Heidegger vs. Capital
The first bit of Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital inspired me to go back to Derrida’s fantastic, beautiful text, “The Animal that, Therefore, I Am (More to Follow)” - or in the original, which plays off the dual sense of Je suis as both ‘I am’ and ‘I follow,’ “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre).” You can get this paper through JSTOR; for anyone interested in questions dealing with animal life, it’s the ideal starting point for getting into Derrida’s thought, not only on this particular topic (further developed in his book The Animal That Therefore I Am), but on ethics more generally. It also has the virtue (?) of focusing largely on the hilarious image of Jacques Derrida, naked, being watched by his cat. As you might imagine, this makes it a bit more accessible than, say, one of his myriad essays on Husserl.
I felt compelled reproduce here, at length, one of its most poignant passages – in part as a counterpoint to Shukin’s rather odd critical reading of the piece, but mostly just because it represents Derrida at his finest:
If I began by saying, “the wholly other they call the ‘animal,’ and for example a ‘cat,’” if I underlined the call [appel] and added quotation marks, it was to do more than announce a problem that will henceforth never leave us, that of appellation – and of the response to a call.
Before pursuing things in that direction, let me confide in you the hypothesis that crossed my mind the first time my gaze met that of a cat-pussycat that seemed to be imploring me, asking me clearly to open the door for it to go out, as she did, without waiting, as she often does, for example when she first follows me into the bathroom then immediately regrets her decision. It is moreover a scene that is repeated every morning. The cat follows me when I wake up, into the bathroom, asking for her breakfast, but she demands to be let out of that very room as soon as it (or she) sees me naked, ready for everything and resolved to make her wait. However, when I am found naked under the gaze of what they call the animal, a fictitious tableau is played out in my imagination, a sort of classification after Linnaeus, a taxonomy of the point of view of animals. Other than the difference mentioned earlier between poem and philosopheme, one can only find, at bottom, two types of discourse, two positions of knowledge, two grand forms of theoretical or philosophical treatise regarding the animal. What distinguishes them is obviously the place, indeed the body of their signatories, that is to say the trace that that signature leaves in a corpus and in a properly scientific, theoretical or philosophical thematics. In the first place there are those texts signed by people who have no doubt seen, observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal. Their gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them (forget about their being naked). If, indeed, they did happen to be seen seen furtively by the animal one day, they took no (thematic, theoretical, or philosophical) account of it. They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them. 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. That category of discourse, texts, and signatories (those who have never been seen seen by an animal that addressed them) is by far the most frequent. It is probably what brings together all philosophers and all theoreticians as such. At least those of a certain epoch, let’s say from Descartes to the present, but I will say later why the word “epoch” and even this historicism leaves me quite uneasy or dissatisfied. Clearly all those (all those males but not all those females, and that difference is not insignificant here) whom I will later situate in order to back up my thesis, arranging them within the same configuration, for example Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Lévinas, belong to this quasi-epochal category. Their discourses are sound and profound, but everything goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them. At least everything goes on as though this troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that they had experienced it at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing. The experience of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. In sum they have denied it as much as misunderstood it. Henceforth we can do little more than turn around this immense disavowal whose logic traverses the whole history of humanity, and not only that of the quasi-epochal configuration I just mentioned. It is as if the men representing this configuration had seen without being seen, seen the animal without being seen by it, without being seen seen by it; without being seen seen naked by someone who, from the basis of a life called animal, and not only by means of the gaze, would have obliged them to recognize, at the moment of address, that this was their affair, their look- out [que cela les regardait].
But since I don’t believe, at bottom, that it has never happened to them, or that it has not in some way been signified, figured, or metonymized, more or less secretly, in the gestures of their discourse, the symptom of this disavowal remains to be deciphered. This figure could not be the figure of just one disavowal among others. It institutes what is proper to man, the relation to itself of a humanity that is above all careful to guard, and jealous of, what is proper to it (p.382-383).
