – you will not kill – to animals. The murder of the animal is
not called “cruel,” “vengeful,” or “wicked.” It is deemed “reasonable,” “just,”
or “good.”
But the story’s morality, enunciated and upheld as it is by the mighty and
powerful as its only authorized representatives, is undermined by the constant
shift of perspective. The Ségurian narration defies standard narratological
analysis. Economical to the point of being spare, the third-person narrative
functions most of the time as a mere link between dialogues, by far more
numerous and profuse. In this sense, the Countess’s stories resemble a puppet
theater. The narration hardly reports any inner thoughts the characters might
have, with the exception of Sophie’s “ideas” and some of her feelings (such
as “Sophie loved animals”) in Les Malheurs, or of Sophie’s (mis)calculations
and her good resolutions in Les Petites Filles modèles. (Chapter XXII is thus
entitled: “Sophie wants to practice charity.”) One could well wonder why, in
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a text so heavily burdened by ideology, where notions of good and evil are
constantly invoked or mobilized, the narrative voice hardly activates the
function which Gérard Genette calls “ideological management” (régie
idéologique). Because the perspective on the action shifts radically depending
on the locutor or the agent of the narrative sequence, the multiplicity of
discourses and their formal equality lessen the strength and scope of
statements that owe their validity to the social and moral standing of the
locutor. In other words, the discursive practice, an effect of a certain literary
apparatus, undermines the ideological content of these narratives and
complicates their purported message. Thus, the comment made by Sophie’s
maid in Les Malheurs regarding the cruel end of the small fish upsets the
apparently neat binary structure of the episode. We could or should think in
agreement with Sophie’s mother and with Sophie herself, since the latter
questions neither the former’s reason nor her authority, that Sophie acted like
a beast (une bête) when she killed her mother’s fish, that she behaved in short
like the bad daughter of a human(e) mother. Yet, the maid unwittingly
suggests another reading of Sophie’s gesture as well as of her mother’s
attitude toward the fish and therefore toward her daughter. Not knowing that
the sad Sophie is guilty of the death of the fish, she remarks:
I was sure you would be sad like your mama because of the
unfortunate fate of these poor little bêtes. But one has to say that
these fish were not happy in their prison. For the small washbowl
was a prison for them. Now that they are dead, they don’t suffer
anymore. Don’t think about them anymore, and let me get you
ready to go into the parlor.
From the maid’s point of view, one cannot simply oppose Sophie’s cruelty to
her mother’s humanness. The fish’s death actually helps reveal the mother’s
cruelty. The latter did not hesitate to “imprison” the fish in a washbowl,
making them suffer a prolonged living death for her own pleasure. Cast in
this light, Sophie’s gesture becomes unwittingly one of liberation, a wild
political act of sorts.
The animal presence does indeed alter the political makeup of these
narratives.
Christianity does not only serve a moral purpose, but also a political one.
A good Christian, if one is to believe the Countess’ stories, never rebels
against social constraint and injustice. He or she accepts them humbly. He or
she triumphs over the wickedness of the mighty by presenting the left cheek,
just as “poor Blaise” did in the novel that bears his name. Written after the
novels I focus on here, Pauvre Blaise is the perfect illustration of the
successful Christian novel. The son of the castle’s gatekeeper, Blaise will
finally get the better of the wicked Jules, the landlord’s son, thanks to his
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humble and meek demeanor. As a result, Jules will become a good master
and a good Christian. Animal adventures or episodes are relatively scarce in
this novel in which humanity and Christianity seem to rhyme without major
problems, and where the behavior of the child-hero, docile and already on the
way to adulthood (he is eleven), is in full agreement with the parental and
moral law. Blaise happens to kill a cat in the course of his story, and he does
so deliberately, acting more in this sense like M. de Réan than like Sophie in
Les Malheurs. No impulse attracts him to the cat; he doesn’t have any relation
to him and he actually hardly identifies him as such. Their chance encounter
takes place near a cemetery in a chapter called “The Ghost-Cat.” Blaise
throws a stone at the cat to defend himself and his companion Jules against
what he perceives to be a threat. One could read the chapter as a successful
attempt to avert the possible return of animality within the so-called human
world: doesn’t a “ghost” name whatever threatens to return from beyond
firmly established borders?
In the universe of Pauvre Blaise, the question of the opposition between
good and evil is settled. One is not confronted with the kind of ethical
complications I have strived to underline in Les Malheurs de Sophie or even
Les Petites Filles modèles. Needless to say, I was bored when I reread it. One
chapter however, entitled “An Elephant’s Revenge,” belies the facile
enforcement of the Christian doctrine. The Second Empire was perhaps the
foremost era of circuses and menageries. Baudelaire’s “Swan” is an escapee
of one of these menageries, a soul mate in this sense of all the convicts on the
run variously celebrated by Hugo and Rimbaud. An elephant is an exotic
animal. Like all these exotic creatures displayed in paintings or at Parisian
crossroads, it points metonymically toward the colonial enterprise to which
its capture and attractive foreignness are linked. I have emphasized up to now
a certain lack of historical contextualization in the Countess’ novels. The
numerous allusions in her stories to the various colonial endeavors of her time
are all the more striking, if discreet. In her first novel, Les Petites Filles
modèles, one learns at the turn of a sentence that M. de Fleurville “met a
cruel death in a fight against the Arabs” (my emphasis). At the end of the
Malheurs, Sophie and Paul play at imagining America, as they are about to
embark toward that destination with their families. They picture it under the
double heading of the animal and the savage:
Sophie – “[…] We will see turtles in America.”
Paul – “And magnificent birds; red, orange, blue, purple, pink
ravens, unlike our incredibly ugly black ones.”
Sophie – “And parrots and hummingbirds. Mama says there are a lot
of them in America.”
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Paul – “And black, yellow and red savages.”
Sophie – “As for savages, they will scare me. They might eat us.”
Savages and animals share the same attributes, while eliciting split affects and
fantasies. The reasons for both their conflation and their distinction are easy
to fathom. But let’s return to our elephant. After he is done with his tricks, the
elephant is allowed to rest in a barn where Jules and Blaise come to visit him
and watch him eat. Soon, Jules starts to prick the elephant’s trunk with a long
pin. After a while, the elephant avenges himself, spraying water at the boy
through his trunk with a force that throws him to the ground. Whatever the
stated morality of the novel, this vengeful gesture gives real pleasure to the
reader. In a similar move, Cadichon avenges the death of his friend Médor, by
violently throwing off August, who is responsible for the dog’s death. August
falls in a muddy hole and almost drowns. A good Christian should not avenge
himself. Blaise suffers Jules’s persecutions without flinching. But animals are
not Christian, even though Cadichon will later embrace to a certain extent the
morality of his masters. The vengeful animal applies the law of retaliation,
according to a logic of retributive justice. If he follows a moral precept, then,
it is not one found in the New Testament but rather in the Old one. In this
sense, the animal can be said to be somewhat “Jewish.”
Sophie gets angry in Les Malheurs and Les Petites Filles modèles. But
her fits of anger never reach the stage of overt conflict with parental figures.
They occur sometimes without cause and they die down like storms. They are
thus different from vengeance, which is often premeditated and which always
tries to answer an unjust action, itself the more or less deliberate result of an
abusive exercise of power. Vengeance, in this sense, is political, all the more
so when the avenged offense is one suffered by a third party rather than by
the avenger himself, as is the case with Cadichon. Animals are the only ones
to avenge themselves and others successfully in the Countess’ works. They
are therefore the only ones to have a political dimension and design, since
politics is not an option for humans in the Ségurian universe.
As Médor’s avenger, Cadichon becomes a third person between the
martyr dog and the children. The place of the third, Derrida reminds us as he
echoes Emmanuel Levinas’ musings on the question of justice, is indeed that
of the first call for (or appeal to) justice.13 By adopting the position of the
third, and more specifically of the witness for the prosecution, the donkey
becomes a political animal.14 With their political subtext, however
unwittingly woven into the text, his Memoirs take on a critical dimension.
In the Biblical tradition, the donkey already figures as a witness,
therefore as the quintessential third person. The donkey that carries Isaac
toward the designated place for his sacrifice is the sole witness to the debate
between Abraham and God. A donkey also witnesses Jesus’ birth in a barn
with another companion, the ox. But these donkeys are both mute and
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passive. No one, no thing testifies for what they think. What their silence
testifies to then, if anything, what it points toward, is their own exclusion
from the pact that is being established under their eyes and ears between
mankind and God. The silence of the donkey in this case is not only the
muteness of one who does not speak, but at least as much that of one to
whom one does not speak.
Cadichon’s position is entirely different from that of its forbearers. Not
only does he witness everything that happens or that is said between humans,
whether openly or secretly, as if he himself were God or the omniscient
narrator he is made to be; not only is he capable in this respect of both
reporting and analyzing the scenes he witnesses, but he is also constantly
addressed, even called upon. Above all, he does testify in writing to the
possibility of a relationship between animals and humans qua animals,
beyond all linguistic and racial borders.
With regard to his position as witness-prosecutor, the dedication of
Cadichon’s Memoirs to his “little master” deserves our attention. As a
codified gesture, a dedication contributes to the definition of a pact between
writer and reader. In theory, a dedication belongs to the tradition of the
“homage” paid to the addressee. An act of deference, it either recognizes or
performatively establishes a hierarchy between addressor and addressee. Yet,
the first sentence of Cadichon’s dedication undermines its traditional function
by formulating a fundamental reproach: “My little master, you have been
good to me, but you have shown contempt toward donkeys in general. In
order to better instruct you on what donkeys are, I write these Memoirs and
offer them to you.”
The gift to the dedicatee thus turns at once into a condemnation. And it is
because Cadichon occupies the position of the third between his little master
and the “donkeys in general,” whose fate he has managed to escape thanks to
his exceptional endowment, that he is able to testify on all donkeys’ behalf.
His Memoirs are construed as an attempt to reestablish both the truth and the
dignity of “donkeys in general” and as a lesson delivered at once bluntly and
deftly to the little master thanks to his mastery of the rhetorical art of
persuasion. The anaphorical stamping of the formula “You will see,” repeated
four times, presents the theses Cadichon wants to demonstrate as if they were
already ascertained.15 But if Cadichon’s deconstruction of anthropocentric
assumptions and their idiomatic manifestations, if the call for justice16 in this
open letter seem to limit themselves exclusively to his kind, Cadichon’s
Memoirs as a whole show that his testimony against injustice and the
arbitrary boundary between animals and humans encompasses all animated
living beings. After all, his best friend, the one on whose behalf he rebels
against the abusive sovereignty of mankind, is a dog. Between them and
between animals in general, there is no hierarchy or boundary of
communication. As Cadichon reminds us at the beginning of Chapter XXIII,
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“I’ve already said with regard to my friend Médor that we animals understand
each other without speaking like men do; the movements of our eyes, ears
and tails replace articulated speech among us.” The care Cadichon takes to
distinguish within the donkey realm between male donkeys, female donkeys
and baby donkeys in his open letter to his master was already a sign of his
analytical refinement and the depth of his political sense. It is as if, in order to
protest against both the injustice and the “racism” to which donkeys are
subjected as a generic “kind,” to show how one is implicated with the other
and to avoid repeating the same mistake he denounces, he had to recognize
and emphasize the different “subject-and-social” positions (masculine,
feminine and infantile) within his own kind in order to do justice to them in
their specificity. Likewise, Cadichon includes in his call for justice any
creature treated as an ass, be he or she a human being, as is the case in the
episode featuring the performing donkey’s showman and his son, whom the
former calls an “animal” and beats down accordingly.
In light of these considerations, one should have a look at the general
conversation between all the children featured in the novel, which takes place
in Chapter XXI, in Cadichon’s presence. Among the children are the two
model little girls, as well as a certain Henri, who bears the same name as both
the Countess of Ségur’s grandson, and the dedicatee of Cadichon’s Memoirs.
The children discuss Cadichon’s behavior, and wonder why he shows so
much hatred toward Médor’s murderer. Henri claims that all donkeys are
asses17 whereas Camille, one of the model girls, asserts that “donkeys are
only asses because they are treated as such.” A moment earlier, she had
turned to Cadichon and addressed him directly, thus including him in the
circle of the conversation. And she had suggested nothing else to him than
that he write his Memoirs.18 Thus, if Cadichon chooses to dedicate his
Memoirs to Henri, Camille can be said to have been his muse. This
metatextual moment, which reflects and has the children and the donkey
reflect on the rationale and conditions of production of his narrative is worth
stressing. Note also that once again it is a girl who sides with the animal (la
bête), albeit in a less “brutish” manner than Sophie.
Could it be because the donkey is the immemorial carrier of the
proletarians’ claim that Cadichon plays, if not without his knowing, at least
without the Countess’ knowing, the role of spokesman for the oppressed?
The word “proletarian,” which gave birth to various cognates precisely
during the Countess’ lifetime, comes, as one knows, from “proles,” which
designates the animals’ offspring. Physical strength and exertion, as well as
the ability to reproduce oneself, are the proletarian’s only means of survival.
The proletarian in this sense is like an animal and has the exact same role as a
beast of burden. Hasn’t the donkey been the exemplary beast of burden in
Western and Mediterranean cultures? The donkey made the mill’s wheel turn;
he dragged the heavy stones with which buildings were built. He is in this
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sense a prototype for the proletarian. True, the donkeys that walk the masters’
children around in the Countess’ narratives are functionally and symbolically
closer to domestics than to proletarians. But the threat of their downgrading
to the status of beast of burden never ceases to hang over them, if they
misbehave.19 That is the reason why, even after Cadichon changes his
demeanor and converts to more Christian feelings, he reasserts the political
aim of his writings by granting himself the right to admonish all the little
masters of the world on the very last page of his Memoirs:
My Memoirs might amuse you, my little friends. At any rate they
will make you understand that if you want to be well served, you
have to treat your servants well; that those you deem dumb (bêtes)
are not so dumb as they look to you; that a donkey is endowed, like
anybody else, with a heart that allows him to love his masters or feel
pain when they mistreat him, and with a will either to seek
vengeance or show his gratitude; and that he can, depending on his
masters, be happy or unhappy, and turn into a friend or into an
enemy, as ass-like as he is. (My emphasis.)20
Cadichon’s final speech is all the more remarkable for its moral authority, an
authority that comes to reinforce the authority of his narrative voice. Such
authority is seldom granted by the Countess to a creature of inferior standing,
be it animal or human.
I started with the question of autobiography. I will end with it.
The sharing of narrative authority between the “grandmother-author” and
the “writing donkey” can also be read in the exchange of their attributes and a
certain conflation of their features. It is as if each one had swallowed the
other, in a rare case of reciprocal incorporation of human by animal and
conversely.21 The old donkey, for the writing donkey has reached old age,
gives himself the right to lecture little children just like a grandmother would
do. The grandmother shows an understanding of the animal and of the
relations between mankind and animals, which allows her to comprehend
Cadichon in terms other than those dictated by the Christian ethos of guilt and
repentance. Therefore she is able to follow Cadichon in his deconstructionist
critique of the anthropocentric opposition between man and beast. The
Countess may not know it, but her narrative makes it known to us: she is he
and he is she.
The issue presents itself quite differently in Les Malheurs de Sophie and
Les Petites Filles modèles. Here, the main take on the stories told is not that
of an old donkey writer who draws a portrait of the artist as an ass, but that of
a tiny little girl, whom the author-writer knew intimately.
As we said earlier, a narratological analysis of the relation between
narrative voice and character is not of much use, given the scant and
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repetitive nature of the narrative devices. What one can say is that the two
narratives do focus their attention and ours on what we might call Sophie’s
experience.
One may remember that the book of Sophie’s misfortunes starts with the
minute account of the destruction by Sophie herself of her wax doll. This
systematic work of destruction (first the doll’s eyes melt, then her lips get
discolored, then her hair is burnt, then her legs are cut off and finally her head
is broken) is followed by the narrative of her burial in Chapter II.
Interestingly, the doll’s funeral is the most unequivocally joyful moment in
the whole book:
One had never seen a more joyful burial. True, the dead person was
an old doll without color, hair, legs or head, whom nobody loved
and nobody missed. Thus did the day end happily.
The whole episode easily lends itself to a Freudian reading. If, as Freud says
in his lecture on femininity, the girl’s relation to her doll is a metaphor for her
relation to her mother; if, as he writes further, the doll (“Puppe” in German
and “poupée” in French) represents the girl, while she herself plays the role of
her own mother toward her; if the girl’s play with her doll testifies to the
erotic intensity of the bond between daughter and mother in so far as the
possession of the much desired doll seals the phantasmatic union of mother
and daughter in the pre-Oedipal phase, then one reading of this initial scene
cannot but impress itself on the reader.22 The primordial scene of the
narrative, the destruction of the doll, can be read and has been read as a selfdestructing gesture on Sophie’s part – a reading supported by the two
chapters respectively entitled “The Wet Hair” and “The Shaven Eyebrows,”
which recount Sophie’s self-inflicted injuries to her own image. The violence
of the doll’s handling, as extreme as it is unconscious, may represent the
violence exercised by the mother in the name of the pedagogical imperative,
at least as Sophie experiences it. Indeed, each time Sophie hurts her doll, she
believes she does – her – good. Moreover, the Malheurs’ fictional universe,
as well as that of Les Petites Filles modèles, is one entirely dominated by
feminine and maternal figures. As many critics have noticed, fathers are quasi
absent from these narratives and boys play only secondary roles. What is at
stake is indeed the relation between mothers and daughters. And when a
mother gives her daughter one or the other of these novels to read, she
obviously restages the scene of this relation.
One can also, however, read the scene of the doll’s destruction, a
destruction which starts with the loss of her eyes, hence of vision and face
(visage in French), as the loci and channels of identificatory processes, as a
gesture targeting the daughter’s image inasmuch as she is an image of her
mother, that is, more radically, as an attack against the human face, as an
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attempt to resist humanization, indeed humanity in every sense of the term.
The two readings of course are not mutually exclusive, quite the contrary. If
the doll’s destruction points to Sophie’s desire to become or remain “animal”;
if, at the same time, one cannot but notice that Sophie treats her “animals”
(ses “bêtes”) the way she treats her doll, harming them for their and her own
good, doesn’t that turn animals into figures or manifestations of what the
subject cannot and should not say about and to her/himself, figures then of
what comes out when she/he tracks her own trails in writing? In other words,
animals would be Sophie’s “alter ids,” if I may say, rather than her alter egos,
since she doesn’t really recognize her image in them.
Indeed, even if Sophie identifies briefly with the robin in Les Petites
Filles modèles, on the whole as we have seen, her relation to or with the
animal remains non-specular: there is no mirror-effect between them, hence
no process of idealization at work, no reflective mechanism that would
prompt “super-egoic” reactions.23 To borrow Derrida’s words, I “am” (suis)
the/an animal, in so far as I follow (suis) it/him/her. I follow the animal, I
chase it/him/her, I run after what/whom I don’t know myself to be; I want
it/him/her while I chase it/him/her and I chase it/him/her because I want
it/him/her, a strange operation of intense desire and repulsion, capture and
flight well rendered by the irreducible ambiguity of the verb “to chase.”
Hence also the metonymic structure of the relation between children and
animals in these narratives, where the “chassé-croisé” and the side-by-side
elude the humanizing and psychologizing face-to-face that founds
anthropocentered relations.
• • •
It would be too quick and easy, as I suggested in the beginning, to group
these novels by the Countess together under the banner of moral idealism,
alongside other edifying writings and more specifically writings by women
aimed at a large and somewhat popular audience. Such idealism cannot be
simply moral, nor such moralism ideal, as soon and as long as a statement
such as “You will kill animals” implicitly underwrites the human(ist) “You
shall not kill.”
Finally, if gluttony (gourmandise) – one of Sophie’s main characteristics
– is a sin punished again and again in these novels, and if the wolf, the
paramount animal embodiment of gluttony, is both feared and abjected, the
wolf nonetheless prevails and triumphs in the numerous passages that
describe moments of oral delectation with a precision in the detailing of the
absorbed food that stands in sharp contrast with the general scantiness of the
narrative. The obvious oral jouissance belies the condemnation of gluttony or
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gourmandise. In the Countess of Ségur lives a wolf who, though ignored or
unacknowledged, leaves a long trail in her writings. That may have been the
main point of attraction of her novels for me. A gourmande myself (so much
so that I devoted my first critical writings to the question of orality and
obviously like to come back to it), when I recall these childhood readings, it
is not the punishment scenes, as impressive as they indeed are, that come
back to me, but the taste of country bread and cream of the Countess’
narrated snacks that fill my mouth.
Yet, if the textual treatment of gluttony can be read as the revenge of the
wolf, the Countess’ zoophilia is not a simple matter either. I have dwelled on
a few episodes recounting the deaths of animals. These episodes, numerous in
kind, are characterized by a narrative and descriptive exuberance which
warrants the comparison with the scenes of snacks (goûters) and meals. And
if the place and role assigned to animals contradict in important respects the
tenets of idealist philosophy and aesthetics, one would nonetheless be
mistaken to ascribe this propensity to animals’ slaughter to a naturalist
conception of animated life (animals are cruel; man is an animal; therefore
man is cruel). It is not because of man’s animalistic essence or quality, not
because man acts as a wolf toward wolves and men alike, that the Ségurian
human being is cruel toward animals. A certain human cruelty is markedly
distinct from animal cruelty. Moreover, the dissymmetry of their respective
fates is evident. If animals (or beasts) and humans do seem to threaten each
other equally, the animals are always the ones to die at men’s hands in the
Countess’ narratives, not the other way round.
One can read the murderous impulse toward animals as a manifestation
of an infantile sado-masochistic tendency, a tendency both complicated and
reinforced by Sophie’s libidinal conflict, as evidenced in her behavior toward
herself as well as others. More generally, one can recognize in a certain
intensification of the violence against animals, or at least in the insistent
representation of this violence, the symptomatic expression of a cultural crisis
or conflict, which has to do with the very definition of the relations and
boundaries between humans and animals in modern times. Since I am
limiting my inquiry here to the realm of literature (albeit a form of literature
explicitly bounded up with social discourse), one only has to think of other
literary works of the period for a confirmation of this hypothesis, one that
Derrida also makes in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow): I
am thinking for instance of the central motif of the hunt in Maupassant’s
work, of his treatment of dogs in his short stories, or, closer even to the
Countess, of Baudelaire’s semi-ethnographic account of dogs’ lives in
Belgium, and his striking and repeated evocation, again in Pauvre Belgique!,
of a fair show which consists in eating dogs alive.
The Countess of Ségur is the contemporary of Joseph Arthur de
Gobineau, whose Essay on The Inequality of The Races appeared in France in
When Sophie Loved Animals
119
1853, as well as of Charles Darwin, whose work On the Origin of Species By
Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life was published in England one year before the Countess
published the Mémoires d’un âne. On the one hand, hers was a capital period
for the formulation of racialist theories and the launching of civilizing
missions in Africa and elsewhere; on the other hand, this was also the time
when the established boundaries between animalkind and humankind were
radically questioned with the help of science. That helps explain why the
gatekeeper Nicaise has recourse to a properly racialist argument to justify the
destruction of the hedgehogs in Les Petites Filles modèles, why the savages
from America are compared to wild beasts more dangerous even than wolfs
in the Malheurs, and, conversely, why Henriette, one of the little girls who
populate the world of the Mémoires d’un âne and who side with Cadichon,
finds herself engaged with a stable boy in a witty discussion involving the
questioning of the arbitrary distinction between the animal and the human
realms.24
On the one hand, then, the Countess’ times were characterized by an
unprecedented epistemological and philosophical narrowing of the distance
between animals and humans in the Western world, a narrowing which put in
jeopardy the anthropotheocratic pact sealed through the ritual or symbolic
sacrifice of animals. On the other, and consequently, this species border
trouble provoked as is often the case a reassertion and consolidation of that
border, of which the new racialist discourse, premised as it was on the
distinction between man and animal, was one manifestation.
This attempt to push away or move away from the animal at the very
moment when it becomes clear that it follows us or rather that we follow
(from) it closely was redoubled and reinforced by another cultural mutation:
the fast replacement of the living being (be it human or animal) by the
machine. Industrialization programmed the disappearance of the animal.
When it stopped being an agent or at least an auxiliary of production, it fell to
the status of a mere object of consumption.
The intensification of animal hunting and the increase of various forms
of animals’ ill-treatment can thus be read both as a defensive reaction against
species confusion and as a result of what Heidegger has called “the modern
domination of technics.” Think of Hugo’s toad, which the poet welcomes in
his poetry along with other rejects of industrial modernity. He too is a victim
of men’s cruelty, and even women’s, but not of other animals.25 A great
witness and analyst of modernity, Baudelaire describes the modern animal
condition precisely as one of “martyrdom” – both real and symbolic:
“martyr” is the qualifier he uses to sum up the fate of those animals with
whom Hugo, his illustrious predecessor and rival, commiserates.26 Finally,
the same Baudelaire makes readable the ways in which the transformation of
a certain experience and understanding of animated life affects the notion and
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Anne E. Berger
treatment of sexual difference. “Woman” is “abominable” because she
belongs to the “natural” realm, because like animals she is deprived of the
function and status of producer of manufactured goods.27 Thus “woman”
tends to take the place of the animal (la bête) in Baudelaire’s work as well as
in the writings of many of his contemporaries. This is a radical departure
from the Enlightenment perspective, which cast women as “the moral sex”;
that is, as the main agents of the civilizing process, as the upholders of
culture.
It is as if the difference between human and animal had been displaced
only to find itself both recast and reaffirmed in the difference between the
sexes, conceived from then on as a difference between man and “female.”
Insofar as the Countess of Ségur’s writings side with the beast and animals in
general (la bête et les bêtes), it is fair to describe her literary intervention as
the work of a “woman,” even of a feminist in spite of herself. In her fictional
world, if, as Ferdinand says, “one could easily mistake many men for
beasts,” only an animal (une bête), or else a little girl deprived of any kind of
symbolic authority, is able to deconstruct established oppositions and
essentializing tautologies: for little girls who love animals, whether they are
mischievous or wise, a donkey is not an ass.
NOTES
1
All translations of the Countess’ works are mine.
2
I draw this line from La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” translated in
English by Norman Spector as “Witness the case we’re now going to cite.”
3
Neither “animal” nor “beast” adequately translates all the connotations attached to
the use of the word bête in French. See below.
4
Bête can be used both as a noun and as an epithet in French: it means at once beast,
or animal-like, dumb; and prone to blunders or mischief (bêtises).
5
Allusion to the Balzacian short story “Une passion dans le désert,” which recounts a
passionate love between a soldier sent to the colonies and a panther.
6
See for instance the early poem “Rêve pour l’hiver,” or the 1872 poem called
“Honte.” The Illuminations are also full of bêtes (see “Après le deluge” or the Shakesperian “Bottom”). The “Deliriums” of A Season in Hell mention the poet’s love for a
pig and celebrate the “moucheron enivré à la pissotière de l’auberge, amoureux de la
bourrache et que dissout un rayon.”
7
“Le loup criait sous les feuilles/ En crachant les belles plumes/ De son repas de volailles:/ Comme lui je me consume” (Poem without a date, generally included among
the poems of 1872).
8
Such absence may be thought of in light of Naomi Schor’s analysis of George Sand’s
idealism. A special case must nonetheless be made for Mauprat, the most animal-
When Sophie Loved Animals
121
littered, indeed animal-like novel of George Sand. On the one hand, each character is
endowed with an animal double according to a conventional equivalence between
humans and animals (the wise Patience has an owl, the faithful Marcasse a dog, and
the wild Bernard is compared to a wolf). On the other hand, the libidinal charge and
erotic violence of the narrative are figured through the recurring topoi of the animal
hunt and the wild galloping of the horses. The main female character, Edmée, is not
only a disciple of Rousseau: she is an Amazon. (On animality as a modern metaphor
for libidinal energy, see Akira Mizut Lippit, Electric Animal. Toward A Rhetoric of
Wildlife.)
9
Allusion to two of La Fontaine’s fables: “The City Rat and the Field Rat,” “The Cicada and the Ant.”
10
On the relationship between the birdcage and the human female condition, and more
precisely between a cage and marriage, between “cage” and “case” – to get married is
literally to “get into a cage” or into a “case” in many Romance languages (“se caser”
in colloquial French, “casar” in Spanish and Portuguese) – see Montaigne’s Essays
(Book III, Chapter V: “On some lines of Virgil”): “If [a wife] is lodged in [her husband’s] affection as a wife then her lodging is far more honorable and secure […] We
cannot do without [marriage] yet we go and besmirch it, with the result that it is like
birds and cages: the ones outside despair of getting in: the ones inside only care to get
out.” See also Derrida’s commentary of this passage in his seminar on December 19,
2001.
11
“Dès qu’il est saisi par l’écriture, le concept est cuit” [As soon as it is seized by
writing, the concept is done (in)]. This witty sentence whose two verbs have culinary
overtones in French can be found on the back cover of the French version of Jacques
Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida.
12
On this topic, see Derrida’s analyses of the partition between humans and animals
by God in Genesis (The Animal That Therefore I Am 15-18).
13
“[…] one might imagine that the animal, the animal-other, the other as animal, occupies the place of the third person and thus of the first appeal to justice, in between
humans and the faces of those who look upon each other as brothers or neighbors. But
no. When Levinas reflects on the other of the other who is not simply a fellow and
brings the question of justice to the fore, that nonfellow remains human” (The Animal
112). Here Derrida interrogates from an animal’s angle Levinas’ anthropocentric assumptions with regard to the nature of the “third person” (the other of the other)
whose intervention brings forward the question of justice. In particular, he takes up
Levinas’ argument in a piece by the latter from 1984 entitled “Peace and Proximity,”
published in English in Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings. Derrida had
already devoted some thinking to this particular piece in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas
(32).
14
In French, the word for “witness” – le témoin – literally means “the third person.”
Témoin derives from the Latin testis which is thought to be an alteration of terstis,
from tristis: le troisième, the third.
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Anne E. Berger
15
“You will see, my dear little Master, how I, a poor donkey, and my little friends,
male donkeys, colts and jennies alike, we have been and still are unjustly treated by
men. You will see that we are very witty […] You will see finally that after finishing
this book, no one will be able to say any longer: he is as stupid as an ass, as ignorant
as an ass […]. Rather, one will say: he is as witty as a donkey, as learned as a donkey”
(my emphasis).
16
“I, a poor donkey and my little friends, male donkeys, colts and jennies alike, we
have been and are still unjustly treated by men […].”
17
“Henri: Pooh! All donkeys are alike and whatever they do, they will only ever be
donkeys [i.e.: asses, translator’s note].”
18
“‘It’s a shame, my Cadichon,’ said Camille, ‘that you are becoming more and more
angry and malicious. You force us to love you less and less. And what a shame that
you can’t write! You must have seen so many interesting things,’ she continued while
stroking my head and neck. ‘I wish you could write your Memoirs; I am sure they
would be really entertaining!’”
19
In the chapter entitled “The Punishment” (XXII) the “grandmother” does mention
the possibility for Cadichon to be reduced to the status of beast of burden, if he continues to misbehave (faire des sottises): “I urge the youngest among you,” she says to
the children, “not to mount him. At the first misdemeanor on his part, I will give him
to the miller who will make good use of him and will have him carry loads of flour.”
20
The rhetorical aggrandizement indexed by the pluralization of the addressee (“mes
jeunes amis”) turns this final parabasis into a real harangue. Note also the shift of
vocabulary from the subjective and emotional register of feeling to the political assessment of intersubjective relations: not only can a donkey be happy or unhappy, but
he can turn into a friend or into an enemy, depending on the way he is treated by his
“superiors.”
21
In Little Red Riding Hood, only the wolf swallows the grandmother.
22
See “On Femininity.” The word Puppe used by Freud in German and its cognate
poupée in French come from the popular Latin puppa, which itself comes from pupa,
meaning “little girl” in Classical Latin.
23
The mirror stage described and theorized by Lacan does not only testify to the imaginary formation and character of the ego; the division it produces or entails between
“self” and image does not only prefigure the symbolic split of the subject between a
self-reflecting consciousness and the unconscious; it is also what prompts the formation of an ideal image, which enables the narcissistic cathexis. In short, the process of
idealisation is bound up with the formation of the specular image.
24
See Chapter XXIII, “The Conversion”:
“Henriette – […] I want everybody to be well-treated, animals [les bêtes] as well
as men.
Ferdinand, with a malicious look – Notwithstanding the fact that one could easily
mistake many men for beasts, if it were not for their standing on two feet.
When Sophie Loved Animals
123
Henriette, smiling – That is the reason why one commonly says: dumb as a hayeater [bête à manger du foin]!
Ferdinand – […] You are as witty…as witty and smart as a monkey!
Henriette, laughing – Thank you for the compliment, Ferdinand! What are you, if
I am a monkey?
Ferdinand – […] if I misspoke, let’s say I am an ass, a nitwit, a goose.”
25
“The Toad” is exactly Cadichon’s age. The poem first appeared in the first series of
The Legend of the Centuries (XIII) in 1859. In this sad moralistic tale, only a poor
donkey who bows under his burden tries to spare the martyred toad further suffering.
26
“It is from strength itself and from the certainty that it gives to one who possesses it
that the spirit of justice and of charity is derived. Thus in the poems of Victor Hugo
there constantly occur those notes of love for fallen women, for the poor who are
crushed in the cogwheels of society, “for the animals that are martyrs of our gluttony
and despotism” (my emphasis). See Baudelaire, “Reflections on Some of My Contemporaries. I. Victor Hugo.”
27
Allusion to Baudelaire’s famous sentence in Mon Cœur mis à nu: “Woman is natural, therefore abominable.”
WORKS CITED
Baudelaire, Charles. “Reflections on Some of My Contemporaries. I. Victor
Hugo.” Baudelaire as a Literary Critic. Introd. and trans. Lois Boe
Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1964.
Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil,
1991.
Comtesse de Ségur, née Sophie Rostopchine. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Claudine Beaussant. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990.
Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire: la bête et le souverain, Vol. 1 (2001-2002). Ed.
Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet et Ginette Michaud. Paris: Galilée, 2008.
— The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. Ed. Marie-Louise
Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Freud, Sigmund. “On Femininity.” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: The Standard Edition. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton,
1965.
La Fontaine, Jean de. The Complete Fables of La Fontaine. Trans. Norman B.
Spector. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
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Anne E. Berger
Lippit, Akira Mizut. Electric Animal: Toward A Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays: A Selection. Trans. and ed. M.A. Screech.
London and New York: Penguin, 1993.
Schor, Naomi. George Sand And Idealism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993.
Deconstruction and Petting:
Untamed Animots in Derrida and Kafka
Joseph Lavery
This essay reads Kafka’s short story “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” in relation to
Derrida’s text “Che cos’è la poesia?” I argue that both Kafka and Derrida are invested
in the importance of the figure of the pet for a critique of humanism, and I develop
this theme over an extended analysis of these two texts’ treatments of comparative
etymology. I conclude by distinguishing the body of the pet from that of the machine,
the thing and (implicitly) the animal by examining its relationship and structural
proximity to the figures of outliving and the remnant.
1. Grammatology and domesticity
Is grammatology a domestic science, or is it best left to the professionals?
This question precociously overlays the institutional, disciplinary and
professional codes occasionally called “deconstruction” with the claims
deconstruction makes about the violence of language, the character of
literariness and the origins of geometry. It does so in order to force the
reflection that, despite the anti-institutional leftist politics out of which
deconstruction emerged and which have been, for many decades, nourished
by the utopian impulses of deconstructive thought, the academic institution of
deconstruction constitutes a police force within the academy. Such
deconstruction operates not only as a canonizing body, as John Guillory has
so effective argued, but as the acid test of the professionalism of an initiate.
Among all the liberatory effects of the events collectively referred to as
“theory,” there has been a profoundly repressive one: the production and
regulation of a process of professionalization in the humanities which is
committed to a kind of categorical and conceptual technocracy.
How best to interrupt this process? First, it is necessary candidly to
acknowledge a categorical difference between two contemporary
deconstructive modes of criticism. One strand of contemporary criticism,
elements of which may be seen in the work of scholars from postcolonial
studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and diverse
outgrowths from traditional cultural studies, have apparently picked up the
check for deconstruction, identifying and explaining vernacular acts of
deconstruction in the lived experiences of marginalized subjects. This move
tends to be coincident with a sense that deconstruction is a first stage, prior to
politics, whether the sense of “politics” is taken to be primarily textual (as in
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the continuing utility of deconstruction in the so-called “canon wars”) or
pertaining to the realm of jurisprudence and the critique of law (as in Judith
Butler’s recent work on precarity). For other writers, deconstruction
continues to be, in the afterlife of its major practitioners, a familiar and
productive strategy for the reading and re-reading of canonical literary and
philosophical texts. This species of deconstruction, which is as likely to take
place in (one of the few) continental philosophy departments as within
literary studies, understands itself as a recuperative and legitimizing reading
of the institution of deconstruction. If it is less likely than its counterpart to be
embroiled within the most visible political battlegrounds of the humanities, it
nonetheless sees itself as part of a wider left critique of philosophy, one
which evades and eschews the apparently unsophisticated “identity thinking”
produced by the convergence of deconstruction and cultural studies.
While these two approaches diverge dramatically in their sense of the
political character of deconstruction, they share a sense that deconstruction
can be thought in terms of professionalization. The first legacy of
deconstruction is constantly and emphatically committed to a logic of the
profession, and particularly to the recuperation of the excluded into the
profession. It demands professional representation for its subjects, and in
return it demands that the profession itself spend more time paying attention
to the world outside the university. The second tradition holds that the
utopian project of deconstruction is available only at the end of a long,
subjectivating process of reading; it continues to read deconstruction as a
kind of bildungsroman in which the subject of deconstruction achieves selfknowledge only after it has been subjected to various procedural and counterinstitutional interventions. This deconstruction sees its aim, then, as becoming
not merely a profession, but to become the hegemonic profession of the
humanities.
As will have been quite clear, my sympathies are more with the first
school than the second. Nonetheless, the aim of the present work is to think
deconstruction as institutively resistant to both logics, and indeed to any
thinking of professionalization. We understand deconstruction least when we
police its operations; we undermine its critical power most devastatingly
when the work of paleonymy becomes the exchange of predetermined
categories. My reading of the animot in Kafka and Derrida is an attempt to
think deconstruction as a satire on the profession, indeed, as a satire on the
distinction between domestic and professional forms of labor in any case,
especially through the careful unworking of the binary logic that such a
distinction presupposes. One consequence is that deconstruction is no longer
on the side of the technocrat, but becomes an act of affection. Kafka and
Derrida, I claim, produce deconstruction that is affectively literate. That is to
say, this work wishes to think of deconstruction itself as a kind of pet in the
house of the profession.
Deconstruction and Petting
127
Work towards a pet deconstruction could take many forms, and in some
senses the short stories of Franz Kafka are not a particularly good place to
seek such a thing. But it is my claim that Kafka’s writing uses the figure of
the pet as a kind of deconstruction: a deconstruction of various traditionally
explosive binaries (inside/outside; human/animal; word/thing) but also a
thinking of the animot which would only find its full exploration in Derrida’s
later writing on the animal.
Kafka’s shorter fiction rarely budged from the topic of the pet, which
will become a companion animal or species at one point and then something
entirety uncompanionable at the next. This is frequently posed as a meditation
on the verb haben, to have. How does one have an animal? The narrator of
“A Crossbreed” is as baffled as baffling on the subject: “I have a curious
animal, half kitten, half lamb” (426). The creature is exterior and interior, cat
and sheep, had and not-had. It spends its time seeking out nooks:
Lying on the windowsill in the sun it curls up in a ball and purrs; out
in the meadow it rushes about like mad and is scarcely to be caught.
It flees from cats and makes to attack lambs. On moonlight nights its
favorite promenade is along the eaves. It cannot mew and it loathes
rats. Beside the hen coop it can lie for hours in ambush, but it has
never yet seized an opportunity for murder. (426)
Curled up in this coop, waiting to ambush but unable to move, the creature
literalizes Kafka’s famous definition of writing, in his Diaries, as “assault on
the last frontier, an assault, moreover, launched from below” (263). But
unlike Kafka’s writing in his own person, “A Crossbreed” will not insist on
the human subject’s will as the motor for creativity – in fact the companion
species here are not human at all, only those animals brought in front of the
curious animal. Children come to visit:
sometimes they bring cats with them; once they actually brought two
lambs. But against all their hopes there was no recognition. The
animals gazed at each other with their animal eyes, and obviously
accepted their reciprocal existence as a divine fact. (426)
Without recognition: reciprocity and divinity.
If there are pets that block the word haben in Kafka, there are also
figures whose animal/vegetable/mineral presence in the house overturns it,
subverts and subjects it to the hysterical logic of the cute. Or at least, there is
one, one of the strangest creatures in literary history, Odradek, the word, the
rebel-pet. Deleuze has rightly noted Kafka’s obsession with the limits of
domestic geography: “Kafka was obsessed with a roof weighing down on
someone’s head: either their chin will be horribly crushed into their chest or
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Joseph Lavery
the top of their skull will break through the roof” (Painting 182). Odradek is
the gremlin in the house that disrupts its ability to be a home, but he is also
the animot in language which mimics the postures of its epistemologies,
razzes at its disavowals, purrs at its ignorance. In a certain sense, then,
Odradek is deconstruction. Since the text of Odradek appears in five
heterogeneous paragraphs, grouped together under the heading “The Cares of
a Family Man,” we can cite it in full:
Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to
account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German
origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both
interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is
accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent
meaning of the word.
No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if
there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like
a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have
thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits
of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and
colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks
out in the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at
a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the
points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if
on two legs.
One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort
of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet
this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it;
nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest
anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in
its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is
impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never
be laid hold of.
He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the
entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he
has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes
faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of
the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you
against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course,
you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him – he is so
diminutive that you cannot help it – rather like a child. “Well, what’s
your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you
live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind
of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the
Deconstruction and Petting
129
rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the
conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often
he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.
I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him?
Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some aim in life,
some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to
Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down
the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet
of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to
anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I
find almost painful. (428)
This is a story of obsession, but it is also a story that generates obsession.
Walter A. Strauss has referred to Odradek as “a miniature version, mise-enabyme, of Kafka’s entire work” (31), and the story has been pored over by
Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom, Rodolphe Gasché, Slavoj Žižek and Werner
Hamacher. When the work is not accorded a specifically privileged role in
Kafka’s corpus, it is often nonetheless regarded as important or, as Deleuze
and Guattari put it, “admirable” (Components 40), a term which aptly sums
up the curious ethical thrust of “The Cares of a Family Man.” Here I propose
to read this piece of writing, if “reading” somehow escapes its gentle but
decisive eradication of interpretative strategy, in relation to Derrida’s equally
incomprehensible text “Che cos’è la poesia?” – what is poetry? – a text
initially published in Italian in the poetry journal Poesia. The answer Derrida
offers to the question of his title can be summarized as: a hedgehog. But in
the publication of the French version the following year, Derrida explains his
text’s complex reading of the figures of translation, poetry and the animal in
relation to the Odradek figure. The theme of the Poesia edition, Derrida
explains, was “what is poetry,” but there was a second, unwritten dimension
to the project:
the question “Che cos’era la poesia?” [what was poetry?] is
addressed to the dead, this time to the “Odradek” by Kafka. At the
moment he or she is writing, the living respondent does not know
the answer given by the dead one: it appears at the end of the issue
and is the choice of the editors. Destined to appear in Italian, this
“response” exposes itself in passing, sometimes literally, in letters
and syllables, the word and the thing ISTRICE (pronounced IZ-TRRITCHAY), which, in a French connection, will have yielded the
“hérisson” [Elizabeth Weber adds in Points… in English, the
hedgehog]. (475)
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Joseph Lavery
Derrida implies, then, that the sounds of “istrice” offer a phenomenological
account of the strictures, restrictions and constrictions of poetry, but also that
this particular trisyllabic word-thing responds to “Odradek.” How can we
read Odradek as a hedgehog-poem, and what does it mean to do so?
2. Pet translations
Derrida’s multilingualism in this text, like the polymorphous perversity of the
etymology of “Odradek,” is constitutive of the play of particularity and
difference which, he will claim, constructs the poetic object. Published in
simultaneous translation, “Che cos’è la poesia?” like its subject, exhibits the
quality of thrownness-into-the-road: “neither the one nor the other, the animal
thrown onto the road, absolute, solitary, next to (it)self” (289). In addition to
the resonance between “istrice” and restriction, the hedgehog theme also
points to the differences between animals in different languages at the level of
concept. The istrice is not, strictly, translatable: Erinaceus europaeus, the
West European Hedgehog, which is indigenous to Britain, would not be the
Atelerix algirus or Algerian Hedgehog, native to France. This latter species
would originally have been thought of as identical to its West European
cousin, but was granted “species authority” in 1842, due to its lighter coloring
than its Western European variety. The differences between these two species
are certainly minor. The Italian istrice, however, is likely to belong to a
different order altogether, in fact a rodent of the genus Hystrix cristata, the
Crested Porcupine. (Both “porcupine” and the French “porc-épic” make
reference, like “hedgehog,” to a perceived swinishness in the creatures.1) The
recognition of the animal is first and foremost, then, a misrecognition, like the
gaze of the sheep and cats at the crossbreed of Kafka’s story.
As poetry to language, so Odradek to the family home, the pet that has
you: this appears to be the reading of Kafka that Derrida’s paleonymy
gestures towards. Such a reading responds directly to the traditions and
difficulties of translating this story into English. The most invested terms
Kafka uses and reuses here – Ziel, Sorge, Wesen – are all more or less
untranslatable categories proper to German; other terms (notably Hausvater)
may be literally translatable, but not without some profound sense of loss. I
lack the time to do these questions justice at this point, but will pause a little
on the title, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters.” “Cares” suffices as a translation for
Sorge, with the caveat that the German term produces a greater sense of
affective and even existential disorientation than the English may muster.
Willa and Edwin Muir’s “family man” is a complex and legitimate translation
of Hausvater, but it covers over some of the term’s complexities: the German
need not mean the actual head of a real household, but could be the governor
or pastoral officer of a residential institution – a care home or boarding
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school. This ambiguity is important to the story because the final lines, in
which the narrator describes “my children and my children’s children,”
should not be taken to mean literal, familial offspring. The register and title of
Kafka’s story pose familial relations as a hypothetical, even a fiction. Other
translations of Hausvater offer partial solutions and additional problems:
Ronald Gray suggests “caretaker” (128), which lets slip the gender of the
subject but does aptly link the subject of the story to the house, rather than the
family per se; Harold Bloom suggests “Paterfamilias” (8), which alters the
tone dramatically but emphasizes the fictiveness of the kinship here. The
stakes are high, in part, because of the general canonical tendency to
overwrite the figure of the Vater in Kafka with his own father, a tendency that
all of his writing plays with. Michel Carrouges is not alone in having cast
Kafka as Odradek and his father as the Hausvater (38). If such a reading is to
be pursued, it must take into account the specifically non-paternal aspects of
the father here; the oddly non-familial climate of Kafka’s stories. Literature
will be a space for familial difference, not similitude. This may also be the
meaning of Kafka’s famous anti-psychoanalysis – a demand for the
protection of difference by literature, the erection of a space safe from
familial interrogation. As he writes of literature in his Diary, it can offer “a
possibility for discussing the differences between fathers and sons.”2
Of course the problem of translating Hausvater is not incidental to the
story itself, which is concerned with the ways in which generations write each
other and the role that multilingual borrowing (Slavonic/German) plays
therein. Kafka’s intervention, if it can be so called, is that such a process is
irresistibly mediated through the figure of the affectionate pet. The story that
Kafka narrates – from impossible etymology through affectively ambiguous
companionship to the end of reproductive, heteronormative temporality – is
presented to us as a cute little story about a talking thing. It is remarkable how
tempting it has proven to generations of Kafka scholars to resolve the deftlyconstructed and effectively defended ambiguity of Odradek’s origin. The
process of paleonymy, kicked off by Kafka in fictional form at the beginning
of his story, has been played out by scholars for nearly a century. The most
dominant reading follows the analysis by Wilhelm Emrich that “Odradek”
can be analyzed in Slavic as a diminutive noun form of odraditti meaning
“dissuade,” and accordingly, translating “Odradek” as something like “little
dissuading thing.” Emrich’s analysis therefore explicitly vindicates the first
group of lexicographers in the story. The second most dominant strand
derives from Hans Joachim Schoeps and regards the word as a bastardization
of the Czech odrodek, or one who is “outside the series,” “outside the law”
(Tauber 72) or “out of the lineage” (Hamacher 321). The third discernable
tradition – which, while the most diffuse, still holds a certain coherence –
regards the word as a coded reference to Kafka’s Judaism. Max Brod was the
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first and most ardent defender of this view, writing that the word offers an
array of possibilities suggestive of “renegade”:
renegade from one’s race, “rod,” renegade from the council, “rada,”
the divine decision of the creation, “rat.” […] From this you can
understand that Kafka writes, alongside the general tragedy of
mankind, in particular the sufferings of his own unhappy people,
homeless, haunted Jewry, the mass without form, without body, as
no one else has ever done. (107)
The reading of “Odradek” as a reference to Jewishness is taken to be a
Freudian reference by Bloom, who sees, in terms not wholly dissimilar to
Emrich’s, an instance of denial, or “Kafka’s synecdoche for Verneinung”
(10). More recently, Jean-Claude Milner has seen “Odradek” as a six-pointed
star of David because it is an encrypted half of “dodekahedron,” or twelvesided shape, a reading reiterated by Slavoj Žižek (117). There are also minor
interpretations: Hamacher significantly develops this odd index of Odradeks
in a trawl through Kott’s dictionary: “odraditti means ‘to alienate,’ ‘to entice
away,’ odranec means ‘rags,’ odranka means ‘a piece of paper,’ ‘patchwork
of a text’; odratti means ‘tear off’; odrbati means ‘scrape off,’ ‘rub away’;
odrek means ‘the renunciation’; odrh means ‘reproach’; odrod and odrodek
mean ‘the one without a kind’” (321). To this odd index of Odradek’s we
could add at least dreck, meaning “crap” in German and “shit” in Yiddish;
Trenderl or dreidel, the spinning top for Jewish children which was the
subject of a story in the Hannukah issue of the Prague Zionist newspaper
Selbstwehr, immediately preceded by “The Cares of a Family Man” (Bruce
155-156); and die Rade, which is the corn cockle.
I have only one contribution to make to this ongoing debate which, while
clearly absurd, is also very good fun. We have become accustomed to reading
Kafka’s “K,” which Klaus Mann calls “the fatal ‘K’” (137), as a kind of sigil,
not really a letter at all: I propose that it therefore be read separately from the
rest of the word “Odradek.” Kafka’s diaries give us many reasons to read this
letter as autobiographical in the strangest way. For example:
I will be alone with Father this evening. I believe he is afraid of
coming up. Should I play cards [Karten] with him? (I find the “Ks”
ugly, they almost offend me; yet I write them, nevertheless, they
must be very characteristic [charakteristisch] of me.) (Tägbucher
375)
What is actually characteristic of the writer here? The letter K itself, or
Kafka’s using it in spite of its being offensive to him? The letter K is a hinge
between the various figures of writing Kafka develops in this passage and
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throughout the diaries – his familial anxiety, his sadomasochism, the
jouissance of being feared. Almost a signature, the K ends Odradek to sign
off on the emergence of writing from the body. Here, it is an animal body,
too: Dorade + K, sea bream, Odradek, writing. Paleonymy, the deconstructive
inhabiting and investigating of old words, is shown by Kafka to be
indispensable to the logic of the family. This inquiry overturns the logic of
the bildungsroman by literally inverting it, producing what Kafka calls a
bildung des Wortes, an account of the word “Odradek” that narrates language
from the perspective of productive forces. The Muir’s “account” (from
bildung) obscures the explicitly literary and paleonymic thrust of Kafka’s
vocabulary. Peter Fenves’ translation is more apt from this perspective: “on
this basis they seek to ascertain the formation of the word” (319).
Emrich attempted to “translate” “Odradek” into “German,” based on the
derivations he perceived as most important, and came up with Abrächen.
How could we think of turning the skein of common words formed by
“Odradek” into an English equivalent: Diddlek? Rembak? Noddonk? The K
is probably invaluable, as is the diminutive sense and the sense of being
overworked, even encrypted. However, the word is pronounceable and fits
quite easily into a linguistic series; as with Lecercle’s reading of Lewis
Carroll’s portmanteaus, the word Odradek “conforms to the phonotactic rules
of language” (33). In the case of Odradek, this phonotactic conformity works
in all of the languages with which Kafka was familiar, what Deleuze calls the
“great four” – Hebrew, Yiddish, German and Czech – and of course it is
pronounceable in English too. In any case, the irruption of the proper name
“Odradek” into a synchronic system of common nouns is not without
consequences. It does nothing to efface the permanent effect of Odradek, in
his trickiness and undecidability. When you ask him where he lives, he tells
you “no fixed abode,” at least according to the Muirs. In German, he tells you
that he lives at an Unbestimmter Wohnsitz – an unfixed abode. Fenves’ more
literal translation reveals a more substantial comparison: “undetermined
address” (325). The address exists, but is in itself “Unbestimmter,” the word
(like the English “indefinite”) that constructs the “indefinite article.” The
house itself is improper, indefinite, “not fixed.” The first response
(“Odradek”) is now seen in a more fruitful light: the word itself is an
indeterminate address, in the sense of “Anschrift,” which, like the
“Unterschrift,” would always give Kafka such anxiety. In the same way the
Hausvater expects laughter to deictically peg the body to language, we expect
signatures to deictically peg the name to an object. “Odradek” does neither.
By allowing this other into our family, into our home, we have rendered
irreversible a flaw that might have otherwise naturally eroded: there is an
odradek looking at us in the home of our language.
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3. The arabesque body / legs, catachreses, organs
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em/ And little fleas have
smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum. This familiar series of bugs is both cute and
sublime: cute in that we enjoy fooling ourselves into finding it risible;
sublime in that it radically alters our perceptions of space and time. It calls to
Haraway’s hinge between material and semiotic productions, forcing us to
read the text of nature as a series of inter-species encounters. Freud’s frequent
readings of architecture invite a similarly vertiginous perspective. For Freud,
the inhabiting of a house by animals is figuratively related to the
phenomenological reality of a headache – real bodily pain produces the
dream image of infestation. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he writes:
separate portions of a house may stand for separate portions of the
body; thus, in a dream caused by a headache, the head may be
represented by the ceiling of a room covered with disgusting, toadlike spiders. (45)
For Freud, as for the Kafka of “The Metamorphosis,” there is something
about the permeability of the house by animals that undermines the subject’s
ability to conceive of herself as fully human. But Freud and Kafka also share
another figure for thinking through the imaginative dumbshow of animate
objects: the spool. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud recounts
observing a young boy, with whom he shared a house, flinging a reel into his
cot and retrieving it. His observation, the foundation of the famous fort/da
paradigm, was that the child had invested the spool with the characteristics of
his mother, and was staging her primary abandonment of him – either, and
Freud remains somewhat undecided, in order to master the traumatic event
and thereby acclimate to it, or to enact imaginative revenge on the mother
with “a defiant statement meaning ‘Alright, go away! I don’t need you; I’m
sending you away myself!’” (54). In either case, Freud is describing a species
of petting: the child renders the traumatic human drama minor by reducing its
scale and making it a source of pleasure and companionship. And the
irascible Freud can hardly contain his own mixed feelings about the adorable
boy’s petulance: “this good little boy had the sometimes irritating habit…”
(53). Cuteness, in other words.
What this story helps us to see in Kafka’s spool – but, of course, it is not
just a spool – is that it too figuratively replays the family drama, but this time
from the perspective of the Hausvater. The infinite potential for Odradek’s
existence mocks the narrator’s own attempts to theorize a future for his
children and grandchildren in harmony with the rhythms of heterosexual
temporality. Odradek is a queer figure in that he undermines what Lee
Edelman has theorized as reproductive futurism, the temporal logic tethering
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the political tout court to compulsory heterosexuality. Edelman’s analysis
lends itself just as well to Odradek as to the fort/da: “In a political field
whose limit and horizon is reproductive futurism, queerness embodies this
death drive, this intransigent jouissance, by figuring sexuality’s implication in
the senseless pulsions of that drive” (27). This way of thinking, however,
opens up a terrain which has yet to be considered: what does it mean that
these moments of irreducible, even foundational queerness, in Freud and
Kafka, come from the animating of spools, the turning of spools into animals,
words and little people all at once? Against himself, perhaps, J.J. White offers
us a useful term when he disavows a link between mediate, contested
territories in the various Kafka stories set, like “The Cares of a Family Man,”
on the stairs. White writes: “any link via staircases between Odradek and the
imperial messenger is probably at most an arabesque” (85). It’s a strange
proposition: the link is arabesque, by which we understand ornate and
whimsical, yet oriental and mysterious, impressively formulated but distant,
other than the main point of West European non-arabesque discourses on
Kafka. But could Odradek himself not be described as “arabesque,” in these
and other senses? The arabesque body, the sign of an interior infinity, would
resemble the body demanded by Derrida’s poem: “eat, drink, swallow my
letter, carry it, transport it in you, like the law of a writing become your body:
writing in (it)self” (Che cos’è 292). Like the stairway in Kafka, the logic of
the arabesque does not fully belong to the inside, or rather it opens up an
“inside/outside” inside the “inside.” And, still like the stairway, the figure of
Odradek entails a thinking of a dance, a pirouette that perhaps emerges from
the arabesque. The arabesque is also the ballet pose in which the dancer is
poised on one leg, the other perpendicular, suspended and extended away
from the body: it is Odradek himself whose legs are in the arabesque: “but
from the middle of the star protrudes a small horizontal rod, and this rod joins
up to another at a right angle” (428). Arabesque is a helpful term for us here:
in the staircases of his stories, Kafka calls into question the limits of the
domestic and inside, and pulls exteriority ever closer to the centre of being.
Queerness would be a name for the arabesque body.
The arabesque logic of spatiality, by which the outside is always already
inside, can also help us to think the question of Odradek’s animality – the
sense that he shares some, though by no means all, characteristics with the
animal. As I mentioned at the outset, there is a translation problem here:
Odradek, we know, is a Wesen – a being, a creature, an entity, but also a
philosophical category descriptive of quiddity, whatness, ipseity. The Wesen
is neither word nor body, but denotes the incorporation of words and the
textuality of bodies: it is the already arabesque body; the body which is not
simply internal to itself. Kafka forcefully insists on the prior textuality of the
arabesque body; we know exactly what Odradek looks like. It/he is a spool,
covered in multicolored bits of thread, matted together, with a protruding pair
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of rods, and “by means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of
the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs”
(428). But the passage’s lack of ambiguity in fact redoubles its ambivalence
and the urgency with which questions present themselves to us: is Odradek a
machine, or an organic body? If the former, does he have a purpose, and was
he built? Are there any organic parts at all? Is he a kind of human-cyborg? Or
a human-animal hybrid? An animal-cyborg? If he is an organic body, why
does he so resemble a spool, and why the thread and wooden appearance?
There is a pedigree to this kind of investigation of Kafka deriving from
Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful analysis of “The Metamorphosis” in which,
through entomological analysis, Nabokov adduces a provocative (and
defiantly extra-textual) reading of Gregor Samsa’s situation: “curiously
enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard
covering of his back.” While Nabokov had the weight and learning of an
e(n)tomological tradition to help him specify the form of Gregor’s condition,
the prospective odradekologist must create his own principles deriving from
the specifics of the Wesen he is analyzing. These, again, are not questions that
Kafka will permit us to answer, since the very pronouns are inconsistent:
“er… es…” At one moment animal and animot at the next, Odradek’s
outward form carries threads, lines of questioning that must be pursued into
the object-creature’s guts; to find his heart. Animal, vegetable, or mineral;
zoology, lexicography, or mechanics?
One choice is to restrict the enquiry to the question of engineering,
acknowledging that Odradek was surely more likely made than born. Perhaps
he is either a machine in his own right, or a component part of an invisible,
larger machine. This view was first articulated in English in 1948 by Herbert
Tauber, for whom Odradek “seems […] to be part of a machine” (72).
Tauber’s briefly-sketched argument is that Odradek exposes to the Hausvater
the machinery of the “higher law” to which he himself is subject (72). The
limitation of Tauber’s analysis is that the Hausvater is incapable of
reconciling “senseless” Odradek with any kind of law, the law of purpose and
telos formulated in the fifth paragraph (428). The mechanical argument is
given a true theological character by Heinz Politzer in a comparison with “In
The Penal Colony”:
There is a certain similarity between the thing Odradek and the
execution machine; although both are described realistically in great
detail and with much ironic gusto, both serve as messengers from a
world far beyond any reality we know. (67)
But, again, why “messenger”? Is there an angelic Odradek within the
machine? Politzer is certainly right to describe the “gusto” with which
Odradek is created, however, and this creativity leads to another kind of
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engineering: Deleuze and Guattari use Odradek’s status as a “strange and
useless machine” (Kafka 40) to account for another perceived thwarting, here
of the text’s development into a longer or more sustained work:
a text that includes an explicit machine will not develop unless it
succeeds in plugging into a concrete socio-political assemblage
(since a pure machine is only a blueprint that forms neither a story
nor a novel). Kafka thus has many reasons to abandon a text, either
because it stops short or because it is interminable. (38)
Their understanding of the machine is outlined in most detail in Anti-Oedipus
and A Thousand Plateaus: the term “machine” is used to describe any
auxiliary apparatus or technology which performs tasks on the behalf of lifeflows, those being psychic or erotic movements. A machine is not, however, a
totally closed system: “every machine functions as a break in the flow in
relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is a flow
itself” (Plateaus 39). Already there is one specific difficulty in describing
Odradek as a machine in this way: if he is a technology or apparatus, how can
we possibly avoid reading him as having a purpose or, in the DeleuzoGuattarian vocabulary, responding to a life-flow? We can certainly see
Odradek as a flow itself, but to what – if not the “world far beyond reality” –
is he connected? What would a machine be if it were unplugged, but
continued to spin off into infinity, operating a universal thwarting-function?
Odradek is more engaged in the narration of the story itself than Deleuze and
Guattari imagine, and does indeed have an animal, even human, demeanor.
He is cute, evasive and pathetic. If Odradek’s movements do not immediately
seem to belong to a “socio-political assemblage” with regard to the Hausvater
or the text, nor does he seem simply disinterested or not “plugged in.”
Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of Odradek as “pure machine” or
“strange and useless machine” does not seem to account for what Harold
Bloom has rightly termed his “harmless and charming” demeanor (10). The
little man, or, more specifically in this case, little old man, is one of the
figures analyzed by Derrida in his penetrating essay on Kafka, “Before the
Law,” in which Derrida performs a great Freudian inversion on the account of
the elderly gentleman, which we can here see in the Hausvater’s treatment of
his timeless companion: “The adjournment until death of the elderly child, the
little old man, can be interpreted as non-penetration by premature ejaculation
or by non-ejaculation” (209). Like the little old man, Odradek walks with the
aid of a stick. But it is not so simple: his own limbs, as points of the stars, are
not merely appendages to a corpus, but the totality of that corpus. There is no
star but limbs. This theme, of an object seeming to be a leg or being used as a
leg, a simulacrum of a leg, hangs off Odradek like a thread to be followed
around Kafka’s other stories. It seems particularly to call to the stiffening of
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the legs in “The Judgment,” in which, at the crucial moment of revelation,
Georg Bendemann’s father seems to resemble Odradek, with stiff
perpendicular legs which seem to radiate, like light from a star: “and he stood
up quite unsupported [frei] and threw his legs out” (85). Georg’s father’s
body seems to become a glowing, stiff limb: his communication, judgment
and mental state are communicated by the denial of a differentiation of the
limb, a rejection of the localization of the limb to protuberances, and the reincorporation of the limb at the centre of his body. The process is also seen in
the relationship between “The Metamorphosis” and “A Country Doctor.” For
Gregor Samsa, his multitudinous legs are the debased and inverted image of
legs as a symbol of sexual pleasure and motility, and are simply the crap of
his body that gets in the way and must be blocked out: “shutting his eyes to
keep from seeing his wriggling [Zappelnden] legs.”3 “Zappelnden” is
translated by Edwin and Willa Muir as “struggling” (89), but might better
indicate “wriggling” or “fidgeting”: it is the rubbishy, neurotic activity of an
ineffective, immobile body. After numerous mentions of these numerous legs,
towards the story’s conclusion, Kafka begins to provide the reader with
counter-examples of legs in which they are treated as properly sexual and
effective extuberances. It is through the figure of the limb that Gregor’s state
of being is contrasted with his mother’s legs which seem to overtake the
lower half of her body: “His mother lay in her chair, her legs stiffly
outstretched and pressed together” (134). Mrs. Samsa is arrayed here as the
archetypal Oedipal ban: supine but stiff, she pushes her body out as a limb,
while closing it off into a torso. By the end of the novella, the bodies have
ceased to use external limbs for their ostensible purposes at all, as the
daughter of the family seems to stand up, bodiless, into a realm of hope and
disembodied bliss: “And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and
excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to
her feet first and stretched her young body” (139). This deeply erotic figure
perversely concerns the disembodiment of a young girl, a temporary
resolution to the dichotomy many-crap-legs/one-strong-body shed as a
snake’s skin. The many-crap-legs, scummy, bacterial and ineffective, take
flight, through the wormhole of the wound, to the body of another boy who
dies from a huge wound in his thigh in “A Country Doctor.” The eponymous
narrator is to treat a sick boy, who at first appears to be quite healthy, but
who, upon closer examination, has a large wound in his leg that, it seems at
first, will certainly kill him. Inside the hole in his leg, itself reminiscent of
Gregor’s fatal apple-wound, the doctor finds:
Worms, as thick and as long as my little finger, themselves rose-red
and blood-spotted as well, were wriggling from their fastness in the
interior of the wound toward the light, with small white heads and
many little legs. (223)
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The insectoid legs-within-a-hole-in-a-leg complete the cycle of contamination
enacted by the limb in Kafka’s stories: the normative structure which
conceives of and delimits the idea of the leg as an upright, external limb, that
holds the limb at arm’s length, is infested by interior limbs. Like the
“spines” of a hedgehog, which in English seems to emphasize the plurality of
that which should have remained singular, the weaponization of the body.
If we are to read the (Freudian, Kafkan) spool and the (Heideggerian,
Derridean) hedgehog in relation to each other, along an axis of the arabesque,
it would nonetheless be important to emphasize the role that organs play in
these two figures. For Derrida, a poem may be a hedgehog, but it is learned
by heart – the organ strangely outside of the machine, or, as Derrida puts it,
“a certain exteriority of the automaton” (Che cos’è 295). Odradek laughs as
though he has no lungs: there are no internal organs here. But one would
need to be careful about reading Odradek’s body as though it were an organ.
Adorno was the first to see the potential problems here. In the final section on
occultism in Minima Moralia, he writes, “the offal of the phenomenal world
becomes, to sick consciousness, the mundus intelligibilis. It might almost be
speculative truth, just as Kafka’s Odradek might almost be an angel” (240).
(We are reminded again of the tendency of critics to think of Odradek as
carrying some kind of message.) The English term “offal,” like the German
“Abfälle,” points us to an entirely distinct sense of the organ: the term, from
“off-fall,” while originally used to mean the organic matter that literally fell
off the carcass during disemboweling, has come to signify all parts of an
animal not as frequently consumed as the others, including many external
parts: tails, ears, trotters, genitals, snouts, etc. Adorno’s “sick consciousness”
reads Odradek’s animal labor purely in terms of surplus exchange-value. This
kind of reading is also performed by Žižek in The Parallax View. Žižek pays
serious attention to “The Cares of a Family Man,” and offers a substantial
challenge to the reading of the limb in Kafka by reading Odradek, conversely,
as a lamella, an external organ. Žižek writes:
Odradek is simply what Lacan […] developed as the lamella, the
libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a
body, the mythical presubjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather,
the remainder of the Life-Substance which has escaped the symbolic
colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephalic” drive which
persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal
authority, nomadic, with no fixed abode. (117-118)
Žižek’s lamella refers to a zombie organ that has grown up alongside the
Hausvater but escaped the “symbolic colonization” which has overrun the
rest of the house. Like Edelman, Žižek sees radical potential for the death
drive in overcoming the repressive order of the Symbolic.
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A hedgehog learned by heart: this paradoxical phrase, as suggestive of
petting as of poetry, may perversely describe Odradek. It is also, selfevidently, a catachresis: “Odradek” and “hedgehog” both inhabit dead
metaphors and animate new ones, approaching the principles of paleonymy
and grammatology with an affect that Derrida names “humility.” Or rather,
addressing the addressee of poetry, Derrida summons “the humility that you
surname, thus transporting yourself in a name beyond a name, a catachrestic
hérisson” (Che cos’è 296). To return finally to the theme of translation, then,
we might end by noting that the word “remnant,” leaping out of the third
paragraph of the Muirs’ translation, almost has the form of a catachresis. The
Muirs write that one is tempted to think that it is “only a broken down
remnant.” The German offers us no such possibility: one is tempted to think
“jetzt sei es nur zerbrochen,” literally, “and that it is merely broken.”
On one level, this translation is simply a distortion: a broken thing is not
a remnant of a whole thing, and the Muirs’ translation shows evidence of a
Benjaminian understanding of Odradek as a mimetic emblem of the
brokenness of history. Edwin Muir certainly suggests this reading in his
critical work on Kafka: “[Kafka’s] is in its unique way a complete world, a
true though unexpected reflection of the world” (36). For other readers,
however, the figure of Odradek as a kind of remnant seems to endure: for
Laura Quinney, Odradek’s status as a remnant is precisely what constitutes
the uncanny feelings aroused in the Hausvater and alienates him from the
processes of the house: Odradek is a “shadowy remnant of consciousness, [a]
wavering presence that become[s] uncanny because [his] residualized
subjectivity appears as otherness, an otherness which resists codification and
assimilation” (224).
Perhaps a defense of the Muirs’ phantom remnant could be established
on the basis of Nicholas Royle’s description of the Derridean remnant, which
attempts to articulate “the difficulty of thinking remains other than on the
basis of what was once present” (361-362). The anxiety of the Hausvater
certainly poses a kind of question of the remnant, that Odradek will outlive
him, and be a remnant after his own death. The story ends, after all, with what
I have described as a queer resistance to reproductive futurism on the basis of
the theme of outliving: “He does no harm to anyone that I can see, but the
idea that he might outlive me [überleben] I find almost painful” (283). To
“outlive” [überleben], to survive, but also to live out, as in “he lived out his
life in penury.” The “über” exceeds the “re-,” “super-,” “extra-” and “meta-”
prefixes in English, leading to “surplus” or “excess,” as in “überrest,” or
“excess leftovers.” The “überleben” which constitutes the Hausvater’s fear is,
of course, the last word of one of Kafka’s better-known works, which, in
having the last word, comes closest to outliving its own narrative form, in
German though not quite in English:
Deconstruction and Petting
141
“Like a dog!” he said; it seemed as though the shame of it was to
outlive him. (The Trial 231)
“Wie ein Hund!” sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn
überleben. (Der Prozess 444)
It should be no surprise, by now, that the figure of the dog and the figure of
outliving should entail such mutual dependence, such companionship, in
Kafka’s work. If his contribution to literature is simply to insist on it, in its
own terms, as forcefully and as silently as can be thought possible, we might
also say that literature was always, for Kafka, a pet project.
NOTES
1
Hélène Cixous has sought to understand the “porc-épic” as an anagrammatic untying
of the “corps-épic.”
2
Tagebücher 206. My translation.
3
“The Metamorphosis” 89. The translation is slightly amended.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. London:
Verso, 1979.
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Modern Critical Views: Franz Kafka. New
York: Chelsea House, 1986. 1-16.
Brod, Max. Franz Kafka. Trans. G. Humphreys Roberts. London: Secker and
Warburg, 1948.
Bruce, Iris. “Kafka and Jewish Folklore.” The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. Ed. Julian Preece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002. 150-168.
Carrouges, Michel. “The Struggle Against the Father.” Franz Kafka: A collection of criticism. Ed. Leo Hamalian. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1974. 27-38.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Painting Sets Writing Ablaze.” Two Regimes of Madness.
Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. Ed. David Lapoujade.
New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. 181-187.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986.
142
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— A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” Acts of Literature. Trans. Avital Ronell
and Christine Roulson. Ed. Derek Attridge. London: Routledge,
1992. 181-220.
— “Che cos’è la poesia?” Points… Interviews 1974–1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Ed. Elizabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995. 288-299.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004.
Emrich, Wilhelm. Franz Kafka. Frankfurt: Athenaeum, 1960.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. London: George Allen, 1952.
— “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. Trans. John Reddick. London: Penguin, 2003. 45-102.
Gray, Ronald. Franz Kafka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Hamacher, Werner. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from
Kant to Celan. Trans. Peter Fenves. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1996.
Haraway, Donna J. “Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship
in Technoscience.” The Haraway Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
295-320.
Kafka, Franz. Tagebücher. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken, 1954.
— Briefe 1902-1924. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken, 1958.
— Der Prozess. Die Romane. Berlin: Schocken, 1965.
— The Trial. Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken, 1998.
— The Complete Short Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Ed. Nahum N.
Glatzer. London: Vintage, 1999.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy Through the Looking Glass: Language,
Nonsense, Desire. London: Hutchinson, 1985.
Mann, Klaus. “Preface to Amerika.” Franz Kafka: A Collection of Criticism.
Ed. Leo Hamalian. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. 133-150.
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Nabokov, Vladimir. “Lecture on the Metamorphosis.” 11 Dec 2009, 19 Apr
2010. <http://www.vahidnab.com/kafka.htm>.
Politzer, Heinz. “Parable and Paradox: ‘In the Penal Colony.’” Franz Kafka:
A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Leo Hamalian. New York: McGrawHill, 1974. 65-80.
Quinney, Laura. “More Remote Than the Abyss.” Modern Critical Views:
Franz Kafka. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
221-235.
Royle, Nicholas. “The Remains of Psychoanalysis (I): Telepathy.” Deconstruction: A Reader. Ed. Martin McQuillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000.
Strauss, Walter A. On the Threshold of a New Kabbalah: Kafka’s Later
Tales. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.
Tauber, Herbert. Franz Kafka. London: Secker & Warburg, 1948.
White, J.J. “Cyclical Aspect of Kafka’s Short Story Collections.” Paths &
Labyrinths: Nine Papers from a Kafka Symposium. Ed. J.P. Stern
and J.J. White. London: University of London Press, 1985. 80-97.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Say the Ram Survived:
Altering the Binding of Isaac in Jacques Derrida’s
“Rams” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Adeline Rother
In “Rams,” Derrida writes, “For each time, and each time singularly, each time
irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world”
(140). This chapter considers the consequence of Derrida’s enigmatic maxim for the
practice of animal sacrifice. In closing the world of one animal, can sacrifice
affirm the continuity of lineages, boundaries, traditions, oaths – indeed of the entire
human world? Bringing Derrida into conversation with Coetzee’s Disgrace and with
passages from Genesis, this chapter interrogates an investment in sacrifice as a cut that
creates the world.
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace ends with an obscure decision regarding the life of
an animal. With the words, “Yes, I am giving him up,” an assistant in an
animal shelter, David Lurie, delivers a crippled dog to Bev Shaw, a
veterinarian who performs euthanasia (220). In David’s statement, the “yes”
is followed by a partial cogito (“I am”). David also employs a prepositional
verb phrase implying completion (“give up”), and for the first time refers to
the dog not as “it,” but as “him.” And yet, no statement could be more
undecidable from an interpretative point of view. Does this final sentence –
this spontaneous and solemn sentence of death, this rendering of the beloved
and unique animal – announce an animal sacrifice, or does it constitute an
“ethical” pledge to carry and support the animal in putting it down, even if
this means imperiling or sacrificing the “I”?
In his essay “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities,
the Poem,” Jacques Derrida raises the question of sacrifice in relation to the
end of the entire world. In an enigmatic refrain, he states that the death of
each being – “human, animal or divine” – signifies “the absolute end of the
one and only world” (140).1 But when confronting the inevitability of
surviving certain friends and loved ones, Derrida determines that he must
“carry” the other, and the world of the other, beyond the end of the entire
world. He affirms, “I must then carry [the world], carry you, there where the
world gives way: that is my responsibility” (161). But in carrying the other
beyond the other’s death, one must impossibly endure through the end of the
world. Carrying the other, one must inevitably sacrifice the other’s singularity
and reduce the fullness of the other’s world, at least to some extent. Derrida
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therefore insists, “It’s a question of carrying without appropriating to
oneself.” He writes,
To carry now no longer has the meaning of “to comprise”
[comporter], to include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to
carry oneself or bear oneself toward [se porter vers] the infinite
inappropriability of the other […]. (161)
Derrida grants that carrying the other, though it entails a certain risk of
sacrifice, is the only way to carry or sustain oneself. Quoting Paul Celan, he
writes, “For no one bears this life alone” (163). But the work of
“countersignature,” of bearing oneself toward the other’s enunciation, and
offering an inflected, interpolating response, may moderate the risk of
sacrifice by obliging one to risk the speech and signature of the self. In the
term’s legal acceptation, to “countersign” is to add one’s signature to a
document that has already been signed – usually by someone else, but
occasionally by oneself (for example, in a consulate, when one is required to
reproduce one’s signature in order to prove one’s identity). When Derrida
adopts the term, he affirms and embraces the activity of signing, while
troubling the notion that the repetition of our signature – like the repetition of
sacrifice – can permit us to prove or sustain our identities time after time. In
responding to the other’s enunciation or to a signature as complex as a
literary corpus, we find our own signatures, idioms, and worldviews
inevitably altered and signed.
In Disgrace, the last dog to be euthanized is a dog that nearly “sings”
(215), inviting David into a strange form of call and response that could
resemble the “uninterrupted dialogue” mentioned, and longed for, in the title
of Derrida’s essay. Of course, within “Rams,” Derrida qualifies even the best
of dialogues as virtually uninterrupted and nearly continuous (139).
Incessantly, he considers the melancholy interruptions in our sustained and
sustaining conversations with the other, interruptions ranging from shifts and
lapses in the self, to irresolvable misunderstandings between friends, to the
ultimate interruption of an interlocutor’s death. In Disgrace, David does
confront the ultimate finitude of self and other, but he glosses over faults,
lapses, and complications, both in the other and in himself, when he
“consigns” the singing dog to the flames (144). Beginning with “I,” saying “I
am,” David bears the other – up. The novel ends when David signs, “Yes, I
am giving him up” (220). But David’s “yes,” like Derrida’s “virtually,” hints
at the existence of an implicit and unbounded dialogue whenever the “I” is
announced. Saying “yes,” David concedes to a vague sense that someone is
approving his performance in the “theatre” of euthanasia (142). With some
irony, he has already named this grand Other, calling it “the universe and its
all-seeing eye” (195).2
Say the Ram Survived
147
Saying “yes,” responding to Bev’s question (“Are you giving him up?”),
David may lapse in his responsibility to countersign the voice of the singing
dog (219, 143). In fact, this dog nearly disappears during sacrifice, and is
seemingly replaced by a sacrificial lamb. In the book of Isaiah, the prophet is
compared to a sacrificial lamb, not because the prophet never speaks, but
because he never blames God for setting him apart from the rest of society.
The prophet “was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his
mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her
shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth” (Isa 53:7).3 When David calls
the singing dog to the veterinarian’s table, it hurries over eagerly, yielding to
David “like a lamb,” a male lamb, a “him” (220). Though the lamb-dog does
open its mouth, excitedly licking David’s face, it does not protest the fate of
being sacrificed or “set apart” (although the other dogs do, by madly
snapping left and right) (143). Perhaps the singing dog, like a beloved child,
is “saved” from sacrifice, but at the same time effaced and victimized when
substituted for by this figure of the silent, compliant sacrificial lamb (220).
Certainly, the traces of sacrifice in this scene point us toward a “darker
reading,” to use David’s term, of David’s “love” for this dog and other
animals (118, 219). Sacrifice is at work in David’s interactions with Driepoot,
other animals, and with human beings as well. However, David’s work for
dogs is frequently interpreted not as sacrifice, but as an obscure calling to
carry and respond to animals at the moment of their greatest alterity, in and
beyond the moment of death. Derek Attridge’s reading of Disgrace is perhaps
the best-known and most impressive contribution to this angle of
understanding. In “Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in
Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Attridge figures dog-work within the paradigm of the
pure and disinterested gift. “The two tasks Lurie undertakes in his state of
disgrace,” dog-work and creative production, “although each can be seen as
bizarre and as bizarrely conjoined in his mode of living at the end of the
novel, do have a common thread. Both manifest a dedication to a singularity
that exceeds systems and computations: the singularity of every living and
dead being, the singularity of the truly inventive work of art” (116-117). In
putting forward this argument, Attridge may in fact downplay the importance
of sacrifice, conceived somewhat narrowly as penance or a search for
redemption. Referring to David’s virtual sexual assault of a young woman
early in the novel, long before his involvement with the dogs, Attridge writes
that, “Lurie’s commitment to the dead dogs can’t be thought of as an attempt
to counterbalance the sexual wrong that began the sequence of events it
culminates” (115). Attridge also notes the absence of the word “penance”
from David’s self-reflections, adding, “[I]t would be a misreading of his
behavior” with the dogs “to suggest that he is taking on an existence of
suffering and service as expiation for his sin” (116). Because the mongrels
are of no value to contemporary society (and are in fact a drain on the
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economy), David cannot fulfill his debt to the young woman, to her family, or
to society, by suffering on their behalf. Instead, Attridge argues, dog-work
explodes this debt, transcending its conditions in the passage to another
economy defined by disinterested service and bestowals of unearned,
unexpected “grace.” Though I agree with Attridge that dog-work does not
function as the absolution of a debt, I think it can be understood as sacrificial
in a different sense. Dog-work, and especially the killing of the lamb-dog, is
not the redemption of David’s crime against the young woman, Melanie
Isaacs, but may be an effort to complete it, impossibly, upon an ever-shifting
chain of substitutional animals.
David’s sacrifice of the singing dog, Driepoot (“three-leg”), recalls the
classical image of the sacrificial lamb, but also restages the burnt offering of
Isaac’s ram, a struggling animal that is caught by its horns in a bush. Thus,
David becomes a figure of Abraham, and is forced to wrestle with Derrida’s
wager that the death of the animal signifies the end of the world as a whole.
Derrida’s hyperbolic maxim with existential and ethical implications is
restated in his short preface to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, where he
writes, “Death, death itself, if it exists, leaves no place, not the slightest
chance, either for the replacement or for the survival of the only, unique
world” (11).4 This formulation gives rise to a world picture in which all life
strives for continuity, produces “God” and the entire world in the face of
perpetual perishing. Derrida perhaps includes sacrifice in this striving when
defining “God” as such; in a surprising moment, he writes, “God signifies
this: death can bring an end to one world, but death does not signify the end
of the entire world” (11).5 If animal sacrifice brings an end to one world, it
not only does not signify the end of the entire world, but rather forges the
entire world, generating an aura of a higher life even as the animal is
excluded from it. One anthropologist, Nancy Jay, has even criticized sacrifice
for masquerading not as death at all, but as birth – as a form of “male
childbearing” that relegates maternity to a second, more “animal” order of
reproduction.6
When Derrida inscribes sacrifice into the work of interpretation in
“Rams,” figuring countersignature as the act of writing upon the almost
bodily uniqueness of a work of literature, while allowing one’s own idiom to
be altered and signed, he acknowledges the necessity of bridging, of
communicating, of making contact, and of giving rise to some degree of
worldly ground. But sacrifice loses its fantasmatic status as the cut that
worlds, as a hyphen in a slash, as Derrida indicates in glossing a verse by
Paul Celan (“The world is gone, I must carry you”). Even in a potentially
sacrificial encounter, poeticized with an idiom of signing, writing, sealing and
the pact, self and other meet in a virtual arena in which there is no ground or
table for sacrifice. Derrida writes,
Say the Ram Survived
149
No world can any longer support us, serve as mediation, as ground,
as earth, as foundation or as alibi. Perhaps there is no longer
anything but the abyssal altitude of a sky. I am alone in the world
right where there is no longer any world. Or again: I am alone in the
world as soon as I owe myself to you, as soon as you depend on me,
as soon as I bear, and must assume, head to head or face to face,
without third, mediator, or go-between, without earthly or worldly
ground, the responsibility for which I must respond in front of you
[…]. (158)
In the uncertainty of this encounter, the temptation to create the world
through sacrifice persistently remains, a point that Derrida foregrounds in
selecting Genesis 22 (the near-sacrifice of Isaac) to explore the necessity and
destructive potential of engagement with the other.
The sacrifice of Isaac (or Ishmael) belongs to the three Abrahamic
traditions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. As a seminal narrative that
fathers “Father Abraham,” the Akedah is perhaps particularly vulnerable to
the infinite usurpations that form the basis of dissemination. In lines of
textual inheritance, or in lineages of fathers and sons, dissemination describes
the inherent but obsessed losses that drive the performance of sacrifice as a
sublime sign of filial continuity and relation with the gods. In Genesis 22,
slaying and burning the animal on the pyre prepared for Isaac elicits, or at
least precedes, God’s blessing of an exceedingly copious posterity, of
descendents which are nonetheless figured as sand grains and distant stars
and not in terms of lineages and lines.7 Derrida, developing the suggestion of
dissemination in the text’s poetry of sand-grains and stars, questions the
animal sacrifice that seems to repair the virtual rupture of Abraham’s line.
Self-consciously replicating the intervention of the angel that saves Isaac,
Derrida intervenes on behalf of the ram. Or perhaps, he faces the animal as
Abraham does, observing its struggle for life and even imagining the
consequences of the ram’s escape – not in order to erase the future set out
before Abraham, but to question the deflection of filial uncertainty onto the
“fatherless” animal.
The Biblical chapter, which ends with a list of Abraham’s nephews and
nieces, begins when God orders Abraham to take Isaac, his and Sarah’s only
son (but not the only son of Abraham), to an unnamed high place in the
distant land of Moriah, where Abraham is to sacrifice Isaac for a burnt
offering (Gen 22.2). Accompanied at first by two servants and an ass,
Abraham and Isaac accomplish the final part of the journey alone. After
several days of walking, Abraham
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[…] came to the place which God had told him of; and
Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound
Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
slay his son.
And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and
said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.
And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing
thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind
him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and
took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of
his son.
And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh
[Jehovah/YHVH will see]: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the
LORD it shall be seen. (Gen 22.9-14)
Though the ram is sacrificed as a burnt offering “in the stead of” Isaac, the
animal is not presented as a “substitute” for Abraham’s son. At stake in the
narrative is God’s outrageous request for a human child, a form of sacrifice
forbidden by law in Leviticus 18.21, which bans offering children “to
Moloch,” or passing them through fire. Isaac is furthermore a beloved child,
referred to as, “thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (v. 2). This
love only heightens the undesirability of Isaac’s sacrifice from the perspective
of the historical audience. In fact, Isaac asserts his own categorical difference
from the sacrificial animal when he puts a question to his father. First,
Abraham and Isaac take leave of the two servants and the ass. At this point,
Abraham transfers the wood for the sacrifice – presumably borne by the ass
until then – onto Isaac himself (v. 5-6). This implied transformation into an
animal makes Isaac suspicious, prompting him to say, “Behold the fire and
the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (v. 7). When Abraham
reassures Isaac that God would “provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering,”
Abraham admits privately that God has transformed the boy into a lamb (v.
8). Gradually, Isaac’s humanity is restored through a certain “passing of the
torch”: the wood – transferred from the ass onto Isaac and prompting his
mention of the lamb, is later arranged under the boy in preparation for his
sacrifice; however, the wood ultimately serves as a pyre for another animal:
not the lamb, but the lamb transformed into the full-grown sheep that God
provides. Throughout, Abraham has borne the duty of sacrificer even as the
Say the Ram Survived
151
identity of the victim remains in flux. When the wood finds its proper
destination and is set aflame, sacrificial law is restored; a passage is made
from a morally contemptible slaying to one that is codified in Biblical law.
This passage is marked by the rhythm and relativity of time. Whereas
Abraham’s knife hesitates over Isaac long enough to allow the contretemps of
the angel’s intervention, the sacrifice of the ram is executed quickly and with
no mention of Abraham’s knife (v. 13), again suggesting the
incommensurability of the beloved son and the sacrificial animal.
In Derrida’s reading of Genesis 22, as reimagined through a poem by
Celan (“Grosse Glühende Wölbung”), Abraham’s arc of violence is halted
twice: first by the angel that intervenes for Isaac, and again by the ram, who
fights for its survival. Derrida champions the animal, no doubt, but may also
accentuate a struggle implied in the Biblical narrative, when the ram is
pictured locking horns with a pseudo-ram in the form of a shrub. If Abraham
fails to sever the enraged animal from its adversarial double, or finds the
branching horns turned upon him, the sealing, reparative sacrificial fire
becomes improbable. The violence directed at Isaac will continue to
reverberate. The blessing is also deferred, an authorial coup by Derrida that is
not meant to again inflict existential uncertainty upon Abraham, but to
question its sacrificial projection upon the animal. Though God’s blessing
lays down seed, it was composed by Biblical authors in a retrospective search
for roots. This search is not problematic in itself, unless it ascribes finitude
onto “the animal” or another outsider, including the “enemies” that
Abraham’s descendants will possess at their gate, according to the blessing of
God (v. 17). When Derrida disrupts the killing of the ram, disturbing the
blessing of God, he refuses to stand on ground that is gained by displacing
finitude onto the animal other (147). Coetzee also stages and interrupts the
sacrificial slaughter of Isaac’s ram in Disgrace, leaving his Abrahamic figure,
David, in need of some substitute – or of some alternative. In virtual dialogue
with Derrida, Coetzee gestures toward an alternative to sacrifice in an otherdirected ethics of listening and response.8
In Coetzee’s novel, David Lurie, fifty-two, is a professor of
Communications at a fictional university in Cape Town, South Africa (4).
Early in the novel, he jeopardizes his professional life by seducing a college
student, Melanie Isaacs, into an affair involving sex he calls, “not rape, not
quite that, but undesired nonetheless, undesired to the core” (25). Although
their story provokes outrage among students and faculty, David’s colleagues
offer a path to professional rehabilitation that David refuses to take. He leaves
Cape Town to stay with Lucy, his only child, who manages a farmhouse, a
market stall, and a dog kennel in the uplands of the Eastern Cape. Soon after
his arrival, three strange men descend on Lucy’s home, raping Lucy, beating
David, and killing the kenneled dogs.
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In the weeks and months after the attack, Lucy’s exact thoughts and
memories are never revealed, but she struggles with depression and gradually
accepts the realization that she is pregnant. David tries to find his footing
again in two different ways, composing a libretto about Byron’s mistress,
Teresa, and volunteering at an animal clinic where injured or unwanted
animals are put to sleep. Every single weekend, a number of dogs must be
killed. Afterwards, their corpses are sheathed in plastic, and then cremated at
a hospital incinerator. David takes over the latter part of the work, folding the
dogs’ bodies so they won’t become broken or jammed, and placing them in
the plastic shroud. He then drives the dogs to the incinerator, and gradually
begins staying with the dogs’ bodies in order to feed them into the flames
(work normally done by laborers) (141-146). The final scene of the novel
takes place during a “session” of euthanasia (144). Twenty-three dogs have
already been killed (219). Bev Shaw, the veterinarian in charge, gives David
the chance to “save” the young dog that showers David in “generous
affection” (215). But deciding to euthanize this dog as well, David calls the
dog, and then,
Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. “I
thought you would save him for another week,” says Bev Shaw.
“Are you giving him up?”
“Yes, I am giving him up.” (220)
Contemplating the stunning coup of this final scene, Rita Barnard has
described it as a reminder of the “radically new,” and has even cautioned
against “beating it into shape with a critical shovel,” in reference to the way
the dogs’ bodies are processed by laborers before David takes over the job
(222-223). But if we treat the final scene as a radical departure from the body
of the novel, we risk another sort of interpretative “violence”: not the
battering to which Barnard alludes, but something resembling David’s own
actions when he sublimates the dogs into ashes. In the critical literature on
Disgrace, the many signs and fragments of the Binding of Isaac have not
been considered; in fact, the novel’s sacrificial thematic has been largely
passed over in enthusiastic and sometimes exuberant discussions of the
focalizing character’s involvement with animals. Certain readings culminate
in a sort of euphoria over David’s work for dogs, a feeling that may be driven
by the suppression of sacrifice from David’s relationships with women and
from his obscure involvement with animals, including the twin-like slaughtersheep, the he-goat, and the dogs.
Say the Ram Survived
153
Following Isaac
An “s” pluralizes the biblical name of the character Melanie Isaacs, inscribing
her in a chain of substitution and incomplete or disappointed sacrifice. In
Disgrace, Melanie shares her name and identity with a sister, Desiree Isaacs,
a schoolgirl dressed in “uniform” who has “Melanie’s eyes, Melanie’s wide
cheekbones, Melanie’s dark hair” (163). Both are assimilated to the figure of
the “girl child” who “does not own herself,” as David says of Melanie: in
other words, in David’s half-ironic fantasy, they tremble on the border
between human and animal, sexual maturity and childhood, self-possession
and possession by the other (53, 18). Melanie’s animal aspect is part of her
seductive power. David fixates upon her “coarse-knit sweater,” “black
tights,” and “little black woolen cap” (9, 11, 26). A diminutive horn is even
visible in the “delicate whorl of her ear” (25). Through scattered references to
sacrificial law in the Hebrew Bible, ovine Melanie is further identified as an
acceptable sacrifice. David describes her as a “firstborn” child, and repeatedly
admires her “perfect” body (164, 23). Falsifying his classroom records, he
marks her attendance as “unblemished” (41). David’s sexual possession of
Melanie, which he qualifies as “not quite rape,” even bears comparison to the
near-sacrifice (or “not-quite” sacrifice) of Isaac in Genesis 22 (25).9 When
David “mounts” Melanie upon the low elevation of his living room floor, he
suffers a petite mort that Coetzee suggestively compares to falling from a
mountain top: “he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its
climax he tumbles into blank oblivion” (19). When David revives, he
discovers that “the girl is lying beneath him, her eyes closed, her hands slack
above her head, a slight frown on her face” (19). In Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of
Isaac (Princeton version), the boy’s bound hands express a certain calm; in
Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Abraham, they are invisibly pinned at the small of
his back.10 Melanie’s unbound hands lack any definite expression, but her
stretched arms suggest bondage and exposure to harm (a situation that
Melanie may indeed desire). But in a clever reversal, David is the one
ligatured like a sacrificial beast. Whereas Melanie’s “tights and panties lie in
a tangle on the floor,” David’s “trousers are around his ankles” (19).
Coetzee transitions quickly from here to David’s classroom lesson on
“the poet in the Alps” in the sixth book of William Wordsworth’s Prelude
(21). David asks his students, “The majestic white mountain, Mont Blanc,
turns out to be a disappointment. Why?” (21). Unconsciously, he interrogates
the phenomenology of his own disappointment after the incomplete
“sacrifice” of Melanie. Like “a visual image burned on the retina,” as David
lectures, discussing Wordsworth’s metaphysical poetics, Mont Blanc replaces
the Moriah of David’s living room floor, forming a chain, or mountain-chain,
of erotic resemblances. In broader terms, the duplication of the sacred place
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points to the recurrence of sacrifice as a supposedly “perfect”
accomplishment that is nonetheless repeatedly performed.
Another Moriah is outlined as David compares the Alps of Wordsworth
to local mountains of South Africa. The European mountains are like the
“Drakensberg,” David suggests, struggling to engage his class – or like
“Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets” (23). Table
Mountain, a landmark overlooking the city of Cape Town, is a plateau
surrounded by peaks and cliffs. It looks uncannily like an elevated, sacrificial
slab, hewn by cosmic forces.
As Melanie and her substitutes continue to free themselves from
David’s embrace, a shifting Moriah remains as the fantasmatic bedrock of
passing rapture and inevitable disappointment. The evasion of Melanie
continues to haunt David in his exile, as he admits in speaking of
“something unfinished in the business with Melanie” (190). When
attempting to reconcile with Melanie’s father, David speaks of being “at a
loose end” (165). Of course, David had previously been left in a lurch when
Soraya, a well-liked prostitute, permanently cancels their weekly meetings
in the opening pages of the novel (11). This sense of unfinished business is
one force compelling David to create the weekly appointments with the
dogs. At the same time, in working with dogs and especially Driepoot,
David stages an ideal interaction that transcends everyday interactions with
others, others with “shadows [and] complications,” as David remarks with
frustration (170). David “is tired of shadows, of complications, of
complicated people”; he “loves his daughter, but there are times when he
wishes she were a simpler being: simpler, neater” (170). By sacrificing
Driepoot “in all its idiot simplicity,” he momentarily removes the folds and
frictions from relations with people, and from dog-killing, which David
finds increasingly traumatizing and exhausting (170).
To trace an additional “fold” (a word that also denotes an enclosure for
sheep in Disgrace’s verbal-imaginary networks), David’s sacrifices in the
clinic’s “inner room” evoke an essential erotic scene of folding, enfolding,
and escape (5). Though Driepoot allows David to collect him in his arms,
the other dogs “lock their legs” on the clinic table (143). But after they have
been killed, David folds their limbs before rigor mortis sets in, making the
classic shape of the sacrificial lamb (219). This folding takes place within
enclosed spaces, which render the power of the sacrificer absolute while also
presenting the possibility of escape. Likewise, David’s seduction of Melanie
is framed by barriers and thresholds, conducted within walls; one night, he
enjoins her to stay while enabling her release, reluctantly “unlocking the
garden gate” and allowing her to “wriggle out” (18):
He reaches out, enfolds her. For a moment he can feel her little
breasts against him. Then she slips his embrace and is gone. (17)
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David’s libidinal scene complicates his relationship with his daughter, Lucy,
who demands recognition as a fellow adult. David knows this – telling the
man who wants to marry Lucy that “She wants to live her own life” – but he
also keeps his daughter’s childhood bedroom, and twin bed, unchanged in his
house in Cape Town (202, 26). After the attack, David follows Lucy into the
dog kennels, where she is attending to the dead and dying dogs. In the
parameters of the fantasy space, David is reduced to the bumbling desirous
father.
“My dearest child!” he says. He follows her into the cage and tries to
take her in his arms. Gently, decisively, she wriggles loose. (97)
And again, with Lucy,
“My child, my child!” he says, holding out his arms to her. When
she does not come, he puts aside his blanket, stands up, and takes her
in his arms. In his embrace she is as stiff as a pole, yielding nothing.
(99)
Folding the dogs, sheathing them in bags, David makes a routine of these
idealized exertions of gentle power. When Driepoot appears, his scene
repeats,
He opens the cage door. “Come,” he says, bends, opens his arms.
The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his checks, his
lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. “Come.” (220)
Enfolded in the room of mirrors, Melanie, Lucy, Driepoot and others
assimilate traits of one another. They also bear traces of intertextual doubles
(including Lolita, the Nabokovian girl-child, who is remembered in David’s
reference to Driepoot’s lolloping and by Coetzee’s repetition of the number
twelve).11 But Driepoot and Melanie take on the special relationship of Isaac
and the ram, of the royal child and the whipping boy, of the beloved firstborn
that can be taken by God, and the livestock firstling that redeems him
(Exodus 13). This embedded bond is indicated by a subtle play of similarities.
When David spies on Melanie during her play rehearsal, he is ravished by her
“wiggling bottom,” a canine image applied more fittingly to Driepoot when
the excited mutt “wags his crippled rear” for David (25, 220). The room in
which Driepoot is to be put down is described as a surgical “theatre,” which
connects the dog’s gripping death to Melanie’s performance at the chic Dock
Theatre (142-143, 190). The stage is haunted by euthanasia as one modality
of modern violence toward animals: David notes that it was formerly “a cold
storage plant where the carcasses of pigs and oxen hung waiting to be
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transported across the seas” (190-191). In these theatre spaces, circuses of
animal suffering, David occupies a strange position between participant and
spectator in the killing of animals. From our perspective, he becomes a
witness to animal suffering in modernity, whether in animal shelters,
scientific laboratories, or windowless slaughterhouse plants.
Coetzee pushes the concept of the “double” to its limit by linking
Melanie to the ram-dog through a series of oppositions. While Driepoot is
deformed (unfit for sacrifice, according to Biblical law), Melanie is “perfectly
formed” (30); whereas Melanie is impervious to the so-called “cat-music”
that David plays as he “wills the girl to be captivated,” Driepoot, “the dog
that likes music,” is a captive audience “fascinated by the sound of [David’s]
banjo” (15, 219, 215). Again, in these connections, Coetzee may establish a
registry of human violence toward animals. In The Others: How Animals
Made Us Human, Paul Shepard remarks that German medieval Katzenmusik
(or “cat-music”), a ritual and social genre analogous to the French charivari,
imitated the cries of cats being tortured in the streets (276).
In a final indication of the links between them, Melanie and Driepoot are
bound together by proxy in the pair of “half-grown” “slaughter-sheep,”
purchased by Lucy’s neighbor, Petrus, for a party to celebrate the birth of a
son (113, 126). The pair is tethered on a desolate patch of earth where they
have no access to food or water. David, though irritated at first by their
bleating, finds himself strangely disturbed by the manner in which the
condemned sheep are being kept (123). He puzzles,
A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the
two Persians, he does not know how. The bond is not one of
affection. It is not even a bond with these two in particular, which he
could not pick out from a mob in a field. Nevertheless, suddenly and
without reason, their lot has become important to him. (126)
Here, and throughout the novel, recurring images that are seemingly
incidental indicate, without unveiling, the patterns in David’s mysterious
impulses. In this case, the stammering of “bond” may point to the “Binding of
Isaac.” Indeed, David compares the sheep’s slaughter to the open-air
sacrifices practiced by non-priests in the Hebrew Bible. He remarks that the
celebrants, cooking the sheep, send a pleasing odor skyward, which David,
godlike, judges offensive: “Soon there comes on the wind the stench of
boiling offal, from which he infers that the deed has been done” (127). In a
clarifying afterthought, he adds, “the double deed.” With this splicing of one
deed into two, David inscribes the slaughter-sheep into diverging chains of
doubling and substitution that lead progressively to Melanie and to the novelending dog. Describing the victims as “black-faced Persians,” he points to
Melanie (“Melàni: the dark one”), and to the clothes she wears (“dressed
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157
from top to toe in black, with a little black woolen cap”); moreover,
remarking that the sheep “do not own themselves, do not own their lives,”
David echoes his assertion that Melanie “does not own herself” (123, 18).
However, in a second chain of association, the sheep are linked to Melanie’s
canine substitutes. At a loss for how to rescue the sheep, David contemplates
“pen[ning] them up in the dog cages” (18, 26, 126, 206).
Of course, when David asserts that Melanie Isaacs “does not own
herself,” he adds, “perhaps he does not own himself either” (18). But this is
part of David’s belief that his responsibilities are evacuated whenever he is
ravished by a woman’s beauty. Indeed, when David later refuses to excuse
Melanie’s absences from class, citing his professorial “responsibilities,” he
notes that Melanie “does not dignify the word with a reply” (35). In general,
David is skeptical of the notion of taking responsibility. But in his cynicism
he embraces the opposite extreme, concluding that “the source of his
impulses is dark to him” (33). In this sense, David becomes like Abraham,
abandoning responsibility to his child when ravished by the all-consuming
voice of God.
Indeed, David is linked to Abraham in numerous ways. If the literal
meaning of Abraham is “exalted father” or “my exalted father,” this is the
role assumed by David in the relationship with Melanie. One morning, David
comforts Melanie as she sobs in Lucy’s childhood bed, the place he chose for
her to sleep. “There, there,” he says, nearly murmuring, “Tell Daddy what is
wrong” (26). Later, when Melanie’s father (“the other father, the real one,” 67) comes looking for Professor Lurie in the corridors of the university, David
“says without thinking,” “Here I am” (37). The phrase is one that Abraham
utters three times in Genesis 22, responding to God, to the angel, and to Isaac
as well (v. 1, 7, 11). Moreover, the word “intervenes” punctuates all of
Disgrace (53, 130, 145, 173), ringing popular retellings of the Biblical story
and indicating David’s stubborn belief that forces more powerful than
Melanie are to blame for ending the affair. He says, “Melanie would not have
taken such a step by herself […]. She is too innocent for that, too ignorant of
her power” (39). He instead blames Melanie’s father, describing him like the
Wizard of Oz, concealed behind a screen: “He, the little man in the ill-fitting
suit, must be behind it” (39). Finally, Coetzee alludes to the multiplication
and dissemination of Abraham’s descendants when David wonders whether
“old men” like himself should indeed father future generations (190). David
concludes it “unnatural” to “broadcast […] old seed, tired seed, seed that does
not quicken” (190). Lucy agrees, encouraging David in his struggle to
abandon his characteristic paternalism. She says, “You cannot be a father for
ever” (161).
In addition to the binding of Isaac, another episode concerning
Abraham’s paternity and Isaac’s very life is encrypted in the catastrophic
attack on Lucy’s farm. This time, David plays the role of Abraham in relation
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to Sarah, his wife. Whereas Abraham and Sarah dissimulate their relations
when dwelling among the Egyptians and the Philistines, posing as siblings
and not as husband and wife (Gen 12:9-20, Gen 20), David and his daughter,
Lucy, find themselves living not as father and daughter, flesh and blood, but
as a stereotypical married couple. David remarks, “As inexorably as if they
were man and wife, he and she are being driven apart […]. Their very
quarrels have become like the bickerings of a married couple, trapped
together with nowhere else to go” (134).
In Genesis 18, God visits Abraham and Sarah in the guise of three
strangers. Abraham rushes frantically to show the strangers hospitality,
offering scarce water for washing their feet, asking Sarah to prepare bread,
and selecting the choicest calf from his herd to be dressed by a manservant (v.
4-7). After a sumptuous meal, the strangers inform Abraham that Sarah will
have a son. Sarah, eavesdropping, laughs at the prospect of conception,
saying, “After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?”
(v. 12). The immaterial gift of improbable conception does reach Sarah,
transported by the strangers’ words. Thus, even as Abraham’s paternity is
assured, his conjugal authority is compromised, as Sarah, standing at the
opening of her tent, hears the strangers’ intimate promise and offers her
audible laughter in exchange. The attack on Lucy’s farm accentuates these
libidinal undercurrents, giving more room, or greater hospitality, to the
suggestion of sexual ravishment, seizure of wealth, and circumvention of
conjugal authority in the Biblical narrative.
Gift-bearing marauders, the divine visitors arrive in Disgrace on what
David calls a “day of testing” (94). David and Lucy are walking with the
dogs. When three men approach with “long strides” from over the horizon,
David and Lucy offer them “a nod, a greeting,” without expecting or inviting
them to stop (98). The strangers request hospitality themselves. Asking to use
Lucy’s “telephone,” they open a line into ethereal alterity. When Lucy asks,
“Why must you telephone?” they mention “an accident,” “a baby” (92). Lucy
lets them in, first locking the dogs in the kennels and instructing David to stay
outside. They rape her (an event unseen), ignoring David’s plea from outside
the house to “Take everything. Just leave my daughter alone” (94). When
their work inside is done, the strangers use Lucy’s rifle to slaughter the dogs
in the kennels, eliminating Lucy’s defense system in an amplifying
remembrance of Abraham’s slaughter of a calf from his herd. The ice cream
they devour in Lucy’s kitchen before leaving may even recall the “butter and
milk” with which Abraham and Sarah regale their guests (96). But despite the
exploitative nature of the strangers’ passage, it bears the ambivalent status of
a pharmakon, as David implies when describing the probable rapist as
“strikingly handsome” (92). In this expression, spoken before the rape, David
presciently fuses the extreme violence of the “strike” to the chance of beauty
for Lucy’s child. There are other glimpses of the brighter life Lucy envisions
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when, deciding to go through with the pregnancy, she “determine[s] to be a
good mother” (216). In the early morning, before the strangers arrive, Lucy
admires the auspicious, “lucky” geese that visit her each year (88). The same
morning, chiding her father, “Lucy laughs” (91), recalling Sarah’s laughter at
the notion of having a child after menopause (Gen 18.9-15).
Two events in Coetzee’s novel, the attack on the farm, and the sacrifice
of Driepoot, stun us in a first reading, and always retain their frame of
incongruity. But regarded as encryptions of Genesis 18 and 22, these events
can surprise us again: they become rewritings of ancient material, and of
ancient surprises, no less. One word that does not surface often in the patterns
of Biblical allusion in Disgrace is “sacrifice.” Lucy uses it once in the sense
of self-sacrifice, but David detects an intention to sacrifice him. Lucy says, “I
must have peace around me. I am prepared to do anything, make any
sacrifice, for the sake of peace” (208). David demands, “And am I part of
what you are willing to sacrifice?” Shrugging, Lucy replies, “I didn’t say it,
you did.” David shoots back, “Then I’ll pack my bags.” Here, David activates
a chain of “packing” metaphors that figure two modalities of sacrifice in the
novel: being sacked – like the dead dogs, wrapped in black plastic bags – and
being sent packing, like the Biblical scapegoat loaded with iniquities and
expelled into the wilderness. David, repeatedly sent packing, projects this
condition onto lower-ranking others that, in some cases, he quite literally
“packs.” Soon after telling Lucy that he will “pack his bags,” David takes
refuge in the clinic with the three-legged dog, and turns again to his
outlandish opera (215). Not without an air of resignation, David foresees
having to “fold [Driepoot] up and pack him away in his bag” (219-220).12
Another possible trajectory is traced in David’s interaction with
Driepoot. When David takes refuge in the clinic, Driepoot invites David into
an absurd and unpredictable musical routine of call and response, nudging
him toward a greater acceptance of humility and humiliation. In the clinic,
David works on his opera, strumming his banjo and humming the very
limited lyrics that he writes. Driepoot, enchanted by the music, “smacks its
lips and seems on the point of singing too” (215). In the beginning, David is
inclined to allow Driepoot to “loose its own lament” between the strophes
that he composes. He wonders, “Would he dare do that: bring a dog into the
piece […]?” (215). Ultimately, he says no, which compels us to ask David’s
frequent question: why? One answer lies in David’s emblem and most
enduring flaw: the burnt and slow-healing ear.
During the attack on Lucy’s home, the intruders use household alcohol to
set David on fire. He goes to the hospital with burns on his scalp, face, and
eye, but he notes, “the flange of his right ear” is the only part of him “that
actually caught fire” (106). Eventually, David reaches a point where “[only]
the ear still needs daily attention” (141). When David sacrifices the dog that
wants to sing, and that wants David to sing, David fails to attend to the ear, as
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Coetzee indicates through the mirroring of events: the hospital incinerator
where the dogs are “burnt up” presumably sits on the grounds of “Settlers
Hospital,” where David was treated for his wounded ear and promptly
“discharged” (220, 116). When David returns to the periphery of the hospital,
where he feeds the dogs into the incinerator, he may transfer his burn-wounds
to the dogs, while also stubbornly keeping them raw. The incinerator signifies
the perpetuation of David’s deafness to others: it is a realm of silence where
David nourishes his preference for the eye, noting a sign “in three languages”
and scrutinizing the activities of the laborers, whose “sodality” he does not
wish to join (145). Before determining to sacrifice Driepoot, to “wheel the
bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up,” David even represses a
thought of the untrained ear (219, my emphasis). He wonders, “Is it too late
to educate the eye?” (218).
Following David to the incinerator can be obscurely gratifying. Perhaps
it makes us feel that lives are being concluded properly, even sublimely,
without residue. David is magnetized by dog-work but has difficulty listening
to Lucy and answering her call to recognize the fullness of her world. In a
number of conversations and arguments with David, Lucy struggles to
convince him that she is – like him, like all others – at the center of an entire
world (198). She affirms, “I have a life of my own, just as important to me as
yours is to you” (198). Hinting that the problem lies with her father’s burnt
ear, she writes in a letter, “You are not listening to me [...] I am not the person
you know” (161). Listening to Lucy, and gradually knowing her, would lack
the possibility of perfection and completion he finds in dog-work, a weekly
cycle of incineration and sweeping clean. Like poetic interpretation in
Derrida’s essay, the relationship with Lucy presents David with the trial of an
encounter, of an open-ended test on the borders of the sacrificial paradigm.
In “Great, Glowing Vault,” Celan protracts the ram’s killing to a point of
infinite deferral. The singular animal is bodied forth infinitely, allowing
Derrida to register its refusal to submit generously to sacrifice. In Coetzee’s
novel, idealized representations of the “lamb to the slaughter” do appear in
the final moments, in a scene of closure that corresponds to the sudden
appearance and burning-up of the ram in the Biblical story. Almost as soon as
Driepoot appears, he surrenders trustingly to David, tolerating David’s
embrace and crossing the threshold to oblivion “like a lamb” (220). The novel
as a whole, however, questions the exaggerated pliability of Driepoot, who
“would die for [David], he knows” (215). Coetzee troubles the deflection of
ordinary perishing onto idealized images of the animal, and gestures toward a
non-absolute alternative to sacrifice in an other-directed ethics of listening
and response.
In the encounter with alterity, there remains the risk of sacrificing the
other’s enunciation in order to protect one’s “naked” ear (Disgrace 120).
Derrida inscribes this condition in the catachretic figure of the “wounded
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161
mouth.” For a short period, David hangs upon the other’s speaking wound.
When he hums the music to his opera, feeling the blood hammering in his
throat, Driepoot licks his lips and almost sings or howls (215). In Derrida’s
words, both sustain an animal alertness that,
[…] keeps attention forever in suspense, breathless, that is to say,
keeps it alive, alert, vigilant, ready to embark on a wholly other path,
to open itself up to whatever may come, listening faithfully, giving
ear, to that other speech. (Rams 146)
But in the breathless suspension of sacrifice, one doesn’t remain passive, but
rather attempts to countersign the vulnerable elocution of the other. David
merely hums, but he should have brought himself to sing to Driepoot, who
“sits up, cocks its head, listens,” and seems ready to sing in return (215).
Derrida continues, speaking about poetry,
Even when one recognizes – and this is my case – that on the side of
the poem there is a wounded mouth, speaking, one still always risks
suturing it, closing it. Hence it is the duty of the reader-interpreter to
write while letting the other speak, or so as to let the other speak. It
is this that I also call, as I was saying a moment ago, countersigning.
[…] One writes some other thing, but that is in order to try to let the
other sign: it is the other who writes, the other who signs. (Rams
167)
In Disgrace, Lucy might be the one to best represent this art of
countersigning. After the attack, David finds Lucy “taking in the carnage of
the dog-pens” in an impossibly faint, radically transfigured iteration of the
sacrifice of Isaac (97). Lucy attends to “one dog” that remains alive with a
gunshot wound in its throat. The dog’s agony, its very wounded mouth,
appeals to Lucy, almost from beyond the limit of the world.
The dog with the throat-wound is somehow still breathing. She
bends over it, speaks to it. Faintly it wags its tail. (97)
Bending, speaking, breathing with and for the other, Lucy creates peace for a
dog whose life is seeping out. David learns from Lucy and performs the same
work for the dogs in the clinic. However, this moment of “carrying the other”
is shattered in a tragicomic intervention of the angel of the Lord. David
comes wailing: “Lucy!” causing her to look up with a frown (97).13 Is it proof
that his ear still needs daily attention? Isn’t it Lucy who has been listening
faithfully, giving ear, to that other speech?
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NOTES
1
“Rams” belongs to a larger constellation of contemporaneous material, including a
brief preface to the volume Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (9-11). See also Derrida’s interview with Évelyne Grossman, “The Truth that Wounds,” as well as Derrida’s eulogy address for Hans-Georg Gadamer, entitled, “Comme il avait raison! Mon
Cicérone Hans-Georg Gadamer.”
2
See Derrida’s essay, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” Coetzee seems
to respond to “Ulysses Gramophone” in Elizabeth Costello, in Costello’s recorded
interview about Joyce’s character, Molly Bloom. See Elizabeth Costello 9-15. Mark
Sanders, while not highlighting the Derridean “yes” in David’s affirmation, makes a
fascinating argument about the novel’s final phrase, “Yes, I am giving him up.”
Though “giving up” belongs to a category of verbs that David terms “perfective” (including “seal off,” “burn up,” and “finish off”), the verb’s “progressive” form, “I am
giving,” implies suspension, process, and non-completion.
3
Biblical citations are from the King James Version.
4
My translation. Derrida’s words are, “la mort, la mort elle-même, s’il y en a, ne
laisse aucune place, pas la moindre chance, ni au remplacement ni à la survie du seul
et unique monde […]” (“Avant-propos,” Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde).
5
My translation of Derrida’s phrase, “‘Dieu’ veut dire: la mort peut mettre fin à un
monde, elle ne saurait signifier la fin du monde.”
6
According to Jay, groups that sacrifice are often acutely concerned with father-son
lineages, including the cultic lineages of legitimate priests. Additionally, sacrifice is
almost never performed by women (with the exception of aged women and virgins, in
some cases) (152, note 2). The rites, Jay argues, overcome the role of “childbearing
women” in the reproduction of society, affirming a more essential “male intergenerational continuity” through sacrifice, a bloody demonstration of “birth done better”
(xxiv). In Disgrace, Coetzee inscribes the classic opposition, which Jay explores, between pure, male, sacrificial blood, and the contaminating blood of women (though all
blood is regulated and potentially dangerous). When David muses that “the blood of
life is leaving his body,” he compares himself to a “clean” sacrificial animal whose
blood must be drained into the ground (see Gen 9:4, Deut 15:23, 1 Sam 14:32). And
yet, David rejects affiliation with the blood of women, glossing “blood-matters” as “a
woman’s burden, women’s preserve” (104). While glamorizing his own sacrifice, he
fixates uncomfortably upon “sanitary napkins” (180), Lucy’s “staleness, unwashedness” (125), Lucy’s blood-stained mattress (121), and all that falls under “menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath” (104).
7
The blessing reads, “By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast
done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will
bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as
the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast
obeyed my voice” (v. 16-18).
Say the Ram Survived
163
8
To the series Celan-Derrida-Coetzee, in which the Genesis story is reopened with a
focus on the ram, one could add Caravaggio’s two oil paintings of the sacrifice of
Isaac (c. 1600). Particularly in the painting referred to as the “Princeton version,”
Caravaggio presents the ram as a dog-like partner to the intervening angel. Hélène
Cixous also brings the animal presence in the Akedah into relief, identifying the donkey as Abraham’s confidant. See “Writing blind: conversation with the donkey.” Dominick LaCapra argues that Derrida elides the sacrificial animal, and the question of
victimization more broadly, in his reading of Genesis in The Gift of Death, where he
focuses instead upon Abraham’s impossible position between imperatives (the absolute imperative to obey God, and the ethical imperative to preserve the life of his son).
However, when Derrida returns to Genesis 22 in his later essay, “Rams,” he focuses
on the animal as a key problem, a shift in focus that highlights the problem of victimization both in the Genesis story and in a broader theoretical tendency to valorize sacrifice or sacrificial qualities (182-183).
9
Here is the passage in full. Melanie has been wined and dined at an expensive waterfront restaurant.
It has begun to rain: sheets of water waver across the empty bay. “Shall we
leave?” he says.
He takes her back to his house. On the living-room floor, to the sound of
rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her. Her body is clear, simple, in its way perfect; though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion.
When he comes back the rain has stopped. The girl is lying beneath him, her
eyes closed, her hands slack above her head, a slight frown on her face. His own
hands are under her coarse-knit sweater, on her breasts. Her tights and panties lie
in a tangle on the floor; his trousers are around his ankles. After the storm, he
thinks: straight out of George Grosz.
Averting her face, she frees herself, gathers her things, leaves the room. In a
few minutes, she is back, dressed. “I must go,” she whispers. He makes no effort
to detain her.
He awakes the next morning in a profound state of well-being, which does
not go away. (19-20)
10
Rembrandt’s painting is available at Rembrandt: The Complete Works.
<http://www.rembrandtonline.org/>.
11
Lucy and Soraya (with her “honey-brown body”) are especially linked to Lolita in
her adult and pubescent instars (1); but Melanie is as well, appearing on the threshold
of her apartment in Lolita’s “sloppy felt slippers” (Lolita 269; Disgrace 24). To give
just one example, Lucy’s corpulent, asthmatic bulldog (Katy) resembles the dog of
Lolita, “heavy and old,” who “loped alongside [H.H.’s] car like a fat dolphin,” but was
“too heavy and old” to keep up (Lolita 280). This image helps H.H. complete his picture of Lolita metamorphosed, like Lucy, into an unlovely but endearing (and “milk”skinned) mother-to-be.
12
David never considers destroying the pages of his opera, but this represents an unexplored trajectory in Coetzee’s storyline, one that wends its way through another
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Adeline Rother
novel by Nabokov. In Pale Fire, John Shade performs a weekly ritual in which he
admits creative failures but also covers his traces. As Nabokov’s delirious narrator
informs us, Shade “crafted verse on index cards but destroyed drafts the moment he
ceased to need them” (9). One “brilliant morning,” the narrator watches Shade, “burning a whole stack” of his index cards “in the pale fire of the incinerator before which
he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé” (9). However, Shade “saved” “twelve” draft-cards
out of “a sneaking fondness for” them (9), as David feels “a particular fondness” for
Driepoot, the twenty-fourth dog, and must decide whether to “save him for another
week” (215, 219). David’s very name may connect him to Nabokov’s “pale fire” and
to Shade’s ritual of self-immolation. By a single alphabetic step, Lurie becomes lurid.
The adjective is contradictory: it means both pale and glowing, like pale fire, like the
dim fires of the hospital incinerator on the horizon (150), and like David’s personality:
“his temperament, though intense, has never been passionate” (2); his style in bed is
“lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest” (3).
13
There is another iteration of the angel’s interruption just prior to David’s sacrifice of
Driepoot, which is in turn interrupted by the end of the novel in Coetzee’s selfconscious authorial coup. Lucy is bent over “at work among the flowers,” surrounded
by bees “in their seventh heaven” (217); David, clearing his throat, calls Lucy’s name
“loudly” and prompts her to look up – this time with a smile. Even at this bright moment, a sinister lining is present: there is mention of the truck that David uses to take
the dogs to the site of cremation (211), and there is also Katy, a placid ram-dog like
Caravaggio’s, who “raises her head” then comes to sniff David’s shoes, perhaps sensing his movements around the clinic and the incinerator. Katy is in fact the only dog
that the attackers spare when they shoot the dogs in the kennels. David tells a neighbor
that he and Lucy lost “the dogs, of course, all but one” (115). David may therefore
exceed the programmatic spirit of the attackers when he kills the last dog, Driepoot,
telling Ben Shaw that there is “one more” (220). As the twenty-fourth dog, Driepoot
is, like Katy, the seventh dog (110), precariously marked for the ritual metering of
time.
WORKS CITED
Attridge, Derek. “Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Novel 34.1 (2000). 98-121.
Barnard, Rita. “J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral.”
Contemporary Literature 44.2 (2003). 199-224.
Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. New York: Penguin
Books, 1998.
— Disgrace. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
— Elizabeth Costello. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Say the Ram Survived
165
Cooper, Pamela. “Metamorphosis and Sexuality: Reading the Strange Passions of Disgrace.” Research In African Literatures 36.4 (2005).
22-39.
Derrida, Jacques. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” Acts of
Literature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 253-309.
— “Avant-propos.” Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Paris: Galilée,
2003. 9-11.
— “Comme il avait raison! Mon Cicérone Hans-Georg Gadamer.” « Il y aura ce jour…», à la mémoire de Jacques Derrida. Ed. Georges Leroux, Claude Lévesque and Ginette Michaud. Montréal: À
l’impossible, 2005. 53-56.
— “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem.”
Trans. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski. Sovereignties in
Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi
Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
— “The Truth That Wounds: From an Interview.” Trans. Thomas Dutoit.
Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Ed. Thomas
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press,
2005.
LaCapra, Dominick. History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Jay, Nancy. Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and
Paternity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Berkeley: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1962.
— The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books,
1991.
Sanders, Mark. “Disgrace.” Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (2002). 363-373.
Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Covelo, CA:
Shearwater Books, 1996.
Crowds and Powerlessness:
Reading //kabbo and Canetti with Derrida
in (South) Africa
Rosalind C. Morris
What links the post-Enlightenment humanist discourse on the animal to that on
Africa? What traces of being otherwise can be excavated from within the linguistic
memory and narrative traditions of those who have, historically, been asked to signify
“Africanity”? And when is the possibility of being otherwise that against which
purgative violence is organized? Reading back from contemporary South African
discourse on the human and the African, as framed by the problem of foreigners,
animals and their rights, this chapter revisits Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd’s
material on /Xam mythology. Reading in light of Derrida’s late work, The Animal
That Therefore I Am, it not only seeks the traces of /Xam thought about possible
conceptions of human-animal being, but also seeks to bring that thought to bear on
Elias Canetti’s rendering of /Xam myth in his monumental work, Crowds and Power.
Under the specter of “xenophobic” violence, as it materialized in South Africa in
2008, we conclude here by considering how and why the predicament of being
simultaneously modern and African is articulated in contemporary South Africa as a
question of the animal as citizen, by figures as diverse as Thabo Mbeki and J.M.
Coetzee.
For Anne, Antjie, and Ingrid
“They are animals. They treat us like animals.” This statement, uttered by a
Somali immigrant in South Africa following a recent eruption of what has
been called “xenophobic” violence, expresses an obvious and commonplace
sense of othering. It is a nearly universal gesture to abuse others by naming
them as animals. But if one listens carefully to these words, one can also
discern in them something more specific. Here, animality designates the kind
of being that lacks compassion, that does not care for the suffering of others,
and that disavows others precisely by withholding from them a capacity to
suffer. It stages a complex mirroring between compassionless humans and
suffering animals. It is the kind of statement made possible only in the
aftermath of Jeremy Bentham’s extraordinary rephrasing of the question of
humanity’s relationship and obligation to its animal others. “Can they
suffer?” he asked. Derrida reminds us of the importance of this question, and
its partial displacement of language and Reason as the definitive and
exclusive attributes of humanity at a turning point in European history (The
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Animal 27). We will have occasion to consider Bentham’s intervention in
some detail below, but in the meantime I wish to focus on the logic and
idioms structuring local understandings of the recent violence in order to
draw out what was, and is, the problem of Africanity in South Africa today.
Only then will it be possible to understand its relationship to the animal
question.
The events of which the above-cited, anonymous immigrant spoke
erupted in May of 2008, when a series of violent, collective actions were
aimed at individuals identified as “foreigners.” These so-called foreigners
were residing in poor townships of major metropolitan centers, especially
Johannesburg and Cape Town. Alexandra Township, of Johannesburg, was
the putative origin of this phenomenon, but it was also observed elsewhere,
and, though largely contained, it continued to manifest in more rural regions
quite remote from the wealthy centers of capital. The violence directed
against so-called foreigners was remarkable for its rapidity, intensity and
organized, collective nature. It was also remarkable for its cruelty. Victims
were chased from their homes, their property burned or otherwise destroyed.
Many were physically assaulted by groups, pummeled with household
implements and left unconscious or presumed dead. Women with small
children were not spared. Most horrifyingly, some people were burned alive –
in that form of execution which arose in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle called “necklacing.”1
In Gauteng Province alone, sixty-three people died in these assaults,
which took place over a period of less than one week, and approximately
100,000 people were rendered homeless.2 Police, eventually backed by the
military, managed to restore order to those townships where the violence had
occurred, and massive counter-protests, featuring the slogan, “Shame on Us,”
emerged almost instantaneously. Explanations of the violence have tended to
invoke the class differences that now operate in a country that foreswore a
fuller revolution and the politics of redistribution in the interest of peace and
the creation of black capital. Working class and unemployed South Africans
responded to the events of May 2008 with a commentary that, no doubt,
captures much of the truth of the situation, if not the nature of the violence.
Staggeringly high unemployment rates (exceeding forty percent in many
townships), inadequate housing, and poor, sometimes non-existent services
(water, electricity and sewerage) have generated an economy of severest
scarcity. Every new body taxes these already stretched resources. Moreover, a
government effort to provide housing through the Reconstruction and
Development Program, which erects about 180,000 houses per year, has in
some places been subverted. Bribery and corruption have permitted some
people to access housing ahead of those who are merely “in line” for such
benefits, and some of those thought guilty of bribery are non-citizens, or have
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arrived in RDP areas more recently than those who have been waiting
(whether for services or something else) since the program’s inauguration.
This being “in line” is, of course, the symptom of industrial modernity in
South Africa, an iconic mark of its bureaucratic systems and the
organizational protocols of its main industry, mining. Thus, the great sefela
artist, Ngoane Tooane Motsoafi, sings of the “in a file people” who
obediently work in the mines, and dreams of “corpses forming a line.” The
forms of work and of death are almost interchangeable for him, and with the
bravado typical of sefela artists, he mocks this submission to the line.3 For
township residents today, however, it is the violation of the line, the patient
waiting for that to which one is supposedly entitled but which seems
endlessly delayed, that constitutes the biggest threat. Breaking into this line,
not waiting one’s turn, is tantamount to bringing death to others; it make them
wait in line too long, indeed until death.
There is no doubt that these economic pressures are deeply implicated in
the violence of 2008. Nor is there any doubt that perceptions of corruption
and bribery are accurate in many but certainly not all instances. Moreover,
South Africa is now home to some 3,000,000 people who are classed as
illegal immigrants, and its infrastructure and political institutions are not
equipped to sustain them. Nonetheless, the nature of that implication remains
unclear. For the violence was most acute in areas which had enjoyed
significant improvement in service delivery over the past decade, and
relatively successful reconstruction programs. A report by metropolitan
police head Robert McBride claimed that personal conflict underlay many of
the assaults, and that criminals opportunistically seized on the riots, offering
protection services to foreigners and then either identifying those who refused
them or participating in the destruction of their property and persons. Even
so, McBride acknowledged that it was xenophobia that created the
opportunity (Basson 6).
Recognition of a bias against foreigners has been circulating in South
Africa for at least ten years, and it has been noted that the phenomenon is
common among all of the most developed nations in the southern African
region. Yet, it is remarkable that most of those communities with long-term
histories of migrant labor, and transient but formally recognized populations
of non-citizens, were relatively quiet during the 2008 riots. Most mining
towns, for example, remained peaceful if tense, and while violence certainly
afflicted some mining communities, it was much more prevalent elsewhere.
Sometimes, this quietude was itself well-organized,4 but the strange
distribution of xenophobia begs us to ask whether the violence is, in fact,
adequately described by that word, xenophobia.
There are many reasons why one might be tempted to call this violence
xenophobic, for it is accompanied by a vociferous demand – a demand
attempting to become a commandment – that foreigners leave, that they “go
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home.” Many South Africans read this politics of expulsion, which ironically
encodes a commitment to the idea of home, as either primordially African or
as a function of the colonial uprooting of people from the homes to which
they would otherwise have been attached. Some also see the turn to an
ideology of autochthony or indigeneity as, itself, a function of colonial
modernity and its aftermath.5
Percy Zvomuya, writing in the Mail and Guardian, takes up the first
position, to argue that “Africans on the continent have never liked one
another […] Ever since Europe’s powers sat down in Berlin in 1884 to divide
Africa among themselves, Africans have internalized the differences the
Europeans foisted on them in their quest for empire and wealth.” Zvumoya
adduces a painful litany of incidents from across the post-colonial continent
in which one group of Africans has tried to expel another from the national
territory that it claims to rightfully dominate. Striking among these is his
invocation of Robert Mugabe’s reference to “totemless aliens,” namely
Malawian and Zambian farm-workers whom Mugabe blamed for supporting
the Movement for Democratic Change (his opposition) in Zimbabwe. Many
of the foreigners who were attacked in South Africa were, of course
Zimbabweans, their numbers having swelled during recent years as a result of
agricultural failure and massive inflation, not to mention political violence in
their home country. But Zvumoya somewhat mockingly recalls the less
arcane derisions heaped on those same Malawians and Zambians, but also
Mozambicans, by earlier Zimbabweans. And he continues with like tales
from Botswana, Nigeria, Zambia and elsewhere.
Writing against the analyses proffered by Zvumoya is Jacob Dlamini.
The two cultural critics represent something like the extreme poles of thencurrent discourse about the violence within South Africa, and between them a
whole array of competing claims and vexed questions have been articulated.
For his part, Dlamini suggests that neither economic competition within a
specifically “South African economy” nor a primordial aversion to difference
lies at the roots of a phenomenon that he also terms xenophobic. “The
xenophobic attacks do not come from the inability of South Africans to deal
with difference. The causes of this despicable bout of violence and madness
are many, but the mere fact of difference is not one of them,” he insists. Quite
rightly, he observes the long history in which people from neighboring states
have been integrated as part of the labor force in South Africa – not only as
miners but also as shoemakers and tailors, and as participants in local
struggles against apartheid. He does not remark, though he might have, that
migrant miners from Lesotho were actually granted many of the rights
associated with citizenship, including voting, under the first South African
constitution – thereby demonstrating how complex and capacious are the
forms of relation between natives and foreigners in recent South African
history (Neocosmos 5). In any case, claims Dlamini, the South African
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171
economy is not bounded in ways that are isomorphic with the political
boundaries of the nation-state. Accordingly, he argues that it is necessary to
speak of a unified southern African economic region. Yet, if there is truth in
this analysis (and there is much), it is a truth that reinvigorates the enigma of
xenophobia: “The tragedy of recent events is precisely that the perpetrators of
these evil acts ignored this very rich history of integration between locals and
migrants.” In response, Dlamini rejects the economizing efforts by ANC
leaders to demand hospitality on the grounds that members of the governing
party who went into exile during the apartheid years were the recipients of
generosity in other nations.6 Why make the experience of a small minority the
basis of a national ethics of hospitality-as-debt, asks Dlamini. In the end,
however, he merely extols the virtues of humanism in the face of the
unanswerable question: What transformed foreignness into a force that people
felt they had to expel? Thus, he asserts that “the responsibility to be kind to
others must come out of humanity’s perennial concern about what it means to
be human.”
What then, is the nature of this violence which, in so many ways, seems
to have been torn from the pages of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power¸ and
especially that part of the text devoted to “baiting crowds”? And what
conception of the human writes hospitality as one of its constitutive
elements? We will return to the latter question at the end of this essay. Here, I
want to focus on the question of violence. Baiting crowds are, for Canetti,
those crowds which form spontaneously around the explicit goal of killing (if
only by expelling) single individuals, whose presence is thought to bear the
menace of death: “The crowd advances towards victim and execution in order
to rid itself once and for all of its own deaths,” he writes. The crowd is
destined for failure, however. Canetti continues, “But what actually happens
to it [the crowd] is the opposite of this. Through the execution, though only
after it, it feels more menaced than ever by death; it disintegrates and
disperses in a kind of flight. The greater the victim, the greater the fear” (4950). One can imagine that, in places where food and housing are so short as to
threaten individuals with starvation and death by exposure to the elements,
the presence of others can itself feel like the force of death. But which others?
Who is an other? This is the question that the events of 2008 in South Africa
so urgently pose. The question must be asked on two levels, first on the level
of who, specifically, was systematically victimized by so-called xenophobic
violence in South Africa (and perhaps in other comparable contexts). The
second question concerns the way in which the enactment of violence against
others is read as an index of a persisting alterity in and of South Africa. The
two questions, we shall see, converge in the category of Africanity.
A Human Rights Watch report notes that the first attacks in Alexandra
Township were preceded by a community discussion of crime, and that,
during a public forum, foreigners were said to be responsible for the crime
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Rosalind C. Morris
that currently afflicts Alexandra. Robert McBride’s report even goes so far as
to suggest that community crime-fighting associations and a state-sponsored
“Take Charge” program may have ironically created the conditions of
possibility for massive scapegoating. Having determined that crime was itself
foreign, crowds in the township called “Beirut,” (the irony could not be more
acidic), marched under the soaring call of the following chant: “Khipha
ikwerekwere” (kick out the foreigners). Who are the foreigners? Like many
other townships, Alexandra is home to people from all over South Africa,
people who speak isiXhosa, isiZulu, seTswana, seSotho, siVenda, English
and Afrikaans among other languages. It is an urban community, whose very
existence on the periphery of Johannesburg makes it a magnet for migrants
from across the country and the southern part of the continent. A perusal of
video shot by journalists during the week of rioting shows that the foreigners
were identified as those without papers. In other words, they were those who
could not demonstrate that they are South African, or at least legal residents
with rights to the goods and services provided by the South African state.
This is a remarkable fact, for it indicates that there might otherwise have been
confusion about who is a foreigner. One woman, with loudspeaker in hand,
can be seen on an independent journalist’s video agitating the crowd, telling
them to go house to house, shack to shack, demanding papers. If there are
none, she harangues, the shacks must be burnt. Stories of similar incidents
abounded in the South African press for weeks after the initial violence broke
out.
The fact that the foreigners were to be identified as those without papers
indicates how powerful the idea of the state is even among those with little
state-based education. Calls for assaults on people without papers reveal that
it is the state which mediates, by recognizing, the identity of the country’s
residents. As much as any discernible visible difference, or any obvious racial
stereotypy, the recognition (or lack thereof) by the state in the form of papers
seems to have provided the alibi for violence in 2008.7 Those without papers
(the sans papiers of South Aftica) are, of course, those not eligible for
government support services, and a “lack of papers” is one of the mechanisms
by which poor people are denied their title to land and other resources – now
as under apartheid. Often, such people and their advocates deride the injustice
of this regime of papers, and indeed, the history of the anti-apartheid struggle
is replete with a kind of insurgency that specifically targeted the paper-giving
rituals of a state which used documentation as the means to implement its
politics of difference-as-inequality. Passbook protests, in which black people
burned the passbooks that the state required them to have at all times, but
especially while traveling, are the signal example of this kind of protest.8
Today, the lack of papers among both poor South Africans and non-South
African migrants creates a problem of identity, of course. And, on occasion,
there is the possibility that the two may be confused. The risk is exacerbated
Crowds and Powerlessness
173
by the fact that many of the language areas and hence spaces of belonging in
southern Africa overlap but also confound the boundaries of the nation-state.
Thus, for example, SeTswana is spoken in Botswana as well as in South
Africa, the Tsonga spoken by Shangaan people is found in Mozambique but
also in Limpopo Province, and SiSwati is similarly spoken by the Swazi
people in Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa. There are many more
comparable examples. Moreover, the fact that some foreigners may be able to
lay claim – not only by bribery, but through processes of naturalization – to
resources that are designated for South Africans also suggests that there is
confusion. Foreigners, it seems, may also be able to assume the appearance
and even the place of South Africans. Or at least some South Africans fear
such a possibility. Indeed, this possibility is constantly invoked by those who
assert that the foreigners are usurping the place of South Africans “in the
line” for RDP housing, or water, or electricity. The reverse is also true. South
Africans without documentation can be treated as foreigners, as evidenced by
the fact that nearly thirty percent of those killed in the “xenophobic” attacks
were originally from South Africa, and hence could claim to “be” South
African (Basson 6).
The problem, then, is not foreigners per se, but the possibility that the
category of the foreigner may be unstable, that it may be impossible to know
who is a foreigner and hence that one could be evicted from one’s rightful
place as someone in and of the place which is South Africa. Here, violence
seems to be born of a need or a desire to produce a difference that otherwise
cannot be so clearly discerned. In this context, the relative impunity of Asian
workers (Japanese sushi chefs, for example), not to mention Europeans, is
revealing. “Khipha ikwerekwere” in this context also means: “I am not a
foreigner.” Indeed, this claim, which is only partly a claim to national
belonging, may be one of its primary meanings. And it has as its spectral
other side a mirror image of comparable instability, bitterly expressed as a
loss of identity among foreigners. Thus, Zimbabwean journalist Munyaradzi
Makoni, who sought refuge in South Africa seven months prior to the attacks
in May, writes, “Thousands of refugees are not sure of who they are any
more.”9
If the recent violence in South Africa is partly born of fear, the kind of
fear that menaces the baiting crowds described by Canetti, it is also partly
because this statement, “I am not a foreigner,” is vulnerable to question –
from both sides. In 2008, poor South Africans felt themselves to be at risk of
losing their relative access to resources that would mark their difference from
other Africans. And it is against other Africans that most violence is directed.
Perhaps, one should say that the loss of relative access would be the ironic
sign of their becoming African and not only South African. I say ironic both
because such access has not, historically, been either a right or an actuality
for this group of people, but also because it is precisely this “becoming
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Rosalind C. Morris
African” that South African President Thabo Mbeki claimed as the basis of
the post-apartheid regime’s re-orientation, and of his own (post-Mandela)
program of continental recovery, which he terms “African Renaissance.”10
To be an African: this is the lure and the terror that confronts South
Africans after the fall of apartheid. It is ideologically invested and affectively
disavowed. It conjures a sense of authenticity but also of dysfunction, the idea
of priority but also of failure. At the origin of humanity, Africans are also
those whose states are repeatedly said to be (and often are) failing them.
Accordingly, ideologues of an African Renaissance avow continental
solidarities while working class residents of South Africa live in horrified
thrall to the inflationary despotism of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. A
FutureFact survey of 2,500 South Africans found that 70% of township
dwellers, and 64% of suburban residents believe South Africans are superior
to other Africans. On the question of border patrol, 76% of township residents
and 86% of suburbanites advocate strict limitations on emigration from
“troubled African countries.”11 South Africa is riven by the competition
between a popular fear of Africanity (among people of all races) and an elite
avowal of it, between a common desire for isolation as the means of
guaranteeing exceptionalism, and a solidarity that seeks recognition of Black
South Africans’ belated arrival to the status of postcoloniality. Let us then
consider what is entailed by the avowal of Africanity in South Africa.
Thabo Mbeki’s famous, “I am an African” speech which, until his overthrow
by populist rivals at Polokwane, some believed would have the same force for
contemporary South Africans as Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia Trial speech had
for his generation, was delivered when he was still Deputy President, on the
euphoric occasion of the adoption of the new constitution. It begins, not
incidentally, with beginnings, and these are axiomatically African. “On an
occasion such as this, we should, perhaps, start from the beginning,” he says.
“So, let me begin. I am an African.” Africanity and origin are interchangeable
terms, here; the one implies the other. The rhetorical structure of the entire
speech, punctuated repeatedly by the phrase, “I am an African,” identifies the
sources of this Africanity as, quite simply, being in the place of Africa. It is
not possible to read this text in its entirety here, but for our purposes it is
worth noting the degree to which the speech incarnates and articulates the
twin but competing ambitions of nationalism and pan-Africanism. The
nationalist dimension is dominant at the level of function, but the panAfricanist ambition rings repeatedly throughout the speech. In the doubling of
these two interests, the idea of indigeneity emerges as the basis of all claims
to authority. Power accrues to the one who is in place, and in the place of his
or her origins.
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175
It is thus first of all the landscape from which Mbeki draws his identity.
Subsequently, it is the animals and the “desolate souls” of the Khoi and the
San, whom Mbeki describes as “perished,” that are named as ancestors.12 The
Khoi and the San “fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land
has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to
defend our freedom and dependence [sic] and they who, as a people, perished
in the result [sic].” Claiming descent from the European colonizers as well as
those whom they killed, enslaved or conquered, Mbeki then advocates
memory, including that of one’s ancestors’ murderousness, as the key to
humanity: “Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these
ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former
deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its
remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.”
Among the most unexpected gestures in this speech is that in which
Mbeki, asserting his Africanity, also contemplates the possibility of the
animals having citizenship. It is one of the moments in which the concept of
the nation comes radically into question, and when the continent both grounds
and vanishes beneath the nation. “At times, and in fear, I have wondered
whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and
the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the
pestilential mosquito.” A “human presence among all these,” he continues, “a
feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare
challenge me when I say – I am an African!”13 The invocation of two sets of
original co-habitants in the historical space of South Africa – namely the
animals and the Khoi and San peoples – is significant. These two groups have
almost invariably been identified as the original inhabitants of southern
Africa by both colonial writers and anti-colonial nationalists, to say nothing
of post-colonial historians. Between them and the historical era is the event of
European arrival, and all that it entails. It is with them (the San and the Khoi,
often lumped together as Khoisan), and with their interrupted relationship to
animals that the question of the foreigner is introduced in South Africa.
One might say that the era of colonialism is the era of the foreigner – an
era marked by the arrival of Europeans, the importation of slaves from the
Malay archipelago, the expulsion of residents from their lands, and the
subsequent recruitment of migrant workers from now-restricted agricultural
areas to the mines. But it is also the era of contact with the foreign, via the
capitalized trade with distant regions. For the other (South) Africans, the
speakers of Bantu languages who migrated into the Cape from regions further
north, both before and after the Europeans arrived, the European arrival
meant the displacement by capitalism of that awkward and sometimes violent
balance between the hunter-gatherer San and the agropastoralist Khoekhoen
and Bantu peoples.14 It meant the arrival of a foreignness that could not be
accommodated except through compulsion. It also meant the transformation
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of local antagonisms under the laws of commensurability and opposition. The
Khoekhoe and the San, referred to as Bushmen and Hottentots by Europeans
who subjected them to colonial domination, came to forge new and
unexpected alliances with each other, even as they were co-opted into wars
against the Bantu-speakers. Yet, as Mbeki’s speech insists, their communities
would be mercilessly reduced. Initially, their destiny, as those whom
Europeans recognized as original inhabitants of the area, appeared to be
death. In the nineteenth century, originariness was understood to be that
which is surpassed, or to use Canetti’s language, that which is survived rather
than that which survives. In this respect, it is a quality attributed to both
Africans and animals. Not that which survives, but that which is survived. It
would be tempting to say that this understanding puts the Khoekhoen and San
in the position of animals, but this would not be quite correct. It would be
more accurate to say that the Khoekhoen and the San, but especially the San,
were subjected to this positioning because they were deemed not to have
separated themselves sufficiently from the animals, or because they attributed
too much power to animals. This is a way of saying that they were thought to
lack a discourse of the animal-as-Other. Perhaps this was a correct
assessment, though a wrongly valued one. Mbeki himself acknowledges and,
to a certain extent, reproduces the appearance of that persistent intimacy, that
being-with-animals for which the San came to be known throughout the
world.
But what is the nature of that intimacy for Mbeki? He can almost
imagine citizenship for the animals, and he can (almost) do so out of fear. His
statement is extraordinary for its vivid identification of fear as the basis for
granting citizenship to an other. The animals named are mostly predatory, or
at least enormous (the springbok stands alone as a relatively innocuous,
vegetarian beast). In other words, they are beasts that could inflict death on a
human, which could, in this limited physical sense, claim dominion in the
place where humans also live. Of course, the animals are not granted
citizenship. Citizenship is only for human beings, and moreover, only for
humans native to a place or naturalized in it. Hence, in South Africa, it can be
granted to Europeans, as well as Malays and Chinese, to Xhosas as well as
Zulus, Khoekhoen as well as San. Animals may, in a certain manner, have
rights, but not citizenship. One doesn’t attribute to them duties. And this is
because they are assumed – at least within the terms of Western logocentrism
– to be incapable of either responding or assuming responsibility.15
Perhaps this is why some of the people persecuted by recent violence
have said that they are being treated “like animals.” They have been given no
opportunity to call into question the terms by which their persecution is being
prosecuted (this questioning of the question is the gesture of response rather
than reactivity). Perhaps too this is why some people have referred to those
perpetrating the violence as being “like animals,” for those committing the
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violence seem to feel no sense of responsibility to those who have taken their
place within the space of South Africa. In both cases, the specter that seems
to be haunting the burned out townships is that of a feared confusion between
those who are committing violence and those who are being violated.
What does it mean to identify the other with an animal? To fear the other
in oneself as an animal? To fear the possibility that one could become an
animal? To fear that the boundary between what one is and what one is not
lacks categorical stability? What is the history within which this question has
been posed? What is the relationship between the question of Africanity and
the question of animality in a history by which Enlightenment thought,
reaching its apotheosis in Hegel, posits these two as the twinned figures of
otherness, and the twinned objects of fear (to borrow a phrase from Hobbes)?
How has this history figured in South Africa, where Africanity has been the
name of both enslavement and liberation, and where, today, the question of
the foreigner sublates within itself the question of the animal and the question
of Africa? To answer these questions requires more than can be accomplished
in an essay such as this. Nonetheless, we can begin to respond to this question
by turning and returning to some of the iconic texts within which these
questions have, however obtusely, been posed. As the foregoing paragraphs
may already have intimated, my point of departure is Elias Canetti, whose
efforts to theorize the history of tyranny makes the case of the Bushmen
(/Xam San) the basis for a counter-discourse on modernity. It is Canetti who
comes to mind in the violence of today, and whose efforts to think of the
violence of another moment led him to South Africa. Reading with but also
against Canetti, I move back toward the texts on which basis he derived his
theory of crowds and transformation, namely the work of Wilhelm Bleek and
Lucy Lloyd. The reader is asked to linger with these texts, to stay and to
listen, to encounter what will no doubt seem foreign in order to grasp the
enormity of the challenge of a difference which does not offer itself,
immediately, to explanation or (what is worse, and what is perhaps Canetti’s
failure) to reduction such that difference becomes that alterity against which
the self-sameness of the West is established. Moving forward, I return to
Canetti’s questions with J.M. Coetzee and Jacques Derrida, to understand,
once again, why it is that South Africa today is the scene of the most urgent
effort to rethink the relationship between Africanity and alterity, humanity
and animality, alterity and co-existence. If, following the end of apartheid, the
world watched South Africa with such bated breath, it was, I believe because
the entire philosophical edifice in which was incarnated the project of
Enlightenment thought – with its valorization of Reason taking the form of a
radical opposition between humanity and animality – was being challenged.
That this challenge has generated anxiety, that it has occasioned the violent
affirmation of nationalism (perhaps the most familiar form of Enlightenment
modernism), and that it has seemed at times destined to collapse into neo-
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primitivism should not blind us the great thought experiment which South
Africans now labor to inhabit on behalf of a much larger world. Let us then
return to the Khoekhoen and the /Xam San, who, after all, have not departed.
It is not the case that the Khoekhoen and the San have perished so completely
as to be merely desolate souls haunting the vast expanses of the beautiful
Cape. Although the question of “extinction” remains one of controversy, and
although it is still common to hear people, from Thabo Mbeki to Neil
Bennun, say that they have entirely vanished from the world, there are,
according to Geoffery Blundell, approximately 110,000 San people living in
South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola.16 But the myth of this
disappearance has sustained the narrative of colonization for many centuries.
For a long time, the San were known to Western audiences, and to South
African audiences, primarily on the basis of the linguistic and ethnographic
efforts of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd who, in the middle and late
nineteenth century, worked with /Xam (members of the Bushmen/San
language community) individuals to learn their languages, compose lexicons
and dictionaries, record their myths and legends, and otherwise produce an
account of the knowledges that they, individually, continued to bear – in
however fragmentary form. The men and women whom they interviewed and
worked with had been incarcerated in colonial prisons, and were survivors of
a devastating frontier campaign, as well as the typically destructive epidemics
that afflicted the indigenes of the Cape (just as they afflicted most other
indigenous populations in the world). The care and systematicity of the Bleek
and Lloyd efforts to learn from and of the /Xam have not been surpassed to
this day, and the dictionaries and compilations of narrative that they
generated remain incomparable sources for anyone seeking to know
something of the /Xam world in the moment that they encountered it.
In 1911, Lucy Lloyd published an edited edition of the compilations that
she and Wilhelm had generated under the title of Specimens of Bushman
Folklore. Elias Canetti would later refer to it in his own work, Crowds and
Power, as “the most valuable record of early humanity,” and on its basis,
would devote an entire chapter to “Presentiments and Transformation among
the Bushmen” (337). In that chapter, he would attribute to the Bleek and
Lloyd text an understanding of how Bushmen really think and feel about
“what it means […] to think of a creature other than himself” (Crowds 340).
This understanding (accurate or not, real or phantasmatically projected) held
Canetti fast, for it was transformation that he understood to be at the heart of
the crowd, the only social phenomenon in which people overcome their
putatively instinctual aversion to contact with others. The theoretical
problem, which he believed to be a historical problem, was to explain how
the overcoming of an aversion to others could simultaneously be the origin of
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a process by which the expulsion of the foreigner, and indeed the survival by
killing of the other/foreigner, comes to define political life. To understand
this, Canetti turned not only to human origins but to what he believed was the
original mode of relation to animals.
What amazed Canetti about the Bushmen described by Bleek and Lloyd
was the degree to which they simultaneously identified with the animals of
their presentiments, and yet remained separate from them. Indeed, without
identification, the Bushmen would have lacked the magic of transformation.
But without continued separation, says Canetti, “the presentiment would be
meaningless” (341). In all of the transformations associated such
presentiments, Canetti writes, “one body is equated with another” (340). This
equation is not quite a substitution, however. Writing of a transformation in
which a hunter identifies with a springbok, Canetti writes, “The man feels the
black hair on his ribs as though he were wearing the animal’s skin; but it is
his own skin” (341). Moreover, the man’s capacity to retain a certain
distinction between himself and the object of his presentiment also permits
him to differentiate between the multiplicity of beings with whom he might,
successively, identify. “A Bushman can become this or that, but ‘this’ and
‘that’ remain separate from each other, for between transformations he
always becomes himself again” (341). Ultimately, the form of separation that
is both most complete and indicative of the most profound proximity –
namely the moment in which the hunter slays his prey and possesses it – is
death. In Canetti’s words, the Bushman “feels the living animal, his body
becomes its body, moving and watching as it does. But he also feels the dead
animal, as an alien body pressed to his own and in a state in which it can no
longer escape him” (342).
The passage to which Canetti refers in Crowds and Power is that section
titled “Bushman Presentiments,” in Specimens of Bushman Folklore. It
commences thus:
The Bushmen’s letters are in their bodies. They [the letters] speak,
they move, they make their [the Bushmen’s] bodies move. They [the
Bushmen] order the others to be silent; a man is altogether still, when
he feels that his body is tapping [inside]. A dream speaks falsely, it is
a [thing] which deceives. The presentiment is that which speaks the
truth; it is that by means of which the Bushman gets [or perceives]
meat, when it has been trapped. (Specimens 330)
In a note to this section, which was recorded in the now silent /Xam dialect
spoken then by the Bleek informant, //kabbo, in February and March 1873,
Wilhelm Bleek notes that the word used for letters was “!gwē,” which was
used to “denote both letters and books.” According to Lloyd’s notes, “//kábbo
explained that the beatings in their bodies […] are the Bushman’s ‘letters,’
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and resemble the letters which take a message or an account of what happens
in another place” (Specimens 331).17 In an earlier note, also appended by
Lloyd during the editing stage, we find the following statement: “They feel in
their bodies that certain events are going to happen. There is a kind of beating
of the flesh, which tells them things […]” (330). The entire note appears
almost verbatim in Canetti’s book, conjoined to the body of the main Bleek
text – neither appears in quotation marks.18
Canetti is not interested in “whether or not these presentiments are true,”
he says, but he nonetheless speculates that the /Xam may retain faculties “that
we have lost” (339). For //kabbo, it mattered greatly that presentiments, rather
than dreams, communicated the truth. This, at least according to the narrative
that he provided to his interlocutor, Wilhelm Bleek, was the basis of his
success as a hunter. But for Canetti, the truth that matters is not that which
constitutes the content of the presentiment; it is, rather, the fact of having
presentiments, which permit the /Xam to traverse the boundaries of selfhood.
This traversal is not limited to that between humans and animals, but includes
that between persons. Indeed, the category of person itself traverses what
those in the West, and those who are heir to its philosophical traditions
(including Thabo Mbeki) tend to refer to as the animal and the human
divide.19
The significance of the Bushmen’s presentiments and their “talent for
transformation,” is inseparable, for Canetti, from the question of human
origins. “In the enormously long period of time during which he lived in
small groups, he, as it were, incorporated into himself, by transformation, all
the animals he knew. It was through the development of transformation that
he really became a man; it was his specific gift and pleasure” (Crowds 108,
italics in original). This becoming human thus entails the incorporation of an
animality that is both foreign and constitutive of man. That transcendence
sees the small group become a larger crowd that simultaneously realizes itself
and emerges from the smaller group, becoming what Canetti describes as the
“increase pack.” More than this, however, it entails the autonomization of
human increase, and specifically a detachment of human increase from that of
other animals. For Canetti, this detachment and investment in human increase
is itself a transformation and it is the “propelling force behind the spread of
men” (107). It is not yet the full autonomization of increase, in the fetish of
quantity, but it moves humans in that direction. We can note here that this
transformation marks the accession to the human. It is the mark or trace of its
realization. Being human means separating the ends of humans from the ends
of animals. It is the moment at which animals become the mere instrument or
means for human ends. Thus we can see that it also marks the arrival of a
kind of instrumental reason. Whether this moment constitutes the emergence
of the human or the emergence of the modern, which is to say the emergence
of a post-Enlightenment conception of the human as that opposed to the
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animal, remains to be seen, and it is perhaps the mark of Canetti’s own
ensorcellment by modernity that he cannot mark the difference between these
two, but we shall return to this question later. Let us linger here on the
moment of transformation.
The structure of transformation by which humans emerge in Crowds and
Power is not without its internal contradictions. The pack, Canetti argues,
“owes its origins among men to the example of animals […] Men have learnt
from wolves” (96). It would seem then that the mimesis of animals (those
kinds of animals which formed packs) was part of a structure binding humans
and animals. This mimetic capacity was there at the beginning, and even
among the apes to whom humans are related, writes Canetti. Hence, he
engages in a thought experiment aimed at a deepening of the concept of
mimesis – one that would liberate it from the instrumental telos of producing
mere adjustments to the environment: “To understand how we have become
human beings, the most important thing would surely be to examine the
imitative faculties of apes” (Human 12). It is unclear how this observation of
apes would lead to a discernment of what made humans emerge as such, but,
as in the discussion of the increase pack, it is clear that some kind of
detachment occurs, and that this detachment emerges from a kind of doubling
between human and animal, a doubling which is as much like a fold as a
division. One nonetheless wants to know what permits the mimesis to occur
in the first place. Or, to put the matter slightly differently: What division
between animals and humans authorizes the gesture by which animals exist
for humans as example? How does the animal come to be that which is
posited in its difference or otherness from the human?
In the earliest moment of Crowds and Power, a moment that anticipates
without foreshadowing the discussion of the Bushmen, Canetti writes, the
“knowledge of the animals by which he was surrounded, which threatened
him and which he hunted, was man’s oldest knowledge. He learnt to know
animals by the rhythm of their movement. The earliest writing he learnt to
read was that of their tracks; it was a kind of rhythmic notation imprinted on
the soft ground and, as he read it, he connected it with the sound of its
formation” (31). So, at the origins of human existence, there is a creature that
both reads and mimes the animals with which he or she shares the planet,
with which he is continuous, but from which it is always already departing.
Let us not fail to recognize that these origins have a form which has been
retrojected from the present in an act that attributes to particular
contemporary, living people the quality of being merely residual (it will be
some time before this residual status is translated into originariness).
The reading that also permits the miming of animals is, in Canetti’s
analysis, performed in and on the body, as it was for the /Xam people whom
Bleek and Lloyd interviewed. As such, it effects a transformation of the
person in whose body the tracks make themselves felt. The reading of tracks
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or traces is, of course, the skill for which the /Xam are still, today, most
famous, and it is their extraordinary abilities to discern the movement of
animals from their tracks that informed and informs their hunting practice,
and which made them such desirable members of the South African Defense
Forces – which employed them in the border wars against Angola.20 As
Jacques Derrida has taught us, this discernment of traces is common to all
acts of reading, and may indeed qualify as a minimal definition of reading.21
However, such reading is not a uniquely human gesture, even in Canetti’s
estimation. Nor is the covering of tracks (and here Canetti’s early work
moves in the direction – though it falls short – of the more rigorously
philosophical text that Derrida wrote at the end of his life, L’Animal que donc
je suis). In Canetti’s analysis, when the gesture of self-concealment fails,
there is the possibility of covering over one’s capacity to make tracks. This
latter concealment takes the form of “playing dead,” a gesture of incomplete
transformation that Canetti locates “nearest to the center of the circle, the
point which is still” (Crowds 345). When being pursued by a predator, “the
pursued hopes to be given up as dead, to be left lying on the ground while his
enemy goes away.” This very common kind of transformation, “is well
known and attested in the case of animals,” writes Canetti (345). His task,
however, is to draw a limit between animal feints and a linguistic deception
that, he implies, is properly human.
The narrative of a dissimulation born of simulation, which, in Canetti’s
account, meets its limit in the example of those immortals (he invokes
Proteus and Thetis) who were subject to fate because they could not feign
death is, not incidentally, the subject of the very first /Xam text in Bleek and
Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman Folklore. Perplexingly, Canetti never
mentions it. At the beginning, as it were, in the first origin myth of the
trickster deity, Mantis (widely thought of as a primary deity among the
/Xam), the god is described as “one who cheated the children by becoming a
hartebeest, by resembling a dead hartebeest. He feigning death lay in front of
the children” (Specimens 3). The children take the feint seriously, cut up the
seemingly dead hartebeest and commence to transport the meat home. But
they are soon terrified when it reassembles itself, each of its parts acquiring
life and rejoining itself to the other parts, speaking as they do so. The
Mantis’s feigning of death, it seems, is not so much an effort to escape death
– the Mantis does not die without also being able to restore itself – but in
order to frighten and fatigue the children by appearing as that kind of creature
who, because assumed to be dead, can terrify them by acting as itself, namely
a living thing. So, the narrative concludes, “he yonder will sit deceiving (at
home), while we did cut him up with stone knives (splinters). Іă-ttā! He went
feigning death to lie in front of us, that we might do so, we run” (Specimens
15).22
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There is, one notes, a double deceit here: in the first the Mantis appears
in the form of a hartebeest; in the second the living creature appears in the
form of the dead, indeed in the form of that which can die – something to
which the Mantis is not otherwise subject. This double deceit or pretense is,
however, not quite the kind of pretense at pretense that Lacan made the
constitutive mark of the human. As Derrida observes, in his trenchant
rereading of Lacan, the difference between the kind of pretense that entails a
“playing dead” and true lying is “the possibility of telling the truth in order to
lead the other astray, in order to have him believe something other than what
is true” (L’Animal 128). For Lacan – as for so many others in the postCartesian tradition – “an animal does not pretend to pretend. He does not
make tracks whose deception lies in the fact that they will be taken as false,
while being in fact true ones, that is, that indicate his true trail.”23 The animal
is not “subject of the signifier,” which is to say, it does not have language.
Canetti, writing in the same moment, also shares Lacan’s fundamental
commitment – that animals do not possess and are not possessed by language,
and that they do not, as a result, lie. Thus, he writes, “A talking animal would
be no more than a human being” (Human 221). But, it seems safe to say, the
/Xam from whom he sought to learn so much, and on whose practice of
transformation he based the theory of the crowd, did not. In /Xam discourse,
the full capacity for deceit is accorded to animals, at least in their original
state (and this attribution accompanies a lack of binary structures
counterposing the human and the animal).
At the same time, /Xam mythology contains a complex discourse in
which the absolute alterity of death is understood precisely to be that which
erases the tracks of those who are subject to (and who are speakers of)
language. The “wind does thus when we die, the wind makes dust, because it
intends to blow, taking away our footprints, with which we had walked about
[…] and our footprints, which the wind intends to blow away, would
(otherwise still) lie plainly visible” (Specimens 397-399). The passivity of the
account is remarkable; the erasure of one’s tracks, anticipated by the living
but effected by a force that exceeds any possibility of a specular exchange, or
identificatory misrecognition, seems to steer clear of the Lacanian error, at
least as diagnosed by Derrida. It does not rest on the assumption that only
human beings are capable of erasing their traces, and of knowing that such
erasure is effective. “Traces erase (themselves), like everything else, but the
structure of the trace is such that it cannot be in anyone’s power to erase it
and especially not to ‘judge’ its erasure, even less so by means of a
constitutive power assured of being able to erase, performatively, what erases
itself” (L’Animal 136). So writes Derrida. It would seem that the /Xam men
and women of Bleek’s and Lloyd’s time recognized, as Derrida recognizes,
not the relative capacity for deceit among humans (as their definitive
attribute) so much as the ambiguity of the threshold between humans and
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animals, an ambiguity not unrelated to the recognition, recounted in the myth
of the wind and death, that neither humans nor animals are masters of the
signifier to the extent that they can ensure the erasure of their own tracks and
traces.
Let this not become a sentimental discovery of deconstructionist ethics in
/Xam form. For the quixotic reading of traces is also the foundation of
hunting – that pursuit of the other’s death which transforms the other into the
instrument of one’s own survival. Nonetheless, if one takes seriously the idea
that /Xam thought bore (and perhaps still bears) within itself a different
conception of the relationship between animals and humans than that which
operates in post-Cartesian thought in the West, one must still resist the
temptation to write this difference under the sign of Africanity. What I wish
to argue here is that the emergence of a concept of “the African” coincides,
and is indeed inseparable from the emergence of something called “the
animal,” and moreover that such a formulation of categorical difference, of
otherness (on which basis Enlightenment subjectivity constitutes itself), takes
place in and as modernity. It is a modernity that Elias Canetti misrecognized
as the human, universalizing a particular tradition of thought that was itself
premised on the withholding of universalizability from the African. It is this
history that discloses itself in the movement of Bleek’s and Lloyd’s texts, that
is then reiterated, intensified and extended in Canetti’s, and that marks the
current discourse on the political in South Africa.
It is, of course, not the question of the human so much as the question of
tyranny that compels Canetti’s analysis. And, in his estimation, the origins of
tyranny are found less in the capacity for transformation than in the
prohibition on it. It is this prohibition or delimitation of transformability that
he sees emerging in the lives of people like the Bushmen, whom he believes
he has discovered in Bleek’s and Lloyd’s pages:
Without transformation he could not have obtained his food, but it
was also something imposed on him, and which continued to be
imposed even after he had satisfied his hunger. He felt as though
there was nothing but movement everywhere and his own being was
in a state of continual flux; and this inevitably aroused in him a
desire for solidity and permanence only to be satisfied through
prohibitions on transformations. (Crowds 383)
Power emerges here as the relative capacity for stability, and the
simultaneous power to transform others. Other than murder, the original form
of that gesture by which a person turns others into things they are not, is,
according to Canetti, slavery. In slavery, men are turned into animals,
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whether singular or collective. The single slave is analogized to the dog, the
group to cattle. Thus, Canetti concludes the section of his book on
transformations with a certain bitterness: “Once men had succeeded in
collecting large numbers of slaves, as they collected animals in their herds,
the foundations for the tyranny of the state were laid” (384).
It is not incidental that the first limit to transformation is introduced in
the very passage where Canetti describes the feigning of death by the animal
being sought as prey. Remarking that it would have been useful if Thetis and
Proteus had been able to feign death – could have escaped their fate – he then
remarks on why this was impossible: because, as gods, they were immortal.
They could not imitate what they were, could not dissimulate a death that was
not proper to them (Crowds 346). The tyrant, we might say, aspires to this
power, which is also a vulnerability: the escape from transformation. Because
such an escape is impossible, he demands that others die before him, or at
least that they be taken with him (397). The tyrant is the one who, aspiring to
immortality but faced with death, transforms into the survivor by
commanding others to die. In a sardonic moment in August 1945, having seen
the closure of World War II and the seeming apotheosis of tyranny in the
bomb that had been invested with the terror of the supernatural, Canetti
remarked, “what glee at the thought that the animals could survive us”
(Human 72). This would be the true end of the survivor. The human survivor.
The human as survivor.
One cannot help but remark the fact that, for all his enthusiasm about
Bleek’s and Lloyd’s work, and despite his repeated testimony to the lessons
learned in reading about those he termed “Primitive Peoples,” Elias Canetti
paid relatively little attention to what the /Xam said. His nearly verbatim
reproduction of //kabbo’s testimony about presentiments has, as its
counterpart, near silence about what //kabbo offered as explanation of the
relationship between animals and humans. Quite remarkable in a book about
transformation, Canetti neglected the asides and notes, embedded in or
accompanying almost all of the stories and myths recorded by Wilhelm
Bleek, about the fact that, in the beginning, humans and animals were not
differentiated in any absolute sense. One of the most common clarifying
comments accompanying the myths in Specimens of Bushman Folklore is one
explaining that the character in the story “was formerly a person.” This
applies not only to animals – springbok, ostriches, lions and so forth – but
also to elements, such as the wind. Moreover, these creatures and elements
often transformed one into the other, an occurrence that took place with
apparent regularity in the First Time. Thus, for example, “The Wind was
formerly a person; he became a bird” (Specimens 107). The animals-aspeople are often depicted as wily; they are frequently recounted seducing,
abducting, deceiving, beating and killing other persons. In the tale about the
origin of death, for example, the Moon instructs a hare to descend to earth to
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tell the people that they will not die, but will rise again as does the moon each
night. The hare, grieving over the death of its own mother, which it believed
to be irrevocable, refused to bear the Moon’s message as instructed, and
instead told the people that they too would die and never more arise. The
Moon, in a fit of pique over this petulant but nonetheless effectual deceit,
struck the hare and cleaved its lip. As additional punishment, the Moon
commanded that the hare became “altogether” a hare (Specimens 57-65).
This becoming altogether what one is lies at the center of /Xam
mythology and marks the difference between two temporalities, that are
usually referred to as the time of the First Race, or the First-at-Sitting-People
(sometimes the First-There-Sitting-People), and that of the present-day world.
As Neil Bennun aptly summarizes, “The First-at-Sitting-People often ate each
other, they fed their families on their own innards and they did not feel bound
to keep their own shapes” (15). This state of fluidity and mutual consumption
ended when a certain Anteater, bereft of children, abducted a Springbok girlchild (through elaborate deceit, but also, more importantly, on the basis of the
Springbok mother’s refusal or inability to dissimulate the identity of her
child24). When, later, a Lynx desired the anteater’s forcibly adopted child for
his wife and abducted her in turn, the Anteater burrowed frantically after him
in an effort to recapture the Springbok. The Lynx, forewarned of the
Anteater’s approach by the young Springbok who, like her human
descendents, discerned the future by attending to the trembling of the earth,
set a trap for the Anteater. And she, enraged at having been foiled, hurled a
reciprocal curse that ended an era. The curse commanded the animals to
assume a permanent posture – the Lynx became a creature who walks at
night, the Springbok a creature who stands and feeds on bushes. But the
matter did not end there. The Lynx responded, and the Anteater was similarly
cursed to become, like the Lynx, a being that inhabits the night.25
It is in the aftermath of this world-transforming curse – an act of naming
as violent as anything in Genesis – that transformation assumes its modern
dimensions in /Xam mythology. Thus, for example, J.D. Lewis-Williams and
D.G. Pearce describe this structure as characteristic of all contemporary
discourse and art produced by shamans and other descendents of those who
appeared, to Bleek, Lloyd, and so many others, to be on the verge of death:
“A hunted eland may turn out to be the rain. A man can become a lion. A
jackal barking in the night may be a shaman come to see if the people are safe
and well fed […] For the San, transformations like these are part of
everyone’s thinking, if not their experience; they are part of life” (159). The
time after the First-there-Sitting-People, or the Ancient Race, as Bleek and
Lloyd translated the phrase, is one marked by restricted transformation, to use
Canetti’s language. The transformations that follow the end of the First Time
are regularized and even ritualized. This restricted transformability is, as we
have already seen, a quality that he recognizes and takes on in his own
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theorizing, but where he attributes it to the human, the /Xam myths posit it as
a function of a naming that originates with animals-as-persons, and that is
marked by the emergence of distinct identities, but not of a generic distinction
between the animal and the human.
This does not mean that the /Xam make no distinctions, but it is also the
case that the category “animal” translates poorly in /Xam. The “absent”
binarity between the animal and the human in /Xam has, to the extent it has
been recognized at all, generally been interpreted by linguists and
anthropologists as evidence that /Xam language is poor in abstraction.
“Terms for abstract ideas are rare” in the vocabularies of the Khoisan
languages, wrote Isaac Schapera, the great student of Radcliffe-Brown and
anthropologist of southern Africa. “But in terms dealing with veld lore, wild
animals, and birds, trees, herbs, and roots, the chase, all the wealth of
description which that entails, the languages are remarkably rich.”26 In the
monumental dictionary that Lucy Lloyd assembled under the tutelage of her
brother-in-law, and on which basis all subsequent studies of /Xam language
are based, there is no single term that denotes what, in European languages, is
called “the animal.” There are words that cover the concept of “game
animal,” namely that which can be hunted and eaten, but no categorical noun
that would include those creatures that are not hunted along with those that
are, and nothing against which the human can draw its own boundaries, and
constitute itself “as such.” This is interestingly revealed in the English index
to Lloyd’s dictionary, where the entry for “Animal” is followed by a list of
/Xam terms that includes: “!kaŋ ‡ha” (“a small wild animal which eats mice),
“‡kam Іge” (“wild animal” or “game”), and “Θpwo:” (game?).27 None of
these can be said to perfectly translate the English word for animal.
Moreover, the entries for individual species, such as ants or anteaters, lizards
or lions, are provided with contrastingly numerous /Xam terms.
It would be tempting to assume a corollary to this proliferation of
specific terms attaching to single species and the apparent absence of a single
category in which to encompass them all, namely that the /Xam do not
therefore also have a single category for humans. But they do, although this
term is itself incommensurable with “the human,” in the Western postCartesian sense. As already suggested, the /Xam term is not defined by the
absolute binarity in which the human and the animal, written in the singular,
are counterposed. Lloyd’s dictionary identifies the term “!e” (or “!ε”) as the
plural designating men or people. What Specimens of Bushman Folklore
makes clear, however, is that this term also encompasses animals, or at least
animals who “formerly were persons.” It is perhaps not surprising in this
context that that there is no recording of the term with which the /Xam
denoted themselves as such. Just as “!e” is the plural of person in /Xam,
Khoekhoen is the plural of “khoe,” meaning humans or people, but /Xam is
actually a Khoekhoen word meaning, quite simply, “cattleless.” It is a
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negative designation, a name given by others, to remark an otherness in
which the /Xam seem relentlessly to have been shrouded – an otherness that
finds itself most poignantly articulated in the repeated insistence on their
having already died. They are the people, it seems, who have been known
only in relation to death. No doubt this is why, in Canetti’s mind, they are the
quintessential other of the survivor. He continued to write of them for years:
“After more than twenty-five years I am still an apprentice of the bushmen.
More than I can learn from them, I don’t want to know. But I have not come
very far in my knowledge of them, for atom bombs and moon voyagers
disturb me and constantly interrupt my study” (Notes from Hampstead 24).
Canetti’s distractions by modern technologies of death notwithstanding, he
seems to have attributed to /Xam people an unlimited aspiration to
transformation, one unmitigated by the incipient forces of tyranny that would
finally condense themselves in the form of the totalitarian state. However,
one should recognize that the /Xam of Bleek’s time also identified their
neighbors in terms of their alterity – an alterity that seems to have been
relatively immune to transcendence. //kabbo’s account of his journey to the
Cape, where he was to be incarcerated for livestock theft (a common crime
born of hunger among the marginalized /Xam), is a poignant and pathos-filled
testimony to the fraught relationships between the Xam and their Bantuspeaking neighbors, as both were being encompassed by European
colonialism. “I have said to thee that the train [fire wagon] is nice,” //kabbo
told his eager amanuensis. “I sat nicely in the train. We two sat in [it], we [I]
and a black man.” The account continues and includes a story of //kabbo’s
near falling from the train, as well as his rescue by a woman. It also includes,
as is common in /Xam narrative (which abounds in repetition), another
account of the black man. It is, of course, told to a white man: “I sat beside a
black man; his face was black; his mouth [was] also black; for they are all
black.” The two speak to each other, the black man asking //kabbo where he
comes from, and //kabbo responding – though we do not know in what
language they communicated; in the 1870s it was probably the emergent local
Dutch creole, Afrikaans.28 Speaking thus to each other, inquiring after a lost
and longed-for home, //kabbo nonetheless reflects on the identity of his
traveling companion with a certain retrospective derision: “White men are
those whose faces are red, for they are handsome. The black man he is ugly,
thus his mouth is black, for his face is black” (Specimens 299).
It is important to bear in mind the context of this exchange, //kabbo
having been released from the prison into the “care” of the Bleeks for the
purposes of facilitating the great linguist’s researches. At the time, there was
a widespread belief among European scholars that the /Xam and Khoekhoen
were racially distinct from the Bantu-speaking blacks of sub-Saharan Africa,
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and moreover, that they were both purer on account of their proximity to
human origins (compared to the putatively degenerated darker races), and
more directly related in language to the Egyptians and other speakers of what
were called “Hamitic” languages. The relative interest in and valorization of
these cultures, which Bleek took to an extreme, also manifested itself in the
effusive admiration for their narrative accomplishments. In 1863, in the
preface to a translation of “Hottentot” materials in the library of the governor,
Sir George Grey (the largest such collection in the world at the time), Bleek
wrote, “The great ethnological difference between the Hottentots and the
black nations of South Africa has been a marked fact from almost the earliest
acquaintance of the Europeans with these parts, and occasional stray guesses
[…] have already for some time pointed to a North African origin for the
Hottentots” (Preface xiv). In this case, Bleek was treating the Hottentot and
Bushman traditions as closely related and nearly identical, by virtue of their
difference from the Bantu tradition (despite the differences in language
structure, and the presence or absence of sexing). In the violent comparison
with the latter, he not only thought the literature of the Hottentots to be
important because it exceeded what had been imagined by Europeans to be
the intellectual incapacity of these people, but he also remarked its superiority
to anything produced by the “Negro nations” and went so far as to suggest
that it had “been employed almost in the same direction as that which has
been taken by our own earliest literature” (xiii).
The point here is not to reproduce this discourse and its assumptions –
which were among the more enlightened of their time, however racist they
must now appear – but to make clear that //kabbo, speaking in 1871, was
already well aware of the world into which his words would enter. He
grasped fully the hierarchy of power that had both removed him from his
home and suspended him in the dubious category of informant. His arrest had
come in the wake of the Korana war of 1868-69, on the northern frontier,
where the Korana had developed a long-standing tradition of cattle raiding
into a form of resistance to European settlement. They had received support
from /Xam in this endeavor, who often also took livestock for food, and it
was for such theft that //kabbo had been arrested, by a black man in the
service of the colonial regime (Deacon 19). For these reasons, contemporary
historians rightly question the fantasy of authenticity that infused Bleek and
Lloyd’s project. Yet, one need not reject their texts as the mutually contrived
hallucination of Europe’s other. The narratives told by the /Xam and recorded
by the German linguists remain an incomparable document of resistance, for
in them is the trace of an imaginative world in relation to which even the
most ambitious anthropologist must admit a lack of mastery. To read them is
to confront much that remains enigmatic, as well as much that is fabulously
familiar. And in the asides, the acknowledgments of forgetting, and the
simple invocations of vanished elders who knew more, the texts testify to
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something that escaped the traces of both memory and the unconscious in
living persons.
//kabbo longed to return home, not least because he felt that, at the Bleek
residence, he did only women’s work, keeping house and working to the
point of exhaustion when what he desired was a man’s task and pleasure of
listening to stories, conveying that which is learned on journeys, examining
the homes and the natural environment of the places where he would visit
others to hear their tales, repairing his hut (Specimens 299-317). But of
course, the world of home was being radically altered by the new land politics
of a still-expanding colony. In this milieu, a complex dependency between
Bleek and //kabbo was mediated as well by the knowledge, conceded by
//kabbo, that prison life on Robben Island was still worse. Though it was a
kind of imprisonment, and though it entailed the double ignominy of doing
women’s work and being transformed into an object and not merely a bearer
of knowledge, Bleek’s home did offer a chance to tell stories and to escape
the brutal labor of the lime-works in the pleasures of talk – however
diminished in form from the raconteur’s practice that defined everyday life in
the Bitterpits (//kabbo’s place) before his arrest. The mutual estrangement
that is written into //kabbo’s account of his arrest by a black man is not, thus,
transparent evidence of a primordial tribalism. Nor does it testify exclusively
to the historical specificity of that kind of solidarity which can, today, be
advocated by Mbeki and disavowed by xenophobes. It is inseparable from the
history of colonialism, from the encompassment of one set of differences by a
another structure of opposition. Let us note the distinction here between
difference and opposition. The slippage between these two is precisely the
slippage on which xenophobia is erected. As Michael Neocosmos reminds us,
it is a slippage encouraged by the state. And, of course, the state’s discourse
is one embedded in larger philosophical traditions. Accordingly, it is the
history of the transformation of difference into opposition, and of otherness
into Africanity and animality, that we need now to consider.
“Once men had succeeded in collecting large numbers of slaves, as they
collected animals in their herds, the foundations for the tyranny of the state
were laid” (Crowds 384). So writes Elias Canetti. It is, of course, well known
that the arrival at the southern tip of the African continent, like the arrival
elsewhere on the continent of Africa by European traders, also inaugurated
the era of transcontinental slavery. It is also well known that the putative end
of slavery, in South Africa as elsewhere, was often merely supplanted by
slavery by a different name, in the form of indentured labor. Not only were
those who obtained their freedom after abolition and emancipation forcibly
entered into apprenticeships that often withheld from them the rights that
legislative reforms were supposed to guarantee, but their new status lacked
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even the protections of the office established for that purpose under an earlier
dispensation, namely the Protector of Slaves (Christiansë). For several
decades more, destitute individuals who were encountered by colonial forces
on the frontiers of the expanding South African state were simply captured
and “distributed as servants” to the colonists (Deacon 19). This was the fate
of many of the /Xam as well as Korana and Griqua in the area north of the
Orange River after 1879, the area to which many of Bleek’s and Lloyd’s
informants returned (Deacon 23).
By the time the /Xam were collaborating with the Korana (Khoekhoen
people, as were the Griqua), they had already overcome an earlier
antagonism.29 The autodidactic historian of South Africa, George McCall
Theal wrote in his introduction to Bleek’s and Lloyd’s book that “every
man’s hand was against [the Bushmen]” and that “By the Hottentots and the
Bantu the Bushmen were regarded simply as noxious animals […] destroyed
with as little mercy as if they had been hyenas” (xxxi, xxix). In Theal’s
analysis, the early settler colonialists soon adopted the sentiments of the
Khoekhoen and Bantu, and treated the /Xam as people “without a right to the
soil over which they roam, as untamable robbers whom it was not only their
interest but their duty to destroy” (xxxi). It is not possible to trace here the
process by which the shared sufferings of the various indigenes of South
Africa became the basis of new solidarities, ones that could encompass the
formerly opposed /Xam and the Khoekhoen. But we can recognize it in the
story of //kabbo, arrested among those who had aided the Korana in cattleraiding. The long history of the forging of new if fragile alliances among
these two groups and the Bantu-speakers – especially Xhosa and Zulu
speakers – stretches between the moment narrated in the account of //kabbo’s
train ride and the speech that Thabo Mbeki delivered at the promulgation of a
new constitution premised on the assumption of equality, and phrased in the
idiom of Africanity. Its emergence is the improbable achievement of an anticolonial resistance that, for the better part of a century, made the
transcendence of difference the cornerstone of liberationist discourse.30 If
apartheid, and its predecessor state forms were organized around the
systematic cultivation of difference (through the adumbration of minutely
calibrated racial categories), the formal policy of the African National
Congress worked on the basis of non-racialism. Though challenged by the
Black Consciousness movement in the 70’s, it was this policy that informed
the new constitution, over whose joyous birth the then Deputy President
asserted his Africanity. But what does it mean to be an African, to lay claim
to a position which, for four or five hundred years, has been inseparable from
the transformation of humanity into animality under the sign of slavery?
What does it mean to claim both Africanity and the modernity which
constituted itself by rendering Africa as its other? Can modernist discourse
accommodate a conception of humanity that is not premised upon the
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oppositional structure by which the human and the animal are pitted one
against the other?
Historians of the modern must confront the fact that the expansion of the
category of the human in the discourse of human rights, such that it
encompasses the long-excluded bearers of blackness, has been accompanied
by the radical questioning of the limits of the human. Why? What is the
relationship between the extension of rights to black Africans and the
questioning of human privilege? Does the final repudiation of white privilege
necessarily entail the abandonment of rights as the exclusive entitlement of
the human? How shall we answer this question without reducing the
philosophical interrogation of Enlightenment discourse to a mere reaction
formation? The terrain is fraught, but no less urgently broached as a result.
Let us then turn from the /Xam and the hyper-invested (by Canetti) possibility
of a counter-discourse on the relationship between animals and humans. Let
us turn to a certain convergence between the otherwise very different writings
of Canetti and Derrida, and place them alongside those of the South African
writer who, more than anyone else, has articulated a critique of that modernist
opposition between the human and the animal on which basis the
enslavement of Africans occurred, as much as did the industrialization of
killing in the interest of human increase.
Here, then, are three texts: one from Canetti, one from Coetzee, and one
from Derrida. The first, by Canetti, appears in a chapter entitled “The Arrival
of Animals,” in the memoir of his childhood called The Tongue Set Free.
Canetti is recalling, from the vantage of one who has witnessed the death
camps of Nazism, a field trip organized by his most revered teacher. The trip
to a slaughterhouse is preceded by numerous careful discussions in which the
teacher, a Mr. Fenner, assures the students that the killing of animals is now
(“in contrast to the earlier days”) painless, even “humane.” Thus readied for
his trip to the abattoir, the young Canetti is nonetheless overwhelmed by the
spectacle of a pregnant ewe’s body, opened to reveal the tiny fetus within.
The sight horrifies the young boy and prompts him to utter the word
“Murder.” The teacher appears to understand the young Canetti’s sentiment.
Indeed, he seems to have anticipated it. It is because the war materialized a
perceived affinity between the otherness of animals and of Jews that Mr.
Fenner had taken such pains to prepare the children for their tour of the
abattoir. But the point of the recollection is the recognition that the
knowledge had had no capacity to mitigate the horror or the event, or the pity
it would induce. Indeed, they were correlate with each other.
Writing retrospectively, Canetti is aware of the word murder’s potential
to appear excessive in relation to animal slaughter, for after the Holocaust, the
category of the human has been shored up – in direct proportion, it would
seem, to its violation during the war. “The word came easily over my lips
because of the war,” Canetti recalls (The Tongue 229). This easy vocalization
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of murder is also the mark of an intimacy between language and violence. In
a related entry from 1949, Canetti asks whether “animals have less fear
because they live without words,” and indulges a fantasy about a “rebellion in
a slaughterhouse.” Knowing that such an uprising shall never come to pass,
he remarks, “things we eat daily, they sing like the men in the fire” (Human
115).
As Derrida has shown, the passivity that Canetti attributes to the animal
in a gesture linking the genocide of people with that of animals, is a quality
which owes itself to the extraordinary intervention of Jeremy Bentham, that
great technologist of gentle punishment. “‘Can they suffer?’ asks Bentham,
simply yet so profoundly.” Derrida repeats the question. He does so after
asserting that the period inaugurated by Bentham’s question has been
organized by two developments: the “unprecedented […] subjection of the
animal,” and the emergence of pathos as the primary structure of war between
those who kill animals without pity and those who defend such pity
(L’Animal 27-29). Derrida’s delineation of this double development is
preceded by a self-conscious restaging of Canetti’s analogy: “One should
neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained
away.” He continues with an additional “complication.” Traditional forms of
treatment of the animal have been transformed by “the joint developments of
zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic forms of knowledge, which
remain inseparable from the techniques of intervention into their object […]
namely the living animal.” The industrialization of production for
consumption, which he observes at the base of modern relations to “the
animal,” leads Derrida to contemplate through reversal the familiar metaphor
by which animals and Nazi victims were conceived in terms of each other:
“As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas
chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the
overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by
means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous
and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the
same hell” (L’Animal 25-26).
Derrida’s text also marks the difference between the genocide of the
Nazis and that of the industrial food industry as being governed by a practice
of dissimulation, one that produces death precisely by appearing to invest in
life, or at least continued existence. This investment is inseparable, Derrida
tells us (just as the young Canetti intuited), from a certain ambition to render
the killing of animals “humane.” So, it is not a matter of those who resist the
discourse of compassion being the sole perpetrators of that violence to which
the animal is especially subject. On the contrary, the discourse of pity binds
pathos with the pathological, and constitutes something like an autoimmunological principle at the heart of the modern. How different is the
killing of /Xam myth – where the killing of animals-as-persons occurs
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without mercy, but within a highly restrictive economy. /Xam myth, we
might agree with Canetti, shows through contrast to what degree the modern
mode of death through investment in life dissimulates the cruelty of its own
murderous machine by infusing it with pity for the dying. The /Xam kill
unapologetically, but openly and within severe limits.
Derrida’s point, of course, is that the two-centuries old process
inaugurated by Bentham’s question is simultaneously a transformation and a
continuation of a discourse that accords to the human the power of naming.
The capacity to suffer is, as Derrida notes, an odd capacity, being marked not
by the power of being able, but of being able not to be able. This becomes the
basis of that war identified by Derrida between the one who kills and the one
who pities. And all on the basis of a difference whose nature and force resides
in language. The animot, a playful word in which Derrida hopes his
(francophone) listeners and readers will hear not only “word” but also
“plurality” (thanks to the homonym that links animals [animaux] and the
neologism animot [pronounced animō]), is untranslatable in English.
Nonetheless, we can remark what the phrase, “the animal-word” indicates:
namely, that it is the word, “animal,” or rather the generalizing abstraction of
the animal from the plurality of what are called animals that makes possible
the naming of the human. And it works by rendering human he who calls
animals “animal.”
Derrida’s response is not to overturn the opposition that, historically, has
oriented all forms of humanism, but to proliferate the limit of the human in a
manner that destabilizes the opposition between humanity and animality. It is
not that there is no difference between animals and humans, he says, but
rather that the differences are many, indeterminate, shifting; in their
multiplicity they reveal the limit of the human to be abyssal. It is, Derrrida
says, the drawing of a singular limit in the effort to immunize the human
against that to which animals are subject by humans that becomes the source
of toxicity, or auto-immunity: a self-protectivenesss that cannot not be selfdestructive. By this gesture of opposing (figured and reiterated in the
evolutionary biologist’s preferred metonym for humanity, namely the
opposable thumb), the humans who are heir to the Western humanist tradition
perform the most invidious violence. Indeed, Derrida suggests, it is this very
gesture that enables the industrialization of killing, the massive, organized
slaughter-houses wherein the impeccably efficient and putatively painless
deaths of animals – animals raised only to die to serve humans – are
manufactured.
It cannot escape the notice of anyone who reads literature from South Africa
that the arguments developed by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am,
based on the 1997 conference at Cerisy, are structured by a set of questions
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that run directly parallel to those posed in the extraordinary works of South
African novelist J.M. Coetzee, and especially in The Lives of Animals and
Elizabeth Costello. In the former, where readers first encounter the story of
Elizabeth Costello, a fictional novelist delivering lectures on the question of
animals at the invitation of a somewhat more punctilious animal rights
philosopher named Peter Singer, there is staged that war of which Derrida
writes – between the advocates of pity and their opponents. Elizabeth
Costello commences her lecture with a passing reference to Kafka, but she
truly embraces her subject with a discourse upon the possible linkage
between Nazi death camps and industrialized slaughter. She commences by
citing the same metaphor-turned-cliché at the heart of Derrida’s meditation:
“They went like sheep to the slaughter.” “They died like animals.”
“The Nazi butchers killed them.” Denunciation of the camps
reverberates so fully with the language of the stock-yard and
slaughterhouse that it is barely necessary for me to prepare the
ground for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the
Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like
animals […] (Lives 20)31
After reflecting upon an afternoon drive in which she saw no “drug-testing
laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs,” Elizabeth Costello remarks, “Yet
I am sure they are here.” She knows that the visual absence of cruelty is the
structure in which it is produced. And so she continues,
“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of
degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third
Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise
without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry,
livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”
(Lives 21, Elizabeth 65)
Elizabeth Costello self-consciously resists the “Western discourse of man
versus beast, of reason versus unreason.” In making her case she has
occasion to impugn Kant for failing to pursue his own insight and to chastise
Descartes for a failure of imagination. Reason, she says, contra Kant, is not
the being of the universe or of God, but merely “one tendency in human
thought” (Lives 23, Elizabeth 67). Descartes is rebuked for his conception of
the animal as machine rather than embodied soul (Lives 33, Elizabeth 78;
Derrida too interrogates the animal-machine metaphor). And she then
explains that what permits both the Nazi slaughter of humans and the more
generalized Western slaughter of animals is the incapacity for sympathy, that
which would allow people to “share the beings of another” (Lives 34,
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Elizabeth 79). In a passage that cannot but recall the Bleek and Lloyd
collection of /Xam myths, Coetzee has Elizabeth Costello assert that “There
are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” Fiction, like shamanism
perhaps, is the writing of an imagination by which one thinks oneself into the
existence of another. But sympathy is not pity, she might have reminded her
readers. Pity condescends from one side of a categorical divide; sympathy
endeavors to cross it.
There are detractors to Costello, of course. Coetzee leaves his readers
uncertain as to the author’s own position on her discourse, and he offers
characters who reiterate most of the major trends within Western philosophy.
Within the novel, an audience member and dinner companion insists that
animals lack shame (Lives 40, Elizabeth 85). A poet accuses Elizabeth of
adducing a false reversibility between the terms of an analogy; that Jews are
treated like cattle, he says, does not men cattle are treated like Jews (Lives 50,
Elizabeth 94). A philosopher by the name of Thomas O’Hearne (stand-in for
Heidegger) insists on the categorical distinction between humans and animals
on the grounds that animals do not die in the sense of being conscious of their
impending death as the threat of absolute annihilation (Lives 64, Elizabeth
109).32 Each of these arguments is refuted by Costello, whose insistent
rejection of post-Enlightenment pieties not only mirrors but seems to follow
the structure of Derrida’s argumentation in The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Even so, Coetzee’s novel seems, in many ways, to perform that pretense
at pretense which constitutes the essence of the lie and hence of the human
for Lacan – in a formula with which Derrida takes umbrage; it pretends to be
a philosophical treatise or at least a series of lectures, knowing that it will be
treated as a novel which is trying to dissimulate itself as non-fiction, all the
while being a treatise or series of lectures (and hence, non-fiction?).
Nonetheless, the overt discourse on animals and the question of right also has
a parallel that can be traced in the more conventional novels. Their
accumulating narrative is sutured together in The Lives of Animals in a
moment that, not coincidentally, also brings Coetzee closest to Canetti. In a
conversation with her son, Elizabeth Costello remarks that animals are treated
less like things than prisoners of war, and that (here she cites Aristotle), war
and hunting are the same thing. In the era of absolute victory, compassion
becomes possible but it does not ultimately negate the “more primitive” sense
of complete possession and moral immunity vis-à-vis the stranger, the other
who is now prisoner. When, in response to this disquisition, her son reminds
her that prisoners of war are less often killed than treated as slaves, the author
Costello responds, “Well, that’s what our captive herds are: slave
populations. Their work is to breed for us. Even their sex becomes a form of
labor” (Lives 59, Elizabeth 104).
Slavery, the origin of tyranny, the first real transformation of humans
into animals: such was Canetti’s thought. In Coetzee’s writings, humane
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slaughter transforms animals into slaves. It is important, in this context, to
note the careful differentiation between that kind of violence which generates
slavery, and that which constitutes mere subjugation in the work of Coetzee.
In the Booker-prize winning novel, Disgrace, which charted the paranoid
space of the first transition from white rule, a white woman raped by three
black men on the piece of land that she refuses to call a farm, is confronted by
her father. He is angered at her apparent submission to the events, and her
decision, moreover, to bear the child which results from the rape. When he
says that “They want you for their slave,” she responds in the negative, “Not
slavery. Subjection. Subjugation” (159).
Perhaps the fact of not becoming a slave is a function of not being treated
as an animal. The narrative of Disgrace stages the relationship between men
and animals as one of identification and misrecognition – conducted in the
space where naming might have occurred. The violent double bind of such
naming is fully and painfully disclosed. The white characters find it difficult
to not analogize the black men with wild dogs, and in their vengeful assault
on the white woman, the black men own this characterization, taunting their
victim thus: “Call your dogs! No dogs? Then let us show you dogs” (160).
But, and the point cannot be passed over, this showing is not a naming, nor a
response to being named. It is the refusal of a gesture, naming, which, by
virtue of the metaphoric linkage between animal and black man, is less an
interpellation than a name-calling; a hailing that obstructs rather than solicits
response or any possibility for responsible relation. One can say that in
inhabiting the violent linkage between blackness and animality, they disclose
the violence of that naming which granted white humans domain. But there is
a more immediately South African set of referents to this narrative as well.
In Coetzee’s novel, the awful enactment of a colonial script foretold is
itself written into the account of the book’s unreliable narrator, David Lurie,
and that of his daughter, both of whom recognize two distinct modes of
relating to animals. One of these, what the characters refer to as the African
mode, confronts the imbrications and responsibility of humans in the killing
of animals. The other, which generates both abattoirs and humane societies
oriented around the gentle elimination of unwanted creatures, bears the stamp
of European cultural history. At a feast to be offered by Petrus, one of Lucy’s
assailants, David Lurie expresses suspicion of the fact that Petrus is “bringing
the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to
eat them” (124). Lucy rebuffs his squeamishness by asking him, “What
would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir, so that you
needn’t think about it?” “Wake up,” she commands him, “this is Africa.”
David Lurie’s psychic transformations in the course of the novel move
him between the competing poles of a European tradition. Early on, in a
conversation with the daughter whose friend, Bev, operates a kennel, David
Lurie insists on the difference between animals and humans and argues that
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kindness to animals should not be premised on a misrecognition of any
identity between the two. He urges her, “As for animals, let us be kind to
them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation”
(74). In the aftermath of his daughter’s violation, however, Lurie takes up the
task of caring for the animals over whose gently hygienic deaths Bev
presides. At the end of the novel, he “has learned […] to concentrate all his
attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has
difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (219). Here, what stands in the
place of the proper name, which is precisely not what the naming of animals
generates, refers only to a relation between others – though not any or all
others.
One cannot help but note here a certain resonance with the passage from
Lacan’s Écrits cited by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am. It is the
passage in which Lacan explains the constitutive lack of the human subject as
originating in the incapacity to prove one’s own existence. “For I can only
just prove the Other that he exists, not, of course with the proofs for the
existence of God, with which over the centuries he has been killed off, but by
loving him, a solution introduced by the Christian kerygma” (317).33 David
Lurie has come to love that other with which he cannot identify – an other
whose otherness must take the form of either animality or death, or both. It
enables him to kill this other, of course. But this facilitating of what we call,
so revealingly, a humane death should not blind us to the other fact of David
Lurie’s transformation. Namely, that he does not learn to love the black man,
as her daughter says she will. Moreover, the novel cannot be separated from
the antecedent text in which the structure of care for those whom one wounds
or kills first appears. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate, a narrator
as unreliable as is David Lurie, chooses a lame woman from among the
prisoners taken by the Colonel over whom he presides. Her broken ankles and
scarred face, her pitiable condition and her vulnerability to the soldiers who
prey upon her, lead the colonel to invite her into his quarters where, over a
period of days and weeks, he tends her wounds, bathes her, and guiltily
seduces her. One is struck by the physical parallel between the Magistrate’s
choice of a woman with broken ankles, and David Lurie’s favored dog,
whose crippled hind legs do not support him. And one could say much about
the precise structural parallels that bind these novels, as well as the departures
that Disgrace makes from Waiting for the Barbarians on the question of
Africanity. But above all, it is necessary to observe that, somewhere along the
trajectory that stretches between Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980 and
Disgrace, the latter published in the same year as The Lives of Animals, the
object of care has changed. Animals have replaced the colonized as the
beings on whom the burden of alterity falls, and whose receipt of
benevolence is demanded as the corollary and the compensation for
subjugation. But if the conclusion of Disgrace can be retrojected into the
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earlier works, the benevolence offered to the barbarians, like that given to
animals (but not that which defines the vindictive violence of Petrus’
sublimated anticolonialism), would be the gesture accompanying slavery, and
not merely subjugation. In this sense, slavery means both the treatment of
humans like animals, as Canetti and Coetzee would agree, but also, as
Derrida and Elizabeth Costello insist, the regimentation of death through the
investment in hygiene and continuity, legitimated on the basis of pity.
At the end of Crowds and Power, Canetti remarks on the “utter
helplessness” of the religions of lament, and especially Christianity, but also
Buddhism. The figure of the suffering man, the “dying man and the man who
ought not to die,” has been killed off, as Lacan would say. All that is left is
the image of suffering as that with which every wounded being can identify.
In the aftermath of his de-transcendentalization, the figure of Jesus becomes
the figure of the individual who ought not have been destroyed but who
nonetheless is. Accordingly, Canetti says the religions of lament “give their
blessings to whatever happens” (Crowds 467). Coetzee echoes this sentiment
but gives it a specifically South African cast and inflects it with the critique of
colonialism when he has Elizabeth Costello visit her sister, a nun who works
in KwaZulu Natal. Elizabeth finds the Christian concern with Christ’s body
morbid and attributes it to the Catholics, but Blanche, or Sister Bridget as she
is now called, reminds her that it was the Reformation and not the Catholic
tradition that made the dead Jesus its fetish. And she condemns the young
men from Oxford and Cambridge who, in an earlier moment of
Enlightenment missionary zeal, had promised the Zulus the deification of
science.
Those young fellows from Oxford and Cambridge and St. Cyr
offered their new barbarian subjects a false ideal. Throw away your
idols, they said. You can be as gods […] Come to our schools, they
said, and we will teach how. We will make you disciples of reason
and the sciences that flow from reason; we will make you masters of
nature. Through us you will overcome disease and all corruption of
the flesh. You will live forever. (Elizabeth 141, emphasis in original)
Blanche or Sister Elizabeth laughs at the absurdity of this promise, and lauds
the Zulus who “knew better.” But when Elizabeth asks if she is certain that
they do not attend church because of the promise of a better afterlife, Blanche
insists, “I promise nothing except that we will help them bear their cross”
(141).
If I understand Derrida’s project in the Animal That Therefore I Am, it is
precisely to reject the otherwise tempting reading of such a dialogue as being
structured by mutual exclusion and binary opposition. There is a relationship,
he argues, between reason and pity, between the development of a rational
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order of killing and the form of pity that abandons itself to the provision of
care for those whose wounds are the effect of its own machinery. One cannot
extricate oneself from either without enormous, as yet unforeseen
consequences, and one cannot simply embrace the alternative either. There is
a structure of the double bind here; reason and kindness are both the
opportunities and the liabilities of an Enlightenment project whose
consequences remain, as Canetti says of Christianity, “inexhaustible.”
One wonders why there is so little mention in the fractious dialogue between
Elizabeth and Blanche of sacrifice. Would not sacrifice provide the idiom for
differentiating a killing that exceeds instrumentality, that is not merely part of
the subjection of animal life to the demands of human increase? Might
sacrifice not provide a name for that killing which is immune to pity?
Certainly, the anthropological discourse that is otherwise so frequently
invoked by Coetzee is redolent with the language of sacrifice. Indeed, it
makes the practice of sacrifice (that act both apotheosized and ostensibly
terminated in the Christian crucifixion) a definitive if not exclusive attribute
of Africanity. And if Coetzee shies from the topic (except in the muted
reference to Petrus’ slaughter), it is a searing issue in contemporary South
Africa, and one around which the question of human and cultural rights is
staged in competition to that of animal rights, and made the ground of various
claims to Africanity.
Thus, for example, in January 2007, Tony Yengeni, the former Chief
Whip of the African National Congress, was released from prison, where he
had served five months of a four year sentence for fraud in a case linked to
corruption investigations of Jacob Zuma, then president of the ANC. Upon
emerging from prison, Yengeni and his family held a public celebration and
cleansing rite at which they slaughtered a bull and two sheep, with Yengeni
commencing the process by stabbing the bull with his family’s spear. This
rite, performed in the name of tradition and staged in the eminently modern
space of a Cape Town suburb, elicited a fury of media attention, and
competing claims as to the propriety of the gesture, its possible cruelty and its
amenability to prosecution. The South African Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to animals was initially said to be considering legal action on the
grounds that the slaughter contravened the Animal Protection Act. After
intervention on the part of the South African Human Rights Commission, the
SPCA determined that the circumstances surrounding the slaughter, when
considered in relation to the demands of culture, did not constitute cruelty.
The Department of Arts and Culture added its voice to the Yengeni defense
when its spokesperson, Sandile Memeni, not only asserted the Department’s
intention to stand by Yengeni’s “search for meaning, purpose and the
redefinition of the relationship with the cosmos, God and his ancestry,” but
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noted the hypocrisy of critics who did not also impugn Christian, Muslim or
Jewish traditions of sacrifice. He concluded that “there is no universal
standard to look at this matter.” The provincial secretary of the ANC added
the following remarks, “We African people will practice our culture and no
one under the sun will ever stop us. This is part of our being human.” We can
observe that sacrifice and Africanity have been fused in the ANC secretary’s
defense – but only on the horizon of rights. To be African, and to honor the
obligations of sacrifice, is a right because such sacrificial acts are constitutive
of African humanity.
Events like the Yengeni family slaughter occur weekly in the suburbs of
South African cities, and invariably generate a comparable discourse of
accusation and counter-accusation. More often than not, critics are white,
while defenders of the practice are black. And many of the arguments against
such killing are made on hygienic grounds. Some critics have even advocated
the establishment of ritual abattoirs, so as to keep the killing out of sight, but
this has been rejected on the culturalist grounds that “the blood has to spill in
the home, where the ancestors dwell, and a family elder must announce the
occasion to the ancestors on behalf of the family. The blood is symbolic
because it is the giver of life.” Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello would probably
have a slightly different response, one that does not root itself in the defense
of other traditions so much as it registers the complicity of the concealment
with the killing. One might even imagine that she would oppose the secreting
of such killing on the grounds that it would constitute the final subjugation of
local tradition to the violence of the Enlightenment. But perhaps the naming
of such tradition as African already expresses that encompassment. To be
African is, inevitably, to be African for others.
Let us accept (at least for a moment) the assertion made by those who
claim to be Africans, and those who do not, that the form of one’s humanity
is expressed in the manner of treating animals. Let us, for a moment, accept
the notion that, historically, those who inhabited what is now called South
Africa did conceive of all animals merely as the means to their own relative
increase. This does not mean that some of them (Khoekhoen and Bantuspeakers) did not cultivate their animals, that they did not breed and select
from among the fittest and hence, that they did not subject their animals to
their own interests and kill them. But, and here Derrida offers an
unprecedented intervention with his reading of Bentham, they did not ground
their modes of death-dealing in pity, or make this mode of killing a sign of
the humane. The opponents of the Yengeni slaughter emphasized the fact that
the animals cried out, and that, as such, they demonstrated their discomfort
and pain, even fear. The defenders of it asserted the necessity of a
communication between the dying and the dead; the animal’s death cry
disclosed a certain suffering to be sure, but more importantly, it made visible
to the ancestors the fact of the sacrifice, and hence of the fidelity of their
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heirs. Thus, though both sides agreed that the animal suffered, the terms by
which this suffering became a ground for the claim on humanity were utterly
and ineradicably opposed. Between them, the idea of rights promised a means
of commensuration and adjudication, but it failed as a method of translation.
Here, then, in a theater of contemporary history, was enacted a drama from
the pages of Coetzee’s fiction, not as a white fantasy of African rapacity
submitted to by guilty liberals, but as a contest between the demands of a
culture that kills out of condescension and pity dissimulated as necessity, and
one that kills within a relatively closed circuit of debt and obligation,
sometimes economized as vengeance.34
It may be helpful to recall here that, prior to his arrest and then release
from prison, before his scandalous assertion of Africanity, Tony Yengeni had
been a stalwart of the modernist, anti-racialist ANC, having joined it during
the heady days of 1976 when student protests culminated in the Soweto
massacre. He had been a friend of national hero Chris Hani and a member of
the armed wing of the ANC called Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). While in
prison on “terrorism” charges for his leadership of the MK in Cape Town, he
was tortured by Jeffrey Benzien. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), Tony Yengeni and Jeffrey Benzien re-enacted the torture, in which
Yengeni’s head was placed in a wet bag and he was ridden “like an animal,”
and threatened with death. In the hearings, Yengeni famously asked, “What
kind of man are you…I mean the man behind the wet bag?” And Benzien
responded, “I ask myself the same question.”35
These lines comprise the epigram for Ingrid de Kok’s extraordinary
poem, “What kind of man,” part of a series of poems written in response to
the TRC and first published in Terrestrial Things. “What kind of man mounts
another/ in deadly erotic mimicry, then puts a wet bag over his head/ to
suffocate him for ‘the truth’? [...] We have no other measure but body as lie
detector.”36 It is as if the poem aims to distill the long cruel legacy of
Enlightenment thought, in which the human is marked by the capacity for
deceit, and in which the reduction to animality is the only means of effacing
the doubt that afflicts one in the face of another who cannot be fully known.
Elias Canetti recognized that San thought contained within itself one
alternative to this philosophical tendency, but conceded that he had not yet
learned enough from it to know how not to inhabit his own genealogy. And,
in his constant return to a conception of humanity as being marked by both
language and the capacity for deceit, he reproduced it. “Man [is] the animal
that notes what it murders” (Human 224), he wrote, having already
recognized the scandal of refusing humans the exclusive benefit of a
commandment against killing and having termed the killing of animals
murder.
One way to understand Benzien’s torture is to recognize that it sought
not information but speechlessness, which is what is implied by the term,
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203
trauma. The information that Yengeni might have relinquished would have
come in the moment that he began to recover from the terror of death – in
order to evade it. But within a philosophical system that accords humans the
exclusive capacity for language, rendering other beings speechless is
tantamount to treating them as animals. At that point, they will not be able to
deceive or to dissimulate, and hence to evade the power of the torturer.
Benzien was torturing Yengeni as an African (as categorized by the apartheid
regime), as a member of the African National Congress, and as a person
opposed to the withholding of human rights to Africans. Benzien’s torture
literalized the logic by which animals and Africans are transformed one into
the other (as occurred in slavery) – not as among the San, where such
transformation is conditioned by the personhood of both, but in a manner that
withholds subjectivity from either. Speechlessness, or muteness, is not, one
must insist, silence – is not a withholding of words that might otherwise have
been exchanged. What I have written, very cursorily, under the shorthand of
“name-calling rather than naming” must stand as a placeholder for the kind of
non-relation, the un-responsible (rather than irresponsible) effect of a gesture
that performs categorical violence. In the case of Benzien, this practice also
earned for him the moniker of animal. One of his other torture victims
remarked that, despite a capacity for charm and civility, “he can change […]
behave like an animal.”
We are reminded here of the victims of “xenophobic” violence who said
of their attackers, “They are animals. They treat us like animals.” In this
reversibility, this non-identificatory circuit of mutually mimetic accusations,
there is condensed the history not of humanity, perhaps, but of a certain
Enlightenment humanism – which now counts (South) Africa as another
place of residence. In the museums and speeches that invoke the cultural
death of the /Xam, and in the persisting memory harbored in the otherwise
alienated and transformed languages of //kabbo’s distant relations, however,
there are also traces of something else, namely a way of comprehending the
world that is not premised on the radical opposition between something called
human and something called animal. In these archives of both disavowal and
grief, plumbed by such diverse thinkers as //kabbo and Canetti, Mbeki and
Yengeni, there are traces of this other thought. That these traces have not
been entirely effaced, despite efforts to eliminate them, suggests something
about the nature of signification – an open process that “has” us as much as
we “have” it. Perhaps the wind will ultimately take them. In the meantime,
they give to be thought the possibility of being otherwise.
NOTES
1
In necklacing, a person’s head is doused with alcohol, a tire is placed around their
necks and then they are set alight.
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2
Basson 6. The Mail and Guardian derives its figures from an internal report written
by metropolitan police chief Robert McBride.
3
Sefela is a Sotho genre of performance in which singers compose and perform narratives about their experience as migrant laborers moving to and from the mines. Full of
irony and bravado, attesting to the freedom and also the ignominy of work on the
mines, as well as the complex relations with those who remain at home, the genre is
performed by men, though it has a counterpart among women called seoeleoelele. The
sefela referred to here was recorded by Mrs. Mokitimi in 1981, and is reproduced by
David Coplan (131).
4
Thus, for example, in Khutsong, an anti-government coalition that formed to oppose
redistricting, organized anti-xenophobia rallies and enforced its policy of “hospitality”
partly in order to demonstrate its control over an area where the municipal government
had lost much of its authority.
5
Jean and John Comaroff, in particular, have argued that the turn to a politics of indigeneity has emerged in South Africa as modernist forms of political reckoning are
overwhelmed by postmodern ones, with the idea of the rights-bearing individual being
dislodged by that of the native-born person as the ideal of the citizen-subject. They
also argue that the emergence of xenophobia, allegorized in discourses about other
kinds of aliens, such as plants and animals, reflects the contradictions of a neoliberal
emphasis on open borders and free markets, an emphasis implemented by nationstates that nonetheless remain territorially defined and hence concerned with border
maintenance. See “Naturing the Nation” (649). Michael Neocosmos, arguing with and
against the Comaroffs, asserts that xenophobia in South Africa must be understood as
the product of a state discourse in a specifically decolonizing context. Drawing parallels between Fanon’s Algeria and transitional South Africa, he notes that xenophobia
emerges when state discourse permits a slippage to occur between the foreigner-asoppressor/colonizer and the foreigner-as-outsider. He argues (and I would concur) that
such a slippage occurs when a local bourgeoisie, effecting an identity between anticolonial nationalism and decolonization, moves itself into the place of the deposed power without effecting a structural transformation of the relationship between state, society and capital. His example from South Africa is the Black Economic Empowerment initiative, an ANC policy aimed at the creation of black capital, which stands in
the place of more radical programs of redistributive economic justice. (From “Foreign
Native” to “Native Foreigners” 12, 15-18).
6
Yvette Christiansë (personal communication, July 2008) reminds me that Dlamini
himself overlooks the many kinds of informal exile that also took place, and that encompassed individuals who were not official members of the ANC. He perhaps underestimates, as a result, the full extent of hospitality afforded by neighboring states to
South Africans who were fleeing apartheid.
7
In this regard, Neocosmos’s claim (6) that a crude racial stereotypy informs xenophobic violence seems inadequate. No doubt such a stereotype is at play and informs
much police and other violence, but the video I have seen of the 2008 riots clearly
shows that the inspection of papers constituted a switch point, and that the mere appearance of foreignness was not always sufficient to incite violence.
Crowds and Powerlessness
205
8
Isabel Hofmeyr narrates with exceptional acuity the battle to implement a regime of
power based in literacy and the fetish of papers. While she notes the complex struggles between forms of literacy and orality, going so far as to suggest that indigenous
leaders resisted colonialism by “oralizing” the documentary tradition of the colonial
state, she also makes clear that the territorialization of power, and the establishment of
“apartheid” even avant la lettre – through practices of cartographic demarcation and
literal fencing – worked by subjecting everyone to the power of writing and hence,
“papers.”
9
Makoni 25. The Big Issue is a glossy magazine on contemporary issues in South
Africa, produced by an NGO of the same name as part of a skills development program aimed at the promotion of “social responsibility.”
10
At the time of writing, I had not yet read Antjie Krog’s new book, Begging to be
Black, in which she responds to Mbeki’s politically pragmatic and economically
oriented goal of African renaissance with an ethics of self-transformation born of her
reading of South African history and specifically the biography of the Sotho King
Moeshoeshoe. For Krog, influenced by Paul Patton’s reading of Deleuze, becoming
African, or becoming black means abandoning European Enlightenment forms of
identity for a sense of social indebtedness and entailment, in which identity is radically dependent on non-separation from others. A translator of /Xam myth/poetry, her
account is perhaps as influenced by the Bleek and Lloyd collection as by the narrative
of Moeshoeshoe as an alternative to militarist nationalism embodied in Shaka Zulu.
11
“What we feel, warts and all,” in the Mail and Guardian. The paper quotes an attitudes survey produced by FutureFact, an independent research company sponsored by
or subscribed to by corporations in South Africa.
12
The terms Khoi and San are colloquial versions of the more formal “khoekhoen”
and San. The “/Xam” are a subcategory of the San. As ethnonyms, Khoi and San have
replaced the older, colonial designations of Hottentot and Bushman respectively. In
this essay, I use the terms as they are used by the authors who deploy them and according to the conventions of the time. Thus, when citing Mbeki and popular discourse about the khoekhoen and San, I use the terms Khoi and San. When referring to
the writings of Bleek and Lloyd, and those like Canetti who relied on them, I use the
terms Hottentot and Bushman. In all other cases, I defer to the current protocols of
naming established by contemporary indigenous communities, and the anthropologists
who inform their self-representation. Accordingly, khoekhoen and /Xam are the default terms here. Both of the languages are “click” languages, but orthographic practices have changed somewhat since Dorothea Bleek publisher her dictionary of /Xam.
In general, I follow the practice of the writers cited.
13
In fact, Mbeki’s somewhat remote bearing and patrician demeanor and diction are
often invoked by common people as evidence that his Africanity is indeed in doubt,
that he is too influenced by Europe. In any case, he is not always, perhaps even rarely,
deemed “one of the people” in the populist sense. And this fact made him vulnerable
to the populist movement led by Jacob Zuma, which overthrew Mbeki at an ANC
conference in Polokwane, December 2007.
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14
There is a significant debate about whether the Khoekhoen and San people should
be categorized as a single group of people, both originally inhabitants of South Africa,
or if the Khoekhoe should be considered secondary migrants, who brought agriculture
and who remained, until the colonial era, in conflict with the more nomadic San.
There is not space to assess this argument here, nor am I equipped to do so. Nonetheless, readers are asked to bear in mind that the opposition between nomadism and
agropastoralism is an analytic gesture, and that there was constant exchange – sometimes violent – between Khoekhoen and San people despite other, linguistically based
differences.
15
For a full discussion of what it might mean to respond, and not merely react, and for
a critique of the analysis that has presumed the easy opposition between responsive
and responsible humans, and reactive but irresponsible animals, see the discussion in
Derrida’s “And say the animals responded?” in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Also
Spivak.
16
Nqabayo’s Nomansland 16. Blundell provides an excellent overview of the history
of debates surrounding the putative extinction of the San and the possible ways of
accounting for colonization and creolization as well as the interdependence between
San and both Khoekhoen and Bantu-speaking peoples. He notes that the San have,
recently, engaged in a major legal action in which the patenting of indigenous knowledge for the purposes of revenue generation has been protested. Pharmaceutical corporations have been eager to obtain such patents for weight-loss and other health
products, and have often justified their lack of revenue sharing on the grounds that the
San are extinct. The San, it must be noted, vigorously disagree. See especially Nqabayo’s Nomansland 16-28. If archaeologists and anthropologists have revised their
concept of San extinction, to accommodate historical change while acknowledging
linguistic loss, it is nonetheless the case that most popular writers and perhaps most
people believe the San to have vanished. See, for example, Neil Bennun. For a more
scholarly treatment of this same narrative, see Andrew Bank, and Janette Deacon and
Thomas A. Dowson.
17
The spelling of //kabbo’s name appears in two forms in Bleek and Lloyd’s collection, both with and without an accent over the a (á). I have used the unaccented form
as default, as it appears as such on the frontispiece portrait of the great story-teller.
However, when quoting Lloyd’s comments which spell his name as //kábbo, I have
left the spelling as is.
18
This pattern of unmarked citation and textual integration describes most of the Canetti chapter. It is not merely ironic that the /Xam narratives have, since their earliest
inscription, been subject to appropriation and plagiarism. Innumerable translations and
renderings of these narratives have been published by South African and other writers,
more often than not under the name of the translator, with acknowledgment of Bleek
and Lloyd, but rarely of the individual /Xam narrators. A notable exception in this
regard is Antjie Krog, whose volume includes in its very title the names of the narrators whose words the poet re-renders.
19
Many writers have remarked on this trans-species mobility in /Xam thought. Thus,
for example, Mathias Guenther writes, “Ambiguity becomes a palpable state, as ordi-
Crowds and Powerlessness
207
nary reality is suspended through trance, human becomes animal” (70). J.D. LewisWilliams and D.G. Pearce, citing Guenther, summarize the situation thus: “A hunted
eland may turn out to be the rain. A man can become a lion. A jackal barking in the
night may be a shaman come to see if the people are safe and well fed. […] For the
San, transformations like these are part of everyone’s thinking, if not their experience;
they are part of life” (159).
20
/Xam hunting traditionally makes use of small poison arrows. These arrows could
not in themselves fell most game, and certainly not large game as is found in southern
Africa. Hence, the arrows are poisoned and the shooter himself does not pursue the
animal. Rather, members of his community wait until the poison can have achieved its
effect and then follow the animal to its death-scene, where they await its final demise,
then butcher and distribute the meat. Such trackers can generally discern the size, sex,
age and state of health as well as time of passing of an animal from its tracks – by
assessing the depth of the imprint, the destructive effects of wind, the pattern of dew
traces, the presence of more recently deposited seed and dust, and so forth.
21
Derrida’s theorization of the trace was first developed in Of Grammatology but
continued to be refined and extended across the body of his work.
22
For other stories about Mantis, including different versions recorded by Wilhelm
Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, see The Mantis and his Friends: Bushman Folklore.
23
Écrits 305. Cited in Derrida, Animal 129-30.
24
In this story, the anteater’s desire for a girlchild is well known by new Springbok
parents, who always present their newborns as males, regardless of their actual identity. The guilelessness of the abducted child’s mother, her incapacity to pretend that she
has actually borne a male, allows the anteater to identify the object of her desire and
she then steals the infant from its mother’s arms. The mother’s grief makes no impression on the anteater, who simply sends her away, bereft and in despair. Nor does the
mother receive comfort from her own mate, who heaps scorn on the maternal Springbok for her failure to tell the lie that would have protected their offspring.
25
Bennun Chapter 1.
26
Schapera 438. Scharpera uses the term “Khoisan” to refer to the language groups
encompassing both hunter-gatherers and agropastoralists who are now separated out
as Xam/San and Khoekhoen. He uses the now discarded and pejorative term, “Hottentot” to refer to the Khoekhoen. Linguistically speaking, he divides the Bushmen languages into three groups, Southern, Central and Northern, the /Xam being members of
the Southern Group. Many shared lexical units and grammatical structures bind the
languages of Khoekhoen and /Xam, but there are also a number of differences. Most
notable among the latter is the sex-denoting or gendered nature of /Xam and the lack
of such a feature among most Khoekhoen languages (Schapera 419-38).
27
In the English index, “Θpwo” appears, but there is no entry in the main /Xam lexicon under this spelling. There is, however, an entry under the spelling “Θpwai,” with
two alternative spellings, translated as “game.” In all probability this is the term that
208
Rosalind C. Morris
ought to have appeared under the English “animal.” Elsewhere, “Θpwi” and “Θpwe,”
the plural form of “Θpwai,” are translated as “meat.” Lloyd 685.
28
According to J. David Lewis-Williams, the Bleeks initially communicated with their
/Xam informants in a form of Dutch (Afrikaans was already emerging as a distinct
language but is often referred to as Dutch at this time). See 21-25.
29
In an appendix to Specimens of Bushman Folklore (436), in which he recounts his
photographing of Breakwater Convict Station prisoners in Cape Town (1871), Bleek
remarks the case of a young /Xam man who said he had actually been raised by Korana since early childhood. The remark evidences a long and deep intimacy between the
former enemies, one that exceeds the merely instrumental collaborations suggested by
the narratives of cattle-raiding.
30
In this sense the South African project of decolonization differed fundamentally
from the Fanonian project, which was premised not on the transcendence but the repression of difference. In Fanon’s estimation, decolonization entailed the “radical
decision to remove from [the nation] its heterogeneity.” And it would therefore inevitably be confronted with the “question of minorities.” The radical decision, a necessary
corollary but also inversion of the colonial failure to differentiate among those whose
otherness it hypostatized as the basis of domination, was not formally embraced by
South Africa, and despite its possible conjuration by the generic category of the African in Mbeki’s speech, he is also careful to insist on the multiplicity of histories and
identities that are sustained within the category. For Fanon’s analysis of the question
of difference in and for the project of decolonization, see The Wretched of the Earth
(35).
31
This same passage appears, as does much of the book, in Elizabeth Costello (64).
32
Derrida, The Animal 154-55.
33
Cited in Derrida, The Animal 140.
34
One can speak of this structure of debt and obligation in a variety of ways. In South
Africa, it has often been read in the idioms of mutuality, ubuntu, or moral economy
(depending on one’s position). For discussions of these issues, particularly as they
were raised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, see Kwame Gyekye, Martha
Minow, and Richard H. Bell.
35
The South African Press Association release for July 14, 1997 actually quotes Yengeni as asking, “‘What kind of human being could do that? I am talking about the man
behind the wet bag.’”
36
Ingrid de Kok, “What Kind of Man?” forms part of the series, “A Room Full of
Questions,” in Terrestrial Things; reprinted in Seasonal Fires.
Crowds and Powerlessness
209
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Bennun, Neil. The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People. London: Viking, 2004.
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Bleek, Wilhelm and Lucy Lloyd. Specimens of Bushman Folklore. Ed. Lucy
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— The Mantis and His Friends: Bushman Folklore. Ed. Dorothea F. Bleek.
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— Crowds and Power [Masse und Macht]. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York:
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— The Human Province. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. London: Picador,
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Christiansë, Yvette. “‘How disposed of’: The Liberated Africans,” Symposium on the Abolition of the British Slave Trade, John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University, Sept. 2007.
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker and
Warburg, 1999 [1980].
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— The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
— Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker and Warburg, 2003.
Coplan, David. In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s
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de Kok, Ingrid. “What Kind of Man?” Terrestrial Things. Cape Town: Kwela, 2002.
Deacon, Janette and Thomas A. Dowson, ed. Voices from the Past: /Xam
Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996.
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— The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. Stanford: Stanford
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Guenther, Mathias. Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society.
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Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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Gyekye, Kwame. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the
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— Begging to be Black. Cape Town: Random House Struik, 2010.
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Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton,
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Lloyd, Lucy. A Bushman Dictionary. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1956.
Lewis-Williams, J.D. Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern
San Rock Paintings. London: Academic Press, 1981.
Lewis-Williams, J.D. and D.G. Pearce. San Spirituality: Roots, Expression,
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2008): 25.
Mbeki, Thabo. “Statement of Deputy President T.M. Mbeki on behalf of the
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“What we feel, warts and all.” Mail and Guardian 11-17 July. 37.
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2008
<http://www.mg.co.za/articledirect.aspx?articleid=339923&
area=xenophobia_insight>.
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”1
James Siegel
Confrontation with peoples from different ethnicities no longer has the power to shake
Western identities in the way it had during the period of decolonization and before. It
is as though all forms of social difference are now easily bridgeable. This is arguable.
But the necessity for the production of social difference still exists if one follows.
Jacques Derrida’s essay on the animal.
If all essents went up in smoke,
it is the noses that would differentiate
and appreciate them.
Heraclitus, Fragment 7
I. The “Other” revised
The “other” taken into account by ethnography has been the peoples of
different cultures. That type of otherness is suspect today. Suspect to such a
degree that the practice of ethnography, particularly in the United States, has
been revised. One is not surprised to read that an American anthropologist
has lived in a part of the world remote from her country, has become fluent in
the language, has spent years there and has discovered no important
differences, at least once the anthropologist attends to the persons she knows.
When ethnography takes this form it can be accused of undermining its own
first assumptions. In France the conclusions drawn from this state of affairs
have been brought to the fore with such force that many ethnographers feel
that their discipline is threatened. The opening of the Musée du Quai Branly
was also the closing of the ethnographic section of the famous Musée de
l’Homme. The rich collections of the latter were transferred to the new
museum. “Really, one could think one is dreaming. Everything one reads on
the subject is unbelievable.”2 Thus remarked the eminent anthropologist
Louis Dumont when the project was announced. It is “unbelievable” that the
ethnographic museum might disappear. It, according to Dumont, makes the
work of ethnographers available to the public. It forms a part of their
instruction. It tells them, he implies, of the peoples of the world. Without it
they would be ignorant. One is in a world of dreams if one thinks one could
live without ethnography.3 The anthropologist Jean Jamin published an article
at the time, “Faut il brûler les musées d’ethnographie?” (“Is it Necessary to
Burn the Museums of Ethnography?”), the answer to which would be “yes” if
214
James Siegel
the ethnographic other is not merely out of date but morally and politically
suspect as many think.
The question was the nature of the value of the museum objects. The new
museum was seen by anthropologists as an art museum. But this was
disputed. The purpose of the museum, said President Chirac in his address at
its inauguration, was to honor peoples formerly despised. The new museum
would “render justice to the infinite diversity of cultures” and in doing so
would “manifest another regard for the spirit of peoples and civilizations of
Africa, Asia and Oceania.” One might think that the ethnographic museum
from which the bulk of the collections came, the Musée de l’Homme, had
done just this. It is the calling of ethnography, indeed, to “render justice” to
the diversity of peoples. But listening to President Chirac, one has the
impression that the ethnographic museum had to be dismantled for there to be
“a new view” for diversity, both of “peoples” and of “civilizations.” And of
course the diversity displayed at the Musée de l’Homme reflected the
understanding of peoples under colonial rule. An entirely different approach
was called for, one that would dissipate the aura of colonialism the old
museum emanated and so put the relation of France to its former colonies on
another basis. That the new institution does not have a more descriptive title
reflects the inability to find a suitable term for ethnographic artifacts that have
become aesthetic objects.
Throughout his speech Chirac spoke in pairs – sometimes it was “peoples
and civilizations,” sometimes “arts and civilizations.” There was no dispute
about the word “civilization” as there might have been fifty years earlier. But
between “art” and “people” there was a choice to be made. Ostensibly there
was to be room for both, but most ethnographers are not clear that room was
left for their study. There had been a passionate debate between
ethnographers on one side and art historians, curators and dealers on the
other. It concerned first of all the designation of what was to be in the new
museum. The objects were mainly (but not entirely) from the Musée de
l’Homme.4 Were they then still to be used to illustrate the lives of peoples, or
were they now to be shown for their aesthetic value? One question was how
best to understand “others” (not to mention who exactly these others are or
were); another was how to “honor” them. It was necessary to “multiply points
of view” in order to give a certain “depth” to the “arts and civilizations of all
the continents.” In order to do that, old views had to be “dissipated.” It was
not only the outdated views of ethnographers but those of the general public
which were in question. The prejudice in which the ex-colonial peoples were
held had to be erased, and this would come about by showing the cultural
achievements of these peoples. The word “other” here persisted, but it passed
between the “other view” (“ours,” the viewers) to the change in the status of
the others (“them”), those to be viewed otherwise.
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
215
Between the things to be seen and the viewpoints there is an unsettled
relation in the president’s speech. To see the exhibition would be to change
the way one sees, but the directions this would take could not be stated in
advance. The established way of placing “the other,” the ethnological
viewpoint, was clearly to be discarded. And this in the interest of views
“more open and more respectful, dissipating the fog of ignorance, of
condescension and arrogance of the past which have been so often present
and have nourished suspicion, contempt and rejection.”
“Condescension and arrogance,” “suspicion, contempt and rejection”
would be replaced by admiration. And with this the credit for the objects
would fall to the nations where the objects had been made. Ethnic
designations were kept but they now had the status of, for instance,
“medieval’ in “medieval art.” One admired these objects while bracketing the
beliefs surrounding them as belonging to the past. Credit no doubt would be
given to France for making this gesture. No doubt particularly so because the
high aesthetic value of the objects reflected the refined taste for which France
is well known. France could be proud that the objects, though nearly all
collected under colonialism and whose ownership was often disputed, formed
a part of its “patrimony.”
Objects were at the center of the museum, as they are in most museums.
But objects had been lost sight of by social anthropologists for some time.5
Instead of classifying peoples through their things, or seeing the inner
motivations of peoples through objects, anthropologists had turned to the
direct study of society. Anthropology in France too had developed in this
direction especially, but not entirely, outside the museum for some time. This,
however, by itself did not seem to excuse anthropologists from furthering a
view of others said to be morally, culturally and politically out of date. The
museum stood for ethnography. It was not that ethnography was to be
eliminated, but that it would have to take other forms. There was to be a place
for this in the museum as attested to in particular by the participation of LéviStrauss, after whom an auditorium in the museum was named, but the director
of the museum has clearly indicated that objects without aesthetic value were
not to be included.6
For many anthropologists, the closing of the ethnographic museum
seemed to mark an end of an era; where it left ethnology was unclear. Tracing
the treatment of objects in ethnographic museums placed the dilemma in
perspective. It is just this that Benoit de l’Éstoile has done in a study of
French ideas of the other as seen through the evolution of the museum. I will
follow his schema in the following paragraphs.
De l’Éstoile begins with the cabinet des curiosités, the collections of odd
unclassified objects. He cites the study of Krystoff Pomian on the collectors
of the Renaissance. Pomian shows that some of these objects from far-off
places were “‘collected not for their use value but because of their
216
James Siegel
significance as representatives of the invisible, of exotic countries, of
different societies, of strange climates’” (213, Pomian 49). These objects
eventually were separated from those considered art objects. The cabinet of
curiosities contained things without a principle of selection. They amounted
to an encyclopedia of the world according to de l’Éstoile. Some objects,
collected in far-off parts of the world, came to indicate distance and things
unknown. This resulted in a generalized other, more or less the equivalent of
something, anything, unknown and from anywhere.
With the rise of science, the objects became classified and separated
from art objects. The attempt at classification is at the beginning of the
ethnographic collections. From the start ethnography almost literally
domesticated, gave a home to, the strange. It reduced strangeness by showing
its rationality or its place in scientific thinking. It is just this endeavor that is
thought no longer to be necessary and, worse, to classify in anachronistic
ways. Those of us who believe we show contemporary ways of life and
escape this anachronism are not thereby freed from the charge associated with
it: that we do not let others speak for themselves. The new display of old
collections might, in its way, be a more direct form of communication
between cultures if, only, it could free itself from the aura of the primitive, as
Jacques Chirac wished, and if it could be bound to national “heritage.”7
The germ of the conflict between ethnography and art was already
present at the separation of the cabinet of curiosities from the art gallery in
the seventeenth century. Objects to be considered scientifically on the one
hand; those to be appreciated aesthetically on the other. Often objects were
contested. Were they to be considered evidence of historical and cultural
development, or were they to be seen as art? Objects from the Americas
collected for the Louvre in the middle of the nineteenth century because they
attested to the origins of art were transferred to the new Trocadéro museum at
the end of that century when it was decided that they did not in fact do so.
They did not show “a great page in the history of humanity but another art
altogether.”8
The Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in conjunction with
the Universal Exhibition of 1878, developed the natural science project in
evolutionary terms. The thinking of the time consolidated a hierarchy with
“savages” at the bottom. But the museum’s collections and classifications had
other consequences as well. Jean Jamin points out that “each piece collected,
classed and presented in the museum not only counted as a witness [of the
history of humanity] but also counted as proof […].” Rivet, the director of the
museum, according to Jamin, used the word “proof,” a word taken from the
law, as a way of “giving ethnology the task of rehabilitation of oppressed and
marginalized cultures” (15). “Proof,” then, of the value of otherwise
unappreciated cultures. This appreciation, however, did not change the
centrality of focus on origins; the origins of civilization and the origins of art
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
217
were at the heart of the idea of collection. Aesthetic value was even
considered a danger by Rivet since focusing on it could mean bypassing the
collection of everyday objects useful for the classification of ways of life.9
Meanwhile, ethnology evolved under colonialism, and the idea of the
“other” became progressively differentiated. The Colonial Exhibition of 1931
represented the ways in which colonialism “gave value to natural wealth left
unexploited by natives.” This included the peoples themselves who were said
to be in the process of development under colonial aegis. Thus the static view
of “races” which were once and for all whatever they were originally gave
way. Ethnography had the task of completing this encyclopedia. “Art nègre”
was included because it was thought to be sufficiently ancient to show the
origin of this evolution (de l’Éstoile 49). This showed the way to the study of
aesthetics particular to specific cultures. And in so doing it removed the
ethnographic exegesis of art from the continued popular belief in a
generalized and savage other. Thus, for instance, Michel Leiris, an important
collector of objects for the ethnographic museums and a friend of Picasso,
remarked of one of his friends’ masks from the Ivory Coast that it has “a
combination of quasi geometric elements each of which can be perceived in a
relatively autonomous way and at the same time taking the value of a sign in
the whole of a face imaginatively reconstituted by the viewer” (Crise nègre
1139).10 Once one knows that a face is not an imitation from nature but a
construction made out of quasi-geometric units, one can arrange these units
mentally and find a face.11 Plastic elements become read as signs. Reading
them, one reaches a face, but without the code one cannot read and is left
with the generalized, hence possibly with the savage. There is a particular
aesthetics, not “ours.” Through it one understands the object as a mask with a
particular designation. Without this the mask appears to represent an inchoate
intention, a nightmare of the uncivilized perhaps; but if one appreciates it it
seems to speak of something we cannot grasp but we intuit nonetheless. It is
beautiful, we say. Knowing the code, one knows what the mask “says.”
Kantian ideas of beauty and pleasure then do not apply. Nor do ideas of
savagery; both are banished in favor of understanding. One needs
ethnography to generate such understanding.
But popular understanding did not evolve along the same lines as
ethnography. The latter showed the specificities of different cultures. The
former remained invested in the spectral and global otherness out of which
ethnology had emerged. Thus the importance of “art nègre,” meaning certain
objects of Africa and Oceania “discovered” to be art, a discovery confirmed
by the interest of artists such Picasso, Matisse, Vlamink and others, but to
which both the English translations – “black arts” and “Negro arts” – seemed
still to apply. The word “art” indicated something worthy of appreciation.
What went with the other term was an understanding of this art as “savage”
and even magical. The “Rapport général” of the exposition of 1931 notes that
218
James Siegel
“‘It does not take much imagination to evoke bloody ceremonies of
suppressed cults, monstrous celebrations in the glades, strange marriages of
love and death behind these masques and sculptures.’”12 Beauty and savagery
then contended or perhaps reinforced each other in popular appreciation of
the objects.
The history of the treatment of the objects under consideration is full of
ambiguities. On one side, ethnology, accused of racial stereotyping even
when it works against the generalized view of “savages.” On the other,
aesthetic interests displacing ethnology, ignoring the place of objects in social
life and thereby accused of ethnocentricism for bypassing local ideas of
aesthetics and, by neglecting the peoples who made the objects, leaving them
open to prejudicial judgments. There is also the question raised by the
seemingly inexorable pull of aesthetic attraction of objects said to be
“fetishes” and which were in the main religious and magical objects in their
places of origin. Though the savage other apparently vanished, the objects
that sustained interest remain attractive under another name without asking
whether there is a connection between the magical and the beautiful. The idea
of beauty and the idea of the wild are mixed also in Kant for instance, the
beautiful being originally wild or, in French, “sauvage.” It is not surprising
then that the beautiful and the “savage” should appear together. In the Quai
Branly, magic is entirely subsumed under a generalized aesthetics. Something
is worth looking at even if one knows nothing about it.
French ethnology had sidestepped the problem not by avoiding the topics
of magic or aesthetic appeal but by focusing on a broader issue. Paul Rivet, in
describing the project of the ethnological museum and its research, wrote
“The most humble tool, the most imperfect, the crudest pottery is as much, or
even more worthy of study […] than the most finely decorated vase.”13 Not
long before Apollinaire had complained about the results of such thinking.
Speaking of the Musée de Trocadéro, the predecessor of the Musée de
l’Homme, he said that it hid the aesthetically valuable and for that reason was
practically not visited. The museum, he noted, had “a great number of
masterpieces by African and Oceanean artists.” But, in a phrase that
anticipated the criticism of the Musée de l’Homme, he said “The collections
are mixed in a way to satisfy ethnic curiosity (curiosité ethnique) and not
aesthetic sentiment.”14 This was precisely the charge repeated later
particularly by Jacques Kerchache, an art dealer and friend of Jacques Chirac
to whom credit for the idea of the new museum has been given.15
The opening of the new museum, then, brought a conflict of values –
aesthetic versus ethnographic. The latter extended far beyond the limits of the
discipline if one listened to the argument of anthropologists. Their cry at the
closing of the ethnographic section of the Musée de l’Homme was heartfelt.
Thus Louis Dumont, whom we quoted above, continued in a column in Le
Monde:
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
219
Until the 18th Century “art” was understood as mechanical arts,
craftsmanship, and the “beaux-arts.” Since then the latter has been
elevated to coincide with absolute Art, but many artists continue to
think of themselves as artisans. One can say that in speaking of “arts
premiers” one actually imposes a modern notion of “beaux-arts” on
cultures which do not recognize the term. Would you separate the
parietal art of Lascaux from craftsmanship? To obtain an abstract
equality with that which comes out of our own culture one proposes
to look at the beaux-arts from other places with the presuppositions
of bourgeois parvenus.
Either one sees objects in the terms given by their fabricators and thus
“understands” them or one sees them falsely. The falsity consists in imposing
an aesthetic and an idea of place which belongs to a certain culture, one
amongst many, that of the culture within which the museum was established.
Differences between cultures are obscured, the result being a false view. The
charge against ethnographers in return is that even their differentiated view of
peoples is now out of date. The differences they insist on are irrelevant in the
world today and, once again, they leave open a route toward prejudice.
The argument is complicated and even ironic. On the one hand, the case
against the ethnography museum is that it consolidates a distorted view of the
other. Distorted either because in spite of itself it fosters ideas of savagery, or
else because it furthers views of cultural identity frozen during colonial times
and now out of date and demeaning. The argument against the art museum is
similar: it imposes an aesthetic in place of an interpretation on objects and
thus on peoples and is ethnocentric.
Before the closing of the ethnology section, popular interest in the
museum had declined considerably. In part because the museum was under
financed. But in part also because what drew crowds to it before seems to
have evaporated. The interest in the ethnographic other had dissipated, surely
in large part because of the work of anthropologists who meticulously
delineated the reasonableness of the societies they studied. But also because
the peoples who had made the objects were known under their ethnic names
which now, instead of making them seem exotic, left them entirely without
connection to museum visitors. The peoples to be honored by the new
museum were peoples whose ethnic designations were subsumed under
national designations. The slippage from ethnic to national identities matched
a change in European popular mentality, one that was aided by the presence
of former colonial peoples in the métropole where they were known not as
speakers of Wolof, for instance, but as Senegalese or simply as Africans. It is
the designations on their passports that determine who they are, not their
ancestry. And if they have no French visa, they are deported to their
“homeland,” which is a state. The state, not even the nation and certainly not
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ethnicity, determines identity both politically and, though to lesser degree, in
the museum. It is true that ethnic designations are still attached to museum
objects, but the honor falls on citizens of states.
The new museum designed to honor certain peoples is clear about who is
honored. It is the heirs of the people who made the objects, thus linking
ethnicity and state. But who exactly are these heirs? Speaking of Nok
sculptures made 2000 years ago but claimed by the Nigeria of today, Antony
Appiah comments:
When Nigerians claim a Nok sculpture as part of their patrimony,
they are claiming for a nation whose boundaries are less than a
century old, the works of a civilization more than two millennia ago,
created by a people that no longer exists, and whose descendants we
know nothing about. We don’t know whether Nok sculptures were
commissioned by kings or commoners; we don’t know whether the
people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of
them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, to the
gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is that they didn’t make
them for Nigeria. (119)16
The famous Benin sculptures are known as such, but does the honor fall to
Nigeria where the capital of the Benin kingdom was located, or to the
neighboring state, Benin? How can national identity claim the fabrications of
the peoples who lived in the area before the nation and before colonialism? Is
there necessarily an “heir” at all? If there is, how is it that such objects are
inherited? By their influence on subsequent artists? By genealogical
connections between peoples? By the pride of the peoples of a nation in those
who lived there before them? By seeing and liking them?
The new museum claims a universality for these objects; anyone from
anywhere is capable of appreciating them on the basis of a general idea of
beauty common to people as humans. The national designation, once
accepted, leaves ethnographic analysis in the place, at best, of art history. It
might explain social conditions of another time, but such knowledge is
optional in considering the value of the objects. Once the important
designation of the object is national, thus part of the political world of today
and so part of the world as a whole, value comes to be measured by a
universally valid aesthetic. Enjoyment of these objects opens to all: Parisians,
not to mention those from any place in the world who might visit the museum
as well as peoples of say, Nigeria, amongst those designated as the “heirs” to
these objects. Whatever ritual purpose the objects might have had is a matter
of the past and is only incidental to their contemporary status. They are
beautiful now, they were then – and there; now and forever and even before,
the future included; for all time and all places.
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Universalism of aesthetic appreciation comes into being along with the
diminishing of cultural differences of all sorts. A former curator of the
Pompidou Center for Modern Art and then director of the Musée national
d’art moderne, Germain Viatte, who guided the Quai Branly to its
completion, thought that the foreign was unavoidable in Paris. One is
“constantly confronted” with it, and right here. “One cannot cross through our
cities without being constantly confronted with cultural alterity.” But
familiarity dissolves exoticism; mere alterity is left. The exotic evaporated;
the foreign was no longer strange. But there are still “exotic cultures,” and
one therefore needed a new sort of museum to respond to this “change of
comportment of our European countries with respect to exotic cultures.”17
The exotic, limited to the museum, differentiated from the people at its
origin by the renaming of these people, still has a place. Anthropology has
been accused of exoticism. But now exoticism will have a safe place within
art. The museum will preserve the exotic whereas anthropology, contrary to
the charge against it, reduced it to the familiar. The work of anthropologists,
in this view, is complete. Being already familiar with alterity, one no longer
needs anyone to explain it. “They” are now understood.
But there is still a “they,” those one sees in Paris from the ex-colonies in
particular. And behind “them,” as it were, in their past or, at least, somewhere
else, the exotic persists. It is now, however, sealed off in the museum. In the
museum as it has now been constructed, the exotic does not infect presentday immigrants. The universalizing of aesthetic appreciation valorized now
by the museum has drained the exotic from them. They no longer raise
specters.
The Quai Branly, of course, is designed to further good relations with the
ex-colonial countries. The charge against it has been ethnocentricism,
imposing as it does a particular notion of beauty. The further question is
whether the political aim itself is achieved. A rather different view than that
of President Chirac was given by the former Minister of Culture and Tourism
of Mali, Aminata Traoré. She had this to say in an open letter sent to the
French president on the occasion of the museum’s opening:
So our works of art have the right to the city just where we, in
the aggregate, are forbidden to stay […].
The artworks which today take the place of honor at the Musée
du Quai Branly belong first of all to the disinherited peoples of Mali,
Benin, Guinea, Niger, Burkina-Faso, Cameroon and the Congo.
They form a substantial part of the cultural and artistic patrimony of
these “without visas” of whom some have been shot dead at Ceuta
and Melilla and these “without papers” who are daily tracked down
in the heart of Europe and, when arrested, sent back in handcuffs to
their countries of origin.
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In my “Letter to the President of France” concerning the Ivory
Coast and Africa in general, I cite the Musée du Quai Branly as a
perfect expression of the contradictions, incoherence and paradoxes
of France in its relation to Africa. At the moment when the doors are
opened to the public, I continue to ask how far the powers of this
world will go in their arrogance and the theft of our imaginary.18
Indeed, anyone living in certain areas of Paris, when rounding a corner is all
too likely to find a group of police surrounding a “sans papiers,” usually
African but often enough Indian, Pakistani or Chinese as well. (The list is
incomplete.)
“Honoring” the peoples who made the objects displayed in the Quai
Branly thus in no way ameliorates the economic and political views that lead
to the deportation of migrant workers from France. One wonders if the
Kantian notion of beauty does not reveal its “savage” foundation too clearly
when applied to the art of the museum. If so, it all the more effectively
conceals prejudice under the name of the beautiful all the while that it
preserves it. From this point of view prejudice would no longer be the direct
rejection of the objectionable foreigner. Rather, the idea of savagery would be
held in concealment in certain cultural forms, honorable ones, and then
applied, no doubt unconsciously, to those who are its “heirs” and so remain
contaminated. “Under the skin,” so to speak.
This, at least, is one possibility. But I do not think it is the likely effect of
museum display. One can turn to someone interested in museums in general
and the ethnographic in particular for another view. According to Georges
Bataille, in 1930 museums produced the desire to be what was on display.
“Today museums are a great and unexpected success,” not only for their
riches but also because they offer “the greatest spectacle of a humanity
liberated from material cares and devoted to contemplation.” It is on Sunday
that he observes the crowd exit from the Louvre.
One has to keep in mind that the halls and the objects of art are only
a container of which the contained is formed by the visitors: it is the
contained that distinguishes the museum from private collections.
(Musée 300)
What visitors see or rather comprehend is not what is given to them to see.
They see something else, and this something else is given by their
identification with the figures they have “contemplated.”
The canvases are only dead surfaces and it is the crowd that
produces the play, the bursts, the glints of light described technically
by the authorized critics. At five on Sundays at the exit of the
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Louvre, it is interesting to admire the flow of visitors visibly
animated by the desire to be the like of the celestial apparitions
which their eyes still hold in fascination. (300)
Bataille speaks of the visitors to the Louvre, but his remarks refer to the
peoples whose artifacts appear in ethnographic museums as well:
When a native of the Ivory Coast puts polished axes from the
Neolithic in a container full of water, bathing them in it, offering
poultry to those he believes to be “thunder stones” (fallen from the
heavens in a clap of thunder), he only prefigures the attitude of
enthusiasm and the deep communion with objects which
characterizes the visitor to the modern museum. The museum is the
colossal mirror in which man contemplates himself finally in all his
faces, finding himself literally admirable and abandoning himself to
the ecstasy expressed in all the art revues. (300)19
The impulse behind the museum is universal in Bataille’s view. But the
museum itself is not. He notes that the first museum was founded by the
Convention in July 1793, thus during the Terror. “The origin of the modern
museum was thus tied to the development of the guillotine.” He implies that
here is an effect of the crowd (a notion as recent as the possibility of
anonymity) in the museum. Viewing “in private,” one is known to others and
thus more surely to oneself. In a crowd, it is said, one loses one’s identity and
thus loses oneself to the objects. If this happens in the ethnographic museum,
identification with the objects is strengthened by ideas of evolution, which
said that those on display were an earlier version of oneself.
It is not by accident that Bataille speaks of the stone axe and the
guillotine. There is a violent, even revolutionary element. The possibility of
identification with the other upsets established hierarchies particularly when
that other is foreign. This passes through objects. It might be indirect but is
not less radical for that. The items displayed might be beautiful and
presumably free of contemporary political significance, but the hierarchy of
taste, one of the foundations of social hierarchy, will be upset. As Nélia Dias,
the author of a history of the Trocadéro museum, remarks, “Everything
happens as if the valorization of certain types of extra-European art inevitably
brought with it the questioning of the Occidental idea of art and,
consequently, of that of the art object” (Quai Branly 73-74). The museum
offers a potential source of value outside the normal. And the acceptance of
this value makes the viewer like those who made the objects or who are
pictured in them, no matter how “savage” they might be.
Jacques Kerchache, who first had the idea of the Quai Branly, originally
wanted “tribal arts” put in the Louvre. Apollinaire before him had the same
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idea. To do so would change the hierarchy of tastes. In the end, Kerchache
was successful in having a place made for them in the Louvre, thus putting
these pieces on a par with “masterpieces.” It is not clear that the objects
currently in the Louvre will remain there. Meanwhile, the Quai Branly
establishes their special worth. But the hope for radical change suggested by
Bataille does not occur. The assimilation of such works remains equivocal
since the change in taste does not bring new sorts of people into the top of the
hierarchy, with the exception of a few brought there for window dressing.20
Nor is it clear that today it reformulates tastes. Instead it establishes the
French “patrimony.” It no longer owns the colonies, but much of their most
valuable cultural productions are subsumed by France, they belong to it, not
simply by legal – or illegal – possession, but through excellent French taste
that appreciates beauty.21
Seeing oneself in the other as Bataille described of course is not
geographically or culturally limited. But when and how it takes place depends
on prevailing conditions. When Sartre wrote about such a moment in 1948, it
was the beginning of the era of decolonization. In an introduction to an
anthology of poetry in French from the Caribbean and Africa edited by
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sartre wrote this:
Here [in their poems] erect black men look at you. I wish you to feel
as I do the shock of being seen. Whites have enjoyed three thousand
years of the privilege of seeing without being seen […] Today these
black men look at us and our look returns in our eyes; black torches
in their turn illuminate the world. (ix)
No one had ever thought there could be a return of looks between whites and
blacks. Then, through poetry written in French, it occurred. In retrospect it
seemed it could always have occurred and no doubt did. But it went
unnoticed. And this was for cause. The result for whites of being seen in the
eyes of the black other (NB: singular) is to discover that “our whiteness seems
to be a strange, pale varnish which keeps our skins from breathing, a white
jersey [maillot] worn at the elbows and knees, under which, if we could
remove it, we would find the true human flesh, flesh the color of black wine”
(ix). At the time when Africans were accused of practicing magic, to allow
oneself to exchange looks with them for whites would mean seeing that one
was them, just as the visitors to the museum saw themselves as what they saw
there. The result was said to be political revision, even revolution. To see the
return gaze of Africans is no longer to count on the unselfconscious rightness
of white everyday lives. Something else is lodged in them to which they are
blind. For Viatte in Paris, this moment, now wrapped in familiarity, is much
less possible. He easily meets the gaze of the “Senegalese,” so defined by his
passport. But for Sartre in 1948, without this encounter whites were blind to
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themselves. Their sight will be returned when they see Africans “en face.”
And when it is, everything will be different. Thus the possibility of the
ethnological other, in the museum or not, in another time.
This moment is linked to the ideas that governed the foundation of the
Musée de l’Homme, particularly the idea of the “document.” The document
was at the heart of the museum, according to Bataille and to others who
published in the magazine Documents in 1929-1930. These included Paul
Rivet, the director of the museum, and Georges Rivière, who described the
aim of the ethnographic museum in that journal. Rivet, according to Jean
Jamin, saw the museum objects as “documents.” They were the “proof”
needed to put peoples in evidence. Jamin uses the term interchangeably with
“material witnesses.” The anthropological use of “document” came to mean
its use value, to use Marx’s term adopted by Dennis Hollier in speaking of
Documents. “Use value,” in this context, had a double significance. For
ethnographers this meant the equal value of all objects, the seeing of them
without judgment. Their aesthetic worth, for instance, did not matter; what
counted was their provenance. As such, a document was irreplaceable. It is
there that it joins the idea of use value in Marx. Use value is always singular.
In Marx it occurs before the exchange with other objects in the course of
which an idea of value necessary in exchange is produced. In the
ethnographic conception of the time, only the place of the object in its
original location matters. The idea leads easily to the notion of context. An
ethnographic object might be inexchangeable but it could be explicated by
describing its place. The idea of place was slippery – after all, contexts are
variable.22
The document is not a representation. Rather it forms part of whatever it
documents; it belongs to the time of its origin. But as a document it is
removed from its provenance. It thus “refers,” one says, to its origin, being at
a distance from it. But it does not necessarily bring with it its original context
when it makes this reference. It only attests to the existence of its provenance,
to the object belonging to that moment and that place. Whatever reflections it
might stimulate do not belong to it as document. The document says what it
says; as a document it is incontrovertible in saying that “this belongs to that
time or place or event.” The question it raises is not its sense but its validity,
the degree to which it can be accepted as authentic. Whatever associations it
might provoke are irrelevant to it as a document. As a document it refuses all
speculation.
For Bataille, the ethnographic museum offered radical possibilities linked
precisely to the change of context that occurs when an object becomes a
document without becoming an object of exchange. The document in refusing
all substitutability nonetheless stimulates associations that have their
provenance outside of it. Take, for instance, a piece entitled “Les Pieds
Nickelés.” It is about comic figures favored by French children at the
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beginning of the twentieth century and about the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.
Bataille’s two pages on them begins, “A Mexican god, thus Quetzalcoatal,
amuses himself by gliding down the mountains seated on a small plank. More
than anything else expressible in the usual repertoire of words, he always
seems to me to be one of the Pied Nickelés.” The God (Quetzalcoatl) amuses,
and “moral liberty” depends on amusement. There has to be something else to
render us this necessity, Bataille says. And he finds it in the Pieds Nickelés
and regrets that it is mainly children who read it. But the Pieds Nickelés have
had a constant appearance amongst the children of all social classes since
their first appearance in 1908. “I can’t help being crudely taken with the
thought that men, not at all savage, not having paradise at their door, have
generously erected playthings (fantouches) into gods and have reduced
themselves to the role of playthings, to the point of regarding curiously, but
with a big knife, what is inside the stomach of the screaming plaything.” And,
he concludes, “an individual is not a plaything, he is a player, or he is both at
once […] Amusement is the most crying need, and of course, the most
terrifying of human nature” (216).
If amusement is the “most terrifying” need of human nature, it is because
to cry with laughter is to put the serious, hence the authoritative, aside. One
might kill without justification and without condemnation. This is the world
of everyone before they have the identities that come with adulthood, the
world of children. What in France is relegated to children Mexicans have
given to a god. Something ridiculous, a “fantouche,” only serious to children,
is taken seriously by “Mexican” adults; even given an ultimate seriousness,
one that offers no justification and so is indistinguishable from amusement.
And in doing so, children show a possibility that adults decline. The latter, in
France, refuse to elevate the amusing, the ridiculous, into Gods. It is to their
detriment. Mexicans satisfied their need. But we do not. Or rather, adults
recognize the need for amusement since they give the Pieds Nickelés to
children. But then they take it away. “Life is not a burst of laughter, educators
and mothers of families in effect say to children, not without the most
comical gravity, Then, with a light hand they give them the Pieds Nickelés to
browse, but with the other, they brutally take them away.” Amusement is
restored but brutally kept in check. Seriousness reigns.
Quetzalcoatl was a serious possibility for French people so far as Bataille
was concerned because seeing his image awakens something out of their own
past. This past here is not contained in the history of all humanity, but is
limited to those who read Pieds Nickelés and not necessarily all of them. If
one sees Quetzalcoatl in the usual ethnological way, he stays where he was –
in “Mexico” as Bataille used the term. But conjoined to a figure known in
childhood, the result is not nostalgia for that time but the presence of the
Aztec god. Quetzalcoatl, for that instant at least, lives in France and works on
its inhabitants.
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
227
The lack of seriousness of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico becomes important in
France. It does so via the memory of another moment when amusement was
taken seriously. All that is needed for amusement to become serious again is
the making of a correspondence. But the Pieds Nickelés are only one possible
point of conjuncture with that god. And it is not certain that Bataille meant
that the same conjunctions worked for everyone. In the museum people fill in
what they see. It is, as we have said, no doubt an effect of the loss of identity
said to occur in crowds. (We recall that for Bataille the museum is
coterminous with the revolution, thus with its crowds.) The loss of identity
allows a correspondence that would not be made if one were contemplating
Quetzalcoatl in private. But there is no assurance that everyone fills in what
he or she sees in the same way; no assurance either that each finds his
resemblance in the same figures in the Louvre. One cannot know if the trigger
setting off conjuncture is the same for everyone. The singularity or “use
value” that Bataille insisted on makes it impossible to establish. All that one
can say is that there is a moment of conflation of what one sees and what one
knows in one way or another, a conflation not necessarily brought about by
resemblance or any other attribute.
If we follow the way in which Quetzalcoatl on his sled is seen through
the Pieds Nickelés, we see that almost paradoxically the very singularity of
the object taken from elsewhere is the source of its effectiveness in
communicating to those who see it in the museum. Quetzalcoatl “makes
sense” only if we use that phrase loosely as it is used in common speech. Its
“sense” is its capacity to be confounded with the Pieds Nickelés. Quetzalcoatl
seems then to somehow light up, to stimulate further thinking. This figure
from elsewhere, now in a museum, then refers to France, or rather a France as
it might be and even mentally is. Precisely as a document from elsewhere it
inflects life in France. No archeologist of Mexico I am sure would recognize
this figure as Bataille presented it. And that is also a source of its force. It
escapes Mexico to remake “the French.” It speaks to them, telling them that
“they” are “us.” Or, more precisely, that “we” are “them.” We are them
already; we did not know it. To be so it was not and still is not important to
believe in Quetzalcoatl in the way that one believes in God. It is not even
necessary to lay bare the source of correspondence between this figure of
Aztec origin and something hidden in “us.” It is only necessary that the
connection be, somehow, in one way or another, felt and thus set into
operation.
Precisely because the document has no sense as such other than this
peculiar and limited form of reference, it offers itself as a challenge to
recognition. As a result, the form used to recognize it outside its provenance
is far-fetched, in a literal sense; idiosyncratic in its logic, unverifiable, and
quite probably different for each viewer. As such, there is no assurance that
one can necessarily find a biographical reference to explain the connection.
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One can only say that Bataille thinks it is the case in this instance. It seems
necessary that there be a trajectory of the object through the viewer, but what
(if any) associations are made cannot be established with assurance.
At the same time, it is important that Quetzalcoatl was seen in the
museum of ethnology. The museum gives the terms by which one
domesticates this moment. By “domesticate” I mean here “give a home to”
the perceptions the museum has stimulated. The “elsewhere” or foreignness
of the object to oneself is relocated geographically and culturally. Taking the
term for one’s own, one has a relation with this place. It is in this manner that
the ethnographic museum could upset European cultural hierarchies. There is
something foreign inside these remade hierarchies and there is something
inside ourselves, though forgotten and thus foreign to us, that allows us to
find ourselves within the new structure. The museum catalyzes their juncture.
Inadvertently, of course.
This is the other found in the ethnographic museum. But it does not take
the form that ethnographers would give it. When Rivet used the word
“document,” he meant something quite different, closer to a notion of
authenticity that then would be reduced to the schema that would be imposed
on objects, granting them generality.23 The interpretation that began with
objects with the aim of producing an understanding of cultures had the
museum as its center. But another sort of ethnography developed in the
Anglophone world with Malinowski in particular. The long stay in a single
place with the aim of showing the practical reason of life there left the study
of objects behind. One can say that the witness, the person who could attest to
the nature of life in far away places, replaced the collector and the analyst.
Both the study of objects and the direct study of societies were domesticating
in a positive sense of the word. They showed the common humanity of the
peoples studied and thus related peoples to one another. Ethnography took the
route of generality to accomplish the same end – the establishing of a place
for the foreign – as the ethnology museum did for Bataille through its display
of singularity.
The study of objects came to seem outdated when evolutionary
classification depended on the frozen identities of the peoples who made the
objects, despite the work of many to counter this trend. But it was the success
of both ethnological methods and the grand historical changes that came with
the end of colonialism that deprived ethnography of the means to elicit
interest in the unknown. It has been two generations since there has been an
Anglophone anthropologist capable of speaking to those wanting a general
culture, much less a figure such as Bataille who linked peoples on the basis of
incomparable (because ungeneralizable) differences.
When the place of the object could be made explicit, the document had
served its purpose. Around it a view of everyday life formed. The document
as Bataille understood it served, rather, as a peculiar form of communication
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between cultures. Peculiar because the meaning of Quetzalcoatl as Bataille
explained him could in no way be verified. It remained idiosyncratic. One
learned nothing much about “Mexicans” as he anachronistically termed
Aztecs, but one felt in touch with them. This view could only be eroded by
ethnographers’ patient explication of local context.
The difference between the two forms of document can be seen in a
passage from Michel Leiris’ account of his expedition in Francophone Africa
collecting for the Trocadéro museum. The following excerpt from his notes
was made in the south of colonial French Sudan:
The old man who has been teaching me the mysteries of the mask
society since the day before yesterday for the second time since
yesterday took out an astonishing text in secret language. I took
down the text, l read it aloud with its intonations, and the old man,
delighted, got up, clapped his hands and cried, “Pay! Pay!”
(“Excellent! Excellent!”). But at the moment of translation
everything went wrong. The secret language is a language of
formulas, made up of enigmas, of cockcrows, of puns, of cascades of
phonemes and interpenetrating symbols. The old man, thinking that I
really wanted to be initiated, applied his usual principals of teaching.
When I asked for a translation of a word or an isolated phrase, he
lost his place and had to start over from the beginning and go to the
end, but he got mixed up and, naturally, gave me a different text
each time. Playing the role of teacher, when I interrupted he became
furious and shouted “Makou!” (“Silence!”).24
This formula is effective only through the exactness of its repetition, not
through its semantic content. But what is repeated is unclear, not only
because it sounds to Leiris like “cockcrows” and “interpenetrating symbols”
but because it varies with each repetition. Leiris presumes that the teacher
cannot repeat any particular word of the text accurately unless he starts from
the beginning. Each time he is asked to do so, the teacher gives a different
text. Another example, however, indicates that Leiris misunderstands what
the teacher is doing.
Enraged with a man who came to sell gris-gris. When I asked for the
magic formulas one has to pronounce to use them, each time I made
him repeat one of the formulas in order to take it down, he gave a
different version and each time it came to a translation, more new
versions. (Miroir 211)
This seller of amulets, giving the text that goes with them, also gives a
different version each time. The text is never an original, it seems. It is,
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rather, only one instance of what is said magically. The teacher of the first
example, asked for a translation, understands that there is no movement from
one language to another possible. Instead the magical text fulfills itself, to use
a Benjaminian construction, differently each time. Magical language here is
secret language, meaning that an original, authoritative version is never
revealed, not that the language that it takes in practice is itself secret. The
series of “cockcrows” and “interpenetrating symbols” that carries it forward
never arrives. It is never understandable, it is never precisely repeatable and
its sounds cannot all be identified. Leiris therefore resorts to approximation of
the sounds and to concluding that they are conflations of symbols and animal
sounds. Leiris, however, thinks it can and should arrive; there should be an
identifiable, authoritative version and it should be understandable. He tries to
take it down accurately, to the frustration of his teacher who, no doubt,
thought his pupil an idiot and to Leiris who obviously held the same opinion
of his teacher and the seller of gris-gris.
The “secret language” is revealed to Leiris, but he never knows it. The
secret here is not its content – whether it actually has a content is unclear.
One learns this secret language only by repeating it. But what one repeats one
does not know. It is as though magic arrives from a different and unfindable
source each time it is used. The old man knows the secret does not depend on
a content which might be paraphrased nor on matching his own recitation
with whatever issued from his mouth when he last said it. It depends, rather,
on seeing that it is “communicable,” that it is even communicability itself,
and he is delighted when Leiris seems to be affected by his, the teacher’s,
recitation. But when Leiris interrupts the recitation in order that one of its
elements be reiterated, the teacher finds serious “misunderstanding.”
Reiteration is impossible and therefore no text can be constituted. Instead
there is “iteration,” which is at once unique and yet seems to be a repetition of
something. With that it seems that something has been said. To borrow the
terms used by Samuel Weber in reading Benjamin, the sheer mediacy, or
inbetweenness of the formulae, has to be taken as such.25 Even to call these
“formulae,” which means the repetition of the same words, is wrong. This
language has no generic title – neither formulae, nor incantation accurately
names it. That would mean that the words refer to ascertainable versions of
themselves and this is wrong. The magic of language depends not on lack of
reference but on references never being reached.
When something is communicable and yet does not arrive one cannot
predict the result. In the case of Leiris and the teacher, the teacher is enraged
in the first instance; in the second it is Leiris. It seems that at least one of the
pair has to be. They are in communication with each other but they have
incompatible ideas of how magical language works. It is not only that Leiris
does not understand “them,” “the other.” The teacher also misunderstands not
only what Leiris wants, but magical language itself. Suppose the language
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231
had worked as it was supposed to. Leiris would then have been initiated into
the mask society. He would be one of them. Magical language would then be
“understood” in the fashion of the place. A hierarchy would be established.
One would no longer be able to speak of the mediacy of language, only of its
social effectiveness, meaning its capacity, finally, in some way or other, to
achieve an intention and so to obscure the moment we have noticed. The
mediacy of language is marked here by the fury it incites as it communicates
but does not join. Not linking but “adjoining,” placing people mentally next
to one another, as it were, across cultures only to make war.
But perhaps war is not the only possibility. There could be merely the
confusion experienced exiting from the museum after seeing something with
aesthetic force. “Aesthetic force” here is not exact. One does not appreciate
what one sees as though there is a difference between subject and object; one
loses that difference between oneself and the object. The force of magic can
make one into the other through a form of communication that is never
appropriated but only suffered. There is still magic within beauty. Except that
magic, in societies where it is recognized, can consolidate new identities. The
confusion of identities on exiting from the museum in a society where magic
is denied inflects social intercourse only indirectly. At best the object asserts
itself through the individual only surreptitiously, without his knowledge.
There is then no understanding between cultures through the art museum,
only communication. And, as has been often pointed out, this communication
is rapidly put into aesthetic terms that do not correspond with its culture of
origin. One sees the need for a serious weighing of the value of understanding
with all the complications of different ways of understanding versus the value
of communication.
As it stands, magic, hidden in a museum such as the Quai Branly under
the guise of beauty, might stimulate the radical possibilities of the age of
Bataille and Sartre, but then is reduced to contemporary understanding of
aesthetics. Such a movement would form the substance of honor while
permitting the fearless expulsion of those honored from the country. At the
same time, it is not certain that magic has been definitively discarded nor that
the domestication of ethnic others marks the end of the totally other.
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II
The exchange of glances across boundaries opening a reflection of social
order takes place differently today. We turn to the encounter of Jacques
Derrida and his cat, described in L’Animal que donc je suis. Derrida asks,
“can one say that the animal looks at us?” He expands:
I often ask myself, me, in order to see, who I am – and who I am at
the moment when, naked, in silence, taken by surprise by the look of
an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have difficulty, yes, I
have difficulty not to be embarrassed.26
If Derrida is almost embarrassed in front of the cat then, of course, he will
have exchanged glances with it. The thought of such an exchange occurs to
Derrida in an instant of surprise. It brings a comparison of himself and the
cat.
In front of the cat who looks at me naked, could I be ashamed like an
animal [bête] who does not any longer have a sense of its nudity? Or
on the contrary shame like a human who keeps the sense of nudity?
Who am I then? Who should I ask if not the other? And perhaps the
cat himself? (20)
Derrida asks himself in what identity he could be ashamed if he could not
restrain his capacity to be ashamed in front of an animal. Is it because, like
the cat, he does not feel nude or is it because he does and therefore
shamefully attributes to the cat the ability humans have to trigger shame? “It
is as if I am ashamed, then, naked in front of the cat, but also ashamed to be
ashamed.”
But he keeps his embarrassment in check. The encounter puts his identity
into question and leaves him to think how he might find out who he is, even
perhaps asking the cat. But he does not think about what the cat must think of
him; he does not ask the cat who he is. The shame he imagines is not like the
awkwardness of the white confronting a black who sees that he is dressed
unnaturally in his white skin and thinks that he should be like the person in
front of him. “Who am I then?” he asks, but the question does not lead to an
answer, as it does in Sartre. There are, rather, two answers. He could be like
the cat, that is, without a sense of nudity, or he could retain his sense of being
naked and then attribute to the cat the possibility of triggering this shame. In
one instance he is the cat, as it were; in the other, the cat is he, that is, human.
There is no resolution, and the remainder of the book does not expand the two
possibilities. Instead it leads to a reflection on what makes his confrontation
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233
potentially embarrassing and on the failure of previous philosophers to think
about such an encounter.
If Derrida has difficulty restraining his embarrassment in front of the cat,
if the cat triggers shame and thus opens the two possible effects of being
ashamed, it is because this cat is not symbolic and is not a type. (“I must say
right away that the cat of whom I speak is a real cat, it is not a figure of a
cat.” 20) If it were a figure of a cat, Derrida would not be “ashamed to be
ashamed.” A figure is always at a remove from whatever it figures. This cat is
not like that. It is a singular being, not a figure, nor an example of a type –
“cat.” Were the cat just “a cat,” his look could be disregarded. But precisely
this particular cat cannot be reduced to “an animal,” “a cat” (hence without
shame) and therefore embarrasses him. It embarrasses him precisely because
it offers a look which meets his own, but the source of that look is and
remains enigmatic. Why he should be embarrassed by the cat is never made
clear and cannot be made so. Precisely as a singular being, a totally other, the
cat at once causes shame and offers no identity with which to resolve it.
Derrida is only possibly like the cat while this singular being cannot be
appropriated as himself since the totally other offers nothing to appropriate.
At least it does not do so before it is elaborated into a figure.
There is, in fact, nothing in the exchange to make it memorable. We do
not see a menace, for instance. It is easy therefore to dismiss, and that is what
philosophers before Derrida seem to have done. Philosophers before Derrida
have disregarded the returned look of the cat. It simply did not signify for
them.
There are basically […] two great forms of theoretical or
philosophical treatment of the animal […] There is first of all the
texts signed by people who no doubt have seen, observed, analyzed,
reflected the animal but have never been seen by the animal. They
have never come across the look of an animal posed towards them
[…] If ever one day they had been seen furtively by the animal, they
have taken no account (thematic, theoretical, philosophical) of it;
they have not been able or not wished to draw any systematic
consequence from the fact that an animal can, face to face, look at
them, clothed or nude, and, in a word, without a word address itself
to them; They have taken no account of the fact that what they call
“animal” can “look at and address itself” to them from one origin or
another. (L’Animal 31)
The cat was ignored by other philosophers. Which does not mean that it did
not communicate with them and even initiate the communication. From
where, that is in what capacity, they might have done so is necessarily
uncertain. Treating it as “what they call an animal,” they have dismissed this
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possibility of communication. They too might have felt shame without being
able to resolve it into terms of identity. Had they done so, precisely the status
of the particular animal would have to be considered. But the cat being “what
they call an animal,” they could and probably did merely dismiss what they
saw. Or they refused to consider that the communication with the cat implied
an embarrassing form of self-consciousness. Embarrassing because the
animal in front of them shamed them apparently for reasons which they could
not take seriously, it being only an “animal” who looked at them as they
looked at their respective “animals.”
The question “Who am I” arises “at the crossing of these two singular
generalities, the animal (l’animot) and the “I,” the “I’s” (76). There Derrida
asks himself, “What is happening? How is it I could say ‘I’ and what am I
doing then? And moreover, me, what am I and who am I?” (76). When one
says “I” to the cat, one can’t know that the cat understands “I” as the person
uttering that instance of discourse. The sign “I” belongs to language and is a
“generality,” transcending the individual who uses it. But in front of the cat,
this sign is not shared. Within this pair, it belongs only to Derrida (if we can
call him that) and is thus “singular.” In front of this cat, Derrida’s language is
confined to himself. Language as we know it, language as speech, becomes
useless, and with that the sense of identity that comes through it as one
speaks, saying “I,” finding oneself as the speaker, makes no sense. But
nonetheless, something seems to cross between the two creatures, even if
nothing is said that can be reproduced. At this point we are not far from the
situation of Leiris and his teacher. There also, there was communication but
no understanding.
Who is this cat? It lives in Derrida’s house, but it is not exactly his, he
tells us, and therefore not exactly a pet. Pets, one supposes, are the residue of
the time when working animals often lived in the houses of the peasants who
owned them. They were not, however, part of the family in the way that pets
are. One might well, for instance, kill them for their meat. It is with the
bourgeois family, separated from work, that pets appeared in the form we
know them. They fill in a certain space. They are, for instance, perfect
siblings, especially to children who do not have them, but as well to those
who do. One does not fear their rivalry, for instance. They are said often to
look like their owners or their owners to look like them. Projections
beginning in kinship are easy to make with them. It is in this capacity
ordinarily that people speak to animals and that they imagine the animal
responding, though before that the workhorse or the water buffalo of the
tropics were also spoken to. Can one say, then, that the cat cannot speak?
They cannot speak to certain people. If they speak to children it is
because children find transferential relations in them. Adults might do so as
well, but, out of convention, hearing the animal’s response they refuse to
accept the independent being of the cat. The answer of the pet is never
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235
contentious and usually is reassuring. As too the domestic animals that
preceded the pet, though perhaps less so. The workhorse, for instance, beaten
by its master who depended on it for a livelihood, no doubt repeated his
owner’s feelings. So too the water buffalo, the familiar animal of much of the
tropics, is spoken to by its caretakers. The cat who lives with the Derrida
family was not a pet and not a domestic animal. At least not at the moment he
followed Derrida into the bathroom.
The animal can be a substitute human:
Everyone is in agreement on this subject. The discussion is closed in
advance. It would be dumber than the dumb animals [plus bête que
les bêtes] to doubt it. Even the dumb animals know this. (So ask the
ass or the ram of Abraham […] They know what happens when men
say, ‘here I am’ to God, so accepting to sacrifice themselves, to
sacrifice their sacrifice or to pardon themselves). (52)
The sacrificial animal can be such because he stands for a human, sometimes
a son. If he “knows” what is in store for him, it simply points to the identity
given to him by transference and which allows him to speak and be spoken
to. The cat who enters the bathroom with Derrida, who looks at him, has been
stripped of his transferential possibilities:
Non, mais non, my cat the cat who looks at me in the bedroom or in
the bathroom, this cat who is perhaps not “my cat” [“mon chat” ni
“ma chatte”] it does not represent, as an ambassador, the immense
symbolic responsibility which our culture has always laid on the
feline race […] If I say, “it [he, il] is a real cat” who sees me nude, it
is to mark its irreplaceable singularity. When he responds to his
name […] he does not do so as a type, “cat,” and even less so as a
cat [chat ou une chatte]. Even before this identification, it comes to
me as this irreplaceable living being who enters my space, in this
place where he can encounter me, see me, indeed see me naked. (26)
This cat of which Derrida speaks has no symbolic significance. It does not
stand for anything or, for that matter, for anyone, Derrida in particular. It is
possibly not even his cat. It cannot be sacrificed. If there is a sacrifice here, it
is Derrida himself who is offered up. He, naked in front of the cat, is no
longer Jacques Derrida. He has given up his social identity, or had it taken
from him, including his name. There is only the gesture, the exchange of
glances which, taken into account, tells of the impossibility of this gesture
ripening into the symbolic or the semiotic. Derrida questions his own identity
when he finds himself in that situation and asks whom he should ask to find
it. “Who am I then? Who should I ask if not the other? And perhaps the cat
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himself?” (20). But he does not ask the cat, no doubt because this cat has
been deprived of its transferential associations, leaving nothing to address.
(Had he done so, the reply would not be repeatable.)
Instead Derrida turns to other philosophers who have never mentioned
being possibly embarrassed by the gaze of an animal. Such an event has been
excluded from serious philosophical consideration. It is an ambiguous
moment. To take the cat seriously is to risk being exposed by a philosophical
judgment. But if one is correct and one is a philosopher oneself, one is
embarrassed on their behalf. They missed something elementary and Derrida
is embarrassed to be grouped with them.
Suppose Derrida made no reflection on the neglect of philosophers
before him. What if instead he spoke of the exchange of looks with the cat.
Had this been the case we would have looked for the reasons for this moment.
We would have searched his biography for something like the Pieds Nickelés
as the basis for his recognition of the cat. Very likely we would not have
found it. No doubt Derrida also did not find it or did not look for it,
occupying himself instead with the reasons for his predecessors’ neglect of
the possibility of such an exchange. If he had merely reported the exchange
alone the encounter with the cat would possibly be uncanny. The exchange
might seem to be based on something other than the established relationship –
master and pet, perhaps – which would have called for a search for the basis
of a transferential moment. Once the cat appears as something other than the
cat, and we do not know what that might be, the exchange would be
unsettling. But this cat has no references; there is no figure to unpack. What is
left to trigger shame is simply its glance, or rather, its return glance.
Something passes between them. At a moment of nakedness Derrida notices
and is embarrassed. But for no given reason other than the sense of having
been seen and having noticed that he was so.
Derrida is ashamed or embarrassed, but also “ashamed to be ashamed.”
Seeing the cat look at him, he moves to the cat that philosophers have never
exchanged glances with. It is this absent cat, absent from Derrida’s
predecessors’ experience or at least from their accounts, that then appears in
front of him. This is what previous philosophers did not see. But once seen it
reveals nothing about itself, nor does there seem to be anything special to be
revealed. It is not, for instance, the return of earlier cats, thus producing the
uncanny. It is merely the cat that followed Derrida into the bathroom and that
stimulated his thinking about philosophy. The cat that looks at Derrida has a
reference that is plain to see once one looks (or thinks). One does not find a
presence that calls for references that need to be revealed. This cat is, indeed,
“totally other.” It is taken as such rather than being transformed into
something to be wondered at or made into a figure – of evil, of beauty, of
wisdom – in the way of the savage other whose otherness is threatening. It is
not a figure, Derrida says. It is simply an other, one out of “all others” who is
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
237
“totally other.” Stop. Or rather, think about why this totally other has not been
thought about. Follow this cat. Follow it to philosophers who ignored
animals. Follow it further to the totally other before the uncanny has been
attributed to it. Follow it further to the appearance of totally others – but not
uncanny ones – as they manifest themselves in other forms and places.27
When Sartre speaks of the exchange of regards of whites and Africans, of
the exposure of the former that would occur through it, “the African”
formerly without significance takes on significance and hierarchy is
drastically revised or perhaps collapses. It is close to what Bataille imagines
when amusement is taken seriously. Blood flows. Sartre’s “African” produces
uncanny effects. Seeing him, the white man comes to feel unnatural to
himself. To exchange regards with “the African” nonetheless would be to
domesticate the savage from the European perspective; to restore a hidden
reality. It could then banish the uncanny. It is politically and morally right to
affect an exchange of looks; it turns the savage into a person capable of being
integrated into European society.
One can understand Sartre’s picture of the confrontation of whites and
Africans by contrast to Hegel’s description of Africa. There is no such
exchange of regards of whites and Africans in The Philosophy of History.
They were not capable of becoming partners is such a transaction. To do so
would be to take the insignificant as demanding a response. Instead, Hegel
proposed Africans be brought into the dialect in the only way he could
imagine it being done – by becoming slaves. Slavery, he thought, though
unjust, was “a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the
culture connected with it” (99).
Sartre’s white man feels his clothes are unnatural. He is uncanny to
himself. To tame that feeling, he has to understand the African, to grant him
the universality that Hegel felt he lacked and in this way to be able to
exchange “normally” with him. And thus to accept him as a political actor. At
that point we arrive where we were in the consideration of the ethnically
different other before the Quai Branly and before Derrida. But the
assumptions of the last two are not in agreement. In the first, a certain
universality reigns. In the second, precisely leaving out the universal leaves
the basis of communication. Derrida’s cat provokes an exchange between the
two of them. An exchange devoid of transcendent categories appropriable
through the voice; thus a nonlogocentric means of communication. It is
precisely on this basis that all others can be totally other. At once “other,” that
is, something one has a relation to that is not us, and totally other, with
nothing in common. And in particular without an uncanny dimension that
would restore significance once revealed for what it is. And thus make the
totally other something less than that.
The sans papiers may not speak my languages. But when I meet him,
whoever he is, he is a singular other and he can be a totally other. He is not to
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be found in the Quai Branly and not to be feared as he once was. Historical
circumstances – the end of colonialism in particular, of course – have stripped
him of his savagery but left him vulnerable. The Quai Branly does little to
help him. Derrida’s formulation gives him, along with all of us, a total
otherness that, when it arrives, shows us to be in communication of a sort we
had not earlier recognized. And then?
NOTES
1
This article is an abridged and revised version of the article of the same name in
Siegel, Objects and Objections of Ethnology.
2
“Non au Musée des arts premiers.”
3
Ibid.
4
For an English language account of the sources of the collections in the Quai Branly,
see Sally Price. For an account of the war between ethnographers and their opponents
told from the point of view of the first, see Bernard Dupaigne.
5
This happened earlier in America than in France. See William Sturtevant who, decades ago, complained that anthropologists (Americans) were making no use of the
extensive collections stored in museums.
6
Stéphane Martin, the director of the museum, noted in an interview that ethnographic
museums “have the weakness often to present contemporary productions indiscriminately […].” He continues, “They do not take into account that in not taking into account of universal rules, good or bad, of contemporary art they exclude themselves
from the cultural stakes.” Aesthetic value takes precedence. Peoples whose objects do
not count in “the cultural stakes” will not find themselves on display in the museums.
He gave as an example contemporary Inuit art, which is never exhibited in the same
locations as Warhol or Yinka Shonibare, who were celebrated at the Venice Biennial.
7
William Sturtevant long ago pointed out that the early history of ethnography was
independent of collections. The objects from the cabinets of curiosities were not the
basis for it. Rather, “the development of ethnology […] grew instead out of written
collections of customs-compendia from travelers’ accounts and from classical literature of such things as religious customs and marriage customs – a different kind of
collecting […].” But, as he also points out, the development of museum collecting and
the development of ethnology were simultaneous, leaving objects important. The situation in France was different than in the United States. The French museum was a
much more important site of ethnological research. Moreover, objects put on public
display, available for direct inspection, even though accompanied by ethnographic
information, allowed for a popular understanding of cultures that could be quite different from that of ethnographers. In particular the idea of the savage (a word less
ambiguous in English than in French) remained lodged in much of popular mentality.
Making the provenance of these objects national rather than tribal would presumably
cleanse them of this association.
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
8
239
See Rolande Bonnain. For the history of the Trocadéro museum see Nélia Dias.
9
According to Georges Henri Rivière, the Trocadéro, the ethnology museum Rivet
headed, the predecessor of the Musée de l’Homme, “could become a beaux-arts museum, its objects grouped together under the aegis of a single aesthetic. A poor principle which in truth would end in upsetting the picture” that ethnography gives. The
result would be a chance collection of objects.
10
Jamin says of Leiris here that he does not posit an equivalence of African and Western art objects but rather shows that Africans have their own aesthetic.
11
Franz Boas described Northwest Coast Indian objects in a similar way in Primitive
Art.
12
De l’Éstoile 54, quoting the Report général of the Exposition, page 377. Rudolf
Gasché stresses in The Idea of Form that the idea of beauty arises for Kant primarily
out of nature, that is, out of the undefined wilds.
13
Rivet quoted in Jamin (15).
14
Apollinaire was concerned too about rising prices. France was being left out as
German conservators had funds available. “Fetishes sold for a louis five or six years
ago are today regarded as extremely precious objects […] It is time for France, whose
extremely varied colonies are so rich in works of art, to save the rest of exotic civilizations.” He suggested a new museum, the equivalent of the Louvre, which was, finally,
the idea that prevailed nearly a century later.
15
For Kerchache and his role in placing “arts premiers” in the Louvre and the Quai
Branly, see Raymond Corbey.
16
Appiah adds that the Nok could, nonetheless, as a culture rather than a people, have
descendents. Even so, “If Nok civilization came to an end and its people became
something else, why should those descendants have a special claim on those objects,
buried in the forest and forgotten for so long? And, even if they do have a special
claim, what has that got to do with Nigeria, where, let us suppose, a majority of those
descendants now live?” (120). For another extended discussion of this issue see James
Cuno, especially Chapter five, “Identity Matters,” 121-145. I am indebted to Magnus
Fiskesjö for bringing this book to my attention.
17
In part too because along with this it became harder to conceive how to present
cultures. According to Benoit de l’Éstoile, the last exhibits were, for instance, influenced by formats derived from popular media. The ethnography museum died in the
first place by indifference: the indifference of the state, which was parsimonious in the
final years, and the indifference of the public. In 2001 the Musée de l’Homme had
only 110,000 visitors, half of two years earlier. Whereas it had been part of the avant
garde at its opening, the sections of that time that remained seemed out of date while
the renewed galleries became an “anachronism,” according to Benoit de l’Éstoile
(204).
18
Aminata Traoré concluded her letter by apostrophizing the objects of the museum.
“I would like to address once more these works of the spirit that will know (sauront)
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how to intercede with public opinion for us. We miss you terribly. Our countries, Mali
and the entire African continent have suffered upheavals. The God of money has been
added to the Christian and Muslim gods who contest your place in our hearts and your
functions in our societies. You must know something of the transactions that have
brought certain new acquisitions to his museum. It is the driving force of the market
called ‘free’ and competitive which is supposed to be the paradise on earth when it has
only brought the abyss to Africa […] Do you not hear more and more lamentations of
those who have taken the terrestrial path, losing themselves in the Sahara or drowning
themselves in the waters of the Mediterranean? […] If so, do not stay silent and do not
feel yourselves to be impotent. Be the voice of your peoples and witness for them.
Remind those who want you so much in their museums and French and European
citizens who visit them that the total and immediate annulling of the external debt of
Africa is primordial […].” See also her Lettre au Président des Français à propos de
la Côte d’Ivoire et de l’Afrique en general. Traoré speaks for “our countries, Mali and
the entire African continent” as the aggrieved parties rather than those of the collectivities of the time. It makes one wonder in what capacity she apostrophizes the objects.
Is it in the manner of those who made them and for whom they were often religious or
ritual objects, or is it as a literary figure of today?
19
“Deep communion” with objects is much less evidenced in museums today where
ubiquitous cameras have replaced eyes. But Bataille’s observation is not out of date.
Taking pictures rather than looking also acknowledges the pull of the objects. For
whatever reason, but not excluding the savagery within beauty even if it is now mediated by a culture of celebrity and market value.
20
Witness the appointment of Rachida Dati, a woman of Mahgrebian descent, as Minister of Justice. It is this ministry which administers the deportation quotas, often
enough through illegal maneuvers.
21
It is as part of a heritage rather than, with certain exceptions (such as Aminata Taoré
to a certain extent), as magical or religious objects that the objects of the Quai Branly
are reclaimed by nations where their provenance is found. Controversies over ownership mark the formulation of national identity, and in that capacity they become objects of political controversy. One of the arguments against returning the objects is
that the recipient nations do not have the means to keep them. This is often euphemistic, masking the well-known fact of major theft and resale of returned objects. This is
not, of course, because Africans do not value them, but because they understand their
value. Their actions mirror the close relation of the market and the museum in Europe.
There is, indeed, a world market. Not merely was the idea of the Quai Branly conceived by an art merchant, but there were also four major auctions of art in Paris of the
type displayed on the occasion of the museum’s opening. One wonders if the same
sort of claims would have been made had the objects remained in the Musée de
l’Homme. Perhaps. But with some exceptions the objects are not reclaimed because of
religious or magical value but for their place in a “patrimony,” a term much more
closely tied to their value as commodities. Ethnological value remains use value. It is
less vulnerable but by no means immune to being exchanged in the market. The “patrimonies” of nations have long been filled with booty turned into commodities. The
very attempt of the French state to conceal the magical use of so many of these objects
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
241
by substituting transcendent beauty as their important attribute raises disputes about
ownership easily resolvable were it a question of religious or magical artifacts whose
use is particular to certain peoples. It is an open question whether the objects of the
Quai Branly have been cleansed of their magic.
22
James Clifford points out that the ethnographic object could shock in the same way
as the surrealists’ productions. This according to Clifford is by the abandoning of the
difference between high and low culture. One could show an object as valuable (worth
seeing, even unavoidable) that had until then been thought mundane. Apparently the
very display was enough to achieve this effect.
23
“At the present moment, ethnography must be nothing other than comparative. In
the beginning it is useful and even indispensable to give minute and complete descriptions of collections, to draw up inventories, and to accumulate conscientiously catalogued documents.” The document here begins as possibly unique and ends by being
one of a type. The reduction of singularity rather than its use seems to have been the
aim.
24
Entry of October 31, 1931, apparently made in Upper Volta (Miroir d’Afrique 233).
25
This is how Samuel Weber interprets the magical language posited by Walter Benjamin in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Weber’s interpretation
of Benjamin yields another Benjamin altogether apart from the one Anglophone readers have concentrated on. Following it further would be likely to expand the issues
discussed here in fruitful new directions.
26
L’Animal 18. All translations from this work are my own. After I had finished this
piece, David Wills’ excellent translation appeared with the title The Animal That
Therefore I Am. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to read this extraordinary book
in English.
27
One has then to ask what became of the uncanny. How is it that the appearance of
the totally other occurs without it? I cannot say except that it possibly marks our
epoch, one that differs in important ways from the time after each of the world wars. It
is not that the possibility of total destruction that occupied the minds of people then is
not present now. But its terms are different. “We,” the peoples of the industrialized
world are responsible for its coming regardless of national identity. We cannot blame
this destruction on an enemy unless we turn against ourselves. The reflection of such
destruction in the totally other then disappears. Uncanny moments are then not magnified into social fears.
WORKS CITED
Apollinaire, Guillaume. “Exotisme et Ethnographie.” Œuvres en prose
complètes, vol. 2. Ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décadin. Paris:
Gallimard, 1991. 254-287.
242
James Siegel
Appiah, Antony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New
York: Norton, 2006.
Bataille, Georges. “Musée.” Documents, vol. 2 (1930): 300.
— “Les Pieds Nickelés,” Documents, vol. 2 (1930): 214-216.
Boas, Franz. Primitive Art. New York: Dover, 1955.
Bonnain, Rolande. L’Empire des masques: Les collectionneurs d’arts premiers aujourd’hui. Paris: Stock, 2001.
Chirac, Jacques. “Discours prononcé lors de l’inauguration du pavillon des
Sessions au Musée du Louvre.” 13 April 2000. 5 May 2007
<http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/elysee.fr/francais/interventions/discour
s_et_declarations>.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Corbey, Raymond. “Arts Premiers in the Louvre.” Anthropology Today, 16:4
(August 2000): 33-65.
Cuno, James. Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over our Ancient
Heritage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 121-145.
Derrida, Jacques. L’Animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006.
Dias, Nélia. “Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro.” 1878-1908: Anthropologie et muséologie en France. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1990.
— “Le musée du Quai Branly: Une généalogie.” Le Débat 147 (Nov-Dec
2007): 65-79.
Dumont, Louis. “Non au Musée des arts premiers.” Le Monde. 25 Oct 1996.
Dupaigne, Bernard. Le Scandale des arts premiers: La véritable histoire du
Musée du Quai Branly. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2006.
De L’Éstoile, Benoit. Le Goût des Autres: De l’Exposition coloniale aux arts
premiers. Paris: Flammarion, 2007.
Gasché, Rudolf. The Idea of Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
1-41.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956.
Hollier, Denis. Les Dépossédés. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1993.
“Tout Autre est Tout Autre”
243
Jamin, Jean. “Documents et le reste… De l’anthropologie dans les basfonds.” La Revue des Revues 18 (1994): 15-22.
— “Faut-il brûler les musées d’ethnographie?” Gradhiva 24 (1990): 65-69.
Leiris, Michel. “La Crise nègre dans le monde occidental.” Afrique Noire: La
Création plastique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.
— Miroir d’Afrique. Ed. Jean Jamin. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
“Un musée pas comme les autres: Entretien avec Stéphane Martin.” Le Débat
147 (Nov-Dec 2007): 5-22.
Perron, Corinne. “Musée du Quai Branly: Une lettre d’Aminata Traoré.” 29
juin 2006. 5 May 2007 <http://www.ustke.org/syndicat/2006/06/29/
211-musee-du-quai-branly-une-lettre-d-aminata-traore>.
Price, Sally. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 81-110.
Rivet, Paul. “Le Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro.” Documents, vol. 1
(1929). 54-58.
Rivière, Georges Henri. “A propos du ‘Musée des sorciers.’” Documents, vol.
2 (1930). 109-116.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Orphée Noir.” Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et
Malgache de langue française. Ed. Léopold Sédar-Senghor. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1948.
Siegel, James. Objects and Objections of Ethnology. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2010.
Traoré, Aminata. Lettre au Président des Français à propos de la Côte
d’Ivoire et de l’Afrique en général. Paris: Fayard, 2005.
Sturtevant, William C. “Does Anthropology Need Museums?” Ed. Daniel M.
Cohen and Robert F. Cheney. Natural History Collections: Past,
Present, Future: Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 17 November 1969. Vol 82. 619-645.
Weber, Samuel. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Benjamin’s Abilities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 4047.
Meditations for the Birds
David Wills
This chapter muses over the status of a recorded bird song in order to raise certain
questions concerning non-ratiocinative utterance, and concerning forms of repetition
or response. Are the birds making music, or simply mimicking, parroting or aping
themselves? Is their song a call and response, a chant, or simply a repetition? Is it a
theme and variation, indeed an improvisation, or rather a mechanical repetition, or
indeed reproduction? Those questions are examined in the context of Derrida’s call for
“another thinking of life, of the living, within another relation of the living to their
ipseity, to their autos, to their own autokinesis and reactional automaticity, to death, to
technics or to the mechanical [machinique]”; and they are developed through analysis
of Descartes’ mechanical imaginings in the Second Meditation, and of the hauntings
of reaction in response in his writings more generally. If, for Descartes, it appears that
one comes to be by thinking only against a certain background of inanimation, one has
to understand that over and against the more general difficulty, which we are only
beginning to deal with, of distinguishing auto-motion from automatism.
1. Original realistic plush beanbag birds with authentic sounds
I recently learned that “a gentle squeeze is all you need to brighten your day
with […] natural [bird] songs.” What is not stated, however, is the fact that
you have to repeat the squeeze over and over, many many times, should you
wish to brighten your whole day. Unless you be one of those cheerful souls
whose whole day can be brightened by a single avian utterance lasting just a
few seconds. Even then, however – and it is here that the problem really
begins – it isn’t immediately obvious whether what you have heard can in
fact be defined as a single utterance.
What you get from that one gentle squeeze sounds like a single repetition
of a musical phrase or bird call. But the sounds produced by one squeeze do
not perhaps constitute a single repetition; what one hears may indeed be a
single bird call or a single performance of that call which consists of a single
repetition of a series of notes. For example, in the case that will be my
paradigm, a certain bright red plush beanbag bird, when squeezed, emits eight
“notes” (it is doubtful whether the standard Western chromatic definition of a
note applies), then pauses, then again emits the “same” eight notes. To
determine whether what one has heard is one or two calls, one would have to
research the literature and understand differences among call, song, repeat
and serial singing behavior.1 In the meantime, however, we have to accept
and interpret the decision of the Cornell Ornithology Lab, for it is thanks to
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that institution that one hears the “repetition” just referred to, it being the
source of the genuine recorded sound for incorporation in certain toy birds
produced in association with the National Audubon Society and Wild
Republic.2 You squeeze once, and the bird sings once, but its song is half
composition and half repetition, or a composition that is pure pleonasm, a
series of notes followed by its own redundant and tautological repetition. I
have verified that repeatedly, by squeezings of Cardinal, American Robin,
Common Loon, and Blue Jay. I consider the number of repetitions of the
experiment, that is to say my repeated squeezing of Jay, Robin, the Cardinal
and the Loon, to be sufficient for me to have scientifically proven the fact of
that tautological repetition in the case of the Cornell/Audubon/Wild Republic
birds.3 You squeeze once, but they always sing their song twice they always
sing their song twice. Or at least, what they utter once, they utter twice. Or,
differently put, they utter once what twice they utter, they utter once when
twice they utter.
A whole series of questions comes thus to be raised: is that song a verse,
or rather a refrain? Are the birds making music, or simply mimicking,
parroting or aping themselves? Is their song a call and response, a chant, or
simply a repetition? Is it a theme and variation, indeed an improvisation, or
rather a mechanical repetition, or indeed reproduction? For those questions
come down to the question of what life is in it: what amount of life in the
sense of what form of life comes out of such a squeeze? How can we answer
that question given that these are toy birds rather than real birds? And given
that they utter recorded real sounds rather than real live sounds?4
The fact that live sound means something different to a bird than it does
to a human has obviously led to a distinction between a “dumb” animal and
thinking human, rather than to an interrogation concerning the definition of
life. But we should perhaps think again, as Derrida advises in terms that we
shall return to, think “another thinking of life, of the living, within another
relation of the living to their ipseity, to their autos, to their own autokinesis
and reactional automaticity, to death, to technics, or to the mechanical
[machinique]” (The Animal 126). Short of resolving the question of the life of
sound, however, we might consider the matter of vision and appearance. The
squeezable birds are said to be “realistic,” their sounds “authentic.” Yet we
know that a certain level of realisticness is sufficient for an artificial bird to
be visually recognizable by, or trustworthy for, others of the same, or similar
species. As long as a wooden decoy can stand in for a duck, I feel sure that
the original realistic plush beanbag toy would be able to function as a visual
simulacrum of the cardinal, robin, loon or blue jay. But such self-deception is
not limited to birds. Descartes, we also know, accepted, in principle at least,
to be deceived by human decoys in the form of mechanical androids let loose
in the streets of seventeenth-century Holland: “But then if I look out of the
window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I
Meditations for the Birds
247
normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax.
Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons?”
(Meditations 21). The French text is here more descriptive than the Latin
from which the English translation is drawn: “cependant que vois-je de cette
fenêtre sinon des chapeaux et des manteaux, qui peuvent couvrir des spectres
ou des hommes feints qui ne se remuent que par ressorts [yet what do I see
from this window but hats and coats which could conceal specters or fake
men that move only thanks to metal springs]” (Œuvres 281). Within the space
of a few pages Descartes’ imagination twice considers the human form to
clothe a lifeless machine, either hats and coats covering automaton passersby,
or, when it comes to his own living body, alternatively something like a
moving skeleton with organs and limbs attached, or a contraption of bone and
flesh that can be best observed when dead: “the first thought to come to mind
was that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of
limbs which can be seen in a corpse [toute cette machine composée d’os, et
de chair, telle qu’elle paraît en un cadavre]” (Meditations 17; cf. Œuvres
276). But if Descartes is given to imagining or finding a lifeless machine
beneath the human form, he considers that to be a means of proving his
possession of powers of thinking that transcend those of the imagination or
“what they call the ‘common sense,’” such as are available to the “least of
animals.” Any old animal can believe what it sees; only a thinker can deduce
what it sees to be other than what it is, for example either dead or alive. No
faculty of non-human animal sense perception, Descartes would have us
believe, can lead a lowly creature to determine whether coats and hats, seen
from a distance, hang on live humans or inanimate automatons. No such
faculty will, conversely, permit the lowly animal to know a piece of wax as
anything other than a piece of wax. Or, in the precise terms of a Descartes not
at all confused by the question of what is really alive enough to put on a hat
and coat, only a thinker can undress a piece of wax: “Any doubt on this issue
would clearly be foolish; for what distinctness was there in my earlier
perception? Was there anything in it which an animal could not possess? But
when I distinguish the wax from its outward forms – take the clothes off, as it
were, and consider it naked [mais quand je distingue la cire d’avec les formes
extérieures, et que tout de même que si je lui avais ôté ses vêtements, je la
considère toute nue] – then although my judgment may still contain errors, at
least my perception now requires a human mind” (Meditations 22; cf. Œuvres
282). As Derrida comments, “The animal that I am not, the animal that in my
very essence I am not, Descartes says, in short, presents itself as a human
mind before naked wax” (73).
According to certain observations and deductions in Descartes’ Second
Meditation, therefore, the capacity of the human mind, in going beyond sense
perception and the common sense, in contradistinction to the capacities of the
animal, progresses as follows: it sees its body stripped down to a lifeless
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machine; it understands that in order not to remain at the level of seeing,
which might perceive real clothes to hang on lifeless automatons, it needs to
employ cogitational judgment; and finally, such judgment or thinking raises
the human above the animal by undressing a piece of wax. At best there
would seem to be some hesitation, not to say confusion, over how to describe
the life form that is reason, at worst one comes to be by thinking only against
a certain background of inanimation. Derrida again:
Descartes’ prudence […] incites him to abstract from the “I am” his
own living body, which, in a way, he objectivizes as a machine or
corpse (these are his words); so much so that his “I am” can
apprehend and present itself only from the perspective of this
potential cadaverization […] in order to define access to a pure “I
am,” [he] must suspend or, rather, detach, precisely as detachable, all
reference to life, to the life of the body, and to animal life. (72)
Descartes’ thinking being establishes itself not only in contradistinction to the
animal life of the body, but further than that, in relief against figures he
supposes to be those of a lifelessness defined by automatic and inanimate life.
He therefore installs a bizarre and paradoxical imbrication of forms of life –
human, animal, and mechanical – whose hierarchical separation is much less
clear than one might hope or expect.
2. Extended, flexible, and changeable wax
Descartes’ wax, from the category of “bodies which we touch and see,”
begins within the artisanal ambit of the animal, having “not yet quite lost the
taste of honey.” It is still very much bees’ wax. Once it is put by the fire it is
found to be “not after all the sweetness of honey, or the fragrance of the
flowers, or the whiteness, or the shape, or the sound, but rather a body which
presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now
exhibits different ones […] take away everything which does not belong to
the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and
changeable” (Meditations 20). What the wax loses in order to become
something conceptualized by the mind is, among other things, its animality,
in the sense of the knowledge of it that derives from smell/taste (honey) and
hearing (the sound it made, while still solid, when rapped with a knuckle).
Before being undressed, or in the process of being undressed, the wax will be
divested “of its sensible finery [parures] or facing [parements]; namely, of
what, in it, remains animal or exposed to animality” (The Animal 73).
Even though Descartes is trying to argue for knowledge of properties in
wax, or properties of the object/body in general, which do not derive from
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249
perception, when he comes back to the possibility that “knowledge of the wax
comes from what the eye sees, and not from the scrutiny of the mind alone”
(21, my italics), he seems to acknowledge that the concepts of extension,
flexibility and changeability are owed to a primary visuality. It is in order to
counter that, as if to distract from the persistence of vision, that he has
recourse to the image of automatons referred to above. For if elimination of
what I suggested was the animal sensory field is not enough to prove a
“perception” derived from “purely mental scrutiny,” and if a form of visual
life still reasserts itself as the means of knowledge beyond the other senses,
then such an illusion will be remedied by raising the specter of automatic
men. First remove the animal; then, if that doesn’t work, introduce the
androids. That is how one can isolate a truly human thinking being.
What are we to make of extension, flexibility and changeability, in fact?
On the one hand they are the basis for this distinction between what is known
by the “imagination,” or sense perception, and what is perceived by the mind,
and define, therefore, the proper conceptions of a body, “everything […]
located outside me” (22). The extension, flexibility and changeability of the
object as scrutinized by the mind should be understood to transcend all of the
following: what is known when one sees first a piece of wax, then sees it
melting and spreading out; what is known when one first sees the piece of
wax at hand, inside, and then looks out the window to the hollow men; what
is known when one first sees wax, solid or melted, then looks out to hats and
coats, concealing real men, or springs and sprockets; and what is known when
one first imagines on the basis of the senses, and then thinks on the basis of
the mind. For in each of those cases of knowledge, and in the relations among
them, extension, flexibility and changeability would also seem to be involved.
Extension, flexibility and changeability are not properly speaking properties
of the object, not what the object reduces to once its animal sensibility has
been removed and once it has been threatened with the absolute lifelessness
of automatism; rather they are the conceptual properties by which the object
comes to be defined by the mind rather than by the senses. There is therefore
nothing to prevent the mind from extending, flexing and changing in its turn.
However, in order to avoid seeing the mind devolve back into an object or
body, we would presumably have to find a way to describe those mental
transformations, which did not depend in any way on visuality as
representative of the senses in general; we would have to understand an
extension whose concept eluded or excluded visuality.
3. Not only virtuoso but artist birds
Though it would be absurd to downplay the role of visuality in non-human
animal sense perception, clearly scent and sound function there at a far higher
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level than they do in the human sensorial hierarchy. We might expect the way
a bird conceives of a body to differ from human understanding precisely
because the animal assigns a different perceptual and cognitive function to
sound. Birds even self-extend, among other means, by singing. In the first
place, what does that do to their status, in Descartes’ terms, within the
category of everything located outside me? Does the bird change and extend
by means of song in the same way that a piece of wax does? Even he, I
suspect, I think, would find the analogy to be somewhat perverse, although
we know that he has allowed for automatic animals – “machines [having] the
organs and outward shape of a monkey or some other animal that lacks
reason” (Discourse 139), animals we should presume to be as inanimate as a
piece of wax – just as he allows for spring-loaded automatons in hats and
coats crossing the village square. In the second place, what does a bird’s
sonic self-extension do to its status as a (non-)thinker if it is thereby able to
know and understand something like territory – surely a question of the
extension of bodies – in a way that we cannot conceive of?
Birds use song to mark territory. But we would have to understand the
bird song, even in its territorial function, as different both from
protolinguistic utterance, and from communication as we normally conceive
of it. To the extent that it is a matter of proclaiming one’s radius of influence
to whatever other animals are to be found within earshot, it has no known or
presumed, no specific addressee: it is a generalized dissemination, or, as
Deleuze and Guattari have it, a deterritorialization: “Sound owes [its] power
not to signifying or ‘communicational’ values (which on the contrary suppose
that power), nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over
sound), but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound
and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization” (348). Deterritorialization
is no longer about the simple extension of territory. It may have something to
do with the flexibility of territory, and indeed, its changeability, but no doubt
in a way that goes beyond the means by which those properties manifest
themselves in heated wax. Deterritorialization would be closer to what we
understand in Derrida as a force of différance: “We must already remark that
the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterritorialization that
are relative and may even occur on the spot […] A territory is always en route
to an at least potential deterritorialization” (326, translation modified).
Deleuze and Guattari prefer such terms as vector, or transversal: “What holds
all the components [of a territorial assemblage] together are transversals, and
the transversal itself is only a component that has taken upon itself the
specialized vector of deterritorialization” (336). The privileged figure for
such a deconstruction of territory is the ritornello or refrain, exemplified as
well by a childhood lullaby or round, Proust’s Swann’s Vinteuil’s little
phrase, as by the bird song. But the ritornello doesn’t necessarily work
transversally or deterritorially. To the extent that it serves to comfort and
Meditations for the Birds
251
reassure, to operate as a placard or “posted” sign, it represents a powerful
gesture of territorialization: “In animals as in human beings, there are rules of
critical distance for competition: my stretch of the sidewalk” (321). The
conservative function of the ritornello is all the more powerful by virtue of its
aurality. Sound, and by extension music, are just as capable of falling into the
black hole of “fascism” as of capturing mute and unthinkable cosmic forces:
“Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, [sound] also effects the
most massive of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the most redundant”
(348).
What is there, therefore, in the repetition of a refrain, that causes it to
lean one way rather than the other, in favor of deterritorialization rather than
reterritorialization? For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer resides in the
capacity to hazard “an improvisation” (311), a capacity recognized in birds,
in particular as their simple territorial sweep or sway gives way to the
transversal effects of courtship, sexuality, or sociality. No longer do they
simply repeat their calls like a beacon foghorn, warning off competitors or
enemies; instead they become musicians, introducing style: “What
objectively distinguishes a musician bird from a nonmusician bird is precisely
this aptitude for motifs and counterpoints that, if they are variable, or even
when they are constant, make matters of expression something other than a
poster – a style – since they articulate rhythm and harmonize melody” (318).
The white-crowned sparrow, like the ovenbird, the Chingolo sparrow, the
European redwing, and splendid sunbird, has a single song. At the other end
of the scale, the brown thrasher is reputed to be capable of over 2000
different songs, and the nightingale, of up to 200. It is possible that a male
sedge warbler never repeats exactly the same sequence of sounds twice
during his lifetime. Some birds with a small number of songs seem capable of
doubling their repertoire by singing either an accented or unaccented song
type, one for territorial defense and the other for mate-attraction. Indeed,
ethologists believe that the latter two purposes constitute the grand taxonomic
distinction for all songs.
There is far from universal agreement, however, concerning what
constitutes a different song, and hence concerning the repertoire of each
species. To take a single example from among my original realistic plush
beanbag examples – bluejay, robin, cardinal, and loon – the cardinal is said
by one authority to have a repertoire of eight to twelve songs (Catchpole and
Slater 165), and by another to produce an innumerable quantity of songs
(Saunders 241). The Cornell Ornithology Laboratory reduces that variety to a
single “whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit” repeated
twice (which may also be a single “whoit” repeated sixteen times). What he is
in fact saying sixteen times, according to the accepted version of the
catchphrase, is “what cheer.” That differs from the Robin’s “Kill ‘im, cure
‘im, give ‘im physic,” and the Bluejay’s “Thief! Thief! Thief! Thief! Thief!
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Thief!,” “too strident to appear beautiful to the human ear.”5 Are any of my
species “not only virtuosos but artists” in Messiaen’s terms, cited by Deleuze
and Guattari (316-317)? For that talent seems in the final analysis to imply
less a quality of composition than a quality of performance, the ability to sing
better than a competitor. And it seems also to be identifiable in the first place
in territorial songs, hence in the fixed, placarded, identitarian, potentially
fascist repetition of the ritornello. That suggests that the quality of a
performance might be determined by its quantitative superiority, by the
number of simple repetitions, by a form of mechanical reproducibility; he
sings loudest who sings most, longest, or last.
But, to return to Descartes’ terms of reference, there might after all be
some analogy between the visible extension of wax, and sonic extension such
as the bird song; and indeed, a difference between melting wax and undressed
wax. Melting wax could be compared to competition over territory: the
further one is able to extend oneself, however thinly one is finally spread, the
greater one’s territorial reach, even to the point of the liquefaction into
virtuoso song or evaporation into artistic composition. But once it comes to
courtship, a bird no longer simply extends; it undresses oneself, attains the
property, principle or concept of extension. And in dancing, singing and
mating beyond even that, beyond extension, beyond thought, the bird
deterritorializes into cosmic music such as Descartes could never have
possibly heard.
4. God as super-extended cosmic bird
Would we prove the existence of God if we were to conceive of him singing
like such a super-extended cosmic bird, only silently?
After all, Descartes’ ontological argument doesn’t work too well. In the
Third Meditation, he famously insists that the ideas he has have to have come
from elsewhere. He then goes on to categorize his ideas in terms of his own
self-representation, followed by “God, corporeal and inanimate things,
angels, animals and finally other men.” That list is reduced to two categories
where the first (the ideas of men, animals and angels) is found to be derived
from the second (myself, corporeal things and God). However, he excludes
things from the latter group because “I can see nothing in them which is so
excellent as to make it seem impossible that it originated in myself” (29),
which leaves, therefore, himself and God as the source of all ideas.
Continuing in the same vein he surmises that almost everything could derive
from him, everything, that is, except the idea(s) of God: “a substance that is
infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely
powerful, and which created both myself and everything else (if anything else
there be) that exists. All these attributes are such that, the more carefully I
Meditations for the Birds
253
concentrate on them, the less possible it seems that they could have originated
from me alone. So from what has been said it must be concluded that God
necessarily exists” (30).
Within this logic, birds (animals) derive from wax (things), which
derives from me who derives from God. God self-extends infinitely yet
remains immutable; however extendable he be, he is neither changeable nor
versatile and therefore not wax; and, since ideas of animals are still more
derived than those of things, definitely not a bird. When yesterday’s wax
returns in Descartes’ Third Meditation – (we understand it to be the same wax
today, and we wonder whether, if honey is the sole food that never spoils, that
gives a certain immutability to wax?) – there is a modified version of
yesterday’s concept of it determined by extension, flexibility and
changeability; he now adds substance, duration and number. But, he opines,
“as for all the rest, including light and colors, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and
cold and the other tactile qualities, I think of those only in a very confused
and obscure way, to the extent that I do not even know whether they are true
or false, that is, whether the ideas I have of them are ideas of real things or
non-things.” Among those varied qualities, heat and cold will become the
exemplar of “material falsity,” the representation of non-things as things,
because “the ideas which I have of heat and cold contain so little clarity and
distinctness that they do not enable me to tell whether cold is merely the
absence of heat or vice versa, or whether both of them are real qualities, or
neither is” (30). Where does that leave “all the rest, including light and
colours, sounds, smells, tastes?” Sound, for example, and in particular: is it so
unclear and indistinct that we are to understand it as merely the absence of
silence? Music as the absence of noise? And where does that leave the bird
song? As the absence of rational speech, we might expect a Descartes to
respond, but then language and song would be like heat and cold, and we
would have no more certainty of the clarity and distinctness, or even of the
reality of one (language), than we would of the other (the bird call). Perhaps,
instead, we should understand a bird song as the absence of what some
observers have identified, for example in the Blue Jay, as “primitive” or
“vestigial”: “The bird has the head uplifted in a song pose, and produces a
series of mixed warbles and twitters which carry only a short distance and are
altogether different from the ordinary noisy calling of the bird […] I regard
this singing effort of the Blue Jay as primitive, that is, as an indication that
the Blue Jay’s ancestors were real singers. In short, the bird at certain times
reverts to the ancestral song. But such a song […] has no significance for the
present life of the bird” (Saunders 104). The hypothesis is of an ancestral
Blue Jay with a different repertoire, living a whole other prior life, relating
wholly differently to territory and mating; or else, of a real singer Ur-bird,
wholly song, pure, perfect, perhaps infinite musical expressivity, the god of
all birds to which today’s humble Blue Jay can compare itself only in the
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mode of imperfection, but proving thereby that such a total song, and God as
that song, exists.
5. The model animal response industry
There is a type of reciprocity in Descartes’ movement though angels, animals
and men, through things, to me, and finally to a God who is everything. We
should read it that way if we are not to advocate – in the robes of the evil
demon’s advocate – that there is a confusion of deductive and inductive logic,
or a circularity of argument from the generality of life and things to the
particularity of God as perfect and infinite generality. We should instead hear
angels, animals and men breathing or singing the idea of them through things
to me and on to God, who breathes back into or sings back into me, us, them,
everything. A call and response bird chorus of ideas flooding the universe
with song.
Response, after all, is everything. As long as it can be differentiated from
reaction it is everything, and, as much as thinking, it is us, what makes us
human. That is so from Descartes all the way to Lacan, Derrida will argue.
Derrida finds in Descartes’ letter to an unknown addressee of March 1638 a
more explicit formulation of the dilemma of the end of Section 5 of the
Discourse. In the Discourse, automatons made to look like monkeys are
presumed to “possess entirely the same nature as those animals,” whereas
automatons made to look like men can be distinguished from real men by two
means (139-140). The first of those means concerns response, and on that
question the 1638 letter is particularly explicit: “never, unless it be by chance,
do these automatons respond, either with words or even with signs,
concerning what is asked of them” (Œuvres 1004, my translation). But, as
Derrida points out, in the letter, the rhetorico-fictive frame of Descartes’
explanation is somewhat strange. We must imagine this:
[A creator of automatons] who “would never have seen any animals
other than men,” [but who] would nevertheless be capable, as homo
faber or technicus, as engineer, of manufacturing automatons that
resemble humans for some, and animals (a horse, a dog, a bird, says
Descartes) for others, resembling them enough to be mistaken for
them […] They would “imitate” (Descartes’ word) “as much as was
possible, all the other actions of the animals they resembled, without
excluding even the signs we use in order to witness to […] our
passions, such as crying out when struck, or fleeing when there is a
lot of noise around them.” (80)
Meditations for the Birds
255
Imitation and reaction aside, animals, like these automatons, and especially
automatic animals, can’t reply to a question. Ask a lifelike automatic animal
created by a fictitious man who has never seen an animal other than a man
whether it is real, and it may be baffled, but it won’t have a good answer to
the question.
In contrast to the situation of the Meditations, though, and the clockwork
hats and coats crossing the square, here at least we are dealing with sound and
utterance, and not just visual experience. When Lacan raises the question of
animal language and response as one of gesture, he does so firmly within a
regime of visuality. In “The function and field of speech and language in
psychoanalysis,” it is a matter of the dance of the bees and the code by which
they indicate the direction of and distance to the nectar. But their dance
doesn’t constitute a language because of the “fixed correlation of its signs to
the reality that they signify” (Écrits 84). For Lacan, bees dance in code to
which other bees react, in contrast to humans who speak in language to
which other humans respond. In “Propos sur la causalité psychique” we learn
further how the maturation of the gonad in the hen-pigeon is a reaction to the
sight of a fellow creature of either sex, even as a mirror reflection (Écrits
189-190). Beyond his surprise at “the purity, rigor, and indivisibility of the
frontier that separates […] reaction from response,” Derrida asks more
specifically how that can be so when, “especially when – and this is
singularly so for Lacan – the logic of the unconscious is founded on a logic of
repetition, which, in my opinion, will always inscribe a destiny of iterability,
hence some automaticity of the reaction in every response, however
originary, free, critical [décisoire] and a-reactional it might seem” (125).
The destiny of iterability functions, in Lacan as in Descartes, as a
technological drift. Not just because of the logic of repetition, and hence of
the automaticity of the unconscious, but also in the mediation by simulacrum
that is the mirror stage. There is something strangely analogous, even if the
analogy be a reverse one, between the coming-to-identity of the human as
lack and misrecognition by means of the specular image, and the coming-tocogito by means of the misperception through a Dutch window of welldressed automatons. Descartes’ uncanny compulsion is by now familiar to us:
wherever there is an animal – or often even a man – it seems that the chimera
or fiction of an automatic one is never far away. The connection functions in
him like some automatic reaction, the haunting, precisely of an inevitable
automaticity.
So, pace Cornell, he will have foreseen the original realistic plush
beanbag birds with authentic sounds. Even a well-trained artisan who has
never seen an animal other than other men, provided he has “given himself
wholeheartedly over to the study of mechanics” (Œuvres 1004, my
translation) could have dreamed them up. I don’t know whether the songs
they sing bear witness to their passions, and they don’t appear to be cries
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uttered such as when they have been struck, even if “gentle” is probably not a
scientifically rigorous word for the squeeze required to make them sing. All
the same, what they utter or emit are indubitably automated sounds,
manufactured to the extent of being recorded; neither live, nor en direct, these
bird songs remain irrevocably technologized in one side and out the other of
their authenticity. Songs of live birds become dead, mechanically reproduced
sounds. A living bird who heard their sound would very likely respond to
them, but no one who stopped to speak or to sing to these birds would think
for very long that they were alive. Living is understood to require what
Derrida calls “a certain auto-motion, an auto-kinetic spontaneity […] [the]
power to move spontaneously, to feel itself and to relate to itself. However
problematic it be, that is even the characteristic of what lives, as traditionally
conceived in opposition to the inorganic inertia of the purely physicochemical” (125).
But what if something in the original realistic plush beanbag birds were
to revive them; what if that were precisely the repetition of their song? What
if, even before the Cornell Ornithologists decided to repeat the sequence of
bird sounds – according no doubt to some better-founded scientificity than
Wild Republic’s marketing department’s choice of words – what if, even
before the song were transmitted and translated into a code of territorial
protection, or a code of mate attraction, there were in it sufficient autopoeisis, auto-affection, and auto-kinesis to constitute nevertheless a form of
“life,” a word we should henceforth use only between quotation marks. For,
as Derrida insists, it is no longer so easy to distinguish that life from what we
presume to be its inanimate opposite; to distinguish automotion from
automatism. His objection to Lacan is not that there are no parameters or
criteria for distinguishing between reaction and response, between code and
language, and between animal and human:
Far from erasing the difference – a nonoppositional and infinitely
differentiated, qualitative, and intensive difference between reaction
and response – it is a matter, on the contrary, of taking that difference
into account within the whole differentiated field of experience and
of a world of life forms […] of reinscribing this différance between
reaction and response, and hence this historicity of ethical, juridical,
or political responsibility, within another thinking of life, of the
living, within another relation of the living to their ipseity, to their
autos, to their own autokinesis and reactional automaticity, to death,
to technics, or to the mechanical [machinique]. (126)
How much life is there in a bird song technologically separated from its
living voice? How does that change if it sounds sufficiently alive to have
another animal respond to it? And especially if it thereby gives rise to a
Meditations for the Birds
257
mating process and the reproduction of life? Do we make our inalienable
distinctions between reaction and response and between animal and human
precisely in order not to have to deal with those questions? So that we can
reassure ourselves that we – we who know what a response is and how it is
different from a reaction – would never be so naïve as to respond, in the sense
of starting up a conversation with a recorded voice? Even if, when that
recorded voice is a voice that sings, we are all too ready to sing back to it or
along with it?
Descartes’ uncanny familiarity with automatons should no doubt be
understood as a function of the mechanicist tradition that he was heir to.
Indeed, the mechanical monkeys of the Discourse are mentioned in the
context of a treatise he had written, a summary of which makes up much of
the final two sections of his essay. That treatise has come down to us in
truncated version as the Treatise on Man, and the latter text details the
workings of a human body that Descartes supposes “to be nothing but a statue
or machine […] made by the hands of God” (99). Thus every fictional
manufacturer, having given himself wholeheartedly over to the study of
mechanics, whom we encounter in Descartes, has standing behind him the
transcendent divine artisan, and every separation of body from mind is
reinforced by a determinate opposition between animate life and inanimate
machine. But elaboration of that opposition inevitably calls the distinction
into question, and the machine of the body often seems to invade the mind.
For example, he would compare the nerves of the brain machine with the
pipes in the works of fountains in the royal gardens, “its muscles and tendons
with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its
animal spirits with the water which drives them” (100). In a sense, Descartes
is already performing the task Derrida sets for us of “taking this grand
mechanicist – and what is also called materialist – tradition back to the
drawing board” to the extent of reinterpreting not “the living creature called
‘animal’ only, but also another concept of the machine, of the semiotic
machine, if it can be called that, of artificial intelligence, of cybernetics and
zoo- and bio-engineering, of the genic in general, etc.” (76).
He at least problematizes the generic purity of philosophical discourse.
Not only are man and animal persistently shadowed by the machine, but his
persistent recourse to fictions such as, precisely, the robotician without
experience of animals, and his propensity for fables in general, function as a
mechanicist and indeed automatic penchant within that discourse, his own
little artisanal fiction industry manufacturing fabulous machines that both
animate and respond to his reasoning.
Furthermore, response itself is something of a generic industry within
Descartes’ discourse, presuming we are able to distinguish it from reaction.
Was it reaction or response that led him not to publish his treatise? He made
that decision after learning that “persons to whom I defer and who have
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hardly less authority over my actions than my own reason has over my
thoughts” (Discourse 141) – persons, that is, who are likely to react to his
actions as fast as his reason responds to his thoughts – “disapproved” of the
work of someone else. We know that someone else to be Galileo and the
persons to whom he euphemistically defers to be the Most Eminent Cardinals
of the Commissionary General of the Inquisition. So respond or rather react
he well might, remembering how he once held his own hand to the fire and
thereby learned something of the similarity of the human body and a body of
wax. Remembering what he recounts in the Meditations, react he well might.
The question is the prime concern of three letters to Friar Mersenne between
November 1633 and April 1634. Each time he makes his position clear: “But
for all the world I did not want to publish a discourse in which a single word
could be found that the Church would have disapproved of”; “I have decided
wholly to suppress the treatise I have written and to forfeit almost all my
work of the last four years in order to give my obedience to the Church […] I
seek only repose and peace of mind”; “Though I thought [my arguments]
were based on very certain and evident proofs, I would not wish, for anything
in the world, to maintain them against the authority of the Church […] I am
not so fond of my own opinions […] I desire to live in peace and to continue
the life I have begun under the motto ‘to live well you must live unseen.’” He
writes the motto, which he repeats after Ovid, in Latin for the benefit of the
Cardinals. Bene vixit, bene qui latuit (Correspondence III: 41-42). One
wonders how well a parrot would be able to ape those words in the face of the
threat of the fire, or how much one would have to slur bene vixit, bene qui
latuit for the words to become the “whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit” of
another Cardinal. “What cheer” – it seems obvious – they scarcely resemble.
It can sound or sing as consonantly in English: he lives well who lives
latently. Descartes is heard making slightly improvised versions of the same
adage or refrain in the Discourse and the Meditations, praising the Dutch
peace (Discourse 126), deferring to the Church (Meditations 6), insisting how
small an intellectual territory he seeks to control. My point is by no means to
question his courage or resolve – Part Six of the Discourse is not without
irony towards “those whom God has set up as sovereigns over his people or
those on whom he has bestowed sufficient grace and zeal to be prophets”
(142) – or to suggest that he is reduced to parroting a Cardinal, but rather to
suggest that, whether it be a matter of his words and actions upon hearing of
Galileo’s misfortunes, or some other preemptive maneuver on his part, the
more reflexive – or genuflective – his response, the more likely we might be
to interpret it as reaction.
However, “response [réponse, responsio]” is explicitly the word he
wants in the machinery of debate that he establishes after completing the
Meditations. He invites debate on his work (“objections”) to which he will
then respond or reply (“put Responsio ad objectiones, rather than Solutiones
Meditations for the Birds
259
objectionum, in order to allow the reader to judge whether my responses
contain the solutions or not”) (Correspondence 340).6 One could as well
imagine the initial objections being called “responses” to the Meditations, and
Descartes’ replies being called “objections.” Be that as it may. A response,
Derrida again notes, is also what the Letter to *** presents itself as:
The letter seeks itself to be a response, it presents itself in response
to certain questions, a deferred or mediated response […]
Consequently, and especially within those responses, [there is] the
question of the response of the automaton, or of the animal as
automatic responder [répondeur automatique, also answering
machine] and therefore without response. (85)
Any reading is automatically, (as a matter) of course, pleonastically, like a
mechanical semantic reaction or echo, by definition, a response. Descartes
repeats that he dislikes the “business of writing books” (Discourse 142), that
he has “never had an inclination to produce books (Correspondence 41),
suggesting that he would prefer not to write and so not to invite or incite
responses. He would prefer to think or sing to himself in auto-affective
response or auto-responsive affect. That is how he would protect himself
from any possibility of receiving a response tinged with a reaction, from the
hint of automatism that he automatically is inclined to manufacture, it seems,
whenever it is a question of an animal speaking. Fortunately for us, we
haven’t had to take him too seriously. Something like reflex, impulse,
instinct, or drive – and Freud and Lacan both should have their word to say
about the remainder or not, lack or not of animal in each of those – took over,
so that he did indeed write and publish books, even in the face of the Index
and Inquisition. Once that were so, from the invited objections of 1641 all the
way down to the present, the answering machine – one that “Descartes could
not have imagined in [its] refinements, capacity and complexity all the
powers of reaction-response that today we can, and tomorrow should be
better and better able to attribute to machines, and to another concept of the
machine” (Derrida 84) – one with a parrot-like synthesized human voice
repeating that the machine is on, is on.
6. My body, my fire, this water
Descartes perhaps steps back from the absolute material falsity of such things
as light and colors, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and cold, from their being
known, as he maintained in the Second and Third Meditations, “only in a
very confused and obscure way.” He perhaps revises their lack of clarity and
distinctness when, in the Sixth Meditation, returning to material things, he
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accepts that in respect of them he is “taught something by nature.” For
example, still on the matter of heat and cold, he understands that because he
feels “heat when I go near a fire and pain when I go too near […] There is
simply reason to suppose that there is something in the fire […] which
produces in us the feelings of heat or pain” (57). He understands that perhaps
thanks to Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others, or perhaps because he is
confident he can control the ardor of his Santpoort hearth. From the
beginning, he is next to it, in reality, in his dressing gown, and in his dreams
(13); he comes closer to it, perhaps close to pain, in order to put his wax
where he can watch it melt (20); next day, yesterday’s wax, restoked fire, still
sitting by it, although he doesn’t tell us what he is wearing (26); finally,
flames and stars in his eyes and the idea, again, of getting so close that it hurts
(57). Fire, we know from the Treatise on Man, is the anima or animal itself,
the “very lively and pure flame” called the animal spirits (100). Fire is the
privileged example for describing bodily reaction, the one one kindles near
hand or foot operating in circular response, reaction or reciprocity with the
one in the pineal gland, as graphically shown by the illustrations in the
Treatise.7 Of water nothing is said in the Meditations, but in the Treatise it
serves, however paradoxically, to illustrate the means by which that flame of
the animal spirits brings about the articulations of the body. According to the
analogy of the royal garden fountains mentioned above, there occurs a whole
aquatic carnival between pineal gland and external heat source, complete with
visitors entering the grottos, a bathing Diana, Neptune, water-spewing sea
monsters, and finally the rational soul residing there “like the fountainkeeper” (101). A veritable mechanics of the fluid once his imagination gets
going in order to explain how burning spirits breathe life into limb in the
body of these fictitious mechanical men designed to explain the workings of
real men “I did not yet have sufficient knowledge to speak of […] in the same
manner as I did of other things” (Discourse 134); as if, once again, in a
proliferating call and response between animal and machine, reality and
fiction, and now also fire and water.
Even at the pineal seat of things, therefore, we find not only the expected
and now familiar opposition between animal spirit and a type of clockwork
automatism, here figured by a Promethean technology derived from fire – the
spontaneous combustion of “one of those fires without light […] whose
nature I understood to be no different from that of the fire which heats hay
when it has been stored before it is dry” (134). We also encounter an
opposition between that originary technicity of fire and one of water. For as
the royal gardens fountains analogy demonstrates, he more easily finds in
water than in fire a form of mechanical immediacy, a turbine instantaneity
designed to allegorize corporeal articulation.
In Amsterdam, Santpoort, and roundabout, we imagine, there was much
too much water, no doubt beginning in the walls and constantly threatening to
Meditations for the Birds
261
drown the natural and automatic hats and coats out in the street. All through
his meditating, Descartes is not about to get dressed to go out and experience
it. Too little fire, far too much water; stay close to the fire. For twenty years
he has been trying to stay dry, since November 1619 it seems, if we believe
Baillet’s biography as it relates to the beginning of Part Two of the
Discourse, where we find him “all day shut up alone in a stove-heated
room.”8 That stove-heated room (un poêle) reads, in its archaic usage, as a
room that is all stove (un poêle). It is Descartes’ own word, of course, the
Discourse, unlike the Meditations, having been written in French. We can
read it as a metonymy of his invention, a case of the fire spreading from its
container – somewhat more artisanal or technological than a simple hearth –
extending to engulf the room; or else a case of the word placed near the fire
of signifying drift, melting and extending sufficiently to engulf the room as a
liquid, like water, allowing him to relax and meditate as if in a warm bath. In
the poêle metonymized as heated room we could perhaps trace a movement
from animal reaction to ratiocinative response, but there would still be the
same sound on either side of that divide, or of that mirror, from poêle to
poêle, (de poêle à poêle in fact until he is à poil and naked as a jay bird or as
wax in his bed, dreaming of the body he doesn’t know he has), the same call
and response from automation to animation, poêle poêle repeated however
loony as if from the gullet of some fictitious bird pressed into meditative
service.
NOTES
1
See for example, Catchpole and Slater 9-11, 185.
2
Audubon™ Birds by Wild Republic® is “a collection of original realistic plush
beanbag birds with authentic sounds. These beanbag marvels are a perfect replica of
the original species in the way they look and sound. Wild Republic, the toy brand of
K&M International, Inc., has partnered with Audubon to create this line of genuine
plush birds. Each bird’s lifelike design and detailing is the result of input from Audubon. In addition, the authentic sound in each bird has been provided by the Cornell
Lab of Ornithology and represents hours, months and even years of extensive fieldwork conducted by expert recordists.”
3
In the interests of scientific rigor, I should note the following: 1) the number of repetitions of the experiment is determined by the number of times daily my daughter,
after having her diaper changed and examining first her snow baby (courtesy of
Deeanna Rohr), and second her fish mobile (courtesy of Liana Theodoratou and
Eduardo Cadava), casts her eyes longingly toward the birds (courtesy of Sharon Cameron); 2) since the very beginnings of my investigations I have felt compelled to
give two squeezes to each of the four birds mentioned above, producing two (or four)
repetitions of the call, either because I seek to compound by a factor of two my daughter’s pleasure, or because there is some automatic impulse or desire at work in favor of
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a repetition of a repetition, a call and response effect, or for some other unconscious or
unknown reason; 3) the “gentle squeeze” that the manufacturers cite is sometimes not
enough to call forth the song, and a more complicated manipulation and variation of
grip and pressure, at times bordering on violence, is required. However, up to this
point, never have I failed, in the end, to make each bird sing.
4
The onset of autumn prevents me from testing the probability of receiving a response, from a live bird, to my recorded sound. However, before I experienced the
authentic Cornell-approved sounds of the birds in question, I accidentally observed
during the height of summer that a cardinal that happened to be roosting nearby responded to a relatively cheap, flat and toneless electronic version of its call emitted
from a battery operated baby-rocker.
5
See Brand, Songs 75, 79; and More Songs 83.
6
Lettre à Marsenne, 18 Mars 1641, in Œuvres de Descartes, Correspondance III 340.
7
See Treatise on Man 103, and Œuvres et lettres 823, 865.
8
He was especially prey to another type of fiction at that time, namely dreams, but by
the time of the Discourse they have become “convers[ations] with myself about my
own thoughts” (116). See note 1 at both Philosophical Writings, Vol. I 4 and 116.
WORKS CITED
Brand, Albert R. Songs of Wild Birds. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons,
1934.
— More Songs of Wild Birds. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1936.
Catchpole, C.K. and P.J.B. Slater. Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 1984,
1991. Vol. III.
— “Discourse on Method.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I,
II, III. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 1984, 1991.
Vol. I. 111-151.
Meditations for the Birds
263
—“Meditations on First Philosophy.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I, II, III. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and
Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985,
1984, 1991. Vol. II. 1-62.
—“Treatise on Man.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I, II, III.
Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald Murdoch.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 1984, 1991. Vol. I.
99-108.
— Œuvres de Descartes, Correspondance III, Janvier 1640 - Juin 1643. Ed.
Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin, 1971.
— Œuvres et lettres. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1953.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966.
— “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis.” Écrits:
A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Saunders, Aretas A. A Guide to Bird Songs. New York: D. Appleton-Century
Company, 1935.
CONTRIBUTORS
Anne E. Berger was Professor of French Literature at Cornell University and
is currently Professor of Gender Studies and Literature at the University of
Paris 8, where she heads the “Centre d’études féminines et d’études de
genre.” She has written on the Enlightenment, modern poetry and poetics,
women writers, deconstruction, feminist criticism and the cultural history of
feminist theory, the politics of language, and the cultural politics of the
Maghreb. Her recent publications include Algeria in Others’ Languages
(Cornell University Press, 2002), Scènes d’aumône: Misère et poésie au XIXe
siècle (Paris, Champion, 2004) and Genre et Postcolonialismes: Dialogues
transcontinentaux, with Eleni Varikas (Paris, Editions des Archives
Contemporaines, 2010).
Marie-Dominique Garnier is Professor of English literature at the University
of Paris 8 (formerly Vincennes), where she teaches seventeenth-century
poetry and drama, modernism, literature and philosophy (Derrida, Deleuze),
and, more recently, Gender Studies. She has published essays and book
chapters on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, De Quincey, Dickens, Joyce, T.S.
Eliot, and Woolf, and a book on George Herbert (Didier Eruditions). She has
worked in the field of literature and photography and edited Jardins d’Hiver
with the Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure (1997). She is also a
translator of Samuel Pepys, Sir Thomas Browne, and, more recently,
Madeline Gins’ Helen Keller or Arakawa. She co-organised with Joana Masó
(University of Barcelona) a conference at the University of Paris 8
(December 2007), on the writing of Hélène Cixous (Cixous sous x – d’un
coup le nom, PUV, 2010).
Joseph Lavery is a student in the Program in Comparative Literature and
Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on
nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone and Francophone literature,
with special interests in aesthetics, aestheticism, Orientalism, psychoanalysis,
and colonial allegory.
Ginette Michaud is Professor in the “Département des littératures de langue
française” at the Université de Montréal. She has published on Roland
Barthes, James Joyce, Jacques Ferron, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and
Jean-Luc Nancy. She has co-directed three volumes on Derrida: Études
françaises (“Derrida lecteur,” 2002) with G. Leroux; the Cahier de L’Herne.
Derrida (2004), with M.L. Mallet; and an issue of the Cahiers littéraires
Contre-jour (2006), “À la mémoire de Jacques Derrida,” with G. Leroux and
C. Lévesque. Her most recent publications include Battements du secret
littéraire. Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous. Volume 1 (Hermann,
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Demenageries
2010), “Comme en rêve...” Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous. Volume 2
(Hermann, 2010), and Veilleuses: Autour de trois images de Jacques Derrida
(Nota bene, 2008). She is a member of the international editorial committee
in charge of the publication of Jacques Derrida’s seminar, of which the first
volume La bête et le souverain, Volume I, 2001-2002, edited by M. Lisse,
M.L. Mallet and G. Michaud, was published in 2008, and the second in 2010.
Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of
the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
She is also a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and
Gender at Columbia. A scholar of both mainland Southeast Asia and South
Africa, she has published widely on topics concerning the politics of
representation, mass media, the relationship between violence and value,
gender and sexuality, and the changing forms of modernity in the global
South. Her most recent book is Photographies East: The Camera and its
Histories in East and Southeast Asia (Duke, 2009).
Adeline Rother is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University with a Master’s
degree in Études féminines from the University of Paris 8. She is formulating
a dissertation on how certain enduring themes – sacrifice, reproduction, man,
and animal – are being transformed in a biologistic age.
Marta Segarra is Director of the “Centre Dona i literatura” and Professor of
French and Francophone Literature and Feminist Theory at the University of
Barcelona, and Associate Scholar at the “Centre d’études féminines et
d’études de genre” at the University of Paris 8, where she has been Visiting
Professor. Her more recent books are Nouvelles romancières francophones du
Maghreb (Karthala, 2010), The Portable Cixous (Columbia University Press,
2010), and Traces du désir (Campagne Première, 2008). She has also edited
several collections of essays, including, most recently: Rêver, croire, penser
autour d’Hélène Cixous (with Bruno Clément, 2010), Le Désir et ses
interprétations (2008), L’Événement comme écriture: Cixous et Derrida se
lisant (2007), and Políticas del deseo: literatura y cine (2007).
James Siegel is an ethnographer whose specialty is Indonesia. He has
published several books on that country dealing with politics, religion,
witchcraft, literature, language and other topics. He was for a long time the
co-editor of the journal Indonesia.
Claudia Simma is agrégée de Lettres Modernes. She teaches high school
French literature and tutors at the Institute of European Studies in Paris. She
studied at Zurich University before enrolling in Literary Studies at the
“Centre d’études féminines et d’études de genre” at the University of Paris 8.
Her doctoral thesis, written under Hélène Cixous’ direction at Paris 8 in 2000,
is titled, Penser (le) toucher de l’œil en lisant La Passion selon G.H. de
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Clarice Lispector. Her publications include articles on Hélène Cixous
(“Points de rencontre,” Rue Descartes, 2001; and “A screen of love,” The
Oxford Litterary Review, 2002). She is currently translating Hélène Cixous’
book Manhattan into German.
David Wills is Professor of French and English at the University at AlbanyState University of New York. Originally from New Zealand, he taught
previously in Australia and Louisiana. Following earlier publications on
modernist (surrealist) or post-modernist (Pynchon) literature, and film theory,
his work of the last fifteen years has concentrated on articulations of the
human and the inanimate, particularly in Prosthesis (1995) and Dorsality
(2008), where he argues for the originary technicity of the body and for an
imbrication of nature and machine that takes place outside our field of vision,
reorienting our ethical, political and sexual relations. His work on Derrida
includes a book of essays (Matchbook, 2005) that concentrates on
deconstruction’s engagement with questions of reading, in particular relations
between (slow)-reading and the speed of technology; and translations of Droit
de regards, Donner la mort, La Contre-allée, and L’Animal que donc je suis.
He is writing a new book on forms of technological life.