Between The She-Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood: The Figure of the girl in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign vol. I (original) (raw)

Chercher la chatte Derrida's Queer Feminine Animality

French Thinking About Animals, 2015

This essay situates some of the dilemmas of the effort to think with non-human animate being in the Western philosophical tradition by examining the posthumous work of Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. 1 I argue for the usefulness of Derrida's work on animality for crafting a queer ethics of relating to the living in general, just as his notion of spectrality offered a way to grapple with the traumatic persistence of (historical) affect in the present. Nevertheless, even as Derrida reaches toward a referent by insisting on the particularity and singularity of his (female) cat, what he animates is the lively density of intertextual feline figures in the history of literary and philosophical thinking and writing about questions of figure and reference and questions of inscription (as "cat scratch"). Thus, even as Derrida seeks to literalize the allegorical search for the elusive figure of the animal other as a mode of chercher la femme, his work subtly demonstrates the figural inter-implications that shadow the discourses of feline femininity (involving both sex and species difference) in efforts to meet and face animate alterity. Derrida's theoretical practice can be understood to be "always already" queer theory, if queer theory is understood in one of its valences, that is, as an immaterial de-normativization that works at the level of language, thought, and ideology to critique, but in a viral fashion, by replicating terms and repurposing them so that their operation moves down paths that are overgrown with the bushes of normative philosophical thought. 2 These paths are inscriptions, they don't quite open up; but they leave-or are-traces, and can be followed, like the tracks that Derrida is following in The Animal. Key terms that have emerged from deconstructive gestures include queer, though "queer," I think, carries with it-as the wind does scent-faint but specific whiffs of sex/sexual identity/sexuality. Derrida thus helps us to understand how theory is always already queer, and to affirm this queerness further. Derrida's later work that moves toward the non-human living also has the potential to invest another queer theoretical domain-let's call it animal theory-with a meditation on subjectivity that brings with it traditions of Western philosophizing on the human and non-human. Animal theory is a queer theory in this respect: that it displaces humanism, de-normativizes subjectivity, and turns us toward not difference but differences, one of the most emphatic of Derrida's lessons having been the impossibility of a reference to "the" animal in favor of singular, differential, abyssal relations. 3 Derrida's thinking on-about and with-animals, by displacing the humanist subject (in both anthropocentric and universalist senses), can thus assist the ethical aspirations of a queer theory devoted to refashioning that subject in

Who Follows Whom: Derrida, Animals and Women

In ‘L'Animal que donc je suis’, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and other animals, human faultiness becomes a sign of our exclusive capacity for self-consciousness, freedom and awareness of mortality. While Derrida's argument is compelling, he neglects to explore the connection between the human domination of animals and the male domination of women. Throughout ‘L'Animal’, Derrida equivocates between ‘man’ and ‘humanity,’ and between the biblical figures of Ish and Adam. In so doing, he repeats a gesture that he himself has insightfully criticized in other philosophers, such as Levinas. By articulating the distinctions that Derrida elides, I suggest a way of reading Genesis which avoids this difficulty, but also continues Derrida's project.

The Feminine Beast: Anti-moral Morality in Early 20th-Century Literature

Konturen

Texts of the early Twentieth Century link animalism, gender struggles, and issues of identity in their stark critique of bourgeois gender ideology. This essay places selected texts by Bertolt Brecht and Frank Wedekind in the center of this debate as they elaborate on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of the Western nature/culture divide and his animal imagery. For Brecht, corruption of bourgeois value systems, including gender concepts, undermines any possibility for an authentic lifestyle, whereas Wedekind ¬– a generation earlier – explores the corruptibility of authenticity itself.

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Purdue University Press: 2008

Focusing on the contemporary representations of the 'witch' as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders, this book revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current feminist perceptions of exclusion and difference. It examines a selection of 20 th century Northern American and European 'witch' stories to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the fantasy of the 'witch' widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, I develop a new concept of the witch, one that challenges stigmatized forms of sexuality, race and ethnicity as linked to the margins of culture and monstrous feminine desire. I turn instead to the causes for radical feminist critique of 'feminine' sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking, and show that the problematic conversion of the ugly hag into a superwoman can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970's radical texts to the present, my book explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti together with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.

The Animal That Therefore Derrida Is: Derrida and the Posthuman Critical Animal Studies

2014

This paper aims to discuss the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida’s contribution to the contemporary critical animal studies. Derrida is concerned with a critical thinking that starts with a dismantling of straightforward distinction between the human and the animal and he questions the hierarchical position of nature that bedevils the human-animal relationship. By concentrating on his own theory of animal-subjectivity and animal-gaze Derrida puts the homogenizing concept of animal (popular throughout the philosophical history of animal) into a big question. And by referring to the politics of speciesism he points to the big issue of contemporary problem of marginalization that covers all other fields of critical theory. My intention is to deal with all these issues by emphasizing on Derrida’s animal based theoretical essays specially The Animal That Therefore I Am. [

Animal Writes: Derrida's Que Donc and Other Tails

Demenageries: Thinking (Of) Animals after Derrida. Edited by A. E. Berger & M. Segarra, 2011

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 the uncouth soundtrack left in Derrida’s text by the clanging middle part of the title and its “Que Donc”, imported from Descartes. 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” or pack-formation – among whom Hélène Cixous and Valerio Adami.

The apparition of feminine alterity in Derrida's Politics of Friendship

in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship: Amity and Enmity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), edited by Luke Collison, Cillian Ó Fathaigh and Georgios Tsagdis, 2022

This chapter seeks to elucidate why Jacques Derrida's Politics of Friendship, despite repeatedly criticising the Western philosophical tradition for excluding feminine figures when thinking about friendship, nonetheless refuses to cite or engage any actual feminine voices and experiences of friendship. The chapter’s contention is that, with this strategy, Derrida seeks to highlight the haunting presence of certain feminine spectres within the philosophical canon of friendship. With this move, Derrida also aims to signal the possibility of an alternative politics of friendship that is less violent to the singular alterity of feminine friends. Yet, while this attempt is laudable, it is also subject to certain problems. Indeed, as this chapter concludes by arguing, while Derrida’s decision not to engage an actuality of feminine voices and experiences of friendship does not straightforwardly replicate the exclusionary mistakes of the philosophical tradition he criticises, his aim of signalling a less violent politics of friendship could nonetheless have been bolstered by an engagement with the actuality of performances, practices, and experiences by which friendship is reconfigured today.