The Slave1

This chapter takes off from Derrida’s examination of the relationship between the sovereign and the people in Early Modern political philosophy, notably Rousseau’s Social Contract and Rousseau’s interlocutors (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes); and from Derrida’s analysis of servitude or slavery in Robinson Crusoe. It sets this in the context of other Enlightenment writings on slavery and abolition (e.g. returning to the Encyclopédie), and to representations of slavery in the Americas more generally, including the English and French versions of the Letters from an American Farmer by the founding father of American identity, Crèvecoeur. Like the savage, the slave exists on the borderline between what is set up as the human and what is set up as the animal. Supporters of slavery put forward the hypothesis of natural slaves who are (like) animals; abolitionists, including former slaves, focus on the bestialisation of human beings who are forced to be property as domestic animals are. Debates over the precise definition of a slave, and over the distinction between figural and literal slaves, also have a purchase on modern slavery and the difficulty of drafting legislation.

The Love of the Wolf

Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is paid to women writers or to the ramifications of woman occupying the place of the animal in a hierarchy with man. This chapter starts with Derrida’s intertexts for the figure of the wolf in a domestic context: Plautus (Asinaria), Montaigne and Rousseau’s Confessions. It then supplements these by focusing on writing of the twentieth century by Cixous, Vivien (The Lady with the She-Wolf), Duffy (The World’s Wife) and Carter (The Bloody Chamber) which evokes the love of the wolf as both desirable and frightening. Tsvetaeva’s writing comes in as an intertext in Cixous’s ‘Love of the Wolf’, in particular her long poem ‘Le Gars’ and her essays on Pushkin. Fairy tales, notably Red Riding Hood, are also key intertexts. The chapter also returns to Derrida’s analysis of Deleuze and Lacan in their specification of the animal against man.

Man is a Wolf to Man1

This focuses on Derrida’s analysis of the figure of the wolf in the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, particularly in La Fontaine’s fables (where the wolf can represent the sovereign as well as the outlaw) and in political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably Hobbes’s De Cive and Rousseau’s Discourses. This is developed with reference to other texts of the period such as the Encyclopédie in which wolves are represented as man’s enemies, rivals for scarce resources, notably food. The wolf is typically evoked as solitary and hungry; for Hobbes he, like man in the state of nature, is dangerous. For Rousseau, on the other hand, both wolf and pre-social man are shy rather than violent, preferring flight to fight – and food is naturally abundant for natural man who would in any case prefer fruit and vegetables to meat. The politics of food and taste are critical both in the self-fulfilling prophecy that man will become a wolf to man, and in the extermination of wolves.

Women and Other Animals: Working Metamorphoses1

Heidegger’s distinction between man and animal, in common with other philosopher’s accounts, also has sexual difference at stake. This chapter takes up his opposition between human creativity and mechanical (animal) technology. Other writers present technology as integral to hominization. In either case, the work of women (as well as other inferiors) can end up on the mechanical animal side – and thus women’s weaving (like spiders’ webs), for example, would be neither creative nor a true technological invention. The chapter analyses some myths of weaving and metamorphosis (such as those of Arachne or Philomela); and then turns to contemporary women writing back. Duffy’s poetry mocks those, like Aesop, who lay down the law about animals and humans; Darrieussecq and Ndiaye’s novels rewrite metamorphosis into a pig, wolf, or dogs.

Wanting Conclusions

This chapter reflects on the work of the book in supplementing Derrida’s writing on animals and the animal-human divide, by widening his focus on the Enlightenment to include a greater range of writings in that period on wolves, savages and slaves. Equally his suggestion that the animal-human boundary always implies or implicates sexual difference is taken beyond the critique of men’s figures (including those of Benjamin cited by Agamben) to incorporate the contribution of women writers. Animal rights philosophers (such as Singer or Regan) emphasize the role of reason in their construction of a case – which Derrida queries for its reliance on a humanist model of rights long used to oppress animals. Insofar as emotion is involved they follow Bentham in highlighting animal suffering, which arouses anger or pity – wanting to avoid sentimentality. However, Haraway or Hearne, for example, focus on case studies of ethical and mutual communication, affection, respect and learning between humans and animals, as well as animal suffering. This relation to otherness, which could include love or friendship, involves both an interrogation of man’s confidence in ascribing properties to himself alone and an openness to the potential or existing properties of any other beings.

The Savage

This chapter takes up Derrida’s analysis of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in The Beast and the Sovereign volume 2, and sets the figure of the savage in the context of eighteenth-century philosophical and proto-ethnographic writing about the New World including Buffon, Jefferson, Maubert de Gouvest and the Encyclopédie. La Fontaine again emerges as an intertext with a fable featuring beavers which highlights the key question whether or not perfectibility divides man from the animal. Other properties that are relevant in this context are choice of diet (in particular cannibalism), bodily adornment (nudity as opposed to clothes, hairiness or hairlessness), living in solitude or in communities, language, sovereignty and naming. The savage is represented on the frontier between the human and the animal – sometimes falling on one side and sometimes on the other.

Introduction

This introduces Derrida’s writings on animals, and sets them in their historical context (after the Holocaust, during the War on Terror and in a time of industrialisation of food production); and their theoretical and literary context from Aristotle to Coetzee, with Bentham, `Heidegger and Agamben key interlocutors. The animal is typically used in philosophical writing as the antithesis of man whatever the criterion used – reason, language, feigning and stupidity (bêtise) being amongst many properties given in various texts (including Descartes, Lacan and Deleuze) by man to himself and denied to the animal. At the same time, animals are used to represent human beings in many texts, including fables or speeches concerning the sovereignty of the state. Derrida is concerned by the relationship between the repetition of the assertion that there is a gulf between men and all other animals (considered as one homogeneous group), and the ethics and politics of the acting out of this animal-human divide both with respect to animals (e.g. the development of domestication) and to human beings who are animalised (e.g. heads of ‘rogue’ states such as ‘the Beast of Baghdad’).