The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments

Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar

Michael Naas

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823263301
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida's final seminar, "The Beast and the Sovereign" (2001–3), as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world.The book begins with Derrida's analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger's seminar of 1929–30, "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, " the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things.The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida's corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments.

1

Derrida’s Flair (For the Animals to Follow …)

You have to hand it to him: He had a certain flair, Jacques Derrida did, and it was for that that he was often criticized, sometimes even denounced, and especially by other philosophers. He had a certain flair in his person, to be sure, but especially in his language, in the way he did philosophy, in what we naïvely like to call his style, and this is no doubt what drew the greatest fire from his detractors. He had a flair for language, true, but also for argument, for the ways in which philosophical argument must always be tracked through the thickets of language, and claims, no matter however universal or abstract, must always be ferreted out and picked apart through the idioms of particular languages, and in his case, for the most part, the French language. Thus Derrida demonstrated that even in philosophy the nets and snares we use to pursue our game, the signs we follow to pursue the objects of our chase, are always in some way complicit with and determined by what they seek. In other words, the hunter is always in part—though only in part—determined by the game he is pursuing and the game he is playing.

That is why Derrida had no illusions about the possibility of the philosopher ever simply surveying the objects of his or her pursuit from above, of observing objects from on high without having to put his or her nose to the ground in order to follow the traces. And he knew, of course, that when one is following a scent or reading a sign, rather than surveying a field or describing an object from above, the risk is always great of being thrown off the path or getting caught oneself along the way. That is why, for Derrida, the philosopher needs not only a capacity for clear and reasoned argument but also—and there is no better term here—a certain flair, that is, a particularly developed sense of olfaction, or let us just say it, a particularly keen sense of smell. While the French verb flairer means quite explicitly to sense, to sniff, to pick up a scent, or, as we might say, to follow one’s nose, the English word flair retains at least some of the flavor or scent of the French from which it is derived when it suggests a knack, talent, or bent for something, as when we speak of a particularly good student having a flair for philosophy, a “keenness” or “instinctive discernment,” a nose or sense for it.

In this first chapter, I would like to suggest that, in the last decade or so of his life and work, Derrida demonstrated a particularly keen sense for the animal, for the theme of the animal or of animals in philosophy, and that he followed this theme with an unparalleled doggedness in the book that was published after his death, The Animal That Therefore I Am, and in the two years of his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida demonstrates in these works an extraordinarily developed sense, an extraordinary flair, for following or tracking the ways in which philosophy has traditionally treated the animal, opposing the animal—the entire animal world, as we will see, and not just particular animals—to the human by denying the animal and granting the human a series of attributes ranging from language, reason, culture, and technology to mourning and a relationship to death, from the capacity to respond or to weep to the ability to lie or to promise, attributes that will then be at the center of the human’s definition of himself and, as a result, at the center of his philosophy.

I would thus like to follow Derrida here as he follows this argument regarding the animal in The Animal That Therefore I Am and in The Beast and the Sovereign. I will try to retrace Derrida’s footsteps as he reads the traces of the animal in a philosophical tradition that runs from Plato and Aristotle to Heidegger and Levinas, a trail that Derrida himself could never have known he would end up taking when he set out but that, in retrospect, we can and, I think, we are now obliged to follow in the extraordinary corpus he has left us on this subject. If I have thus begun by recalling Derrida’s relationship to language, and the differences between languages, between the French flairer and the English flair, for example, it is in order to suggest, along with Derrida, that language is never transparent in philosophy and that one must always follow Derrida’s tracks in both English and in French, even when the translation is as intelligent, lucid, rigorous, and inventive as David Wills’s translation of The Animal That Therefore I Am and Geoffrey Bennington’s of The Beast and the Sovereign.

If Derrida follows what might appear to be a rather unorthodox theme for a philosopher—the question of the animal, and particularly of the animal in relation to human beings—it is because this theme is uncritically present, dogmatically present, indeed almost omnipresent in philosophy from the very beginning. The thickets and brambles through which Derrida will track down the presence of the animal will thus not be extraphilosophical but, precisely, intraphilosophical, not only contemporaries such as Levinas and Lacan but also Heidegger, Schmitt, Rousseau, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Descartes, Montaigne, Aristotle, and from the very beginning, therefore, Plato. Derrida thus did not invent this theme or trope for philosophy or go poaching animals outside philosophy in order to smuggle them in over its border. Though the animal appears oftentimes at the most uncritical moments of philosophical texts, and often without theoretical justification, it—they—populate philosophy from its very inception. One need only recall, for example, the enormous bestiary deployed by Plato to characterize Socrates alone, who is compared in the dialogues not only to a midwife, shepherd, captain, doctor, or philosopher king, but to everything from a gadfly, torpedo fish, bee, and snake to a goose, swan, stork, even a blood hound, as we see in the Parmenides, where Zeno says with obvious humor but also approval and admiration that Socrates follows the “argument with a scent as keen as a Laconian hound’s” (Parmenides 128c), proof that Derrida was in good company in having a certain flair for philosophy. Or, again, one need only recall within the Republic the way in which the guardians are compared to watch dogs, the desiring part of the soul to a multiheaded beast, and the tyrant to a wolf—this latter example being at the center of the first year of The Beast and the Sovereign seminar. And then there would be Plato’s pervasive use not only of the animal in his work but of the trope of the hunt for the very work of philosophy, not only, as we just saw, the necessity of having a certain flair for argument and dialectic but, in later dialogues such as Phaedrus, Statesman, and Sophist, the necessity prescribed by that method called diairesis or division of dividing concepts along their natural joints, as if the conceptual world or landscape were an enormous sacrificial beast that was to be divvied or carved up along its natural articulations.1 It thus does not take too much digging or sniffing around to come to see that Derrida may not be overstating his case when he argues in The Animal That Therefore I Am that philosophy’s incorporation of the animal within its own project, and the singular line it draws and redraws between the human and all other animals, is a “gesture” that seems “to constitute philosophy as such, the philosopheme itself” (ATT 40).

It is this dogmatic and for the most part uncritical and unjustified division between the human animal and all other animals that Derrida draws our attention to and takes aim at in The Animal That Therefore I Am. First published in French in 2006 and then in English translation in 2008, this posthumous work is the complete version of a long lecture Derrida delivered in July 1997 at a ten-day conference devoted to his work at Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, France.2 As I recalled in the introduction, the general title for the Cerisy conference, chosen by Derrida himself, was “The Autobiographical Animal,” and, as if to sign this conference with his own autobiographical flourish, the paper Derrida delivered as part of that conference was read on July 15, 1997, that is, on his sixty-seventh birthday, and it lasted an almost inhuman nine hours.3 I recall all this as background for reading a work that was presented at a conference that was not just any conference for Derrida and on a theme that was, for him, not just any theme. Hence Derrida demonstrates in some of the earlier pages of The Animal That Therefore I Am that he had in effect been tracking the philosophical treatment of animals—as well as, I should add, the very notion or quasi-concept of flair—from almost the very beginning of his work.4 One might be tempted to think that in these pages the author doth protest and self-justify too much were the list of texts treating the animal not so extensive, from early works such as “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Signsponge, “White Mythology,” Glas, and The Post Card up through “Circumfession,” “Fourmis,” “Heidegger’s Hand,” Politics of Friendship, Specters of Marx, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” and so on and so forth (ATT 35–39). And we can now say in retrospect that Derrida’s meditations on the animal and on the relationship between the human and the animal would not end in 1997 but would continue right up to his death in 2004. Indeed these themes became constants in his work, not only in relationship to what is proper to man but also, and especially, in relationship to the theme of sovereignty, a theme that would become, as I argued in the introduction, dominant in the final decade of his work and, especially, in The Beast and the Sovereign. We will thus want to keep in mind that this work on the animal was hardly the first in Derrida’s corpus and that it would develop into a long meditation on the proximity between the beast and the sovereign, both of whom are either above or before the law, who either see without being seen, with a sovereign gaze that makes the law insofar as it is above it, or who see and are seen seeing from a place that is outside or before the law—from what might be called “a wholly other origin,” if not, as we will see, another origin of the world (ATT 13).

It is thus surely no accident that The Animal That Therefore I Am opens with a scene of seeing or of gazing, the unexpected and somewhat uncanny scene of Derrida describing the experience of suddenly finding himself being looked at naked by his cat. For many, this would be one of those moments when Derrida could rightly be accused of making a show of his flair, beginning a philosophical work with an autobiographical description of an experience that is prephilosophical and rather ordinary, the experience of coming out of the shower and being looked at naked by one’s household cat. But Derrida could not be more serious in this opening scene, this sort of counter-Genesis that recounts the genesis of his work on animals, as the gaze of the other, in this case the animal other, is situated in relationship to the origin of shame or modesty as well as the culture and technics of clothing. What happens, asks Derrida, when a philosopher lets himself be gazed at naked by a cat and then tries to think this experience philosophically? This scene of a human being first looked at rather than looking, an object for the gaze of another rather than a subject whose gaze seeks to see and to know the object before it, sets the stage for the rest of Derrida’s analysis and accounts for its many methodological reversals. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, it is the animal that is first seen seeing and the human that is first seen seen—a simple reversal that is enough to reorient an entire philosophical tradition of thinking the animal other.

Derrida thus treats the question of the animal and of the flair of the animal in philosophy, but he does so by rethinking philosophical argument and method in terms of that flair. By comparing his own way of proceeding in The Animal That Therefore I Am to that of an animal sniffing its way along, picking up a scent and following it wherever it leads, returning to its own tracks from time to time to pick up the trace or scent of another, even when that other is oneself, Derrida puts the very question of flair and its relative exclusion from philosophical interest at the center of his own work: “To put it differently, one would have to ask oneself first of all what there is about scent [flair] and smell in man’s relation to the animot”—a neologism I will explain in a moment—“and why this zone of sensibility is so neglected or reduced to a secondary position in philosophy and in the arts” (ATT 55). In the opening scene of The Animal That Therefore I Am, it is the cat that looks and gazes and Derrida who is seen, Derrida who scratches and sniffs, who uses his flair to find his way through a philosophical tradition that attempts to understand and speak of the difference between the human and the animal. The original French title of the book, L’animal que donc je suis, means not only “the animal that therefore I am [suis]” but “the animal that therefore I follow [suis],” or, as in Genesis, “the animal that therefore I, the human, come after [suis],” the animal I follow, therefore, but then also the animal to which I, as man, will assign names and over which I—and this is where Derrida begins parting ways with the original Genesis—will have dominion.

While we have all probably had some version of this experience of being seen naked by an animal, seen and exposed, genitals and all, and while we have all probably felt the confused embarrassment that accompanies such an experience, the task for Derrida the philosopher is to think the experience of this gaze philosophically—something, he says in a rather bold claim, has never really been done in the history of philosophy since it would have called into question our very assurance of a singular and indivisible limit distinguishing the human from the animal. Listen to how Derrida couches this claim in the form of a challenge:

At the risk of being mistaken and of having one day to make honorable amends (which I would willingly accept to do), I’ll venture to say that never, on the part of any great philosopher from Plato to Heidegger, or anyone at all who takes on, as a philosophical question in and of itself, the question called that of the animal and of the limit between the animal and the human, have I noticed a protestation based on principle, and especially not a protestation that amounts to anything, against the general singular that is the animal. (ATT 40)5

This is, to be sure, a rather strong claim and a sweeping challenge. Derrida seems to leave himself some wiggle room, it should be noted, by suggesting that while certain philosophers might well have called the singular limit between the animal and the hum...