David Farrell Krell, Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida's Final Seminar, ‘The Beast and the Sovereign’ , Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013. 196 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-0-2530-0933-3 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The World after the End of the World
In several late texts, Derrida meditated on Paul Celan’s poem ‘Grosse, Glühende Wölbung’, in which the departure of the world is announced. Delving into the ‘origin’ and ‘history’ of the ‘conception’ of the world, this paper suggests that, for Derrida, the end of the world is determined by and from death—the death of the other. The death of the other marks, each and every time, the absolute end of the world.
Anthropocentric and Authoritarian: Examining Derrida's Critique of Heidegger
Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 2015, vol. 16.1, pp. 27–51., 2015
In Of Spirit, Jacques Derrida claims that Heidegger’s attempted deconstruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism remains anthropocentric and, as such, is inherently authoritarian. This paper takes up these charges to engage with whether Derrida is justified in coming to this conclusion. To do so, it briefly outlines Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism and subsequent re-thinking of human being in line with the question of being, before suggesting that Derrida is correct to suggest that Heidegger’s thinking remains anthropocentric. It then engages with whether Heidegger’s defence of this continued anthropocentrism is authoritarian by engaging with the nature of what it is to be authoritarian. By engaging with three senses of authoritarianism, termed authoritarian in the sense of the author, sovereign, and dogmatic, it suggests that, while Heidegger can indeed be thought of as being authoritarian in the senses of the author and sovereign so too can Derrida, and, indeed, by pointing to passages whereby Derrida links the sovereign author to democracy, I show that, on Derrida’s terms, it is possible to conclude that Heidegger’s thinking is inherently democratic. I then engage with the third sense of authoritarian, authoritarian in the sense of the dogmatic, and by discussing the relationship between being and time, the nature of provisionality in Heidegger’s thinking, highlighting a number of statements he makes on animality that confirm this provisionality, and pointing to the openness inherent to meditative thinking, conclude that, while Derrida is correct to maintain that Heidegger’s thinking is anthropocentric and can be thought of as being authoritarian in the senses of authorship and sovereignty, it is not authoritarian in the sense of the dogmatic .
Derrida Today, 2019
Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997, Derrida’s speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida’s thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994), such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida’s text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida’s asides on the verb ‘to follow’, which in turn invoke notions of ‘succession’, ‘pursuit’, ‘understanding’, ‘consequence’, ‘compliance’, even ‘being’ itself, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come?
Investigaciones Fenomenológicas, 2018
The world, as a unifying nexus of significance , is inherently precarious and constitutively destined toward its own unraveling. Our fascination with a future end of the world masks our realization that the world as common and unified totality is already disintegrating. What remains after the end of the world is also what precedes it, the geomaterial elements, which condition the world without being reducible to things within it. Through our participation in elemental materiality, we encounter the abyssal vertigo of deep time as an anachronistic rupture of lived and historical time. The geological memory of stone situates it at the threshold of world and non-world, while our liability to an immemorial prehistory situates us at the intersection of in-commensurable durations, those of the ancestral past as well as the apocalyptic future. Resumen: El mundo, como un nexo de signi-ficado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra compren-sión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que con-dicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de dura-ciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico.