Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human 9780748680986

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Derrida and Other Animals





DERRIDA AND OTHER ANIMALS THE BOUNDARIES OF THE HUMAN

2 Judith Still

EDINBURGH University Press



© Judith Still, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8097 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8098 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8099 3 (epub) The right of Judith Still to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).



Contents

Acknowledgements vi 1 Introduction

1

2 Man is a Wolf to Man

67

3 The Love of the Wolf

110

4 The Savage

182

5 The Slave

249

6 Women and Other Animals: Working Metamorphoses

304

7 Wanting Conclusion

358

Bibliography 372 Index 391

Acknowledgements

I’d like to express my gratitude to numerous colleagues at Nottingham and elsewhere for taking the time to discuss various questions with me – there are too many of them to name them all here but especial thanks must go to David Murray and Chris Johnson for reading sections of the manuscript and combining helpful comments with muchneeded moral support; Martina Williams who helped with preparing the book for publication – all remaining mistakes are my own; and Naomi Sykes who generously shared the unpublished manuscript of her own book on animals. The University has always been kind with financial help for visits to libraries, and this was supplemented by Santander funding for research trips to Paris in 2014. I should also like to thank Joanne Collie for all her support with this book (as with a number of others), in particular she is the best of interlocutors when struggling with translation decisions. Alan Grafen has been extraordinarily generous in lending me his flat in the rue St Maur – I do not think this book would have been written without that refuge – where good memories of friendship are always present. Short sections of Chapter 3 were first published in edited volumes with Legenda and EUP and a very short section of Chapter 6 was first published as an article in the Australian Journal of French Studies; my thanks to them all for their permission to recycle this material. ‘Eurydice’, ‘Mrs Beast’, ‘Little Red Cap’, ‘Circe’ and ‘Mrs Aesop’ from The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy (Copyright © Carol Ann Duffy, 1999), are reproduced by kind permission of Picador and Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd. Last, but obviously not least, my heartfelt thanks to the longsuffering Keith, Michael, Lily, Ruby and Badger. All page references will be given in the text (using the short title of the work) after the first reference in an endnote which will give full bibliographical details. Quotations from the French will be given first in English and then in the original to allow me to pay close attenvi

Acknowledgements tion, from time to time, to questions of translation. When Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, two of the most respected translators of Derrida, refer in the ‘Foreword to the English Edition’ of The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 to Derrida’s teaching these seminars in English at the University of California, Irvine, they comment: ‘to his evident joy in teaching was often added a measure of suffering and regret for all that remained behind in the French original’. Quotations from other languages will be given in English only.

vii

This book is to, and for, Christine Madge Still, 4.9.22–11.6.14, who introduced me to My Family and Other Animals and to so much more: independence and interdependency, love of reading, love of animals, love of friends, love of family.

viii

1

Introduction

[This book] was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters. It was only with the greatest difficulty, and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I could devote exclusively to animals. (Gerald Durrell, ‘The Speech for the Defence’, in My Family and Other Animals)1

The frontier or abyss­– a ­ nd animals as good to think This book will examine Jacques Derrida’s contribution to a longstanding philosophical and political debate around defining the human with and against the animal, and thus constructing the nature of ‘man’ (a term used advisedly) in a way that has typically evoked a significant division, if not an abyss, between human beings and other animals, often with devastating consequences both for animals and for those presented, or, to some extent at least, perceived as, animals in human form. For however secure a frontier seems to be, it can always be breached for better or worse. My title, calked on a light comic autofiction that typically sees human beings as animal types and the life of various other animals as equally fascinating in its diversity, refers to ‘Derrida and other animals’. The ‘other’ implies that Derrida is an animal and one of many animals who will be the subject. A stronger sense of ‘other’, common in theoretical discourse, would suggest that animals are the other to the man. This book will operate in between those two senses of ‘other’, paying close attention to Derrida’s analysis of the shifting borders erected around the human in attempts by numerous thinkers at different points in history to make it a more homogeneous category, as well as of counter-attempts to disturb that homogeneity. The most obvious boundary for the category of the human is that with the animal, yet it is as difficult to define ‘the animal’ as it is ‘man’. For Derrida, 1

Derrida and Other Animals there would be animals rather than ‘the animal’ (bees are not to be confused with apes), but, he notes, however attentive to difference a writer may be, s­/he still has to reckon with the philosophical and political histories which have made the animal-human disjunction of critical importance. It is crucial not only because of the impact on non-human animals (such as factory farming), but also because a number of (sexual, racial or class) sub-categories of the human may slip from one side of the border to the other, or, more precisely, be expelled from the human, and thus made easier to sacrifice. For Derrida, any such frontier would be one of many shifting and permeable boundaries that have been or could be set up at different times between living creatures­– ­for instance, he notes that all life forms can be divided into beings that have testicles and those that do not. In The Animal That Therefore I Am he discusses the human-animal border in terms of limitrophy, thus explicitly connecting it to his other work on borderlines; limitrophy is concerned with what grows close to the limit and what both generates and complicates the limit.2 Derrida never naively claims, against the metaphysical affirmation of opposition, some kind of homogeneity or biological continuity without difference­– i­t would be too bête (stupid) (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 30; L’Animal que donc je suis, 52).3 His thesis is rather that: ‘The multiple and heterogeneous border of this abyssal rupture has a history. Both macroscopic and microscopic and far from being closed, that history is now passing through the most unusual phase’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 31) (‘La bordure multiple et hétérogène de cette rupture abyssale a une histoire. Macroscopique et microscopique, loin d’être close, cette histoire traverse une phase exceptionnelle’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 53)). He also argues that: Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say ‘the living’ is already to say too much or not enough), a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and­/or death [. . .] one will never have the right to take animals to be the species of a kind that would be named The Animal, or animal in general. (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 31) Au-delà du bord soi-disant humain, au-delà de lui mais nullement sur un seul bord opposé, au lieu de ‘L’Animal’ ou de ‘La-Vie-Animale’, il 2

Introduction y a, déjà là, une multiplicité hétérogène de vivants, plus précisément (car dire ‘vivants’, c’est déjà trop dire ou point assez) une multiplicité d’organisations des rapports entre le vivant et le mort, des rapports d’organisation et d’inorganisation entre des règnes de plus en plus difficiles à dissocier dans les figures de l’organique et de l’inorganique, de la vie et­/ou de la mort [. . .] jamais on n’aura le droit de tenir les animaux pour les espèces d’un genre qu’on nommerait L’Animal, l’animal en général. (L’Animal que donc je suis, 53)

Animal is a word that humans have given themselves the right to bestow as if they had inherited it­– ­while reserving words, language, for themselves and depriving the Animal of this language of noun, verb, attribute. The Animal would thus be enclosed in a space like a zoo or a hunting or fishing ground, a space of domestication or an abattoir, but containing all living creatures never mind how much difference there is between a shark and a lamb or a lizard and a dog. To put a little flesh on these bones: Thomas Hobbes, for example in On the Citizen (De Cive (1642)), is typical of philosophers who use the general category of the animal as a foil to prove the specificity of man, in asserting the difference between men’s agreement (the commonwealth) and any animals including even those like ants and bees who seem to direct their actions to a common aim.4 He also, and this is a related move, argues for man’s rights over animals (On the Citizen, 105–6) and will then assert, as integral to the system of hierarchy, for the husband’s rights over his wife and children, the master’s rights over his slaves and so on. As Derrida remarks: ‘prosthstatic sovereignty, which Hobbes recalls in [chapter 9 of] the De Cive, is indivisible [. . .] presupposes the right of man over the beasts’ (‘souveraineté prothétatique, dont Hobbes rappelle dans De Cive qu’elle est indivisible [. . .] suppose le droit des hommes sur les bêtes’).5 Derrida uses the word prothétatique, ‘prosthstatics’, to conjure up the specificity of Hobbes’s artificial state of Leviathan (an ‘artificial animal’ as Hobbes calls it6), based on a covenant between men, as ‘at once zoologistic, biologistic, and techno-mechanist’ (‘à la fois zoologiste, biologiste, et techno-mécaniste’), of ‘sovereignty as animal machine, living machine and death machine’ (‘de la souveraineté comme animal-machine, machine vivante et machine de mort’) (Beast 1, 29; Bête 1, 54)­– ­and this state implies the absolute subjection of animals. Derrida quotes chapter 8 of Hobbes’s On The Citizen as follows: Right over non-rational animals is acquired in the same way as over the persons of men, that is, by natural strength and powers. In the natural 3

Derrida and Other Animals state, because of the war of all against all, anyone may legitimately subdue or even kill Men, whenever that seems to be to his advantage; much more will this be the case against animals. That is, one may at discretion reduce to one’s service any animals that can be tamed or made useful and wage continual war against the rest as harmful, and hunt them down and kill them. Thus Dominion over animals has its origin in the right of nature [. . .] Since therefore it is by natural right that an animal kills a man, it will be by the same right that a man slaughters an animal. (On The Citizen, 105–6; cited in full by Derrida, Beast 1, 30; Bête 1, 55)

Since animals (defined by man as non-rational) are excluded from covenants or agreements, they can never be part of the commonwealth, and never receive the protection afforded to men by the artificial animal which is the State.7 Laws in many countries today measure out degrees of violence which may or may not be exercised against different animals, but typically the killing of animals for food, or because they are a nuisance, is lawful as Hobbes asserts it should be. Derrida points out the speciousness of Hobbes’s arguments­– while animals may not make literal discursive conventions with ­ men there are many understandings with domestic animals, horseriding being just one example, but also the organisation of territory with non-domestic animals (Beast 1, 55–7; Bête 1, 88–90). Equally, Derrida notes that most citizens have not participated in written contracts with the state, and many human beings are subject to forms of violence equivalent to that meted out to animals. In Chapter 5 I shall look at the complex position of slaves who are also excluded from covenants in some respects. At the other end of the spectrum, the vegetarian Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like Hobbes a key intertext for Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, differs from those philosophers, such as Hobbes, who wish to retain animality and humanity as two distinct and coherent categories throughout, and then allow for the slaughter of beasts by natural right. Even though there are points at which Rousseau does refer to that dividing line (for example in relation to the thorny question of innate liberty as human perfectibility), he is ready also to draw a number of differences and distinctions that cut across both humans and animals, notably the disjunction between those who eat meat and those who do not. This choice of diet relates metonymically to a larger question of living peacefully with other creatures. Rousseau is known for his preference for paradoxes over prejudices­– ­he does not think that men have to be figural animals (doomed to be wolves or sheep, predators or prey), but he does want to consider animals like 4

Introduction men. His Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité (1755)) has a famous and influential note on orang-utans and other primates who might be men, and the key issue is one of the suspending of judgement.8 Both there and elsewhere he makes distinctions between animals as well as keeping an open mind on the setting of the boundary between men and animals. For Rousseau it is neither inevitable nor desirable that the sovereign be a Hobbesian tyrant who subjects animals and then considers that the people are like cattle which he keeps in order to devour. Derrida points to the element of ‘dictatorship’ wherever sovereignty is exercised (Beast 1, 67; Bête 1, 102–3), but would not efface the differences between various models of sovereignty from the most democratic to the least (Beast 1, 76; Bête 1, 114). Rousseau is well aware that analogies, most notoriously that man is a wolf for­/to man,9 serve a purpose such as shoring up absolute monarchy by arousing terror at what is said to be the alternative to strong government­– ­a war of all against all. In his Discourse on Inequality, he writes contra Hobbes: ‘it seems that no animal naturally makes war on man except in a case of self-defence or from extreme hunger’ (Discourse on Inequality, 83) (‘il ne parait qu’aucun animal fasse naturellement la guerre à l’homme, hors le cas de sa propre défense ou d’une extrême faim’ (Discours sur l’inégalité, 136)), and this follows a reference to wolves or bears who are far from enthusiastic about attacking men just as men would not be eager to attack other men outside of society other than in extreme circumstances. We might note here the reference to starvation; determining the cause (natural or social) of famine is often key to a political argument, then as now. It is not inevitable that a thinker’s attitude towards animals determines his or her use of them to figure other men, say, natural man (savages) or slaves. However, it is likely to inflect the degree to which the short-cut is sufficient and clear in its positive or negative significance. As part of his examination of the relationship between human beings and animals, Derrida then pays close attention not only to philosophy’s assertion of a gulf between man and the animal, but also to the ways in which animals are used to think about humanity in a range of writings including fables and fiction. Analysing ways in which animals are conjured up in language (animals as good to think) again leads to ethical questions about their treatment: sacrificing certain animals (say, in bullfighting or hunting) or extending love to animal companions. This is also crucial in relation to the dehumanisation of some human beings, including women, at p ­ articular 5

Derrida and Other Animals historical moments­– ­ this book takes the specific examples of ‘savages’ (indigenous peoples) and slaves in the New World. Animal imagery is widespread and common whether drawing on domestic animals (cow, chicken) or wild animals (lion, hyena); it is also shaped by history and location­– ­the experience of a wolf is different in the medieval period from today, different in Paris, in the Pyrenees or in Canada.10 Travel to the New World, in particular Canada, increases exposure (even if at one remove for those remaining in Europe reading letters sent home, or other texts representing this new wild) both to wolves, competing for meat, almost always characterised as hungry and therefore dangerous, and to starvation. Derrida’s writing will be cross-referenced in this book both with a select number of other works by his contemporaries on the question of the boundaries of the human, and also with some of the wide range of intertexts conjured up in his writing of animals, including Plato, Plautus, Plutarch, Jean de La Fontaine, Hobbes, Daniel Defoe, Rousseau and Martin Heidegger. There will be brief consideration of a few of the key animals rhetorically introduced in these debates about the difference between man and beast, but also of the animals evoked to stand for man (or kinds of men) in the stories human beings tell themselves about political life. I shall move from an examination of Derrida’s response to the recurrent philosophical scrutiny of the difference between man and other animals, to the critical question how ‘we’ treat (with) ‘the other’. Following the intertexts, I shall focus first on the figure of the wolf, and man as a wolf to men, then on man as a wolf to women, and women writers conjuring wolves in Chapter 3. In the fourth chapter I shall turn to ‘the savage’ or wild man, and in the fifth to the slave, or man as a thing (property). The final chapter will return to the question of the humanity of women with fables and tales of metamorphosis. I have deliberately supplemented Derrida’s intertexts with a number of female-authored texts for, in spite of his careful and persistent attention to sexual difference, his canon is stoutly male here. For me this topic is one on which it is crucial that women’s voices should be heard. This opening chapter will set the philosophical, ethical and political scene of Derrida’s analysis of the boundaries of the human­ – ­including the contexts of his writing. In this case there are at least three specific socio-political contexts which require examination: the industrialisation of food production (factory farming) in the late twentieth century (and ‘destroying old Species and making new ones’ as Margaret Atwood’s ‘Adam One’ puts it (The Year of the Flood, 6

Introduction 176)); the Holocaust as extreme example of man’s inhumanity to man, apparently reduced to beast; and the War on Terror (in particular post-9­/11). While Derrida, a Jewish thinker, is acutely aware of the specificities of the Holocaust he also questions the attempt to erect this as a unique case in a certain discourse of ‘After Auschwitz’. Thus other attempted genocides as well as the use of Terror, and even new forms of mass cruelty to animals, all feed into his reflection on the particularity or otherwise of man and his others. More generally, most, if not all, ideologies, or simply phrasings of inequality between beings, refer to the human-animal distinction, typically in order to present the would-be higher term as more human, and the lower term as brutish. While philosophy may evoke ‘man’ as unitary, and other discourses borrow this too (‘les droits de l’homme’ for example11), there is a recurrent movement in and out of the human­– ­women, slaves and savages are my particular examples in this book, but there are others, such as differences of generation or special need. Various qualities or acquisitions are regarded as specific to men in different philosophical traditions: language, reason, symbolic thought, perfectibility, laughter, politics, responsibility, free will, consciousness of death, pretending and so on. In this chapter I shall begin with a brief introduction to the question of the animal-human borderline as articulated in a range of texts by Derrida, and move on to the socio-political contexts in which and against which he was writing. The fourth section will focus on the philosophical tradition, from the ancient Greeks to Emmanuel Levinas, which Derrida analyses, followed by the textual context today­– p ­ hilosophical, theoretical and literary. The sixth section will elaborate on the particular angles of approach that I shall take in the book.

The Derrida texts in question and the problem of defining terms The first work by Derrida to be widely read not only as addressing the boundaries of the human but also as a significant contribution to critical animal studies was the essay ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)’ (‘L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre)’).12 However, as Derrida himself insists in that text, animals as well as the question of the animal are to be found throughout his writing, in the philosophical, deconstructive work on all the philosophers he has analysed, starting with Husserl, arguments ‘that for a very long time, since I began writing, in fact, I believe I have dedicated to the ­question 7

Derrida and Other Animals of the living and of the living animal. For me that will always have been the most important and decisive question’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 34) (‘que j’ai cru, depuis fort longtemps, depuis que j’écris en vérité, consacrer à la question du vivant et du vivant animal. Elle aura toujours été pour moi la grande question, la plus décisive’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 57)). In addition there are what he calls ‘mes animaux’­– a­ll the ‘figures animales’, that is to say, figures of animals or animal figures, in his writings (not, he emphasises, fables). He takes the example of ‘White Mythology’ (‘La mythologie blanche’): ‘Indeed, that essay follows the movement of tropes and of rhetoric, the explanation of concept by means of metaphor, by prowling around animal language’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 35) (‘elle suit en effet le mouvement des tropes et de la rhétorique, l’explication du concept avec la métaphore en rôdant autour du langage animal’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 58)), from Aristotle to Nietzsche’s horse.13 In all this it is important for Derrida to avoid domestication, and rather allow animals some independence in his concern for them: ‘Animals are my concern. Whether in the form of a figure or not. They multiply, lunging more and more wildly in my face in proportion as my texts seem to become autobiographical, or so one would have me believe’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 35) (‘Les animaux me regardent. Avec ou sans figure, justement. Ils se multiplient, ils me sautent de plus en plus sauvagement à la figure à mesure que mes textes semblent devenir, on voudrait me le faire croire, de plus en plus “autobiographiques”’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 58)). The subject of the conference at which Derrida originally delivers the paper ‘L’Animal que donc je suis’ is autobiography: ‘I therefore admit to my old obsession with a personal and somewhat paradisiacal bestiary. It came to the fore very early on: the crazy project of constituting everything thought or written within a zoosphere, the dream of an absolute hospitality and an infinite appropriation. How to welcome or liberate so many animal-words [animots] chez moi? In me, for me, like me?’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 37) (‘J’avoue ainsi la vieille obsession d’un bestiaire personnel et quelque peu paradisiaque. Elle s’annonça très tôt: projet fou de constituer tout ce qu’on pense ou écrit en zoosphère, le rêve d’une hospitalité absolue ou d’une appropriation infinie. Comment accueillir ou libérer tant d’animots chez moi? en moi, pour moi, comme moi?’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 60)). This quotation represents perhaps his first use of the term l’animot­– a­ way of defamiliarising his reader, or attentive listener when the word is used in the singular to replace 8

Introduction the abusively universalising l’animal.14 In the plural the neologism is less critical and would only be detected if the speaker spells it out. Critical animal studies is a flourishing area of interest, as I shall discuss further in section five of this chapter, and more and more texts explicitly inspired by Derrida are being published.15 However, this work in the wake of deconstruction has to pass between a Scylla of mimicry (repeating Derrida is not always the greatest homage) and a Charybdis of over-simplification with respect to the language deployed. One particular hazard lies in the repetition of the dichotomy man-animal, a necessary recurrence for the sake of analysis­– ­and yet ­. . . A number of critics, however much they protest their desire to question both the homogenisation of each term of the binary and also the establishment of a gulf between the two terms, tend to echo the hierarchy with uncanny fidelity. Leonard Lawlor, for example, in This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida, writes: ‘If one raises animals to the level of humans, or if one lowers humans to the level of animals, one ignores the difference that requires living beings to be treated in a variety of ways.’16 The end of his sentence seems fine, with its reference to the differences that require treating living beings in a variety of ways, but the ‘one’ conjured up at the beginning of the sentence who can choose to raise or lower is telling a different tale about the ‘us’ Lawlor regularly evokes. While my comment may seem unfair, particularly from someone in a glass house, in Lawlor’s story, as in so many well-intentioned stories (and not only about animals), animals above all emerge as suffering beings­– ­and humans as those with an ethical responsibility to reduce this suffering. There is a passing resemblance to the language sometimes used by white abolitionists with respect to black slaves. If the return of the binary sometimes occurs in my own writing, then I apologise in advance­– ­it is a challenge to step outside the metaphysical circle. In the second year of his seminars on ‘The Beast and the Sovereign’ Derrida suggests that the contours of Robinson Crusoe’s island are like the limits on our thinking (for Heidegger)­– ­the borders which we must not cross in order to think.17 Derrida nevertheless advises his audience to endeavour neither to consider animality in general, that is to say, the life common (my emphasis) to plants, beasts and humans, and even to gods, nor the differentiated animality of animals. When writing on the question of the history of writing about the animal-human borderline it is necessary to keep referring to ‘man’ and ‘animal’, animals both including and not including man. Yet 9

Derrida and Other Animals these terms are simultaneously in question both because of the fluidity of the man-animal borderline and because ‘man’ both includes and does not include woman. I shall repeatedly be using traditional he­/man vocabulary as useful for both echoing and highlighting this tension. Similar points need to be made with regard to other vocabulary that has a historical specificity, such as ‘savage’­– ­a noun that would not be considered appropriate today and yet if it is airbrushed from language describing past attitudes the reader will lose the sense of the work from earlier periods. If you refer to man and ‘other animals’ or ‘non-human animals’ in an attempt to show awareness that man too is an animal, nevertheless language catches you out, showing that ‘man’ remains a distinct category of animal who can be ring-fenced­– a­ s indeed Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, or La Fontaine would agree from a natural history point of view, even though some philosophers barely go so far. The Animal That Therefore I Am sets out clearly the danger of the very word ‘animal’: ‘The animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 23) (‘C’est un mot, l’animal, c’est une appellation que des hommes ont instituée, un nom qu’ils se sont donné le droit et l’autorité de donner à l’autre vivant’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 43)). Derrida also emphasises the importance of distinguishing between the singular animal and plural animals. A further question is the distinction between animal (l’animal) and beast (la bête), animals (les animaux) and beasts (les bêtes)­ – ­the plural form being generally more open to difference. At times Derrida seems to use l’animal and la bête synonymously (which is quite common in French) and at other times he is careful to differentiate. If I take his analysis of the question ‘Qu’est-ce que les bêtes et les hommes ont en commun?’­– ­which is perfectly possible in everyday French­– t­ hen (if you could abstract from the dense philosophical and linguistic context of these seminars) the best translation of la bête­/les bêtes would be animal­/animals. However, Derrida does sometimes differentiate, and therefore (I presume) the English translation of the seminar gives the question as ‘What do beasts and men have in common?’ (Beast 2, 8–13; Bête 2, 30–6). When Derrida does wish to emphasise the difference, saying for instance at the very beginning of this seminar series: ‘The beast is not exactly the animal’ (Beast 1, 1) (‘La bête ce n’est pas exactement l’animal’ (Bête 1, 20))­– ­there are a range of connotations, including a kind of bestiality of the animal, as 10

Introduction Derrida puts it­– a­ lthough bestiality proper is in fact deemed proper to man (Beast 1, 138; Bête 1, 192). As Margaret Atwood’s survivors of the man-made plague put it in reference to the peaceful vegetarian Crakers: ‘No point in giving spray guns, since you could never teach them about shooting and killing people. They just aren’t capable, not being human as such.’18 ‘Beasts’ is far less frequently used as a synonym for ‘animals’ in everyday modern English than bêtes is for animaux in French. ‘Beast(s)’ is today used more figuratively than literally, from the gentle and becoming quaint ‘don’t be a beast’ and ‘beastly’, to ‘beast’ indicating size or stature (often admiringly, ‘what a beast’­– t­he French too have ‘c’est une vraie bête’), to ‘beast’ as a particularly pejorative term for certain kinds of criminals, notably sex offenders. Thus there is a slightly different set of connotations in English than in French: the two languages do share the sense of bestial as low and cruel, but English has no equivalent of the adjective bête as stupid and the noun bêtise as stupidity or stupid thing (as in ‘I did a stupid thing’) or as an inconsequential thing or trifle. I should note that, because of the lack of equivalence, my translation here is flatfooted and quotidian; in, for example, Geoffrey Bennington’s translation of Derrida’s discussion of Gilles Deleuze the adjective and noun are both left in French, which is probably the best solution in this instance. Particularly in the context of a discussion about ‘man’ and ‘animal’, and perhaps more generally, these terms appear as untranslatable from French into English or indeed German (Beast 1, e.g. 162–3, 169ff.; Bête 1, 221–2, 229ff.), and Derrida concurs with Deleuze that, for example, bêtise, in the way in which he is citing it, is not a defect in the order of knowledge and thus not an error (which would be a common translation or mistranslation). Derrida remarks that some other Romance languages share with French the reference to the beast in a term relating to what we Anglophones end up lamely calling stupidity, but that is not sufficient to overcome untranslatabiliy­– w ­ hich will even, and even more pertinently, occur within one and the same language or cultural code (Beast 1, 170; Bête 1, 230). Derrida cites Avital Ronell’s Stupidity (Beast 1, 68, 170–5; Bête 1, 104, 231–8) where the metalanguage is English though it shuttles between French and German too; Ronell considers stupidity to be a quasi-concept from the Greek onwards.19 Derrida comments on her analysis of Heidegger’s use of the term Dummheit to refer to his commitment to Nazism­– H ­ eidegger clearly not regarding himself as stupid in general­– ­which somehow takes his behaviour ­conveniently outside the realm of the political (or phi11

Derrida and Other Animals losophy). However, as I have argued elsewhere in relation to some translators’ practice of leaving the noun hôte (meaning both host and guest) untranslated, alongside the gain of keeping the specificity of the range of connotations in French, there is a loss in such a transformation of everyday terms into philosophically foreign objects. Derrida analyses Deleuze and Félix Guattari on stupidity at length (Beast 1, 141–84; Bête 1, 195–250), including Deleuze’s statement: ‘Bêtise is not animality. The animal is guaranteed by specific forms that prevent it from being “bête”’ (‘La bêtise n’est pas l’animalité. L’animal est garanti par des formes spécifiques qui l’empêchent d’être “bête”’), pointing to the way Deleuze puts bête in quotation marks to separate it off from the animal­– a­ nimals cannot be bête.20 Derrida argues, however, that ‘stupidity’ is not unique to human beings, any more than all the other properties listed by anthropocentric philosophers. Bernard Stiegler defends Deleuze from the charge of making a classic metaphysical opposition between man and animal in Etats de choc: Bêtise et savoir au XXIe siècle, writing: ‘Derrida fait la bête­ – ­and Deleuze is not exactly Derrida’ (‘Derrida fait la bête­– ­et Deleuze n’est pas exactement Derrida’).21 In saying ‘Derrida fait la bête’, Stiegler is perhaps suggesting that Derrida is being or pretending to be stupid, and perhaps echoing Derrida’s remark that he who plays the sovereign plays the beast, which earns a translator’s note to the effect that ‘French readers would immediately recognise the reference to Pascal’s Pensée that reads: “L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête” [Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misery of it is that whoever tries to act the angel acts the beast]’ (Beast 1, 33). Stiegler goes on to compare Deleuze’s statement that ‘Bêtise is not animality’ (‘la bêtise n’est pas l’animalité’) to Derrida saying ‘The beast is not exactly the animal’ (‘La bête ce n’est pas exactement l’animal’). But it could be argued that this is clearly a different point­– t­ he one thinker saying that stupidity is not animality, and going on to say that indeed animals are not able to be stupid, and the other alluding to the fact that beast and animal are not exact synonyms for each other. Furthermore, one context for Derrida in his overdetermined choice at the outset of ‘La bête’ over ‘l’animal’ in the seminar title La Bête et le souverain is the question of the difference in gender, lost in translation and often overlooked in any case (Beast 1, 2; Bête 1, 20).22 Nevertheless, for Stiegler the key is the question of individuation in Deleuze, as taken from Gilbert Simondon, which, he argues, Derrida does not understand (Etats de choc, section 20, ‘La répétition comme individua12

Introduction tion’).23 Yet the case made that human beings individuate on the level of precisely the individual (psyche) while animals do so on the level of the species, elucidating Deleuze’s point about ‘formes spécifiques’, still seems to me (perhaps not quite understanding the point myself) to make a clear distinction between the human on the one hand and the animal (or, even more sweepingly, non-human life forms) on the other. Derrida, on the other hand, is arguing that living creatures in general are both bête and not bête (Beast 1, 176; Bête 1, 239). I shall return briefly to the question of la bêtise in Chapter 3. Whichever term is used, animal or beast, a further difference opens up between French and English in that l’animal (il) is masculine, and the third person pronoun is therefore identical in form to ‘he’ where English often uses ‘it’. Likewise la bête (elle) is feminine and the pronoun is the same as ‘she’. Of course the same could be said of the masculine armchair and feminine chair, where the translator will always render il and elle as ‘it’ without a second thought. In both languages, for most animals (though not all and the exceptions, such as cows, are telling), as for human beings, the masculine is the generic form, and there is a specific form for the female: all dogs are dogs (chiens), but only female dogs are bitches (chiennes)­– a­ term that indeed pet lovers hardly like to apply to their female dogs today, so predominant have its pejorative connotations become, and thus it has retreated into the professional zone of breeding. However, there is a difference between the languages where personal pronouns are concerned. In translating French material on a wolf (il) in the singular or a lamb (il) in the singular­– E ­ nglish has to decide whether the creature is an ‘it’ or a ‘person’­– a­ nd if a person then which gender. In the plural (ils in French for any group which contains at least one creature or object gendered masculine) both people of either sex and objects are all conveyed by ‘they’, but wherever the singular individual is concerned English must convey a decision. French is carried along by grammar without such choices regarding personhood and sex having to be made until a particular animal is evoked whose sex needs to be highlighted. When Derrida or Hélène Cixous talk about the female cats they share their homes with, the personal pronouns oscillate between il referring to the cat (le chat) and elle referring to the female cat or pussy (la chatte)­– w ­ hile the translator will probably render both il and elle by ‘she’. Many English speakers would not call their pet cats or dogs ‘it’­– ­but an account of ‘the wolf’ is more difficult. A comparison could be made with the foetus and the debate over when to confer personhood. There may be an element 13

Derrida and Other Animals of humour for prospective parents in referring to ‘it’ if they do not know the sex of their future child, perhaps warding off the fear of death, natural or induced. Of course the issue of when a foetus becomes a person in law or in ethical terms is a key question for the debate over abortion. In English, sex to some extent goes with personhood­– ­something which is less true in some other languages. The ‘de-sexing’ and hence ‘de-personalising’ of ‘it’ can be used by bullies in a reign of terror. Derrida raises a different issue of personhood in grammar, in the context of translation from Latin, with the question of whether the wolf is a ‘who’ or a ‘what’ (Beast 1, 61–2; Bête 1, 96); I would take this amongst other things as an alert sensitising his audience to the casual removal of personhood in everyday or philosophical language. He later poses the same question with respect to the beast and sovereign (Beast 1, 137–8; Bête 1, 190–1), reminding his audience that death risks reducing ‘who’ to ‘what’ or revealing the ‘what’ of ‘who’. Without then formally declaring that human death is the same as animal death (how would he know? And Derrida is typically attentive to what he cannot know), Derrida is gently aligning the question. Whether translating or analysing, it is important to be aware of the different genre, status or micro-context of the different texts by Derrida that will come into play, and also which version is being widely read, or read by a specific critic, at which point. Works focusing on animals include interviews reworked such as ‘ “Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’,24 or lectures reworked such as ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’. The latter was first delivered (over roughly ten hours) at a conference in Cerisy on autobiography (or rather, the title chosen by Derrida, ‘the autobiographical animal’)­– ­and the full published version of that lecture includes both a minimally reworked version of a typed-out lecture and the attempt at a transcript of recordings of an improvised supplement on Heidegger. Marie-Louise Mallet signals the difficulty of conveying in a published text the rhythm, the intonation, or the pauses which were very important for Derrida (‘Avant-propos’, in L’Animal que donc je suis, 12–13). It is important to note (as Derrida indeed does) that a conference at Cerisy takes place under the auspices of hospitality and friendship­– i­n many cases long-standing friendship. ‘L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre)’ was first published in conference proceedings, and then ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)’ was translated by David Wills in Critical Inquiry in 2002.25 This is only the introduction to the very long lecture given at Cerisy­– t­ he ‘to 14

Introduction follow’ announced more writing to come though that intention was perhaps partially obscured for some readers by the important play on being and following with ‘je suis’­– ­it is always risky to read Derrida too quickly. As he observes with respect to the time and carefulness of deconstruction: it should be slow, prudent and differentiated (Beast 1, 75–6; Bête 1, 112–14). Although the article is only part of the lecture it was understood as a major contribution to the field and found a relatively large audience. A later section of the lecture was published in 2004 as ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’ in Cahiers de l’Herne, having been translated as ‘And Say the Animal Responded’ in Cary Wolfe’s Zoontologies: the Question of the Animal.26 It was not until 2006 that finally the full text was published as a book­– ­the translation coming out two years later. I give this full publication history because it has affected the critical writings drawing on Derrida’s thinking around animals. There are also seminars which he had no opportunity to revise for publication before his death (and we do not know whether he even intended publishing them in full), such as the two volumes of The Beast and the Sovereign which are the main pretext and context for the present book. The long interview ‘Eating Well’ was first published in English in 1988, then in French the following year.27 This was intended to engage with the point that deconstruction has a responsibility to think in the wake of a reinterpreting, decentring or displacing of the subject. The context of a discussion between Derrida and his old friend Jean-Luc Nancy is thus very pertinent, and the fact that Nancy is Derrida’s interlocutor clearly shapes the direction­– m ­ eaning an engagement with the Holocaust.28 Here Derrida again questions the closure of the human and the exclusion of the animal. Man (not necessarily including woman) is of course the classical subject if ever there was one­– ­caught up in the phallic and sacrificial logic of carnivorous introjections, he points out, killing and eating animals who are deemed not to be ‘my neighbour’ (mon proche), not to be the object of ‘thou shalt not kill’. The main focus of this book will be, as indicated, The Beast and the Sovereign; however, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)’, given as a lecture in 1997, and first published in short (and therefore perhaps relatively more palatable) form in 1999, predates the seminar series, which starts in 2001 and is only published from 2008 onwards, thus has been much more discussed to date. A fifteenpage extract from ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ also appeared in Atterton and Calarco’s 2004 collection Animal Philosophy (113–28)­ 15

Derrida and Other Animals –m ­ uch shortened from the translation published in Critical Inquiry (almost fifty pages) in 2001­– ­the extract is indeed the same length as David Wood’s commentary (‘Thinking with Cats’, 129–44). While it is typically the nature of collections to have to present shorter pieces, I mention the abridging here because of the tendency of some writers in this field to cite Derrida in passing without perhaps having experienced his thinking on the question as it unfolds over a particular time span of reading or writing. There is a tendency to aphoristic or even gnomic pronouncement in the name of Derrida­– ­while a slower, more meandering path might lead in, and to, a slightly different sens, both as direction and feeling. In any case, since this essay has proved such an important text not only for what it says but on account of its reception, I shall briefly outline some of the points of engagement here as well as intermittently throughout the book. The essay makes clear that Derrida’s interest in the question of the borderline established by philosophers between animal and man is long-standing, and that there have been numerous animal figures in his writing over the years­– ­although these have increased as his writing becomes more autobiographical (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 35; L’Animal que donc je suis, 57–8). Writing the self seems to mean, for Derrida at least, getting closer to the animal. The question ‘who am I?’, the gaze in the mirror, for Derrida (as for Rousseau) also involves a kind of stripping bare (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 50–1; L’Animal que donc je suis, 76–7), which, shifting between the figural and the physical, in some respects makes man closer to the animal­– ­in other ways more conscious of the difference with respect to the experience of nakedness, and being seen nude. Many passing mentions of ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ focus on Derrida’s nudity in front of his cat.29 I shall take up that particular question again in my Chapter 4 in relation to the imagined nakedness of the savage, and the assertion that shame is peculiarly human. I should note that Derrida opens this Cerisy lecture with his desire for his words to be nu (L’Animal que donc je suis, 15), and returns to this declaration more than once. In other words, he immediately brings together mind and body in a way that language so often does (for instance, Derrida wants his words to come from the heart) and yet the philosophical tradition frequently cleaves asunder. It is of course also important that Derrida’s discussion of nudity and shame takes place in the genre of the autobiographical anecdote or confession, and that it is a real little (female) cat who is looking at his 16

Introduction penis (le sexe). Le sexe is translated as ‘my sex’ in The Animal That Therefore I Am (4); the French term denotes biological sex or gender, as well as the sexual organs (notably the penis), and also ‘the other sex’, in other words, women. In this context it presumably refers to Derrida’s penis, as, importantly, the object of the gaze in terms of shame and vulnerability. The importance of this relates in part to his discussion of the sovereign phallus and erection as bêtise (Beast 1, 221–5, 256–7; Bête 1, 295–300, 344–7). Later Derrida highlights philosophers’ lack of interest in the sexual differentiation of animals (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 36, 40; L’Animal que donc je suis, 59, 64)­– ­I might add, with, say, Luce Irigaray or Michèle LeDoeuff, lack of interest in sexual difference in humans too. When Derrida tells us this is a real cat­– ­‘this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 9) (‘c’est pour marquer son irremplaçable singularité’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 26)). He is not using the genre of zoopoetics as Kafka or Hoffman do. This is a beloved pussy who might, he imagines, bite him (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4, 6; L’Animal que donc je suis, 19–20) when he is at his most vulnerable, an oral fantasy that will recur in another guise in my Chapter 3 on the love of the wolf who might eat you up. In face of what cannot be admitted, Derrida refers to biting his tongue, a further example of language (la langue) conjoining quite naturally the physical and the linguistic which writing on ‘the animal’ chooses to split apart. Later he writes of ‘la passion de l’animal’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12; L’Animal que donc je suis, 29) with all the different meanings of love and suffering, borne across both the objective and the subjective genitive (a familiar poststructuralist form which will take on particular weight in my Chapter 3 on the love of the wolf). Derrida asks what happens to ‘the fraternity of brothers’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12) (‘la fraternité des frères’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 29)) when an animal arrives on the scene (as he has done elsewhere, I might add: or a woman). Who counts as my neighbour (mon prochain)? When Levinas writes on fraternity, he says that, gazing upon the brother, you must not notice the colour of his eyes­– y­ ou are not pausing on material details but focusing on the humanity of the gaze itself (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12; L’Animal que donc je suis, 29–30). Yet I might say that sounds a little like a prohibition of sensual love for ‘the brother’­– ­and then an interdiction of the animal (and maybe even the woman’s) body. Wood has an ­interesting analysis of the scene between Derrida and 17

Derrida and Other Animals the cat in ‘Thinking with Cats’, reminding his reader of the phenomenological work done by Sartre and Levinas with respect to the look of the other. Sartre focuses on the experience of being objectified if not ‘devoured’ by the other’s gaze, but, as Wood points out, that is the gaze of the other human being. I would suggest that Derrida is precisely expanding, to the cat he shares a house with, that sense that the other projects their own world. Levinas, like Sartre, does not extend his sense of the human being or face to animals­– ­Wood cites him to the effect that ‘the being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics’ (Animal Philosophy, 131). Animals, philosophy from at least Aristotle onwards tells us, cannot respond. Yet those who spend time with cats usually believe that kittens not only look and return your gaze (without you necessarily knowing how to interpret any stare), they also purr and meow meaningfully (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 32; L’Animal que donc je suis, 54). John Berger, like Derrida, is fascinated by the gaze between man and animal but for him, as for many philosophers, this stretches across ‘an abyss of non-comprehension’ similar though not identical for both parties­– ­the kind of statement that provokes me to ask­– ­but how do you know that? 30 Berger comments convincingly on the disappearance of animals from men’s lives over the last couple of centuries­– b ­ oth wild animals and animals raised for food which now tend to be hidden away. Yet, he points out disapprovingly, household pets are multiplying in what are, for Berger, sterile environments where the autonomy of both man and pet is lost in mutual dependency­– ­‘the parallelism of their separate lives has been destroyed’­– ­a strange nostalgia, in my view, for an imagined relation (Why Look at Animals?, 25). Derrida, on the other hand, is differentiating his experience of a pet cat here from Lewis Carroll’s young girl, the Cartesian Alice, who concludes that kittens always say the same impenetrable thing­– ­in other words, they do not respond (a point made particularly in the French translation of Alice where the verb répondre is twice intercalated into the text)­– w ­ hereas human beings can be understood to answer clearly with a yes or a no (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 9; L’Animal que donc je suis, 24–5).31 (A conviction about clarity that is always useful in the case of rape trials and sexual abuse in general, I would add, without casting any aspersions at any distinguished children’s authors or other ambiguous entertainers.) Derrida also references the Cheshire cat with his simulacrum of discussion and madness­– ­but returns to the particularity of his own cat (not that you can own a cat as he and Cixous 18

Introduction are both at pains to point out) who is not a symbol but a living being who, like himself, will one day die. This cat comes when you call her name whether or not that can be considered a response­– a­ n absolutely critical question of ‘the response to a call’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 13) (‘la réponse à l’appel’) (L’Animal que donc je suis, 30)), response to an appeal, calling, or appellation. Philosophy has left animals ‘without a word with which to respond’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 32) (‘sans mot pour répondre’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 54)). Animals are said not to be able to respond, but only to react, and then more specifically not to be able to feign, lie, or efface their traces. Michael P.T. Leahy, for example, cites Wittgenstein (whom he considers to be an authority on such matters) to support his own conviction that it must be true that animals cannot simulate­– a­ nd that this is one element of the abyss between man and the animal.32 I should note that while Flaubertian stupidity, or indeed the ability to dissimulate in general, might not seem to confer a desirable place in the hierarchy of living creatures, it is of course to be viewed in perspective. One element of the perspective is the location of those truly clever writers who analyse such phenomena (one step above the Bouvards and Pécuchets and other autodidacts), and another is the location of animals who cannot pretend­– ­and who are then available for food, experiments and the rest since they are clearly not ‘moral agents’ (Leahy, Against Liberation, 7) living in an amoral world where good and evil do not exist, and so, pace Kant, do not need to be treated as ends in themselves. When Derrida turns to this question of pretence (and discovers that philosophers assert both that it is truly human to speak the truth and also that only humans lie) his most frequent point of reference is the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who asserts that animal ruse cannot cross a certain threshold of dissimulation­– ­a clear case of denial for Derrida. There has to be a threshold since even those who never look at animals must know of the long rhetorical history of, say, the cunning fox (see Beast 1, 89–91; Bête 1, 131–4). For Lacan, the fox might, say, be able to feint but not to use the trickery or second-degree feigning that relates to the Symbolic order­– a­ nimals are trapped in the Imaginary.33 Yet what is the clear boundary between feigning and second-degree feigning (for animals or men)? When Derrida says in French ‘je le suis’ there is an irreducible equivocation over whether an animal’s signature could efface his trace­– a­ nd a need to go back over these tracks because: ‘The fact that a trace can 19

Derrida and Other Animals always be erased, and forever, in no way means­– a­ nd this is a critical difference­– ­that someone, man or animal, I am emphasising here, can of his own accord erase his tracks’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 33) (‘Qu’une trace puisse toujours, elle, s’effacer, et à jamais, cela ne signifie pas du tout, et c’est là une différence critique, que quelqu’un, homme ou animal, je le souligne, puisse de lui-même effacer ses traces’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 56)). In other words, not only might the reader reflect on animal behaviour and whether animals ever use disguise, but also question the confidence with which properties and powers are assigned to ‘man’. One of the aspects of The Animal That Therefore I Am that has aroused most attention is Derrida’s deployment of the neologism animot in place of ‘the animal’. The general singular word ‘animal’ could always be placed in quotation marks, but instead Derrida succumbs to the temptation to create a new word ‘at the same time close but radically foreign, a chimerical word that sounded as though it contravened the laws of the French language, l’animot’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 41) (‘à la fois proche et radicalement étranger, un mot chimérique en contravention avec la loi de la langue française, l’animot’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 65)). This coinage is: ‘Neither a species nor a gender nor an individual, it is an irreducible living multiplicity of mortals, and rather than a double clone or a portmanteau word, a sort of monstrous hybrid, a chimera waiting to be put to death by its Bellerophon’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 41) (‘Ni une espèce, ni un genre, ni un individu, c’est une irréductible multiplicité vivante de mortels, et plutôt qu’un double clone ou un mot-valise, une sorte d’hybride monstrueux, une chimère attendant d’être mise à mort par son Bellérophon’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 65)). Derrida tells his audience that there are three heterogeneous parts to this term. The first is that in French the plural is heard in the singular noun which expresses neither all animals except man in one, nor man plus animals in one, thus there is a multiplicity of limits and heterogeneous structures. Confusing all non-human living beings in one common and general category ‘the animal’ is a crime, ‘a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 48) (‘un premier crime contre les animaux, contre des animaux’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 73)). (I would note that this could be translated ‘against animals, against some animals’­– ­in other words, not only animals in general but also particular animals.) Should we accept, he asks, that ‘thou shall not kill’ does not apply to animals, that there is only crime ‘against humanity’? The second part 20

Introduction is that the suffix mot ‘should bring us back to the word, namely to the word named a noun [nommé nom]’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 48) (‘devrait nous rappeler au mot, voire au mot nommé nom’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 74)), for the animal is deprived of the word, of naming ‘the thing as such’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 48) (‘la chose en tant que telle’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 74)). In French nom means both noun and name­– ­that ambiguity is important but lost in the English translation. Third, it is not a question of ‘ “rendre la parole” aux animaux’ but of acceding to thought, however chimerical or fabulous, that thinks the absence of name or word other than as privation. About ten years later readers were able to follow in more detail Derrida’s thinking around animals with the publication of The Beast and the Sovereign (La Bête et le souverain I (2001–2002), then La Bête et le souverain II (2002–2003)). The main inspiration for my book is above all this posthumous publication of these two volumes of Derrida’s seminars. Volume I, covering the first year of the seminars, is chiefly concerned with the bestiary of political language and covers a wide range of ‘corpuses’: Derrida as above all and primarily a reader.34 Volume II, the second year of the seminars, is more tightly focused on two texts­– ­ although typically these texts, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Heidegger’s essay World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt­– ­Endlichkeit­– ­Einsamkeit),35 are read along with many intertexts. The Beast and the Sovereign is a posthumous publication of Derrida’s 2001–3 seminars with an impressive team for both French and English editions: Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud for the French edition, and Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf for the English. Derrida’s ‘seminars’, delivered at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales between 1984 and 2003 (and previously at the Sorbonne, and then the Ecole normale supérieure), inevitably show him in pedagogical mode, with an element of opening out, of education and nourishment. He wrote out his lectures for the seminars in full in advance (see Beast 1, ‘General Introduction’, ix–x; Bête 1, ‘Introduction générale’, 9–10), and his words were also recorded by some of his students­– ­which is particularly important for the few improvised sessions. These are thus written works in so far as they were typed out by Derrida, but with a view to the particular situation of teaching, as well as the oral context of delivering a seminarlecture. Derrida also delivered his annual seminar in America (details are given in ‘General Introduction’, ix–x; ‘Introduction générale’, 21

Derrida and Other Animals 10). A parallel could be made between the second volume of seminars with its alternation between Defoe and Heidegger and Derrida’s Glas with respect to its juxtaposition of Hegel and Genet­– b ­ ut there the layout in two columns is important, it is a written work. The Beast and the Sovereign is in some respects an oral­/aural work although I am reading the written text which Derrida spoke­– ­which raises the question of the translation into a different form. The oral (and here in a teaching context) has a different alternance effect to that which is crafted for publication. One of the stated aims of the ambitious and exceedingly welcome project to produce a complete edition of Derrida’s seminars and lectures is ‘to give the reader the chance of an unprecedented contact with the philosopher’s teaching voice’ (‘General Introduction’, ix; ‘Introduction générale’, 9); a challenge lies in that bringing together of reader (by definition exposed to the written) and the voice (by definition heard). These are typically different intimacies and different temporalities; for instance the reader can and often does opt for the intimacy of solitude with the book and the choice of time, place, order of reading. You can read books naked and in bed, although academic books may not invite such a choice. The listener who is present at a seminar usually has the voice of the speaker in her or his ear­– ­the apparent immediacy is differently seductive and meaningful, and presents particular constraints as well as opportunities for the speaker. The supplementing of the seminar or lecture by the published transcription is thus neither less nor straightforwardly more­– ­it is simply that we need to be attentive to the difference. I should, however, add that there is of course some overlap between the seminars and published works since inevitably Derrida used elements of the seminar material, sometimes reworked, in public lectures and in publications (‘General Introduction’, x–xi; ‘Introduction générale’, 11). I shall not attempt to track the overlap (as the published Beast and the Sovereign seminars have done much of that work) unless it is significant to my argument, for example I shall allude to Rogues without necessarily indicating where material is a revised version of the seminars.36

Socio-political contexts There are a number of contexts to Derrida’s writing on animals­– ­I have referred already to the micro-contexts of presentation and publication, but there are far more significant larger ones at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. Although 22

Introduction some (by no means all) of the theorists who work on or with Derrida abstract his writing from context as if this might pollute its philosophical quality, it seems to me that Derrida is typically acutely sensitive to the world around him, and to the way in which it is read or represented to an end. This may be seen as a world on the brink of Anthropocene environmental catastrophe, a gradual decline or degradation of the natural world thanks to human activity, which has accelerated enormously in recent decades. Equally, particularly those writing from the ‘developed world’ often characterise this historical moment as ‘after’ or ‘post’ some significant past moment. It might be framed as after the War (meaning the Second World War), with a certain sense of optimism (a world committed to ensuring peace and human rights after the horrors of the early and mid-twentieth century); this world is one which is also named ‘after Auschwitz’ (a synecdochal phrase Derrida found excessively homogenising), with an implication of shame and of finding certain assumptions impossible (including assumptions about civilisation or writing). Equally this period is one which is called post-industrial or postmodern, and globalised. How do these periodisations relate to Derrida’s writing on animal-human relations or the animal-human borderline? Clearly the imminence of environmental disaster (which will include the loss of species) relates to a pressing urgency to rethink human relations with nature­– a­ lthough any ethical relationship to animals is sometimes indirect, for instance loss of habitat is deplored because of the contribution to global warning (disastrous for humanity in the eyes of many scientists) as much as because of human responsibility not to take actions that have devastating consequences for other species. Indeed it has been pointed out that those who take an ecological approach (desirous of achieving a balanced ecosystem) often come into conflict with animal rights activists (for whom every animal life has a value in qualitative terms) and even human rights activists (for whom every human life has a value in qualitative terms). Those who wish to preserve particular endangered species through captive breeding programmes often cross breed sub-species initially if the gene pool is too limited and then kill at birth those individuals who would make the species more rather than less hybrid.37 Then the question might be asked­– w ­ hy should these species be preserved at the cost of killing individuals? Is it really for man, so that he lives in an aesthetically pleasing diverse world? Or is there a lurking sense that nature (or God) intended particular species (fossilised in form) to survive? Harmony for an ecosystem may well involve measures to 23

Derrida and Other Animals control reproduction (including importantly human reproduction), if not culling of certain species. Some demographers would point out that historically the greatest correlation with a reduction in the human rate of reproduction in any given society is increase in per capita wealth and relative equality of distribution. However, increase in human wealth has historically not proven to have only a positive impact on the natural environment or on animals, except as regards demographic decline, for each individual tends to leave a larger and more damaging footprint as their income grows. Derrida devotes less time or space to looming environmental disaster than some readers (such as Wood) would like, although it is clear that this is a context that he is aware of­– ­just as he is conscious of the animal rights movement, and has some sympathy for its concerns, but cannot simply subscribe to a discourse calked paradoxically on human rights. Similarly Cixous wonders whether she should point out that: All the components of the philosophy of the self in the West have, on the one hand, had a liberating effect, since the values of freedom of expression, of opinion, and so on, have been associated with them; but point out too that this philosophy was undermined by aspects unforeseen and at the time unforeseeable, repressive aspects having to do with phallocentric and colonial patterns of speech. And so, if I were to work towards this philosophy, might it not be necessary to do two things at once: to emphasize both the permanent value of the philosophy of rights, and, simultaneously, the inadequacy, the limits of the breakthrough it represented: to both construct and deconstruct, to praise and criticize, at one and the same time.38

Derrida’s focus is on investigation of the philosophical tradition with attentiveness to these contradictions, and on the ethical relationship between human beings and between human beings and other species, and from thence to concrete socio-political matters involving human cruelty to animals (such as bullfighting or factory farming). The industrialisation of food production and the post-modern relation to the animal is part of Derrida’s focus, for example, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, where he discusses the huge shift in our relation with animals since the end of the eighteenth century, a period which is widely regarded as the location of the third revolution in relations between humans and animals. This agricultural revolution involves scientific breeding, the forerunner of industrialisation of food production. Derrida points out that exploitation, training, hunting, experimentation and so on did not begin in the Enlightenment but are as old as man and ‘what he calls his world, his knowledge, his 24

Introduction history, and his technology’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 25) (‘ce qu’il appelle son monde, son savoir, son histoire et sa technique’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 45)). Yet in the last two centuries there has been a ‘bouleversement’ thanks to the conjoined development of ‘savoirs’ and ‘techniques’­– w ­ ith genetic experimentation and the manipulation of the genome, industrialisation of food production (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 25; L’Animal que donc je suis, 46), and the advent of mass species extinction. John Berger argues that for the last couple of centuries every tradition which previously mediated between man and nature has been broken. This relationship was not of course purely economic and productive: ‘animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises’ (Why Look at Animals?, 12) rather than as meat, horn or leather. For Berger there is a cultural as well as physical marginalisation as animals are ‘co-opted in to the family and into the spectacle’ (12)­– ­by which he means a range of phenomena from Disney films to books of photographs of animals, or zoos where the caged animals ‘are the living monument to their own disappearance’ (Why Look at Animals?, 36) and where, for Berger, the gaze is extinguished. In the context of such a radical shift in the relation between human and animal Derrida claims that the answer to Bentham’s question ‘Can they suffer?’ (which neatly refocused the Cartesian obsession with access to rational thought) is undeniable (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 28; L’Animal que donc je suis, 49). This is why there has been a long war over pity which is now entering a critical phase. I shall pause to note that Derrida, whose use of language is typically precise, is not afraid to use the term war here, just as he has deployed the term genocide and evoked the concentration camps, carefully mentioning gypsies and homosexuals as well as Jews sent to gas chamber: To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. Henceforth more than ever. And I say ‘to think’ this war, because I believe it concerns what we call ‘thinking’. The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there. (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 29) Penser cette guerre dans laquelle nous sommes, ce n’est pas seulement un devoir, une responsabilité, une obligation, c’est aussi une nécessité, une contrainte à laquelle, bon gré ou mal gré, directement ou indirectement, nul ne saurait se soustraire. Désormais plus que jamais. Et je dis ‘penser’ cette guerre, parce que je crois qu’il y va de ce que nous appelons ‘penser’. L’animal nous regarde, et nous sommes nus devant lui. Et penser com25

Derrida and Other Animals mence peut-être là. (L’Animal que donc je suis, 50)

The war on pity of course also relates to less important human beings­ – ­Donna Haraway’s exceptional work on the torture of primates in laboratories relates this clearly to social organisation in general and the situation of women.39 The context of the very long aftermath of, or shadow cast by, the Holocaust and mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism more generally is one to which Derrida refers more often in the context of his work on human-animal relations. His critique of totalitarianism in the broadest sense, and indeed of the ‘totalitarian’ exclusions by democratic states­– ­whether of asylum-seekers or of any others who do not fit the model of the good citizen­– ­is a major strand of analysis. Animals as a category (notwithstanding the privilege accorded to individuals) are certainly radically excluded in most human societies­ – ­they are the ones who can be offered up as sacrifice whether allowing the reproduction of the community in a material sense (providing food or service) or in a social sense (ensuring cohesion). As totalitarian strategies in the polis are analysed not only in those states that we are comfortable to name ‘totalitarian’, Derrida’s work becomes more controversial. For example, Derrida is one of those who dares to make a comparison between the Holocaust and human behaviour towards animals, particularly in the context of the industrialisation of food production (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 26; L’Animal que donc je suis, 46–7); this is something that has been raised by a number of animal rights campaigners but is often treated as unthinkable by those concerned with philosophical ethics more generally. It is mentioned in Wood’s commentary on the extract from ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am’: in a footnote he cites J. M. Coetzee’s fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello, and notes that the comparison between the Holocaust and men’s cruelty to animals was first made by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Animal Philosophy, 140, 215). Singer (1904–91), whose mother, brother and other family members were killed in the Shoah, was the first Yiddish writer (and only the second vegetarian40) to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. A quotation from Singer’s The Letter Writer is cited as an epigraph to Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka in which Singer’s character Herman Gombiner, whose entire family have been killed by the Nazis and whose most affectionate and ethical relationship is with a mouse, muses that for animals all men are Nazis and life is an eternal Treblinka.41 In J. 26

Introduction M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals the ethical vegetarian Elizabeth Costello makes a parallel between the Holocaust and the animalindustrial complex in a guest lecture.42 This raises the difficult question of analogy, but might also be phrased as evoking the possibility of sharing (a capacity that poets have, according to Costello, partly because they go beyond the tautological structures of reason), compassion or empathy.43 Costello is then attacked in a letter from a poet, Abraham Stern, who refuses to dine with her; he argues that she is trading in cheap analogies: You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand wilfully, to the point of blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way. (The Lives of Animals, 49–50)

In The Open Giorgio Agamben takes this argument further, perhaps to the point of absurdity unless one reads his assertion as having a silent acknowledgement of all the other forces operative on any Holocaust: ‘Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are [. . .] an experiment [. . .], an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin.’44 In Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy, ‘Eating Well’, the response to the real Holocaust, metonymically described by Nancy as Auschwitz (a metonymy that Derrida feels should be called into question), seems to Nancy to be elided while the sacrifice of animals (which Derrida will controversially call genocide) is insisted upon. Nancy appears to want (but Derrida cannot quite believe this) Derrida both to denounce Auschwitz and to denounce Heidegger for not denouncing Auschwitz. Perhaps Nancy was feeding his old friend lines in ways we readers cannot quite recognise, but, to illustrate the fact that readers may indeed be confused, Sara Guyer comments that ‘Nancy’s final interjections refer to Derrida’s failure to recognize political abuses and their historical situation, even if Nancy’s tack repeats too familiar questions about Heidegger’s silence.’45 Thus ‘Heidegger’ and ‘Hitler’ play strange rhetorical roles in these discussions: for animal rights philosophers, Heidegger (with his odour of the fascist) may 27

Derrida and Other Animals lurk behind the failure of Continental Philosophy to take animals seriously. For Nancy or Elizabeth Roudinesco (and many others) the importance of a reassuring ritual of once again communally condemning (particularly Nazi) violence to human beings (by implication rather worse than anything one could do to animals), or the retort ‘Hitler was a vegetarian’, seem to play an uncanny role in the debate.46 It is as if the failure to sacrifice animals leads directly to sacrificing humans­– ­Derrida gently points out that empirically there does not appear to be any such relationship, and that his interlocutors need not worry too much as it seems improbable that we will stop sacrificing animals altogether (or indeed human beings) any time soon, if ever. In another dialogue with Nancy, which takes place about fifteen years later, Derrida raises again the question of animals being excluded from the question of responsibility.47 Nancy is clearly still uncomfortable with the issue, saying that since Derrida is dealing with animals he does not have to, and wondering to himself: ‘What’s come over him here, what is this .­ . . isn’t this just a bit much?’ He is reassured when Derrida maintains that he is concerned with human animals too, and replies: ‘Then I already feel better. I was afraid you were going to institute a law that allowed you to be cruel to me but not to your cat’ (‘Responsibility’, 85). As Derrida points out, that is rather a tired humanist accusation . . . It can be argued in addition that there is an intimate relation between the way in which we treat animals, such as exterminating wolves perceived as a threat to human survival, and human genocides, how we treat animalised human beings, that there is a porosity of the boundary. This could become what Tom Regan would call a Kantian argument about indirect duty to animals­– ­that humans should desist from cruelty to animals because it will encourage cruelty to humans.48 While the extermination of wolves may seem in general to relate to a much earlier time period, it is revived as an issue where wolves have been reintroduced. One interesting flashpoint today is the Canadian-American border­– ­some Americans are exceedingly hostile to Canadian wolf immigrants, and will shoot on sight or indeed track to kill. Meanwhile environmentalists and zoologists are tracking and shooting with cameras in order to study the wolf life-cycle and evaluate protection programmes. The results are then sometimes reproduced in a somewhat anthropomorphic style on television programmes. Any conflict with Americans loaded with guns and violent rhetoric creates another level of drama beyond the one which focuses on the relative merits of wolves feeding themselves 28

Introduction and their young, and the viewers’ putative attachments to furry prey such as bison calves­– s­ almon are less cuddly and so generate fewer interesting conflicts for the spectator. The thinker who perceives a gulf between humanity and animality often then also uses animal tropes to dehumanise other men and women. This use of the animal to dehumanise certain human beings (which then may impact indirectly on treatment of animals in a vicious circle) occurs in many other contexts apart from the concentration camps. Derrida cites the moment when Iraq stopped following the political and military-economic strategy of the United States, and Saddam Hussein (who had been a tyrant for many years previously, but as an ally and client of the US) became known as ‘the beast of Baghdad’ (Beast 1, 20; Bête 1, 42). At the time of writing the seminars entitled The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida was particularly concerned with the rhetoric of ‘post-9­/11’ (‘the War on Terror’) and the use in English of the image of a ‘rogue state’, which conjures up the idea of the rogue animal. The French voyou is used only for human outlaws­– ­the ambiguity between the human and the animal in English is one of the reasons, Derrida argues, that it comes to the privileged position it occupies in the American rhetoric of rogue states.49 Originally rogue meant unprincipled outlaw: From there the meaning gets extended, in Shakespeare as well as in Darwin, to all nonhuman living beings, that is to plants and animals whose behaviour appears deviant or perverse. Any wild animal can be called rogue but especially those, such as rogue elephants, that behave like ravaging outlaws, violating the customs and conventions, the customary practices, of their own community. A horse can be called rogue when it stops acting as it is supposed to, as it is expected to, for example as a race horse or a trained hunting horse. A distinguishing sign is thus affixed to it, a badge or hood, to mark its status as rogue. This last point marks the point rather well; indeed it brands it, for the qualification rogue calls for a marking or branding classification that sets something apart. A mark of infamy discriminates by means of a first banishing or exclusion that then leads to a bringing before the law. It is somewhat analogous to the wheel, forerunner of the yellow star. (Rogues, 93–4) De là le sens s’étend, aussi bien chez Shakespeare que chez Darwin, à tout vivant non humain, à la plante ou à l’animal dont le comportement parait déviant ou pervers. Tous les animaux sauvages peuvent être dit rogue mais en particulier ceux qui, comme les rogue elephants, se conduisent en hors-la-loi ravageurs qui contreviennent aux mœurs et aux coutumes, aux usages réglés de leur propre communauté. Un cheval peut être dit rogue quand il cesse de se conduire comme il faut, comme on 29

Derrida and Other Animals l’attend de lui, par exemple un cheval de course ou de chasse discipliné, on lui attache alors un signe distinctif, badge ou hood, un capuchon ou une sorte de cagoule pour marquer son statut de rogue. Ce dernier point marque bien la marque, à savoir que la qualification de rogue appelle une classification marquante et qui met à part; la marque d’infamie discrimine par un premier bannissement qui exclut pour mettre au banc des accusés. Fonction analogue à celle de la roue, ancêtre de l’étoile jaune. (Voyous, 135)

With the yellow star, Derrida reminds his audience also of the Holocaust. When Derrida presents the Beast and the Sovereign seminar for his American audience in Spring 2003, he makes plain the immediate relevance of the history of the concept of sovereignty: Referring frequently to the contemporary situation and to the problems of globalization, that affect the logic of nation-state sovereignty, we shall also address the question of rogue states and their leaders who are often, in the political rhetoric of the most powerful states, compared to ‘beasts’. At stake, here, naturally (long before 9­/11 which we shall however discuss), are the concepts of war­– i­nternational or civil­– ­according to European law, of cruelty, of terror, and (national and international) terrorism, etc. (Beast 2, xiv) En nous référant souvent à la situation contemporaine et aux problèmes de la mondialisation (‘globalisation’) qui affectent la logique de la souveraineté état-nationale, nous aborderons aussi la question des Etats voyous (Rogue States) et de leurs leaders souvent comparés, dans la rhétorique politicienne des Etats les plus puissants à des ‘bêtes’. Il y va naturellement (et de bien avant le 11 septembre dont nous parlerons pourtant) des concepts de guerre­– i­nternationale ou civile­– s­ elon le droit européen, de cruauté, de terreur et de terrorisme­– n ­ ational et international, etc. (Bête 2, 14)

Derrida notes that Hobbes is writing at a time when civil war is the greatest fear, and fear, or terror, is the political passion par excellence for Hobbes, generating and generated by the artificial animal Leviathan or sovereign (Beast 1, 39–40; Bête 1, 68–9). Civil war for Hobbes would be the death of the State. However, today we have to ask, Derrida says, whether we can tell the difference between civil war and any other war, between war and national or international terrorism (Beast 1, 29; Bête 1, 54). Terrorism frequently relies on disguise, on enemy combatants who, temporarily at least, look like one of us citizens, the family next door, rather than like rogue beasts­ – ­this is one of the ways, I would suggest, that it resembles civil 30

Introduction war, brother against brother. Picking up on Derrida’s autoimmunity figure, Hillis Miller writes: ‘What is most terrifying is the conviction that the terrorists are not outside, but within, secretly present as antigens, “terrorist cells,” against which it is extremely difficult, in the end impossible, to develop effective antibodies.’50 Those policing borders have to do their best to spot the potential rogue­– ­which often results in the crudest of measures, as Derrida indicates above in relation to the persecution of Jews. When Derrida is suggesting that in some respects the beast is sovereign and vice versa, he argues: Whence the accusation so often made today in the rhetoric of politicians against sovereign states that do not respect international law or right, and which are called ‘rogue states’ [Etats voyous], i.e. delinquent states, criminal states, states that behave like brigands, like highway robbers or like vulgar rapscallions who just do as they feel, do not respect international right, stay in the margins of international civility, violate property, frontiers, rules and good international manners, including the laws of war (terrorism being one of the classic forms of this delinquency, according to the rhetoric of heads of sovereign states who for their part claim to respect international right.) [. . .] The ‘rogue’, be it to do with elephant, tiger, lion, or hippopotamus (and more generally carnivorous animals), [the ‘rogue’] is the individual who does not even respect the law of the animal community, of the pack, the horde, of its kind. By its savage or indocile behaviour, it stays or goes away from the society to which it belongs. As you know, the states that are accused of being and behaving as rogue states often turn the accusation back against the prosecutor and claim in their turn that the true rogue states are the sovereign, powerful and hegemonic nation-states that begin by not respecting the law or international right to which they claim to be referring and have long practiced state terrorism, which is merely another form of international terrorism. (Beast 1, 18–19) D’où [. . .], et ce sera l’un des principaux foyers de notre réflexion, son foyer politique le plus actuel, l’accusation si souvent lancée aujourd’hui, dans la rhétorique politicienne, contre des Etats souverains qui ne respectent pas la loi ou le droit international, et qui sont traités, en français, d’Etats voyous [. . .]­– ­c’est-à-dire Etats délinquants, Etats criminels, Etats qui se conduisent en brigands, en bandits des grands chemins ou en vulgaires sauvageons qui n’agissent qu’à leur tête, ne respectent pas le droit international, se tiennent en marge de la civilité internationale, violent la propriété, les frontières, les règles, et les bonnes mœurs internationales, et jusqu’au droit de la guerre (le terrorisme étant une des formes classiques de cette délinquance, selon la rhétorique de chefs d’Etat souverains qui 31

Derrida and Other Animals prétendent, eux respecter le droit international). [. . .] Le ‘rogue’, qu’il s’agisse de l’éléphant, du tigre, du lion, de l’hippopotame (et plus généralement des animaux carnivores), c’est l’individu qui ne respecte même pas la loi de la communauté animale, de la meute, de la horde de ses congénères. Par son comportement sauvage ou indocile, il se tient ou il va à l’écart de la société à laquelle il appartient. Comme vous savez, les Etats qui sont accusés d’être et de se conduire en Rogue States (Etats voyous) retournent souvent l’accusation vers le procureur et prétendent à leur tour que les vrais Etats voyous sont les Etats-nations souverains, puissants et hégémoniques qui, eux, commencent par ne pas respecter les lois ou le droit international auquel ils prétendent se référer, et pratiquent depuis longtemps le terrorisme d’Etat, qui n’est qu’une autre forme du terrorisme international. (Bête 1, 39–40)

In Rogue States, Noam Chomsky refers to directives from the US Strategic command that insist that, in order to frighten the wolves (as Niccolò Machiavelli puts it) or terrorise the terrorists (as French interior minister Charles Pasqua phrased it), the State must show itself capable of behaving like an irrational beast (Beast 1, 88–9; Bête 1, 129–30). A very different thinker that Derrida also cites in this context is Carl Schmitt who, in the 1920s, denounces hypocritical states that go to war with the alibi of universal humanity, branding their enemies as outlaws, outside humanity, in other words as animals.51 This means that the states in question, with an imperial and economic logic, are in fact behaving­– ­according to Schmitt­– ­apolitically (since they claim not be acting in the name of a particular sovereign state) and thus like brutes or werewolves (Beast 1, 71–8; Bête 1, 107–16). I should note that while Schmitt remains a very influential legal and political theorist, his association with Nazism (Beast 1, 77; Bête 1, 115) does make his remarks here on human rights more than controversial, even though their contemporary relevance in a different context is clear. In Rogues Derrida clarifies that the rhetoric of rogue states has been going on for a long time (xiii), it is simply that ‘post-9­/11’ it has become media-theatricalised. He analyses the autoimmune responses of democratic states: when apparently democracy is threatened they then take undemocratic measures­– e­xamples including Algeria in 1992 as well as the United States in the wake of 9­/11.52 Democracy has been associated with freedom (at least since Plato)­– ­for good or bad, of course, since there is an economic and exploitative element to the call to freedom. Derrida notes in The Beast and the Sovereign that universal declarations of human rights date from the same 32

Introduction French Revolution that gave us the modern name ‘terrorism’ (Beast 1, 39; Bête 1, 68). Much of The Beast and the Sovereign is focused on fables, particularly those of La Fontaine, fictive narratives which put animals and human beings on stage to produce a moral lesson. These are, for Derrida, simulacra of knowledge (Beast 1, 35; Bête 1, 62). Neither political discourse nor above all political action acknowledges itself as fabular, but Derrida suggests that a fabular dimension might determine political and military actions on the part of the State or terrorism. He argues that the media, teletechnologies, spread the empire of fable: they are a fabulous deployment of ‘information’. Thus he makes the case that the global technical reproducibility of the image of the collapse of the Twin Towers is integral rather than posterior to the event for both supposed aggressor and supposed victim (Beast 1, 36; Bête 1, 63–4).53 This makes the event of a different order to human (or animal) catastrophes resulting in similar or greater numbers of fatalities which feature only minimally in the media archive of the most economically and militarily powerful nations. Today, over a decade after the seminars, I might note the popularity of posting videos of beheadings on the net as another example of the deployment and logic of image-effects, a way of ‘making-known’ via fable that Derrida was discussing (Beast 1, 35–39; Bête 1, 62–7). I shall return to fables in a number of the chapters to come, in particular La Fontaine’s ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ in Chapter 2, but also feminist re-writings of fabular animals in Chapter 6.

The philosophical tradition: Aristotle to Levinas A different kind of context for Derrida’s writing on and with animals­ – ­and indeed the pretext for much of his work­– ­is the philosophical tradition of evoking ‘the animal’, in particular from Aristotle (whose man is a political animal, uniquely endowed with reason) to, probably the most significant of his interlocutors here, Heidegger, and then his old friend Levinas. One of the most decisive staging posts in that long history is René Descartes, for his nefarious and extensive influence on French (but not only French) thinking in its separation of the sensual animal body from the cogitating human mind as the foundation of human being. This dialogue with anthropocentric philosophy will be referenced throughout the book, and so I shall simply sketch a few introductory points here. While these pretexts are typically counterfoils­– ­and in The Animal That Therefore I Am, 33

Derrida and Other Animals Derrida, at the time of writing and speaking one of the greatest living philosophers, refers to ‘les philosophes’ and ‘la philosophie’ without much sympathy for this history­– t­here are exceptions of course. Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ is, for Derrida, one of the greatest pre-Cartesian or indeed anti-Cartesian texts­– m ­ ocking human presumption vis-à-vis animals, asking for example: how do I know if I am playing with my cat or she is playing with me (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 7; L’Animal que donc je suis, 22)? He (Montaigne, like Derrida) has his moment for starting or stopping the game, but so has she. This is a critical intertext for Cixous’s writing on cats. In The Animal That Therefore I Am (13; 31) Derrida proposes that, from the point of view of animals, there are two kinds of discourse: the first is that of texts (even strong, profound texts) signed by people who have observed animals but have not seen themselves being seen by animals or addressed them. These are writers such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Levinas, all philosophers ‘en tant que tels’, of a certain epoch perhaps, and Derrida keeps reciting these names throughout his lecture like a mantra, an incantation, a synecdoche for so much. With these thinkers there are no real animals. I might make comparison here with colonial anthropology and native peoples where there is little question of a return gaze. The other kind of discourse is that of poets and prophets, and theirs is the trail or track that Derrida is on in this work (and the one I shall pursue particularly in Chapters 3 and 6). The story of the animal in the philosophy evoked above is one of a monomaniacal and (it seems to me) fantastical focus on the ‘powers’ that animals allegedly do not have (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 27; L’Animal que donc je suis, 48), and thus a glorification of singular man. For example, following Heidegger, animals are said to be melancholy, as if they are mourning the fact that they are dumb and cannot name themselves (as if man too did not receive his name) (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 19; L’Animal que donc je suis, 38). Yet of course animals are said not to be able to mourn, indeed, pace Heidegger again, not to have any relationship to death­– D ­ errida asks (plaintively, angrily or simply uncomprehendingly): how can you refuse the animal access to their death as such (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 20; L’Animal que donc je suis, 39)? For Heidegger, as Derrida analyses in a range of texts, this is summarised in his classification in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics of ‘the animal’ as ‘poor in world’ (weltarm), against the stone (his figure for the inanimate) which is ‘worldless’ 34

Introduction (weltlos) and swiftly set aside by Heidegger, or, more critically, the human which is ‘world-forming’ (weltbildend). The animal is marked by poverty, impoverishment, negativity­– b ­ y what it does not have and what it cannot be (man). Agamben notes the reference in Heidegger to St Paul (Romans 8:19) on the animal’s yearning expectation for a redemption ‘it’ can never have (The Open, 60). Levinas famously relates the ethical dimension to the face, that which sees­ /is seen, that which speaks, and hears or understands speech. The problem is how that figure relates to the boundary of humanity­– ­and how that relates to veiled women I might ask. Figure means face as well as figure in French and is thus doubly appropriate for me here, in relation to Levinas’s visage, in that it is not clear whether or not face is a figure of speech or to be taken completely literally, or floats between the two.54 Derrida reminds his interlocutors, in The Animal That Therefore I Am and in one of the seminars collected in The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1, of Levinas’s embarrassed response to the question: ‘do animals have faces?’ With what could be regarded as a traditionally Jewish (though it might also be Socratic) strategy he answers with a question: ‘would you say that a snake has a face?’ (Beast 1, 237; Bête 1, 317). This question reminds the interlocutor, as Derrida often does, of the potential boundaries within, as well as around, ‘the animal’. Derrida points out that this example does not come about by accident­– ­and not only because of Genesis­– ­the snake has a role to play in many stories and has more than one symbolic role. ‘It’s to a face that our ethical responsibility is addressed, from a face [. . .] that I receive the imperative: “Thou shalt not kill”’ (Beast 1, 237) (‘c’est à un visage que notre responsabilité éthique s’adresse, c’est d’un visage [. . .] que je reçois l’impératif: “Ne tue point”’ (Bête 1, 317)). Thus, the question about whether a snake has a face is also the question: is it permitted to kill a snake?55 A different philosophical approach, not unproblematic I think, but much more promising for Derrida, links animal suffering (at the hands of man) not to meditation on their innate lack but to the active response of pity­– ­this is the path taken by the Enlightenment utilitarian philosopher and political radical Jeremy Bentham (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 27; L’Animal que donc je suis, 47–8). Joanna Bourke, like Derrida, values Bentham’s contribution, and the role of sentiment in the period, but she does note that allowing that all sentient beings suffer does not prevent the setting up of hierarchies of pain­– ­some higher beings can be represented as more sensitive, and thus liable to suffer more than others. These hierarchies between 35

Derrida and Other Animals species and within the human species remain with us today. She also notes that some thinkers make a zero sum or limited economy argument­– ­thus if you care about animals then you will care less about, say, children­– ­ while others make a sensitising argument. Bourke points out the interesting fact that the SPCA was set up before the SPCC, in 1884.56 Bentham (1748–1832) also campaigned for the abolition of slavery, rights for women, divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexuality­– ­thus he is in himself an argument that compassion does not have to be a zero sum game as some would make it. Bentham raises the question of animal suffering in a footnote to his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation thus: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?57

Derrida takes the question of animal passion, man’s shared vulnerability with animals, to the point of death, referring to ‘the finitude that we share with animals’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 28) (‘la finitude que nous partageons avec les animaux’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 49)). Here he is standing against not only the history of philosophy but also certain contemporary philosophers of finitude who insist today on locating human specificity in this term, and thus returning to an age-old philosophical obsession with man’s consciousness of death.

The modern critical and literary context Agamben’s writing on the animal-human distinction, and his notion of ‘bare life’, are proving particularly influential at the moment; con36

Introduction sequently I shall attempt briefly to summarise some of Agamben’s arguments here, and at relevant points later in the book, while indicating in what ways it seems to me that, unlike Derrida, Agamben is unselfconscious about the residual metaphysics in his writing. He adopts (notably from Heidegger) a series of oppositions, such as world versus environment or world versus earth, open versus closed, unconcealedness versus concealedness, to support the master distinction of man versus animal, whether inside or outside the category of man. Ultimately, in spite of lengthy exegesis, these oppositions remain unshaken even if Agamben suggests that there are moments when Heidegger brings the animal into a greater degree of proximity with man than his reader might expect.58 Agamben appears to attempt a degree of historicisation, but the socio-political context for his highly selective history of ideas is very sketchy if not contentious. Derrida takes up some points from Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign, but, surprisingly, Agamben does not refer to Derrida on numerous occasions when he might seem to be engaging with work Derrida published earlier. The two books most relevant to Agamben’s thinking about animals are Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, first published in 1995,59 and The Open: Man and Animal, first published in 2002. The Open ranges in a series of very short chapters over a very long history (a tactic that can serve to dehistoricise), although the key reference throughout, which Agamben is seeking to illuminate, or from which he is seeking illumination (the distinction is not clear), is Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the same work that is the subject of Derrida’s second year of seminars on the Beast and the Sovereign, and which is already a major point of reference in the extempore section ‘I don’t know why we are doing this’ of his Cerisy lecture reproduced in The Animal That Therefore I Am (141–60).60 Agamben’s first chapter ‘Theriomorphous’ (The Open, 1–3), however, begins with an attempt to elucidate the puzzle as to why the thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible shows ‘the righteous’ (that is to say, the remnants of Israel still alive when the Messiah comes, or ‘concluded humanity’) with animal features. One answer might be, he suggests, that this tradition shows that on the last day ‘relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature’ (The Open, 3). Agamben returns to this at the close of the work with the second-century Gnostic Basilides, the question of non-knowledge, and the hypothesis that ‘we’ might ‘now’ indeed risk ourselves in 37

Derrida and Other Animals the ‘suspension of the suspension’, in the emptiness between animal and man (The Open, 92)­– ­a conclusion which is not in any way fleshed out (and I use the figure of speech advisedly). I would suggest that the opening and closing of The Open with religious debates underlines the theological underpinning of the many assertions, however secular in form, of the abyss between man and animal.61 In the second chapter of the work, Agamben swiftly takes us from the thirteenth century to Georges Bataille’s engagement with Gnosticism and his dispute with the great twentieth-century commentator on Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, over ‘the rest’ that survives the death of man as subject or the end of History­– ­whether that would be quintessentially human (for Bataille) or man as a happy loving animal in harmony with nature and without war or philosophy (for Kojève). Agamben considers a range of other ways in which men become animals in different senses for thinkers in the aftermath of war, for example men figured as sheep to a slaughterhouse. Agamben then ranges through a dizzying selection of thinkers and texts from Aristotle’s De anima to natural scientists from the nineteenth century in an attempt to pursue the definition of ‘life’ from vegetative, organic or ‘nutritive’ life to ‘animal life’ defined by its relation to an external world. This relates to Agamben’s recurrent and influential attempt to pin down again what he calls ‘bare life’, here specified as the blind and unconscious organic animal (for example the functions of the circulation of blood or respiration). He refers to this in the case of clinical death detached from any brain activity (The Open, 15). My problem is that while this is a perfectly possible definition of what one might call bare life­– w ­ hen an animal (including a human animal) becomes like a vegetable­– i­t is crucially not identical to those in concentration camps62 or slaves or non-human animals. Agamben seems to slip from the assertion that there are two animals within any ‘higher’ animal (the organic animal and the one which has a relationship with the world) to a division between man and other animals. He writes: The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible. It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex­– ­and not always edifying­– ­economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal 38

Introduction have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place. (The Open, 15–16)

For Agamben the mystery is: The practical and political mystery of separation. What is man, if he is always the place­– a­ nd, at the same time, the result­– ­of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way­– w ­ ithin man­– ­has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. And perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal. (The Open, 16)

Although he calls this division a mystery that has to be studied, nevertheless he does not ever really challenge its existence other than by creating the blank category of ‘bare life’ into which he places various categories of human beings, depending on the subject at hand, usually alongside animals. While it might be argued that these are not his taxonomies, and that he is simply referring to a categorisation performed by others at different historical points, I think there is a critical difference between acknowledging an attempted bestialisation, for example of field slaves in the Americas, and asserting that somehow then all slaves enter into a category that also includes the brain dead. The same is true of animals.63 Agamben cites various eighteenth- (notably Linnaeus) and nineteenth­ -century (notably Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley) taxonomies to produce Homo­– ­know thyself­– ­sapiens (The Open, 25). Man’s only ability, he suggests, is to recognise himself as human: ‘Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human’ (The Open, 26), what Agamben then calls an ‘Anthropological Machine’ (The Open, 33–8). One problem arises with palaeontological findings that suggest there would have been a ‘sprachloser Urmensch’­– a­ challenge because man identifies with language thus places muteness outside himself. Homo alalus would be a non-speaking man­– ­which is clearly impossible­– ­we humans have to assume that properly human language is utterly distinct from any animal communication. In that case how, in the wake of Darwin, do you get from animal to man? Agamben is particularly interested in Jacob von Uexküll, the great twentieth-century zoologist and founder of ecology who, for Agamben, abandons the anthropocentric perspective of his 39

Derrida and Other Animals ­redecessors, and radically dehumanises nature influencing both p Heidegger and Deleuze. Classical science says there is a hierarchy of living creatures in one world; Uexküll proposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds, uncommunicating, reciprocally exclusive, equally perfect, occupying different spaces and times (The Open, 40).64 Heidegger on being-in-the-world as a fundamental structure may be a response to this. Heidegger seeks to situate Dasein’s fundamental structure (its being-in-the-world) in the relationship between the animal’s poverty in world and world-forming man and thus to inquire about the origin and sense of that openness which, with man, is produced in the living being. Agamben finally moves from what seems to be a purely ontological and metaphysical argument to politics: ‘The ontological paradigm of truth as the conflict between concealedness and unconcealedness is, in Heidegger, immediately and originarily, a political paradigm. It is because man essentially occurs in the openness of a closedness that something like a polis and a politics are possible’ (The Open, 73). Another way in which animals are bereft, of course, is in their inability to have a political life or to change and develop (a characterisation that can return with ‘the savage’ or other inferior forms of men, I would note). Heidegger, writes Agamben: was perhaps the last philosopher to believe in good faith that the place of the polis (the polos [pole] where the conflict between concealedness and unconcealedness, between the animalitas and the humanitas of man reigns) was still practicable, and that it was still possible for men, for a people­– ­holding themselves in that risky place­– ­to find their own proper historical destiny. (The Open, 73)

Heidegger was then, according to Agamben, the last philosopher to believe ‘that the anthropological machine, which each time decides upon and recomposes the conflict between man and animal, between the open and the not-open, could still produce history and destiny for a people’ (The Open, 73). This discourse of ‘the last philosopher’ is intimately linked to the apocalyptic and self-flattering discourse of the ‘end of’ politics, end of history, end of philosophy in some ‘now’ or ‘today’ which is little and selectively evidenced if at all, and usually involves a strange nostalgia for earlier periods when ‘we’ had greater power than ‘we’ do now for better or worse. Thus Agamben declares of twentieth-century totalitarianisms (and here he seems to be speaking for himself rather than paraphrasing Heidegger in spite of the Heideggerian influence): ‘man has now 40

Introduction reached his historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task’ (The Open, 76). Then he concludes that it is ‘likely’ that ‘we’ have still not emerged from this aporia: ‘Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity­– ­who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity’ (76). Poetry, religion, and philosophy are now ‘transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy’ (76–7). I dare not ask what is meant by historical efficacy here nor whether all religions are deemed by Agamben to experience this loss in the same way. Is Islam, for example, in the same phase as Christianity? And the many religions outside the great monotheisms that still preoccupy the West? Agamben continues with a dash of Foucault: Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden­– ­and the ‘total management’­ – ­of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate. (The Open, 77)

The final flourish of this chapter is a neat phrase: ‘The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man.’ The relentless repetition of ‘total’ is one of the many ways in which Agamben must be differentiated from Derrida, who is typically more interested in the fissures and cracks that are always already inherent in any attempted totalisation. But what does this mean for Agamben­ – ­what total humanisation of the animal? Never mind total animalisation of man . . . There are at least three critiques that Derrida makes with regard to Agamben in the first year of The Beast and the Sovereign seminars (Beast 1, 92–6, 315–17, 324–34; Bête 1, 134–9, 419–21, 430–43).65 These are directed particularly at Homo Sacer as The Open had not then been published, however, the comments stand in general for both works. One charge concerns Agamben’s gesture of sovereignty in wanting to be the first (the premier) to locate an inaugural event, to show which thinker is the true origin of a particular line of thought.66 Derrida contrasts the princely handing out of prizes by Agamben with Levinas, whose stance could be summed up in the ethical and 41

Derrida and Other Animals courteous words or gesture: ‘after you’ (Beast 1, 96; Bête 1, 139). The establishment of priority is part of the power play of the text: the singular master establishes his authority as he lays down the law to the many, and often simultaneously accuses fellow writers of negligence and neglect. The second critique that Derrida makes concerns Agamben’s stress on the importance of the distinction in the Greeks, and particularly Aristotle, between zo¯e¯ (bare life common to all living beings, animals, men or gods) and bios (the form or way of life proper to an individual or a group) as a way to approach the definition of the human.67 Yet Derrida points out that Aristotle’s pattern of references to zo¯e¯ and to bios do not support this claim. For Agamben in Homo Sacer, zo¯e¯ is bare life (life without qualities); Derrida says it is rather ‘life that is qualified’, therefore Agamben’s subtle distinction between the ‘attribute of the living being’ and the ‘specific difference that determines the genus zo¯on’ is ‘untenable’. This is not a distinction between what is rational and what is without reason. The third point would be Derrida’s disagreement with Agamben’s historical claim that the introduction of ‘bare life’ into the political order is the decisive event of political modernity­– s­ ince, at the same time, any notion of ‘qualified’ life is as ancient as can be according to Agamben’s own examples (Beast 1, 316–17; Bête 1, 421). He points to the limitations of the conventional linear paradigm of history which thus residually informs Agamben’s periodisation of bare life.68 While the liquid in which Derrida swims is primarily a philosophical brew, there is also a literary context, and indeed the borderline between genres is not always as clear cut as the ‘two discourses’, setting philosophy against poetry, evoked in The Animal That Therefore I Am might imply. Unlike poetry, philosophical knowledge, Derrida polemically declares, deprives itself of ‘la pensée de l’animal, s’il y en a’, translated as ‘thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing’, yet it could be animal thought, animals thinking, if there is such a thing (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 7; L’Animal que donc je suis, 23). Yet Derrida is more aware than most of us of the many borderlines once one investigates texts rather than abstractions. The Beast and the Sovereign takes, in its second year, the first novel in English, Robinson Crusoe, alongside Heidegger’s seminars, but neither quite as twins nor as opposites. In the first year Derrida relishes the possibility of hybrid and ambiguous texts such as La Fontaine’s Fables: animal poetry which is perhaps a sugar coating for political and moral lessons (and a domestication of 42

Introduction animals), or perhaps more interrogative of the norms of the period. Hybrid authors too: Rousseau is evoked as autobiographer as well as the author of the Social Contract. The Animal That Therefore I Am names Carroll, Baudelaire, Rilke and Valéry amongst other literary writers­– A ­ lice in Wonderland emerging as perhaps surprisingly conservative. ‘L’animal autobiographique’ that Derrida calls himself, an autobiographical animal on the model that ‘so and so is a real political animal’, for instance, is more Montaigne than Malherbe, more Rousseau, Proust, Gide, Woolf, Stein, Celan, Genet, Cixous, Duras, also St Augustine and Descartes, than Spinoza­– ­Derrida’s list is both canonical and particular, with an unusually good share of women. One of the contexts that critics most often cite in relation to writing on animal-human relations is that of the work of the South African J. M. Coetzee, whom I mentioned above in connection to the analogy between the Holocaust and man’s cruelty to animals. Derrida makes a brief reference to Foe, The Lives of Animals and Disgrace in The Beast and the Sovereign­– s­ imply advising students to read these ‘magnificent novels’ (Beast 2, 46; Bête 1, 80).69 I would add that gender, sexual and family relations are critical in Coetzee’s work, and above all the question of love.70 A further key literary context for Derrida is the writings of Hélène Cixous; I shall turn to Cixous above all in Chapter 3. In many of his works as indicated above Derrida chooses to play seriously with animal figures where that might not be a conventional choice for the analysis in question.71 This will not be a major focus in my book, but I shall just briefly mention here one example to give a flavour of this practice. In his homage in memory of HansGeorg Gadamer, Derrida decides to analyse a poem by Paul Celan, particularly focusing on the last line which stands alone, ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen.’72 Derrida wants to pay attention to what Gadamer ‘called the Anspruch of the work, the claim it makes upon us, the demanding call a poem sets up, the obstinate but justified reminder of its right to stand up for its rights’ (‘Rams’, 141). He asks: Will we know how to read, will we have the ability to translate the succession or substitution of definite articles (masculine, feminine, or neuter) and, above all, of personal pronouns (ich, er, dich), so as to attempt to respond to them or to answer for them? Articles and pronouns that name the living as well as the dead, animals, humans or gods, and that so skilfully punctuate this poem. (‘Rams’, 147) 43

Derrida and Other Animals The ram (Widder) is the: Sacrificial animal, battering ram, the bellicose ram [belier] whose rush breaks down the doors or breaks through the high walls of fortified castles (Mauerbrecher); the ram is, in addition, an animal whose name is a sign of the zodiac (21st of March, Ram or Aries). The zodiac (from zo¯dion, the diminutive of zo¯on, animal) makes it possible to read [lire] both the hour [l’heure] (according to the light [lueur] that appears on the ecliptic plane) and the date. (‘Rams’, 153–4)

For Derrida the ram, horns and burning recall the key Abrahamic sacrificial scene in the Old Testament: ‘More than one holocaust. Substitution of the ram. Burning. The binding of Isaac (Genesis 22)’ (‘Rams’, 155), alongside other examples of sacrifice such as Aaron’s (Leviticus 16). At the same time the horns of the ram are an instrument with which music prolongs breath, the song of joy inseparable from the visible form of spires, twists and turns of horns (‘Ram’, 156). The ram is between life and death.

Contemporary writing on animals Theorising the relation between man and animals is increasingly foregrounded across disciplines today as a response to many factors, including the steady rise of social Darwinism with its analysis of man as animal; increased sensitivity to animal suffering and the possibility of animal rights73 as the slaughter of animals in the worst of conditions increases exponentially worldwide; and particularly in my context the influence of critical theory and more specifically the wake of deconstruction.74 In this section I shall evoke one or two aspects that will impact on the book. One is a sense that instrumental accounts of the human exploitation of animals need to take more account of animal agency (as with other subaltern studies) as well as the range of motivations on the part of human beings. Naomi Sykes, for example, argues that the scientific study of the distant past obsessively pursues evidence for a material instrumental use of animals by humans (largely as meat), leaving aside much other evidence for a richer and more complex cultural relationship. She writes: Whether as living organisms or as ‘products’ (meat, skin­/fur, bones, artefacts), the behaviour and properties of animals­– h ­ ow they look, sound, smell, feel­– a­re important ingredients for human cultural experience [. . .]. In sum, our everyday interactions with animals, whose lives are so 44

Introduction intertwined with our own, inform the way we think about and behave in our environments; they give shape and meaning to our worlds.75

I shall summarise some of her argument here as it is useful to juxtapose against Derrida’s arguments about the figure of the animal. For example, Sykes’s own discipline of zooarchaeology (as analysis of animal bones) is still used largely to discover what humans ate at a given moment, and what animals they hunted or had domesticated (using assumptions such as that domesticated creatures are smaller, or that there would be a different ratio of male to female bones). All this quite naturally presumes human superiority and agency. Culture enters largely in the catch-all category of ‘ritual’. The social implications of dairying, for instance in the role of women in milking, tend to be ignored in favour of a quest for the ‘origin’. Archaeologists, like historians, use the idea of ‘revolution’ (for instance the Neolithic Revolution when people first domesticated animals), but one disadvantage of the term is that it suggests a speedy transition whereas this could well be gradual and varied. Domestication (of which there are many different definitions) may then be seen as something that humans (decided to) do to animals; as Haraway puts it: ‘Humanist technophiliacs depict domestication as the paradigmatic act of masculine, single-parent, self-birthing, whereby man makes himself repetitively as he invents (creates) his tools.’76 A counter-archaeological perspective on domestication as a mutual socialisation up to a point is becoming more acceptable, with opportunistic wolves taking advantage of ‘the calorie bonanzas provided by humans’ waste dumps’, in Haraway’s phrase (The Companion Species Manifesto, 29), and then gradual behavioural and genetic change, whether always intentionally or sometimes unintentionally through human control of reproduction. Haraway emphasises the work of Darcy Money on behavioural ecology, and a process of co-evolution in which both genetics and environment play a role (The Companion Species Manifesto, 30–2).77 Sykes repeatedly draws attention to the socio-cultural dimension rather than pursuing models based on the biological sciences such as the ‘optimal foraging model’, which implies that hunted animals are viewed as no more than a source of meat to be acquired as efficiently as possible, and domestication is viewed again as an even more efficient way of accessing protein.78 Thus she emphasises social and even affective aspects of domestication such as the relationship which develops between horses and riders, the importance of 45

Derrida and Other Animals animals for traction, the way in which weaving influenced gender roles, and the significance of animal husbandry, for instance in the valorisation of prize breeds, which could be compared to pets in that the putative close relationship (between, say, hunter and prey) is not lost but displaced from ‘outside’ (the wild) to ‘inside’ (the domestic). I should point out here that the opposition I have just used for analytical simplicity is one that worries Sykes if it means that a tangle of great complexity and variety gets shoe-horned into neat formulations: setting wild against domestic, hunter-gatherer against farmer or trust against domination. Even the term ‘hunting’ requires considerable unpicking in any pre-historic or historical context­– ­to see whether the appropriate frame of reference includes trapping or fishing (and then how the perception of the sea relates to that of the wilderness). Human responses to wild animals reflect cultural attitudes to the ‘natural world’ (the wild), thus hunting may also be about gender (as in the virile Norman chasse par force), coming of age rites, social control, and the legitimisation of power (in Norman forests game animals are associated with the aristocracy against peasants and domestic animals, and poaching takes on a particular significance). Indeed in traditional societies hunters’ ability to travel between worlds may be viewed as a sign of power, even supernatural authority. It could even be argued that in the absence of its opposite (the domestic), the concept of the wild does not exist, so that huntergatherers have a single integrated world in which animals are more courted than hunted or hunters transform into or at least imitate their prey, encouraging the animal to sacrifice itself. Then at a certain point the wild becomes a distant exotic. Domestication, as much as hunting, should be seen in terms of a complex palette of relationships­– e­ ven if one takes the now humble chicken (with its many distinct breeds and far higher status before the advent of battery farms), which is so widespread in terms of human communities over the centuries, its value may not always be about meat or even eggs, but feathers, sacrifice or cockfighting.79 The consumption of ‘exotic’ animals is often taboo­– t­he definition of exotic sometimes depending whether the animal was imported by colonists, such as the Romans, for them to eat, or by natives who have traded for what are then perceived as rare and precious animals if not deities. Animal introductions tend to occur in periods of high human mobility. Ideas of landscape also both shape and are shaped by relations with animals. Sykes notes that:

46

Introduction Perrin [. . .] suggests that, prior to the invention of land ownership, animal tracks would have been a vital component for human perception of landscape. This is particularly the case amongst hunter-gatherer groups whose lifestyle and patterns of mobility are intimately linked with the movement and migration of the animals that they follow [. . .]. Under such circumstances landscapes are constituted and perceived through specific and repeated human-animal interactions that occur at particular times and places. (Beastly Questions, 103)80

Human marking of animals does not necessarily signify ownership­– ­they may be ancestral clan marks. Many of these insights might be vulnerable to being subsumed by the critic into simply more or less subtle ways of using animals as means to a human purpose. But I would argue that the nuances are important: for instance, the distinction between branding a piece of property and sharing a distinguishing mark between human beings and other animals considered as all part of one clan group, even if animals (like many humans) have little choice as to whether to be marked by the social group or not. Another area of recent work in critical animal studies is a renewed theoretical interest in animal training­– ­again at a historical moment when this is rapidly disappearing from most people’s lives in the developed world where working animals as a means of transport, traction, tracking or even guarding have largely been replaced by mechanical or electronic means. Thus the practical need to train animals is radically reduced. Even some forms of training animals for entertainment, such as in circuses and other shows, have almost disappeared due to concerns about animal welfare and dignity (although factory farming might seem crueller to far more animals, it benefits from being hidden rather than spectacular). The most important reference here is Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, which first appeared in 1986, and has proved both enormously influential and equally controversial. Hearne is a philosopher, a poet and a trainer of horses and dogs­– a­ potent (and, for some, disgusting) witch’s brew.81 Donna Haraway, another important and influential writer and practitioner with respect to training and love, takes up some of Hearne’s ideas sympathetically although not uncritically in The Companion Species Manifesto, a powerful discussion of relations of kinship between species. I shall turn to these writers again in Chapter 7. Haraway is also critical for her work on biological science, as both an insider and an outsider.82 She is concerned not only with the cruelty towards animals in laboratory work but also with 47

Derrida and Other Animals power relations in human society; she refers to elite (white and male, especially in her chosen period of the 1950s) scientists studying animal (especially primate) behaviour as ‘a dominant cultural group with immense power to make its stories into reality’ (Simians, 2). Haraway argues that animal sociology or the science of animal groups ‘has been unusually important in the construction of oppressive theories of the body political’ (Simians, 11). Despite scientific faith in the nature-culture split, animals are understood to show people their origin or essence. So: Animals have been ominously ambiguous in their place in the doctrine of autonomy of the human and natural sciences [. . .] despite the claims of anthropology to be able to understand human beings solely with the concept of culture, and of sociology to need nothing but the idea of the human social group, animal societies have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization of the oppressive orders of domination in the human body politic. They have provided the point of union of the physiological and political for modern liberal theorists while they continue to accept the ideology of the split between nature and culture. (Simians, 11)

Haraway calls for ‘a liberating science of animal groups’, needed both for human beings83 and to express better who animals are (Simians, 12). She claims that: ‘The political principle of domination has been transformed here into the legitimating scientific principle of dominance as a natural property with a physical-chemical base’ (Simians, 19), and argues for the need for feminists collectively to rebuild natural sciences not for domination but for liberation, for example by taking a deeper look at animals in ways that have little to do with us­– ­something which would be supported by those concerned with animal welfare too. Haraway points to emerging work on matrifocal groups, long-term cooperation, and flexible process. Kelly Oliver opens Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human with the example of a tiger attacking his trainer, Roy Horn, on stage in Las Vegas in 2003. She writes: We could say that Roy performs our conflicted relationship with animals: his seemingly paradoxical attempt to master them through love, his sense of himself so closely connected to his animals, and the fact that he made his living exhibiting and training them. Roy’s accident reveals the illusionist’s most profound illusion: that he can master animals. That is, the accident was a symptom of the animal accidents at the heart of everything we take to be distinctively human that assures us of our mastery over all other creatures and the earth.84 48

Introduction My question would be whether it would be possible to replace ‘animals’ with ‘men’ here. In terms of the reception of Derrida’s writing, there is now a significant corpus that focuses on him directly or uses his work as inspiration (for example in Turner’s collection The Animal Question in Deconstruction and others I refer to in this chapter). Other writing, particularly from the Anglo-American tradition, is more sceptical of Derrida and indeed what is perceived as ‘the Continental tradition’ more generally­– ­for instance the framing of Atterton and Calarco’s Animal Philosophy collection85 and the preface by Peter Singer, seen as the most eminent of animal rights philosophers in an AngloAmerican tradition (inadequate though these boundaries based on geography or language might be).86 Oliver begins Animal Lessons by questioning what she calls ‘philosophies of otherness’ or ‘philosophies of difference’ (which may or may not include Derrida, sometimes he is allowed to be the exception to her rule); she claims that ‘philosophies of otherness from Freud through Kristeva repeat romantic gestures that exclude and abject animals [. . .] concepts of subjectivity, humanity, politics, and ethics continue to be defined by the double movement of assimilating and then disavowing the animal, animality, and animals’ (Animal Lessons, 4). I cannot see how Derrida in particular would fall unknowingly into the trap Oliver describes even if others in her long list may do so­– ­her most convincing points with respect to ‘the animal’ in philosophy could be taken from him, although that is not always acknowledged. For example, she writes: ‘Animals are so radically other, it seems, they cannot even stand in the place of the other in relation to the subject of philosophy. Yet in significant ways, animals remain the invisible support for whatever we take to be human subjectivity’ (Animal Lessons, 4). Philosophers of difference, she claims, ‘do not recognize differences among animals or the possibility of ethical relations with them’ (Animal Lessons, 5)­– I­ would add Luce Irigaray’s name to Derrida’s here as someone who is in fact clear about the necessity of ethical relations with animals.87 Oliver wants ‘us’ to move from an ethics of sameness through difference to an ethics of relationality and responsivity: Acknowledging the ways in which we are human by virtue of our relationships with animals suggests a fundamental indebtedness that takes us beyond the utilitarian calculations of the relative worth of this or that life (so common in philosophies of animal rights or welfare) or economic exchange values to questions of sharing the planet. (Animal Lessons, 21–2) 49

Derrida and Other Animals Again it would be interesting to compare this with the work of Irigaray (an ethical vegetarian and ecological thinker) on sharing the world. Oliver points out that there is still a divide today between those who embrace the dangers of either ‘biological continuism’ (common for many animal rights philosophers) or ‘metaphysical separationism’ (which characterises much of the history of philosophy) (Animal Lessons, 8–9). Lawlor uses the even simpler category of: ‘biologism. For instance, biologism would say that there is no difference at all between a reaction to a stimulus and a response to a question’, and references Derrida’s ‘L’Animal que’ (172–3). However, he is surely overstating his case with the rhetorical use of ‘at all’ (This Is Not Sufficient, 25). Derrida points in fact to Heidegger’s complicity with the risks of continuism and separationism (which is then Oliver’s point), and in fact many philosophers (including Beauvoir and Lacan) have elements of both. Many accounts of critical animal studies today begin with posthumanism as well as animal rights.88 Berger and Segarra gloss The Animal That Therefore I Am as challenging the Cartesian ‘I think’ implying and depending on an ‘I’­– ­‘thinking begins at the point when an other “me regarde” (not only looks at me but concerns and therefore affects “me”)’ (‘Thoughtprints’, 7)­– ­‘at the point of their “irreducible” entanglement’. The ‘I’ does not have pure autonomy and cannot ‘form the basis for simple and linear differentiation of the human from the animal’. The problem is the understanding of language as essentially deictic (in other words, pointing at things), bound to the ‘autotelic self-deictic self-positioning of the “I”’ (‘Thoughtprints’, 8). Animals are usually granted self-motion and self-affection but not the power to refer to themselves through deixis. They ask: ‘Does the indictment of the act of “naming” in general and of naming the animals in particular in the wake of animals’ thoughtprints not contradict Derrida’s otherwise proffered love of language?’ I find this rather puzzling in its bringing together of naming, calling and the more general question of language(s).

Savages, slaves and women In this book, it is my choice to focus on savages, slaves and women as examples of subaltern groups who have been figured as animals, as well having functioned as ‘figures’ in themselves, to some extent in the way Andrew Benjamin uses the term in Of Jews and Animals. 50

Introduction At the same time I hope to give a little space to the plurality of material beings in history, whether animals, savages, slaves or women, and also to the rhetorical sense of figure. Rhetorical figures based on likeness such as simile, metaphor, synecdoche and so on can be slippery and mobile; even if they also produce hierarchies, these can slip. Figures have clusters of characteristics which can shift yet have to be sufficiently recognisable. Benjamin’s focus is on the philosophical tradition of ‘the figure of’: he wants to position the relation between the particular and the universal. Neither the figure of the Jew nor the figure of the animal, he argues, can form part of a generalised concept of particularity. ‘What counts as a universal has its own history within both philosophy and theology’ (Of Jews and Animals, 9). I would add that there is only ever a drive­/machine to produce universality which constantly expels exceptions or ‘particulars’ or blindly strategic collections of particulars­– ­the universal is only ever asserted. I presume that Benjamin selects the figure of the Jew for numerous historical reasons as well as on account of particular philosophical texts that interest him, such as Heidegger’s. However, for me both animal and woman are more general examples of particulars­ – ­almost all human societies know animals and women and are dominated by men. Savages could also be more generally defined as those who are outside the dominant ethnic group and perceived as in a lower state of development­– ­although I shall use the Early Modern encounter with the New World to make the category more historically specific (as it is in Defoe). With the figure of the slave likewise, there is a question as to the weight to give to a particular historical phenomenon of chattel slavery against a more general exploitation. Benjamin argues that ‘to the extent that universality prevails both the Jew and the animal have to be held as excluded’ (Of Jews and Animals, 4), which will be true for certain texts although presumably not true either for some Jewish texts or for texts from societies that do not know Jews. In other words, this is a particular philosophical history of obsession with the Jew. Benjamin argues that work to ameliorate the condition of animals must be based on an ethical position which is aware of the role of the animal in the history of philosophy. In other words, it is necessary to rethink the metaphysical project­– ­the structure of thought­– ­as well as the ethical one. The distancing of the human body (and therefore animality) was necessary for the abstract conception of human being and thus there has been a radical separation of human from animal, notably in Heidegger. This is not just distance but ‘the absence of a 51

Derrida and Other Animals relation’: ‘human being exists without relation to the animal [. . .] The without relation is central both to the construction of figures and to their work’ (Of Jews and Animals, 11). Furthermore, in this philosophical and artistic tradition: ‘The animal’s death would establish the uniquely human [. . .] There is the need for practices that maintain vigilance against the possibility of animality’s interruption’ (Of Jews and Animals, 13). I would add that this is true of femininity or women too. All this relates not only to the establishing of human being in philosophy, but also to the community­– ­the (in)hospitality or (auto)immune practices of the social group. Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign and my book, which is on its track, are thus characterised by the shifting of registers between material animals dominated by men, ‘to become either an enslaved instrument of work or else animal nourishment (horse, ox, lamb, sheep, etc.: animals, let us note, that can become victims or prey of the wolf)’ (Beast 1, 12; Bête 1, 32), and the figural or analogical wolf-sovereign, say, who governs cattle-people. An attentive reader might note already, in Derrida’s characterisation of ‘real’ animals, what might be an analogy with human slavery that might then even lead to some suspicion regarding ‘nourishment’ and the meanings that can have. In other words, I would suggest (as I hope, trying not to be too forlorn, will be clear throughout the book) that it is hard to think the category of the empirical without the figural and vice versa. Readers who know Derrida well might also worry at what he calls the ‘obscure’ (Beast 1, 20; Bête 1, 42) term analogy­– ­a word that ‘designates for us the place of a question rather than that of an answer. However one understands the word, an analogy is always a reason, a logos, a reasoning, or even a calculus that moves back up toward a relation of production, or resemblance, or comparability in which identity and difference co-exist’ (Beast 1, 14; Bête 1, 34). Beyond this persistence of identity and difference in any relationship summed up with the comparator ‘like’, in this specific case of man and animal or beast, there is a recurrent gesture that ‘brings man and animal close in order to oppose them’ (Beast 1, 14; Bête 1, 34). Derrida’s work insistently challenges that abyssal heterogeneity­– ­for example insisting not only that the ‘political man is still animal but that the animal is already political’ (Beast 1, 14; Bête 1, 35), and that, contra not only Aristotle but a long philosophical tradition, animal societies have ‘the appearance of refined, complicated organisations, with hierarchical structures, attributes of authority and power, 52

Introduction phenomena of symbolic credit, so many things that are so often attributed to and so naively reserved for so-called human culture, in opposition to nature’ (Beast 1, 15; Bête 1, 35). Derrida turns here to the key question for anthropologists in the wake of Lévi-Strauss and for psychoanalysis­– ­the prohibition of incest­– a­ sking when we understand avoidance of incest (for instance by great apes) as signifying interdiction, and thus the definition of law, as we move between human and animal societies. Importantly, Derrida reminds his students in the first session of The Beast and the Sovereign, this questioning does not simply leave us with muddled resemblance: ‘Every time one puts an oppositional limit in question, far from concluding that there is identity, we must on the contrary multiply attention to differences, refine the analysis in a restructured field’ (Beast 1, 16; Bête 1, 36). I shall try to refine the analysis in a restructured field of the human-animal, a field including many of the thinkers Derrida identifies as critical but also a number of others­– i­ncluding notably women writers as a particular supplement that will help multiply attention to differences.

Notes  1. Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956).   2. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29–31; L’Animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 50–4.   3. David Wood seems to claim that because Derrida is not in favour of biological continuism (for good reason I would suggest), he is to some extent subscribing to the notion of an abyss between man and other animals (which Derrida certainly detects in philosophical writing to date, although Wood presents himself as an exception to the rule­– ­publishing a piece which problematises ‘the animal’ in the same year that ‘L’Animal que donc je suis’ comes out, and giving a paper even earlier), however much he suggests that animal life is a heterogeneous multiplicity. Wood argues for a number of continuities­– ­which seems to me not to contradict what Derrida writes­– D ­ errida is surely claiming that there is neither a single continuity nor a single abyss. The many points of relationship (for instance Wood takes up Derrida’s reference to Bentham and human acceptance that animals suffer) will still have areas of potential fracture­– ­a human being’s sense that primates, or even all mammals, suffer may still not extend to all living beings, and may depend not only on the point in history of the human in ­question 53

Derrida and Other Animals but also their geographical and cultural location. And we do not know where any particular animal sets the boundary of suffering. See Wood, ‘Thinking with Cats’, in Animal Philosophy, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 129–44.  4. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 71–2.   5. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 29; La Bête et le souverain I (2001–2002), ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 54.   6. See the opening words of Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). For commentary on these see Derrida, Beast 1, 47ff.; Bête 1, 78ff.  7. Margaret Atwood’s vegetarian ‘God’s Gardeners’ challenge this very point when they commemorate the Flood, saying ‘Then God establishes his Covenant with Noah, and with his sons, “and with every living creature.” Many recall the Covenant with Noah, but forget the Covenant with all other living Beings. However, God does not forget it. He repeats the terms “all flesh” and “every living creature” a number of times [. . .] No one can make a Covenant with a stone: for a Covenant to exist, there must be a minimum of two live and responsible parties to it. Therefore the Animals are not senseless matter, not mere chunks of meat. No; they have living Souls, or God could not have made a Covenant with them’ (The Year of the Flood (London: Virago Press, 2010 (2009), 109). Although the reader may guess that Atwood is having fun with the somewhat sanctimonious tone of the God’s Gardeners’ lore­– ­these are on the whole the good guys relative either to the sects for rich people (such as the Church of PetrOleum), the violent and sadistic painballers or, worst of all, the Corporations.  8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. with an Introduction by Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), Note J, 154–61; Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité in Oeuvres complètes (hereafter OC), ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95), vol. III, Note X, 209–11.   9. Derrida signals the ambiguity of the dative in the Latin phrase homo homini lupus. 10. It might be noted that wolf is less often a quotidian insult than cow, pig, sow, dog, bitch or viper. It is as least as often a compliment or self-­ designation (I’m hungry as a wolf)­– ­there is an ambiguous relationship to the wolf, both enemy and parallel to man in some respects. This will be tracked over the next couple of chapters. Animal insults are discussed in Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of 54

Introduction Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), chapter 2, in particular the bestial racial slurs which tend to accompany colonialism, enslavement, war, genocide and other forms of what is called ‘brutality’. Patterson’s comments with respect to the representation and the treatment of the indigenous people of the Americas as wild animals, until they have been ‘enslaved’ when they become domestic animals, are relevant to my Chapter 4. 11. As so often there are issues in translation: ‘human rights’ may still exclude ‘animals’, but the translation of homme in French by ‘human’ in English relates to a general move in that language away from the use of ‘man’ to represent humanity (homo) on account of its also meaning male (vir). 12. A longer version of the essay and translation were published later in book form, and page references are to these for consistency. 13. See Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); ‘La mythologie blanche’, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 14. See Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra, ‘Introduction: Thoughtprints’, in Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida, ed. Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Marta Segarra (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 3–22. This essay, in common with other work in this area, persistently ascribes the coining of animot to Derrida (5) in The Animal That Therefore I Am, but in footnote 8 remarks that ‘He (re) invents it “after” Hélène Cixous who made this pun in “Writing Blind,” first published in TriQuaterly 97 (1996) and republished in Stigmata.’ See Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 139–72 (140); ‘Conversation avec l’âne: Écrire aveugle’, in L’amour du loup et autres remords (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 79–105 (81). 15. After completing the manuscript of the present book I came across two new works devoted to Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign seminar: David Krell, Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, ‘The Beast and the Sovereign’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) and Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2015). Fortuitously both, unlike the present work, focus far more on Heidegger than on Derrida’s other intertexts­– ­and so I would direct readers keen to pursue the Heideggerian questions towards both of these careful as well as clever readers. Naas is particularly focused on the second year of the seminar. Krell­– w ­ ithout, he writes, wanting to be an apologist for Heidegger­– ­attempts to ‘answer’ some of Derrida’s concerns in part by enlarging the range of Heidegger texts. He supplements Derrida’s work with attention to other philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty 55

Derrida and Other Animals or Nietzsche, while I have chosen to focus more both on the poeticfictional (with particular attention to women writers) and the political (with particular attention to so-called savages and slaves). 16. Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 25–6. 17. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 33ff.; La Bête et le souverain II (2002–2003) (Paris: Galilée, 2010), ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, 64ff. 18. Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 253. The Crakers are a man-made creation who or which might be considered animals in (very beautiful) human form­– t­ here are references also to the modern imaginary of so-called primitive peoples. 19. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 20. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 150–1; Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 196–7. 21. Bernard Stiegler, Etats de choc: Bêtise et savoir au XXIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2012), chapter 2, section 19, 83–8. 22. Derrida insists on the (French) tongue and the genders it imposes (Beast 1, 65; Bête 1, 100). I will return to his rhythmic repetition of ‘la...le...’ in my Chapter 3. 23. Derrida refers to individuation in Deleuze in terms of bêtise, and its presupposition of thought as human freedom, in relation to the influence of the late eighteenth–early nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, whom Deleuze cites, but who might be a less welcome point of emphasis for his advocates than the midtwentieth-century philosopher of science, Simondon, currently much cited (Beast 1, 152ff.; Bête 1, 209ff.). 24. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘ “Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Derrida, . . . Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Points ­ Stanford University Press, 1995), 255–87; ‘Il faut bien manger’, in Points de suspension. Entretiens, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 269–301. 25. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)’, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28:2 (Winter 2002), 369–418; ‘L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre)’, in L’animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1999), ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, 251–301. 26. Jacques Derrida, ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’, Cahiers de l’Herne. Jacques Derrida, 83 (2004), ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, 117–29; ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’, trans. David 56

Introduction Wills, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121–46. 27. See my Derrida and Hospitality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), chapter 6, 251. 28. Nancy is particularly implicated in the question (Who comes after the subject?), which has been posed to make up a special issue of the journal Topoi. Derrida has already doubly blotted his copybook in that he has not provided an article for the special issue unlike all the other contributors so the interview is second best­– ­and then this is both too late and too long to be transcribed in full for the special issue. In addition he keeps questioning the question ‘Who comes after the subject?’, or the terms of the letter of invitation, and his good friend and philosophical ally Nancy seems to develop quite a tetchy tone as Derrida insists on talking about animals and apparently not answering the questions. 29. See Ginette Michaud, ‘On a Serpentine Note’, in Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida, 41–72, for a more extended discussion of the scene of nakedness in ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’. 30. John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), 12. This collection brings together pieces published over three decades. 31. Returning to my epigraph, Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals is a fascinating example of reflection on inter-species communication and affection (though the budding natural scientist of the 1930s is keen to collect specimens, and would not suit the sensitivities of animal rights campaigners today), juxtaposed with representation of communication within the human species of very varying quality. To me there is a distinct difference between this and the relentless anthropomorphism of Natural History programmes today where relations between animals are seen in parallel to relations between humans­– ­with implied conclusions then drawn about both. 32. See Michael P.T. Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 6. 33. There is a long discussion of Lacan in the section ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’ of The Animal That Therefore I Am that is reproduced in the Fourth Session of La Bête et le souverain I. Derrida notes that Lacan’s use of scientific material that shows how animals respond to mirror images (hence their accession to the Imaginary at least) is an advance on many anthropocentric thinkers. 34. Marian Hobson argues that Derrida is above all and primarily a philosopher and above all and primarily a teacher­– t­his is also true. See her ‘Derrida: Hostilities and Hostages (to Fortune)’, Paragraph, 28:3 (2005), 79–84. 35. These lectures were delivered 1929–30. See Heidegger, The Fundamental 57

Derrida and Other Animals Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 36. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Voyous: deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003). 37. I am thinking for example of the Caucasian European bison or wisent. 38. Hélène Cixous and Chris Miller, ‘We Who Are Free, Are We Free?’, Critical Inquiry, 19:2 (1993), 201–19, 201–2. Thanks to Martina Williams for sending me this article based on an Amnesty lecture. 39. See Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions (New York and London: Routledge, 1989). 40. Singer’s vegetarianism explicitly forms part of his ethical protest against man’s bloody exploitation of animals. In his writing he links this both to a stance against man’s cruelty to man, specifically the Holocaust, and to a degree of social isolation as a result of vegetarianism. Derrida, who does not subscribe to the view that vegetarianism is a solution, nevertheless asks, in ‘Eating Well’, if it is by chance that women and vegetarians are just beginning to be included in the concept of subject or citizen at the moment of the deconstruction of the subject? Authority and autonomy, he says, are given first to homo et vir, the adult male (father, husband, brother). The leader or chef (the Head of State) must be a carnivore, as well as a married man (‘Eating Well’, 281; ‘Il faut bien manger’, 295). 41. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Letter Writer, in The Collected Stories (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1968). Chapter 7 of Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka focuses on Singer and his horror throughout his life at the violence casually inflicted by men on animals­– ­even in the world of his youth prior to the industrialisation of food production. Patterson traces the adoption of production lines in Chicago slaughterhouses, which inspired the anti-Semitic Henry Ford in his ‘rational’ organisation of work in his car factories, to Hitler, who thanks Ford for his support in Mein Kampf, and his scheme of management of slaughter in the camps (see Eternal Treblinka, chapter 3). See also Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). See also Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future published in the Mercure de France in 1930, which includes an account of the Swift and Company abattoir in Chicago with a focus on black themselves between human, workers in the mechanised abattoirs­– ­ animal and machine. Thanks to Jeremy Lane and to Jackie Clarke for this reference. Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, trans. Charles Milner Thompson (New York: Arno Press, 1974). 42. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University 58

Introduction Press, 1999)­– ­this includes an Introduction by Amy Gutman and essays by the literary theorist Marjorie Garber, the philosopher Peter Singer, the religious scholar Wendy Doniger, and the primatologist Barbara Smuts. Costello draws a comparison between herself and Kafka’s famous ape Red Peter who lives as a human (see Franz Kafka, ‘A Report to the Academy’, in Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Jospovici (New York: Knopf, 1993), 195–205). Coetzee later published Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker and Warburg, 2003), which adds additional material to what he originally gave as the Tanner lectures at Princeton 1997–8, a context which he is echoing in the story of Costello­– t­hus there are elements of Derrida’s autobiographical animal. 43. See Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19–20, for a brief but helpful account of critical (as opposed to crude) empathy and then critical anthropomorphism. Weil began writing her book because she was haunted by Coetzee’s Disgrace, and refers to his work at a number of points throughout. 44. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 220. 45. Sara Guyer, ‘Albeit Eating. Towards an Ethics of Cannibalism’, Angelaki, 2:1 (1995), 63–80, 77. 46. For Roudinesco see, ‘Violences contre les animaux’, in Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain ­. . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard and Galilée, 2001), 105–27. Even though Derrida does not advocate vegetarianism as such in this dialogue, but is rather raising issues of what levels of violence towards men or animals should be found acceptable (such as veal calves kept in crates), Roudinesco first raises the spectre (or red herring) of starvation, and then takes refuge in the traditions of French gastronomy. Derrida responds that human beings do not eat meat because it is biologically necessary, and that industrially produced meat is not the best source of gastronomic refinement­– ­it is a question of changing the customs and habits of thought and a matter of making an ethical decision. 47. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Responsibility­– ­Of the Sense to Come’ (2002), in Derrida, For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 56–86; Derrida, ‘Responsabilité du sens à venir’, conversation avec Jean-Luc Nancy in Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2004). 48. See Tom Regan, Defending Animal Rights (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), chapter 1, ‘Ethical Theory and Animals’. For Regan as an animal rights advocate this is of course grossly inadequate as a response to cruelty to animals. 59

Derrida and Other Animals 49. Derrida quotes from the Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘in the animal kingdom, a rogue is defined as a creature that is born different. It is incapable of mingling with the herd, it keeps to itself, and it can attack at any time, without warning’ (Rogues, 94). See Mark Strauss, ‘A Rogue by Any Other Name: The Adjustable Language of Foreign Policy’, Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington DC, 15 December 2000. Derrida also refers to Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Role of Force in World Affairs (Cambridge MA: South End Press, 2000) (e.g. Beast 1, 89; Bête 1, 130). Srinivas Aravamudan discusses the history (if there could be such a thing) of roguery in ‘Subjects­/Sovereigns­/Rogues’, in Derrida’s Eighteenth Century, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Jody Greene, 40:3 (2007), 457–65, and notes also the importance of economic fraud in this semantic field­– s­ omething clearly intertwined with political domination. 50. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida Enisled’, Critical Inquiry, 33:2 (2007), 248–76, 272. 51. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1928) trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 52. Autobiography too, the self-writing of the individual subject, has its moments of autoimmunity as well as autoaffection: ‘Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living, would be an immunizing movement (a movement of safety, of salvage and salvation of the safe, the holy, the immune, the indemnified, of virginal and intact nudity), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing, like every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, autonomous, autoreferential movement. Nothing risks becoming more poisonous than an autobiography, poisonous for oneself in the first place, auto-infectious for the presumed signatory who is so auto-affected’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 47) (‘L’autobiographie, l’écriture de soi du vivant, la trace du vivant pour soi, l’être pour soi, l’auto-affection ou l’autoinfection comme mémoire ou archive du vivant serait un mouvement immunitaire (donc un mouvement de salut, de sauvetage et de salvation du sauf, du saint, de l’immun, de l’indemne, de la nudité virginale et intacte) mais un mouvement immunitaire toujours menacé de devoir auto-immunitaire, comme tout autos, toute ipséité, tout mouvement automatique, automobile, autonome, auto-référentiel. Rien ne risque d’être aussi empoisonnant qu’une autobiographie, empoisonnant pour soi, d’abord, auto-infectieux pour le présumé signataire ainsi autoaffecté’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 72)). 53. Derrida’s used of the term ‘supposed’ in this context may seem unduly provocative or even offensive to those close to people who died on 9­/11 (whose grief will still be sharp). I understand it as his attempt to 60

Introduction highlight the history of relations of terror both before and after that event in a way which would bring out the oscillation of terrorism and terror between sovereign state and groups opposed to a state. At that point there would be a very large number of deaths arising from actions attributable to the state, rarely acknowledged as having the significance of individual victims that we tend to give to those nearest to us. 54. See Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida Enisled’, for a relevant discussion of the naked and exposed face in Levinas. 55. See my Derrida and Hospitality (244–8). 56. See Joanna Bourke, What It Means To Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (London: Virago, 2011), Part 2, ‘The Politics of Pain’, 112. Animal rights philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan are both critical of ‘emotionalism’­– ­perhaps this is seen as feminine . . . 57. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne and Son, second edition, 1823), chapter 17, 311, footnote. Bentham is referring to the Code Noir (which will feature in my Chapter 5) in his comment on the French. 58. Agamben finds moments of greater proximity between man and animal lurking in Heidegger’s writing as part of his exegesis of particular sections of text­– t­hese do not seem to lead to any grander challenge of the fundamental categories on which Heidegger rests his case. One example is in chapter 14 of Agamben’s The Open, ‘Profound Boredom’. There are, Agamben tells his reader, two structural moments relating to boredom in Heidegger’s very lengthy account of this key Stimmung in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The first is Leergelassenheit: usually we are occupied, if not captivated, by things­– ­in boredom we are left empty (the example is four empty hours waiting at a railway station), and then become held fast by boredom (The Open, 64). Agamben asks if this boredom is close to animal captivation since Dasein is delivered over to some being that refuses itself in its totality (The Open, 65). However, Heidegger’s second structural moment of boredom (Hingehaltenheit) takes a step beyond this proximity­– ­it is ‘being-held-in suspense’ (The Open, 66), left inactive or fallow. This deactivation of concrete possibilities is critical for man because it makes pure possibilisation possible­– ­making possible all possibilities of Dasein as possibilities. Thus there is, Agamben shows, some similarity as well as difference between man and animal (The Open, 68); but, for me the problem is that there are nevertheless always two utterly homogeneous categories: man and animal­– ­even if, to our assumed surprise, they are occasionally shown to be closer to one another (for example, when man is in the first phase of boredom) than at other times. 59. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 (1995)). 61

Derrida and Other Animals 60. Derrida had also written extensively on Heidegger in earlier works such as ‘Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’ and ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–62; ‘Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique (1983)’ and ‘La Main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II) (1984–1985)’, in Psyche. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 395–451; Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987). I will return to these briefly in Chapter 6. 61. Agamben occasionally acknowledges this trait in Heidegger, but is less explicit about the tendency in his own writing, for instance: ‘Heidegger seems here to oscillate between two opposite poles, which in some ways recall the paradoxes of mystical knowledge­– ­or, rather, nonknowledge. On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other, insofar as it is not capable of disconcealing its own disinhibitor, it is closed in a total opacity. Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge’ (The Open, 59). 62. Agamben sometimes refers to inmates of the camps in general in relation to bare life and sometimes more specifically to Muselmänner; see Melissa Shani Brown, ‘De-Ciphering the Muselmänner: Contradictions between Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and Ryn and Klodzinski’s “On the Border Between Life and Death: A Study of the Muselmanns in the Concentration Camps”’ (forthcoming) for the argument that witness accounts suggest that even those most distant from human life (called Muselmänner) were not a homogeneous category and still had more elements of the human about them than Agamben imagines. 63. Andrew Benjamin argues that Agamben’s conception of homo sacer hinders any attempt to think the particular. See Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 14. See also Chapter 6. 64. Uexküll proposes that Umgebung is what we see, for example, a dragonfly flying alongside us; Umwelt is the environment world constituted by Bedeutungsträger (carriers of significance) or Merkmalträger (marks)­– ­the only things that interest the animal, for instance, the dragonfly. Umgebung is our own Umwelt but according to Agamben has no particular privilege. Thus of course the stalk of a flower has different significance for each of many creatures (girl, ant, cow), but the more significant claim is that these worlds are perceptually uncommunicating­ – e­ ven the worlds of the spider and the fly caught in its web (The Open, 62

Introduction 42). Agamben does point out that this hypothesis (which, he emphasises, is supported by scientific experiments) might be compared to the political geography of the time on relations between populations and their environment such as the notion of Lebensraum (which we might link to Nazism) and of peoples intimately linked to their vital space as their essential dimension. 65. See Stephen Morton, ‘Troubling Resemblances, Anthropological Machines and the Fear of Wild Animals: Following Derrida after Agamben’, in Lynn Turner, The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 105–23, for this debate. 66. This is a particular reference to Agamben’s work on the phrase ‘man is a wolf to man’ which I shall discuss over the next two chapters, but also has more general purchase on his style of writing; Derrida cites him on Hegel, Pindar, and Levinas amongst others claimed as forgotten origins. 67. See Rogues, 24 (Voyous, 46), for Derrida’s comment that this distinction in Plato and Aristotle is ‘more than tricky and precarious’ (‘plus que difficile et précaire’), unlike Agamben’s formulation. 68. For a more general interrogation of linear periodisation, with a break between every step, see Derrida’s ‘White Mythology’, where he also investigates the play between an internal articulation of concepts and a historical or genealogical attachment, which is highly pertinent to the question of sovereignty. See Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derrida’s “Eighteenth Century”’, in Derrida’s Eighteenth Century, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Jody Greene, 40:3 (2007), 381–93. 69. See, for example a brief account in Morton, ‘Troubling Resemblances’, 117–20. 70. Morton ignores the love (and killing) of dogs as critical in Disgrace both for Lucy Lurie and, more surprisingly, for her father the lecturer David Lurie; this is analysed in Weil, Thinking Animals, e.g. 122–7, 134–45. See David Lodge, ‘Disturbing the Peace’, New York Review of Books, 20 November 2003, for an interesting review of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. 71. Many of the articles published in the last ten years on this question take particular angles on Derrida’s deconstructive play on one or more animals (including monkey, sponge, worm or cat)­– ­or bounce off Derrida for the purpose of interpretation of a literary or filmic text. See for example the collection Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida, ed. Berger and Segarra, which includes Ginette Michaud on Derrida’s silkworms, Anne E. Berger on Comtesse de Ségur’s novels, two articles on Coetzee and also an essay on Kafka. 72. Jacques Derrida, ‘Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue­– B ­etween Two Infinities, the Poem’, in Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 135–63. 63

Derrida and Other Animals 73. See Regan, Defending Animal Rights, on the growing consensus over recent decades that animal welfare is an important ethical issue whereas in the past ‘animal advocates’ could be accused of mental illness or simply ignored. 74. To give just a few examples­– ­ many more will occur through these pages: The Oxford Literary Review published an issue on ‘Derridanimals’ in 2007; Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves and Tom Regan (New York: SUNY Press, 1999); Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), this has one chapter on Derrida and others on Heidegger, Levinas and Agamben; Dominick LaCapra, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), this is an example of a work with numerous references to Derrida on animals, but not a sustained analysis of the Derrida material. 75. Naomi Sykes, Beastly Questions: Animal Answers to Archaeological Issues (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 99. Sykes cites the work of L. Bartosiewicz, N. Overton and Y. Hamilakis, and K. Poole and E. Lacey, in this quotation. 76. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 27. 77. Haraway presents dogs as the first domestic animal and then in some ways the stand-in for all domestic animals, which might be something of a leap. Carla Freccero, ‘Figural Historiography: Dogs, Humans and Cynanthropic Becomings’, in Comparatively Queer, ed. Jarrod Hayes, Margaret Higonnet and William J. Spurlin (London: Palgrave, 2010), 45–67, takes up dogs (in particular fighting dogs in the New World from the conquest to the present day) as ‘partners in the crime of evolution’ and models for the choice between ontological autism (a rather disturbing term, seeming to categorise lesser humans, borrowed from Eduardo Kohn) and merger which humans and dogs negotiate. Thanks to Vincent Bruyere who sent me this thought-provoking chapter. 78. Sykes asks in her chapter 4, ‘Animal Diaspora and Culture Change’ (Beastly Questions, 76–98) how our views would change if red deer were managed primarily for their antlers rather than for meat­– a­ plausible hypothesis at certain historical periods­– ­with antlers having religious and cultural significance as much as practical use. Fallow deer, introduced with the Roman and Norman empires, kept over the centuries in private parks, are more valuable for status than for meat. 79. Sykes writes: ‘Cobb (2003: 77) states that cockfighting “wears misogyny on its sleeve” and it is not surprising that, today, cockfighting tends to be a male-only sport. In general terms it is more common in patriarchal societies, where rates of female-directed violence or “inti64

Introduction mate terrorism” are comparatively high (Johnson 2006: 1015). In some cases, domestic violence has been linked directly with cockfighting (McCulloch and Stancich 1998). These findings concur with the growing body of evidence (e.g. Mullin 1999) that suggests the way that people treat animals is a reflection of, or at least provides an insight into, how they treat one-another; Henry (2004: 423) specifically mentions cockfighting in his article on the relationship between animal cruelty and human delinquency. The idea that humans and animals become mutually socialised through their interactions (e.g. Armstrong Oma 2010; Mlekuž 2007) is interesting with regard to chickens and it was certainly the conclusion of Geertz (1994), whose pioneering study of cockfighting in Balinese society highlighted the close identification between men and their birds, the two being almost indivisible’ (Beastly Questions, 86). Of course it is also possible that human violence is displaced onto animal displays (as arguably in Rome). Sykes is referring specifically to R. Cobb, ‘Chickenfighting for the Soul of the Heartland’, Text, Practice, Performance 4 (2003), 69–83; M. P. Johnson, ‘Conflict and Control: Gender Symmetry and Asymmetry in Domestic Violence’, Violence Against Women, 12 (2006), 1003–18; and B. C. Henry, ‘The Relationship between Animal Cruelty, Delinquency, and Attitudes Toward the Treatment of Animals’, Society and Animals, 12:3 (2004), 184–207; she also cites the work of L. McCulloch and L. Stancich, M. H. Mullin, K. Armstrong Oma, D. Mlekuž, and Clifford Geertz. 80. The reference is to O. T. Perrin, ‘Marks: A Distinct Subcategory within Writing as Integrationally Defined’, Language Sciences, 33:4 (2011), 623–33. Sykes also cites T. Ingold and R. Willerslev here. 81. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 82. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991)­– a­ collection of essays published between 1978 and 1989, gathered together into what she calls ‘a book about the invention and reinvention of nature’ (Simians, 1). 83. The experiments she studies make the assumption that a certain amount of dominance functions to organise social space, but too much causes social disruption (pathological aggression). Thus there is a natural political economy­– ‘­The group that loses its alpha male loses in the competitive struggle with other organized organic societies. The result would be reflected in less food, higher infant mortality, fewer offspring, and thus evolutionary disadvantage or even extinction. The market competition implicit in organic evolutionary theory surfaces here’ (Simians, 18). 84. Kelly Oliver, ‘Introduction: Biting the Hand That Feeds You: The Role of Animals in the Philosophies of Man’, in Animal Lessons: How They 65

Derrida and Other Animals Teach Us to be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1–22 (1). 85. See my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 6. 86. Lawlor links Derrida to Peter Singer saying they are ‘in alliance’, but the main evidence that he gives for this is that they both cite Bentham (as do so many others) and do not base their argument on ‘rights’ (This Is Not Sufficient, 2)­– ­then he leaps to the assertion ‘If you accept this alliance, therefore, and you want to follow Derrida, then you must, we must, support and advocate what Peter Singer (among others) supports and advocates.’ That is, we must support ‘direct attacks’ on animal suffering. Lawlor does not make specific suggestions for action but offers a framework that ‘amounts to affirming unconditional hospitality’ (This Is Not Sufficient, 3). I would argue that in fact most of these issues are about conditional hospitality­– a­ nd thus it is a question of decisions rather than simply an affirmation of such a stance. 87. See Luce Irigaray, ‘Animal Compassion’, in Animal Philosophy, ed. Atterton and Calarco, 195–201, written for this volume, and not yet published in French. I analyse this essay in my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 6. 88. See, for example, Berger and Segarra, ‘Introduction: Thoughtprints’, in Demenageries, 3–22. Wolfe also does this in his Introduction to Zoontologies.

66

2

Man is a Wolf to Man1

Introduction: The Beast and the Sovereign and lycological intertexts In this chapter I shall set off from the posthumous publication of Derrida’s 2001–2 seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1, to follow the figure of the wolf, particularly the genealogy of the key phrase ‘lupus est homo homini’ (usually translated as ‘man is a wolf to man’) and its various mongrel offspring. Derrida cites a range of classical and Early Modern authors, circling, perhaps doggedly, around Plato, Plautus, Plutarch, La Fontaine, Hobbes and Rousseau amongst others, explicit intertexts and interlocutors for him. For Derrida, while there exists an extensive political bestiary (including the fox and the lion), it is the wolf who is pre-eminently both sovereign and beast in political discourse. The wolf thus makes us think about a certain characterisation of man, man’s self-definition, and how this impacts on possible constructions of community (social existence), of a just or unjust society (the social pact), and ultimately the state (polis). I should note again that I shall echo the he­/man language of the sources I am using because it allows the reader to look for the ambiguity or tension between man as human being and man as male, which is often critical to, for example, Rousseau’s writing and his reception, and indeed to that of many other philosophers of the time, and even today. Chapter 3 will focus explicitly on sexual difference, women and wolves. Through the different treatments of the wolf, and of wolfish man, I shall briefly track the questions of the representation of the savage, and tyranny and enslavement, in these authors; these will be pursued further in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. This will include worrying at the notorious voracious appetite of the wolf­– ­and the way in which the shift from brute hunger (the need to survive) to perfectible taste (choice and distinction) is depicted as quintessentially human in a number of authors. I shall conclude with man’s relation to the animal wolf, and a first pass at the politics of what we eat. The wolf is the undomesticated, free 67

Derrida and Other Animals animal par excellence, in spite of (or relative to) the physical similarity between wolves and dogs, domesticated par excellence, trained to obey their master’s law. The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 is principally concerned with the bestiary of political language (or zoo-political discourse),2 in which the wolf has a privileged place: Derrida argues that the wolf is usually placed outside the polis or the law­– f­ or example figuring man in the state of nature, a creature of appetites, free of social or political control, the outlaw. However, the wolf shares this liminal position with the Sovereign; the one who makes the law (or creates the social bond) is in some respects not included within it or subject to it: The law (nomos) is always determined from the place of some wolf. I shall call it lyconomy. No genelycology or anthropolycology without lyconomy. (Beast 1, 96) La loi (nomos) toujours se détermine depuis la place de quelque loup. J’appellerai cela lyconomie. Pas de génélycologie ou d’anthropolycolygie sans lyconomie. (Bête 1, 140)

My particular interest in The Beast and the Sovereign is the question of what, or who, is excluded from the polis­– ­bearing in mind that, in a typical Derridean move, being-outside-the-law (l’être-horsla-loi ) includes the sovereign, criminal, and beast­– ­and there is an uncanny, fascinating complicity, mirroring or doubling between them in spite of the heterogeneity of their modes of being outside the law (Beast 1, 17; Bête 1, 38). Derrida, speaking, plays on the hesitation ‘eh, eh’. The beast and the sovereign joined by an ‘and’ (et), as we may say ‘black and white’ or ‘good and evil’, are opposites; yet the ‘and’ may be considered a copulative, suggesting that you cannot have one without the other­– o ­ r that they are engaged forever in a mortal and amorous combat (like archetypal twins). However, he goes further, introducing ‘is’ (‘e.s.t.’, spelled out to distinguish it from the homophone ‘e.t.’)­– w ­ e see the face of the beast in the sovereign and vice versa­– ­if we allow the beast to have a face (as Levinas does not). You can see the one through the other (like an uncanny X ray): In the vertigo of this unheimlich, uncanny hallucination, one would be as though prey to a haunting, or rather the spectacle of a spectrality: haunting of the sovereign by the beast and the beast by the sovereign, the one inhabiting or housing the other, the one becoming the intimate host of the other, the animal becoming the hôte (host and guest), the hostage too, of a sovereign of whom we also know that he can be very stupid 68

Man is a Wolf to Man [très bête] without that at all affecting the all-powerfulness ensured by his function or, if you like, by one of the ‘king’s two bodies’. In the metamorphic covering-over of the two figures, the beast and the sovereign, one therefore has a presentiment that a profound and essential ontological copula is at work on this couple: it is like a coupling, an ontological, onto-zoo-anthropo-theologico-political copulation: the beast becomes the sovereign who becomes the beast; there is the beast and [et] the sovereign (conjunction), but also the beast is [est] the sovereign, the sovereign is [est] the beast. (Beast 1, 18) Dans le vertige de cette hallucination unheimlich, uncanny, on serait comme en proie à une hantise, ou plutôt au spectacle d’une spectralité: hantise du souverain par la bête et de la bête par le souverain, l’un habitant ou hébergeant l’autre, l’un devenant l’hôte intime de l’autre, l’animal devenant l’hôte (host et guest), l’otage aussi, d’un souverain dont on sait d’ailleurs qu’il peut aussi être très bête sans que cela atteigne en rien la toute-puissance assuré par sa fonction ou, si vous voulez, par l’un des deux ‘corps du roi’. Dans le recouvrement métamorphique des deux figures, la bête et le souverain, on pressent donc qu’une profonde et essentielle copule ontologique est à l’oeuvre qui travaille ce couple; c’est comme un accouplement, une copulation ontologique, onto-zoo-anthropo-théologopolitique: la bête devient le souverain qui devient la bête: il y a la bête et le souverain (conjonction), mais aussi la bête est (e.s.t.) le souverain, le souverain (e.s.t.) la bête. (La Bête 1, 39)

Another way in which Derrida phrases this coupling is in his use of prosthesis as grafting (Beast 1, 70; Bête 1, 106). I discuss Derrida’s description of prosthstatics as the construction of the artificial animal which is the State in Chapter 1,3 but grafting would suggest a conjoining of man and beast which is rather different­– ­closer to the werewolf, perhaps, and the many other chimeras scattered through the seminars and throughout The Animal That Therefore I Am (Beast 1, 80; Bête 1, 118–19). One of the first questions to be asked, where the sovereign beast is concerned, is whether might is right, and how that relates to law and the sovereign state? Another question puts some flesh on the bones of the politico-ethical debate concerning the limited hospitality (at best) of the state: how are those considered not to be (good) citizens or brothers framed: those such as women, savages, servants, slaves and animals? Sovereign man is deemed by Kant to be master of himself (ipse and potes), as woman, servant, slave cannot be. Is an animal master of himself?, I might ask, and man’s answers vary. Domestic animals may be analogous to pampered children, trusted servants or to slaves; wild animals may be represented as free or as 69

Derrida and Other Animals slaves to instinct. Democracy has an ipsocentric quality­– ­it prefers ‘semblables’, a critical, but common, term in French which can mean similar or ‘like’ in the sense of something which is ‘like’ something else, which gets translated in Derrida’s Rogues by the unusual ‘compeers’; in other texts it is sometimes rendered by ‘self-same’.4 How does this bring me to the wolf? Who or what is the wolf? There are many, many stories, legends, turns of phrase involving wolves­– ­some of which cross national and linguistic borders and others, unsurprisingly, which do not. In terms of figures of speech, Derrida picks up, in the very first sentences of his first session (December 2001), on ‘à pas de loup’.5 As you might imagine, with the tempting pas, and its step or negation meaning, as well as the lupine association, this is something Derrida identifies with, and may be the way he will proceed in his seminar (rather than speaking like the peaceful dove imagined by Kant or Nietzsche). ‘A pas de loup’ is a set phrase, translated as ‘stealthily, like a wolf’, that does not exist in English even though Anglophones might share the sense of the wolf’s silent, and potentially dangerous, gait, if not from personal experience then from childhood reading. Jack London’s 1906 novel White Fang describes the first appearance of the famous she-wolf (half-dog) acting as a decoy to lure out dogs to feed the wolf pack as follows: ‘Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a dog-like animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring, cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs.’6 The impact of North American wolves on the British and French mythology of the wolf is a large and interesting question which I shall largely set aside although it will briefly recur in other chapters. The negation of the homonym pas infects ‘à pas de loup’ suggesting furthermore that the wolf, imperceptible, is, in some sense, more than stealthy: he is not there; there is no wolf. Just as Magritte’s ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’ refers to a picture of a pipe, the figure of the wolf, the fabulous wolf, is of course not a wolf.7 The absence of the person (or animal) can be a source of power, sovereignty can lie in the invisible, all-seeing, King: ‘The strength of the wolf is all the stronger, sovereign even, is all the more all-conquering [a raison de tout] for the fact that the wolf is not there’ (Beast 1, 6) (‘La force du loup est d’autant plus forte, voire souveraine, elle a d’autant plus raison de tout que le loup n’est pas là’ (La Bête 1, 25)).8 The fact that a wolf can take you by surprise is a critical point of comparison for Derrida. The French also have the saying ‘When you 70

Man is a Wolf to Man speak of the wolf, you see its tail’ (Beast 1, 5) (‘Quand on parle du loup, on voit sa queue’ (Bête 1, 24)), which is said when a person materialises just as you are talking about them­– ­speak of the devil, as we say in English. While this may seem to focus on a surprise appearance rather than disappearance, the reference to the tail (rather than, say, the head), as well as emphasising the animal in the synecdoche since we humans have lost our tails, suggests to me that the elusive wolf is already on his way out even as he enters the scene. The wolf’s tail, standing for the wolf, makes Derrida wonder if there is a drift towards the masculine in that figure of the menacing, insensible wolf. The famous Gustave Doré illustration of Little Red Riding Hood (1862) shows a surprisingly calm and naturalistic wolf towering over an ambivalent little girl­– ­the wolf is shown from behind and his tail is much more striking than his head which is hardly visible. However, in the case of le loup as a black velvet mask worn most often by ladies, seeing without being quite seen (seductive and dangerous, I would say, like London’s imaginary half-breed she-wolf), at masked balls, the drift, Derrida suggests, is towards the feminine­– ­and the tracking of the difference will be one of the important themes in what is to come.9 Derrida also emphasises ‘une faim de loup’­– i­n English you can talk about wolfing food down and used to refer to having a wolf in your stomach­– ­and the sense of a voracious appetite associated with wolves; for instance, he remarks on the repetition of dévorer in references to wolves in the zoo-political examples. The wolf can be presented as the one who is going to eat you up (or eat up the little pigs or the lambs)­– ­the castrating father, according to Freud (Beast 1, 64–5; Bête 1, 99).10 As Angela Carter puts it in her revision of Red Riding Hood, using indirect free speech to express doxa: ‘The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.’11 Red Riding Hood traditionally says to her grandmother­/wolf: ‘what big teeth you have’, but also remarks on the size of her­/his ears. The devouring mouth is also the location of the cry or speech­– ­vociferation, as Derrida puts it­– ­which can (or, in the case of the sovereign, must) be listened to. In Plato’s Republic (roughly 360 bc) the wolf is the people’s champion who becomes a bloodthirsty tyrant. In Asinaria, by Titus Maccius Plautus (254–184 bc), where there is said to be the first recorded instance of the Latin phrase ‘homo homini lupus’, it occurs in the context of market-place cheating, the possibility of being rooked by your fellow man if he is unknown to you.12 71

Derrida and Other Animals However, in the action of the play it is not even a stranger, a trader whom you have not met before, but your nearest and dearest who are most dangerous, as I shall show in the next chapter. In his essay ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’ (‘Sur des vers de Vergile’), Montaigne writes that ‘homo homini’ is either a god ‘deus’ or a wolf ‘lupus’­– ­a classical juxtaposition of two positions which are both antithetical and yet strangely similar in their exteriority to the human understood as such.13 Derrida frequently brings in both the animal and god to lists which include a number of categories intermittently forgotten in, or apparently marginal to, the subject under discussion, such as hospitality. Montaigne makes his claim in the context of a discussion about whether or not a man should marry, making a comparison with a caged bird­– ­you want to be inside the bond of marriage when you are out, a roaming bachelor, and vice versa (Beast 1, 58–61; Bête 1, 92–6). Pausing here we can get a sense of the wandering or errancy of the phrase, not unlike the nomad savage or wild animal­– P ­ lato started with men who eat human flesh, cannibals, who turn into wolves, and then makes an analogy with a tyrant-wolf. But Plautus, often cited as the origin of the political use of the phrase, in fact drifts from market-place trickery into the domestic, and the commoditisation of sex, and Montaigne too picks up on the domestic side; this will be tracked in Chapter 3. In Hobbes, the author above all recognised for his deployment of the phrase, it is actually something of a damp squib. Derrida refers to Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Beast 1, 92–6; Bête 1, 134–9) as an example of the emphatic reference to Hobbes, commenting, as I noted in Chapter 1, on Agamben’s sovereign-like gesture of claiming to be the first to show who was ‘the first’­– ­in the case of this phrase of course Hobbes is not the first.14 The wolf mentioned specifically in De Cive may be, Hobbes writes, the (Roman) monarch or the (Roman) people­– w ­ hen predatory. He cites Cato for the first case and Pontius Telesinus for the second. But what Hobbes’s readers (including such famous readers as Rousseau) usually remember are the arguments about the state of nature as a wolfish state of war of all against all, like, he claims, the daily existence of Native Americans (savages). Although we might note that Hobbes also sees European social existence as the same constant competition, simply without the violent outcomes while the Sovereign holds the peace. According to La Fontaine’s Fables (1668) the wolf can occupy a range of positions; in ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ (‘Le Loup et l’Agneau’), as well as the outlaw, he is the absolute monarch: his 72

Man is a Wolf to Man argument is always ‘right’ because he is the strongest. He is the independent spirit who would rather starve than be collared in ‘The Wolf and the Dog’ (‘Le Loup et le Chien’); and then, in ‘The Companions of Ulysses’ (‘Les Compagnons d’Ulysse’), the animals including the wolf are those who do what is natural, such as eat lambs when hungry; while man does the same but is more of a hypocrite: he kills and eats those whom he claims to protect. The male wolf is certainly typically associated with a voracious appetite­– b ­ ut there is a hint in La Fontaine’s fables that freedom, being outside the law, is even more important to the wolf than filling his belly. In ‘The Wolf and the Dog’ this is the key difference between wolf and dog; the dog has agreed to be man’s servant in return for food­– h ­ e is so greedy he is servile­– ­while the wolf can overcome his appetite to choose freedom. I might note that here La Fontaine imagines a convention or an agreement between man and animal contra the view of Hobbes and others that such a thing is unthinkable. The lack of the possibility of an animal response in law is used by Hobbes to permit any violence against animals, as I noted in the last chapter. La Fontaine not only (via fable) shows a rational dog, but also demonstrates that agreeing to be a servant, or slave, only moderates the violence that will be meted out since, I might add in a return to Hobbes, fear is the instrument that makes subjects obey the law of the household as well as the law of the land. The father is a little king in his house (Derrida, Beast 1, 29; Bête 1, 54). Finally reaching the eighteenth century, and just a few years before Rousseau’s Social Contract (Du contrat social (1762)), I shall mention Voltaire’s Candide (1759), less often a point of reference for Derrida, who would rather see the French eighteenth century as ‘the age of Rousseau’.15 The Anabaptist Jacques, the benefactor of the naive hero Candide and his Leibnizian tutor Pangloss, argues against the absurd optimism of Pangloss: ‘Mankind must have corrupted nature just a little [. . .], for men are not born wolves, yet they have become wolves’ (‘il faut bien [. . .] que les hommes aient un peu corrompu la nature, car ils ne sont point nés loups, et ils sont devenus loups’), for they have created weapons of destruction, bankruptcy and the rest.16 The Anabaptist, however, is not Voltaire, whose marginal notes to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality provide a growling counterpoint to Rousseau’s portrait of man, a freer and happier animal in the state of nature than he will be in society. Voltaire notoriously refers to the Discourse on Inequality (in a thank-you letter to Rousseau) as ‘your new book attacking the human race [. . .] no-one has ever used so 73

Derrida and Other Animals much intelligence to try to make us stupid­/beasts’ (‘votre nouveau livre contre le genre humain [. . .] on n’a jamais employé tant d’esprit à vouloir nous rendre bêtes’).17 Rousseau’s natural man is both an animal (bête) and no worse for that, to Voltaire’s horror. He is not a rapacious ‘wolf’, and indeed Rousseau argues that wild animals, including wolves, do not conform to the figural ‘wolf’: even though they are carnivores who must eat prey to survive, they are not needlessly aggressive predators. Pit a bear or a wolf against a savage­– r­ obust, agile and courageous as all savages are­– a­ rm him with stones or a good stick, and you will find that the danger will be at least mutual; and that after a few such experiences, wild beasts, which do not like to attack their own kind, will not be eager to attack man either, having found him to be altogether as ferocious as they are themselves. (A Discourse on Inequality, 83, my emphasis) Mettez un ours ou un loup aux prises avec un sauvage robuste, agile, courageux comme ils sont tous, armé de pierres, et d’un bon bâton, et vous verrez que le péril sera tout au moins réciproque, et qu’après plusieurs expériences pareilles, les bêtes féroces qui n’aiment point à s’attaquer l’une à l’autre, s’attaqueront peu volontiers à l’homme, qu’elles auront trouvé tout aussi féroce qu’elles. (Discours sur l’inégalité, OC, III, 136, my emphasis)

Here Rousseau’s natural man, a hypothetical origin, is melded with the ‘savage’, a figure to which I shall turn in Chapter 4. This figure is both based on ethnographic evidence, which was devoured by many Enlightenment philosophers, including Rousseau, and also a composite, generalised image, not only carrying a stick but becoming a stick with which ‘civilised man’ or ‘prejudiced man’ could be beaten.

La Fontaine and the fable of might and right Derrida ranges over and dissects a number of these examples and more, but repeatedly goes back to the La Fontaine fable ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, which is a key text in showing how the wolf is both outlaw and monarch. Derrida insists on the use of the wolf in fables because: as the fables themselves show, political force or power, in laying down the law, in laying down its own law, in appropriating legitimate violence and legitimating its own arbitrary violence, is in essence such that this unleashing and restraining of power passes by way of the fable, in other words, by way of a language that is both fictional and performative .­  . . In the fable itself, within a narrative that is itself fabulous, power is shown to 74

Man is a Wolf to Man be an effect of the fable, of fiction and fictive language, of the simulacrum. Just like the law, the force of the law, which Montaigne and Pascal said is, in essence, fictional.18

Similarly, however, Derrida as the teacher, in a certain position of authority, keeps his audience hungry for some time before providing a detailed analysis, as the French expression has it, ‘ils restent sur leur faim’­– ­although they have had some food they are left wanting more. This is, amongst other things, an acting out of a play on the second line of the fable, which to some may seem a filler (it is not even translated in the version below): ‘Nous l’allons montrer tout à l’heure’ (translated by Bennington as ‘As we shall shortly show’)­– ­the proof of the fable’s moral will be shown performatively in time. It is power to be able to make people wait, and in that way Derrida, the teacher, is playing the wolf (Beast 1, 78–9; Bête 1, 117–18). It is not until the eighth session, two and a half months after the first, that Derrida reaches ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, having travelled via Rousseau, Hobbes, Montaigne, Plato, Plautus and the rest: That innocence is not a shield, A story teaches, not the longest. The strongest reasons always yield To reasons of the strongest. A lamb her thirst was slaking, Once, at a mountain rill. A hungry wolf was taking His hunt for sheep to kill, When, spying on the streamlet’s brink This sheep of tender age, He howl’d in tones of rage, ‘How dare you roil my drink? Your impudence I shall chastise!’ ‘Let not your majesty,’ the lamb replies, ‘Decide in haste or passion! For sure ‘tis difficult to think In what respect or fashion My drinking here could roil your drink, Since on the stream your majesty now faces I’m lower down, full twenty paces, ‘You roil it,’ said the wolf; ‘and, more, I know You cursed and slander’d me a year ago.’ ‘O no! how could I such a thing have done! A lamb that has not seen a year, 75

Derrida and Other Animals A suckling of its mother dear?’ ‘Your brother then.’ ‘But brother I have none.’ ‘Well, well, what’s all the same, ‘Twas some one of your name. Sheep, men, and dogs of every nation, Are wont to stab my reputation, As I have truly heard.’ Without another word, He made his vengeance good . . . Bore off the lambkin to the wood, And there, without a jury, Judged, slew, and ate her in his fury.19 La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure: Nous l’allons montrer tout à l’heure. Un agneau se désalterait Dans le courant d’une onde pure. Un loup survient à jeun, qui cherchait aventure, Et que la faim en ces lieux attirait. Qui te rend si hardi de troubler mon breuvage? Dit cet animal plein de rage: Tu seras châtié de ta témérité. ­– ­Sire, répond l’Agneau, que Votre Majesté Ne se mette pas en colère; Mais plutôt qu’Elle considère Que je me vas désaltérant Dans le courant, Plus de vingt pas au-dessous d’Elle; Et que par conséquent, en aucune façon, Je ne puis troubler sa boisson. ­– ­Tu la troubles, reprit cette bête cruelle; Et je ne sais que de moi tu médis l’an passé. ­– ­Comment l’aurais-je fait, si je n’étais pas né? Reprit l’Agneau; je tête encore ma mère. ­– ­Si ce n’est toi, c’est donc ton frère. ­– ­Je n’en ai point.­– ­C’est donc quelqu’un des tiens; Car vous ne m’épargnez guère, Vous, vos bergers et vos chiens. On me l’a dit: il faut que je me venge.  Là-dessus, au fond des forêts Le Loup l’emporte, et puis le mange, Sans autre forme de procès. (Fables, I, 10)

The crux of the fable is the question of the relationship between might and right: the wolf’s power to eat the lamb regardless of whether or 76

Man is a Wolf to Man not he wins the argument about his right to do so, and thus always winning the argument in a life and death sense (and in the sense in which the sovereign founds right) if not, we might think, in terms of what is right. Is having the right to do something the same as being right? Derrida is interested both in the way le droit is at stake, and la raison (also ‘reason(ing)’). In French ‘avoir raison’ is to be right (correct) but ‘avoir raison des autres’ is to prevail over others, say, to be the strongest in an argument. He makes an interesting link to Kant’s ethics and politics, showing how Kant’s moral law is regularly underpinned by (the coercive power of) state law: ‘a right without force is not a right worthy of the name’ (Beast 1, 207) (‘un droit sans force n’est pas un droit digne de ce nom’ (Bête 1, 278)). This could bring me to the question of women (or servants) and Kant, who defines women as lacking in self-mastery and hence ineligible as (voting) citizens and also in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis moral law.20 Derrida points out in a number of texts (typically citing Emile Benveniste21) that ipseity­– ­a principle of legitimate sovereignty­– ­refers always through a complicated set of relations ‘to possession, property, and power, to the authority of the lord or seignor, of the sovereign, and most often the host (hospites), the master of the house or the husband’ (Rogues, 11) (‘à la possession, à la propriété, au pouvoir, à l’autorité du seigneur, du souverain et le plus souvent de l’hôte (hospites), du maître de céans ou du mari’ (Voyous, 31)). It is worth noting the way in which Derrida sets up a sequence of political, economic and sexual domination­– b ­ ut this is also the domination of men (however defined as semblables) over those who are not semblables, particularly animals. Kant is not quite a wolf (though he is not quite a lamb either).22 Derrida asks whether ‘la raison du plus fort’ teaches us that force trumps law or ‘that the very concept of law, that juridical reason itself, includes a priori a possible recourse to constraint or coercion, and, thus, to a certain violence’, adding that ‘This second interpretation was, for example, Kant’s, and it did not necessarily represent the point of view of the wolf. Nor, for that matter, that of the lamb’ (Rogues, xi) (‘que le concept même de droit, que la raison juridique, inclut a priori le recours possible à la contrainte, à la coercition, donc à quelque violence? Cette dernière interprétation fut celle d’un Kant, par exemple, et elle ne représentait pas nécessairement le point de vue du loup. Ni de l’agneau d’ailleurs’ (Voyous, 9)). Derrida’s analysis points us in the direction of the wolfish state­– ­quite simply the sovereign state defined as that which has the power 77

Derrida and Other Animals to make the law and (because it can) enforce it. A society where men are the strongest can exclude women from decision-making power even if they are essential as the ground, the infrastructural support, invisible labour or object-commodity, the means of (re)production in that society. They can be members of the community as lambs are members of the human community (against the wolf) in La Fontaine’s fable. Derrida uses a fine analysis by Louis Marin (which I am to some extent traducing by clipping out one moment) in which he paints the wolf of this fable as ‘a solitary creature, a savage and inhuman animal, a wild beast’ (‘créature solitaire, animal barbare, inhumain par définition, bête sauvage’).23 For Marin the lamb represents affective and ethical community (still suckling its mother, and an ally of shepherds and dogs), while the wolf represents excess of nature: ‘he is apparently without companions, a solitary individual, free from all natural ties, subject to no necessities other than that of his own voracity’ (Food for Thought, 69) (‘apparemment, il est sans compagnon, individu solitaire, libre de tout lien naturel, sans autre nécessité que sa propre voracité’ (La Parole mangée, 74)). Yet as soon as we relate ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ to other fables of La Fontaine, such as ‘The Companions of Ulysses’ (1690, Fables XII, 1), we may see that lambs are kept to be devoured; they may be in the community of men but, rather than a full part of the community, they are its property­– ­which can be true of some categories of human beings as well as animals. The wolf is a figure of the phallic sovereign, and of punitive justice, as much as a figure of the solitary outlaw; and indeed the sovereign state will set out to annihilate the outlaw, including an outlaw or ‘rogue’ state, sometimes on the basis of what an imaginary ‘brother’ or ‘one of your people’ or ‘one of your name’ might have said or done. Derrida does not hide his reference to the American rhetoric, imitated by European politicians, of the ‘rogue state’ which must be isolated and punished. The absolute outsider typically, however, is imagined to have allies inside the sovereign nation which opposes it­ – ­second-class citizens always under suspicion of being collaborators if not the enemy within; this autoimmune reflex is familiar from the 1930s and 1940s as well as the War on Terror. La Fontaine’s ‘The Companions of Ulysses’, which Derrida discusses in the context of Rousseau’s reference to Plutarch’s treatise on animals and reason in his Social Contract, shows Ulysses (or Odysseus in the Greek) trying to encourage his companions, whom the sorceress Circe has turned into animals, to drink another draught which will bring them back into human form. It is a rewriting of 78

Man is a Wolf to Man an episode in the Odyssey (Book X), part of a long tale narrated by Odysseus to his host Alcinous, and his court, whom he persuades to help him return home. Homer’s version gives the men no choice, for Circe simply smears them with a salve and they are restored from swine to younger, handsomer and taller men than ever before­– ­and then they weep for joy. In La Fontaine’s rewriting, however, animal after animal has a good reason to refuse. This surprising turn echoes a much earlier re-inscription of the episode by Plutarch in a treatise which preaches vegetarianism, and argues against the notion of a gulf between men and animals. For brevity, I shall cite only the section from La Fontaine concerning the wolf. In reading the fable we might note a hint of woman-prey in the young and beautiful shepherdess. Her sheep are devoured by the hungry wolf, but he argues that if he had not eaten them then men would have done so: Next to the wolf the princely Greek With flattering hope began to speak: ‘Comrade, I blush, I must confess, To hear a gentle shepherdess Complaining to the echoing rocks Of that outrageous appetite Which drives you, night by night, To prey up on her flocks. You had been proud to guard her fold In your more honest life of old. Pray quit this wolfship, now you can, And leave the woods an honest man.’ ‘But is there one?’ the wolf replied: ‘Such man, I own, I never spied. You treat me as a ravenous beast, But what are you? To say the least, You would yourself have eat the sheep, Which, eat by me, the village weep. Now, truly, on your faith confess, Should I, as man, love flesh the less? Why, man, not seldom, kills his very brother; What, then, are you but wolves to one another? Now, everything with care to scan, And rogue with rogue to rate, I’d better be a wolf than man, And need not change my state.’ Le prince grec au loup va proposer l’affaire; Il lui dit, au hasard d’un semblable refus: 79

Derrida and Other Animals Camarade, je suis confus Qu’une jeune et belle bergère Conte aux échos les appétits gloutons Qui t’ont fait manger ses moutons. Autrefois on t’eût vu sauver sa bergerie: Tu menais une honnête vie. Quitte ces bois, et redeviens Au lieu de loup homme de bien. ­– ­En est-il? dit le loup. Pour moi, je n’en vois guère. Tu t’en viens me traiter de bête carnassière: Toi qui parles, qu’es-tu ? N’auriez-vous pas sans moi Mangé ces animaux que plaint tout le village? Si j’étais homme, par ta foi, Aimerais-je moins le carnage? Pour un mot quelquefois vous vous étranglez tous: Ne vous êtes-vous pas l’un à l’autre des loups? (Fables, XII, 1)

In other words, as the famous Latin proverb has it, ‘man is a wolf to man’ when he is outside the fold, but is also a wolf to others within what is designated the community, founded on sacrifice. The reader might remember that King Ulysses himself is a thief of others’ sheep or cattle, notably in the tale of the monstrous Cyclops, which immediately precedes the story of Circe. Thus La Fontaine seems to hint in the course of the fable that men may be worse than real wolves. His closing ‘moral’ undercuts this, but is that an issue of self-censorship in dangerous political times? Is the end more or less important than the story? I shall return to La Fontaine’s ‘conclusion’ later (‘tout à l’heure’).

Rousseau and Hobbes: wolves in the state of nature What is man? Rousseau typically presents himself as a solitary voice, if not crying in the wilderness, rather like the outlaw or lone wolf, as he speaks out against the band of philosophical brothers who defend the status quo with a panoply of specious and self-serving arguments. There is a play of autoimmunity on the part of both the individual (persecuting himself) and the community which expels him. Derrida points to Rousseau’s use of both seul and le seul in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Beast 2, 65; Bête 2, 106); he is alone (exiled, a refugee, outside the law) and the only one (unique and exceptional in his love for natural solitude, sovereign of his desert island).24 Derrida relates that at times Rousseau may imagine himself as an 80

Man is a Wolf to Man animal, even a werewolf; at other times he is given that name by his enemies who also present him as unsociably ‘farouche’, a term that can be applied to animals or children meaning ‘shy’, but also, say, to a warrior, meaning ‘fierce’, or an enemy, where we might translate it as ‘bitter’. The word is thus evocative of many of the contradictions in Rousseau’s self-representation and his representation by others, and the animal elements therein. Rousseau often chooses Hobbes as his imagined adversary, most famously in his Discourse on Inequality and Social Contract (Du contrat social (1762)), but also, for example, in his first Discourse, which brought him fame, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts (1750)).25 There Rousseau illustrates his view that philosophers are potentially harmful with the fact that ‘one philosopher’ claims: ‘that men are wolves and can devour one another with a clear conscience’ (Discourse on the Sciences, 22) (‘que les hommes sont des loups et peuvent se dévorer en sureté de conscience’ (Discours sur les Sciences, OC, III, 27)),26 and namechecks Hobbes on the following page just in case his reader has missed the point. An English-speaking audience might associate Rousseau’s references to Hobbes with Leviathan, his most famous work in the Anglophone world. However it is De Cive­– p ­ ublished in 27 and then translated into French by Hobbes’s friend Paris in 1642, Samuel Sorbière in 1649, and kept in print throughout the eighteenth century­– ­which was far better known in France. Leviathan (1651) indeed was not translated into French until the twentieth century.28 Rousseau emphasises the fact that he is a citizen of Geneva in his dedication and signature for many reasons, but an attentive reader might catch amongst these the challenge from the citizen of a Republic to the subject of a monarch who has presumed to generalise from his experience to say what a man, and a citizen, is. Hobbes, of course, presents himself as arguing as a mathematician from first principles. It is in De Cive’s ‘Dedication to the Right Honourable William Earl of Devonshire’ (cited by Derrida, Beast 1, 58; Bête 1, 92) that we find the famous phrase; I shall quote at length because so often the phrase is cut out of its context and simply associated with Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature: The Roman People had a saying [. . .] that Kings should be classed as predatory animals. But what sort of animal was the Roman People? [. . .] that people plundered nearly all the world. So the words of Pontius Telesinus are no less wise than Cato’s. As he reviewed the ranks of his army in the battle against Sulla [. . .], he cried that Rome itself must be 81

Derrida and Other Animals demolished and destroyed, remarking that there would never be an end to Wolves preying upon the liberty of Italy, unless the forest in which they took refuge was cut down. There are two maxims which are surely both true: Man is a God to man, and Man is a wolf to Man. The former is true of relations of citizens with each other, the latter of relations between commonwealths. In justice and charity, the virtues of peace, citizens show some likeness to God. But between commonwealths, the wickedness of bad men compels the good too to have recourse, for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud, i.e. to the predatory nature of beasts. Though men have a natural tendency to use the term rapacity as a term of abuse against each other, seeing their own actions reflected in others as in a mirror [. . .] natural right does not accept that anything that arises from the need for self-preservation is a vice [. . .] The famous deeds and sayings of the Greeks and Romans have been commended to History not by Reason but by their grandeur and often by that very wolf-like element which men deplore in each other. (On the Citizen, 3–4, my emphases)

Hobbes argues that relations between commonwealths are like those between wild beasts in the state of nature (a point that Rousseau also makes in the Social Contract) even if there is peace within the commonwealth. I have emphasised the repeated recourse to beasts of prey (notably wolves), to the wild, and to voracity in this quotation. Derrida refers to the: Fantastic, phantasmic, insistent, recurrent altercation between man and wolf, between the two of them, the wolf for man, man for the wolf, man as wolf for man, man as humankind, this time, beyond sexual difference, man and woman (homo homini lupus, this dative making clear that it is also a way for man, with his human space, to give himself, to represent or recount to himself this wolf story, to hunt the wolf by making it come, tracking it (in French this wolf hunt is called louveterie) [. . .] in a fantasy, a narrative, a mytheme, a fable, a trope, a rhetorical turn, where man tells himself the story of politics, the story of the origin of society, the story of the social contract, etc.: for man, man is a wolf). (Beast 1, 9) Fantastique, phantasmatique, insistante, récurrente altercation entre l’homme et le loup, entre les deux, le loup pour l’homme, l’homme pour le loup, l’homme comme loup pour l’homme, l’homme comme genre humain, cette fois, au-delà de la différence sexuelle, l’homme et la femme (homo homini lupus, ce datif disant bien qu’il s’agit aussi d’une façon pour l’homme, dans l’intériorité de son espace humain, de se donner, de se représenter, de se raconter à lui-même cette histoire de loup, de chasser le loup en le faisant venir, en le traquant (on appelle louveterie cette chasse aux loups) [. . .] dans un phantasme, un récit, un mythème, une 82

Man is a Wolf to Man fable, un trope, un tour de rhétorique, là où l’homme se raconte l’histoire du politique, l’histoire de l’origine de la société, l’histoire du contrat social, etc.: pour l’homme, l’homme est un loup). (Bête 1, 28)

Hobbes informs his dedicatee (and other readers) that, while it may seem surprising that even men like Cato are so prejudiced, blaming in Kings what they allow in the people, this is because moral philosophy has made no progress over the years (On the Citizen, 5), unlike, say, mathematics. He maintains that philosophers should have started with the origin of private property if they wanted to understand natural justice: it is clear that nature placed everything in common (Rousseau agrees with this, contra Locke), so there must have been a ‘human agreement’ in order for private property to exist. Common ownership leads to war yet all would seek to avoid this, he tells us (On the Citizen, 6). ‘Human greed’, which means that men want things for themselves, and ‘natural reason’, which means men want to avoid violent death, thus lead to private ownership via ‘agreements’ (which animals are deemed incapable of). Rousseau of course differs over both the nature and the effects of human greed outside society. He does so on account of the short-term temporality of his state of nature (relations do not last), and also man’s inability to make comparisons both because of the fact that men are scattered, and because of the undeveloped state of human reason or language at this stage. He also disagrees with Hobbes over the means naturally adopted by men and other animals to avoid violent death. Rousseau prefers the thesis of flight rather than fight; he writes: ‘Hobbes claims that man is naturally intrepid and seeks only to attack and fight [but . . .] there is nothing so timid as man in the state of nature, [. . .] he is always trembling and ready to run away at the least noise he hears or the smallest movement he observes’ (Discourse on Inequality, 82–3) (‘Hobbes prétend que l’homme est naturellement intrépide, et ne cherche qu’à attaquer, et combattre [mais . . .] rien n’est si timide que l’homme dans l’état de nature [. . .] il est toujours tremblant, et prêt à fuir au moindre bruit qui le frappe, au moindre mouvement qu’il aperçoit’ (Discours sur l’inégalité, 136)). I shall suggest as a parenthesis that we compare wolves. Hobbes’s ‘Preface to the Readers’ shows how all the ‘animal passions’ are natural (and not evil in themselves, thus acceptable, say, in a young child), and so, famously, the state of nature is ‘a war of all men against all men’ (On the Citizen, 12).29 Hobbesian man has no natural love for fellow men: ‘By nature, then, we are not looking 83

Derrida and Other Animals for friends but for honour or advantage [commodum] from them’­– ­what we might call profit (On the Citizen, Ch. 1, ‘Man without civil society’, 22). Hobbes illustrates this point with the telling example of contemporary social gatherings­– ­the kind of example that leads Rousseau to suggest that we should abandon all the scholarly books ‘which teach us to see men only as men have made themselves’ (‘Preface’, Discourse on Inequality, 70) (‘qui ne nous apprennent qu`à voir les hommes tels qu’ils se sont faits’ (‘Préface’, Discours sur l’Inégalité, 125)). As Rousseau will do, Hobbes argues from the thesis of natural equality (On the Citizen, 26), that ‘Nature has given each man a right to all things’ (On the Citizen, 28). However, his other hypotheses of natural greed and aggression, which Rousseau opposes, mean that, for Hobbes, this natural right was useless because it was the same for everyone: thus one rightly attacks and the other rightly resists since he has no security from attack (On the Citizen, 29). Rousseau imagines the state of nature as supplying more than enough food, and so wonders why a man would take the risky step of attacking another man to seize his fruits or berries rather than simply picking his own from a nearby tree. Thus he combines ‘optimism’ about the environment with anthropological optimism (and historical pessimism).30 Many thinkers join Hobbes in preferring the opposite­– h ­ istorical optimism combined with anthropological pessimism, which Derrida, using Schmitt’s enthusiastic commentary on Hobbes,31 glosses as a vision of man as ‘bad, corrupt, dangerous, fearful, or violent [. . .] man as a dangerous animal [. . . with] the features generally attributed to the beast (brutality, poorly controlled instincts, the irrationality of the living being’ (Beast 1, 44–5 (‘mauvais, corrompu, dangereux, apeuré ou violent […] l’homme comme animal dangereux [avec] des traits qu’on attribue en général à la bête […] la brutalité, les instincts mal dominés, l’irrationalité du vivant’ (Bête 1, 75)). Data on natural man from travellers, or from those such as Buffon32 who also relied on travellers’ writings, fed into Rousseau’s theory of natural man and of the origin of inequality which is a cornerstone of his theory of society and sovereignty. In his Preface, Rousseau gives a note (II) to Buffon saying ‘I lean with confidence on one of those authorities who are respected by philosophers because they speak from a solid and ‘sublime reason’ (Discourse on Inequality, 139) (‘je m’appuie avec confiance sur une de ces autorités respectables pour les philosophes, parce qu’elles viennent d’une raison solide et sublime’ (Discours sur l’Inégalité, 195)). Of course 84

Man is a Wolf to Man much of this ‘data’ on the peoples of the New World, was contradictory, showing Hurons or Iroquois both as generous hosts and as cannibal wolves.33 Rousseau could thus be quite sceptical about the reports made by travellers, in particular when they are ready to deny humanity to those they encounter: In the two or three centuries since the inhabitants of Europe have been flooding into other parts of the world, endlessly publishing new collections of voyages and travel, I am persuaded that we have come to know no other men except Europeans; moreover it appears from the ridiculous prejudices, which have not died out even among men of letters, that every author produces under the pompous name of the study of man nothing much more than a study of the men of his own country. Individuals go here and there in vain; it seems that philosophy does not travel and that the philosophy of one nation proves little suited to another. (Discourse on Inequality, note X, 159) Depuis trois ou quatre cents ans que les habitants de l’Europe inondent les autres parties du monde et publient sans cesse de nouveaux recueils de voyages et de relations, je suis persuadé que nous ne connaissons d’hommes que les seuls Européens; encore parait-il aux préjugés ridicules qui ne sont pas éteints, même parmi les gens de lettres, que chacun ne fait guère sous le nom pompeux de l’étude de l’homme, que celles des hommes de son pays. Les particuliers ont beau aller et venir, il semble que la philosophie ne voyage point, aussi celle de chaque peuple est-elle peu propre pour un autre. (Discours sur l’Inégalité, note X, 211)

The state of nature­– ­ whether in Rousseau or Hobbes­– ­ is of course a theoretical device, not supposed to be a prior state empirically described. Derrida indeed compares Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality to a ‘Robinsonade’ in the second year of the Beast and the Sovereign seminars, which take Robinson Crusoe as a point of departure­– t­ he question being whether the sovereignty of the solitary natural man is pre-political or political. He refers the term to Marx, who considered Rousseau in particular but also the general structure of philosophico-political fictions in the epoch as Robinsonades (Beast 2, 21–4; Bête 2, 48–51). However, both Rousseau and Hobbes have knowledge of the New World, and this plays a part in the construction of the rational (Hobbes emphasises his scientific, mathematical method) and imaginatively empathetic (Rousseau acknowledges the part played by his reveries in the woods) state of nature. The dire warning about the war of all against all in Hobbes’s De Cive has much more force if it is not simply a thought experiment but an empirical example­– ‘­the Americans’ of the present century 85

Derrida and Other Animals for his contemporaries. The importance of this is underlined by the ­frontispiece which depicts ‘Libertas’ as a Native American.34 Hobbes was very interested in the settlement in America, and, as aide to the Earl of Devonshire, was technically a colonial landowner. I will quote: a war which cannot be brought to an end by victory because of the equality of the contestants is by its nature perpetual; for the victors themselves are so constantly threatened by danger that it must be regarded as a miracle if even the strongest survives to die of years and old age. The present century presents an example of this in the Americans. Past centuries show us nations, now civilized and flourishing, whose inhabitants then were few, savage, short lived, poor and mean, and lacked all the comforts and amenities of life which peace and society afford. Anyone who believes that one should remain in that state, in which all is allowed to all, is contradicting himself; for by natural necessity every man seeks his own good, but no one believes that the war of all against all which naturally belongs to such a state, is good for him. (On the Citizen, 30)

There is a related reference to America in Leviathan: the ‘Savage people of America’ are given as an example of ignorance, with an as if structure. To confound those who argue that there has never been a Commonwealth where principles of reason sustain the essential rights which make Sovereignty absolute, Hobbes writes: ‘Wherein they argue as ill, as if the Savage people of America, should deny there were any grounds, or Principles of Reason, so to build a house, as to last as long as the materials, because they never yet saw any so well built’ (Leviathan, 378, my emphasis). I shall return to images of Native Americans, wolves who will not naturally accept a collar in some accounts, in Chapter 4. The form of the as if here allows the savages to hover ambiguously between men, who gradually perfect the art of building by the application of their reason, and beasts, who, according to Hobbes, cannot progress. For Rousseau, in the state of nature, man is a solitary animal, amoral, so the law of the strongest is like gravity, a fact (more ‘la loi’ than ‘le droit’ du plus fort), but has no lasting consequences. Fear implies flight not binding conventions like the social pact. Furthermore: ‘Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that man is naturally evil just because he has no idea of goodness’ (Discourse on Inequality, 98) (‘N’allons pas surtout conclure avec Hobbes que pour n’avoir aucune idée de la bonté, l’homme soit naturellement méchant’ (Discours sur l’Inégalité, 153)). In fact Hobbes does argue, like Rousseau, that there is no morality in the state of nature, 86

Man is a Wolf to Man but it is true that his picture of man’s behaviour in that situation is much darker because he assumes passions that Rousseau sees as the product of society. Rousseau questions the assumption that ‘man in a state of nature is this robust child’ (Discourse on Inequality, 99) (‘l’homme sauvage est un enfant robuste’ (Discours sur l’Inégalité, 153)), and says that, even if that were so, it would not make him cruel­– ­he would not bite his brother’s leg just because he was disturbed (we might note the more or less cannibal reference). Cranston translates ‘l’homme sauvage’ by ‘man in a state of nature’, which is a matter of interpretation­– ­taking the reader away from the ‘savage’. On the following page Rousseau begins (again using Hobbes as his foil) a discussion of pity, a passion which prevents man from harming others.35 Pity is absolutely critical for Rousseau’s account of humanity­– ­analysed at length in Derrida’s Of Grammatology.36 Where Rousseau writes that Hobbes claims ‘the wicked man is a robust child’ (Discourse on Inequality, 98), Voltaire underlines méchant in his copy and writes ‘the savage is only wicked like a wolf who is hungry’ (‘le sauvage n’est méchant que comme un loup qui a faim’) (Rousseau, OC, III, 1330), returning us to the ambiguity of the wolf’s appetite. Rousseau insists on the relative peace that reigns between creatures in the state of nature, and a natural economy of plenty that means wolves and men are not driven to the desperate measures that they would be if they were starving. This allows him to dispute the grounds that Hobbes provides for the right to have power over slaves (or women or children) and for the King to have power over subjects, that is that they will have agreed to this out of fear of a violent death (terror, says Derrida, with a deliberate echo). While pity is key to Rousseau’s work, for Hobbes it is ‘that fear, that terror or panic that Hobbes in Leviathan said was the political passion par excellence, the mainspring of politics’ (Beast 1, 39) (‘cette peur, [. . .] cette terreur ou [. . .] cette panique dont Hobbes, dans le Léviathan, déclarait qu’elle était la passion politique par excellence, le ressort de la politique’ (Bête 1, 67)).37 That terror is a social and not a natural phenomenon, asserts Rousseau. In Rogues, and other works, Derrida turns repeatedly to the question of democracy and its twin tendencies to expel and to welcome diversity: In its constitutive autoimmunity, in its vocation for hospitality (with everything in the ipse that works over the etymology and experience of the hospes through the aporias of hospitality), democracy has always wanted by turns and at the same time two incompatible things: it has 87

Derrida and Other Animals wanted, on the one hand, to welcome only men, and on the condition that they be citizens, brothers and compeers [semblables], excluding all the others, in particular bad citizens, rogues, noncitizens, and all sorts of unlike and unrecognizable others, and, on the other hand, at the same time or by turns, it has wanted to open itself up, to offer hospitality, to all those excluded. In both cases [. . .] this hospitality remains limited and conditional. (Rogues, 63) Dans son auto-immunité constitutive, dans sa vocation à l’hospitalité (avec les enjeux de l’ipse qui travaillent l’étymologie et l’expérience de l’hospes comme les apories de l’hospitalité), la démocratie a toujours voulu tour à tour et à la fois deux choses incompatibles: elle a voulu, d’une part, n’accueillir que des hommes, et à la condition qu’ils fussent des citoyens, des frères et des semblables, en excluant les autres, en particulier les mauvais citoyens­– ­les voyous -, les non-citoyens et toutes sortes d’autres, dissemblables, méconnaissables, et, d’autre part, à la fois ou tour à tour, elle a voulu s’ouvrir, offrir une hospitalité à tous ces exclus. Dans les deux cas [. . .] cette hospitalité reste limitée et conditionnelle. (Voyous, 95)

Insofar as democracy has wanted ‘to welcome only men’, the list of those excluded at least as citizens, if not in other ways, has featured women prominently. That exclusion is one which, Derrida argues, continues to haunt the language of fraternity which many insist on retaining (especially in France, following the tradition of the Republic) even while they apparently challenge it. He takes Nancy to task for this in Politics of Friendship (Politiques de l’Amitié) and then again in Rogues, writing ‘Let us not forget this overwhelming and thus terribly blinding fact: the brother of which one speaks is always a man’ (Rogues, 60) (N’oublions pas cette evidence massive et terriblement aveuglante: le frère dont on parle est toujours un homme’ (Voyous, 90)). Of course here, I also wish to consider nonhuman animals­– a­nd, in Rogues, Derrida wonders rhetorically whether Nancy’s language of ‘singularities’ includes animals or not.38 For Rousseau, it is social man who learns to be a rapacious predator, from the very first beginnings of society as we know it, a society of inequality and injustice. His words echo those of Plato in the Republic, writing of tyrants, but he takes the point further in extending it from the solitary sovereign to an entire class: The rich, for their part, had hardly learned the pleasure of dominating before they disdained all other pleasures, and using their old slaves to subdue new ones, they dreamed only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbours; like those ravenous wolves, which, having once tasted human 88

Man is a Wolf to Man flesh, refuse all other nourishment and desire thenceforth only to devour men. (Discourse on Inequality, 120) Les riches de leur côté connurent à peine le plaisir de dominer, qu’ils dédaignèrent bientôt tous les autres, et se servant de leurs anciens esclaves pour en soumettre de nouveaux, ils ne songèrent qu’à subjuguer et asservir leurs voisins; semblables à ces loups affamés qui ayant une fois gouté de la chair humaine rebutent toute autre nourriture, et ne veulent plus que dévorer des hommes. (Discours sur l’inégalité, 175–6)

We might note that his comparison is not with wolves in general, but with starving wolves who have been denatured by this extreme experience and thus turned to eaters of men. Cranston translates affamé as ‘ravenous’, an adjective that we commonly associate with wolves, but this slight shift deflects us from the politics of access to food, critical both in Europe and in the New World of Rousseau’s day­– ­and globally today for both human beings and other animals. Derrida glosses Rousseau’s critique of the absolute monarch of his day, worse than a real wolf, who regards his subjects as cattle thus: He keeps the cattle with a view to devouring it, he only keeps the cattle in order to devour it, so as to devour it savagely and gluttonously, tearing at it with his teeth, violently, he keeps it for himself the way one keeps for oneself (in what is a larder) but with a view to keeping even more completely for oneself by devouring, i.e. by putting to death and destroying, as one annihilates what one wants to keep for oneself­– a­ nd Rousseau does say ‘cattle’, i.e. an animality not domesticated (which would be something else again), but already defined and dominated by man in view of man, an animality that is already destined, in its reproduction organized by man, to become either an enslaved instrument of work or else animal nourishment (horse, ox, lamb, sheep, etc.: animals, let us note, that can become the victims or the prey of the wolf). (Beast 1, 12) Il garde en vue de dévorer le bétail, il ne garde le bétail que pour le dévorer, afin de le manger de façon sauvage et gloutonne, à pleines dents, violemment, il le garde pour lui comme on garde pour soi (dans ce qui est un garde-manger), mais en vue de garder encore mieux pour soi en dévorant, c’est-à-dire aussi en mettant à mort et en détruisant, comme on anéantit ce qu’on veut garder pour soi­– e­ t Rousseau dit ‘le bétail’, c’est-àdire une animalité non pas domestiquée (ce qui serait encore autre chose) mais déjà définie et dominée par l’homme en vue de l’homme, une animalité qui est déjà destinée, dans sa reproduction organisée par l’homme, à devenir ou bien instrument de travail asservi ou bien nourriture animale (cheval, bœuf, agneau, mouton, etc. Autant d’animaux, notons-le, qui peuvent devenir les victimes ou la proie du loup). (Bête 1, 32) 89

Derrida and Other Animals I shall now turn to the way in which eighteenth-century philosophical and scientific writers represented real wolves.

Wolves in the Encyclopédie I should like briefly to move away from Derrida’s explicit intertexts in The Beast and the Sovereign to consider how the Enlightenment might have considered wolves as animals rather than figures for men. Are wolves naturally savage in the sense of cannibalistic or voracious predators on men (rather than just dwellers in forests as the Latin etymology for ‘savage’ suggests), ferocious as in the quotation I gave earlier from Marin writing on La Fontaine: ‘a solitary creature, a savage and inhuman animal, a wild beast’. Or are they seen as solitary, becoming enragés when men impinge on their territory­ – ­remembering Rousseau’s comment in his Confessions Book IX that philosophes and Christians are warring like ‘loups enragés’­– ­are wolves enraged by definition or is this a particular specification of wolves? For Rousseau, if left alone, the solitary creature does no harm­– ­it is unnatural proximity that is dangerous, the colonisation of others’ territories. I shall turn to that invaluable source, Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. In the entries on wolves, we find a very similar structure to that of the entries on sauvages.39 Savages are either hospitable, and what is most needed by travellers is providers of food, or they are voracious and cruel cannibals, which is what we most fear. Derrida suggests that being eaten, or swallowed up, is the greatest fear, often figured as terror of engulfment, for example, in that classic text of European man’s encounter with savages on land he has made his own, Robinson Crusoe.40 There is a long article on the wolf (categorised as Natural History and Zoology), which begins with the physical differences between wolves and dogs, and then turns to character and behaviour: The wolf is highly carnivorous, naturally crude and cowardly, but cunning if need be and bold when necessary. He will attack in broad daylight animals that he can carry off, such as lambs, kids, small dogs, even if they are guarded by men. But when he has been mistreated by men or dogs, he only comes out at night; he prowls around dwellings; he attacks sheep pens; he digs up the earth so that he can get under doors; and once he is in, he kills everything before choosing and carrying off his prey. Le loup est très-carnassier, naturellement grossier & poltron, mais ingénieux par le besoin & hardi par nécessité. Il attaque en plein jour les animaux qu’il peut emporter, tels que les agneaux, les chevreaux, les 90

Man is a Wolf to Man petits chiens, quoiqu’ils soient sous la garde de l’homme. Mais lorsqu’il a été maltraité par les hommes ou par les chiens, il ne sort que la nuit; il rôde autour des habitations; il attaque les bergeries; il creuse la terre pour passer sous les portes; & lorsqu’il est entré, il met tout à mort avant de choisir & d’emporter sa proie. (My italics except for loup)41

I would simply note the negative tone in this first article. It emphasises the carnivorous nature of the wolf and his ferocity, killing more than he eats­– b ­ ut also his cowardice, calling him ‘poltron’. Others will see the wolf as intelligently adaptive to his environment and competitors, and wise in avoiding pointless battles. Nevertheless, there is a sense that it is in relation to men’s misuse that the wolf maltraité becomes more indiscriminately lethal­– ­killing far more than he can eat. In human terms this evokes the wolf driven to acts of terror, like a scorched earth policy that consigns others to starvation. Men keep domestic animals ‘sous la garde’, a phrase that conjures up the ambiguity of the relation: this could mean custody or protection. The entry for wolf continues with the next stage of desperation for the starving beast: When he has not been able to find anything in inhabited areas, he hunts in the depths of the woods; he pursues wild animals; at last, in the greatest of need, he pounces on women and children, and even on men. Wolves that follow armies and become accustomed to eating human flesh, actually prefer to attack men: we call them were-wolves, that is to say, a wolf you should beware of. Lorsqu’il n’a pu rien trouver dans les lieux habités, il se met en quête au fond des bois; il poursuit les animaux sauvages; enfin, dans l’extrême besoin, il se jette sur les femmes & les enfants, & même sur les hommes. Les loups qui se sont accoutumés à manger de la chair humaine en suivant les armées, attaquent les hommes par préférence: on les appelle loupsgarous, c’est-à-dire loup dont il faut se garer.

Here we have wolves as man-eaters, and a first reference to loupsgarous (usually werewolves) as wolves who have acquired a taste for human flesh­– ­although only after failing to secure any other prey whether in inhabited areas or the depths of the woods. The development of a perverse craving for human flesh is a theme in some writing on cannibals in the period­– s­ urvival cannibalism as a result of famine is sometimes treated more sympathetically (though not inevitably) than ritual cannibalism (typical of the Tupi or the Iroquois), particularly when it is Europeans who are so reduced due to sieges, 91

Derrida and Other Animals shipwrecks and the like, but also in the case of Native Americans. However, necessity can easily be reinscribed as taste, as it is here. The entry continues with a return to the contrast between wild wolf and domestic dog with which it opened: Although the wolf resembles the dog closely with respect to the shape of his body, yet they are naturally hostile to each other, and enemies by instinct. Young dogs flee from wolves; dogs which are strong enough, fight them with all their might. If the wolf is stronger, he42 will devour his prey: on the contrary the dog leaves the wolf he has killed; he serves as food for other wolves, for these animals devour each other: if one of them happens to be badly wounded, the others gang up to finish him off. Quoique le loup ressemble beaucoup au chien par la conformation du corps, cependant ils sont antipathiques par nature, & ennemis par instinct. Les jeunes chiens fuient les loups; les chiens qui ont assez de force, les combattent à toute outrance. Si le loup est plus fort, il dévore sa proie: au contraire le chien abandonne le loup qu’il a tué; il sert de pâture à d’autres loups, car ces animaux s’entre-dévorent: s’il s’en trouve un qui soit grièvement blessé, les autres s’attroupent pour l’achever.

The article places emphasis on the difference between wolves and dogs (domesticated and thus part of society in some respects); like sauvages and Europeans they may have similar bodies but they are very different in kind. Dogs are not cannibals and do not even eat wolves, whereas wolves are presented as cannibals, eating other wolves as well as dogs and men. This article on wolves in Natural History is followed by another entry on wolves, resulting in the dialogic form that the Encyclopédie sometimes adopts, as it does for sauvages, in the category Hunting (Chasse). This is not a white-wash, but does have an altogether more sympathetic and admiring tone. Yet in an article (Louvetier) under Venery (Vénerie) there is a reference to ‘the evil animals called wolves’ (‘les animaux malfaisants appelés loups’); in other words, it is not a question of hunting as a genre being sympathetic to wolves. Hunting is, however, typically invoked in relation to animals as they are used by men.43 Buffon’s writing, while seminal for Natural History, is always anthropocentric, and even organised structurally according to the way in which any animal relates to men. His writing on deer is criticised by Friedrich Melchior Grimm for its detailed explanation, and even unphilosophical celebration, of the art of hunting, unlike what is to be found in Diderot’s articles in the Encyclopédie. Buffon, according to Grimm, shows a failure of thought, the very characteristic of humanity: 92

Man is a Wolf to Man There is no pleasure less worthy of a thinking being than hunting. If your principles were not too strict, you might be able to tolerate man hunting for food and even to enhance gastronomic pleasure; but man had to be truly degraded, and a depraved animal in every sense, in order to systematise the art of deer hunting with dogs, and to make that innocent and peaceful animal, which dwells in forests without troubling any living creature, die a slow and agonising death. Il n’y a point de plaisir moins digne d’un être qui pense que celui de la chasse. Avec des principes moins étroits, on pourrait peut-être tolérer celle qui pourvoit à la nourriture de l’homme et même au plaisir de la table; mais il fallait que l’homme fût bien dégradé, et un animal dépravé en tout sens, pour avoir réduit en principe l’art de forcer le cerf, et de faire expirer dans de longs tourments l’animal innocent et tranquille qui habite les forêts sans incommoder aucune créature vivante.44

Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is subtly referenced here in the use of the expression ‘man as a depraved animal’­– ­his paradoxical phrase ‘the man who thinks is a depraved animal’ angered the philosophes associated with the Encyclopédie as seeming to question the absolute valuing of reason above all else. For Rousseau, conceptual thought as an element of perfectibility brings degeneration as well as progress. Grimm continues to play on the opposition between thought­/enlightenment­/philosophy and any sympathy for hunting, writing: ‘reflection should have enlightened and convinced men that there is nothing more barbarous’ (‘la réflexion aurait dû les éclairer et les convaincre qu’il n’y a rien de plus barbare’). He ends the paragraph with a very clear gibe at his erstwhile friend: ‘I am in complete disagreement with citizen Rousseau who, in his bilious excesses, happily says that we should let princes hunt for fear that they will do worse.’ (‘Je ne suis nullement de l’opinion du citoyen Rousseau qui, dans ses excès de bile, dit volontiers qu’il faut laisser chasser les princes, de peur qu’ils ne fassent pis.’) Earlier, with his ‘rien de plus barbare’, it could be argued that Grimm’s sympathy for deer here outweighs sympathy for the subjects of the tyrant of his day as expressed by someone who wants to be the citizen of a Republic. Although he is always alert to the need for decisions at particular moments, the relative balancing of animal and human rights in the abstract is a game Derrida refuses to play (as evidenced, for instance, in the dialogues ‘Eating Well’ or ‘Violences contre les animaux’), but is a strategy familiar from the rhetoric of activists on both sides. ‘La Chasse’ in the Encyclopédie is defined as ‘all the forms of war which we wage on animals’ (‘toutes les sortes de guerre que nous 93

Derrida and Other Animals faisons aux animaux’) (3: 224)­– a­ s man became a hunter for various material reasons (typically the author rejects legend and mythology), ‘man thus became a very frightening animal for other animals’ (‘L’homme devint donc un animal très redoutable pour les autres animaux’ (3: 225)­– ­we might note the play on man-animal. While animals may eat some other animals, ‘man devoured all of them’ (‘L’homme les dévora toutes’). If he does not literally eat the flesh, he can use the skin­– ­and his appetite is voracious. There is a careful placing in the past of this general hunting for food and clothing, and a highlighting of the use of hunting in more recent times for the purpose of distinction between different categories of men.45 To return to the definition of wolves, the second Encyclopédie article is a more nuanced account of this apex predator (like man, at the top of his food chain): Wolf, the, (Hunting) is the strongest carnivorous animal in the temperate climates of Europe: he is particularly powerful in the fore quarters: endowed with vigorous lungs, speed, and a reserve of strength that makes him almost impossible to tire out. Along with these advantages, nature also gave the wolf very acute senses. He has sharp sight and hearing, but above all his nose is the organ providing him with the most powerful of senses. It is his nose which tells this animal, over great distances, where he should seek his prey, and which informs him of the dangers he might encounter on his path. These gifts of nature, joined with the need to feed themselves on meat, seem to destine wolves in particular to pillage: indeed, it is the only means they have to feed themselves. We call them cruel, because their needs are often in competition with our own. They attack the herds which man reserves for his food, and the wild beasts that he intends for his pleasure. And so we wage outright war on them, but that very war that kills a large number of individuals of that voracious species, serves to extend the instinct of those who remain: it multiplies their means, develops the caution that is natural to them, and seeds in them precautions and ruses which would otherwise be unknown to them. Loup, le, (Chasse) est le plus robuste des animaux carnassiers, dans les climats doux de l’Europe: il a surtout beaucoup de force dans les parties antérieures du corps: il est pourvu d’haleine, de vitesse, & d’un fonds de vigueur qui le rend presqu’infatigable. Avec ces avantages, la nature lui a encore donné des sens très-déliés. Il voit, il entend finement; mais son nez principalement est l’organe d’un sentiment exquis. C’est le nez qui apprend à cet animal, à de très-grandes distances, où il doit chercher sa proie, & qui l’instruit des dangers qu’il peut rencontrer sur sa route. Ces dons de la nature joints au besoin de se nourrir de chair, paraissent destiner le loup singulièrement à la rapine: en effet, c’est le seul moyen 94

Man is a Wolf to Man qu’il ait de se nourrir. Nous l’appelons cruel, parce que ses besoins sont souvent en concurrence avec les nôtres. Il attaque les troupeaux que l’homme réserve pour sa nourriture, & les bêtes fauves qu’il destine à ses plaisirs. Aussi lui faisons-nous une guerre déclarée; mais cette guerre même qui fait périr un grand nombre d’individus de cette espèce vorace, sert à étendre l’instinct de ceux qui restent: elle multiplie leurs moyens, met en exercice la défiance qui leur est naturelle, & fait germer en eux des précautions & des ruses qui sans cela leur seraient inconnues.

This shows the wolf as intelligent and simply, naturally, concerned by his care to preserve himself; like Rousseau’s natural man, he avoids danger when he can rather than looking for combat. Man is only threatened by the wolf, and represents wolves as cruel, because of the competition for resources. It is man who has declared war on the wolf rather than vice versa, and he has thereby made him more dangerous. The reader who knows Plutarch’s views on the immorality, indeed cruelty, of meat-eating to titillate the palate might note that, in this article, the reader is reminded that while wolves only hunt for food, men keep domestic animals for food and so, in eighteenth-century Europe, hunt wild animals largely for their pleasure (‘ses plaisirs’). This pleasure is not a simple sensual pleasure but related to the elite’s desire to differentiate themselves from the rest, as the article ‘Chasse’ cited above makes clear, giving the example of the poacher condemned to be tied to the back of a deer. With great strength united with great wisdom, the wolf would easily provide what he needs, if man did not create thousands of obstacles for him; but he is obliged to spend all day hiding in the woods to keep out of sight from his enemy: he sleeps there, a light, restless sleep, and he only begins to live at the moment when man returns from his labours and lets silence reign over the countryside. Then he begins his search; and, constantly sniffing the air while walking, he is alerted from far off of the place where he will find his prey: in countries where the woods are inhabited by wild animals, hunting easily provides him with enough to live off. One wolf alone can bring down a large stag. When he is full, he buries what remains, so that he can find it if he needs to; but he only goes back to his left-overs if he has been unlucky in the hunt. When wild animals are scarce, the wolf attacks flocks or herds, seeks a stray horse or donkey in the countryside: he is exceptionally fond of the flesh of young donkeys. If the precautions taken by shepherds and the vigilance of their dogs puts the flocks out of danger; he becomes bold out of necessity, he approaches dwellings, attempts to penetrate into farmyards, snatch poultry, and eats dogs who do not have the strength or the experience to defend themselves against him. When famine makes his hunger more pressing, he attacks 95

Derrida and Other Animals children, women; and eventually after getting accustomed little by little, he becomes something grown men should fear. In spite of these excesses, this voracious animal is often threatened with death by starvation. Avec une grande vigueur jointe à une grande sagacité, le loup fournirait facilement à ses besoins, si l’homme n’y mettait pas mille obstacles; mais il est contraint de passer tout le jour retiré dans les bois pour se dérober à la vue de son ennemi: il y dort d’un sommeil inquiet & léger, & il ne commence à vivre qu’au moment où l’homme revenu de ses travaux, laisse régner le silence dans les campagnes. Alors il se met en quête; & marchant toujours le nez au vent, il est averti de fort loin du lieu où il doit trouver sa proie: dans les pays où les bois sont peuplés de bêtes fauves, la chasse lui procure aisément de quoi vivre. Un loup seul abat les plus gros cerfs. Lorsqu’il est rassasié, il enterre ce qui lui reste, pour le retrouver au besoin; mais il ne revient jamais à ces restes que quand la chasse a été malheureuse. Lorsque les bêtes fauves manquent, le loup attaque les troupeaux, cherche dans les campagnes quelque cheval ou quelque âne égaré: il est très-friand surtout de la chair de l’ânon. Si les précautions des bergers & la vigilance des chiens mettent les troupeaux hors d’insulte ; devenu hardi par nécessité, il s’approche des habitants, cherche à pénétrer dans les basse cours, enlève les volailles, & dévore les chiens qui n’ont pas la force ou l’habitude de se défendre contre lui. Lorsque la disette rend sa faim plus pressante, il attaque les enfants, les femmes; & même après s’y être accoutumé par degré, il se rend redoutable aux hommes faits. Malgré ces excès, cet animal vorace est souvent exposé à mourir de faim.

In the first paragraph above, there are some almost lyrical moments which hint at the (hunter’s) love of the wolf, to which I shall turn in the next chapter. The danger of famine and starvation again may remind the reader of the situation of Native Americans in the period. Both articles mention wolves’ care for their young­– ­feeding them and defending them from danger. This could lead the reader in the direction of she-wolves and the adoption of children (particularly boys) as a kind of hospitality. Note III to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality focuses on the wolf-child found in 1344 in Hesse who would rather stay on all fours with wolves; Rousseau remarks that it was necessary to fix pieces of wood to make him stand upright by force.46 This could suggest the influence of nurture, but equally the power of nature, in the sense of a more natural existence. The Encyclopédie informs its readers that: ‘People tame young wolves; but with age they recover their ferocious character, and return, if they can, to their savage state’ (‘On apprivoise de jeunes loups; mais avec l’âge ils reprennent leur caractère féroce, & retournent, s’ils le peuvent, à leur état sauvage’). 96

Man is a Wolf to Man A comparison could be made with the adoption of, and attempt at introducing ‘civilisation’ (often in the form of Christianity) to, Native Americans. While there are many cases of perfect assimilation (and I might note the particular situation of women), there is clearly both a recurrent suspicion, and sometimes a reality, that Indians never become truly civilised and could always revert to the wild.47 Agamben remarks on Linnaeus’s interest in 1758 in enfans sauvages or homo ferus, and posits an ‘anthropological machine’, with ancient and modern variants, which produces man through the opposition man-animal or human-inhuman and a process of exclusion­ /inclusion. For him the classical version humanises the animal, includes an outside, to produce the non-man, ‘the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also, and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form’ (The Open, 37).48 The modern version animalises the human, excludes ‘as not (yet) human an already human being from itself’ such as Homo alalus or the ape-man, later, the Jew and ‘the overcomatose person’ (The Open, 37). Agamben’s distinction between ancient and modern relates to his situating himself in the tracks of Foucault­– i­f not correcting or completing Foucault (he claims)­– y­ et Derrida points out that there are many instances in Agamben which contradict this periodisation (Beast 1, 315–17; Bête 1, 419–21). Furthermore, it does not seem to do Enlightenment thinkers any favours to draw together in one vast category, say, the kind of tentative inclusivity extended to newly discovered primates such as orang-utans that we find in Rousseau (though by no means all his contemporaries) with the notion that ‘foreigners’ are ‘figures of an animal in human form’. The term ‘foreigners’ covers a multitude of categories, and even within what is perceived as one ethnic group (say, Turks) Enlightenment writers will make many distinctions based frequently on class.49 The bond of class can be so strong in the period that foreigners do not need to be pulled in from an animal outside in order to be made animal-human. These grand generalisations distract from the specific interest of the animal-human borderline that we see in wolf-children, or wild children, for example­– w ­ ho continue to fascinate today.

From hunger to taste, and the eating of flesh Hunger is a need, natural and common to all animals­– ­a strong philosophical tradition is united on this point. However, thinkers 97

Derrida and Other Animals ­ isagree with one another as soon as they begin to contemplate d hunger more closely, and as they consider its history and development as regards human animals in particular. The discussion has obvious social, economic and political ramifications; Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, doing battle with Hobbes’s powerful account of (carnivorous) man as a voracious and vicious wolf, insists on the natural vegetarianism of man alongside his ability to change­ – ­initially in order to survive. An interesting point of comparison in the Enlightenment is J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a founding text for American identity albeit written by a Frenchman in the voice of an American.50 Rousseau sets up the terms of the debate with his famous description of natural man (le bon sauvage) in the midst of plenty, and shows how social progress has produced starvation, on the one hand, and degenerately refined taste, on the other. In his Social Contract, however, he suggests that a just state could be (or have been) set up where all have sufficient, and in La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) he describes a rural household where, despite eighteenth-century inequalities, an economy of plenty is able to reign thanks to the benevolence of the landowners who manage their estate wisely (and do not find pleasure, or show their status, in imprisoning animals or hunting them). I would suggest that Crèvecoeur begins by reading as an optimistic disciple of Rousseau­– ­as appropriate for the ‘utopian’ side of settlement in the spacious New World. More famously, he is known as a follower of the physiocrats, who focus on farming as source of national wealth.51 For Crèvecoeur’s farmer, America is a refuge for the poor of Europe (Letters, 42), who ‘were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould and refreshing showers. They withered; and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but now, by the power of transplantation, like all other plants, they have taken root and flourished!’ (Letters, 43). I should note that Crèvecoeur is here entering into a debate with Buffon (which will be discussed in Chapter 4), who had notoriously and influentially argued that all the creatures of the New World, including those who are not native, were degenerate and weak compared to the Old World. Rousseau is notoriously less optimistic about ‘the power of transplantation’ even while he would welcome the ‘vegetative mould and refreshing showers’ for men, animals or plants. Farmer James indeed will reveal, perhaps unwittingly, how easily an ethical focus on meeting the healthy appetite of the industrious poor is destabilised when apparent relative equality and mutual aid in the New World is 98

Man is a Wolf to Man founded on a situation of real inequality. The recurring references to animals, alongside considerations of ‘race’ (savages and slaves), are particularly revealing. For Rousseau natural hunger, like man himself and other animals, is good, in that it acts as a spur to necessary self-preservation, but morally neutral in that it is no more virtuous than it is vicious. He suggests that neither man nor other animals are naturally inclined to attack others except in the rare case of the strict need for selfpreservation­– ­his elaboration of the peaceable bon sauvage, and indeed of even relatively unaggressive carnivorous beasts such as wolves, is quite distinct from that of a number of his illustrious predecessors. However, according to Rousseau, man parts company from the animals in that he is free with respect to natural instinct­– ­he can choose to change, for example, his diet.52 Rousseau gives the examples of a pigeon starving next to a plate of roast meat, and a cat dying of hunger when surrounded by vegetation. Man, although naturally inclined towards vegetarianism, Rousseau surmises (from teeth and the average number of children born at a time), is an omnivore who can choose to eat anything in order to survive. However, this free will, which Rousseau also terms perfectibility (not to be confused with natural, moral or political liberty), leads through a series of historical accidents, not merely to survival but to both human progress and degeneration­– t­ his is clearly illustrated with respect to hunger which can be refined into taste.53 In the line of Epicurus and Lucretius, Rousseau derives great pleasure from taste which can be sufficiently satisfied­– m ­ odest taste for local and seasonal produce which can readily be obtained, but may sometimes be transformed by human ingenuity into delicacies available to any household in a just society, and happily shared with kin and friends, as he illustrates in his fiction La Nouvelle Héloïse. However, for Rousseau, social intercourse, where comparisons can constantly be made, has a tendency to translate amour de soi (the natural desire for self-preservation) into amour-propre­– a­ competitive and relative self-preference. Thus rich men and women will want to distinguish themselves by their fine tables, entertaining in order to increase their social worth, and, I might add, keeping exotic animals for the same reason, eating the rarest food precisely because it is expensive and difficult to obtain­– ­for Rousseau, this is taste at its most perverted and poisonous. Thus the free will which helps human beings to survive rather than starve when food is short, and can bring innocent pleasure in the variation of diet where food is abundant, 99

Derrida and Other Animals is lethal both on an individual level when it leads to addiction and a craving for various poisons, and socially in fostering extreme and global inequalities. In a note Rousseau shows how the profit motive means that food which should be life-sustaining is in fact, grotesquely, associated with death ‘if you think of the monstrous mixtures they eat, their pernicious seasonings, their corrupt foods and adulterated drugs; the cheating of those who sell such things and the mistakes of those who administer them, of the poison in the vessels used for cooking’ (Discourse on Inequality, Note I, 149) (‘si vous songez aux monstrueux mélanges des aliments, à leurs pernicieux assaisonnements, aux denrées corrompus, aux drogues falsifiées, aux friponneries de ceux qui les vendent, aux erreurs de ceux qui les administrent, au poison des vaisseaux dans lesquels on les prépare’ (Discours sur l’Inégalité, Note IX, 204)). A key Enlightenment example from the New World of the perversion of taste, to which I shall draw attention in Chapter 4, is that of rum. Derrida is interested in Rousseau as vegetarian (Beast 1, 22; Bête 1, 45), in part because it is integral to the network linking Rousseau to Plutarch.54 In Rousseau’s treatise on education, Emile, there is a very lengthy quotation from Plutarch’s treatise on vegetarianism (as translated by Amyot, with some changes to the language perhaps to make it easier to follow) as a choice to be preferred over devouring flesh, ‘If It Is Permissible to Eat Flesh’ (‘S’il est loisible de manger chair’). Rousseau’s theory, indebted to this Pythagorean tradition, is that ‘frugivores’ are peaceful while carnivores such as the English are more bloodthirsty; Derrida draws attention to the repetition of the verb ‘devour’, dévorer (Beast 1, 23; Bête 1, 46). Elizabeth de Fontenay cross-references Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages where he cites Abraham and Ulysses showing, she says, the terrible carnivorous nature of carnivores (‘La raison du plus fort’, 63).55 In fact, I would argue that Rousseau’s text is even more interesting than Fontenay implies­– ­claiming that early man is a hunter, and thus becomes a meat-eater before he becomes a farmer, Rousseau is also pulling early man away from the human species and towards a generalised animality: ‘Their hut contained all of their fellow men. Stranger, beast, monster: these were all one to them’ (Essay on the Origin of Languages, 33) (‘Leur cabane contenait tous leurs semblables; un étranger, une bête, un monstre étaient pour eux la même chose’ (Essai sur l’origine des langues, 396)). Man does not recognise himself as a man, or strangers as men, any more than he recognises an animal as not-man. Thus, like a wolf, he is loving towards those 100

Man is a Wolf to Man he knows, and tends to run away from those he does not know (but as a sometime carnivore is capable of attacking when he has to eat or has no choice). In note V to the Discourse on Inequality carnivores are referred to as the voracious, ‘voraces’ (143; 199), as opposed to frugivorous, species; man would naturally be vegetarian, Rousseau argues. He cites as evidence the difference between the teeth and the colon in carnivorous and non-carnivorous animals as well as some material from travellers. For example, François Corréal claims that people taken from the Lucayes (Bahamas) to Cuba and Saint Domingue (Haiti) by the Spanish died when made to eat flesh. Note VIII once again refers to the distinction between animaux carnassiers and les frugivores including birds­– ­frugivores have fewer children because it takes longer to feed them. The importance of temporality in Rousseau’s second discourse cannot be overstated. Critically the division is not between animals and humans here but between meateaters and vegetarians. Note IV focuses on the environmental impact of changes in different populations; Rousseau, like Buffon, considers that the natural fertility of the earth or of plants means increasing growth in the absence of animals, but man and other animals consume. Meat-eaters, and particularly carnivorous men, consume the most relative to what they give back to the earth­– ­and of course his arguments sound quite prescient today. For Rousseau a growing population is an indicator of a good society. The farmer is a key figure when we consider the politics of food­– ­but not an unambiguous one. Self-sufficiency may seem desirable (even for Voltaire’s Candide who will famously ‘cultiver son jardin’ once he has stepped aside from the wolfish world). Yet farmers in the New World which seems so empty nevertheless come to displace the indigenous peoples from their land­– t­ hey create starvation for some even as they feed others­– ­something which is true of other colonial situations as well, and also of wild animals displaced from their habitats, as hinted at by the Encyclopédie articles on wolves, and as is familiar to us today. The spectre of possible starvation for the settlers is used to justify terror exercised against animals, Amerindians and slaves, as I shall illustrate in Chapters 4 and 5.

Concluding comments Derrida follows the animal, that he is as well, ‘l’animal que donc je suis’; in this instance the particular, sometimes beastly, animal that is the wolf. Even homo lupus homini is a travelling phrase with a 101

Derrida and Other Animals cluster of meanings that shift as it is re-inscribed in a new context, and it takes some tracking. I would argue that in the Early Modern period, for example, there is very likely to be a connotative reference to the sauvages of the Americas when the theme of man as a wolf, or wolf as a man, is invoked by philosophes. Hobbes’s use of the phrase itself, with respect to Romans, denotes civil, not natural, man and the predatory behaviour of states (see Derrida, Beast 1, 58; Bête, I, 92), yet Rome is set against America in the frontispiece.56 But perhaps because wolves are particularly ‘wild’ creatures, it seems as if the phrase is pointing to a natural instinct or behaviour in men, necessarily held in check by laws and social conventions if civil war is not to break out; in fact it is almost the opposite for Rousseau. Rousseau might claim that the figure of the ‘wolf’ (as in La Fontaine’s fable) is constructed to justify wolfish behaviour disguised as right, the right of the absolute monarch (or tyrant), the slave-owner, the Father (patriarch), and those waging war on sauvages and on real animals such as wolves. One of the weapons in this war being the politics of food. Man is a wolf to man therefore becomes true by invocation, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy and rationale, a ‘sort of narrative simulacrum’ (Beast 1, 35; Bête 1, 62) rather than an accurate description of a natural state of affairs­– ­for wolves or for men.

Notes   1. I gave part of this chapter as a paper entitled ‘Lupus est homo homini: Rousseau and the Question of the Wolf’ for the Voltaire Foundation Enlightenment Seminar (Oxford, January 2011); I should like to thank those present for a very helpful discussion.  2. I should not suggest, however, that Derrida does not also turn to poetry; he does devote a lengthy analysis to Paul Celan, and a slightly shorter one to D. H. Lawrence, in The Beast and the Sovereign 1.   3. Derrida is particularly interested in Leviathan as an artificial animal; see, for example, Beast 1, 26–9, 47; Bête 1, 50–4, 78–9.   4. See Derrida’s elaboration in Rogues, e.g. part 1, chapter 1, ‘The Free Wheel’ (‘La roue libre’).   5. The bulk of this first session of La Bête et le souverain has been published in a number of different versions in French including the proceedings of the 2002 Cerisy colloquium, La démocratie à venir, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilee, 2004), 433–56.  6. Jack London, Call of the Wild and White Fang (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1992), 79. 102

Man is a Wolf to Man   7. Andrew Benjamin uses the term ‘figure’ less in the sense of (potentially polysemic) trope and more to focus on the imposition of the quality of being other that will sanction repositioning the other as the enemy: ‘Figure can be defined therefore as the constitution of an identity in which the construction has a specific function that is predominantly external to the concerns of the identity itself’ (Of Jews and Animals, 4). This has some purchase on the phenomenon that Derrida is analysing here, but reading Derrida carefully may encourage you to be less secure both in knowledge of the authentic identity itself and in the ability of the figure to function without nourishment or interference from any such material identity. Benjamin does discuss the impact of figures on the operation of the institutions and practices of everyday life. While the figure of the Jew is, he writes, external to Judaism, it presents to Judaism an identity and has an effect on how identities are (allowed to be) lived out (Of Jews and Animals, 6). This is no doubt the case, but there also needs to be space in our thinking for resistance.  8. See Alain Grosrichard, Structure du sérail: la fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l’occident classique (Paris: Seuil, 1979), for an analysis of the spectre of despotism in the Early Modern period: the despot is imagined as omnipresent and all-seeing but must never be looked at (obedience is blind) or addressed.   9. Derrida compares the velvet mask to ‘the visor effect’ that he located in the spectral king in Hamlet in his Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf, with an introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York and London: Routledge, 1994)), which brings us over to the masculine again. I would refer also to the eighteenth-century worldly novel; see Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux Laclos, Stendhal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). The lethal struggle to penetrate without being penetrated is common to men in this aristocratic milieu as well as women, but more is at stake for women, and arguably the salon is the feminised form of the battleground. 10. As well as the obvious case history, Derrida cites ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ (1926), where Freud declares that every time a ravenous animal, like a wolf, enters a story it is a disguised father (Beast 1, 30–1; Bête 1, 56–7). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are scathing about Freud’s tendency to spot the Father in every wolf, as Derrida points out in the Fifth Session of The Beast and the Sovereign 1 in relation, for example, to A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)); Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980). I will return to this in Chapter 3. 11. Angela Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988 (1979)), 110–18 (110). 12. The exact form in the play is ‘Lupus est homo homini, non homo, 103

Derrida and Other Animals quom qualis sit non novit’; Derrida worries at the wording in Plautus (Beast 1, 61; Bête 1, 95–6). 13. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo (Paris: Pléiade, 2007 (1580)), III, 5. 14. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, in particular the section on wolves and werewolves (‘The Ban and the Wolf’, 104–11). Agamben jumps to King Edward’s wolf’s head outlaw, and thence to the figure of the werewolf, in his interpretation of the phrase usually attributed to Hobbes. However, the wolf’s head is surely a figure for a creature that can be killed with impunity (indeed sometimes with a bounty). The werewolf is a different order of supernatural and lethal creature, and notoriously very hard to kill. The differences need as much attention as the similarities. 15. Derrida’s legacy as a scholar of eighteenth-century texts is no less important because it may ‘fall on deaf ears among self-identified Derrideans [. . .] as among those who desire no truck with poststructuralism’, as indicated by Jody Greene in her ‘Hors d’Oeuvre’ to Derrida’s Eighteenth Century, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40:3 (2007), 367–79, that she edited on the subject of that legacy. 16. Voltaire, Candide, trans. Theo Cuffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005); ‘Candide’, in Romans, contes et mélanges, vol. I, ed. J. Van den Heuvel (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1972), 273. 17. See George R. Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (New York: Haskell House, 1966), which covers a number of works by Rousseau. Voltaire’s forty-odd marginal notes are unremittingly hostile. My translations. 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘Majesties’, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 109. In this chapter (which is an excerpt from The Beast and the Sovereign), Derrida says he insists on the fable there (in the context of fables of marionettes) ‘no doubt and too evidently because of fables, like those of La Fontaine, that politically or anthropomorphically stage animals who play a role in civil society or in the State, often the statutory roles of the subject or the sovereign’. The original runs: ‘Comme d’ailleurs le montrent les fables elles-mêmes, l’essence de la force et du pouvoir politiques, là où il fait la loi, là où il se donne le droit, là où il s’approprie la violence légitime et légitime sa propre violence arbitraire, eh bien ce déchaînement et cet enchaînement du pouvoir passent par de la fable, c’est-à-dire par de la parole à la fois fictionnelle et performative [. . .] Dans la fable, à l’intérieur d’un récit lui-même fabuleux, il est montré que le pouvoir est lui-même un effet de fable, de fiction et de parole fictive, de simulacre. Comme cette loi, cette force de loi dont Montaigne et Pascal disaient qu’elle 104

Man is a Wolf to Man est d’essence fictionnelle, etc.’ (La Bête 1, 291; translation Beast 1, 217–18). 19. The Translator’s note on different versions of La Fontaine’s Fables in English translation explains that for the purposes of the seminar he has offered a ‘more literal and prosaic rendition’ of the key lines (Beast 1, 7). I will give the following more poetic version here in full, and then comment on the French as appropriate: La Fontaine, Fables, ed. J. W. M. Gibbs, trans. Elizur Wright (1841) (Teddington, Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006 (1882)). 20. See my Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems and Adoption (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2011), 263–76, for analysis of Isabelle de Charrière in her engagement with Kant’s exclusion of women from citizenship on the grounds that they are not masters of themselves. 21. See Emile Benveniste, ‘Hospitalité’, in Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2 vols, I (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 88–91; Derrida, for example: Beast 1, 66–8; Bête 1, 101–3. 22. In Rogues, Derrida cites La Fontaine’s ‘moral’ that ‘The strong are always best at proving they’re right’ (in Norman B. Spector’s rendering of La Fontaine, used by Brault and Naas, the translators of Rogues; see their translators’ note for some remarks on this phrase, 161) (‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’, Rogues, xi­– ­epigraph). 23. Louis Marin, La Parole mangée et autres essais théologico-politiques (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1986), 61–88 (74); Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 55–84 (69). See Derrida (Beast 1, 7–8; Bête 1, 27) for a strong recommendation of Marin’s reading, and particularly of his aligning La Fontaine’s fable with two other seventeenth-century French texts: the Port-Royal General Grammar, and a famous Pensée by Pascal, on the delicate relationship between force and justice, which Derrida returns to a number of times. 24. See Derrida (Beast 2, 64–9; Bête 2, 106–12) on Rousseau and solitude as both a choice (which he might be the solitary one to make) and an imposition or exile from society. This is analysed further in Chapters 3 and 4. 25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, ed. and trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011); Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, OC, III. 26. He follows this with: ‘O great philosophers! Why do you not save these useful lessons for your friends and for your children? You would soon reap the reward for them, and we would have no fear of finding one of your followers among our own.’ (‘O grands philosophes! Que ne réservez-vous pour vos amis et pour vos enfants ces leçons profitables; vous en recevriez bientôt le prix, et nous ne craindrions pas de trouver dans les nôtres quelqu’un de vos sectateurs.’) 105

Derrida and Other Animals 27. De Cive was finished in 1641 (therefore before the English Civil War, unlike Leviathan) and made generally available when the second edition was published by Elzevir in Amsterdam in 1647. 28. See Richard Tuck, ‘Introduction’, Hobbes, On the Citizen, viii–ix. 29. It is interesting to note how the use of the natural to justify the social which Rousseau repeatedly critiques, and which two centuries later is the subject of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), still requires emphasising; for instance, Benjamin highlights the evocation of nature­– t­ he process of naturalisation (essentialisation)­– t­ hat is internal to the work of figures so that the enemy seems natural not arbitrary (Of Jews and Animals, 6). 30. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Introduction: Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité’, in Rousseau, OC, III, XLII–LXX. 31. For Schmitt, Derrida remarks, only political theories based on anthropological pessimism are worthy of the name. Derrida quotes Schmitt in this context on the political significance of animal fables (including ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’), almost all of which, Schmitt claims, can be applied to a real political situation. This is because of what he calls a direct connection between political anthropology and the state of nature conjured up by Hobbes and others: ‘In it, states exist amongst themselves in a condition of animal danger, and their acting subjects are evil for precisely the same reason as animals who are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy)’ (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 59, cited in Derrida, Beast 1, 45; Bête 1, 75–6). 32. He regularly cites Buffon’s Histoire naturelle or refers to it. Rousseau’s famous note X to his Discourse on Inequality, which refers to the evidence collected by travellers, in fact also relies considerably on Buffon. See Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History, trans. J. S. Barr (London: H. D. Symonds, 1797), 10 vols; Histoire naturelle, Nouvelle Edition, ed. Achille Richard (Paris: Editions Pourrat et Pourrat, 1837–8), 7 vols. 33. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapters 2 and 3. 34. The intended reference is to the life of the Caroline Algonkians from John White’s 1585 sketches­– ­possibly based on engravings in Theodor de Bry’s Admiranda narratio. See Richard Tuck, ‘Introduction’, Hobbes, On the Citizen, xxv–vi. 35. See also Rousseau, Emile (OC, IV, 288), on the incompatibility of strength and wickedness in this context. 36. See my Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapter 4, ‘The Passion of Pity in Rousseau’s Theory of Man’, 82–107. /11 (international terrorism, the role of the 37. Derrida links this to 9­ virtual spectacle, and the State Terror with its rhetoric of rogue states) 106

Man is a Wolf to Man as well as to, say, the Terror of the French Revolution, with particular reference to Schmitt as well as Hobbes. See Chapter 1. 38. See my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 6, on Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy, ‘Eating Well’. 39. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapters 2 and 3, for analysis of the use and definition of the term ‘sauvage’ in the Early Modern period, including in the Encyclopédie, and today, whether by post-colonial theorists or Jesuit commentators on Jesuit writers in New France. 40. See The Beast and the Sovereign 2 throughout for Robinson Crusoe. This will be analysed in Chapter 4. The question of Crusoe’s fear of ‘dying a living death’: being buried (swallowed by the earth) alive, or of being eaten by wild animals, or eaten by cannibals (‘the worst kind of destruction’) returns at a number of points, including Beast 2, 138–46; Bête 2, 203–13, a section on ‘inhumation’, cremation and mourning (Beast 2, 160–70; Bête 2, 232–44), and a passage on Friday burying the bodies of other savages (Beast 2, 232–3; Bête 2, 324–5). 41. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert, 35 vols (Paris and Neufchâtel, Briasson, 1751–80). All translations from the Encyclopédie are my own. 42. The translator into English has to make a decision which is left open in French: whether the animal is rendered ‘it’ like an inanimate object or made ‘he’ like a human being (with the masculine then predominating). 43. See Tobias Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest’, in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33:4 (2010), 567–82. 44. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and Voltaire, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc. Revue sur les textes originaux, ed. Maurice Tourneux, 16 vols (Paris: Garnier frères, 1877–82), vol. III (1878), 301–6 (303). This reviewed each volume of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle as it came out. Grimm’s review of volume 6 appeared on 1 November 1756. It begins by praising Buffon in general then attacks his section on deer hunting which, the review states, is not the work of a philosophe; Buffon just appears to be wanting to court the nobility (‘faire sa cour aux grands’). Grimm contrasts this section with Diderot’s article ‘Chasse’ or ‘Cerf’ in the Encyclopédie. 45. Sykes argues forcefully that hunting in earlier centuries is too frequently understood today as the pursuit of protein­– ­she claims (in a way that chimes with the case made by the Encyclopédistes) that there are many contexts when power and distinction are the main motivation­– ­lordly parks being one of them (Beastly Questions, e.g. 107–12). 46. Rousseau returns to wild children in note X, remarking on the prejudices of travellers who want to demarcate the human so rigidly. They 107

Derrida and Other Animals would no doubt, he says, put a wild child, such as the one found in 1694, in a zoo. Derrida points to human zoos as an example of an element crossing the abyss between man and animal­– ­there has been recent controversy over Brett Bailey’s 2014 installation ‘Exhibit B’, which references (or, for some, recreates) nineteenth-century human zoos using local black performers in poses that recall, for example, the Hottentot Venus. Buffon suggests that wild children may be a way of seeing that virtue is natural and it is society that introduces vice (Histoire naturelle, vol. VI, 1752, 277–9). 47. This could be set against the Native American practice of adopting both their friends and their enemies. See my Enlightenment Hospitality. A thriller by Stef Penney, set in 1867 Canada, juxtaposes Indians with wolves, initially fearsome but actually protective so long as they are not threatened or addicted. The novel tells of the adoption of a young girl by Native Canadians; to her father’s shame she refuses to return home. See The Tenderness of Wolves (London: Quercus, 2006). 48. See also Agamben, The Open, chapter 8, ‘Without Rank’, 29–31. 49. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapters 5 and 6 for representations of Turks and chapter 4 for Persians in the works of Prévost, Chardin and others. 50. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813), Letters from an American Farmer (London: Davies and Davis, 1782), ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, 1997). 51. See Manning, ‘Introduction’ to Letters from an American Farmer, xviii–ix on the influence of physiocrats such as Nemours, Quesnay and Turgot (a distant relative and sponsor of the author) on Crèvecoeur (and also on Jefferson). Like Rousseau these early economists preach that not only the wealth but the virtue of nations resides in the cultivation of land. Virgil’s Georgics is another intertext. Manning points to the symbolic currency of the plough in the work; see, for instance the description of the farmer’s son seated on the plough (Crèvecoeur, Letters, 27–8). 52. This thesis of Rousseau’s has been treated with much suspicion by recent commentators on ‘the animal’ and he is not infrequently merged with Herder; for example, Kelly Oliver refers to Rousseau’s ‘pre-­Darwinian Romantic myth’. She writes: ‘In those passages in which they delineate what distinguishes man from animals, both Rousseau and Herder turn to animals to illuminate their arguments. Their arguments do not merely serve as examples against which they define man. Rather, these animals belie the very distinction between man and animal that their invocation seeks to establish’ (Animal Lessons, 2). In fact I would argue that Rousseau is precisely trying to complicate the comfortable opposition between man and beast while acknowledging different his108

Man is a Wolf to Man tories. She continues that: ‘for both Rousseau and Herder, men become civilized, that is, become man, in relation to eating animals. Rousseau identifies the evolution of men in terms of what they eat [. . .] Man’s superiority to other animals is based on the fact that he is an omnivore and can eat everything’ (Animal Lessons, 2). I would strongly disagree that Rousseau presents omnivorousness as a mark of superiority­– h ­e presents it as a fact, and as one that has had both positive and negative effects for human beings. 53. I would note the distinction between Hobbes’s argument based on historical inevitability and Rousseau’s emphasis on the role of chance in human history; in her Introduction to Animal Lessons, Oliver seems to bundle them together in her commentary: ‘In the history of philosophy, the necessity of human existence has been justified with appeals to an eternal realm of forms or reason, divine providence or design, nature or natural laws, and perhaps the most influential alternative to the hand of God: the hand of Nature through the law of natural selection. What these religious and secular accounts of the origin of man share is their insistence on necessity over change, providence over accident’ (Animal Lessons, 2). 54. Derrida recommends Elizabeth de Fontenay’s edition of Plutarch, trans. Amyot, Trois traités pour les animaux (Paris: P.O.L., 1992), for her introductory essay ‘La raison du plus fort’ (7–97) as well the text itself; this is informative about Pythagorean vegetarianism in the ancient world, and particularly Plutarch. She focuses on the figure of the pig. See Fontenay, ‘La raison du plus fort’, 59–69 on Rousseau and vegetarianism in relation to Plutarch. 55. See Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages in Two Essays On the Origin of Languages, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 34–5; Essai sur l’origine des langues, in Rousseau OC, V, 397–8. 56. Rousseau asserts that the law of nature operates between states even where it has been superseded by civil law within a state. See Derrida (e.g. Rogues, 80; Voyous, 118) for the point that the Social Contract effectively defers questions of foreign policy; in a way Kant’s Perpetual Peace picks up the baton, and Derrida typically moves to Kant at this point.

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3

The Love of the Wolf

As soon as you speak of loving there he is. [. . .] In what way is the wolf lovable? It is not the wolf species that we love, it is not the wolf. It is a wolf, a particular wolf, a wolf-but, a surprise-­wolf. (Cixous, ‘Love of the Wolf’, 88–90) Dès qu’on parle d’aimer il est là. [. . .] Par où le loup est-il aimable? Ce n’est pas la race des loups que nous aimons, ce n’est pas le loup. Il s’agit d’un loup, un certain loup, un loupmais, un loup-surprise. (Cixous, ‘L’Amour du loup’, 24–5)1 The question of gender and sexual difference will cross all the others. (Derrida, Beast 2, xiii) La question du genre (gender) et de la différence sexuelle traversera toutes les autres. (Derrida, Bête 2, 14)2

The first sentence or phrase of Derrida’s seminar series on The Beast and the Sovereign, which formed the core of the last chapter, is quite remarkable: ‘La. . . le’. This untranslatable couple of syllables, which might sound like a stutter, an inauspicious start, is initially translated into English as ‘Feminine. . . masculine’ with the French original in square brackets, which gets much closer to the connoted meaning (drawing attention to the gender of ‘la bête et le souverain’) than the sound or the literal meaning which might be rendered ‘the. . . the’.3 That rendition would lose not only the point but the subtle shift in the repeated sound­– n ­ ot a tuneful ‘la. . . la’ or a standard repeated definite article where the masculine prevails ‘le. . . le’, but ‘la. . . le’, so close and yet so different in this particular language. The dreaded gender mistake, failing to get the difference right, can be a point of terror for many Anglophone students of French, or even Anglophone teachers of French.4 English masks sexual difference at certain points where French reveals it (the sexed object), and vice versa (the sexed possessive); it also leans towards an objectification of the animal as ‘it’ where French can only ever render ‘it’ as ‘il’ or ‘elle’, he or she since there is no uniquely neuter pronoun in that language. The language in which Derrida is speaking also permits another stutter, 110

The Love of the Wolf sounding like ‘eh, eh’, which relates to the homophony in French between the conjunction ‘and’ (et) and the copulative ‘is’ (est). ‘And’ could link together two completely unrelated things, perhaps the beast and the sovereign, feminine and masculine; ‘is’ could suggest ontologico-sexual attraction, the process of an identificatory metamorphosis, a liaison if not a hymen (Beast 1, 32–3; Bête 1, 59–60)­– ­Derrida later uses the English phrase ‘the odd couple’, which could of course bring the reader back to ‘and’ (Beast 1, 137; Bête 1, 190). Just as, at moments in Derrida’s exploration of linguistic and conceptual possibilities, the beast is the sovereign, so the feminine can become the masculine and vice versa­– ­but these are moments. The lack of fit between grammatical gender and gender signified here makes language strain in a way that is hard to convey in English.5 Derrida promises his audience, his pupils, echoing La Fontaine’s deferral in ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, that he will, soon (‘tout à l’heure’), and, following the animal, stealthily as a wolf (‘à pas de loup’), show them the scene of sexual difference that his unconscious has been drawn to in his choice of title for La Bête et le souverain. Yet it could be argued that he does not quite make good his promise. For while he does, unlike many commentators on sovereignty or indeed on animals or beasts, persistently allude to the question of sexual difference, he does not often bring it centre stage in this series of seminars, which enables many of his readers to pass it over entirely.6 Yet even the wolf­– ­especially the wolf, who is fascinating with respect to political writings throughout a long historical time span, which draw on the wolf either as an image of man outside society (pre-social man, the savage, the outlaw) or as an image of the bloodthirsty tyrant­ – i­s gendered. Both the sovereign and the outlaw are traditionally (hyper)-masculine even while either can deploy elements of femininity as part of the chain of significations they establish.7 Moreover the wolf also figures in tales of relations between individuals, including relations between the sexes in which young girls may be warned that ‘the worst wolves are hairy on the inside’ (Carter, ‘The Company of Wolves’, 117). Derrida does repeatedly point his audience towards the private domain and to sexual difference­– i­ncluding regular and rhythmical references to genre and gender (if only to draw our attention teasingly to La Bête et le souverain), and citing, for example, Freud’s Wolf Man, but this is much less developed in these seminars than the political-philosophical aspect. I would argue of course that there is always significant overlap between the two domains; and this is 111

Derrida and Other Animals explicit in Derrida unlike many writers who are stricter in policing boundaries. He presents the typically masculine figure of the sovereign as Father, as paterfamilias, and vice versa; when following Benveniste to track the word ipseity as the power to be recognised as himself, the same-same, the proper, he indicates the etymological links to master and husband (Beast 1, 66–7; Bête 1, 101–2). As noted in Chapter 2, the wolf can be represented as all appetite, the one who is going to eat you up, and thus the father (according to Freud), but also the mother in the Wolf Man case history.8 Derrida tells us of ‘The voracious violence of the wolf, who can also turn protective, paternal, and maternal’ (Beast 1, 80) (‘La violence vorace d’un loup qui peut aussi devenir protecteur, paternel et maternel’ (Bête 1, 120)). Bruno Bettelheim picks up on this threatening (and then rescuing) father in his interpretation of Red Riding Hood in The Uses of Enchantment, which I shall discuss in the final section of this chapter. Derrida cites the adoptive mother of Romulus and Remus and of Mowgli­– t­hese are good mothers, who feed and nurture others (étrangers) (Beast 1, 9–11; Bête 1, 29–31). But he also mentions in passing the she-wolf who is deemed to have an excessive sexual appetite. The body historically refused the gift of reason incorporates of course both woman and wolf­– ­as Derrida tells his audience more than once in The Beast and the Sovereign: ‘in the place of the beast one can put, in the same hierarchy, the slave, the woman, the child’ (Beast 1, 33) (‘à la place de la bête on peut mettre, dans cette même hiérarchie, l’esclave, la femme, l’enfant’ (Bête 1, 60)). In this chapter I shall reconsider some of Derrida’s intertexts that featured in Chapter 2 in relation to the traditional sexual and psychoanalytical politics of the hungry wolf, then introduce women’s writing from early in the twentieth century alongside contemporary feminist writing which raises the question of the wolf-woman conjuncture from a gynocentric perspective, and­ /or by complicating sexual difference along with other differences. The fabulous wolf frequently also allegorises hunting and predation in the private or personal sphere on which the polis is built, but which politics wants to ignore. The ‘insensibility’ of the wolf (Beast 1, 6; Bête 1, 26)­– ­represented as silent, imperceptible, and cruelly indifferent to the suffering of his prey­– ­may be designed to terrify yet proves uncannily attractive in some legendary versions of the creature, representing the lure of the wild, in particular when he makes an exception for one particular lambkin. The wolf is not (yet) domesticated, but free­– ­this is both alluring and dangerous for those supposed to 112

The Love of the Wolf be confined to some extent within the domestic economy, the law (nomos) of the household (oikos). I shall ask what it is to love or be loved by a she-wolf or a wolf (with Renée Vivien and Hélène Cixous), thereby also raising the question of the werewolf and other stories about men who are really wolves (with Marina Tsvetaeva), and revisions of Little Red Riding Hood (with Carol Ann Duffy and Angela Carter).9 Cixous’s ‘The Love of the Wolf’ entwines itself with three texts by Tsvetaeva, two 1937 essays around her love for Pushkin ‘My Pushkin’ and ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’ (which are collected in one volume in the French translation to which Cixous refers, Mon Pouchkine suivi de Pouchkine et Pougatchov),10 plus the long poem in French Le Gars (1922), based on a folk tale about a young girl who falls in love with, and is loved by, a vampire-like figure­– ­shifting from victim to match in a way that is both interesting and unsettling.11 Tsvetaeva is attracted not only by Pushkin’s writings and life in general, but, in particular, by the violent, elusive and poetic Cossack rebel and imposter Pugachev who fascinated him, and who is named ‘the Guide’.12 Tsvetaeva’s account of Pushkin and Pugachev also suggests that the potential for revolutionary political change may require love of the wolf.13 Pushkin’s desire for revolt, for rebellion against Tsar Nicholas, thrusts him towards the lupine outlaw Pugachev whose ‘mighty spell’ he falls under; in the character of Grinev he will forgive Pugachev any atrocity, argues Tsvetaeva. Like most animals who have a significant role in the Western imaginary the wolf has a certain conventional relationship to sexual difference as sexual opposition. This is largely the masculine wolf­– ­a (sexual) predator devouring little lambs who need to be protected by ‘shepherds’ (who ‘keep’ them of course to eat them themselves in their own good time). The female wolf also crops up from time to time either as a good (foster) mother or occasionally as sexual predator. Figuring the wolf, for the twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers I am interested in, is a way of thinking through the relationship between women and the law (patriarchal law) as regards sexuality, appetite and language­– a­ nd the role of fear in keeping distinctions, while laughter and desire may embrace what is feared. This is a significant displacement of the sovereign-beast structure that Derrida highlights, where the state has a tendency to fight terror, real or imagined, with terror. The problem for all the writers who struggle to reconfigure a response to the threat of violence is how to engage with the seduction of the wolf without falling back into 113

Derrida and Other Animals romance. But maybe writing new, differently perverse, romances is as good as it gets . . .

A certain tradition Are women lambs (in la Fontaine’s Fables they can be lambs or shepherdesses, figures of love) or she-wolves who consume men? Are women treated as lambs, protected and controlled, in order to prevent them from turning into wolves? Thus sexuality would be policed, by terror, because it is feared (females might be the most voracious cannibals),14 and fairy tales teach morals from an early age. Whichever came first, the wolf or the lamb, it is clear that women are mostly victims of male violence rather than the reverse. The Roman proverb ‘man is a wolf to man’ is often turned to mean that man is a wolf to women. In a novel about gang rape in Paris, La Tournante, Elisa Brune has ‘the father’s friend’ (‘l’ami du père’) say: ‘We were taught that man is a wolf to men. It was to make us forget, I think, that first of all he is a wolf to women’ (‘On nous a appris que l’homme est un loup pour l’homme. C’est pour faire oublier, je crois, qu’il est d’abord un loup pour la femme’).15 Werewolves are usually men; women are more commonly associated with cats­– ­as witches. In a certain literary and filmic tradition werewolves always kill the woman they love. The werewolf genre in the cinema can be dated to the 1935 Werewolf of London (directed by Stuart Walker) and the 1941 The Wolf Man (directed by George Waggner).16 In the earlier film, Wilfred Glendon, a brilliant scientist who is contaminated in Tibet, attacks his wife, the beautiful and unhappy Lisa; in The Wolf Man the son of the local lord of the manor (played by Lon Chaney, Jr) is bitten by a gypsy who has transformed into a werewolf, and attacks the lovely young maiden Laura with whom he has fallen in love. Publicity typically shows the werewolf bent over the voluptuous heroine’s heaving bosom, her face and flowing locks tipped down towards the viewer. We might note the foreign or external origin of the curse­– ­it comes from the outside (outside the national or the domestic space). In a recent novel, The Last Werewolf, the maxim that you kill the one you love is reiterated in relation to the werewolf’s wife Arabella, who is his first victim.17 This novel allows for the rare possibility of a female werewolf, and, in a postmodern turn, the final ‘last werewolf’ at the end of the tale is a (pregnant) woman­– ­this shift in the mode of werewolf reproduction a side-effect of an anti-viral (The Last Werewolf, 336). Deleuze 114

The Love of the Wolf and Guattari celebrate werewolves and vampires precisely because they do not ‘filiate’ but rather ‘infect’.18 The emphasis on propagation by mouth and teeth with no need for a mother to be involved (no need for a vagina, dentata or otherwise) may seem to be something of a masculine fantasy of reproduction­– a­ perverse Pygmalion’s creativity or the author who lives on in his work of language. This is seen in numerous works of science fiction, such as David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977). However, for Deleuze and Guattari it is a question of multiplicity. Plautus and Montaigne: querying the domestic ‘Man is a wolf to man’ is usually associated with Hobbes’s political philosophy­– ­which simply incorporates the subordination of women to their sovereign husbands, more or less analogically to the subjection of the people to the sovereign, slaves to their masters, and animals to human beings. Hobbes, like others before him, has, however, simply borrowed this phrase and turned it to his own ends­– ­terrorising his reader with the thought of the violent chaos that would be the alternative to strong monarchs, husbands or masters. The earliest example that Derrida finds of this Roman proverb is in Asinaria, a comedy ‘of Asses’ (albeit remembered for wolves) by Plautus, and the latter is indeed often cited as the origin of the political-philosophical use of the phrase (although, as noted in Chapter 2, in his play the phrase drifts from market-place trickery into the domestic and the commoditisation of sex). Plautus was born in Sarsina, in the north of Umbria which was then a colony of Rome; he learnt Latin and came to the capital at a young age (Beast 1, 61; Bête 1, 95). He was then something of an outsider, a colonised subject albeit in a cosmopolitan city famous for its origin with the adopted son of a wolf. In Asinaria, the wolf is said to be the stranger in the city­– ­not actually a barbarian, not an absolute other, but your fellow man who is unknown (for as long as he is unknown) to you and may try to cheat you in the market. However, in the action of the play it is not even a stranger but your nearest and dearest who are most financially and sexually dangerous, and potentially violent. Mothers in particular are portrayed negatively as greedy, controlling women, but the men in question, husbands and sons, are also deceitful, lascivious and weak. There is a degree of bathos in this farce­– ­relative to the Romans as noble wolves or even fierce and savage wolves on the battlefield, as Hobbes will show 115

Derrida and Other Animals them­– t­he battleground here is the oikonomia and a ludic power struggle between the sexes and the generations. Men are all creatures of appetites (wolves in that sense) and the home or the family is a hostile environment. The action moves between the home, the market-place and the brothel­– ­the brothel in a sense combining the other two. The key sentence is placed in the mouth of a merchant (known only as Mercator): ‘when one does not know him, man is not a man, but a wolf for man’ (lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit (Act 2, scene 4, line 496)).19 Derrida points out that it is a scene of lending or giving credit (Beast 1, 61; Bête 1, 96), which is true in the sense of a merchant entrusting money to someone he does not know: ‘But notwithstanding, never will you induce me today to trust this money to you, a stranger’ (‘me numquam hodie induces, ut tibi credam hoc argentum ignoto’). We should note, however, that the merchant is not loaning money but simply making payment for some asses he has bought from Demaenetus, an old gentleman of Athens­– ­he wants the latter to be present rather than simply handing over the cash to his steward who is a stranger to him. He is right not to trust the ‘steward’ since in fact it is Leonida one of Demaenetus’s slaves who is masquerading as the steward Saurea. However, the presence of Demaenetus, treated by the merchant as a guarantee that all is well, in fact simply confirms the trick, since Demaenetus wishes to get his hands on the money rather than let the steward hand it over to his wife who controls the purse strings­– s­ o he encourages and underwrites his slave’s deception. The money is to go to his son to pay for a year’s worth of favours from his beloved, Philaenium­– ­who would give them to him for free but is forced into prostitution by her mother. Philaenium treats the slaves Leonida and Libanus seductively in order to persuade them to give the money to her lover, and then agrees to bestow her favours on Demaenetus for a night to show gratitude for the cash. I would point out that in the Roman world brothels were called lupanars, literally dens of she-wolves, and lupa (she-wolf) was a slang term for prostitute.20 Men project predatory and voracious behaviour on to women who are sexually active outside the marital law. Thus no one comes well out of the story­– ­while the proverb specifies ‘to a stranger’ most of Plautus’ characters are above all ‘wolves’ to their spouses or children. We fear strangers but are most at risk from our nearest and dearest. In Montaigne’s ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’ (Essays, Book III, 116

The Love of the Wolf chapter 5) ‘homo homini’ is said to be either ‘deus’ or ‘lupus’­– ­a divine or lupine alternative to humanity that Hobbes will echo in the dedicatory epistle to De Cive which I analysed in the last chapter. Here the context is less political than domestic, a discussion about the contract of marriage, and whether or not a man should marry, the answer being that it depends on the man’s temperament (Derrida, Beast 1, 58–60; Bête 1, 92–6). A good marriage, if such a thing exists, explains Montaigne (with a cautious conditional as Derrida indicates), will try to represent the conditions of friendship rather than love­– ­friendship for Montaigne, I might add, existing primarily between men.21 Montaigne makes a comparison with a caged bird, a wild animal brought into the home, citing Socrates on the double bind of the domestic: you want to be inside when you are out and vice versa. After Plautus’ cynicism it is hardly surprising to learn that whatever a man does he will ‘despair’ (in Montaigne’s words) or ‘repent’ (quoting Socrates’ words). Matrimony as a bird-cage: ‘is one of the examples of what thus lets itself be tamed­– t­rained, broken, domesticated­– h ­ ere an example of [. . .] domestication in the proper sense of the term, one of those conventions, both human and animal, that bend a living being to the law of the household or the family, to the oikos and the domus, to domestic economy’ (Beast 1, 59) (‘c’est un des exemples de ce qui se laisse ainsi apprivoiser­– ­dresser, dompter, domestiquer­– i­ci de cette [. . .] domestication au sens propre du terme, une de ces conventions à la fois humaines et animales qui plient un vivant à la loi de la maison ou de la famille, à l’oikos et à la domos, à l’économie domestique’ (Bête 1, 93)). Even the head of the household, the domestic sovereign, is thus trapped in this unhappy double bind­– ­wanting to be inside or outside the cage, wherever he is not. Thus, according to Montaigne, the marriage alliance is a perfect example of man as a wolf­– ­or god­– ­to men. A feminist reading might claim that men here are discussing paying the price of choice; women of their times had rather fewer choices, and were more at risk (of domestic control and even violence, of poverty and isolation outside the family home). Yet of course the structure of the double bind (tied to the family in Gregory Bateson’s work) can enfold any psyche, including, I would add, animal ones­– ­in spite of Lacan’s magisterial declaration that animals do not have an unconscious, in a formulation that Derrida calls ridiculous (Beast 1, 114; Bête 1, 161–2). Animals too can be driven mad by contradictory demands. I shall soon turn to women and wolves . . . 117

Derrida and Other Animals Werewolves, solitude, bestiality, and Rousseau’s Confessions In another of his series of cultural references, Derrida draws our attention to the fact that Rousseau, at one point in his Confessions, worries that he is becoming a werewolf because he reads so much.22 His confession that he was living as a loup-garou because of his passion for reading is rendered as living like ‘an outlaw’ in J. M. Cohen’s English translation of the Confessions, outside society and thus outside the law, as Derrida (delighted) indicates (Beast 1, 64; Bête 1, 98).23 I would add that the Petit Robert dictionary quotes Rousseau to illustrate the old use of loup-garou (werewolf) to mean sauvage, farouche, solitaire (savage, wild, solitary). There is a link between the wolf (who is not domesticated as the dog is) and solitude. Rousseau is writing about reading, but not speaking; the legendary werewolf, unlike a vampire, cannot talk when he is transformed­– ­he is a lonely howling beast. We could note that Vivien’s eponymous lady with the she-wolf in ‘La Dame à la louve’ is always characterised as ‘solitary’, more quality than accident, which links her to her shewolf in the story. Neither has any desire for intercourse.24 Vivien’s lady thus identifies with her wolf in her ‘farouche’ resistance to social (or sexual) intercourse, and refusal to be the prey of any man. Rousseau’s identifications are, however, more ambiguous. Tsvetaeva will give the same wild and solitary character to her Pushkin’s Pugachev too, as Cixous tells us: ‘There remains the infinite solitude of the wolf, invisible and unrecognised except by himself’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 98) (‘Il reste la solitude infinie du loup, non reconnu, invisible, sinon par lui-même’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 39)). On a visible level, throughout most of Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter, Pugachev is surrounded by fellow rebels­– ­his solitude is thus that which is as unrecognised as it is inevitable for the sovereign, outlaw, lover or wolf. As Derrida indicates: ‘a sovereign is always alone (that is both his absolute power and his vulnerability, or his infinite inconsistency) [. . .] he is the being of exception’ (Beast 2, 7) (‘un souverain est toujours seul (c’est à la fois son pouvoir absolu et sa vulnérabilité ou son inconsistance infinite) [. . .] il est l’être d’exception’ (Bête 2, 29–30)).25 While observers inform us that wolves are pack animals, and that any solitary wolf is usually a young male about to pair bond and then acquire a family which develops into a pack, it is more often the exceptional lone wolf which captures the literary and mythic imagination.26 Rousseau moves between private space (the 118

The Love of the Wolf choice to read voraciously) and political persecution as an example of lupine solitude. He also tells his reader that he is perceived, and cruelly persecuted, as a wolf or lycanthrope, ferocious or mad, after the publication and condemnation of Emile (Confessions XII, OC, I, 591); and perhaps he can therefore empathise with the sauvage or the beast (Derrida, Beast 1, 100–1; Bête 1, 145–6). Bestial cruelty and criminality, Derrida points out, is generally held to be the preserve of man rather than beast; he turns from Rousseau to Lacan, and the latter’s classical assertion that what separates Man from the Beast is the Law (Beast 1, 102–34; Bête 1, 147–86). While this draws on the metaphysical opposition between the animal with innate instincts and man who acquires traits and is thus responsible in law, Derrida sees a small saving grace in Lacan’s critique of theories of inherited criminality. However, Lacan’s rendering of all animal aggression as innocent, also makes innocent all human violence towards animals; in both cases harm would be done without doing wrong. The practical effects of such views are seen daily, Derrida argues, in many forms of cruelty to animals including the millions of animals killed without question. Derrida tracks what is deemed to be a uniquely human bestiality alongside human bêtise (stupidity) in Deleuze and Guattari, and alongside fraternity in Lacan: There remains the immense risk of what is still a fraternalism of the ‘fellow’. This risk is double (and also affects Lévinas’s discourse, let it be said in passing): on the one hand, this fraternalism frees us from all ethical obligation, all duty not to be criminal and cruel, precisely, with respect to any living being that is not my fellow or is not recognized as my fellow, because it is other and other than man. In this logic, one is never cruel toward what is called an animal, or a nonhuman living creature. One is already exculpated of any crime towards any nonhuman living creature. And specifying, on the other hand, as Lacan does: ‘It is a fellow that it [this cruelty] is targeting, even in a being of another species’, does not change or fix anything. It is always my fellow that I am targeting in a being of another species. So the fact remains that I cannot be suspected of cruelty with respect to an animal that I cause to suffer the worse violence. (Beast 1, 107–8) L’immense risque demeure de ce qui reste néanmoins un fraternalisme du ‘semblable’. Ce risque est double (et il vaudrait aussi pour le discours de Lévinas, soit dit en passant): d’une part, ce fraternalisme nous libère de toute obligation éthique, de tout devoir de ne pas être criminel et cruel, justement, à l’égard de tout vivant qui n’est pas mon semblable ou n’est 119

Derrida and Other Animals pas reconnu comme mon semblable, parce qu’il est autre ou autre que l’homme. Dans cette logique on n’est jamais cruel envers ce qu’on appelle animal ou un vivant non humain. On est d’avance innocent de tout crime à l’endroit de tout vivant non humain. Et quant à préciser, d’autre part, comme le fait Lacan: ‘C’est un semblable qu’elle [cette cruauté] vise, même dans un être d’une autre espèce’, cela n’arrange ni ne change rien. C’est toujours mon semblable que je vise, même dans un être d’une autre espèce. Il reste donc que je ne peux être soupçonné de cruauté à l’égard d’un animal que je fais souffrir de la pire violence. (Bête 1, 154)

Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ goes through a phase of torturing small animals, pulling wings off flies or crushing beetles underfoot, and imagining cruelty towards larger animals.27 This is immediately reinscribed by Freud into human sexuality, in terms of its sado-masochistic tendencies; as in the passage Derrida quotes from Lacan, there is no ethical question raised in relation to animals as such. Taking up Derrida’s point about the alibi provided with respect to cruelty towards nonhuman living creatures (and thus lesser human beings too in the end) by this ‘uniquely human’ quality of violence, I should note that Pushkin is well aware of the recorded atrocities committed by the historical figure Pugachev, and his bands of Cossack and peasant fighters, when he constructs his own Pugachev. Tsvetaeva comments on Pugachev’s ferocity, and the subsequent seductive appeal when Pushkin imagines his generosity to one young man, spared from the usual slaughter. Equally Tsvetaeva’s lad (‘le gars’) will kill his Maroussia’s mother and brother to slake his appetite. However, neither this bestiality nor their willingness to spare a beloved victim makes these figures peculiarly human (nor purely animal) in Cixous’s reading­– ­rather it is the beast-human borderline which is made more complicated by her rapprochements. With respect to the werewolf in particular, I should note that the wolf is one of the most common creatures into which man is imagined metamorphosing in myths and legends. Ovid places Lycaon, transformed into a wolf by Jove to whom he had offered a meal of human flesh, in the very first book of Metamorphoses. There is also Little Red Riding Hood­– t­he wolf masquerading as a grandmother­ – a­ nd our proverbs and fairy tales imagine the wolf as a master of disguise, even reinventing himself in sheep’s clothing. Pugachev is similarly elusive, sometimes taking on the part of a rightful sovereign, Peter III. The Enlightenment loup-garou is both the real wolf who eats men and the man who turns into a wolf (thus opposites and similar), who is compelled to feast on human flesh, or imagines that 120

The Love of the Wolf that is the case­– a­ s in the entry ‘Lycanthropy’ in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1762) to which Derrida refers (Beast 1, 100; Bête 1, 145). The Encyclopédie article loup-garou is written by D.J., the chevalier de Jaucourt, an Enlightenment figure who writes against slavery and in sympathy with native American sauvages. He strongly rejects the idea of werewolves along with a poetic list of other fabulous and untranslatable monsters that used to haunt and terrorise the unenlightened: We should be eternally grateful to these enlightened centuries, even if the only blessings that they bestowed on us were to cure us of the existence of werewolves, spirits, lamias, monsters, Liliths, shades, spectres, genies, demons, fairies, ghosts, imps, and other nocturnal phantoms so suited to troubling our souls, disturbing us, overwhelming us with fear and trembling. Nous devrions à jamais les bénir ces siècles éclairés, quand ils ne nous procureraient d’autres biens que de nous guérir de l’existence des loupsgarous, des esprits, des lamies, des larves, des liliths, des lémures, des spectres, des génies, des démons, des fées, des revenants, des lutins, & autres fantômes nocturnes si propres à troubler notre âme, à l’inquiéter, à l’accabler de craintes & de frayeurs.28

What is it we should really be afraid of? Other men? As Lacan interprets homo homini lupus in his Ecrits: ‘cruelty implies humanity’.29 In the Encyclopédie articles lycanthrope and lycanthropie, there is mention of the devil disguising men as wolves (not a real transformation), and then longer analysis of the sickness whereby men imagine they turn into wolves, and therefore adopt wolfish behaviour­– ­and sometimes thereby convince others­– ­ as in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie. The week before Derrida draws his seminar audience’s attention to the passages in Rousseau’s Confessions regarding the persecution (as if Rousseau were a werewolf) which followed the condemnation of his Emile, he had highlighted a different passage in the Confessions (Book VI, OC, I, 248–9). In this case, as in the example of his appetite for reading, Rousseau was once again in the private or domestic realm: he discusses his notorious shyness, particularly with respect to well-born or well-educated women, in relation to an episode in the late 1730s when he was about twenty-five years old. He tells his reader that he had to introduce himself to some brilliant ladies, who happened to be his travelling companions on the way to Montpellier, or he would have been taken for a loup-garou (this 121

Derrida and Other Animals time translated into English as ‘an absolute boor’, Confessions, 236). Here Derrida emphasises once again the relationship of the wolf to the law: Rousseau does not want to be unsociable and ‘outsidethe-law’ (Beast 1, 96; Bête 1, 139).30 I might note in addition the link, if only by negation, between the wolf and an erotic encounter­ –R ­ ousseau begins by joining the ladies for meals, then gains some confidence in conversation, and finally begins an amorous relationship with Madame de Larnage. His frankness about the fact that she is less beautiful as well as older than her newly-wed friend may seem similar to the discourtesy shown by Vivien’s dogged narrator Lenoir in ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’; however, Rousseau presents himself equally ‘warts and all’, and is clear about his strong emotional bond with this generous, sensitive and warm individual. What in Plautus could be cruelly comic is here translated into sensibility. His youthful timidity is unexpectedly his greatest weapon in inspiring this more experienced woman to make the necessary advances while he, like a wild animal, is always about to make his escape. In Rousseau’s famous Discourse on Inequality, he argues against Hobbes that wolves, and men in the state of nature, are fearful rather than aggressive. Like the young Rousseau in this episode in the Confessions, they are always about to flee, rather than always about to pounce with slavering jaws. This is rather a different image of the wolf from the one Cixous and Tsvetaeva are celebrating, where the delicious thrill for the beloved­/victim, like the child listening to a fairy tale, is more related to fear for their safety rather than anxiety that the wolf will run away from them. Rousseau’s uncertainty about his position in such society even leads him to disguise himself as an Englishman (Mr Dudding) in spite of the fact that he does not speak a word of English nor know anything about England, and thus he is uneasily at risk of being unmasked.31 His entrance into the field of romance means that he is no longer in danger of being labelled a loup-garou, and yet it is his very lone wolf or outlaw qualities that make him dangerously attractive to the woman who seems able to persuade him to make an exception for her. While she may not be quite a lamb, a woman’s reputation is always at risk from a penetrating gaze such as that of the Marquis who accompanies them. The period is one in which amorous liaisons of all kinds are common, yet social death is always a risk for women who transgress the law, as many fictional heroines discover. In fact the Marquis, whose merciless social wit would seem to make him a wolf to his fellow men, certainly in the shy and soli122

The Love of the Wolf tary Rousseau’s eyes, is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, who uses his sarcastic assaults on the young man’s weaknesses as a suitor to disguise the fact that he has discovered their secret love affair.

Renée Vivien and ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’32 In this section I am going to take a detour away from Derrida’s explicit intertexts, to focus on a short story by Renée Vivien (1877– 1909), ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ (‘La Dame à la louve’), the opening story in her 1904 collection La Dame à la louve, which is exceptional in rewriting the human-wolf relationship in entirely female terms.33 Derrida’s intertexts in The Beast and the Sovereign are overwhelmingly dead white males, in spite of the tantalising glimpses of the importance he places on sexual difference. And occasionally he even falls into an uncharacteristic discourse of ‘beyond sexual difference’, speaking of ‘man as humankind, this time, beyond sexual difference, man and woman (homo homini lupus)’ (Beast 1, 9) (‘l’homme comme genre humain, cette fois, au-delà de la difference sexuelle, l’homme et la femme (homo homini lupus)’ (Bête 1, 28)). Granted his brilliant dance with questions of sexual difference elsewhere, for example in Choreographies, Spurs (Eperons) or ‘Voices’, it seems appropriate to introduce more voices to the discussion.34 Vivien is better known as a poet, and her short stories have been described as approaching ‘poèmes en prose’.35 In this sharp tale she dissects the unhappy relations between the sexes in the microcosm of a sea voyage. This is a classic device of enclosure where characters are trapped together, and so neither her dogged male narrator, a slave to his appetites, nor the eponymous lady can walk away; we assume he would most likely have preferred easier meat if not for the confinement of the ship, but she is the only woman on board (his repeated, perhaps rather defeated, phrase like a chorus to his comic song).36 More pertinent to this chapter is the figure and reality of the (she-)wolf, and what Vivien might be suggesting about the threshold between the human and the animal which has exercised so many (male) philosophers over the years. The lady’s choice is to love her she-wolf rather than any man or even woman. The reader follows the narrator’s hounding of the lady with the she-wolf during the journey, which ends with a violent storm at sea. While the lady and the shewolf choose to perish in each other’s arms rather than for one to be saved without the other, Lenoir saves his skin and so can tell the tale. History is written by the victors. 123

Derrida and Other Animals Lenoir and other narrators in Vivien’s collection are degraded male author figures not dissimilar to some of the comically rewritten canonical examples in Duffy’s herstory The World’s Wife­– ­such as the dull and self-satisfied Orpheus, or the even more boring Aesop who sees animals as no more than fodder for his sayings, and who, I might add, used wolves to represent the ultimate danger, never to be trusted.37 Orpheus imagines that he charms both animals and Eurydice; Duffy gives voice to Eurydice, figured here as the writer’s wife, helping in the production of the works, and thus the legend, in material ways as well as acting as muse: Big O, was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And, given my time all over again, I know that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess, etc., etc. In fact, girls, I’d rather be dead.38

The two women writers, witty and poetic, deploy twin strategies: re-writing history from the female subaltern point of view, and showing the dominant point of view of the man as so transparently self-deluding that he can no longer delude his audience. A contrast might be made with the narrator of the poet and essayist Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (1926)­– a­ lso someone who frequents brothels and who writes ‘j’ai touché à des femmes’­– ­not exactly ‘I touched women’ but maybe ‘touched on them’, ‘scarcely touched them’. Derrida analyses this work, the very title connoting the masculine, over a session, imagining the narrator’s moue of distaste­– l­a moue (a facial expression signifying irritation or disdain) replacing l’amour (Beast 1, 183–205; Bête 1, 249–75). However, apart from the many other elements separating Vivien or Duffy from Valéry, the masculine chain­– ­male author, male narrator, male protagonist­ 124

The Love of the Wolf – ­sets up rather a different reading effect from that of Vivien’s short stories. Derrida suggests, for instance, that a number of key sentences in Monsieur Teste (such as ‘la bêtise n’est pas mon fort’, another untranslatable sentence suggesting something like ‘stupidity is not my strong point [or forte]’) could be ascribed to author, narrator or protagonist­– ­there is an uncanny mirroring or echoing between the three. Vivien’s story sets dog imagery against the magnificence of Helga, the loving she-wolf, in a way which references the tradition that sees the dog as servile against the freedom of wild animals­– w ­e could think back to La Fontaine’s fable of ‘The Wolf and the Dog’ or forward to Deleuze and Guattari. For Vivien the focus is less on real dogs,39 even if these are bred to work and to serve men in return for their keep, than on men as dogs, servants to their base appetites which they have to feed, who call women bitches (and other animal epithets seen by men to be degrading) if they service their needs and indeed if they do not. Our weak and vain male narrator, Pierre Lenoir, is specifically located on the title page in 69 Ladies Street (‘69, rue des Dames, Paris’); his habitat can be retrospectively interpreted when he tells his reader that he has an indiscriminate sexual appetite. Vivien refers elsewhere to man as ‘a rutting dog’ (‘un chien en rut’); in this story her lady tells the narrator ‘Men who fuss round women, any women they can find, are like dogs sniffing at bitches’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 159) (‘Les hommes qui s’empressent autour de femmes, n’importe lesquelles, sont pareils aux chiens qui flairent des chiennes’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 23)). Vivien’s representation of men as rutting dogs who see women as nothing more than bitches is a careful displacement of the narrator’s self-image as a ‘gay dog’, as men used to say admiringly.40 Sexist (and speciesist) language, as we would anachronistically term it, is subtly reworked.

Semblables and autres This use of an unreliable male narrator apparently to focalise female characters, but in fact also to turn the spotlight on himself in a way he does not recognise, is a device Vivien uses repeatedly in the collection of which this is the title story.41 I should note Vivien’s acute awareness of the connotations of names, not least her own several pseudonyms over the years. Here Pierre Lenoir is like a stone (feeling nothing, at least for others), and the title of another story in the collection, ‘Cruauté des Pierreries’, points us to the cruelty of a man who 125

Derrida and Other Animals works with precious stones. Pierre is a common name, which leads the reader to the sense this could be any man. But Lenoir, ‘the black’, perhaps suggests that he is Jesuitical and villainous even before he speaks. The lady herself is exceptionally pale (associated with foam on the waves and snowy wastes), and paleness has many connotations of course, including perversity in Baudelaire, but also chastity, coldness and so on.42 Tsvetaeva will invert this attachment to pallor, for her the snowy wastes are a backdrop highlighting the blackness to which she is devoted in all its various forms. She remembers childhood walks which ended at a famous statue of her beloved Pushkin: I loved the Pushkin Monument for its blackness­– ­the reverse of the whiteness of our household gods.43 Their eyes were totally white but the Pushkin-Monument’s were totally black, totally full. The PushkinMonument was totally black, like a dog, still blacker than a dog because the very blackest of them always had something yellow above the eyes or something white under the neck. The Pushkin Monument was black like the piano. If they hadn’t told me later that Pushkin was a Negro, I would have known, that Pushkin was a Negro. From the Pushkin Monument I also got my mad love for black people, carried through a whole lifetime. (‘My Pushkin’, 324) La Statue-Pouchkine, je l’aimais pour sa noirceur­– ­l’inverse de la blancheur des dieux de nos foyers. Eux, leurs yeux, ils les avaient tout blancs; la Statue-Pouchkine les avait noirs, du noir épais. La Statue-Pouchkine était noire comme un chien, non, plus qu’un chien, parce que le chien, même le plus noir, aura toujours du jaune sur les yeux, du blanc dans le cou. La Statue-Pouchkine était noire comme le piano. Si l’on ne m’avait pas dit plus tard que Pouchkine était nègre, je l’aurais su: Pouchkine c’est un nègre. De la statue de Pouchkine me vient cet amour insensé pour les Noirs, un amour de toute la vie. (‘Mon Pouchkine’, 18–19)

Both writers are pushing against the grain, the one in her protagonist’s embrace of pale lunar coldness (while in other stories she also celebrates the cruelty of the desert or the jungle), the other in her passion for blackness both symbolically and politically. Lenoir’s narrative appeals first to mesdames, then he gives up on that audience (although he tells us he is a real ladies’ man) and turns explicitly to men as auditors or readers for most of the story. This produces an effect of homosociality avant la lettre (before Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coins the term to account for social male bonding that represses the homosexual44). As Lenoir addresses his fellow men, he claims that they understand each other almost to the point 126

The Love of the Wolf of tedium: ‘There is such a fraternity of feeling between us that conversation is almost impossible. This is the reason I so often shun the monotony of male company, too identical to my own’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 157) (‘Il y a entre nous une fraternité d’âme si complète qu’elle rend une conversation presque impossible. C’est pourquoi je fuis souvent la monotone compagnie des hommes, trop identiques à moi-même’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 21)). The quotation shows Vivien’s wit even as she makes a serious point about fraternity and ipseity.45 Derrida has of course written extensively about fraternity, above all in Politics of Friendship. The social or political community of semblables excludes the animal and the woman­– ­although women serve a purpose of mediating between men (perhaps preventing tedium) and enabling men to reproduce themselves, and thus excluding women is an autoimmune reaction. In Tsvetaeva’s long poem Le Gars (The Lad) 46 there is a section entitled ‘Les Compères’ which shows the voracity and violence of guests apparently come to celebrate the birth of the heroine Maroussia’s son by the baron she has married in the absence of her beloved ‘lad’. She was supposed, on the lad’s instructions, to spend five years without entertaining, but her weak husband has bowed to peer pressure and allowed his ‘semblables’ to come into their home. They urge: ‘Empty it and smash it up’ (‘Vidons-la, puis brisons-la’ (94))­– ‘­la’ (it) is of course a glass (la coupe), but the French gender system allows the ambiguity of imagining it is Maroussia who is to be emptied out and broken. There is violence underlying Lenoir’s homosociality too. These rapacious guests are human wolves (homo lupus homini) with ‘Brigands’ teeth’ (‘Dents de brigands’)­– ­not the wolfish wolf who dazzles in the lad willing to sacrifice himself for his beloved. Theirs is the fraternity that Derrida finds in psychoanalytic accounts of the founding of society: When Lacan talks of this ‘eternal fraternity’, we must not hear in it merely the sort of edifying, irenic, pacifistic, and democratic praise which often denotes and connotes so many appeals to fraternity. [. . . Lacan] does not forget the murderous violence that will have presided over the establishment of the law, namely the murder of the father, thanks to which (thanks to the murder, thanks to the father, thanks to the murder of the father) the guilty and shameful sons come to contract, through a sort of at least tacit oath or sworn faith, the equality of the brothers. The trace of this founding criminality or this primitive crime, the memory of which is kept by the (animal) totem and the taboo­– ­this murderous trace remains ineffaceable in any egalitarian, communitarian, and compassional fraternity, 127

Derrida and Other Animals in this primitive contract that makes of any compassional community a confraternity. (Beast 1, 107) Quand Lacan parle de cette ‘fraternité éternelle’, il ne faut pas y entendre seulement cette sorte d’éloge édifiant, iréniste, pacifiste et démocratique qui souvent dénote et connote tant d’appels à la fraternité. [. . . Lacan] n’oublie pas la violence meurtrière qui aura présidé à l’instauration de la loi, à savoir le meurtre du père grâce auquel (auquel ‘le’ meurtre, ou auquel le père, ou auquel le meurtre du père), grâce auquel, donc, les fils coupables et honteux en viennent à contracter, par une sorte de serment ou de foi jurée au moins tacite, l’égalité des frères. La trace de cette criminalité fondatrice ou de ce crime primitif dont le totem (animal) et le tabou gardent la mémoire, cette trace meurtrière reste ineffaçable en toute fraternité égalitaire, communautaire et compassionnelle, dans ce contrat primitif qui fait de toute communauté compassionnelle une confraternité. (Bête 1, 153–4)

Derrida argues that his emphasis on the brother or the semblable (in Levinas as well as here in Lacan) neither addresses the question of the non-human nor the problem of ‘all those who do not recognise their fellow in certain humans’ (‘tous ceux qui ne reconnaissent pas dans certains hommes leurs semblables’)­– t­he worst prejudices of race, class or sex (I would add) or even against one particular individual (Beast 1,108; Bête 1, 154). The baron’s fellows can attack Maroussia and her child because she is a woman, and furthermore she is contaminated by her association with this being (‘le gars’) who is not a semblable: her infant is potentially the child of the vampirewerewolf. Likewise Rousseau is designated a (were)wolf before he is persecuted, and Vivien’s lady can be left to die because of her shewolf associate and association as well as her sex. The appetites of the compeers are the base ones despised by Vivien’s lady: ‘As long as into My stomach goes And flows out Wine –    who cares!’ ‘Pourvu qu’entre Dans mon ventre Et qu’en sorte Vin –    qu’importe!’ (Le Gars, 94–5) 128

The Love of the Wolf Finally they sum up with fraternity: ‘­– C ­ ompères, fraternisons!’ (95), literally ‘­– ­Compeers, let us fraternise’ or ‘Fellows, let us join in company’.47 Lenoir finds his fellow men almost tedious because they are ‘trop identiques’, Vivien’s wonderfully witty and hyperbolic formulation for semblables. Yet there is no communication or communion with women, only pursuit and transactions. The narrator’s empty words, addressed to females whom he hopes to bed,48 are the companion to his misreading of the lady­– ­he interprets her consistent rejection of him as flirtation in complete contradiction of all evidence. He asserts boldly: ‘She had certainly taken something of a fancy to me’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘Je lui plaisais certainement quelque peu’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 20)). This is a classic ‘no’ means ‘yes’ view of women, and, for a rake like Lenoir, (feigned) resistance would add to the fun of the chase and makes the object more desirable. Lenoir tells his imagined audience: She was adroit enough not to let me see the profound pleasure which my advances caused her. She even succeeded in maintaining her habitual expression of defiance in her yellow eyes. What a marvellous example of feminine wiles! The only result of this ploy was to increase the violence of my attraction to her. Sometimes a long resistance can be an agreeable surprise, rendering victory more triumphant .­ . . (157) Elle eut l’habileté de ne point me laisser voir le plaisir profond que lui causaient mes avances. Elle sut même conserver à ses yeux jaunes leur habituelle expression défiante. Admirable exemple de ruse féminine! Cette manœuvre eut pour unique résultat de m’attirer plus violemment vers elle. Les longues résistances vous font quelquefois l’effet d’une agréable surprise, et rendent la victoire plus éclatante ­. . . (21)

We might note the underlying violence in his reference to his intended ‘victory’, even in the case of this fatuous fraternal chap whom the she-wolf discards as a threat. I would also point out his belief that he causes ‘profound pleasure’ (not just pleasure) in the lady­– ­superficial resistance but deep-down deep pleasure­– s­ uch is his self-confidence and ‘knowledge’ of feminine wiles. As well as the social ‘wiles’, ‘la ruse’ might conjure up the cunning of the wolf conjoined with the feminine. The reference to the lady’s yellow eyes49 also binds her to the wolves, hunted and persecuted by men who suppose these wolves to be hunters of men in spite of the lack of evidence.50 In the long history of non-human animals figured as lacking reason (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, to name but a few of 129

Derrida and Other Animals Derrida’s references), another example of ‘la raison du plus fort’, it is of course man who has the privilege of bêtise­– ­animals cannot be said to be bêtes (stupid) because they are not endowed with reason in the first place, not free and have no will. Man’s auto-positing or selfproclaiming as unique thus willingly, or sorrowfully, embraces the fatal flaws and original sins that lie alongside more obviously hubristic qualities. Derrida discusses the specificity of the French language that brings together (and separates) bête as an adjective and bête as a noun, and the philosophical discussions that posit stupidity as a particularly human quality, at considerable length (Beast 1, 68–9, 138–84; Bête 1, 104–5, 191–250). The position that bêtise is ‘proper to man’ (138) (‘le propre de l’homme’ (192)) and the assumptions underlying it, which Derrida pursues most extensively in relation to Deleuze and Guattari,51 is analogous to the classical argument outlined above, which Derrida traces in Lacan, that it is only man who is bestial, in the sense of cruel, and that it is only ever a fellow man (semblable) who is the target of such bestial cruelty, and not other living beings. Following Derrida, we might ask if this functions as an alibi both for the way animals can be treated, and for the exclusion of some (shifting) categories of human being from the category of semblables. Vivien follows a Flaubertian line of displaying bêtise for the reader, the bêtise of a degree of culture, of laying down the law and making judgements. Yet in bringing the reader to the point where all men are shown to be both devoid of rationality and casually cruel (finally leaving lady and she-wolf clinging to a piece of wood in a stormy sea)­– ­as are the males in this récit, driven only by their instincts to survive and to rut­– ­might the reader track the lady to a reinterpretation of the dumb wolf (who understands what is going on, and masters her survival instinct by her virtue)? The body traditionally refused the gift of reason incorporates of course both woman and beast. I should note that many other women in the stories collected in La Dame à la louve, are intimately associated with wild animals. ‘La Saurienne’ (‘The Saurian’) tells of a crocodile woman whose eyes are put out by the terrified (but so brave!) narrator­– c­ learly fighting terror with terror. Because of the focalisation through Mike Watts, convinced he is in terrible danger, readers cannot tell ‘the truth’, but may suspect his projection onto a solitary old woman, like the witches stoned to death in Carter’s ‘Werewolf’ with their animal familiars. The dualism which might be detected in Vivien’s fiction, perhaps like the dualism in Tsvetaeva, setting the poet against the 130

The Love of the Wolf world, which Cixous celebrates, could be argued to effect at least a partial and temporary displacement. It is not the kind of reversal that leaves hierarchies comfortably in place such as the Orwellian ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, because the poet dies­– ­as the heroine so often dies whether in male or female-authored fiction. In ‘My Pushkin’, for example, Tsvetaeva identifies lupine blackness (here, in Europe in 1937, given a racial materiality), death and poetry: The Russian poet­– ­is a Negro, the poet­– ­is a Negro and the poet­– ­was struck down. (Oh, God, how it all came together! What poet among those that were and those that are, isn’t a Negro and what poet­– h ­ asn’t been struck down and killed?) (‘My Pushkin’, 321) ‘Le poète russe est un nègre. Le poète est un nègre. Le nègre, on le tue. Nécrologie du poète. (Seigneur, comme c’est vrai­– ­quel poète, vivant ou mort n’est pas un nègre? Quel poète n’a pas été assassiné?) (‘Mon Pouchkine’, 14)52

The real social, economic and political forces which align with the cultural hegemony of semblables (and not only in a context when totalitarian regimes are particularly ascendant) make the gesture of reversal more resonant in its very impotence. Even Pugachev, whose Cossack peasant revolt is very successful for a time, seems doomed in hindsight to the failure which comes in due course. The marginality and vulnerability of the speaker is the context to, and pretext for, the text­– ­suspending the efficacy of its judgement. Vivien, born in England as Pauline Tarn, is a kind of sexual refugee in the Sapphic circle in Paris; her stories are published just a few years after Oscar Wilde dies broken in Paris after his sojourn in Reading Gaol. The weakness of homosocial men revealed in Vivien’s stories leaves us with no phallus erected; where there is divinity, it is usually in the shape of a goddess. In ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ there is a broken mast, a ‘floating wreckage’ (162) (‘épave flottante’ (29)) from a sunken lifeboat, but this cannot even do the work hoped for, that is to say saving (let alone (re)producing) life. There is no Father, no sovereign, no master of the house­– t­ here is merely an ineffectual lieu-tenant, some body who stands in. Derrida argues that the apparently secular foundation of modern sovereignty, as a covenant amongst men in Hobbes, is in fact fundamentally theological, with the sovereign a lieu-tenant taking the place of God (Beast 1, 52–4; Bête 1, 85–7). But Vivien’s lieutenant is a debunked representative, appearing briefly, only ‘more or less’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 131

Derrida and Other Animals 161) (‘tant bien que mal’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 28)) in command of organising abandoning ship. Yet he is the one who makes the classically auto-immune political declaration that there is no room at the inn, or rather no space in the lifeboat, for an animal (in animal form); the threshold of tolerance has been reached.53 Lenoir consistently represents the lady as strange, and she is indeed completely different from anyone else on board ship (and also a foreigner).54 For a start, she is clearly clever. The narrator has a horror of intelligent women; he says the lady is: ‘turning out to be not only a shrew but a prude and a bluestocking to boot!’ (158) (‘Prude et bas-bleu autant que chipie!’ (23)) when she tries to explain herself­– ­he just wants sex.55 When the storm breaks we also see her courage; there is a striking distinction between her constant calm and the madness of the men cramming into lifeboats: ‘Men in a panic were jumping in, with loud and incoherent cries’ (62) (‘Des affolés se précipitaient, poussant des cris incohérents’ (28)).56 I would note the loss of language in this crisis­– ­humanity is reduced at dawn to ‘a grey stupor, a mass of creatures and larva-like beings swarming in a twilight limbo . . .’ (162) (‘une stupeur grise, un grouillement d’êtres et de choses larvaires dans un crépuscule de limbes . . .’ (28–9)). This is le vivant not even la bête­– ­simply life surviving (perhaps another specification of Agamben’s recurrent and ambiguous trope of ‘bare life’). I shall return to the question of language, but first turn to appetite. Vivien and appetite Vivien notoriously died of starvation amongst other forms of substance- and self-abuse, and this biographeme is often brought up by those writing on her work, for example when encountering a skeleton in the narrator’s description of the lady: ‘Her emaciated body had the fine and fragile delicacy of a handsome skeleton’ (157) (‘Le corps émacié avait la délicatesse fine et frêle d’un beau squelette’ (20)).57 Without endorsing anorexia, it is nevertheless interesting to consider the question of appetite in her work­– ­both the virtuous struggle (as an ethical or rational decision) to choose to rise above appetites, and the nausea (as a response of the senses or the unconscious) which the appetites (of others) can inspire. The choice of a wolf as partner or avatar is interesting since our image of the male wolf can be a sexual predator prowling for prey, in versions of Red Riding Hood for example.58 I will not mention the 1980s pop song 132

The Love of the Wolf ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’. The wolf after all is typically associated with a voracious appetite even though there is a hint in La Fontaine’s ‘The Wolf and the Dog’, as I have indicated, that freedom is even more important to the wolf than filling his belly­– ­this is the key difference between the wolf and the dog, who has agreed to be man’s servant in return for food. But is this the male wolf according to tradition? And is it then only as mother that the legendary she-wolf rises above appetite, even if importantly as adoptive as well as biological mother, maternal nurturing being seen as just another bodily instinct? Vivien does something different from that tradition­– s­ he both unites female human-being and female wolf and resists the wolfish association with ungovernable appetite which she places firmly on the side of men in society and male dogs, without confining woman or she-wolf to maternal self-sacrifice. The lady, far from greedy, is sickened by raw appetite; she describes her nausea as an appropriate response to the reified world of men: ‘I recoil from the vulgarity of men as I do from a stale smell of garlic, and I am as disgusted by their sordidity as I am by the reek of sewers. [. . .] Morally, I am sickened by men and, physically, I am repulsed by them ­. . . I have watched men kissing women on the lips whilst indulging in obscene fumblings. The spectacle of a gorilla could not have been more revolting.’ (159) ‘la vulgarité des hommes m’éloigne ainsi qu’un relent d’ail, et leur malpropreté me rebute à l’égal des bouffées d’égouts [. . .] Moralement, [l’homme] m’écoeure; physiquement, il me répugne .­ . . J’ai vu des hommes embrasser des femmes sur la bouche en se livrant à des tripotages obscènes. Le spectacle d’un gorille n’aurait pas été plus repoussant.’ (24)

Vivien brings together the smell of half-digested food (strong-tasting garlic, typical of the French man for an English woman of the day perhaps) and the reek of the sewers, food become excrement, reminding the reader of the lower orifices as she speaks of the mouth on which kisses are pressed. When the narrator sees half-naked hairy sailors, he unexpectedly smiles, remembering the insulting gorilla comparison­– ­to me there is something threatening about his being cheered up by that memory. Is he fantasising about what could happen to the virgin lady if there is a shipwreck and the men give full rein to the beast within them unless he offers his gentlemanly protection? He may be projecting the satisfaction of his own desires on to the lower orders. 133

Derrida and Other Animals In ‘Nut-brown Maid’ (‘Brune comme une noisette’), in a moment of sadistic abuse of physical strength, another male narrator (who is on the whole far preferable to Lenoir) forces Nell, the woman he is pursuing, to swallow a toad, to eat her words, for she has said that she would prefer to eat a toad than to kiss him. The words from her mouth (exteriorising ‘vociferation’ as Derrida puts it in his discussion of orality in The Beast and the Sovereign) had not convinced, but her acting them out by putting the toad in her mouth and thence her stomach (Derrida’s interiorising ‘devourment’, the companion to ‘vociferation’) does the trick. It is a radical re-writing of the fairy-tale prince imprisoned in the frog and transformed by a kiss. At the other end of the twentieth century, Carol Ann Duffy will write with cool intelligence like Nell’s in relation to the naive and romantic Little Mermaid who wanted to lose her fish tail for the agony of fishnet tights in which to dance with a prince: I could have told her­– l­ook, love, I should know, they’re bastards when they’re Princes. What you want to do is find yourself a Beast. The sex is better. Myself I came to the House of the Beast no longer a girl, knowing my own mind, my own gold stashed in the bank, my own black horse at the gates ready to carry me off at one wrong word, one false move, one dirty look.59

The question is where the power lies. The narrator of Duffy’s poem is aware that she needs to have knowledge, confidence, experience, money and a physical, indeed animal, means of escape. Would Lenoir, if he only had the chance, take pleasure in forcing the lady to choose between the hairy gorilla sailors and himself, between eating a toad and kissing a frog ‘prince’? The lady had said to Lenoir (when more subtle forms of rejection have failed to discourage him): ‘I cannot understand how a woman of any delicacy at all can submit to your filthy embraces without repugnance. As a virgin my disdain for men is equal in its degree of disgust to the nausea felt by the courtesan’ (159) (‘Je ne comprends pas que la femme la moins délicate puisse subir sans haut-le-cœur vos sales baisers. En vérité, mon mépris de vierge égale en dégoût les nausées de courtisane’ (24)). Even those who are paid to pretend pleasure are in fact nauseated by Lenoir’s kisses, she tells him. He just thinks that she is the one who is playing a role, and laying it on a bit thick (‘Décidément, pensai-je, 134

The Love of the Wolf elle exagère son rôle’). For after all he has had a few pitiful whores but the Parisian ladies still like him, he says. The virgin lady establishes here an equality of disgust between herself and the ‘bitches’ or ‘pitiful whores’ as Lenoir refers to her ‘courtesan’­– a­ rather more courteous term for a sex-worker. The narrator is later overcome by sea-sickness, a more prosaic form of nausea, and another turn of orality after filthy kisses, swallowing and speeches. Indeed, due to the storm, for the first time in his life he neglects his appearance and appears improperly dressed, as he puts it. The visceral reaction to the natural world (sea-sickness) has stripped away temporarily his superficial demeanour, the decorated mask or shield with which he arms himself as he goes out to conquer ladies with his oral skills. The lady is calm in the face of danger while he fantasises his own death, weeps as he touches his skull, experiences his skeleton and imagines: ‘My flesh would turn bluish and black, swollen more than a bulging wineskin. The sharks would seize on bits of my severed limbs, floating here and there. And when my body sank to the bottom of the sea, crabs would crawl sideways over my rotting flesh and feed gluttonously on it’ (160). (‘Je serais une chair bleue et noire, plus gonflée qu’une outre rebondie. Les requins happeraient par-ci par-là, un de mes membres disjoints. Et, lorsque je descendrais au fond des flots, des crabes grimperaient obliquement le long de ma pourriture et s’en repaîtreraient avec gloutonnerie . . .’ (26).) There are no ship-board meals in this tale, which could have been a narrative possibility; instead the one description of eating is this extraordinary fantasy of predation and gluttony. Formerly potentially lusty signifiers of virility (swollen, members) are reinscribed here as damaged rotten flesh to be mauled by the creatures of the sea. It combines the author’s revenge on the arrogant (and potentially vicious) narrator, with his brief moment of self-recognition about a wasted life, a life given over to appetite and flesh in a sexual sense. The vision of the sharks and crabs feasting on his body also gives the reader a nauseating sense of what eating flesh might mean. The social bond is based on sacrifice­– s­ omething must be able to be put to death­– ­usually animals.60 Women and she-wolves The lady is, however, strange, as Lenoir describes her, as well as a stranger (étrangère) in this story not only because of her intelligence, courage and self-control­– ­there is also the relation between 135

Derrida and Other Animals human and animal, la dame et la louve. The story portrays a canny and uncanny mirroring between the woman and the she-wolf­– ­they respond to each other physically, in their ways of being, in their eyes, fur, and attitude, and they take responsibility for each other. These are key terms in the history of men differentiating themselves from animals­– ­as those unable to talk, or more particularly to respond and be responsible (in law). According to the narrator: An aura of harsh and solitary pride, of angry recoil and retreat, emanated from this woman. Her yellow eyes resembled those of her she-wolf. They had the same look of sly hostility. Her step was so silent as to be disturbing. No one can ever have walked with so little sound. Her clothing was of a thick material which looked like fur. She was not beautiful, nor pretty, nor charming. But she was, after all, the only woman on board. (157) Cette femme dégageait une impression d’orgueil rude et solitaire, de fuite et de recul furieux. Ses yeux jaunes ressemblaient à ceux de sa louve. Ils avaient le même regard d’hostilité sournoise. Ses pas étaient tellement silencieux qu’ils en devenaient inquiétants. Jamais on n’a marché avec si peu de bruit. Elle était vêtue d’une étoffe épaisse, qui ressemblait à une fourrure. Elle n’était ni belle, ni jolie, ni charmante. Mais, enfin, c’était la seule femme qui fût à bord. (20–1)

We might note that the wolf-woman shares even her silent step with the wolf, the typical stealthy ‘pas de loup’ to which Derrida draws our attention. The silenced woman may have been deprived of her voice by man who has arrogated the word to himself, yet here the reader has rather the sense of a chosen silence which is ‘disturbing’. Lenoir is noisy by contrast: he chatters incessantly. Aristotle tells us that man is a political animal­– t­his lady, in common with most of the other female characters in Vivien’s collection, resists the city (polis). She is a lone wolf, maybe even rogue wolf: the rogue being the one upon whom the community must turn. She is an outcast, perhaps even an outlaw,61 but is so by her own rational decision­ – ­based on an analysis of the city of men, as well as a visceral reaction (nausea) to men’s practices. When Lenoir dares to lay a hand on the lady, she turns on him: ‘she sprang round like a she-wolf to face me. “Go away,” she commanded with almost savage determination. Her teeth gleamed strangely like those of a wild animal beneath the menacing snarl of her lips’ (157–8) (‘d’un bond de louve. “Allez-vous en”, ordonna-t-elle avec une décision presque sauvage. Ses dents de fauve brillaient étrangement sous les lèvres au menaçant retroussis’ 136

The Love of the Wolf (22)). We might note the emphasis on her teeth. The she-wolf meanwhile has a woman’s eyes when she gazes at the lady: ‘She stroked Helga’s ungainly head whilst the animal contemplated her with a deep womanly gaze’ (158) (‘Elle caressa la lourde tête d’Helga, qui la contemplait avec de profonds yeux de femme’ (22)). I am arguing that Vivien is a woman deliberately re-writing the wolf-woman conjunction. The stereotypical wolf (le loup) is a hunter with a voracious appetite­– t­he man in pursuit of a woman in the Duran Duran song. La louve is split. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida references the adoptive mother of Romulus and Remus and of Mowgli: these are good mothers, who feed and nurture others (étrangers), but he also mentions the she-wolf deemed to have an excessive sexual appetite (Beast 1, 9; Bête 1, 29). Vivien’s story led me to one key intertext, cut out by the censor from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, ‘Femmes damnées. Delphine et Hippolyte’ (‘Damned Women. Delphine and Hippolyta’). In this text we see women, specifically lesbians, figured as running wolves­– ­women with disordered, aberrant, extreme sexuality. Vivien gives us something very different. The lady explains that for so long she has been breathing forest air, snowy air, ‘vast empty expanses of Whiteness, that my soul has come to resemble that of a she-wolf vanishing into the distance’ (159) (‘Blancheurs vastes et désertes, que mon âme est un peu l’âme des louves fuyantes’ (24)). We might note the specificity of gender in this quotation, especially granted that the French language typically generalises the animal,62 and the plural form, in the masculine, and turn to one of the many reasons why Vivien might have chosen a she-wolf to accompany the lady in this story, by making a comparison with Baudelaire’s lesbian couple who are like male wolves, and disordered souls. Baudelaire was a favourite of the young poet, but Vivien becomes very critical of his representations of women in general and lesbians in particular (notably Sappho­– ­a great poet for Vivien, who translates her work, but, above all, a sexual predator in Baudelaire’s fevered imaginings).63 This is the last verse of his ‘Femmes damnées. Delphine et Hippolyte’, an apostrophe addressed to the lesbian couple: Far from your kind, outlawed and reprobate, Go, prowl like wolves through desert worlds apart! Disordered souls, fashion your own dark fate, And flee the god you carry in your heart.64 137

Derrida and Other Animals Loin des peuples vivants, errantes, condamnées, A travers les déserts courez comme les loups; Faites votre destin, âmes désordonnées, Et fuyez l’infini que vous portez en vous!

Four of Baudelaire’s words in this verse are echoed by Vivien in the phrase quoted above: ‘les déserts’ becomes ‘Blancheurs vastes et désertes’; his reference to souls (‘âmes désordonnées’) turns into ‘mon âme est un peu l’âme’; running wolves (‘les loups’) turn to ‘louves fuyantes’ which also picks up on the exhortation ‘fuyez’. In Vivien’s story, Helga is first introduced with the words: ‘a large beast lay sleeping in the trailing folds of her skirts’ (156) (‘une grande bête dormait dans les plis traînants de sa jupe’ (19))­– ­a very intimate position. She reacts in hostile fashion to the man­– ­‘the large beast, lifting up its muzzle, growled in a sinister manner’ (156) (‘la grande bête, dressant le museau, grogna d’une manière sinister’ (19))­– ­who says “ ‘You have a very bad-tempered dog there’” (156) (‘ “Vous avez là un chien bien méchant”’ (20)). However, this is not a male dog but une louve, a female wolf­– ­again Lenoir fails to recognise the nature of the beast, ‘the dreadful animal’ (157) (‘l’affreux animal’ (20)). This image of the she-wolf at the lady’s feet could again be a rewriting of Baudelaire’s ‘Delphine et Hippolyte’:65 Calm at her feet and joyful, Delphine lay And gazed at her with ardent eyes and bright, Like some strong beast that, having mauled its prey, Draws back to mark the imprint of its bite.66 Etendue à ses pieds, calme et pleine de joie Delphine la couvait avec ses yeux ardents Comme un animal fort qui surveille une proie, Après l’avoir d’abord marquée avec les dents.

The mention of the bite mark, a kind of savage writing, or at least labelling, is echoed in the emphasis Lenoir places on the Lady’s lupine teeth (‘Her teeth gleamed strangely like those of a wild animal beneath the menacing snarl of her lips’ (158)). These are teeth which could certainly imprint their mark on you. Derrida brings together eating and language in the iconic dialogue between Red Riding Hood and her grandmother-wolf: ‘The one, vociferation, exteriorizes what is eaten, devoured, or interiorized: the other, conversely or simultaneously, i.e. devourment, interiorizes what is exteriorized or proffered’ (Beast 1, 23) (‘L’une, la vocifération, extériorise ce qui se mange ou dévore ou intériorise, l’autre, 138

The Love of the Wolf inversement ou simultanément, la dévoration, intériorise ce qui s’extériorise ou se profère’ (Bête 1, 46)). His style may not be close to the poetry of Baudelaire, Vivien, Tsvetaeva, or Duffy but, like Cixous a kind of foreigner, he too lovingly stretches language to show the complex of relations which can be so hard to spell out in plain English or even French (a language more comfortable with abstraction). The preceding sentence runs: ‘Devourment, vociferation, there, in the figure of the figure, in the face, smack in the mouth, but also in the figure as trope, there’s the figure of the figure, vociferating devourment or devouring vociferation’ (Beast 1, 23) (‘Dévoration, vocifération, voilà, dans la figure de la figure, dans le visage en pleine gueule, mais aussi dans la figure comme trope, voilà la figure de la figure, la dévoration vociférante ou la vocifération dévorante’ (Bête 1, 46)). While the French can play with the fact that figure means both ‘trope’ and ‘face’, the translator must keep deciding which to use. Animals of course are often considered not to have a face­– ­whether in common usage or in the specialist sense of Levinas­– ­nor are they held to have access to human speech or writing. Both Cixous and Derrida also deploy ‘gueule’, which, by contrast to ‘figure’, is primarily used to mean specifically an animal’s mouth (especially the maw of a carnivore), and ‘se jeter dans la gueule du loup’ (throwing yourself into the jaws of the wolf) is equivalent to entering into the lion’s den in the English idiom. No doubt because it is the term for the mouth of a lower being, ‘la gueule’ is then used for human beings in a whole range of slang expressions, sometimes aggressive, such as those which English might render as ‘shut your mouth’ or ‘stuff your face’.67 Delphine is portrayed in Baudelaire’s poem warning Hippolyta about male lovers who will do her violence: Over you, like a herd of ponderous kine, Man’s love will pass and his caresses fall, Like trampling hooves. Ils passeront sur toi comme un lourd attelage, De chevaux et de bœufs aux sabots sans pitié.

In ‘Sappho to Philaenis’ (1633) John Donne represents lesbians as virgins: a man would husband them, plough their furrow, make their sterile bodies fertile, while a woman leaves no trace.68 Baudelaire’s lesbian is at once less narcissistic (Donne’s Sappho stares longingly into a mirror) and more violent. In his poem the arguments are couched in fierce language: Delphine claims that once Hippolyta has 139

Derrida and Other Animals offered herself to ‘un fiancé stupide’ (a ‘lubber groom’ in Huxley’s translation), Hippolyta would then return to her. She declares to Hippolyta: Go­– ­and bring back, all horror and disgust, The livid breasts man’s love has stigmatized. Et, pleine de remords et d’horreur, et livide, Tu me rapporteras tes seins stigmatisés . . .69

As Hippolyta does in the poem, Vivien will reject harsh taming­– ­being used by, or rather, metonymically, as, a domestic animal, cattle, cow­– b ­ ut via a more positive identification and one that is more hostile to homosociality. Luce Irigaray, too, re-writes the ‘virgin’ as a woman who does not need a man to transform or complete her, but is self-possessed.70 ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ represents Helga as both a symbolic figure and a sensual material being. From ‘the wolf’ or ‘wolves’ in Baudelaire, Vivien takes us to a particular she-wolf who is named. She reconfigures the animal imagery which her male predecessors have used to conjure up women: Donne’s fish and birds suggest nature in unchanging innocence, but it is above all Baudelaire, with his predatory Delphine and lesbians condemned to be running wolves, who is reformulated with Vivien’s inter-species couple. When the storm is raging and they are preparing the lifeboats: ‘Helga howled like a bitch. She howled wretchedly, like a bitch baying at the moon .­  . . She understood’ (161) (‘Helga hurlait comme une chienne. Elle hurlait lamentablement, comme une chienne à la lune ­. . . Elle comprenait’ (28)) (author’s emphasis). The emphasis on animal understanding of death is repeated­– ­and the narrator’s (inhuman?) response is to want to kill the she-wolf (specifically to beat her, to flatten her with a piece of wood or an iron bar, but no such phallus substitute is at hand). Lacan would note: bestial cruelty surely aims at another human being. Such murderous impulses are common to a number of the narrators in Vivien’s collection, when faced with an accurate and honest assessment of a situation (instead of flattery) made by a woman. In ‘La Soif ricane’, Jim says of Polly: ‘I’ll definitely end up killing her one day, just for the pleasure of conquering her . . .’ (‘Je finirai certes par la tuer un jour, pour le plaisir de la vaincre tout simplement . . .’) (36). Aristotle asserts that animals can only feel and express pleasure and pain, while men can express justice and injustice.71 Helga’s howling may be seen differently­– a­ s grieving; she is not in physical 140

The Love of the Wolf pain, but she is singing a lament for she understands that death is nigh for both the lady and herself. The Cartesian formulation suggests that animals can react but they cannot respond, and hence cannot be held responsible and must be excluded from the social covenant.72 In Vivien’s short story the lady and the she-wolf are in sight of land, floating on a broken mast, when the exhausted lady: turned towards Helga as if to say: ‘I can’t go on . . .’   And then something sad and solemn occurred. The she-wolf, who had understood, let out her despairing howl so that it reached the land, so near and so inaccessible. Then, raising herself up, she placed her front paws on the shoulders of her mistress, who enfolded her in her arms. Together they disappeared beneath the waves ­. . . (162) se tourna vers Helga, comme pour lui dire: ‘Je suis à bout . . .’   Et voici que se passa une chose douloureuse et solennelle. La louve, qui avait compris, prolongea vers la terre proche et inaccessible son hurlement de désespoir ­. . . Puis, se dressant, elle posa ses deux pattes de devant sur les épaules de sa maîtresse, qui la prit entre ses bras ­. . . Toutes deux s’abîmèrent dans les flots ­. . . (29) (Vivien’s emphasis)73

To return briefly to the question of language: women’s language is disenfranchised since nothing the lady can say is understood; the male narrator hears what he chooses to hear even if that is the opposite of what she means, as if her words were animal sounds. In the fantastic short story ‘Wolf-Alice’, Angela Carter’s eponymous protagonist is similarly both exceptional, as a wild child, and also everywoman: In the lapse of time, the trance of being of that exiled place, this girl grew amongst things she could neither name nor perceive. How did she think, how did she feel, this perennial stranger with her furred thoughts and her primal sentience that existed in a flux of shifting impressions; there are no words to describe the way she negotiated the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as her sleepings. The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection because it showed us what we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely knew it. (The Bloody Chamber, 122)

Articulate and gifted with language, unlike ‘the ragged girl with brindled lugs [. . . who] would have called herself a wolf, but she cannot speak’ (The Bloody Chamber, 119), nevertheless Vivien’s lady is not allowed to have logos. Her logic is disparaged as impertinence­– t­ he ‘blue-stocking’ insult links her to a long lineage of women whose 141

Derrida and Other Animals analytical intelligence is represented as unnatural, sterile and ultimately meaningless.74 The genealogy is critical, and also conjured up, though differently, by Duffy’s reference in ‘Little Red Cap’ to ‘the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones’ in the belly of the male poet-seducer-wolf. The bones are a figure for silenced female predecessors, eaten up, the male poet-seducer-wolf (‘vociferating devourment or devouring vociferation’) perhaps digesting their words and spitting them out in his own name. Man keeps reason, as well as poetry, for himself, even though in Vivien’s tale men are reduced to incoherent cries in the crisis. Before and after the crisis Lenoir certainly has words, but they have little meaning when he speaks to the lady, and he puts faith in superficial style rather than substance. The most banal of poets, he likes to produce a tedious succession of metaphors on fire, ‘enflammées’ or ‘passionate compliments’ (157) (‘métaphores enflammées’ (21)), knowing that is what women want. While Vivien loves poetry, empty and manipulative words are not what the lady wishes to hear. Lenoir is betrayed by his words at every turn when he addresses his putative audience (hoping it will be his semblables, his brothers), since, as much as the lady, the reader, even if not a woman, can surely not be the dupe of any of his absurd claims­– ­laughter or a wry smile has to be the response, yet he hated looking ridiculous above anything else.75 Thus the only successful communication within the short story is inter-species­– t­ he lady and the she-wolf understand each other. ­ nlike the In spite of Helga’s lament, neither female is afraid­– u men on board the ship. It is fear (terror), according to political thinkers such as Hobbes, which makes men obey laws (Derrida, Beast 1, 39–43; Bête 1, 67–73). Vivien’s women are unafraid­– u ­ nlike the men­– i­n spite of real danger from the natural or social world. Thus ­ nlike those who are they are mistresses of themselves­– ­as outlaws­– u allegedly masters of themselves who are entitled to be citizens in the Kantian model of the state. Of course not all women would react like the lady. She praises (most) women for their loyalty, sincerity, generosity and patience (158; 22–3). This is of course unlike Lenoir’s vision of women when he complacently advises ‘never believe a word they say’ (158) (‘ne jamais croire un seul mot de ce qu’elles vous disent’ (22)). However, the positive qualities attributed to most women by the lady can contribute to their subjugation, which is perhaps why the lady does not choose to love a woman in this story but rather a kindred outlaw spirit in the shape of the she-wolf. In a certain tradition animals are seen as not being free in the way 142

The Love of the Wolf that men are­– ­they are not free to disobey the law of nature (and thus to change for better or worse as men can) and equally not free to choose to obey or disobey human law (and hence cannot be held responsible as men are, for example in courts of law). For Heidegger animals cannot die­– ­they only cease to live.76 In this story of course, Helga does choose to disobey the instinct for self-preservation, the natural law, out of love, and the wolf-lady seeks to make free choices, mistress of herself, however difficult her situation­– ­neither is quite sovereign or beast, perhaps not even female, as the philosophers understand them. And the lady is clearly intended to be an independent woman­– ­seeking to make free choices however difficult her situation.

Cixous and other loving Cixous and Tsvetaeva While Vivien’s she-wolf and lady unite in rejecting appetites, and Rousseau’s figural and real wolves in his Discourse on Inequality, and Rousseau himself as werewolf in his Confessions, are above all timid rather than aggressive and voracious, most modern rewritings of the figure of the wolf rejoice in the access it offers to exploring the pleasure and pain of eating and being eaten. Vivien comes closer to this in a different story in La Dame à la louve, ‘Trahison de la forêt’ (‘Forest Betrayal’): the brutal and self-satisfied narrator Blue Dirk boasts of his killing a tiger, but then Joan, his loyal companion, is devoured by a tigress­– ­an interesting death in its representation of eating and a degree of pleasure on the part of the eater. Joan is described as an excellent and fearless hunter with the eyes of a lynx (‘des yeux du lynx’) (‘Trahison de la forêt’, 65). She seems to know that the tigress is the real danger, and, just before she is devoured (‘dévorée’) (70), she talks of death, a subject she has never previously discussed: ‘you must be very naked. No flesh, no bones. A formless, limitless mass’ (‘on doit être très nu. Pas de chair, pas d’os. Une masse sans forme et sans contours’) (68). Joan will be transformed from the person named Joan into a kind of thing. As the tigress eats her, Blue Dirk hears a sound he will never forget: ‘that mewing, both furious and satisfied, and that crunching of the bones in that terrible jaw’ (‘ce miaulement à la fois furieux et satisfait et ce broiement des os sous l’affreuse mâchoire’) (70). The reader has only the utterly insensitive Blue Dirk’s narrative to go on and cannot tell if there is 143

Derrida and Other Animals any meaningful meeting between Joan and the tigress­– ­in spite of her suspicion that the ferocious tigress is waiting, Joan has gone to fetch water after she has said all on the subject of death that she has to say (‘j’ai dit tout ce que j’avais à dire’) (69). She does not cry out for help­ – ­Dirk imagines an ambush and the tigress ‘sinking her claws deep into her breast, she must have bitten her on the lips, which prevented her from calling for help’ (‘lui enfonçant ses griffes dans la poitrine, elle avait dû la mordre aux lèvres, ce qui l’avait empêchée d’appeler au secours . . .’) (69). The reader may choose to interpret this lethal encounter between two killer females as an embrace and a kiss­– ­ultimately satisfying. The combination of wolf, carnivorous appetite, and red-blooded sexual desire has more often been placed in the masculine­– ­the wolfish sexual predator prowling for prey is typically represented as male, even in Plato with an older man pursuing a younger (the heteronormative being queered from the outset). Plato is the source for a rare staging in The Beast and the Sovereign of an erotic scene, a voracious sexual appetite (mentioned in passing with respect to louves as well). Socrates tells Phaedrus that the lover ‘has an appetite and wants to feed upon you’ then gives the verse ‘as wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves’.77 Derrida segues from one of his references to Phaedrus to a mention of Cixous’s short essay ‘The Love of the Wolf’, which is cited as ‘a text that ought to be quoted and studied in extenso for an infinite amount of time’ (Beast 1, 210) (‘un texte qu’il faudrait citer et étudier in extenso pendant un temps infini’ (Bête 1, 281))­– ­implying a hyperbolic appetite for analysis, although in fact Derrida devotes to it only one page out of the 460 odd pages of volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign before returning to La Fontaine. A new edition of Cixous’s collection of essays in translation, Stigmata, which includes ‘Love of the Wolf’, has a foreword by Derrida which speaks of the importance of drawing attention to stigmata, to the wound at the origin of writing, and affirms yet again his admiration for Cixous, both the person and the work: ‘immense, powerful, so multiple but unique in this century’; today, in his eyes, ‘the greatest writer in the French language’. This book, he says, is: ‘a weave of poetic narratives, this unprecedented book overflows our language, the “French language”, in every way while nonetheless cultivating and illustrating it in a rare and incomparably new fashion. A practically untranslatable fashion.’78 In the first part of Cixous’s tri-partite book L’Amour du loup et autres remords there are two key non-human animals. The one that 144

The Love of the Wolf takes up the most space is ‘her’ cat, Thessie, and the challenges that love for a cat poses, in particular the question of translation between cat and human. The pains and pleasures of love between woman and cat are both far from, and close to, those of love more generally. ‘The Love of the Wolf’ signals that: Love begins with a cat. A kind of lost, accidental, furry baby arrives. A kitten they say. A kitten par excellence: the found beast, the abandoned creature who was meowing­– i­ n Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. She comes into our home one fine morning, the poignant figure of the child we no longer dared hope for, bestowed by the gods, and without requiring a biological mother, or father for that matter. This kitten given by nobody, a gracious creature, is loved without being asked its name. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 88–9) L’amour commence avec un chat. Arrive une sorte de bébé velu perdu, accidentel. Un chaton dit-on. Un chaton par excellence: la bête trouvée, l’abandonnée qui miaulait­– ­dans l’Agamemnon d’Eschyle. Elle entre sous notre toit, un beau matin, figure poignante de l’enfant inespéré, accordé par les dieux, et sans obligation de mère biologique ni de père, d’ailleurs. Ce chaton donné par personne, créature gracieuse, on l’aime sans lui demander son nom. Jusqu’au jour où il devient lion. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 24)

Hospitality which aspires towards the unconditional typically, and dangerously, entails not asking a name from the stranger, but that kitten’s name may be lion (‘L’Amour du loup’, 24). In Derrida’s commentary on fables in relation to political force and power, he gives the example: ‘I’m called Lion and, you’ll listen to me, I’m talking to you, be afraid, I am the most valiant and I’ll strangle you if you object’ (Beast 1, 217) (‘je m’appelle le lion et que, vous allez m’écouter, je vous parle, prenez peur, je suis le plus vaillant et je vais vous étrangler si vous objectez’ (Bête 1, 291)). He is referring inter alia to La Fontaine’s ‘The Heifer, the Goat, and the Ewe, in Society with the Lion’ (‘La Génisse, la Chèvre et la Brebis, en société avec le Lion’, Fables, I, 6). In the expanded version of Cixous’s essay, in place of the phrase ‘Jusqu’au jour où il devient lion’, there is a long quotation from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which tells of the adopted lion cub who grows up to massacre sheep, flooding the house with blood, an outlaw I might suggest. Adoption of a kitten or a cub figures the adopted child­– ­the found beast becomes the foundling­– w ­ ho breaks and devours us. One of Cixous’s examples is the dark figure of the silent Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)­– ­‘le sauvage’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 24). Heathcliff is described by Cathy 145

Derrida and Other Animals as: ‘ “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.”’79 When he turns his attentions to Isabella, Cathy tells him: ‘ “I like her too well, my dear Heathcliff, to let you absolutely seize and devour her up”’ (Wuthering Heights, 145)­– ­Isabella is the lamb in that formulation and Cathy the ambiguous protector. Cathy loves Heathcliff herself as a reflection, typical of the love for the foundling ‘whom our narcissism nurses’ according to Cixous (‘Love of the Wolf’, 89); Cathy says: ‘ “he’s more myself than I am”’ (121), and she loves his love for her. The question of translation between cat and human is raised most sharply in other chapters in L’Amour du loup in terms of the different relations to birds: the narrating woman ‘je’ (whom we might take to be Hélène Cixous, but the autofictional play is always complex in her highly self-referential writing) wishes to liberate a stunned bird; Thessie’s, the cat’s, passion for the bird is of another order.80 The narrator’s attempt to deny the cat a bird that came back from the dead opens up the question of the ethics of human versus animal codes. Later in the work, the narrator appreciates the cat’s enjoyment in drinking the blood and tearing out the organs of a pigeon she has captured. After eating her first pigeon comes the first night in seven years when Thessie does not come to sleep with the narrator immediately­– ­things will never be the same again now she has learnt pleasure in cruelty and how to devour. The child grows up. Cixous focuses largely on masculine predators in ‘The Love of the Wolf’: the wolf is ‘le gars’ (Tsvetaeva’s ‘lad’), Pugachev, Heathcliff or Othello. However, her ‘analysis’, perhaps better termed a poetic weave, as Derrida does, unsettles any comfortable reading of sexual difference as sexual opposition or heteronormativity: Tsvetaeva inscribes the genealogy of her own imaginary in a whole lineage of Pushkin’s love mysteries. These always involve duels, dual relations that are so intense, so red-hot, so white-hot, that in the glare you forget even the dimension of sexual difference. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91) C’est dans toute une lignée de mystères amoureux de Pouchkine que Tsvetaïeva inscrit la généalogie de son propre imaginaire. Il s’agit toujours de duels, de relations duelles, si intenses, portées au rouge, au blanc, qu’on oublie même, dans l’éblouissement, la dimension de la différence sexuelle. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 27)

For Cixous’s Tsvetaeva, lambs can be boys (Grinev) as well as girls (Maroussia), and lambs can eat up wolves as well as be eaten by them. Duels here suggest lethal amorous couplings, such as that between Joan and the tigress in Vivien’s ‘Forest Betrayal’, but there 146

The Love of the Wolf is also a reference to history; Pushkin was killed in a duel with a French Officer, d’Anthès. Tsvetaeva describes the impact on her of a painting that depicts this final duel (one of many) which hangs in her mother’s room in ‘My Pushkin’ (319–20).81 In The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin depicts a duel between Grinev and Shvabrin, who mocks Grinev’s poetry and his love for Maria Ivanovna whom Shvabrin wants to seduce himself, and, in a figural sense, there are many more ‘duels’ in the texts. The English translation has to lose an elusive allusion to gender in ‘Il s’agit toujours de duels, de relations duelles’, the masculine noun ‘duel’ (armed combat), followed, in apposition, by relationships qualified by the feminine plural adjective ‘duelles’ meaning dual or ‘between two’, allowing the sense of ‘duel’ to open up as it does in the beast and the sovereign duo (Beast 1, 32; Bête 1, 59). In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida points to the undecidability between the subjective and the objective genitive in Cixous’s paradoxically ambiguous title­– ­the hovering between the love of the wolf for the lamb (whom he can eat up) and the lamb’s love of the wolf (who loves the lamb). Unlike the version in Stigmata, I would choose to retain the definite article in Cixous’s title (‘the’ love of the wolf), in spite of the awkwardness in English, in order to keep the play between the two genitives. The double genitive in which ‘a two-way, reversible relationship between terms replaces a simple subordination of one term to another’ seems particularly appropriate for these relationships; and the difficulty of following slows reading down and helps to hold at bay ‘quick-fix moral and political judgements’.82 Sometimes English uses the present participle for this kind of ambiguity, ‘loving Helen’, but it does not work for a common noun such as wolf except in the plural (so the translator could have had ‘loving wolves’), which would take away Cixous’s amorous specificity (love of one particular wolf). These ambiguous genitives unsettle properties and the proper (of sexual difference) with their focus on the gift and love: What attaches the wolf to the lamb, she [Tsvetaeva] reckons, is the fact that he hasn’t eaten him.83 Painful mystery of the gift that returns through reflection: what the wolf loves in the lamb is his own goodness. It is thanks to the lamb that the wolf accedes to the plane of love­– ­the love that gives itself without hope, without calculation, without response, but that nevertheless gives itself, seeing itself give itself. The wolf given to a lamb of the Grinev type who doesn’t even notice the enormity of the gift­ – ­that’s really love. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 98) 147

Derrida and Other Animals Ce qui attache le loup à l’agneau, devine-t-elle, c’est qu’il ne l’a pas mangé. Mystère douloureux du don qui fait retour par réflexion: ce que le loup aime dans l’agneau, c’est sa propre bonté. C’est grâce à l’agneau que le loup atteint le plan de l’amour­– ­celui qui se donne sans espoir, sans calcul, sans réponse, mais, quand même se donne, se voyant se donner. Le loup donné à un agneau genre Griniov qui ne remarque même pas l’énormité du don, ça c’est vraiment de l’amour. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 39)84

Derrida is particularly struck by the element of sacrifice in Cixous’s account of the wolf’s love for the lamb (Beast 1, 210; Bête 1, 282), the Christ-like renunciation by the loving, giving, wolf: This wolf that sacrifices its very definition, its identity as a wolf, for the lamb, this wolf that doesn’t eat the lamb, is it a wolf? Is it still a wolf? Isn’t it a delupinized wolf, a non-wolf, an invalidated wolf? If it were a false wolf there’d be no interest. No, we’ve made no mistake, this wolf is a real wolf: right up to the last minute it might eat us, the axe doesn’t falter, right up to the last minute. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 93–4) Ce loup qui pour l’agneau sacrifie sa propre définition, son identité de loup, ce loup qui ne mange pas l’agneau, est-il un loup? Est-il encore un loup? N’est-il pas un loup délupisé, un non-loup, un annulé? Si c’était un faux loup aucun intérêt. Non, ne nous trompons pas, ce loup est un vrai loup: jusqu’à la dernière seconde il pourrait nous manger, la hache siffle sans arrêt, jusqu’à la dernière seconde. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 32)

The carnivore that ultimately sacrifices its appetite may seem to draw Cixous closer to Vivien’s rewriting of the wolf. Yet there remain important differences. Derrida is struck by Cixous’s play between ‘force’ (kept as ‘force’ in Bennington’s translation, which allows the necessary echo through the range of contexts, but which could sometimes be translated by ‘power’) and fear. The fear of the wolf (‘la peur du loup’) is another of these ambiguous genitives, more striking in French than in English which has a preference for the apostrophe followed by ‘s’ as marker of the possessive. Vivien’s lady seems to feel no fear­– ­she is not the child (not even the child within us) who loves to be frightened and thrills at the thought of the wolf coming to eat you up. Derrida points out the wide range of intertexts in Cixous’s piece (just as he himself has a range of interlocutors in The Beast and the Sovereign), and she does indeed make fleeting references to a variety of authors from Aeschylus to Kleist to show, for example, with a quotation from Agamemnon, how the adopted sauvage may start as 148

The Love of the Wolf a kitten but grow to be a lion. However, she herself sets it up more intimately in her 2003 version with her first words laid out like a dedication and enclosed in the arms of a parenthesis in French: ‘(Ce texte qui suit les traces de Marina Tsvetaïeva est un bon-d pour un loup secret)’ (‘L’Amour du loup?’, 17). Although in the 1994 article, and thus in the English translation, the epigraph is simply ‘This is a bo(u)nd for a wolf’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 84), and only at the close of an added paragraph do we find: ‘Following in Tsvetaeva’s footsteps, this reading is a bo(u)nd for a secret wolf’ (84), reversing the use of italics. In either case, the text is specifically following the tracks or traces of the Russian poet and playwright Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). I prefer animal tracks, or non-specific traces, to Cohen’s choice of ‘footsteps’, a translation which binds us to the human. It is also a bon-d for a secret wolf, which is a mysterious formulation; un bon is a good thing or man, or a bond or token, something which is good to be exchanged (appropriate for a work of language). The dash ties the good to a ‘d’ (Derrida’s initial) making it a bond, a leap or a bound, certainly appropriate for a wolf: Vivien’s eponymous heroine turns ‘d’un bond de louve’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 22) (‘she sprang round like a she-wolf’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 157)) as I have noted. In the English the brackets go around a ‘u’, perhaps even more evocative for the pensive reader in the days of text-messaging. French readers can let their minds float on possible semi-harmonies with bander to have an erection, or the double bande (double bind). Cixous’s bond to her fellow experimental and daring writer, Tsvetaeva, expressed in a number of works, is not, however, an exclusive endpoint to the intertextual trail. The bond, or lupine bound, is doubled in Tsvetaeva’s own passion for Pushkin, as the stranger, her strange foreign origin as a poet or even as a person (‘Love of the Wolf’, 85) (‘son origine étrangère’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 17)), or as her ‘literary mother’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91) (‘la mère littéraire’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 27)). We might note the oscillation between distance and proximity­– t­he foreign, even African, strangeness of Pushkin85 and the maternal element: ‘the mothertext, Pushkin’s’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91) (‘le texte-mère, celui de Pouchkine’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 27)). It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the specific and the general in this pattern of texts which ‘overflows language’ as Derrida puts it. Cixous begins with ‘The stranger arrives’ or the arrival of the stranger. This is a classic starting point for a story or film, but also a typical account for Cixous of her own creative process, and also a 149

Derrida and Other Animals specific reference to Tsvetaeva’s writing about these particular texts by Pushkin. What will be called ‘the wolf’ is here named ‘le Dehors’, the Outside (a stronger phrase than the outsider, this is someone who is the outside, the unknown), who comes in and carries her off, but ‘even inside he remains the outside’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 85) (‘même à l’intérieur il reste le dehors’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 17)). The wolf is of course a creature of the wild forest, fors reminding us of ‘outside’ the city walls, outside the law. As Angela Carter puts it in her textual jouissance of the lupine: ‘One beast and only one howls in the woods by night’­– ­we may howl with pleasure as well as pain (‘The Company of Wolves’, 110). The outside(r) is elusive and attractive, as well as dangerous, also a trick of language, words, ordinary and extraordinary, such as ‘love’ read in books, a foreign land.86 When Carol Ann Duffy writes, in her version of Red Riding Hood, of the birth of the female poet in the forest outside her home town she tells us:       Lesson one that  night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?87

Better still was her discovery of the wolf-poet’s books:        As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with  books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

As in Cixous’s ‘The Love of the Wolf’, the poet describes love as separation from the world, a lair in the forest, a secret which is fragile, threatened by the possibility of the death of the other­– ­which Duffy as Red Cap, half following the fairy tale, brings about with a chop of the axe. This image of liberating female violence is sometimes understood by critics as feminist stridency, and I am afraid that Duffy’s Mrs Aesop also wields a castrating axe, although juxtaposition with ‘Mrs Midas’ in the same collection allows a lyrical melancholy to tinge the loss of love, bringing the lost one inside oneself to mourn him (another form of consuming, consummation). Yet the poet herself has to make the break in order to find her voice, rather than end up bleached bones like her grandmother silenced inside a canonical (even when outsider) wolf. In all these texts there is autofiction (Adrian Henri might be Duffy’s wolf), there is a more general par150

The Love of the Wolf ticularity (of the young girl who became a poet), and then a greater generality of a solitary adolescent falling in love with the Outside rather than trying to stay in the city or polis of semblables. There is the possibility of escaping a purely external threat, a Lenoir, but ‘the love of the wolf is that complicated thing, the danger from within, the possibility of being complicit with what threatens us’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 87) (‘Le danger de l’intérieur c’est cette chose compliquée qu’est l’amour du loup, la complicité que l’on peut avoir avec ce qui nous menace’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 21)). We can flee when hatred threatens, but when it is the tortuous love (‘le tortueux amour’) that (is the wolf that) shows its teeth the daughter’s senses are avid (the unconscious) and her heart is blind (the ego).88 We love the wolf. We love the love of the wolf. We love the fear of the wolf. We’re afraid of the wolf­– ­there is love in our fear. Fear is in love with the wolf. Fear loves. Or: we’re afraid of the person we love. Love terrorizes us. Or we call the person we love our wolf or our tiger, or our lamb in the manger. We are full of teeth and trembling. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 88) Nous aimons le loup. Nous aimons l’amour du loup. Nous aimons la peur du loup. Nous avons peur du loup­– ­il y a de l’amour dans notre peur. La peur est amoureuse du loup. La peur aime. Ou bien: nous avons peur de la personne aimée. L’amour nous terrorise. Ou bien la personne que nous aimons, nous l’appelons notre loup ou notre tigre, ou notre agneau dans la paille. Nous sommes pleins de dents et de tremblements. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 23)

Derrida emphasises the importance of the mouth, teeth and tongue, and ‘the violent rush to bite, engulf, swallow the other, to take the other into oneself too, to kill it or mourn it’ (Beast 1, 23) (‘la violente précipitation à mordre, à engloutir, à avaler l’autre, à le prendre au-dedans de soi, aussi, pour le tuer ou en faire son deuil’ (Bête 1, 46)) in the figure of the wolf. As I have noted, ‘figure’ in French, though not in English, has an echo which permits a reference to the wolf’s face, with its slavering jaws, more familiar as the gueule with which Cixous also teases us in ‘The Love of the Wolf’­– ­the question is posed to Levinas­– ­does an animal have a face? Cixous too stresses eating and being eaten in her account of the love of the wolf: From the moment we embrace, we salivate, one of us wants to eat, one of us is going to be swallowed up mouthful by mouthful, we all want to be eaten, for starters, we are all born-eaters from way back, old ogrelings or 151

Derrida and Other Animals ogrelets, we are full of sharp appetites and teeth­– ­but better not say it or else we would never dare to love. Or to be loved. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 89) Dès que nous nous embrassons, nous salivons, l’un de nous veut manger, l’un de nous va être avalé par petites bouchées, tous nous souhaitons être mangés, pour commencer, tous nous sommes d’anciens mangeurs-nés, d’anciens ogrelets ou ogrissons, il ne faut pas le dire que nous sommes pleins de dents et de faims aiguisées, sinon nous n’oserions jamais aimer. Ni être aimés.) (‘L’Amour du loup’, 25)

Born-eaters, here mangeurs-nés­– ­later Cixous proposes us as borneaten mangés-nés (39). The reader who is listening might almost hear an allusion to ‘mon Genet’ (my Genet), one of the writers celebrated by Cixous in La Jeune née whose title likewise echoes his name. She makes a reference to his place in Derrida’s Glas (‘L’Amour du loup’, 38), which she hears (almost) ringing in ‘gars’ as it is tolling ‘beware’ (gare) as in ‘gare au loup’ (beware of the wolf, which slips into loup-garou). It is just the ‘l’ missing, almost elle (she). The sound of Genet in your mouth and your ears (key features of Red Riding Hood’s wolf) again queers sexual difference, writing, desire and oral pleasure.89 In her epic poem Le Gars, translated as The Kid by Cixous’s translator Cohen, Tsvetaeva dramatises the dreams of oral pleasure when the heroine Maroussia first dances with ‘le gars’, the vampire: You are the fruit I am the knife. You are the dish I am the eater. Your eater will do you honour. Your skin is smooth Making my tongue tingle Your skin is soft Making my saliva flow. C’est toi le fruit, C’est moi le couteau. C’est toi le mets, C’est moi le mangeur. Ton mangeur te fera honneur. Ta peau est lisse A faire claquer ma langue. Ta peau est douce A faire couler ma salive. (Le Gars, 30) 152

The Love of the Wolf Maroussia is implicitly compared to a peach, a common metaphor, but Tsvetaeva’s deceptively simple, and frequently monosyllabic, language is subtly polysemic: the ‘douce’ for Maroussia’s skin could be gentle, soft or sweet to taste. It makes the reader aware of the cannibalistic vocabulary that otherwise might be a dead metaphor, commonplace for lovers, or for descriptions of young women, by literalising it in the context of a vampire-lover­– ­or werewolf. Cixous points out how the flesh-devouring lad in the red shirt, ‘gars rouge’, echoes ‘garou’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 96; ‘L’Amour du loup’, 37). But the danger comes from within, from love or from the unconscious or, in a bodily form, from ‘les entrailles’. The French term denotes the intestines, but is also used to refer to the innermost self, the seat of the emotions, perhaps ‘the bottom of the heart’; it can also mean the womb. The decision by the American translator to render ‘le gars’ by ‘the kid’ throughout now becomes even more pointed as he translates ‘les entrailles’ in both Tsvetaeva and Cixous by ‘womb’. Thus Tsvetaeva’s: Chaud cri des entrailles: ­– ­C’est moi, ma promise! (‘L’Amour du loup’, 38)

becomes: Hot cry from the womb: ­– ­It is I, my promised one! (‘Love of the Wolf’, 97)

This pre-judges all kind of decisions including whose ‘entrailles’ the cry comes from since only females have wombs. The French allows it to come from deep inside the ‘gars’ (rather than from, say, the kid inside her womb), and does not allow it to be undecidable which would probably be the most faithful solution. In the very end of the poem the lad and Maroussia are one heart and one body­– t­ he vampire-wolf has sacrificed himself, but she has sacrificed her brother and her mother to his appetite, has left her son with her husband, and risks losing her soul. Tsvetaeva, Pushkin and Pugachev The other polysemically saturated example of the sacrifice or love of the wolf in Cixous’s essay is Pushkin’s Pugachev. Tsvetaeva argues that Pushkin is in love with, is bewitched by, Pugachev­– o ­ r at least with the Pugachev that he creates in his 1836 novel The Captain’s Daughter (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 382; Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 153

Derrida and Other Animals 92). Pushkin is well aware of the discrepancies between his poetic creation and the man who can be deciphered in historical records since he himself had attempted a report on Pugachev for Nicholas I some years earlier. This ‘History of Pugachev’ mainly covers events from the end of 1772, when Pugachev appears as a drifting ‘unknown vagrant’ amongst the Cossacks (‘A History’, 452), to Pugachev’s execution in January 1775 (541–2) after the suppression of his rebellion against Catherine II ‘the Great’­– ­the largest peasant revolt in Russia’s history, characterised by numerous atrocities. Pugachev intermittently takes on the role of the assassinated Peter III.90 The Pugachev whom Pushkin loves (‘endless love’ says Tsvetaeva) is the outlaw, the wolf who loves the lamb (who loves the wolf). The lamb in question, with whom Pushkin identifies, is ‘Griniov’ (Petr Andreevich Grinev), the narrator of almost all of his novel. For Tsvetaeva, Grinev, a sixteen-year-old naive (barely-­educated) country noble boy, magically turns into a thirty-six-year-old poet once Pugachev enters the narrative, as the Guide first imagined as a wolf in a snow storm (The Captain’s Daughter, 337).91 Thus in terms of sexual and other differences what we have is an exiled female poet in her mid-forties seeming to remember how, as a six-year-old girl, she identified with (and still does identify with) a mature male poet, who imagines himself a gently-born rustic adolescent boy loved and enchanted by a violent peasant92 or Cossack rebel who becomes his benefactor in spite of the fact that they are on opposite sides in what is more or less a civil war.93 Tsvetaeva insists that Grinev’s feelings are far more than gratitude­– l­ove for the person who killed your beloved’s parents in front of you cannot just be down to gratitude, it must be amorous bewitchment (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 385; Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 96)­– ­and that his feelings are increased with each successive encounter, including Pugachev’s final sign with his head just before he is executed. There is even magic in his appearance (black hair and beard), his smile, tenderness, majesty, and humour when he cannot read a note: ‘some kind of animal-like child’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 386) (‘une sorte d’enfant-fauve’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 97)).94 Tsvetaeva’s analysis creates a story of doubling and displacement. The Captain’s Daughter seems conventional enough in its plot: a gallant young soldier (Grinev) falls for his captain’s daughter, but his father refuses them permission to marry because she is below him in status. After numerous heroic adventures during the war with the rebel forces of Pugachev they are finally united: he saves 154

The Love of the Wolf her from the wicked and treacherous Shvabrin who is trying to force her to marry him and she saves him from prison after he is falsely accused of treachery himself.95 However, Tsvetaeva is convincing in her case that the true love story is the less conventional one between the young soldier and the rebel Pugachev, or rather between the author, Pushkin, and Pugachev­– a­ nd she places herself in this chain of substitutions­– ­she too has been enchanted by Pushkin’s Pugachev. When he first emerges as a black spot in a white blizzard he could be a wolf­– a­ nd then he wanders, elusive, voracious, bloody and fierce, black and hairy. I would add that he is intimately associated with fur coats in the story. The iconic exchange in the narrative is Grinev’s gift of his own hare-skin jacket that the larger Pugachev bursts out of (The Captain’s Daughter, 342) at the close of their first encounter, and the later return gift of a sheepskin coat ‘off his own back’ tied on a fine Bashkir horse (The Captain’s Daughter, 398). Each is thus enveloped in a skin coat that the other had worn, an intimate exchange, each keeping the other warm. The practical as well as sensual fur also evokes the wild beast. Vivien’s lady is always wrapped up in fur-like material and dreaming of snowy wastes. Carter writes of her ‘Wolf-Alice’: ‘it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist’ (The Bloody Chamber, 119).96 Cixous does not dwell in this essay on the question of sovereignty which is so critical in The Beast and the Sovereign, but, as well as a wolf, Pugachev is also a sovereign (even if an imposter); when he frees Grinev’s beloved Maria Ivanovna for his sake he says: ‘Go free, pretty maiden: I grant you freedom. I am your Sovereign’ (The Captain’s Daughter, 419) (‘Tu peux sortir, la belle, je t’offre la liberté; le souverain, c’est moi’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 100)). Tsvetaeva makes the contrast with the insipidly healthy and round-cheeked Empress Catherine, all in white, wearing a nightcap, who encounters Maria or ‘Masha’ on a park bench, and pretends to be a lady of the court. ‘How much more regal in his gesture is the peasant who gives himself the name Ruler, than the ruler who presents herself as a hanger-on at court’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 388) (‘Comme il est plus royal, le geste du paysan qui se dit souverain devant celui de la souveraine qui se donne pour dame de compagnie’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 100)). While Tsvetaeva acknowledges that Catherine is good and kind, and that Pushkin respects her, she sees her as ‘the lady-­patroness’ (‘la dame patronnesse’), a hateful figure, a patronising matron, sweet to the point of being honeyed or sugary, which makes even the­ 155

Derrida and Other Animals six-­year-­old poet want to die of boredom­– ­the antithesis of a thrilling wolf. For Tsvetaeva there are two real marriages in the book: that between the Empress and Maria (sugar and vanilla, I would say), and the one between Grinev and Pugachev (sealed with blood and fur). There are a series of counterparts to Pugachev, for instance he is ‘the savage wolf’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 389) (‘le loup sauvage’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 102), while Savelich, Grinev’s loyal old family servant, is a faithful dog. All the other characters in the story are stock figures, even Masha (the innocent first love); they are at best nice or lukewarm, against the fire,97 passion and darkness of Pugachev. The true ‘interior’ enemy is the monstrous Shvabrin while Pugachev may be the ‘exterior’ enemy (or enemy on the outside), but is a true friend even if Grinev would have had to do his duty and kill him in battle had circumstances dictated. There is a very different reading effect in ‘A History of Pugachev’, which is not written by the poet Pushkin but rather by a ‘prose writer’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 392) (‘prosateur’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 107))­– ­the reader is disgusted rather than enchanted by the terrorist Pugachev who commits numerous atrocities, while in The Captain’s Daughter the focus is on the exceptional act of grace: he saves someone and the reader identifies with the one who is spared. Pugachev in ‘A History’ is morally weak and cowardly­– ­allowing his woman Kharlova (and her seven-year-old brother) or his friend to be killed by his comrades (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 394) (‘A History’, 473–4).98 He is not a hero, not even a real wild animal but ‘one who allows bestial deeds’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 398) a ‘fauteur de fauves’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 115). Pushkin writes the fiction after the history, transforming Pugachev; thus the novel is ‘the retort of the poet to the historical Pugachev. The lyricist’s retort to the archive’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 399) (‘la riposte du poète au Pougatchov historique, la réponse du lyrisme aux archives’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 116)). He wrote the history for others, Tsvetaeva claims, the fiction for himself: ‘Pushkin’s Pugachev is a poetic liberty, just as the poet himself is poetic liberty, a liberty that in the poet plays itself free from assiduous images and assigned imitations’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 399) (‘Le Pougatchov de Pouchkine, c’est la liberté du poète, comme le poète lui-même est liberté, laquelle, en elle-même, se débarrasse des images importunes, emporte les images imposés’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 117)). She emphasises the poetic process of purification, knowledge, sight, and forgetting, of love of the wolf as revolutionary, overturning order, a kind of bouleversement.99 156

The Love of the Wolf

Little Red Riding Hood Derrida makes a number of references to the iconic tale of Red Riding Hood, including in relation to the Wolf Man (Beast 1, 64; Bête 1, 99). The savage wolf of course features in many popular stories that have been retold over the centuries in different variants including the tale of the ‘Three Little Pigs’, ‘The Goat and her Three Kids’, and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’ (which is also a reference point for Freud’s Wolf Man) as well as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Canis lupus used to be the most widely distributed land mammal apart from homo sapiens, and man’s history of domesticating other animals, then seen as property,100 inevitably brought about conflict with the wolf viewed as competitor, predator and thief (Marvin, Wolf, 8–9, 35–48). I should note, however, that Derrida raises but decides to leave open the question why certain animals have fascinated fabulists and political philosophers more than others. Lupopohobic fables, including Aesop’s in the sixth to fifth centuries BC about the boy who cried wolf or the shepherds who try to tame wolf cubs, combine warnings about wild carnivores with the use of the wolf to represent a wicked human being. The fairy tales typically involve a combination of a thrill and a moral message: the greedy wolf eating up unwary young creatures (and the old grandmother in Red Riding Hood), but then meeting his comeuppance. The animals he has swallowed are often reborn from his stomach­– ­sometimes after his death and sometimes replaced by stones which will bring about his death. It is perhaps a peculiarly satisfying end for the audience (made bloodthirsty by the tale) when the wolf is undone by his appetite or literally or symbolically fed flesh (sausages or stew) as part of his downfall. In ‘The Goat and her Three Kids’, and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’, it is the mother who takes revenge on the wolf for eating her children; but in ‘Red Riding Hood’ it is the hunter or wood-cutter. The hunter skins the wolf and takes the pelt home­– t­his adoption of the animal’s skin, to which I have referred earlier in relation to The Captain’s Daughter or ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, is used to neat effect in Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, one of many modern revisions.101 Derrida points out that Freud tells us that the wolf (whether legend or nightmare) is always the father. A key psychoanalytic reference point for Red Riding Hood is Bettelheim, who points out that there are many traditional versions of the tale, the most popular, and his own favourite, being the Brothers Grimm’s ‘Little Red Cap’ 157

Derrida and Other Animals (Rotkäppchen, 1812). Charles Perrault’s moral tale is earlier (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, 1697102) but vastly inferior according to Bettelheim because the warning message about burgeoning female sexuality is too clear for his taste: Perrault’s young girl is asked to undress and gets into bed with the wolf (who is not disguised as a grandmother). When she asks him what his big arms are for, the wolf replies that they are for embracing, and the tale ends with a moral about how dangerous wolves are, especially ones that seem nice, but follow young girls in the street (The Uses of Enchantment, 168). For Bettelheim this means that the Perrault tale is not a real fairy tale which must have meanings on different levels that you discover as you grow and partially create for yourself. The seduction attempt is so obvious, he declares, that the girl must be stupid or a fallen woman (169). I might note that Bettelheim here seems to protest too much. Carter’s short story, ‘The Company of Wolves’, like the film, contains a series of lupine vignettes, examples of the dangers of wolves, in particular werewolves (although that name is not given until a few pages in (113)), wolves who are really men.103 A killer wolf trapped in a pit changes (back) into a man when dead; a witch turns a wedding party into a band of wolves; a man who vanishes on his wedding night returns and transforms into a wolf on learning that his wife has married again. It has a feel of ‘on dit’, indirect free speech to represent all our traditional worries about the cunning ferocious carnivore lurking in the shadows of the woods­– ­particularly dangerous when famished, in some ways reminiscent of the Encyclopédie’s collection of wisdom about wolves in the Enlightenment. The wolf has ‘slavering jaws’ (110) and cannot listen to reason (111). If a child strays from the straight and narrow path ‘for one instant’ then the wolf will attack­– ­the hyperbole of ‘for one instant’ helps the reader to recognise the social role played by the emphatic warning about the lethal consequences of errancy. For Bettelheim, the fact that Red Riding Hood recognises the beauty of the external world (here forest birds, animals and fungi) suggests the danger she may return to the pleasure principle which dominates the world of the infant (a more primitive form of existence), and has not yet recognised the difference between what one would like (straying from the path to pick flowers) and what one ought to do (go straight to your grandmother’s house, say good-morning and not peek in corners).104 Carter rehearses the threat: ‘Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if 158

The Love of the Wolf the Devil were after you’ (113). The solitary and reclusive (mad old man or grandmother)­– t­hose who choose to live apart (outside the law, Derrida would suggest)­– ­are likely victims alongside the young girls who must be warned.105 Carter suggests that the melancholic howling wolves are ‘mourning for their own irremediable appetites’ but that there is no redemption (112). Thus far the author is in accordance with the classic narrative. However, once she embarks on the main dish, the meat of Little Red Riding Hood, Carter both strips bare some of the anthropological or psychoanalytical assumptions about the function of the tale and challenges the moral. The girl’s red shawl ‘has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow’ (113), and then explicitly, in the following sentence: ‘she has just started her woman’s bleeding’, a critical moment for patriarchal control of female sexuality. Bettelheim claims that this is a fairy tale for an older girl, unlike, say, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, aimed at a younger audience for whom the mother (witch) is all-important; it is the male who is crucial both as dangerous seducerdestroyer and strong, social rescuer, and: ‘the wolf is not just the male seducer, he also represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves’ (Uses of Enchantment, 172). This is why Red Riding Hood gives the wolf such detailed instructions about how to get to her grandmother’s: it represents her inner ambivalence about seducing her father. The red cap, for Bettelheim, suggests a premature transfer of sexual attractiveness from (grand)mother to Red Riding Hood. Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic account is less clear about the oppressive elements of social control of women which Irigaray, for example, would highlight.106 Carter, however, does not separate into two characters or functions the wolf-seducer and the hunter-rescuer­– ­her handsome gentleman hunter already has blood on his chin when he arrives at the grandmother’s house. The last thing the grandmother sees is a young man, eyes like cinders, with huge genitals, ‘Ah! huge’ (‘The Company of Wolves’, 116), approaching her bed. Red Riding Hood knows she is ‘in danger of death’, and hears the voices of the young man’s gaunt grey brothers in the garden: ‘the company of wolves’ (117). At this point, after the teasingly ambivalent elements of the young man’s attributes, Carter turns the tale definitively in her own direction. The girl responds to the wolves’ concert: ‘It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wonder they howl so.’ The wolves are like a band of brothers or comrades, which is a change of emphasis from the usual solitary wolf of the fairy tale. For Deleuze and Guattari there is always a multiplicity of wolves, always 159

Derrida and Other Animals a wolf pack, growing by contagion (rather than filiation). The critical distinction is the choice to be attached to the edge of the pack of wolves rather than in the middle.107 Red Riding Hood takes off her shawl, ‘the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid’ (117). Addressed affectionately, as a familiar animal, ‘my pet’, by the wolf­/man she takes off each item of clothing, as the lycanthrope does, and burns it on the fire­– ­there is no going back. Then she addresses him and freely kisses him. When he begins to slaver and talks of eating her, she ‘burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. [. . .] She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony’ (118). The English phrase ‘his fearful head’ manages to convey the ambiguous French genitive ‘la peur du loup’­– ­should the lamb be afraid of the wolf or vice versa? She partakes of forbidden fruit­– p ­ utting savages’ meat into her mouth­– i­n the delicate grooming ritual which brings together non-human animal behaviour with the diets or ceremonies of ‘other’ humans.108 The final sentence runs: ‘See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.’ This is indeed, in Cixous’s phrase ‘the love of the wolf’. The wolf is (made) tender; the ‘carnivore incarnate’ (‘The Company of Wolves’, 116, 118) is himself tender, like meat ready to eat, just as the girl’s response to his brothers is a tender, gentle one. The Brothers Grimm’s nineteenth-century variation on the tale is a further doubling, a retelling with a second wolf; this time Red Riding Hood has learnt her lesson, rushes to her grandmother and tells her of his approach thus together they defeat this wolf. For Bettelheim the wolf was an externalisation of the ‘badness’ which children feel will swallow them up if they go contrary to parental admonitions (Uses of Enchantment, 177); however, there is resurrection and the girl has been reborn to a higher plane. The hunter is the other side of the father, the one who rescues the girl from the consequences of her wish to seduce him and to be seduced by him (to be loved by him more than anyone else); his violence has served a social purpose and his daughter is pulled out of the wolf’s stomach in a second birth, rid of her weakness after regressing to darkness and to pleasure-seeking. Carter’s belated (post-Freudian) tale ‘knows’ this argument or this interpretation­– a­ nd chooses defiantly to relish both pity for the cold and hungry and also amorous passion, both tenderness and the erotic (with its element of danger and fear). 160

The Love of the Wolf Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’ is taken by the nuns, who find her embarrassing and insufficiently tractable, to live with the nocturnal and unsanctified Duke and thus to be his servant. She finally creates for him a kind of second birth, after she has learnt how to clean herself and deal with her own menstruation, by licking him. She brings him to a kind of humanity, figured by his reflection in the mirror gradually appearing, whereas previously he was a lone predator without a mirror image. This could of course be read as continuous with her domestic ‘service’ role. Christine Delphy amongst others has pointed out the feudal economy that regulates a wide range of unpaid labour performed by women, including the emotional mirroring or psychological reflecting of men-folk to keep their egos in shape for the world of paid work.109 Nevertheless Wolf-Alice’s act of compassion for an old person, solitary, wounded and in pain, albeit in such a violent context, could be compared to the nurturing performed by her own wolf foster mother or to the turning point in ‘The Company of Wolves’ when the girl reaches out to the howling wolf pack in the cold, feeling pity for the other rather than hatred, fear or revulsion. It is quite different to the economically self-interested behaviour of the grand-daughter in ‘Werewolf’, who piously displays her ­grandmother’s severed hand as evidence that she is a werewolf and thus should be expelled from the community. It is a sacrificial and hospitable gesture (like washing feet), as well as an animal gesture like that of a she-wolf, if rather different from Tsvetaeva’s Pugachev or ‘le gars’ as virile wolves that love and save their lambs. Cixous’s comment on Red Riding Hood is that children can live ambivalence, can see both grandmother and wolf at the same time: Grown-ups pretend, but children take pleasure. The wolf says to the child: I’m going to eat you up. Nothing tickles and delights the child more. It is a mystery: why is the idea that you are going to eat me so frightening and so enjoyable? We need the wolf for such delight. The wolf is the truth of love, its cruelty, its teeth, its claws, our tendency towards ferocity. Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, in any way, or even destined for devouring. But happiness is when a real wolf does not eat us. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 94) Les grandes personnes font semblant, mais les enfants jouissent. Le loup dit à l’enfant: je vais te manger. Rien ne chatouille autant l’enfant de délice. C’est le mystère: pourquoi me fait tellement plaisir et tellement peur l’idée que tu vas me manger? C’est pour ce délice que l’on a besoin du loup. Le loup est la vérité de l’amour, sa cruauté, ses crocs, ses griffes, 161

Derrida and Other Animals notre aptitude à la férocité. L’amour c’est quand tout d’un coup on se réveille cannibale, et n’importe comment, ou bien promis à la dévoration. Mais le bonheur c’est quand un vrai loup ne nous mange pas. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 33)

Bettelheim comments: ‘it is the child’s unconscious equation of sexual excitement, violence, and anxiety which Djuna Barnes alludes to when she writes: “Children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”’ (Uses of Enchantment, 176). It may be, however, that Barnes is more challenging than he imagines. According to Tsvetaeva, children fall in love with the Guide Pugachev (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 391; Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 104), and The Captain’s Daughter has the magic of the classic tale. It is the prison and the freedom of the dream, with Pugachev as the father who loves and ‘massacres’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 391; Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 105), the dark night, while the Empress is the rationality of daylight. Perhaps the child does not necessarily move from the thrill to the moral as Bettelheim suggests. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Little Red-Cap’ tells of the love of the wolf as a step (pas, the French might say) on the path for a young girl becoming a poet. Duffy points out that she is using the original title in Grimm’s fairy tales for ‘Little Red Riding Hood’­– a­ s in the folk tale, the death of the voracious wolf is required.110 She presents it as an autobiographical version of the story, beginning with the landscape of Stafford where she grew up. The young girl has a relationship with an older male poet (presumed to be Adrian Henri), ‘the wolf’, but the fear of being consumed by the wolf is translated into her triumph over him­– t­ he hunter as deus ex machina is removed.111 The violence of the fairy tale is ‘waiting to be used’, not something Duffy would necessarily have developed otherwise. A female voice is asserted against the weight of the male poetic tradition. Duffy suggests that the grandmother’s bones are a figure for our silenced female predecessors. ‘Little Red-Cap’ also has a number of ambiguous references to birds. The girl delivers a living bird to the wolf who eats it for breakfast in bed in ‘one bite, dead’­– ­later she learns that ‘birds are the uttered thought of trees’. Poetry is flowers, music, and also blood. The collection ends in ‘Demeter’ with flowers, brought by a daughter to a mother, as a figure for motherhood­– a­ lso autobiographical in a way, Duffy tells her readers. The outlaw, poet, rebel, wolf, lover stand outside, or on the margins of, society which holds together by fear­– ­men and women 162

The Love of the Wolf are made afraid to break the law, including the laws relating to gender (‘la. . . le’). Hobbes claims that outside society man is a wolf to man, but, even without tracking his source in Plautus, I could note with Rousseau that Hobbes shows that competitive social man is a wolf to men and women too­– ­or instead. Yet the horror of the voracious wild is used to keep subjects in line. Thus the romance of the lone wolf or the rogue individual, which remains a delight and a creative inspiration to the Cixousian or Tsvetaevan reader, may yet help guard against the terror that lurks even in fraternal democracy. There are many examples which bring together the love of the wolf, social exclusion and death, and I shall end with just one final rewriting in a different genre: Le Loup, a ballet, whose plot derives from Jean Anouilh and Georges Neveux, choreographed by Roland Petit and created by the Ballets de Paris, first performed in the Théâtre de l’Empire on 17 March 1953.112 This is devised by men, but in a sense co-created by the female dancer whose body helps tell the cruel tale of love and death ‘conte cruel d’amour et de mort’.113 The ballet is usually assumed to have elements of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, with an unhappy ending, and elements of werewolf stories. On the day of his wedding a bridegroom runs off with a gypsy, telling his bride he has been changed into a wolf so that she will accept a captured wolf (who had been ‘shown’, had to do his ‘turn’ as part of a wild animal show) as substitute husband. Little by little the bride discovers that her partner is a real wolf­– a­ nd they live from fear to love in a universe of sensibility and sensuality (‘un univers de sensibilité et de sensualité’114)­– ­effectively outlaws in a small solitary house in the forest. Then ‘the village gossips appear gradually like ghosts. They surround the little house and, very excited, condemn the monstrous act committed by the young woman. They tear down the house. They separate the bride from the wolf’ (‘Les commères apparaissent peu à peu comme des fantômes. Elles cernent la maisonnette et, très excitées, condamnent l’acte monstrueux de la part de la jeune fille. Elles défoncent la maison. Elles séparent la mariée du loup’).115 The commères are the female counterpart of the compères of Tsvetaeva’s Le Gars; women too, especially mothers, have a role in the reproduction of social structures­– ­theirs might not be the same kind of violence as that of the compeers but their strictures can reinforce household law on behalf of patriarchy. Human law and order is thus to be re-established with everything and everyone back in their place. However, the bride will not accept her tritely mendacious human husband when he decides to return to her. When the people of the 163

Derrida and Other Animals village hunt down the wolf she defends him and dies with him. The tale of forbidden love which ends in the death of the lovers is familiar­ – ­yet the strange detail of the bridegroom imposing as his substitute a savage beast on his bride is less so. The emphasis on the animality of the wild lover in the ballet, whether the prosthetic teeth or the repeated gesture of pricking of ears, helps to defamiliarise. To return to female authors: as Cixous wrote in one of her earliest publications, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’: ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies­– ­for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text­– a­ s into the world and into history­– ­by her own movement’ (245) (‘If faut que la femme s’écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l’écriture, dont elles ont été éloignées aussi violemment qu’elles l’ont été de leurs corps; pour les mêmes raisons, par la même loi, dans le même but mortel. Il faut que la femme se mette au texte­– ­comme au monde, et à l’histoire,­– ­de son propre mouvement’ (‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, 39). The patriarchal law of interdiction cuts between female and male, child and adult, animal and human. Feminist revisions then suggest that she-wolves and women can be male poets in love with revolutionary wolves, sovereigns and rogues, mothers or adoptive mothers, virgins or sexually liberated, but are not to be fitted comfortably into the patriarchal woman-virgin-mother-whore complex of commodification. Writing the wolf, the outside the law may bring in ‘Other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns’ (d’autres femmes, d’autres souveraines inavouées’) as Cixous puts it (‘Laugh of the Medusa’, 246; ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ 40), also other outlaws, challenging a tidy boundary between human and animal, preferring ‘l’entre’, entering the in-between. The poets (in the broadest sense of the word) writing about the love of the wolf thus obliquely confront the two fears that keep subjects in check: fear of the wild outside of the polis (la bête) and fear of the consequences of disobeying the Law (le souverain), the Father, little king in his house, which and who make you a subject (see Derrida, Beast 1, 39–43; Bête 1, 67–73). For Hobbes, life is essentially fearful, and thus subjects should be grateful for protection. For many women, there are indeed reasons to be fearful, and some of the authors discussed in this chapter have particular experiences of terror (including Nazism and Stalinism or social exclusions relating to their sexual choices). And yet they write about, say, a queer love 164

The Love of the Wolf for the outlaw such as Pugachev, who defies the sovereignty of the state as monopoly of violence (Derrida, Beast 1, 17; Bête 1, 38); or they mock the recognition and gratitude demanded along with their domestic labour in the voice of, say, Eurydice. Whether celebrating sexual desire or singing the praises only of inter-species companionship, these marginal figures reinscribe ‘man’ and ‘animal’ if only for the space of writing and reading. To give Cixous the last word: When I write, I become a thing, a wild beast. A wild beast doesn’t look back when it leaps; doesn’t check that people are watching and admiring. Those who do not become wild beasts when they write, who write to please, write nothing that has not already been written, teach us nothing, and forge extra bars for our cage. (‘We Who Are Free, Are We Free?’, 218)

Notes 1. ‘L’Amour du loup’ was originally published in a theatre review (La Métaphore) in 1994; this was re-published in a more concise form in Hélène Cixous, L’Amour du loup et autres remords, 17–40. My thanks to Mairéad Hanrahan for telling me about Cixous’s love of the wolf on Oxford station many years ago. ‘Love of the Wolf’, trans. Keith Cohen, in Stigmata, 84–99, is a translation of the original expanded version. While I have consulted this translation and reference it I have preferred to retranslate the French myself­– ­in some cases I shall indicate what might be at stake in the difficult translation decisions. I should like to thank Joanne Collie for discussing these difficulties with me, always a pleasure, and Kathryn Batchelor for advice on translating Le Gars­– ­all remaining infelicities are my own. One of the decisions I have made is to translate ‘il’ by ‘he’ rather than ‘it’. I have chosen to translate the title by ‘The Love of the Wolf’ when I allude to the essay, in spite of the awkwardness in English, in order to emphasise the double meaning in French to which both Cixous and Derrida draw attention. 2. This quotation comes from Derrida’s presentation of the seminar for his American audience in spring 2003, cited in the ‘Editorial Note’. 3. Later ‘La bête et le souverain. La .­ . . le’ (e.g. 97, 100) is rendered ‘The [feminine] beast and the [masculine] sovereign. La ­. . . le’ (63, 65). There is no particularly elegant means in English of conveying what Derrida is doing. 4. See Nancy K. Miller, ‘The French Mistake’, in Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (London: Routledge, 1991), 48–55. His majesty the ego, the internal external examiner, checking for accuracy, upholds the law of gender, 165

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and watches the Anglophone French academic, perhaps particularly women who hesitate sometimes to speak in public in any case, feeling they are transgressing simply by opening their mouths, as Cixous relates in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985 [1980]), 245–64 (251) (‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc, 61 (1975), 39–54 (43–4)). 5. A good example in the first session of the 2002–3 seminar series is Derrida’s reference to ‘une “il”, féminin conjointe au masculin’ (Bête 2, 25)­– ­the ‘conjointe’ with its feminine ending follows ‘féminin’ which we assume to be a masculine noun (‘le féminin’, ‘the feminine’) rather than an adjective describing ‘il’­– w ­ hich as a personal pronoun would be masculine, but is being used as a homophone for the feminine word ‘île’ (island). The ‘conjointe’ seems so strange that it requires a footnote from the French editors (who, as a matter of policy, very rarely provide footnotes). ‘Tel dans le tapuscrit’­– ­that is how it is in Derrida’s typescript­– ­if it were not for the comma then you might think (grammatically) that the footnote key should attach itself to ‘féminin’ which would be an adjective. In English translation the complex straining at gender in language is much reduced­– ­‘ “une ‘il,’” feminine conjoined with masculine’ (Beast 2, 4) with no need for a footnote. 6. See Lynn Turner, ‘When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence Between animots’, Humanimalia, 2:1 (2010), and Oliver, Animal Lessons, for exceptional examples of reading Derrida on animal difference and sexual difference. 7. The absolute monarch, never mind the oriental despot who so often represents the European sovereign in the Enlightenment, is not a homogeneous or monolithic figure of virility­– ­assuming too much coherence in patriarchy can lead to over-optimism about the power of gender bending to subvert masculine authority. 8. ‘Freud sees in the wolf, without hesitation, [. . .] a substitute for the castrating father, the more so in that the father often said in jest to the Wolf Man as a child, “I’m going to eat you.” Later in the analysis, the mother becomes just as much a wolf, if not a she-wolf, as the father’ (Beast 1, 65) (‘Freud voit dans le loup, sans attendre, [. . .] un substitut du père castrateur, d’autant plus que le père disait souvent en riant à l’Homme aux loups enfant: “Je vais te manger.” Plus tard, dans l’analyse, la mère devient aussi loup, sinon louve, que le père’ (Bête 1, 99)). Derrida analyses this case history in detail in ‘Fors’, trans. Barbara Johnson, Georgia Review, 31:1 (1977), 64–116; ‘Fors’, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Auber-Flammarion, 1976), 7–73. 9. In terms of biography as well as writing these writers are interesting 166

The Love of the Wolf for their oppositional sexuality, and their complicated relationship to maternity and to appetite. For instance Vivien, anorexic, is a lesbian at a time when male homosexuality is a crime in England where she was born; Tsvetaeva, Cixous and Duffy all have sexual and amorous relationships with both women and men, unmarried or married to others. While Duffy as the youngest might be assumed to have fewer material difficulties to overcome this would be overly optimistic and her openness about lesbian maternity is unusually bold. Tsvetaeva’s relationship to her children is shrouded in sorrow and mystery­– ­one daughter starved to death in an orphanage, one was sent to the Gulags. Cixous has written about her Down’s Syndrome baby. 10. Tsvetaeva also wrote a number of poems relating to Pushkin between 1913 (before she left Russia) and 1937; and she translated some of his poems into French. See Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), chapter 6, ‘Marina Tsvetaeva’s Pushkin and the Poet’s Identities’. ‘My Pushkin’ and ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’ are both translated in Marina Tsvetaeva: A Captive Spirit. Selected Prose, Introduction by Susan Sontag, ed. and trans. J. Marin King (London: Virago, 1983), 319–62, 372–403. I shall also quote from the translation into French to which Cixous refers: Mon Pouchkine suivi de Pouchkine et Pougatchov, trans. André Markowicz (Sauve: Clémence Hiver, 1987). See ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 384–5; Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 94–5. The translation in Stigmata follows the French spelling for Russian names (e.g. Pougatchov, Griniov) except for Pushkin and Tsvetaeva. I have followed a more common English transliteration for Russian names. Thanks to Polly McMichael for advice on Russian names and monarchs­– ­any remaining mistakes are my own. 11. Marina Tsvetaeva, Le Gars (Paris: Des femmes, 1992, preface by Efim Etkind). After reading The Vampire by A. N. Afanasyev in his collection of popular tales, Tsvetaeva wrote a long Russian poem in 1922 on this theme; it took three months, then a further eight months to transpose it into a French poem­– ­which is this book. While a vampire traditionally sucks blood, the ‘gars’ devours his prey like a wolf. The crossover between a vampire figure and a (were)wolf is also a feature of Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’ in the character of the Duke whose ‘eyes see only appetite’ (The Bloody Chamber, 120). 12. See ‘A History of Pugachev’, in Alexander Pushkin, The Collected Stories, trans. Paul Debreczeny (London: Everyman’s Library, 1999), 443–543. This is, Pushkin tells his reader, an ‘incomplete piece of historical research’ (443) written in 1833–4 on the basis of the archives then available and some eyewitness accounts. Pugachev also features in Pushkin’s short novel The Captain’s Daughter (The Collected 167

Derrida and Other Animals Stories, 326–442), which was first published in 1836­– a­ fter the historical account as Cixous and Tsvetaeva point out. In other words, Pushkin is well aware of the recorded atrocities committed by the historical figure and his bands of fighters when he constructs his own Pugachev. ‘The Guide’ is the title of the chapter in which Pugachev first appears; and following this initial episode Tsvetaeva refers to Pugachev as the Guide. Cixous points to her fondness for everyday monosyllables such as ‘gars’ or ‘guide’ as names for these wolves; The simplicity is complex. 13. This is to be distinguished from the totalitarian politics of Stalinism; the impact of Stalinism on Russian poets, and their response, is brought out by Cixous in a number of works. Apart from Tsvetaeva, she has written on Mandelstam, and wrote a play about the poet Anna Akhmatova, and her close friends Lydia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam in 1950s Russia. See Cixous, Voile noire, voile blanche, French original and translation by Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, New Literary History, 25.2, (1994), 222–354. Thanks to Martina Williams for drawing this play to my attention. 14. According to Bettelheim, in some early French versions the wolf makes Red Riding Hood drink her grandmother’s blood and eat her flesh (see Mélusine, vol. 3 (1886–7) and 6 (1892–3)). See Claude LéviStrauss, ‘Cannibalisme et travestissement rituel (anneé 1974–1975)’, in Paroles données (Paris: Plon, 1984), 141–9 (144–5), for some comments on the way in which female cannibalism is rarely a neutral social phenomenon. 15. Elisa Brune, La Tournante (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 2001), 135. My translation. Thanks to Dylan Sebastian Evans for drawing this text to my attention. 16. There are earlier silent versions: a 1913 Canadian film The Werewolf; The White Wolf (1914) and Le Loup-Garou (1923). There have also of course been many more recent filmic versions of the werewolf story, including a 2010 remake of the original Wolf Man, directed by Joe Johnston and starring Benicio del Toro in the lead role, which raises questions about the intersection of lycanthropy with ‘lunacy’ and domestic abuse by the patriarch (of his wife, children and servant). While the Wolf Man’s father is also a werewolf, and kills the wife he loves, the del Toro character is killed by his beloved­– a­ sacrificial act for which he thanks her as he dies. Other well-known examples of films inspired by the myth include John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981). 17. Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), chapters 13–14. 18. See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1730­– B ­ecoming-Intense, BecomingAnimal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’, in A Thousand Plateaus, 168

The Love of the Wolf 232–309, e.g. 241–2; ‘1730­– ­Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible . . .’, in Mille Plateaux, 284–380, e.g. 295–6. 19. Titus Maccius Plautus, Amphytryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi, trans. Paul Nixon (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1916). There is an issue of ‘who’ or ‘what’ in translation; it seems obvious to translate the phrase as ‘when one does not know him, man is not a man, but a wolf for man’­– ­but Derrida points out that it is grammatically possible to say ‘wolf [the wolf] is a man for man, which is not a man, when one does not know him’. Is the wolf ‘who’ or ‘what’? (Beast 1, 61–2; Bête 1, 95–7). 20. Thomas A. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) writes: ‘one of the terms they [i.e. Romans] commonly employ to describe brothel only succeeds in conveying a sense of misogyny. Lupanar (or lupanarium) signifies in a literal sense “den of wolves,” specifically she-wolves, since the word for female wolf, lupa, is often used for prostitutes. Such terminology emphasises the rapacious, predatory, and greedy nature of the prostitute as a type, and, at the same time, denies her humanity’ (7–8). The term lupanar also exists in French as a euphemism for brothel, and thus femme or fille de lupanar for prostitute. 21. See my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 3, ‘Friendship and Sexual difference: Hospitality from Brotherhood to Motherhood’. 22. See Derrida (Beast 1, 98–101; Bête 1, 142–6) on Rousseau’s half a dozen references to wolves and werewolves in his Confessions. 23. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, I. Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 47. 24. Derrida begins the first session of the second series of The Beast and the Sovereign seminars (11 December 2002) with some questions about the meaning of the phrase ‘Je suis seul(e)’, which he very particularly places in both the masculine and the feminine. (The fact that the English equivalent ‘I am alone’ does not require a decision as to gender means that the emphatic inclusivity of Derrida’s written formulation is lost.) He asks his audience to: ‘Meditate on the abyss of such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in all the world. Because we’re always talking about the world, when we talk about solitude. And the relation of the world to solitude will be our subject this year. I am alone with you in the world. That could be either the most beautiful declaration of love or the most discouraging despair-inducing testimony, the gravest attestation or protestation of detestation, stifling, suffocation itself’ (Beast 2, 1) (‘Méditez l’abîme d’une telle phrase: je suis seul(e) avec toi, avec toi je suis seul(e), seul(e) au monde. Car il y va toujours du monde, quand on parle du solitude. Et le rapport du monde à la solitude sera notre sujet cette année. Je suis seul(e) avec toi au monde. Cela peut être la plus belle déclaration 169

Derrida and Other Animals d’amour ou le plus désespérant témoignage, la plus grave attestation ou protestation de détestation, l’étouffement, la suffocation même’ (Bête 2, 21)). Vivien’s lady would be happy to be alone with the shewolf. But if human company is the only company that is counted then being with her persistent suitor Lenoir would make her long to be alone (with herself). 25. This quotation from Derrida comes in the context of his introducing a strange aphorism from Heidegger to the effect that ‘les bêtes ne sont pas seules’: ‘the beasts are not alone’ (or perhaps ‘beasts are not alone’). 26. See Garry Marvin, Wolf (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 19–24. Deleuze and Guattari are two cultural commentators who do focus on the pack or band rather than the lone wolf or werewolf­– ­but do not follow natural history in seeing this as an extended family­– ­they prefer to imagine the pack growing by infection: ‘Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other’ (Thousand Plateaus, 241). (‘La propagation par épidémie, par contagion, n’a rien à voir avec la filiation par hérédité, même si les deux thèmes se mélangent et ont besoin l’un de l’autre’ (Mille Plateaux, 295). This work has had a mixed reception from those currently working on critical animal studies; for example, Oliver comments, with some accuracy: ‘Even Deleuze and Guattari, whose notion of “becoming-animal” is intended to unseat the Cartesian subject, show little concern for actual animals’ (Animal Lessons, 4). Derrida made the same point in his seminars, saying that for Deleuze, as for the psychoanalysis he is challenging, it is always only about man (Beast 1, 142; Bête 1, 196). 27. Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of An Infantile Neurosis (The ‘Wolf Man’) (1918 [1914])’, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 9, Case Histories II, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 225–366 (255). 28. ‘Lamies’ are fabulous monsters who were reputed to devour children; ‘larves’ and lémures’ are spirits of the dead who pursue the living. See Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) for an account of various bogeymen and their female equivalents such as Lamia (28, 82). 29. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton), 120; Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 147. Quoted in Derrida, Beast 1, 97; Bête 1, 140. 30. Derrida does not refer back to Of Grammatology, but we might be irresistibly reminded of his writing on Rousseau and sex in terms of the supplement, including the particular solitary supplement of 170

The Love of the Wolf masturbation. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), trans. Gayatri Spivak; De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). 31. See Geoffrey Bennington, Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilée, 1991) for an analysis of this episode. 32. An earlier version of this section was published in Women, Genre and Circumstance: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize, co-edited with M. Atack, D. Holmes and D. Knight (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), 96–108. As well as presenting this as a paper at the conference in memory of Elizabeth Fallaize at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (October 2010), I gave a version at a Paragraph conference (Merton College, Oxford, September 2010), and another version at a panel (‘Following Derrida Following the Animal’) organised by Mairéad Hanrahan at the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century French and Francophone Studies conference (‘Human-Animal’, San Francisco, April 2011). I should like to thank the various audiences for their comments. 33. ‘La Dame à la louve’, the opening story in Renée Vivien, La Dame à la louve (Paris: Gallimard, 2007 [1904]), 19–29; ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, trans. Elizabeth Fallaize, in The Oxford Book of French Short Stories, ed. Elizabeth Fallaize (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 156–62. Translations from other stories in La Dame à la louve are my own. Not a great deal has been written on Vivien, and very little on this collection of stories­– ­more emphasis has been placed on her life and on her poetry. See, for example, Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Diana Holmes, French Women’s Writing 1848–1994 (London: Athlone, 1996), 83–103; and MarieAnge Bartholomot Bessou, L’Imaginaire du féminin dans l’œuvre de Renée Vivien: De mémoires en Mémoire (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004). 34. Jacques Derrida in conversation with Hélène Cixous and Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Voice I . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 50–67; Jacques Derrida and Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Voice II . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 68–93; Jacques Derrida and Lucette Finas and Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Voice III . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 95–8. Jacques Derrida, Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Éperons, les styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1979). Christie V Macdonald, ‘Choreographies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 23–42. 35. Martine Reid, ‘Présentation’, in Vivien, La Dame à la louve, 7. 171

Derrida and Other Animals 36. Vivien is witty in order to make a point with her depiction of Lenoir­– ­a rather different kind of comedy to Plautus. 37. Aesop uses wolves as a figure of untrustworthiness for instance, in ‘The Wolf and the Crane’, Aesop’s Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), fable 46, 93. 38. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Eurydice’, in The World’s Wife (London: Picador, 1999), 58–61 (59). Thanks to John Michael Fairless for sharing Duffy with me­– ­happy memories of talking about books and sometimes arguing about them. 39. There is a famous photograph showing Nathalie Barney (Vivien’s most celebrated lover) with what looks like a much-loved dog­– ­a greyhound type breed and so thin and elegant. Barney also mentions her fondness for dogs in ‘Renée Vivien’, in A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Nathalie Clifford Barney, ed. and trans. Anna Livia (Saline MI: New Victoria Publishers, 1992), and it is attested by biographers. 40. The narrator says that when he is terrified ‘only the instinct of the animal in rut survived in me’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 161) (‘il ne survivait plus en moi que l’instinct du rut’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 27)). I would compare Derrida’s remarks on bêtise and priapism (Beast 1, 222–4; Bête 1, 297–9). 41. La Dame à la louve collection has a range of male narrators of different nationalities, for example the murderous Italian Giuseppe Bianchini in ‘Cruauté des Pierreries’ (‘The Cruelty of Precious Stones’); a Scot; the American Jim who daydreams of scalping Polly, his savior; and also legendary male figures such as Ahasueras. This shows similar male behavior across cultural boundaries, and concomitantly female loyalty and fidelity to self and to chosen friends, partners, or other women in ‘Les soeurs du silence’ (‘The Sisters of Silence’) or ‘Le voile de Vasthi’ (‘The Veil of Vasthi’). 42. In the Baudelaire poem, ‘Femmes Damnées’ (Damned or Doomed Women), that I shall quote at length ‘tout à l’heure’, in due course, Hippolyta lies in ‘la pâle clarté des lampes languissantes’ (‘The lamps had languished and their light was pale’); she is a ‘pâle victime’ (‘pale victim’). His suggestion of fragility and gloom is a very different use of pallor to that of Vivien. Some feminist readers, noting the reference to paleness in Vivien’s writing, make a link to a moon cult (say, Artemis) and Amazons­– ­who, in one version, founded Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. The narrator points out that ‘As she listened to me, she affected a faraway look’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 157) (‘Elle affectait, en m’écoutant, une distraction lunaire’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 21))­– ­in fact not an affectation, we presume. 43. The translator, Marin King, suggests that this may refer to a bust of Zeus in her father’s study. 172

The Love of the Wolf 44. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 45. In another story in La Dame à la louve collection, ‘L’Amitié féminine’ (Friendship between Women), Vivien, writing at the very beginning of the twentieth century, argues that a famous example of male friendship (David and Jonathan) is in fact amorous passion, and that women have a greater gift for friendship­– a­ nalysing a different biblical case of Naomi and Ruth. 46. It is very difficult to find the right translation for this title­– ­Tsvetaeva is notoriously difficult to translate in any case. I feel that ‘the lad’ would be a more neutral rendition than ‘the kid’ which is Cohen’s choice­– ­but lad is also far from ideal. 47. In Rogues, the unusual term ‘compeer’ (meaning a comrade or someone who is equal in status or rank) is used as a translation for semblables. 48. He asserts that the words do not matter, only ‘the way in which they are said’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘l’art de les prononcer’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 19)) when courting women. 49. Balzac’s novella ‘The Girl with the Golden Eyes’ (‘La Fille aux yeux d’or’) proposes a young woman who is more attractive than the lady with yellow eyes, but may be an indirect reference for Vivien (who chose to move to Paris in part for the Sapphic circle she could become part of) as a tale of lesbian love in Paris in which the heroine meets a tragic death. See Honoré de Balzac, ‘La fille aux yeux d’or’, in Ferragus. La fille aux yeux d’or (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); ‘The Girl with the Golden Eyes’, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories, trans. Peter Collier, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 50. Steff Penney uses a native American character to express the view that wolves rarely attack humans in The Tenderness of Wolves. Marvin emphasises in Wolf how ‘As a consequence of how the carnivorous ways of wolves entered into human concerns, human groups waged campaigns of extermination against the wolf and were successful in eradicating it from most of its territory. In much of Europe this was accomplished centuries ago, while in most of North America this happened only a generation ago’ (8). 51. In particular, Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 150–1; Différence et répétition, 196–7, and Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1730­– B ­ ecoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’, in A Thousand Plateaus; ‘1730­– ­Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible . . .’, in Mille Plateaux. 52. See Bernadette Fort, ‘Theater, History, Ethics: An Interview with Hélène Cixous on The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies’, 173

Derrida and Other Animals New Literary History, 28:3 (1997), 425–56, for a similar slipping between categories: ‘all those who were born accused, accused of being Jews, women, conspirators, blacks or poets’ (442). 53. See my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 5, ‘The Dangers of Hospitality: The French State, Cultural Difference and Gods’, for the phrase ‘seuil de tolérance’. 54. He comments for example on her ‘curious countenance’, or that she is ‘a strange creature’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘le curieux visage’, ‘un être bizarre’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 19)); ‘I have never seen such a strange face’ (157) (‘Jamais je n’ai vu de visage aussi étrange’ (20)). Again in ‘Brune comme une noisette’, the narrator repeats, although the nut-brown maid he is pursuing is pretty, she is not like a woman­– ­as he perceives women. 55. She responds to the man’s first approach ‘somewhat tartly’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘avec quelque sécheresse’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 19))­– t­ here is a (stereo)typical association of women with liquidity, helped by that familiar trick of the French language la mer­/ mère. Vivien shows the reality of the sea as dangerous, and resists any comforting liquefaction of her female characters­– ­the lady is dry in style and bony in body. 56. In the second story in La Dame à la louve, ‘La Soif ricane’ (‘Mocked by Thirst’), dangerous nature is not the sea, but fire in the prairies­– ­brave Polly calmly fights fire with fire and saves the weak male narrator as well as herself. He comments: ‘I hated her because she wasn’t afraid. Oh! How I hated her! ­. . . I hate her savagely, because she is stronger and braver than I am’ (‘Je la haïssais de ne point avoir peur. Oh! comme je la haïssais! .­ . . Je la hais férocement, parce qu’elle est plus forte et plus vaillante que moi’) (36). 57. Marie Perrin, in Renée Vivien. Le corps exsangue De l’anorexie à la création littéraire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), writes that ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ is ‘the most convincing argument for the link between anorexia and female power’ (‘l’exemple le plus probant du lien entre anorexie et pouvoir au féminin’) (116). 58. Although Angela Carter re-writes this in ‘The Company of Wolves’, made into a film with Neil Jordan in 1984, to allow a female to transform into a desiring wolf. Catherine Hardwicke’s film Red Riding Hood (2011) allows the same possibility. 59. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Mrs Beast’, in The World’s Wife, 72. 60. See Derrida and Nancy, ‘Eating Well’. For analysis of this piece see my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 6, ‘Animals and What is Human’. 61. Edward the Confessor’s laws define the outlaw as a man with a wolf’s head caput lupinum; see Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104–11. Unlike Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, Agamben’s account of the wolf (or of bare life) is not sensitive to issues of sexual difference. 174

The Love of the Wolf 62. There are interesting examples in Cixous’s writing on cats that move between the typical grammatical masculine (le chat) and the specificity of feminine (la chatte) since her cat is female; see, for example Messie (Paris: Des Femmes, 1996). 63. For her critique of Baudelaire on lesbians and Lesbos, see L’être double (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1904), the novel written under one of Vivien’s other pseudonyms or alter egos­– ­the American Paule Riversdale. Vivien was baptised Pauline Tarn, but chose to reinvent herself in Paris. While Vivien is certainly attracted to Sapho as a lesbian poet, the poetry should be prioritised. 64. Translated by Aldous Huxley, in The Cicadas and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Bros, 1929). Another translation refers to werewolves. 65. Of course the image of a lady with an animal at her feet (a lapdog, for example) or with its head in her lap is a common motif in writing and painting. 66. This evokes the Red Riding Hood story; see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, 166–82. The girl comments to the wolf-grandmother: what big teeth you have. The wolf is undone by oral greediness as Bettelheim puts it (178). In The Beast and the Sovereign Derrida associates dévorer [devour] above all other terms historically linked to the wolf. 67. ‘But sometimes it’s the wolf that falls into the jaws of the lamb’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 98) (‘Oui mais parfois, c’est le loup qui tombe dans la gueule de l’agneau’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 39)). The reader might note Cixous’s repetition of ‘gueule’, e.g. for fire (‘L’Amour du loup’, 35) which needs feeding ‘aliment’ (37). 68. As Baudelaire will do, Donne imagines one woman seducing another in ‘Sappho to Philænis’: Thy body is a naturall Paradise, In whose selfe, unmanur’d, all pleasure lies, Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou then Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man? Men leave behind them that which their sin showes, And are as theeves trac’d, which rob when it snows. But of our dallyance no more signes there are, Than fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire.

69. Derrida remarks on the title of Cixous’s collection Stigmata­ – ­the wound at the origin of writing (in Cixous, Stigmata, 2005, x). 70. See ‘La Chasteté paradoxale’ (‘Paradoxical Chastity’) in Vivien’s La Dame à la louve for virginity as fidelity to self. The theme of virginity, not as the state of being physically ‘intact’ but as self-affection, runs 175

Derrida and Other Animals through Luce Irigaray’s works, and is commented on in a number of essays in Luce Irigaray: Teaching, ed. Luce Irigaray and Mary Green (London: Continuum, 2008). 71. Aristotle, Politics 1253a, 2–18; see Derrida, Beast 1, 347–9; Bête 1, 460–3. 72. The Cartesian line is followed, for example, by Hobbes, who excludes animals (and gods) from the possibility of the (social) covenant as indicated in Chapter 1. See Derrida, Beast 1, 39–58; Bête 1, 67–92. 73. These are the final words of the tale, with the author’s italics and parentheses. Might this be Vivien speaking directly rather than Lenoir? 74. In La Jeune Née, Cixous repeatedly uses the syllable con­ – ­which occurs in many key French terms including those relating to knowledge (‘connaissance’ and so on) and recognition (‘reconnaissance’). The translator of The Newly-Born Woman, tries to convey this by inserting ‘cunt’ into the English equivalents­– ­of course this makes the point rather more bluntly; it is hard to convey the critical link to the seventeenth-century Précieuses who were ridiculed for avoiding dirty syllables (‘syllabes sales’). While twenty-first-century readers too may laugh at that preciosity, it is the reaction of those who are perhaps desperate to be appreciated for their minds and language rather than imprisoned in bodies to be worshipped, utilised, brutalised and policed. 75. He claims to detest ridicule (true, though he makes himself ridiculous), but not to know fear (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156; ‘La Dame à la louve’, 20)­– ­which is clearly untrue: he is reduced to a gibbering wreck when danger threatens, and thus made ridiculous by the gap between his words and reality. 76. See Derrida, Beast 2 e.g. 121ff.; Bête 2, e.g. 182ff. 77. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Sphere, 1970), vol. 2, 257. 78. Foreword in Cixous, Stigmata (2005), x. 79. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 141. 80. See Elizabeth Behnke on Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of living-with-cats in Animal Others, ed. H. Peter Steeves. On the subject of pets we might note the provocation: ‘tous ceux qui aiment les chats, les chiens, sont des cons’ (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1730­– ­Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible . . .’, in Mille Plateaux, 294). 81. She depicts d’Anthès as a failed poet jealous of Pushkin’s poetic genius, although the usual version is that it was the honour of Pushkin’s wife that was at stake. 82. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Thomas Adam Pepper’ (first published as ‘Read Slowly, Read Again: Thomas Adam Pepper and the Importance of 176

The Love of the Wolf Difficulty in the Practice of Theory’, 1998), in Song Man: Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie 2, ed. Alison Finch (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), 291–6 (294–5). This comment specifically refers to reading Heidegger and includes other challenging grammatical techniques such as the ‘middle voice’ which occupies the territory between active and passive, which are also applicable to Cixous and Derrida. 83. Cohen’s translation uses ‘it hasn’t eaten it’ for ‘il ne l’a pas mangé’­– ­where the wolf has not eaten the lamb. This allows the ambiguity that the lamb might be female (Maroussia) or male (Grinev)­– ­the lack of a final ‘e’ on ‘mangé’ means that the lamb is not simply feminine (the word is masculine). I have settled for the masculine person as Grinev is the dominant example in the paragraph. To refer to these figures of animals with the neuter ‘it’ is a decision that the animal is not a person which is a decision that the French does not have to make. 84. It is a complex decision how to translate Cixous’s reflexives: ‘se donne’ translated on each occasion by Cohen as ‘gives of itself’. 85. As Cixous indicates, Tsvetaeva is transfixed by the ‘blackness’ of Pushkin (and Pugachev), which operates on a range of semantic levels, including ethical and political points, shades in a painting, the Black Sea or a reference to Othello’s love for Desdemona. We might add the concrete detail that Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal (1696–1781), was Ethiopian, brought to Russia from Turkey in 1704 as a gift for Peter I, who adopted him. Pushkin expresses pride in this remarkable African heritage and wrote an unfinished novel about his great-grandfather, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827–8); see The Collected Stories, 3–40. This also fascinates Tsvetaeva who identifies strongly with anti-racist struggles (see, for example, ‘My Pushkin’, 324–6; ‘Mon Pouchkine’, 19–22) although this particular political message is not explicit in the allusive and elusive Cixous text. 86. Cixous emphasises the life of books in almost all her works. See, for example, her childhood memories in Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006) (Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage. Scènes primitives (Paris: Galilée, 2000)). ‘I used to read in the Clos-Salembier because it was impossible to survive without books. I mean to live without light, without mind or spirit, without reality without sleep without peace without bread’ (47) (‘Je lisais au Clos-Salembier parce qu’il était absolument impossible de survivre sans livre, c’est-à-dire de vivre sans lumière, sans esprit, sans réalité sans sommeil sans paix sans pain’ (82)). 87. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Little Red-Cap’, in The World’s Wife, 3–4. 88. This is a specific reference to Maroussia in ‘Le Gars’, as well as a more general reference to the daughter function (for a mother). 177

Derrida and Other Animals 89. See Mairéad Hanrahan on Genet’s tale of eating a cat: ‘Une Écriture retorse: La réponse de Genet à ses juges’, French Studies, 68:4 (2014), 510–25. 90. Catherine II had seized power after dethroning her husband Peter III who was assassinated. 91. Cixous, in a slight departure from Tsvetaeva and Pushkin, insists on the fact that the mysterious ‘dark shape’ is not a wolf but a thing, ‘la chose’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91; ‘L’Amour du loup’, 28), or a Signifier. 92. Tsvetaeva points out in ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’ that Pushkin­– ­unusually amongst Romantic writers­– ­chooses a hero from near past history, his father’s generation­– ­a man, a real peasant. 93. Not only is Tsvetaeva in exile from Russia, but she is spurned by most other (White) Russian exiles because her husband has become a spy for the Soviets. The questions of class and allegiance, as well as sex, sexuality and age, are critical here. 94. I am citing from the French as well as the English translation because Cixous’s reading is closely entwined with the French version she has read. 95. According to the novel he goes to prison for love of Masha­– ­he does not want to dishonour her by publicising their love, which is his excuse for consorting with the enemy. However, in line with Tsvetaeva’s interpretation it might seem more convincing that the noble Grinev goes to prison because he recognises himself as a traitor in his love for Pugachev. 96. See Sarah Kay on the significance of animal skin in medieval literature often written on processed skin: ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 2 (2011), 13–32. Thanks to Emma Campbell, also working on the animal-human boundary in medieval writing, for sending me a copy of this article. Miranda Griffin has a book in progress with a chapter on the significance of skin, fur and clothing in the construction of, and blurring between, categories of human and animal in three French werewolf narratives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 97. For Tsvetaeva, love for Pugachev (for an incomprehensible and dangerous object) is a secret fire, and the Russian word for ‘guide’, vozhatyi, echoes in its central syllable zhar the word for fire (as well as a charm chary) which she hears as a rhyme; see Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 222. 98. Tsvetaeva does allow that some positive elements come through in the ‘History’: Pugachev’s humour, physical bravery in battle, language, the love felt for him by the common people, his impressive voice and his gaze, also his humanity (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 397–8). 99. This reminds me of the character of the Mother in Cixous’s La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1994)­– h ­ er 178

The Love of the Wolf ethical demand for true confession and apology from those who brought about the death of her sons, unmoderated by political pragmatism, does not bring about a happy ending (a Fascist dictator takes over the city and floods the cemetery where the poor and the marginal have found shelter). However, the fact that an emotional and ethical stand can cause destruction and devastation does not make it wrong. 100. Domestication raises very complicated questions­– ­not least in terms of the history of what may be seen as man doing something to animals or as a mutual socialisation, at least up to a point. See Sykes, Beastly Questions, especially chapter 2, ‘Animal “Revolutions”’. 101. Roald Dahl, Revolting Rhymes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). The narrator meets the girl (who has shot the wolf herself with no intervention from a hunter, moved more by his fur than his teeth) a few weeks later: I came across Miss Riding Hood. But what a change! No cloak of red, No silly hood upon her head. She said, ‘Hello, and do please note My lovely furry wolfskin coat.’

When called in to help the little pig in another rhyme, the sharpshooter, Miss Hood, ends up with a second wolfskin coat and also a pigskin travelling case . . . 102. Charles Perrault, ‘Le petit Chaperon rouge’, in Contes (Paris: Poche, 2006), 4–9. 103. Carter did a considerable amount of work on fairy tales apart from the revisionary collection on which I focus here (The Bloody Chamber)­ – ­which she adapted into radio plays (such as The Company of Wolves, BBC Radio 3, 1 March 1980) as well as the film In the Company of Wolves, dir. Neil Jordan (1984). She edited Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 2005) which brings together The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1990), also published as The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book (New York: Pantheon, 1990), and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1992), also published as Strange Things Still Sometimes Happen: Fairy Tales From Around the World (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993). She also translated The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London: Gollancz, 1977) and Charles Perrault and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (London: Gollancz, 1982). 104. In an earlier version of the tale, the girl must choose between fastening with pins and sewing with needles (Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 170–1). 105. In another tale in The Bloody Chamber collection, the first of the 179

Derrida and Other Animals lupine trio, ‘The Werewolf’, Carter makes explicit that old women who attract attention because of their difference or solitude­– a­ ‘black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time’ (108)­– ­are killed by human, social agency. We can even guess, through the supernatural trappings, that the grandmother’s enviable home is taken from her by the grand-daughter who demonstrates that the old lady is a werewolf. 106. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), e.g. chapter 8, ‘Women on the Market’, which deals with women as commodities (170–91); Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), ‘Le Marché des femmes’ (165–85). The collection also takes issue with Lacan’s account of feminine sexuality. 107. See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves’, in A Un seul ou plusieurs loups?’, Thousand Plateaus, 28–31; ‘1914­– ­ in Mille plateaux, 38–52. See Beast 1, 144–6; Bête 1, 199–201, for Derrida’s comments on this chapter and its sarcasm at the expense of Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man. 108. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapter 3, ‘The New World: Eating the Other’, for a juxtaposition between the reaction of a missionary (Paul LeJeune) and that of a trader (Samuel Hearne) to First Canadians and the habit of eating ‘vermin’. 109. See Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard, Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) for an analysis of the emotional and social work which is a significant element of domestic labour for women. 110. In a conversation with Barry Wood recorded in Manchester in 2005, and reproduced on the website sheerpoetry.co.uk (accessed 23 April 2012). 111. In another autobiographical poem about leaving a relationship, a gentler, sadder one, ‘Mrs Midas’ (The World’s Wife, 11–13), the husband ends up in a caravan in the woods listening to the voice of Pan. In ‘Queen Herod’, the dangerous boyfriend is figured as ‘The Wolf. The Rip. The Rake. The Rat’ (8). 112. The music was written by Henri Dutilleux­– ­the wolf first danced by Roland Petit himself. Petit tells in J’ai dansé sur les flots (Paris: Grasset, 1993) of visiting his friend the playwright Jean Anouilh (they had already collaborated on Les Demoiselles de la nuit) to ask for a story­ – ­Anouilh remembered ‘une histoire cruelle’ that Georges Neveux had told him some years earlier. Anouilh related ‘how, through love, a wolf becomes a man and how men filled with prejudices destroy him so that everything returns to its place, as it should be, in order’ (‘comment, par amour, un loup devient un homme et comment les 180

The Love of the Wolf hommes remplis de préjugés le détruisent, pour que tout revienne en ordre, comme il faut, à sa place’) (J’ai dansé, 210). 113. Henri Dutilleux, in Gérard Mannoni, Roland Petit (Paris: L’Avantscène ballet­/danse, 1984). 114. Georges Arout, La Danse contemporaine (Paris: F. Nathan, 1955). 115. Programme notes, Opéra National de Paris, saison 2012–13, 52–3, from Jean Anouilh, Georges Neveux, Le Loup (Paris: Editions Ricordi, 1954).

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4

The Savage

Of all animals a savage man is the most singular, the least known, and the most difficult to describe; and so little are we qualified to distinguish the gifts of nature from what is acquired by education, art, and imitation, that it would not be surprising to find we had totally mistaken the picture of a savage, although it were presented to us in its real colours and with its natural features. (Buffon, Natural History, IV, 314–15) L’homme sauvage est [. . .] de tous les animaux le plus singulier, le moins connu, et le plus difficile à décrire, mais nous distinguons si peu ce que la nature seule nous a donné de ce que l’éducation, l’art et l’exemple nous ont communiqué, ou nous le confondons si bien, qu’il ne serait pas étonnant que nous nous méconnussions totalement au portrait d’un sauvage, s’il nous était présenté avec les vraies couleurs et les seuls traits naturels qui doivent en faire le caractère. (Buffon, Histoire naturelle, II, ‘Variétés dans l’espèce humaine’, 636–7)

In volume two of The Beast and the Sovereign, the second year of these seminars, Derrida turns to Robinson Crusoe as one of his two main intertexts; the other is Heidegger’s 1929–30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt­– ­Endlichkeit­– ­Einsamkeit, first published in 1975). Returning to questions raised via Hobbes and Rousseau in Chapter 2, this chapter will consider the question of men, such as the American ‘savages and cannibals’ in Robinson Crusoe,1 with a range of intertexts from Maubert de Gouvest to Jules Verne and Cixous. The cannibals in Robinson Crusoe are a community, or at least a collectivity with common purpose, albeit portrayed as ‘inhuman’. The indigenous peoples of the New World can also be represented as ‘outside the law’, men ‘in the wild’­– s­ometimes figured as wolves, the antithesis of both the obedient dog and the lamb (a potential victim, requiring ‘protection’) in La Fontaine’s Fables. The savage can also be represented as free and natural in a positive sense­– ­an inspiration to throw off the shackles of tyranny­– ­however, he is not a citizen.2 In the epigraph above, a quotation from Buffon’s Natural History, 182

The Savage published just a couple of decades after Robinson Crusoe, I might note a number of markers of the anxiety aroused by the figure of the savage. Buffon is generally concerned to make an analytical distinction between man and animals­– ­his incessant cross-referencing between the two is, he argues, in order to show up the specificity of man by contrast with animals. Then what does the philosopher do with natural man? Buffon uses a triple intensifier, ‘le plus’, ‘le moins’, then ‘le plus’ again, and the juxtaposition of ‘si peu’ with ‘si bien’ in the French, to reinforce the point that the savage is the most difficult creature to describe. This scene of misrecognition which Derrida will analyse in its most general form (‘all those who do not recognise their fellow in certain humans’, cited below) has a powerful rhetorical charge as it places the savage amongst the animals (albeit defined as an extreme or limit case) against Buffon’s usual assertion that man is one in his difference from other animals. The potential misrecognition ‘il ne serait pas étonnant que nous nous méconnussions totalement’ (with the reflexive lost in English), combining a kind of double negative with ‘totally’, can imply Rousseau’s critique of European society or equally a disparaging portrait of natural man as animal such as we find in Cornelius De Pauw (or some Voltaire texts). The expulsion of some men from the category of the human subject, protected by the law, can easily have dangerous ethical and political implications, seen in Terror and genocide in more than one century. In the sixteenth century, for instance, the complex idea of the ‘savage’ helped justify the destruction of entire populations. Robinson Crusoe decides against a deliberate (and perilous, I might note) ambush of his cannibal neighbours because: this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were idolaters and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to 183

Derrida and Other Animals the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind. (Robinson Crusoe, 178)

The Black Legend of Spanish misdeeds of course tends to exculpate the English speaker­– ­although Crusoe himself, whom Defoe makes a slaver with a plantation in South America, is no innocent. From Columbus’s voyages onwards the representation of Amerindians as brute animals is a recurrent figure; although in fact the Church, more than other Empires, did have an interest in asserting the potential humanity of those whose souls (if not bodies) it needed a mission to save, and philosophers or philosophes sometimes argued for them as fellow human beings.3 Indeed, once conquered, ‘savages’ could even be civilised in mission schools­– ­in a period when slaves were frequently excluded from the literacy that would be a marker of their difference from a ‘brute beast’. But Derrida suggests that even emphasis on the brother or the semblable, in general, addresses neither the question of the non-human animal nor the problem of ‘all those who do not recognise their fellow in certain humans’ (‘tous ceux qui ne reconnaissent pas dans certains hommes leurs semblables’) (Beast 1, 108; Bête 1, 154). This evokes both the construction of the subject against his semblable and his autre, and also the construction of the community of sembables against their autres­– ­not only a feature of totalitarian or despotic societies. The New World is above all the space of the establishing of new communities in the eighteenth century­– ­on a range of principles from the most to the least communitarian, but the question will always have to be posed: who is inside the community and who is not. Hospitality is sometimes considered to be part of the (self-)definition of man, and thus of the good community. Yet any individual subject, and any community, must restrict their hospitality in order to survive as a (hospitable) entity; this limiting may go to the point of expelling some human beings from the category of humanity strictly understood, and the understanding of animality as a limit to the human is key to this process.4 This chapter and the next approach the figure of the animal primarily with respect to relations between human beings in the eighteenth-century New World. There are a range of intercultural encounters in this time and space which could be broadly grouped into three categories: the first, more interesting and more bouleversant, is the encounter between Europeans and the First Nations of the Americas, who were decimated in numbers with the majority of the 184

The Savage remainder assimilated.5 The second is that between settlers and those who are brought to the New World to serve them, notably African slaves although other forms of bonded or indentured labour are also of interest­– ­I shall turn to slavery in Chapter 5. The third category is that of encounters between travellers or settlers originating in different (mostly European) cultures, for example French and English or Spanish­– ­playing out Old World power politics in the New, but also enjoying significant cultural exchange­– ­we should note a rate of translation and degree of linguistic competency that puts us to shame. All three of these kinds of encounter are significant in Robinson Crusoe to a greater or lesser degree. A more radical sense of the ‘intercultural’ would be to consider animal ‘culture’ and take into account the encounter in the New World between European animals (including humans) and American ones; this would cut up categories a little differently, since the usual fundamental divide for us is animal-human, arguably less so for Amerindians. However, here I shall continue to be fairly (or unfairly) species-centric­– ­my focus will largely be on the animal-human borderline as it relates to less human humans. However, the distinction between relations between men and relations between men and other animals is a division between overlapping spheres, and furthermore one of the main points of difference advanced between Europeans and ‘sauvages’ is that between the domestication and the hunting of animals­– ­the sovereignty of man over animal (Beast 2, xiv; Bête 2, 15).6 In other words, the distinction and relation between beings and non-human animals may form part of the case made as to whether these beings, who or which may be human, are more animal or more human. Enlightenment thinkers could access numerous texts and images to feed their representations of Native Americans. Alongside accounts by explorers or traders, one major source was missionary material which shows native peoples in a range of guises, including satanic, but also good Indians, docile children, to be brought to salvation like Friday. The most important corpus in Early Modern France is the Jesuit Relations, although other religious orders were also influential­– a­ Recollect dictionary is mentioned by Voltaire, for example, and the Ursulines are a significant order of nuns.7 Defoe consumed books about foreign lands with a voracious appetite, and, like Voltaire, took information from Jesuit sources despite his horror of Catholic priests, illustrated by Crusoe’s nervousness that he would be betrayed into the ‘merciless claws of the priests’ in New Spain­ – ­he declares that he would rather be ‘devoured alive’ by savages 185

Derrida and Other Animals (Robinson Crusoe, 243).8 If I were to sum up in a caricatural fashion the missionary message home (remembering the many needs the message had to meet­– ­encouraging funds, more volunteer missionaries, godparents and so on), it would be infantilisation and demonisation. The indigenous peoples had sometimes to be child-like so that they could merit salvation, be adopted and brought into the Church and civilisation. But other times they had to be demonic, to show the bravery of missionaries, the urgency of the civilising mission, and the necessity of some harsh measures. Both facets have a relationship to the animal, such as the wolf, innocent because it is outside the Law, and yet voraciously violent. Jesuit sources are highly influential in shaping French, and also English, perceptions of the Americas (and indeed China) not only in the seventeenth century, but throughout the Enlightenment in spite of its anti-clericalism. They read as eyewitness accounts of this strange and exotic land and its inhabitants, but the figure of the ‘savage’, then the ‘beast’, lurks, and is invoked, in a number of contentious ways­– ­positive and negative (notably as the cannibal, the eater of men).9 In Robinson Crusoe, chapters XIX and XX, a parallel is implicitly established between the cannibal horde in the Americas and a European wolf pack attacking a party of travellers in the territory close to the border between Spain and France­– ­wolves being no respecters of national borders. The reader first sees the wolves picking at the bones of a horse, having already eaten all the flesh. Then: ‘a hundred coming on directly towards us, all in a body, and most of them in a line, as regularly as an army drawn up by experienced officers’ (Robinson Crusoe, 292). After a fight, Crusoe, Friday and the others scare off this first pack just as Crusoe and Friday had together fought off the cannibal savages back on Crusoe’s island. Defoe’s use of devil imagery is common to both savages and these wolves: Crusoe tells of the ‘howling and yelling of those hellish creatures’ (Robinson Crusoe, 293) and of their furious charge: ‘they came on like devils’ (294). The party will later find the corpse of another horse and two men ‘devoured by the ravenous creatures’. The figures of Friday, and other wilder savages, will be analysed in this chapter in the context of the Enlightenment reading of proto-­ethnographic texts on the New World which include ‘Natural History’ as a genre. Buffon represents one of the origin points of modern natural history, which might be described as ‘a knowledge of the living animal being that objectifies or produces objects for the gaze of the sovereign, be that sovereign a great king, or be it the 186

The Savage people’ (Beast 1, 273) (‘un savoir du vivant animal qui objective ou produit des objets au regard du souverain, que ce souverain soit un grand roi ou qu’il soit le peuple’ (Bête 1, 366)). Derrida is here referring to animal dissection (a particular example in front of Louis XIV),10 which he has been discussing alongside the execution of Louis XVI, as well as more general issues of: ‘mastery, both political and scientific, indissociably political and scientific, over an animal that has become an object of knowledge­– ­ knowledge of death, anatomical knowledge above all­– ­for the sovereign, the king or the people [. . .] a political organisation of the field of knowledge, in the form of the anatomy lesson or the lesson of natural science’ (Beast 1, 273) (‘la maîtrise à la fois scientifique et politique, indissociablement politique et scientifique d’un animal devenu objet de savoir, de savoir de la mort, de savoir anatomique surtout, pour le souverain, le roi ou le peuple [. . .] une organisation politique du champ du savoir, sous la forme de la leçon d’anatomie ou de la science naturelle’ (Bête 1, 366–7)). Mastery over ‘the animal’ drives equally the development of zoos and scientific research (and particularly, in this context, the Jardin des Plantes in Paris). This political organisation of the field of knowledge also relates to the debate between those such as the great natural historian Buffon, who present the human, animal and vegetable products of the Americas as degenerate, reinscribing in scientific discourse the prejudices of some of the earliest travellers, and those (including Crèvecoeur, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) who argue that they are an improvement on the men, animals and plants of the Old World.11 This debate had a major impact on the development of natural history, ethnography and philosophy.12 Raynal and his fellow contributors (notably Diderot) also participated in the debate over American ‘degeneration’; their Histoire des Deux Indes was a bestseller in France and went through multiple English-language editions, eliciting responses in America from Crèvecoeur to Thomas Paine.13 Its appeal lay partly in its sympathetic and comparative approach to New World cultures, especially its contrast between the virtuous natural reason of Native Americans and the corrupting effects of commerce exemplified in the fate of African-American slaves. Derrida argues that Robinson Crusoe ‘can and must also be read as a short treatise of anthropology or ethnology’ (Beast 2, 133) (‘peut et doit être aussi lu comme un court traité d’anthropologie ou d’ethnologie’ (Bête 2, 196)), more specifically as comparative anthropology.14 Defoe has his eponymous hero observe that victors of canoe battles take prisoners and bring 187

Derrida and Other Animals them over to the island ‘where, according to their dreadful customs, being all cannibals, they would kill and eat them’ (Robinson Crusoe, 171), and this inspires in him ‘the horror of the degeneracy of human nature’ (172, my italics), horror and degeneracy being terms that are repeated in this cannibal context (for example 177). Thus Defoe is implicitly lining up with the philosophical and ethnographic tradition that sees degeneracy in the New World. Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719, at a moment of ferment; the Enlightenment will famously see a renewed interest in the classical question ‘What is man?’ from philosophes who were breaking free of the old certainties about obedience, even in thought, to Church and State (divinely ordained and humanly policed social order). As Derrida puts it in relation to both Heidegger’s seminar and Defoe’s novel: these are ‘two textual mountain ranges [. . .] that are themselves inscribed in a long mountain chain of sedimentary formations, all historical through and through (philosophical, theological, political, national, literary, etc.)’ (Beast 2, 262) (‘deux massifs textuels [. . .] eux-mêmes inscrits dans une longue chaîne montagneuse de formations sédimentaires, toutes historiques de part en part (philosophiques, théologiques, politiques, nationales, littéraires, etc.)’ (Bête 2, 361)). Novels are typically constructed on the base of a contradiction such as: I love someone but circumstances are against us (say, because I am already married, or because our families do not agree with our love, or because my beloved does not love me). Robinson Crusoe is written about a contradiction less usual than the romantic one­– ­that between man in the state of nature or animal man (who can be considered pre-political although this is a moot point) and civilised sovereign man.15 The encounter in the Americas which led to significant settler colonisation, the first modern wave of colonisation,16 coincides with and helps bring about renewed interest in the question ‘what is man?’ Robinson Crusoe on his island is a savage, man in an animal state, in many respects­– ­he is alone, dressed in skins­– ­although he was not raised as an animal like an enfant sauvage and has a stock of capital. He will become sovereign. Crèvecoeur is not untypical in claiming that the nearer the woods, the more lawless the men. He presents European settlers in the wilderness as worse than Indians­– ­perhaps because they are a hybrid of European with Indian. He makes a distinction between most of the first settlers (excepting those in New England), who are ‘lawless’­ – ­bloodthirsty hunters, drunk, violent towards Indians­– ­and the second generation who are farmers, peaceable, and industrious. 188

The Savage Crèvecoeur refers to the 1774 episode known as ‘Dunmore’s War’, that Jefferson will take up to show the dignified eloquence of the Mingo chief Logan, as a case where Indian violence is triggered by European devastations (Letters from an American Farmer, 54). It is commonplace to see a certain class of European settler as half-savage­ – ­this is said, for example, of the ‘coureurs de bois’ in Canada.17 Castaways and early settlers who go native thus have a particularly challenging relationship to the animal-human borderline albeit in a different way to the child adopted by wolves­– ­and Crusoe attempts to resist his own bestialisation by adopting a savage (the preferred European legend) rather than being adopted by savages (more common in practice).18 The figure of Crusoe could be said to reveal some of the contradiction in Crèvecoeur’s easy opposition between first and second generation settlers. Becoming a good Protestant on his island colony, Crusoe develops an individual relationship with God even while he hunts and dresses in skins. He is industrious and, in a second phase, will work the land like the second generation of settlers. However, the violence underpinning the claim to ownership of land seeps through in a number of episodes. Crusoe’s story does show the mutual dependency of man and animal (Beast 2, 262; Bête 2, 362)­– ­and raises the question that Derrida poses in his seminars as his analysis oscillates between Defoe and Heidegger: do men and other animals have a world in common that they cohabit (Beast 2, 262; Bête 2, 363)?19 As noted in Chapter 1, Heidegger notoriously adapts Uexküll’s ecological theory of perceptual worlds which do not communicate with each other to create an opposition between the animal in its environment and man in his world. Derrida, however, emphasises the importance of ‘et’ (‘and’) in the title of his seminars and throughout. Sometimes that ‘and’ suggests ‘with’, even ‘being-with’. He uses ‘se’, which indicates both the reflexive and the passive form in French, in a series of verbs (Beast 2, 262; Bête 2, 362) to suggest that man and other animals do things together or to each other reciprocally­– ­following each other, hunting each other, eating each other (and, or, themselves­– ­there is a certain grammatical ambiguity)­– s­e manger will be an example that re-occurs. I should note that these important relationships can relate to dying, which is critical for Heidegger as a difference between man, conscious of his own death, and animals which are not, he asserts; Derrida points out, with a different emphasis, that finite life is common to all animals. Furthermore he is also focusing on living together­– ­a living relationship. However, critically, Robinson 189

Derrida and Other Animals Crusoe, while he is living amongst animals for much of the novel, is not to be seen in a purely cosy relation to the world even when we consider living with, rather than killing each other; he is also man as technician and capitalist­– ­man as domesticator­– ­and man as enslaver of other men.

Background: the ethnographic and philosophic encounter with the New World from La Fontaine onwards In using the Early Modern encounter with the New World to illustrate ways of thinking the man-animal borderline I am making the assumption that it was formative for modern political philosophy as well as following Derrida following beasts and sovereigns. Hobbes illustrates his seminal On the Citizen with an image in his frontispiece of two figures: a woman representing Rome (Romeium) and a Native American man representing life outside society (Libertas), the apparently pre-political life of man as a wolf to man, as Hobbes is often understood. The importance of the ‘discovery’ of the New World for European political-philosophical thinking cannot be overestimated, and it includes the development of the possessive individualism of the market economy and nascent capitalism intrinsic to both exploration and colonisation. From the Renaissance onwards, European countries were fascinated by tales and images of the New World of the Americas­– ­Montaigne’s ‘Des Cannibales’ (1580) with its account of native Brazilians is just one of the most celebrated traces.20 Europeans were presented with both a grand panoptic, and sometimes monogenetic, vision of the peoples of the New World (Indians as they were called or, even more generally, sauvages) and also texts that differentiated, specified and classified what were indeed a vast range of places and nations who would certainly not have recognised each other as having much in common at all.21 Defoe’s Friday is, in some respects, emblematic of all (good) ‘savages’. In Crusoe’s journey across the Pyrenees, the party is attacked by three ‘monstrous wolves’ followed by a bear; when two wolves attack their guide, Friday shoots one in the head, and the reader is told that he was used to wolves in his own country and so willing to go closer than the Europeans would (Robinson Crusoe, 286). Friday’s consummate skill at fighting bears and wolves would seem to be a savage quality rather than relating to a specific location.22 The island on which Crusoe is marooned is often taken to be Trinidad or Tobago, and the geography may have some bearing on Defoe’s advocacy of colonial expansion in particu190

The Savage lar areas, but the island environment is relatively generic. Of course European fascination does not manifest itself only in the philosophical speculation of the essay, but also incorporates greedy desire and shuddering horror. Sometimes the writer’s lens focuses on, and coconstructs in an intertextual web, noble warriors (sovereign masters of themselves), sometimes peaceful sages whose possessions are all held in common, sometimes degenerate and brutish cannibals whose community is more like a herd. Before focusing more closely on the Enlightenment, I shall return to one of Derrida’s most cited authors during the first year of The Beast and the Sovereign seminars, and pause on one of La Fontaine’s lesser known fables, the Address to Madame de La Sablière (Discours à Madame de la Sablière (Sur l’âme des animaux)).23 Generally his fables, like those of Aesop, are clearly anthropomorphic in presenting animals that represent men. This discourse, however, is one of those that appear to be closer to natural history, investigating the question of animals’ immaterial qualities, in this case, whether they have a soul, drawing directly or indirectly on ethnographic material from the New World, in particular its example of beavers, an animal that was arousing great interest around 1678 when La Fontaine was writing.24 One possible source is Nicolas Denys’s Description géographique et historique des costes de l’Amérique septentrionale, published in 1672.25 The question whether animals have souls as men do is a critically important philosophical debate at the time, most famously decided by Descartes in the negative. La Fontaine has more radical moments, for instance in his fable about the screechowl which has the foresight to store up and fatten mice for future consumption (‘Les Souris et le Chat-huant’, Fables, XI, 9). This issue of individual accumulation (generally characterised as the province of rational European man) as against immediate consumption for subsistence, and apparently improvident use of any surplus for feasting (sharing), will exercise numerous accounts of ‘savages’ in the New World. Crusoe is more than prudent in accumulating baskets of grain and numbers of goats significantly in excess of his short-term personal needs, and even hoards gold. Gold in particular is often used to illustrate a distinction between Europeans and Amerindian ‘savages’ or other indigenous peoples who regard gold and silver as pretty but worthless, and cannot understand the European obsession with what were to explorers precious metals and stones.26 Clearly there is a divide between those who use this to show the stupidity of natives, and those who suggest that it is Europeans who are mad in 191

Derrida and Other Animals placing such a high exchange value on material with little use-value, but the positive or negative spin does not determine the degree of fixity or fluidity of the borderline. Defoe’s Crusoe plays a canny game­ – ­acknowledging that gold is of less present use to him than other things, but storing it up against the possibility of eventual rescue (Robinson Crusoe, 197–8). The screech-owl is not quite at that stage of development, but is nevertheless a more striking example to set against Aristotle than, say, a prudent squirrel, since the owl even improves on nature by feeding grain to his mice, whom he has hobbled by pecking off their feet. In the Address to Madame de La Sablière La Fontaine is perhaps less radical than in his owl fable as he concludes with a division between the material soul, and ability to feel, common to all animals, and men’s spiritual soul. Unlike non-human animals therefore, ‘man has a double treasure’27 (‘l’homme a un double trésor’ (Discours à Madame de la Sablière, 58)): One soul the common baggage of the fool, The wise, the idiot, the child at school­– ­ The animal, in short; another free Alone to men and angels. L’un, cette âme pareille en tous tant que nous sommes, Sages, fous, enfants, idiots, Hôtes de l’univers sous le nom d’animaux L’autre, encore une autre âme, entre nous et les anges Commune en un certain degré.

This is, as Derrida illustrates in the case of other La Fontaine fables, an ambiguous conclusion. La Fontaine first gathers together all of ‘us’ who are guests on this earth as animals, living creatures, and then he divides ‘us’ into the wise, the mad, children and idiots­– a­ proposal of division into categories which might have different capacities and attributes, and thus different relations to reason, perfectibility and language. Indeed in French enfant can mean an infant (definitionally pre-speech) although in the English translation the child is placed at school. Man is not then at this stage of La Fontaine’s poem (for better or worse of course) one homogeneous entity who can selfproclaim his freedom (although the word ‘free’ is inserted into the English) and rationality relative to all other living beings; rather there is a field, named animals, which has a number of sub-divisions. The other grouping, those who have access to the second treasured soul, is simply specified as ‘nous’, we­/us in common with angels. I would 192

The Savage then ask who is included in the second nous translated firmly as ‘men’ which is of course a distinct possible interpretation; but might it instead mean ‘the wise’, however that term is understood? Who is the semblable? Before La Fontaine reaches this conclusion in the final section devoted to the two rats, fox and egg, a conclusion seemingly reassuring to both religious and Cartesian sensibilities, he has in fact praised beavers far above the First Canadians, summed up in their ‘ignorance profonde’. Beavers cooperate for the common good, and are effective engineers­– ­making it seem unlikely to La Fontaine that they are no more than machines: Far in the north, by icy waters bound, There lives a race in ignorance profound, A race of men­– ­the beasts indeed Are not such fools, for they bridge o’er The torrent wide from shore to shore With bridge of wood and mortar in their need. A strong sound work each beaver helps to form; Both young and old attend the common task; The master beaver, whom the rest must ask In doubt, is there, and bears a staff enorm. Plato’s republic was the apprentice sure Of this amphibious family; they know To build them houses though the winters snow, And to form bridges, while men put in use Their hands and feet to swim across the flood. Well, after this it seems somewhat too good To say the beavers have no sense at all! Non loin du nord il est un monde Où l’on sait que les habitants Vivent, ainsi qu’aux premiers temps, Dans une ignorance profonde: Je parle des humains; car, quant aux animaux, Ils y construisent des travaux Qui des torrents grossis arrêtent le ravage, Et font communiquer l’un et l’autre rivage, L’édifice résiste, et dure en son entier; Après un lit de bois est un lit de mortier. Chaque castor agit: commune en est la tâche; Le vieux y fait marcher le jeune sans relâche; Maint maître d’œuvre y court, et tient haut le bâton. La république de Platon Ne serait rien que l’apprentie 193

Derrida and Other Animals De cette famille amphibie. Ils savent en hiver élever leurs maisons, Passent les étangs sur des ponts, Fruit de leur art, savant ouvrage; Et nos pareils ont beau le voir, Jusqu’à présent tout leur savoir Est de passer l’onde à la nage. Que ces castors ne soient qu’un corps vide d’esprit, Jamais on ne pourra m’obliger à le croire. (Discours à Madame de la Sablière, 52–3)

La Fontaine begins this section of the poem on animals’ souls with those who, ‘we all know’ (‘l’on sait’), live in complete unknowingness, rather like the very first creatures, although their northern (and hence, we readers assume, cold) world may not have the same reputation as the lush garden of Eden. Line 96 presents the comic twist, juxtaposing in the one line the ignorant humans of whom he is in fact speaking (the poet has that special power of speech) with the animals whose canny labours he is about to celebrate. These beasts make one river bank communicate with the other thanks to their durable construction, organised collectively. La Fontaine compares this social organisation favourably with Plato’s imagined Republic, no doubt an amusing aside for the neo-Platonists amongst his admirers, thus bringing in implicitly the whole question of the philosophical joke. Plato’s Republic famously contains a number of elements that different generations of readers have received as jokes, whether it be his egalitarianism with respect to women or his comments on philosophical dogs, both elements pertinent to the context of this ­ ecause the test poem.28 ‘We all know’ when a thinker is joking­– b is conformity to the current doxa. Plato is famous as apprentice to the notoriously ugly but exceptionally wise Socrates; here the poet (a profession which would not be welcomed in the Republic) makes Socrates apprentice to the amphibian (and thus definitionally hybrid) family of beavers. Speculation is apprenticed to empirical experience, and we might note that his savante addressee is known for her daring practice of experimental natural science. While the vocabulary of civilisation is transposed on to the beaver­– ­houses, bridges ‘fruit de leur art, savant ouvrage’­– ­native Canadians are assumed unable to learn anything beyond swimming, as many animals do whether that is more or less ‘natural’ for them. The reader cannot tell if this presentation of the savage simply serves the purpose of a foil to the clever animal, or whether the exploitation of the alleged stupidity of 194

The Savage the indigenous inhabitants of the North also has ideological legs at a time when both Church and State are seeking support for missions to the New World. Bearing in mind Derrida’s analysis of La Fontaine’s fable about the wolf and the lamb, quoted in Chapter 2, beavers seem to mirror legitimate human society of which the lamb and the dog are members. Beavers may live in the forest but they are not outlaws like the wolf. Yet the old overseer beavers that make the young work tirelessly do not necessarily imply an ethical community, but rather the same ambiguity towards power that we find in the representation of the wolf. And lambs and dogs are not usually equal to human members of the community, but may be commodities or servants as Robinson Crusoe illustrates. Unusually the hierarchy of power in the description of beavers’ construction work is shown within a species rather than between, say, the heifer, the goat and the ewe, on the one hand, and the lion on the other, as in La Fontaine’s ‘The Heifer, the Goat, and the Ewe, in Society with the Lion’ (Beast 1, 213–14; La Bête, 285–7), in which the words of ‘sovereigns’ reveal the tautology of power that Derrida claims is fabular discourse par excellence. For Buffon the difference between men and animals is lack of (successive) thought: ‘une suite de pensées’. Thus animals cannot make progress, and he deals with the example of collective labour for the good of all, as in La Fontaine’s example of beavers, by arguing that the key point is that beavers cannot improve on their dams. Beavers’ dams are uniform and without variety, while human productions are highly diverse: ‘Were they endowed with the power of reflection, even in the most subordinate degree, they would be capable of making some kind of proficiency, and acquire more industry; the modern beaver would build with more art and solidity than the ancient; and the bee would daily be adding new improvements to its cell’ (Natural History, III, 330) (‘S’ils étaient doués de la puissance de réfléchir, même au plus petit degré, ils seraient capables de quelque espèce de progrès; ils acquerraient plus d’industrie: les castors d’aujourd’hui bâtiraient avec plus d’art et de solidité que ne bâtissaient les premiers castors; l’abeille perfectionnerait encore tous les jours la cellule qu’elle habite’ (‘De l’homme’, Histoire naturelle, II, 513)). We might note en passant that Robinson Crusoe and Friday make a dam to protect their boat as in a dock, thus Crusoe improves on Friday’s boat construction skills (Robinson Crusoe, 230). But for La Fontaine here dams and lodges are fit for purpose, and so there is no call for increased diversity or ‘improvements’; for Buffon such a 195

Derrida and Other Animals view would lead to the horrifying conclusion that animals are superior to man since man never believes any of his works has reached ‘the last degree of perfection’ and is always eager to improve. The fable’s implication is a kind of Rousseauian perspective avant l’heure on a simple life perfectly adapted to an environment, but applied only to Canadian animals not to First Nations. For Derrida, Robinson Crusoe announces ‘the durable and turbulent relationship, between ethnology as a scientific discipline, sometimes sublimated into concepts that appear ethnocentrism­– ­ to be universalising­– ­and the cruellest history of colonialism and imperialisms’ (Beast 2, 134) (‘la liaison durable et turbulente entre l’ethnologie, comme discipline scientifique, l’ethnocentrisme­– ­parfois sublimé dans des concepts d’allure universalisante -, et la plus cruelle histoire du colonialisme et des impérialismes’ (Bête 2, 197)). Protoethnographic writings (broadly defined) about American animals and indigenous peoples as sauvages are important cultural texts in their own right, but also had a greater impact on Enlightenment debates about the nature of ‘man’, and thus of potential as well as actual social and political states, than has been recognised. Cultural exchange between France, Britain and North America in the eighteenth century is of considerable and dispersed significance. Minor texts, such as those of Charlevoix, Lafitau or Lahontan, thus make a significant contribution to philosophical debate alongside what have become the more canonical works, such as Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, on which attention has focused.29 The proto-­ethnographic texts in circulation from the seventeenth century onwards were rich in ‘information’ even while the ideological and practical needs of missionaries, soldiers or traders in a period of continuing exploration and settlement are manifest. Of particular interest here, apart from specific references to relations with animals, is their treatment of the division of labour, sexual difference, liberty, technology, and comparative explorations in natural history, religious history or linguistics that sought to prove either that human beings were all originally one race (and that differences in environment have determined the cultural and physical differences noted by the writers) or that humanity has always been divided into distinct races. The Early Modern re-examination of the animal-human boundary in the New World includes discussions of domestication and hunting of animals, attitudes to the eating of flesh, the questions of progress, reason and language. The scholarly and historically contextualised analysis of these Early Modern cultural translations and exchanges, and of the 196

The Savage way in which the (sometimes bestial, sometimes sovereign) figure of the sauvage is characterised and deployed, could lead to considerable refinement of our understanding of present-day concerns in relation to the operations of power and ideology in a colonial or postcolonial context.30 The question of the representation of the primitive other (human or animal) in relation to the social and political rights and responsibilities of the dominant community remains of critical theoretical and practical importance today. There is more than one context to the figural use of the animalhuman divide in the Enlightenment, including the way in which religious beliefs played a major role in the encounter in the New World. In the Americas Europeans encountered, or thought they did, people whose relation to animals was different from their own. In many of the religions animals were guardian spirits and donors, and were addressed as relatives.31 Uses of animals to represent particular clans was later developed into the anthropological concept of totemism, but was noted early by missionaries and travellers in the northeast. While many European travellers, settlers and missionaries were dismissive of such reverence for animals, this was not necessarily seen as a sign that the Indians were more animalistic and brutish if it was conjoined with a capacity for belief in overarching divinity, such as Manitou,32 as in the Encyclopédie article on the philosophy of Canadians (that is to say, the First Canadians), which is a major defence of deism. Friday tells Robinson Crusoe about the creator Benamuckee (Robinson Crusoe, 218), and perhaps this faith explains Friday’s (unenlightened) goodness: ‘the same powers, the same reason, the same affections, the same sentiments of kindness and obligation’ as enlightened Europeans (Robinson Crusoe, 212). Derrida comments, however, on Defoe’s Christian (indeed Protestant Bible-reading) model, and that Robinson Crusoe can be seen as ‘a rhythmic series of attempts to learn how to pray properly’ (Beast 2, 48) (‘une série scandée d’essais pour apprendre à prier convenablement’ (Bête 2, 83)). Crusoe learns prayer in solitude and in a world without sexual difference, as Derrida emphasises. I would suggest that the text oscillates between a willed cultural relativism with regard to belief (for example, when Crusoe decides not to wage war on cannibals just because they believe eating people is right), and, as Derrida puts it, a world already determined as the Christian God’s creation. This oscillation between belief and cultural relativism is more typical than exceptional in the context of writings on the indigenous people of the Americas from Montaigne’s Essais onwards (and 197

Derrida and Other Animals I note Derrida’s choice of the term ‘essais’ for Crusoe’s experiments with prayer). In Maubert de Gouvest’s little-known epistolary philosophical novel, Lettres iroquoises (1752), his hero Igli reports his response to his ‘reverend’ French interlocutor, who has made a disparaging remark about animals: ‘The qualities that are perfect in animals are the rivals of human pride. Gather together their marvellous works and everything that they display to your amazed eyes and you will see that they do not give way to you in anything: their goodness and their conduct is assured. [. . .] Our Iroquois have never despised animals; they do not blush to eat them and to mix their blood with their own, something which they would not want to do with Europeans for fear of being infected by them. Our ancient Sages, according to what my father told me, condemned to death all those of our compatriots who had dared soil their lips with the blood of these nations, whom we saw on our banks and several of whom had fallen into our hands. Do you raise yourself above animals? Why are you judging what you do not understand?’ ‘Toutes les perfections des animaux sont les rivales de la fierté. Rassemble les merveilles de leurs ouvrages et de tout ce qu’ils étalent à tes yeux éperdus et tu verras qu’ils ne te cèdent en rien: leur sagesse et leur conduite est assurée. [. . .] Nos Iroquois n’ont jamais méprisé les animaux; ils ne rougissent pas de les manger et de mêler leur sang avec leur sang, ce qu’ils ne voudraient pas faire avec les Européens, de peur d’en être infectés. Nos anciens Sages, à ce que m’a dit mon Père, ont condamné à mort tous ceux de nos compatriotes qui avaient osé souiller leurs lèvres du sang de ces nations, que nous avons vues sur nos rivages et dont quelques hommes étaient tombés entre nos mains. Tu t’élèves au-dessus des animaux? Pourquoi juges-tu de ce que tu ne connais pas?’33

He concludes: ‘ “The animals have their domain, and we have ours. We eat them out of love and not out of greed. They are our friends and our loyal neighbours. Yes, Disciple of Christ, we prefer them to Europeans”’ (‘ “Les animaux ont leur district, et nous le nôtre. Nous les mangeons par amour, et non par avidité. Ils sont nos amis et nos voisins fidèles. Oui, Disciple de Christ, nous les aimons mieux que les Européens”’). This is reminiscent of La Fontaine’s writing about beavers in terms of its celebration of animal works (ouvrages) and wisdom, except that here the point is that the Iroquois’ appreciation of animal qualities places both Iroquois and animals above Europeans. Of course many readers (including the modern editor, Enea Balmas) take this as highly ironic, a bitter joke, 198

The Savage since what Enlightenment philosopher would so value animals and savages except to exploit them textually to critique contemporary France? The oral imaginary of devoration here, eating friends and kin, including animals in the category of those who are close, beloved neighbours, is expressed very differently from the terrifying voracity of the wolf, or the degradation of survival cannibalism, more often projected by French writers on to enemy indigenous peoples. As a thought experiment it is unusual, and, although it is assumed that the author is male, it might be set alongside on the one hand the imagined proximity of human and beast in Marie NDiaye to which I shall turn in Chapter 6, and on the other hand Cixous’s love of the wolf proposed in Chapter 3. Much previous research on the French Enlightenment emphasised that hypothetical ‘states of nature’, such as that found in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, are thought experiments whose function is to critique the injustices and prejudices of the old regime, and propose new models of society (as in the outstanding work of Starobinski). It was a critical scholarly task to warn against reading philosophical speculations such as Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage as if they were, or were believed to be, empirical ethnographic description.34 Robinson Crusoe is equally a text that has had to be reclaimed from its fictional status as ‘realistic and non-fictional memoirs’ (Beast 2, 56) (‘des mémoires réalistes et non-fictionnels’ (Bête 2, 94)) of a Caribbean island. Derrida emphasises the prelapsarian (or pre-Oedipal perhaps) dream in Robinson Crusoe of a world before sexual difference (Beast 2, 54–6; Bête 2, 91–4), a world governed by the oral in fantasies of eating and being eaten, and the tactile in Crusoe’s obsession with using animal skin, primarily to cover himself. However, it is important also to re-examine the function of representations of sauvages in Francophone and Anglophone writing, and to ask not only about the psychic, philosophical or ideological underpinning, but also how that relates to the material situation.35 Defoe’s introduction of women in the final pages of the novel relates to colonial settlement and growth; Crusoe’s relationship to animals and savages whom he can consume or exploit, or might be eaten by, is also part of the complex of early capitalist agriculture and colonial settlement. As Derrida remarks about what he calls a bestiary book: There is also, in this book which is [. . .] an immense zoology, both a taxonomy of the animals­– ­a Noah’s ark, a zoological park, a farm, a 199

Derrida and Other Animals s­ laughterhouse, a hunting ground, a jungle of savage beasts­– ­and, as he says, so often, of beasts that are ‘ravenous,’ ‘furious,’ ‘venemous,’ ‘poisonous’; it is also a protection society for domestic animals, a stockbreeding centre, etc. (Beast 2, 49) Il y a aussi, dans ce livre qui est [. . .] une immense zoologie, à la fois une taxinomie des animaux, une arche de Noé, un parc zoologique, une ferme, un abattoir, un terrain de chasse, une jungle de bêtes sauvages et, comme il le dit, si souvent, de bêtes ‘féroces’, ‘furieu[ses]’, ‘venimeuses’, ‘vénéneuses’ (ravenous Beast, furious, venemous, poisonous); c’est aussi un centre d’élevage, etc. (Bête 2, 85)

Derrida’s examples are far from random and have specific historical purchase which could be unpacked at length­– ­from the development of zoological gardens to that of scientific breeding in the period which sees the agricultural revolution.36 The post-colonial turn has been an important advance on the excessively benign account of the founding Fathers of the Enlightenment which remains too common especially in French work, and I should like to add to this post-colonial critique by taking the case of the First Nations as matter for thinking, objects of intellectual exchange, screens for projection, for example in the accounts of missionaries such as Lafitau or Charlevoix. These are a rich and ambiguous resource, combining religious presuppositions about ‘sauvages’ with remarkably detailed descriptions of people, customs and beliefs, on which to base speculations on the nature of ‘man’ or his capacity to believe and reason. There was a desire to map habitats with their plants, animals, native peoples­– ­forming a kind of continuum of flora and fauna. The exhaustive encyclopaedic drive has ideological inputs and outputs, particularly on the managing of the borderline between the human and the non-human. Secular texts (such as those of the Baron de Lahontan37) have some different presuppositions, and provide a useful point of comparison, but are still part of the colonial project in which Indians can be an inconvenient obstacle to expansion of land tenure as well as very useful allies for soldiers, traders or explorers. There is a different, if related, dynamic of use and fear in relation to slaves to which I shall turn in Chapter 5: slaves are within the law as property, even if, like dogs or cattle, they cannot respond in law. Native peoples are typically depicted as outside the law (outlaws, wolves, or sovereign in their freedom) in European accounts of natural man­– a­ s the peoples in question were dispossessed of land, culture and often existence.38 The upholding of law typically depends on terror of the outlaw outweighing the inconveniences of life in society. 200

The Savage

What is the difference between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ (savage)? I should note that the meaning of my subheading is suspended, hanging on whether the question is grammatical and literal, or rhetorical. For Derrida the indivisibility of what is named the animal (and, for that matter, of man) for philosophy is one of the most stupid elements of philosophical discussions that depend on ‘a unilinear and indivisible line having two edges, Man and Animal in general’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 31) (‘la ligne unilinéaire et indivisible de deux bords, l’Homme et l’Animal en général’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 53)). At that time, he said (speaking in 1997), there had never been any philosopher protesting against the use of the singular ‘the animal’ nor against the sexual neutralisation, if not castration of animals (including ‘man’ I might add) in their discussions. Not all philosophers agree on the definition of the limit between man and animal, but all philosophers ‘have judged that limit to be single and indivisible’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 40) (‘ont jugé que cette limite est une et indivisible’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 65)) and that on the one side are all animals bar man­– ­the animal in the singular, general. ‘Philosophical right thus presents itself as that of “common sense”’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 41) (‘Le droit philosophique se présente alors comme le droit du “sens commun”.’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 65)) Buffon, at a formative moment for natural history, presents a clear case that man is utterly separable from animals: Why retrench from the history of man the history of his noblest part [his soul]? Why thus preposterously debase him, by considering him merely as an animal, while he is of a nature so different, and so superior, to that of the brutes, that those must be immersed in ignorance like the brutes themselves who ever thought of confounding them. (Natural History, III, 325–6) Pourquoi vouloir retrancher de l’histoire naturelle de l’homme, l’histoire de la partie la plus noble de son être [l’âme]? pourquoi l’avilir mal à propos, et vouloir nous forcer à ne le voir que comme un animal, tandis qu’il est en effet d’une nature très différente, très distinguée, et si supérieure à celle des bêtes, qu’il faudrait être aussi peu éclairé qu’elles le sont pour pouvoir les confondre. (‘De l’homme’, Histoire naturelle, II, 510)

The very expression ‘de l’homme’ emphasises the indivisibility of man­– a­lthough the quotation from Buffon used as epigraph to this chapter seems to set up ‘the savage’ as a limit case. This bears 201

Derrida and Other Animals out Derrida’s point that the clear demarcation between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ ends up with the exclusion of some human beings from the category of ‘man’, such as La Fontaine’s evocation of Canadians as less advanced than beavers. As in La Fontaine, ultimately, or Descartes, notoriously, the ‘soul’ (‘the noblest part’) is used by Buffon to demonstrate difference. The classification of man as one of the animals from a material and external point of view is simply an example of the (human) need to categorise according to Buffon. This kind of conventional demarcation is precisely not natural, and certainly does not diminish man’s superiority. Buffon writes: Man, as to the material part of his existence, certainly bears a resemblance to other animals, and in comprehending the circle of natural beings there is a necessity of placing him in the class of animals. Nature, however, has neither classes nor species; it contains only individuals. These species and classes are nothing but ideas which we have ourselves formed and established, and though we place man in one of such classes we do not change his being; we do not derogate from his dignity; we do not alter his condition. In a word, we only place him at the head of those who bear a similitude to him in the material part of his being. (Natural History, III, 326) Il est vrai que l’homme ressemble aux animaux par ce qu’il a de matériel, et qu’en voulant le comprendre dans l’énumération de tous les êtres naturels, on est forcé de le mettre dans la classe des animaux: mais, comme je l’ai déjà fait sentir, la nature n’a ni classes ni genres; elle ne comprend que des individus. Ces genres et ces classes sont l’ouvrage de notre esprit; ce ne sont que des idées de convention; et lorsque nous mettons l’homme dans l’une de ces classes, nous ne changeons pas la réalité de son être, nous ne dérogeons point à sa noblesse, nous n’altérons pas sa condition, enfin nous n’ôtons rien à la supériorité de la nature humaine sur celle des brutes; nous ne faisons que placer l’homme avec ce qui lui ressemble le plus, en donnant même à la partie matérielle de son être le premier rang. (Histoire naturelle, II, 512)

There is a certain rhetorical circularity: if you think that there is no difference between man and other animals then you are an animal. Derrida analyses La Fontaine’s cruel fable about the monkey (aping humanity), and the dolphin (a royal beast by name dauphin at least) who bears him, in which stupidity, bêtise, means you are recognised as an animal and therefore condemned to drown (Beast 1, 254–6; Bête 1, 342–4).39 This seems to belong to the characteristic discourse of legislative rather than questioning fables, which often assert x is not y, a frog is not an ox, for example, however much she puffs 202

The Savage herself up­– ­I shall return to this bêtise of definition with Duffy in Chapter 6. The kind of pretentious pretending to know more than you do (the monkey confusing a place, Piraeus, with a person with whom you can claim acquaintance) readers can of course recognise as properly human (as in earlier discussions of bêtise in Chapters 1 and 3). Again the exclusion of animals from human rights (drowning unwanted offspring, for example) may imply here noble condemnation of the pretensions of other classes (Molière’s nouveaux riches, bourgeois gentilhommes), other races (sauvages expecting not to be dispossessed of their land) or the other sex (femmes savantes). Derrida points out that the obligatory reference to Flaubert on the subject of bêtise should take account of the class position of his Bouvard and Pécuchet (Beast 1, 165; Bête 1, 224). Buffon’s perspective as a natural historian, and pre-eminent categoriser, means that in some respects he is constantly writing, indeed performing, the plurality of animals­– u ­ nlike the philosophers who talk of ‘the animal’­ – ­but for him ‘man’ must be declared to be one. Fontenay argues that the Christian and Judaic monogenetic traditions reinforce this idea of a distinction between one unique humanity (even if with many languages) and many beasts.40 On what grounds would a being be judged as a man, a semblable, one of us, or as an animal (or quasi-animal)? The human-animal borderline is always at stake in political debates. Racial slavery or genocide, as well as less extreme forms of structural inequality (including sexed inequality), are typically facilitated by animalising the other, defined as inferior. The humanity of man (and again, the word is used advisedly) is asserted in order to construct the polis which, however welcoming, usually has what Derrida has called an autoimmune quality­– ­expelling and rejecting those perceived as threatening (however valuable they may be). Crusoe’s first entry in his Journal (cited by Derrida, Beast 2, 4; Bête 2, 24) refers to his fear that he might be ‘devour’d by wild Beasts, murther’d by Savages, or starv’d to Death for Want of Food’41­– ­a fear of not eating or of being eaten; as well as his reduction ‘to a state of savage nature, almost that of a beast’ (Beast 2, 4) (‘à l’état de nature sauvage, voire de quasi-bête’ (Bête 2, 25)). Crusoe himself has been brought to the borderline of definition in the negative (sans), typical of descriptions of savages, almost to the state of a wild beast: without food, without house, without clothes, without weapon, or place to fly to. He has none of the defining properties of man at this point, although the Journal itself of course is a re-mastering of the human property of language­ 203

Derrida and Other Animals – ­with no one to converse with, he can still write, record, his history, including this moment of state zero. Yet it is men other than the self who are most of all aligned with animals. Robinson Crusoe regularly brings together the threat from wild beasts and men­– ­making the reader accept that the adjective might apply to both, for example: ‘neither did I see any prospect before me but that of perishing with hunger or being devoured by wild beasts; and that which was particularly afflicting to me was, that I had no weapon, either to hunt and kill any creature for my sustenance, or to defend myself against any other creature that might desire to kill me for theirs’ (Robinson Crusoe, 66). In this quotation both ‘devoured by wild beasts’ and ‘any creature’ to kill for sustenance may seem fairly clear allusions to non-human predators and prey (though not perhaps absolutely clear granted Robinson’s obsession with cannibals), then ‘any other creature’ introduces greater ambiguity as to the nature of the threat. When he refers to the need to ‘fortify [his tent] from any sudden attempt, either from man or beast’ (146); to ‘securing myself against either savages, if any should appear, or wild beasts’ (Robinson Crusoe, 76); and his wish to chart ‘any violence of man or beast’ (177), then other men and animals are juxtaposed on account of their similarity as predators. Robinson is ‘greatly concerned to secure myself from an attack in the night, either from wild beasts or men’ (Robinson Crusoe, 88); and muses that ‘I might fall into the hand of savages, and perhaps such as I might have reason to think far worse than the lions and tigers of Africa; that if I once came in their power, I should run a hazard of more than a thousand to one of being killed, and perhaps of being eaten’ (135–6). The menace from bestial others is particularly terrifying, as Derrida indicates, when Robinson Crusoe imagines being taken in. Unbridled nature devours, and thus Crusoe fears, for example, that he might be swallowed up by the earth (Robinson Crusoe, 91); an earthquake reawakens this ‘fear of being swallowed up alive’ (98).42 Derrida presents to his audience a kind of aporia: that the more ‘other’ the element that threatens to devour or bury Crusoe, the less ‘other’ it feels, and vice versa (Beast 2, 138–9; Bête 2, 203–4). He then explains that the more external and foreign the element in question (say the lifeless or anonymous earth or the sea) the less horrifying the prospect; it is the menace that is closest to the self, being eaten by your fellow human being who is a cannibal, which is the ‘worse kind of destruction’­– i­t is the autoimmune process of the species devouring itself.43 The cruelty of these fantasised cannibals can be 204

The Savage said to be inhuman only to the extent that they are included within the human. The imagined animal predators are not called inhuman (Beast 2, 139–43; Bête 2, 205–10); they are then placed within the zoological while the savages, however ‘wretched’, are placed within ethnographic discourse by Crusoe’s very delineation of their inhumanity. Derrida makes the comparison with crimes against humanity where animals would never be brought to trial. Crusoe’s fear of being engulfed or consumed­– ­by natural forces, animals or savages, cannibals­– ­is a trope repeated in successive versions of the castaway story, including the female Crusoes such as Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (London, 1767).44 The consciousness of death, which is certainly a feature of Defoe’s protagonist (analysed lyrically by Derrida, Beast 2, 50–4; Bête 2, 86–90), is critical in Heidegger’s definition of weltbildend man­– ­animals, who are weltarm, do not die they only cease to exist (Beast 2, 262ff.; Bête 2, 363ff.). Savages are, however, said to live in the present with no foresight. Their bravery is, thus, foolhardy like that of animals. This element of the philosophical distinction is no more internally consistent than any other­– t­ he assertion of the cowardice of savages or animals can perfectly be accommodated with their inability to imagine their own death. The attempt to assert a distinction between the self and the autre not only vacillates at the point where the inhumanity of the other makes him a man, but also, Derrida points out, in the various borderline activities of Christians such as Crusoe, for example in religious rituals such as Mass. The rational Christian Crusoe does not believe in the spectres or phantasms (such as that of dying a living death) that haunt him and yet, at the same time (in a kind of denegation) he does. Equally in the Englishman’s famous intake of flesh, noted by Rousseau with some distaste, the carnivorous impulse seems to lead in the direction of repressed cannibalism (Beast 2, 143; Bête 2, 208–9). ‘They [the savages] think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton’ (Robinson Crusoe, 177). I might note that killing captives was certainly not unknown in Early Modern European warfare which makes the double analogy even more close to home. Crusoe then alludes directly to his actions, emotions and reasons in relation to goats, turtles, pigeons and curlews as ‘the same view’ as that of cannibals towards himself (200). When he first finds traces of cannibalism on the island he has a bout of uncommonly violent vomiting, as if purging himself of something which might be inside rather than outside him, before he thanks God 205

Derrida and Other Animals that he ‘was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as these’ (172). Physical characteristics­– ­visible difference Environmental determinism is common in the Enlightenment (not only in the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck)­– ­and becomes a battleground when the first edition of Buffon’s Natural History argues that animals and men in the New World are degenerate relative to those in the old.45 Buffon argues that all the native animals (including people) of America are smaller than their equivalents elsewhere due to the cool and moist climate. He claims that there are fewer species, and therefore less variation. Even imported species degenerate in America, a point which Raynal’s Histoire will develop with gusto. This is obviously particularly disturbing to Americans, such as Crèvecoeur, eager to show that, on the contrary, their free, modern and industrious continent is an environment that will allow men (and other animals) to achieve their full potential unlike the old world of fixed hierarchies where so many men do not get enough to eat, as indicated in Chapter 2. Jefferson replies defending American animals (there are more species, and some species are larger than their European equivalents), natural resources and native peoples and settlers (Notes on the State of Virginia, 69–70). Buffon is in fact more progressive than Jefferson in his egalitarian belief that all races, including black Africans, would be equal, indeed identical even in their white skin colour, in the right environment­– a­ nd yet apparently less progressive in his first picture of Native American peoples and animals who have so degenerated from our common origin. The monogeneticism (the belief that all races are originally one) of thinkers such as Buffon or Lafitau implies a more positive attitude to miscegenation­– e­ ven if on the dubious grounds of ‘improving’ ‘races’, lactifying skin colours, seen as inferior.46 References to the relation between the New World and classical antiquity, and the marshalling of linguistic and cultural evidence, lead to particular positions. Benjamin Barton offers one example of an investigation of the monogenetic theory­– ­arguing that the First Nations originated in Asia.47 (Of course, emphasis on the migrations of the First Nations can also be given an ideological spin, undermining their case to be indigenous occupiers of the land.) Barton quotes Charlevoix at length (New Views of the Origin of the Tribes, iii, v, vii–xiii ), broadly agreeing with the latter’s emphasis on languages, rather than, say, material culture or religion, in determin206

The Savage ing the origin of ‘tribes’­– ­although Barton thinks culture and religion have some use in determining origin too (xxxiii, xlii, liii, xcvii). Unsurprisingly then, Barton considers Voltaire ‘singular and incorrect’ (vi, vii) in his opposition to monogenetic theory. Polygeneticism, fiercely maintained by Voltaire (and, more ambiguously, by Jefferson) may appear to have a ‘scientific’ base at the time (unlike today), or simply to fuel a narrative that debunks the authority of the Book of Genesis, but in either case ends up with a racist separation of ‘races’. Ideology is often flexible in the Enlightenment as today, for example the (real or imagined) hairiness of the savage brings him into proximity with anthropoid apes; however, hairlessness too can easily become a sign of animality­– ­and Europeans then become privileged as those who can grow beards.48 This is the case in Robinson Crusoe, for example, ‘white men, or bearded men, as [Friday] called them’ (226).49 Yet Crusoe makes a point of trimming his facial hair, and the reader might suspect that an excess of beard would indeed be too close to shaggy fur. Thus the Abbé Jean Pestré, drawing explicitly on Lahontan with his sympathetic ethnographic gaze, writes in 1752 in the Encyclopédie article ‘Canadians, Philosophy of the’ (‘Canadiens (Philosophie des)’): Most of those who have neither seen nor heard about savages have imagined them covered with hair, living unsociably in the woods like animals, and having only a partial likeness to human beings. It even seems that most men still have this conception. Yet with the exception of the hair on their head and their eyebrows—which many carefully pull out—the savages have no hair on their body. If perchance some should grow they would tear it out by the roots. They are born white like us but become tanned because they are naked, grease themselves with oils, and paint themselves with various colours which over the years the sun burns into their skin.50 La plupart de ceux qui n’ont point vu ni entendu parler des sauvages, se sont imaginés que c’étaient des hommes couverts de poil, vivant dans les bois sans société comme des bêtes, et n’ayant de l’homme qu’une figure imparfaite: il ne parait pas même que bien des gens soient revenus de cette idée. Les sauvages, à l’exception des cheveux et des sourcils que plusieurs même ont soin d’arracher, n’ont aucun poil sur le corps: car s’il arrivait par hasard qu’il leur en vînt quelqu’un, ils se l’ôteraient d’abord jusqu’à la racine. Ils naissent blancs comme nous; leur nudité, les huiles dont ils se graissent, et les différentes couleurs dont ils se fardent, que le soleil à la longue imprime dans leur peau, leur hâlent le teint. 207

Derrida and Other Animals The different theses concerning the origin of the species, monogeneticism or polygeneticism, play an interesting and complex role in these writings about the First Canadians and Americans. Pestré here is reminiscent of Buffon in his suggestion that white skin always lies beneath an outward appearance of colour. The truly enlightened desire on the part of the Abbé to resist the animalisation of Canadians leads to an almost comical insistence that they should have no hair at all on their bodies. Nakedness is another critical element separating man from the beasts, from the Fall in the Book of Genesis onwards­– ­and hairiness is often metonymically linked to nakedness. Dickason points out that nakedness and lack of shame were often seen as savage and bestial against civilised dress, but could also be seen as innocent­– a­ prelapsarian golden age of purity of morals. This is a typical rather than exceptional diametrically opposite interpretation of aspects of the same observed reality­– o ­ ne becoming a guide for practical politics while the other became chiefly a literary and theoretical position (The Myth of the Savage, 50–1). Robinson tells his reader that ‘I could not go quite naked’ (Robinson Crusoe, 357) for practical reasons: he cannot bear the heat and his skin blisters (unlike savage skin), and so he also needs to cover his head. However, this is not a purely practical consideration for ‘nor could I abide the thought of it, though I was alone’.51 In his description of his appearance, the reader might note his umbrella, his mention that his colour was not too ‘mulatto like’ despite the climate, and his trimmed hair (399–402)­– ­these are all markers of civilised humanity. Most passing mentions of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am focus on his somewhat self-conscious and uneasy nudity in front of his cat, a morning bathroom scene which is the opening and recurrent autobiographical conceit. Adam naked before God raises the question of the shame man will later come to know, but animals never know shame in this story. Derrida argues that nudity, being presented to another naked, can be related to passivity (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 11; L’Animal que donc je suis, 29).52 I would suggest that nudity follows the same structure, an old favourite when speaking of animals, that Derrida detects in a series of philosophical discussions of animality: the animal is nothing because of animals’ lack of choice to be anything different and lack of knowledge, or lack of consciousness, of what they are; for example, Lacan’s argument that the animal is not bête or bestially cruel. Derrida writes: ‘The animal, therefore, is not naked because it is naked. It doesn’t feel its own nudity’ (The 208

The Savage Animal That Therefore I Am, 5) (‘L’animal, donc, n’est pas nu parce qu’il est nu. Il n’a pas le sentiment de sa nudité’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 19)). Derrida refers to the myth of Prometheus, bringing together lack and nudity as well as the original sins (including Abel’s animal sacrifice and Cain’s subsequent murder of his brother) in Genesis. All the things attributed uniquely to man ‘[everything that is] proper to man would derive from this originary fault, indeed from this default in propriety’ (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 45) (‘le propre de l’homme, tiendrait à ce défaut originaire, voire à ce défaut de propriété’ (L’Animal que donc je suis, 70)). There is no nudity in nature only nakedness, and it is clear how this relates to indigenous peoples. We might point to the role of education and training­– ­would we know we are naked if society did not teach us this? Missionaries of course (and colonial officers more generally) endeavoured to introduce shame configured according to their own prejudices to the Americas­– a­ nd were remarkably successful if only because their ideology was underwritten by military and economic power. Cixous stages the ambiguous kindness of missionary nuns who offer indigenous Americans sanctuary from the brutal violence of bounty hunters but also insist on separating children from their families, on clothing, and on education as conversion (Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir, 85–97). Some animals too can be trained; it is necessary to be able to write this without making members of the First Nations bestial, or humanising non-human animals. Derrida asks: how do you avoid falling into either anthropomorphic reappropriation or the violence (and bêtise) of suspending compassion and refusing an animal ‘every power of manifestation, of the desire to manifest to me anything at all, and even to manifest to me in some way its experience of my language, of my words and of my nudity’ (‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, 387) (‘tout pouvoir de manifester, du désir de me manifester quoi que ce soit, et même de me manifester de quelque façon son expérience de mon langage, de mes mots et de ma nudité?’ (‘L’animal que donc’, 269)). He thus asserts his ‘avowed desire to escape the alternative of a projection that appropriates and an interruption that excludes’ (388) (‘le désir ainsi avoué d’échapper à l’alternative de la projection appropriante et de l’interruption coupante’ (269)). Perfectibility or progress A key element in the philosophical splitting of man from other animals is perfectibility­– t­his development (or degeneration) allows 209

Derrida and Other Animals historicity (Heideggerian ‘historicality’; Beast 2, 289; Bête 2, 395), which distinguishes man from beast (and from the savage who cannot write, progress, develop). Animals are then said to be machines plus instinct (nature) which they must obey, whereas man is a machine plus instinct (nature), but has free will to disobey­– t­his relates to his spiritual qualities to which La Fontaine and Buffon refer above, and to his ability to progress as well as degenerate. Perfectibility thus stems from free will, from the human ability to choose, say, diet. Switching food sources is key to avoiding starvation when there is an extreme event; Rousseau relates this to large-scale natural disasters in the history of the species in his Discourse on Inequality, but it is also true for an individual in a shipwreck (or, today, an air crash for instance). Rousseau avoids the question of cannibalism in this account, but such practices haunt the imaginary­– ­although not always related to avoidance of starvation, the human, even spiritual, choice of religious ritual can equally be said to lead to real or figural cannibalism. Robinson’s guns and other tools of civilisation saved from the ship meant that he could eat­– ­otherwise, as he explains, with an intriguing series of conditional tenses: ‘I must have perished’ or ‘I should have lived, if I had not perished, like a mere savage’; ‘if I had killed a goat or a fowl, by any contrivance, I had no way to flay or open them, or part the flesh from the skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my teeth and pull it with my claws like a beast’ (Robinson Crusoe, 141). Raw food brings man close to the animal, and thus has a complex relationship to the cannibal savage.53 Today, when class distinction is more critical in Europe than denying humanity to ‘savages’, eating raw meat or fish has become a sign of sophistication­– t­ here is after all no essential content to the structure of distinction. Man’s ability to switch diets can be life-saving when one supply of food is exhausted, but it can also, according to Rousseau, lead to death through dissolute excess­– ­as already indicated in Chapter 2 (Discourse on Inequality, 87; Discours sur l’inégalité, 141). One example, frequently cited with respect to the peoples of the New World, is that of rum, which is typically linked in the case of sauvages to dangerous excess. Rousseau remarks on ‘the good constitution of savages­– ­at least of those we have not corrupted with our strong liquors’ (Discourse on Inequality, 85) (‘la bonne constitution des sauvages au moins de ceux que nous n’avons pas perdus avec nos liqueurs fortes’ (Discours sur l’inégalité, 138)). Cixous deploys this trope too in her desert-island play Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir 210

The Savage (123). Her source text for these castaway sections, Verne’s Les Naufragés du Jonathan, contains long polemical passages concerning the dangers of alcohol amongst the working (or more especially the unemployed) classes who have migrated to the New World­– t­ he nineteenth and twentieth centuries see numerous examples of the ‘savage’ projected on to the then more threatening proletariat (for example, Les Naufragés du Jonathan, Part 2, 184, 186–7). John Long, the author of Voyages of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, first published in London in 1791, tells of his experiences in America and Canada in the 1770s and 1780s, mentioning rum (or other liquor) on almost every other page.54 He shows the advantages of rum for a trader; it is indispensable in trading, gift exchange and socialising. We might note that, like other drugs, it becomes a commodity that creates a highly dependent and insatiable market. Long indicates the dangers of rum insofar as Indians are usually violent when drunk, as the stereotype would have it­– ­which works to the advantage of European powers wanting fierce allies, but against them when it is their adversaries (including the allies of other European powers) who are intoxicated. While depicting the behaviour of Indians under the influence, Long, a gifted linguist often reliant on native hospitality, recognises that many problems were attributable to the influence and example of Europeans. He himself pushed the priest of Tadoussac (Quebec) into the St Lawrence during a drunken quarrel. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, displays his civilised side (particularly important on the island, where ‘going native’, submitting to the environment, would be the easiest option) in his reasonable and rationed consumption of rum and tobacco in moderation, almost as medicine­– ­although as a sailor getting drunk on rum contributed to his misfortunes (Robinson Crusoe, 32). When it comes to the point of giving battle, and the enemy has much greater numbers, then Crusoe, having reassured himself that his man Friday’s first priority is to defend him, gives Friday some rum (there is no earlier reference to him taking that risk); this use of ‘Dutch courage’ is emblematic of the practice of his day (Robinson Crusoe, 231–2). Along with his spare weapons Crusoe takes more rum to the field of battle. In asking whether ‘savages’ are typically classed as men or animals (in fact it is the very ideological flexibility which makes the borderline so useful) we might then consider the intake of rum, the response to starvation (particularly in the icy North), or the eating of what seem like strange things to a European observer­– ­asking whether these are human or animal qualities? Equally there is the question of 211

Derrida and Other Animals what they do not eat; Crusoe introduces Friday to the taste of ‘other flesh’ (goat) to wean him off ‘the relish of a cannibal’s stomach’ (Robinson Crusoe, 213)­– t­ here is almost the assumption that Friday has never tasted other meat. In any case Friday is never able to eat salt­– ­another marker of difference. The things Amerindians eat, such as lice, are given as an example of their bestial side by some observers,55 even though the ability to vary diet according to need is quintessentially human. A voracious lupine appetite can show that sauvages have no foresight (Discourse on Inequality, 90; Discours sur l’inégalité, 144). The representation of the First Nations (and also indigenous inhabitants of many other terrains in the Pacific or in Africa) as cannibals has generated much controversy since the very first accounts of the encounter. I shall consider this as more revealing about the writing subjects than about the objects under discussion, and will leave to one side the questions of verisimilitude, specific agendas, or the relative occurrence of survival cannibalism (whether exceptional or recurrent) rather than ritual cannibalism. Much could be said about local versus external factors in creating cannibalism, whether survival or ritual, and the specificities of the colonial encounter­– ­as I do in Enlightenment Hospitality. The taking-up of positions continues to the present day with debates in departments of anthropology, history and cultural studies.56 Thus Enlightenment man may be defined not directly by his Cartesian reason and use of conceptual language, but by his ability to progress (or degenerate), deriving from his freedom to choose (for example, his diet) in a way that animals cannot. As Buffon claims with respect to beavers and bees, even these apparently more creative and social species cannot make progress. For Rousseau man has a choice to be a vegetarian (or fructivore as he often puts it), which is his natural state, or to eat flesh­– ­and this choice relates not only to food but to a way of life.57 In Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality he follows the line Derrida will advocate in The Animal That Therefore I Am of making a number of divisions within the category of living creatures only one of which is the distinction between man and (other) animals­– ­the divide between vegetarians and carnivores is another significant way of making a distinction for him.58 Technology is an instrument of this perfectibility or willed change (I would ask the question: would it be integral to becoming ‘human’­– ­a key debate today?), including change in diet. Derrida points out that Crusoe is obsessively busy reinventing technology (as well as prayer), and even reinvents the wheel in order to grind knives­– ­a machine he had never 212

The Savage previously seen, and thus an act of sovereignty (Beast 2, 74–83; Bête 2, 119–30). This machine, not requiring hands to operate it, sends Derrida back to techno-anthropological discourses on the hand, which he has analysed in earlier texts, from André Leroi-Gourhan to Heidegger and Nancy. Humanism can be a ‘humainisme’, the human hand distinguished from that of any other animal (Beast 2, 83; Bête 2, 130). The domestication of animals was critical in our technological relation to the world­– f­ or Buffon, power over animals defines man, and animals are hierarchically organised according to their use to humans: The most stupid man is able to manage the most acute animal; he governs it, and renders it subservient to his purposes; and this, not so much on account of his strength or skill as by the superiority of his nature, and from his being possessed of reason, which enables him to form a rational system of action and method, by which he compels the animals to obey him. The strongest and most acute animals do not give law to the inferior, nor hold them in servitude. The stronger, it is true, devour the weaker, but this action implies no more than an urgent necessity, or a rage of appetite; qualities very different from that which produces a series of actions, all tending to the same end. Did animals enjoy this faculty, should we not see some of them assume dominion over others, and oblige them to furnish their food, to watch over them, and to attend them when sick or wounded? Now, throughout the creation of animals, there is no vestige of such subordination, no appearance that one of them knows, or is sensible of, the superiority of his own nature over that of others. It follows, then, that they must all be considered of one nature, and that the nature of man is not only highly superior to that of the brute, but also entirely different from it. (Natural History, III, 327–8) Le plus stupide des hommes suffit pour conduire le plus spirituel des animaux, il le commande et le fait servir à ces usages, et c’est moins par force et par adresse que par supériorité de nature, et parce qu’il a un projet raisonné, un ordre d’actions, et une suite de moyens par lesquels il contraint l’animal à lui obéir: car nous ne voyons pas que les animaux qui sont plus forts et plus adroits commandent aux autres et les fassent servir à leur usage: les plus forts mangent les plus faibles; mais cette action ne suppose qu’un besoin; un appétit; qualités fort différentes de celle qui peut produire une suite d’actions dirigées vers le même but. Si les animaux étaient doués de cette faculté n’en verrions nous pas quelquesuns prendre l’empire sur les autres, et les obliger à leur chercher la nourriture, à les veiller, à les garder, à les soulager lorsqu’ils sont malades ou blessés? Or, il n’y a parmi tous les animaux aucune marque de cette 213

Derrida and Other Animals s­ ubordination, aucune apparence que quelqu’un d’entre eux connaisse ou sente la supériorité de sa nature sur celle des autres; par conséquent on doit penser qu’ils sont en effet tous de même nature, et en même temps on doit conclure que celle de l’homme est non seulement fort au-dessus de celle de l’animal, mais qu’elle est aussi tout à fait différent. (‘De l’homme’, Histoire naturelle, II, 512))

A distinction is made between the casual violence in nature where the stronger animal eats the weaker, and political and social domination over a longer time period, when mastery if not sovereignty can be established. In the eighteenth century it is very common to adopt, like Rousseau, a stadial theory of human history and development, and indeed this still lingers today. The stages of human development are taken to be hunting (probably nomadic), a pastoral existence (which can be nomadic or settled), and then agriculture59­– a­ nd growing crops is assumed to imply permanence although we might add that it need not. With each phase the relationship to the land and to animals changes; wolves are particularly demonised in fable when people become shepherds.60 And theories about the progressive relationship to land at different stages are deployed in justification for the dispossession and displacement of the First Nations of the Americas. Crusoe moves then, according to this pattern, from hunting, helped by his dog who catches a kid (Robinson Crusoe, 124), to thinking of establishing a herd of goats (201, 296–7); once his powder stock is diminished his mind is really focused and he sets up a flock (386–94). Domestication or animal breeding (in the next chapter I shall turn to the husbanding of slaves with Crèvecoeur) is a key feature of Robinson Crusoe; this constructs a differentiation between the wild and the civilised that, it can be argued, hunter-gatherers do not make. Domestication runs the gamut from food and skin supplies (the tamed goats) to companion animals. Companion animals develop, it is surmised, from hunting dogs, and other workers, to luxury pets which become particularly important in the eighteenth century, including rare breeds and exotics such as the parrot which Crusoe cherishes (122, 124) and takes home to England.61 Crusoe’s ‘domestics’, as he calls them, have been promoted from wild goat (or parrot) to tame one. Crusoe’s dog is ‘a trusty servant to me for many years; I wanted nothing that he could fetch me, nor any company that he could make up to me; I only wanted to have him talk to me, but that would not do’ (82). The dog swam on shore with Crusoe, while his two cats were carried ashore. Crusoe refers to their ‘eminent history’ 214

The Savage (82). Thus the relationship with his ‘household’ animals (his domus) may seem benign, and at one point Crusoe talks of taking ‘care of my family affairs’ (198); however, this pretend family relationship is only so positive while the animals are beneficial to him. When the cats he imported start breeding uncontrollably (in other words, not by his order), he ‘was forced to kill them like vermin or wild beasts’ (116). Later he will say ‘I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many’ (Robinson Crusoe, 157), and the reader should note the obligation. This apparent ecological disaster is a feature of many colonial importations of non-native species, and Derrida refers to the story of Noah (as cited earlier) in relation to Robinson Crusoe. The Noah fantasy was a feature of a number of colonial excursions including Cook’s Pacific voyage sponsored by the sovereign, King George, with its pairs of animals on board. It is one which often ends in slaughter, for example, the animals turned into meat before they can fulfil their destiny as the founders of a new race. I could also compare Rousseau’s stay on the Ile de St Pierre, and the story he relates in the ‘Fifth Promenade’ of his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire of importing rabbits (OC I, 1044), rabbits being an excellent example of animals often only too successful in founding a new race and then decimated on account of over-population. Islands, literal or otherwise, are often, really or in the imagination, a locus of demographic disaster as well as perfect for the fantasy of sovereignty. Nomadism is opposed to settled stasis in this stadial theory of history: the land which you move over becomes the land which you husband. This is of course a false, or at least self-interested, opposition. Amerindians could have been seen as managing the forest in which they hunted and indeed as managing food supplies, rather than over-fishing or over-hunting­– s­ omething which becomes widespread with the arrival of Europeans. Mobility can aid the fertility of land too, while growing the same crops on the same land for too long will create the need for fertilisers to compensate for reduction in yield. Rousseau is unusual for his time in his arguments with respect to the enclosure and ownership of land. Derrida invites his ‘students’ ‘to reread the whole of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [. . .] but especially re-read [. . .] that sort of initial statement that Rousseau addresses to the Republic of Geneva’ (Beast 2, 21) (‘relire in extenso le Discours de Rousseau sur l’origine de l’inégalité [. . .] relisez surtout [. . .] cette sorte d’adresse initiale que Rousseau destine à la République de Genève’ (Bête 2, 48)). Rousseau 215

Derrida and Other Animals writes in the Dédicace (June 1754) to his Discourse on Inequality that, had he had the choice, he would have chosen to be born in a Republic where everyone knew everyone else and patriotism meant love of your fellow citizens, and not love of land (57; 112). Derrida notes the succession of conditionals, and in particular this impossible phrase ‘I would have wished to be born’ which conjures up an ‘I’ only possible if the condition were met (rather like the Declaration of Independence). This key argument that land ownership is not decisive in the moral construction of the collectivity includes sauvages in a way that much colonial expansionist rhetoric would not, and opens up a possible rapprochement with animal communities. The reciprocity of the gaze is crucial for Rousseau (as he makes clear in his Social Contract).62 A community of brothers is also bound by blood (Discourse on Inequality, 61; Discours sur l’inégalité, 115). Rousseau’s link between freedom and strength equally makes a connotative reference to sauvages­– ­the Enlightenment doxa (in the Encyclopédie definition, for example, as well as in Rousseau’s writings) is that sauvages (as adjective and noun), whether men, other animals or plants, are healthier and stronger than civilised men, tame animals or cultivated plants. Friday can run so much faster and for so much longer than a European. Rousseau writes (denoting longestablished Republics) that ‘there is in freedom, as there is in heavy and succulent food or in rich wine, something which fortifies robust constitutions used to it, but which overwhelms, ruins and intoxicates weak and delicate people unused to it’ (Discourse on Inequality, 58) (‘comme de ces aliments solides et succulents, ou de ces vins généreux, propres à nourrir et fortifier les tempéraments robustes qui en ont l’habitude, mais qui accablent, ruinent et enivrent les faibles et délicats qui n’y sont point faits’ (Discours sur l’inégalité, 112–13)). He also argues in the Dédicace that the fewer laws the more justice (59–60; 114). He is writing against accounts of human ‘progress’ which are obviously critical in the practice and ideology of the rush for land in the New World as well as in the establishing of the distinction between true men and the animal. Sovereignty, language and naming A key distinction between man and other animals in a number of philosophers is that of language, logos, exemplifying reason. Crusoe, who, like Hobbes in his reference to mathematics, would see himself as a rational man, reckons that ‘as reason is the substance and origin 216

The Savage of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgement of things, every man may be, in time, master of every mechanic art’ (Robinson Crusoe, 85). This conceptual and linguistic ability is also mastery, and not only of mechanical arts in themselves­– ­it relates to man’s dominion or sovereignty. When Jefferson is concerned to demonstrate that Amerindians are not the degenerate savages that Europeans such as Buffon or Raynal might be suggesting, he focuses inter alia on language: rhetorical skill, exercised to a noble end.63 The Mingo chief Logan, who led an attack on European settlers who had butchered members of his family, is his key example of Indian rhetorical powers, intelligence and nobility (Notes on the State of Virginia, 67–8), and he painstakingly gathers an appendix of documents to prove his case which had been questioned by some readers who see Logan as a blood-stained savage (233–64). In 1800 Jefferson even publishes a fourth appendix Relative to the Murder of Logan’s Family. Man’s mind or soul bestows on him dominion over the animals; this is a circular point for Buffon since animals, he says, do not have power over animals. For Buffon, man’s empire over beast is legitimate­ – ­no revolution can destroy it. It is the empire of spirit or mind over matter: ‘a right of nature, a power founded on unalterable laws’ (Natural History, VII, 89) (‘un droit de nature, un pouvoir fondé sur des lois inaltérables’ (‘Discours sur la nature des animaux’, Histoire naturelle, III, 30)) and also a divine gift. Man is not just first of the animals but naturally superior as a thinker over those who do not think: ‘he thinks, and for this reason, is master over beings that are incapable of thinking’ (89) (‘il pense, et dès lors il est maître des êtres qui ne pensent point’ (30)). This sovereignty, which Derrida compares to that of divine Providence, will also be exercised over native peoples, and, we might add, women:64 ‘And the relation to savages as well as to women and beasts was the condescending, descending, vertical relation of a superior master to his slaves, other sovereign to his submissive subjects­– ­submissive or submissible, mastered or to be mastered, by violence if need be­– ­subjected’ (Beast 2, 279) (‘Et le rapport aux sauvages aussi bien qu’aux femmes et aux bêtes était le rapport condescendant, descendant, vertical, d’un maître supérieur à ses esclaves, d’un souverain à ses sujets soumis­– ­soumis ou submissibles, maîtrisés ou à être, au besoin par la violence, assujettis’ (Bête 2, 381)). R. John Williams argues that the slave or subject may also learn from their master to enact mastery over others, notably over animals: 217

Derrida and Other Animals Crusoe’s ethnocentrism throughout the novel relies explicitly on violent (and paradoxically ‘bestial’) performances of anthropocentrism, creating a theatrical and symbolic tension that not only dehumanises Crusoe’s ‘others’, but also bestialises Crusoe as quasi-imperial sovereign. What is most interesting about this process, however, is the degree to which Crusoe’s non-European subjects accept, and in the case of Friday, reproduce it.65

Williams’ point, albeit interesting, does seem to go beyond Derrida in suggesting that a non-European would need to learn to enact mastery­ – ­at least according to Defoe. However, taking into account both the representation of slavers in North Africa and that of cannibals in the New World in Robinson Crusoe, it is not altogether clear that Defoe idealises the ethnic other in this way. Perhaps Europeans have some new tricks to teach­– ­Friday has not previously seen a gun­– ­but this new technology does not introduce sovereignty, merely reinforces it. Sovereignty has a further relationship to land. Robinson Crusoe declares: ‘I was king and lord of all this country indefensibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance as completely as any lord of a manor in England’ (Robinson Crusoe, 114). Later he confirms ‘I had no competitor, none to dispute sovereignty or command with me’ (139). Crusoe’s dominion over his desert island is made especially clear (157) just before he finds the footprint, the trace of another man. Considering himself at table, he says: ‘my majesty the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at my absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away [. . .] Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me.’ Crusoe thus turns fact (Poll is the only one who can utter human words66) into conferred right (Poll is the only one allowed to speak at table)­– ­no doubt there is humour here, but the structure of power is all too familiar. His old and crazy dog is placed on his right hand, and the cats that he had allowed to live on his left. At the very end of the novel, Crusoe, in a considerably improved position, returns to visit ‘my new colony’ (298). What had been a desert island (though frequently visited by indigenous peoples from neighbouring islands) is now populated with Crusoe’s selection of Spaniards (formerly shipwrecked sailors like himself) and apparently repentant and subdued English mutineers plus Amerindian prisoners including women, which means there are about twenty children when Crusoe returns. Crusoe divides up the land though ‘reserved to myself the property of the whole’, and then sends women from Brazil with the aim of making his colony flourish 218

The Savage and grow (299).67 The sexual politics of reproduction here make these women align with cattle in some respects. Buffon claims that language is natural to men­– a­ ll men convey thought by exterior signs, even ‘l’homme sauvage’. If an ape could think as we do then it would use the same kind of language, that is to say, words. If it had purely ape thoughts then it could communicate with other apes (Natural History, III, 328–9; ‘De l’homme’, Histoire naturelle, II, 512)­– ­but this does not happen according to Buffon, based on what information we can only guess. ‘Anatomists have found the tongue of an ape to be as perfect as that of a man. The ape, therefore, if he had thought, would have speech, and if its thoughts had aught analogous to ours, this speech would have an analogy to ours also [. . .] As they express nothing by combined and settled signs, they of consequence are void of thought’ (Natural History, III, 328–9) (‘la langue du singe a paru aux anatomistes aussi parfaite que celle de l’homme. Le singe parlerait donc s’il pensait; si l’ordre de ses pensées avait quelque chose de commun avec les nôtres, il parlerait notre langue [. . .] puisqu’ils n’expriment rien par des signes combinés et arrangés: ils n’ont donc pas la pensée, même au plus petit degré’ (‘De l’homme’, Histoire naturelle, II, 512–13).68 Fontenay reminds us of Plato’s suggestion in his Statesman that if any animal could speak, say, a crane, then that crane would divide the world into cranes and everything else (including humans) without distinction­– t­his aberrant separation or narcissistic classification comes from logos, ‘the self-­ veneration inherent in the one who speaks’ (‘l’autovénération inhérente à celui qui parle’) (‘Un Rameau d’or’, 10). The pre-Socratic Xenophanes already makes the point that if an animal had a god the god would be in its own likeness and thus cows would have a cowshaped god (‘Un Rameau d’or’, 11). According to Derrida, all the thinkers from Descartes and Defoe to Kant or Lacan belong to a world in which ‘the animal is cut from man by a multiple defect of power (speech, dying, signifier, truth and lie, etc.)’ (Beast 2, 278) (‘l’animal est coupé de l’homme par un défaut multiple de pouvoir (parole, mourir, signifiant, vérité et mensonge, etc.)’ (Bête 2, 382)).69 In this schema Poll cannot respond to his master Robinson even if he says the words. Robinson Crusoe has the imperial option of naming his island (the Isle of Despair) or places within it, but his key naming activity is his Adamic naming of Friday­– ­the colonised savage. The two aspects of his animal ‘domestics’, the worker and the companion who can at least echo, if not engage in conversation, relate to the man named Friday­– ­there is perhaps a continuum. And, although Crusoe tries 219

Derrida and Other Animals to teach Friday Christianity, and calls him a Protestant (Robinson Crusoe, 241), there is no scene of baptism­– ­unlike, for example, the parodic immersion of the Ingénu in Voltaire’s tale of that name. Naming tends to recall the Book of Genesis, which Derrida discusses in a number of texts, interested in the number of variants of the origin story (whether comparing different versions of Genesis or making a comparison between the Hebrew story and the Greek one70) and the relationship between naming and domination: He has created man in his likeness so that man will subject, tame, dominate, train, or domesticate the animals born before him and assert his authority over them. God destines the animals to an experience of the power of man, in order to see the power of man in action, in order to see the power of man at work, in order to see man take power over all the other living beings. (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 16) Il a créé l’homme à sa ressemblance pour que l’homme assujettisse, dompte, domine, dresse ou domestique les animaux nés avant lui; et assoie son autorité sur eux: Dieu destine les animaux à éprouver le pouvoir de l’homme, pour voir le pouvoir de l’homme en acte, pour voir le pouvoir de l’homme à l’œuvre, pour voir l’homme prendre le pouvoir sur tous les autres vivants. (L’Animal que donc je suis, 35)

This naming is a classic colonising gesture­– a­ nimals are named, and so are people and places. It should not be assumed that this is purely one-way traffic: when Europeans arrived in what they called the New World or the Americas or the West Indies there was an encounter between two translating cultures. While we do not know whether cranes divide up the world as Plato suggests, certainly the various nations encountered in the New World had a similar tendency to Europeans to make their own location the centre of their universe, according to which others would be assessed. Mapping is another form of translation, and the explorers of the New World were of course concerned to map even more than illustrate, describe in words, or convert into museum artifacts and exhibitions. The maps represent a certain possessive and utilitarian relationship to land. Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635), for example, travelled into Iroquois territory in 1615–16, and drew a famous map to record his ‘discoveries’ (places, peoples, animals and plants)­– p ­ ublished in mid-century.71 About a hundred years later, Claude Le Beau makes a map of his journey, also showing Iroquois lands. A key question will of course be whether there is a relation of possession­– ­the lands of the Iroquois­– ­or simply a location where 220

The Savage Iroquois may be found, just as musk rat may be found. Already with Champlain we have the beginnings of the French hostility to the Iroquois­– ­in a drawing he shows himself helping the Algonquin defeat the Iroquois, the ignoble savages, on the shores of Lake Champlain (note the politics of naming) in 1609. The First Americans were represented as having a different relation to land­– ­their ability to navigate through difficult terrain perceived as an animal way of relating to habitat, like the instinct of a homing pigeon.72 Derrida points out that the solitary Crusoe does not have a map (Beast 2, 46; Bête 2, 81)­ – t­his is the Crusoe who is almost an animal, almost a savage in his skins­– ­but not quite. At the end of the novel, however, Crusoe, quite the colonial ruler, ‘shared the island into parts’ (Robinson Crusoe, 298), a scarring of the landscape which presupposes some kind of agreed map, I would suggest. Finding the right path, and avoiding detours, is a very significant trope for Heideggerian philosophy, to which Derrida returns repeatedly in the seminars (for example, Beast 2, 33–8; Bête 2, 64–71), comparing Heidegger’s circling to Crusoe walking his island. This search for the direct route­– ­which ends up in a circle­– ­is differentiated from the methodical Cartesian philosopher-traveller, who is closer to Crusoe in a different way, in his apparent reliance entirely on his own means. The solitary walking is both a gesture of mastery of the terrain (and Crusoe’s move to divide his territory with hedges will be mentioned in the next chapter), and an activity that can always end up in bafflement. Enlightenment Europe might be called a translating culture both because of the quantity and speed with which it translated books (we are just catching up, relatively speaking), its intellectual curiosity about other cultures, and the amount of travel which took place, physical then also mental displacement.73 In the Americas, Europeans came across different kinds of translating cultures­– ­extraordinary linguistic diversity (running into the thousands) necessitating interpreting skills­– ­and migrating societies nomadic within the year and over hundreds of years, fluid in their formations. When Europeans met Amerindians both needed to translate the other­– ­their language, culture, identity­– ­and there were many mistranslations on both parts; the Amerindians needed to, and did, learn faster. Friday rapidly learns English even though Defoe’s transliteration of his ‘pidgin’ is a not altogether consistent gesture of mastery.74 Europeans, on the other hand, persisted in a range of ­mistranslations in spite of the spirit of scientific enquiry, this being offset no doubt by the usefulness of certain misperceptions to the colonial ­enterprise. 221

Derrida and Other Animals Amerindians were typically translated into either good or bad savages (invasive cannibals): good savages were sometimes interpreted by the prism of the classics (monogeneticism). Names are often seen as relatively resistant to translation, but if we ask what did ‘they’ call themselves and what do ‘we’ call ‘them’­– ­then this raises a series of interesting questions about oppression and assimilation in the past, and, today in our interpretation of that past, repeating that oppression, airbrushing the past, or the sometimes self-flattering guilt of political correctness or post-colonial theory.75 The comparative project, which Derrida relates to Robinson Crusoe, is a key element of ethnography and philosophy in response to the New World, categorising people, animals, customs, and visible, for instance, in images of First Nations in Lafitau, illustrating the way a key part of translation is an initial conjunction and comparison, and it is the comparative urge which is a key part of Lafitau’s enterprise.76 Such combinations of material could be seen as containing and showing the differences and similarities, which translation (in that it replaces one thing with another) sometimes effaces. While scholars may use the French term ‘Iroquois’, because so many do (a reinforcing circle) and it relates to the Enlightenment texts, this people usually name themselves Haudenosaunee. The question of naming is as critical as it is difficult to resolve­– ­I could spend considerable time discussing the use of ‘Indians’ (an other naming which has become a self-naming77), ‘savages’, ‘Native Americans’ and so on. With respect to the Iroquois in particular, the name is critical in that the connotations of Haudenosaunee­– P ­ eople of the Long House­– t­ he League of Peace and Power, a confederation of five nations (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca) and then six (with the addition of the Tuscarora nation in 1722), suggest a political community. The French name, on the other hand, has a couple of possible etymologies­– ­neither of them having the same kind of peaceful or diplomatic implications. One goes via a Basque expression meaning ‘the killer people’. Another possible explanation is a Wyandot (Huron) name for the Haudenosaunee, their enemies to whom they referred in a derogatory way, animalising them as snakes.

Solitude, social characteristics and the human community: the community of cannibals? Comparative ethnography in the Enlightenment, which brings together antiquity and savages (as Lafitau or Charlevoix do), raises 222

The Savage the question of the relative importance of the environment in constructing human subjects or societies. This is critical of course in Rousseau, not only in his Discourse on Inequality but also in his proposals for new forms of social organisation, from the abstraction of The Social Contract to the pragmatism of his attempts to suggest constitutions for the potentially self-sufficient island of Corsica (which Derrida suggests relating to the closed economy of Robinson Crusoe (Beast 2, 22; Bête 2, 48)) or for Poland­– ­never mind the political and economic realities faced by French Revolutionaries as well as those drawing up laws in the Americas. Animals are sometimes imagined without community, unable to form meaningful communities like those of men, and outside the human community in the sense for example that they are not answerable to the law of the community­– ­rather they are outlaws or their masters answer for them. In an imagined ‘pre-history’ to community, there is solitude. I should note the importance of solitude in Derrida’s seminars; it is critical to Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as well as to Defoe’s novel.78 Derrida relates Crusoe’s solitude to Rousseau’s writings on the text in Emile as well as in the political writings mentioned above (Beast 2, 18–25; Bête 2, 43–52). The question for us today is what kind of solitude is Crusoe’s in the novel, alone with animals or alone with Friday, and in the novel’s afterlife? For Marx, the novel itself and the ‘Robinsonade’ of Rousseau’s political writings (as well as those of many political economists), in other words the hypothesis of a state of nature in which man laboured (if only in the sense of hunting for food) alone, is utterly social and political both because Crusoe with his many skills is a creature of developed civilisation and because this dream of solitude is a product of the nascent capitalism or nascent ‘civil society’ of the eighteenth century. Derrida quotes Marx (Beast 2, 25–6; Bête 2, 52–3) as follows: The object before us, to begin with, material production. Individuals producing in society­– h ­ ence socially determined individual production­– ­is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against oversophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, 223

Derrida and Other Animals rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. [. . .] Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society­– ­a rare exception which may well occur when a civilised person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness­– ­is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.79

For James Joyce, whom Derrida also quotes (Beast 2, 15–17; Bête 2, 38–42), Crusoe is equally a product of his particular society and a precursor of what will come­– ­for Joyce the ‘English Ulysses’ is quintessentially English indeed and Imperial: The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who, cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knifegrinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity. Whoever rereads this simple, moving book in the light of subsequent history cannot help but fall under its prophetic spell.80

Joyce’s argument has been considerably developed in numerous post-colonial readings of Defoe. Edward Said argues in his influential Culture and Imperialism that ‘the novel is inaugurated in England by Robinson Crusoe, a work whose protagonist is the founder of a new world, which he rules and reclaims for Christianity and England’.81 While Derrida considers, and does not set aside, these highly political readings­– ­and I could add others that focus on Crusoe in terms of possessive individualism or the monad of capitalism­– ­he also suggests the ways in which Defoe’s focus on solitude is pre-­political. Rousseau makes an acerbic reference to the novel in his Social Contract to show that the reference by contemporary apologists of absolute monarchy to Genesis is meaningless: ‘it cannot be denied 224

The Savage that Adam was sovereign over the world, like Crusoe on his island, for so long as he was the sole inhabitant’ (‘on ne peut disconvenir qu’Adam n’ait été souverain du monde, comme Robinson de son île, tant qu’il en fût le seul habitant’ (OC, III, 354).82 This is presented by Derrida as a fantasy of absolute political sovereignty without obstacle or enemy, ‘hyperbolical, pre-political or ultra-political sovereignty that is the prize of solitude’ (‘souveraineté hyperbolique, pré-politique ou ultra-politique qui est le prix de la solitude’), a ‘citizen-state’ (‘l’Etat-citoyen’) (Beast 2, 21; Bête 2, 47), a Robinsonade. In fact the text oscillates between glorying in solitary, and therefore absolute, sovereignty and terror of savage cannibals who may lurk on the island or arrive at any moment. Robinson Crusoe is often named the first novel (as by Said above), and is distinguished by Rousseau in Emile as unique: the only novel a growing (and solitary) boy should read, and that reading is in fact an acting out, imitation, in a secularisation of religious practice. Rousseau’s version of Robinson Crusoe, like many other versions of this complex, much translated or transformed, text, omits Crusoe’s life before the island on which he is shipwrecked. What primarily interests Rousseau (and Derrida, although he draws attention to the topping and tailing of the novel) is the solitary man who gradually moves through the stages from survival to something more than that. Robinson Crusoe on his island is dressed in skins, man in an animal state in many respects, and he is alone for Rousseau, who feels that young Emile will not really be interested in Friday, who indeed only arrives for about the last three years out of the twenty-eight or so spent on the island. Derrida picks up on Rousseau’s insistence in Emile on Crusoe ‘before Friday’ (‘avant Vendredi’), or at least ‘before Friday is no longer sufficient for him’ (‘avant que Vendredi ne lui suffise plus’) (Beast 2, 18, 20; Bête 2, 44, 46). Unusually Derrida is eliding here a reference to sexual difference: ‘him’ in Emile refers less to Crusoe than to the boy Emile pre-puberty. From puberty onwards Emile will start to be interested in women. Derrida makes it refer to Crusoe­– ­who of course also waits to marry. This could be compared to Joyce’s point about Empire: energy is devoted to a cause, not wasted on sex.83 What is at stake in the representation of solitude here is the gap between the rigorously pre-historical and pre-political (as extrahistorical and extra-political) and the use of the solitary individual as a more or less explicit means to programme politics. Throughout the history of philosophy and politics, throughout the history of 225

Derrida and Other Animals c­ onscious social existence, there is the question of how human beings should best live together. In recent times, there has been a resurgence of the notion of ‘community’ in a casual manner of speaking, in political discourse, and also in contemporary philosophy. This community is usually imagined as sameness­– i­ncluding in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, and the work of Jean-Luc Nancy­– w ­ hich can shortcut all the difficult and important questions about living in a community. Agamben’s dream of a multitude of subjects peacefully coexisting with no relation to identity, with no distinction between body and image, seems to me to be of the order of an abstract fiat; and the repressed recognition of difference, and thus the pull towards power relations, returns in any of the concrete examples (Agamben’s examples of stockings or Tiananmen Square). Luce Irigaray, on the other hand, is a rare thinker who insists that a desirable future community would be based on real (sexuate) difference. When I say that ‘community’ is typically imagined on the basis of sameness, of semblables, at least some shared location, belief or characteristic, even if plurality or diversity appear to be part of the fabric, I am differentiating between community and society in imagining or creating communities is often a response general­– ­ to the great divides of social existence. Social integration is also a feature of utopias, while dystopias take Marx’s class division to an extreme. Enlightenment fantasies about savages (absolute others who are strange mirrors to ourselves, the mysterious footprint on the desert island) illustrate two classic paths to achieving social cohesion. These two routes are signposted by: the common fantasy of exocannibalism, eating outsiders (typical of both proto-ethnographic and missionary accounts of the New World), on the one hand, and endocannibalism (eating insiders) on the other. Imagining exocannibalism is the strategy of unification by means of a common enemy (say, the Iroquois for the French in Early Modern Canada). The community is united by terror of the outside ‘fors’, what lies beyond the law (although there may be rogue insiders, a fifth column)­– a­ nd there may be fear that this community too could fall into such monstrous behaviour if the law is not strong. If the ‘other’ is named as a wolf, a voracious cannibal who wishes to eat you up, then you are justified in retrenching, even destroying that outsider, who is hardly human, before they consume you.84 Once Crusoe sees that the cannibals are holding white men (like himself) as prisoners then he attacks­– a­ nd twenty-two of the savages are killed (Robinson Crusoe, 233–7). In ‘Red Riding Hood’, and other fairy tales or legends, the wolf with big 226

The Savage teeth may seem like an example of inter-species devoration, but the tellers and their audience also ‘know’ that these wolves are cannibals: they are kinds of men, as are their victims­– ­even if these are shaped as pigs or lambs they figure improvident or foolish men or women. Plato refers to the political myth in which men who eat human flesh turn into wolves, and Ovid too has his Lycaon. On the other hand, endocannibalism and incest are extreme representations of sharing, of physical and social recycling to achieve the reproduction of the same­– ­a model held up to a hierarchical and divided European society. The question remains whether it is possible to imagine a hospitable community, to present the welcoming of real difference (both inside and outside the community) without the community being destroyed by such a gift, but rather nurturing community, celebrating eating together and giving to eat. This must mean the negotiation of difference within the community, including sexuate difference, rather than pretending that it does not exist. It also entails another thinking of the classic animal-human divide. Community is first defined in the OED as ‘appertaining to all in common’; this can refer to common ownership or liability, but also to common character or identity. It then has the more neutral sense of social intercourse or communion, and a function as synonym for society or the social state. So at one pole it has quite a specific sense of ‘a body of persons living together and practising community of goods’ and at the other pole it has a far more general meaning of ‘society’ (as opposed to the state of nature, for instance).85 I shall use it in the intermediate sense of: human society from the perspective of what is held ‘in common’. The utopian­– p ­ articularly the desirable eutopian community­– ­does often feature a radical reduction of private property so that the majority of what are known today as possessions are held in common. With the loss of possessive individualism, other forms of individualism or sectionalism may also be erased or discouraged in utopia as a means of achieving the social cohesion typically associated with ‘community’.86 Yet all communities will have differences between their members (at least sexual difference, even if class has been erased and race insignificant or projected elsewhere), and the collective pretence that this is not the case may be as pernicious as, or worse than, division.87 Key questions are: how to specify the community that welcomes strangers conditionally or unconditionally, and the one which repulses them? What of internal differences and boundaries, notably sexuate difference, and the boundary with ‘the animal’? 227

Derrida and Other Animals Exo-cannibalism or Endo-cannibalism Cannibals, fierce man-eating peoples, are the other side of the hospitality that Europeans desired and needed to find in the indigenous peoples of the Americas if they were to survive in this very different and sometimes difficult territory, and set up their experimental communities. Robinson Crusoe of course is an exceptional survivor as his island is so hospitable, and he is such a good husbander, capitalist, settler. Defoe’s text can be seen as encouraging colonialism. Good Indians welcome in shipwrecked, or simply hungry and exhausted, sea-farers to their community, feed them, shelter them and facilitate ­ hether the discovery of routes, their exploration of the terrain­– w water sources, mines, hunting grounds or techniques, and other natural and social resources. This is similar to Friday­– ­although his role as worker is perhaps more typical of the settlement period than of early exploration; Crusoe tells his reader: ‘in a little time Friday was able to do all the work for me, as well as I could do it myself’ (Robinson Crusoe, 215). When he indicates to Friday that he needs more grain now that there are two mouths to feed, Friday is suitably grateful and willing to work really hard. Bad Indians, or cannibals, far from welcoming needy guests, repelled them and sometimes even had them for dinner in a different sense. Defoe shows that Crusoe cannot prevent this fantasy from preying on him: that his location off the American coast leaves him close to ‘the worst of savages; for they are cannibals, or men-eaters, and fail not to murther and devour all the humane bodies that fall into their hands’ (122). Even if it might seem that economic rationalism would prefer not to dwell on such horrors, these dark imaginings about a bloody impediment to progress can justify ‘cleansing’ operations against wild animals­– ­and men. Cannibalism is often defined as inhuman, if not a crime against humanity, but you have to be human in order to be inhuman, as noted earlier. Stories of cannibalism seem to be almost as inevitable a part of human society as is hospitality. Both to some degree happen, or happen more, somewhere else­– ­somewhere other, more natural or more bestial, or in some previous period; even in Robinson Crusoe, where cannibals confess, the spectacle is typically the remains of the feast, and the cannibals do not live on the island.88 Crusoe first discovers human skulls and other bones and remnants of fire, and ‘a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where I supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their human feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creature’ (172). Later he falls upon a cannibal feast, ‘nine 228

The Savage naked savages’ around a fire, not needed, he surmises, for warmth, ‘but, as I supposed, to dress some of their barbarous diet of humane flesh, which they had brought with them, whether alive or dead I could not know’. Crusoe can see through his glass that the savages are dancing stark naked, but could not tell whether they are men or women. He does not see them eat, but afterwards ‘the marks of horror which the dismal work they had been about had left behind it, viz. the blood, the bones, and part of the flesh of humane bodies, eaten and devoured by those wretches, with merriment and sport’ (188–9) – he supposes. Good Indians were figured by some writers as good hosts, especially in the early days of exploration, but increasingly that position seemed to give away too much power and property to those who were required to be without; Friday is never figured as a host rather than a servant. In his rather different and expanded French version of Letters from an American Farmer­– c­onfusingly presented as a translation­– ­Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (first edition in 1784), Crèvecoeur gives a lengthy anecdote concerning a savage and his dog89 who help a settler find his youngest son, lost in the woods. The grateful settler says to his benefactor: ‘I am not offering you any land, you do not want any: we have the land we farm from you and your ancestors.­– ­If ever you are wounded, come to my house, I will suck your wound: if ever you are tired of your village and your people, come and live with a white man whom you have loved for a long time, and who today recognises you as his brother. If ever you have reason to weep, I shall dry your tears, as you have dried mine [. . .] When your dog is old and can no longer follow you; I will give him meat and rest.’ ‘Je ne t’offre point de terre, tu n’en veux point; c’est de toi et de tes ancêtres que nous tenons celle que nous cultivons.­– S­ i jamais tu es blessé, viens sous mon toit, je sucerai ta blessure: si jamais tu es fatigué de ton village et des tiens, viens vivre avec un homme blanc, que tu as aimé il y a longtemps, et qui aujourd’hui te reconnait pour frère. Si jamais tu as cause de pleurer, je dessécherai tes larmes, comme tu as desséché les miennes [. . .] Quand ton chien sera vieux et ne pourra plus te suivre; je lui donnerai de la viande et du repos.’90

Both ‘sauvage’ (who responds with suitably eloquent gratitude) and ‘chien sauvage’ are rewarded with this emotional outpouring, repeated as if verbatim, and including such an intimate detail as the offer to suck (rather than, say, bandage) a hypothetical wound, a small detail that might gesture in the direction of sharing in a 229

Derrida and Other Animals fantasised cannibal exchange of bodily fluids. The virtuous settler family keep their word, maintaining fraternity in the next generation, yet we might note the key point that no land changes hand as savages do not want land. Thus it is the settler family who would hospitably welcome the native man and dog, sheltering, tending and feeding them in their imagined infirmity like two faithful old hounds. No contradiction is made explicit when the next example of ‘l’éloquence sauvage’ (Lettres d’un cultivateur américain, 211) selected by Crèvecoeur (eloquence being a main element of both his and Jefferson’s riposte to Buffon’s degeneracy argument) is a speech given by one of the leaders of the First Nations warning against the white men who have stolen their land, intoxicated them with brandy and tried to convert them to Christianity. These unresolved contradictions, and I shall move on to those concerning animals and slaves in the next chapter, are what make Crèvecoeur’s a richer text and not a mere marketing exercise. As settler colonialism got underway with the establishing of English or French communities (often around religion), Europeans did not want to perceive themselves as the guests of the native peoples but rather as the rightful owners and masters of the terrain­ – ­on which native peoples (and their dogs) would be tolerated if they were useful and behaved themselves (assimilated to the community or converted), adopting a humble version of European ways or staying in reserved areas. The new communities of the New World followed the political logic of establishing ‘us’ and ‘them’, in an inhospitable gesture (whether conscious or unconscious) of the creation of an enemy; they required reassurance of superiority in the face of the fear of being overwhelmed, flooded, suffocated, consumed. Equally, some of the indigenous peoples who will be dispossessed of their land and culture had to be ferocious cannibals, demons (or possessed by demons), showing the work of the devil which the Church had to combat, the pressing need to bring salvation, and the thrilling ever-hovering possibility of martyrdom for God’s soldiers.91 Later in the century, Crèvecoeur, Jefferson and other founders of American identity will be less concerned to focus on the diabolical nature of savages, particularly in the light of the need to prove to Europeans and Americans that America is far from degenerate in its effects. The depiction of savages as more or less noble will depend on the micropolitics of the place and period. Jefferson, from the South, will be more anxious about the greater or lesser humanity of Africans in the light of the possibility of abolition. 230

The Savage The ‘community of cannibals’ can be considered from different points of view­– ­I have suggested that we can see cannibalism as ‘not-us’, the function of the common enemy, the other, the not(fully)-human, in enabling a community. Cannibals could be the definition of not us, the absolute other; we write on our (mental) maps ‘there be monsters’ or ‘there be cannibals’ in terror and fascination, which is integral to the history of colonialism but also a more general figure of fear. Crusoe’s fundamental foundational fear is of being swallowed up alive, as Derrida analyses at some length (for instance, Beast 2, 77; Bête 2, 122–3). Second, cannibals or wolves (outlaws) can be what humans (Europeans) might fall into becoming without society­– ­we need a strong community to protect us from our own wolfish or cannibal nature. Third, cannibalism can be an exaggerated image, more or less a parody, of the sameness of community, as in Lettres iroquoises by Maubert de Gouvest. Maubert de Gouvest shows us sacramental funerary endocannibalism unifying the community­– ­we should note that this is a reversal of French idées reçues about Iroquois cannibals (British allies)­– ­usually represented as ferocious warriors who typically use exocannibalism as part of the ritual torture of their enemies. His Iroquois also have no prohibition of incest, which, like cannibalism, transgresses the social boundaries that separate us from kith and kin. Enea Balmas, the modern editor of Lettres iroquoises, presents Maubert de Gouvest as therefore pessimistic and despairing­– ­he critiques society in the name of nature and yet shows nature to be bestial. This introduces the issue of the genre that appropriates the cultural other to critique the self, sometimes seen as simply another way of using up and exploiting the other (who is already materially exploited in this context of course). The other would then be no more than a cipher, and any cultural details would be no more than titillating exoticism to sugar the didactic pill­– ­a charge sometimes made against Montesquieu or Diderot, and which is certainly appropriate to Voltaire. Stripped of the amusing trappings, the eighteenth-century observer from another culture may then also simply be the self. However, in this particular text, are there any traces of openness (or hospitality) to cultural difference and of awareness of French colonialism via the representation of the French as both bad hosts and bad guests? Beyond that, is the otherness of animals respected? When Igli temporarily runs out of furs to trade, his mistress puts his own skin to commercial end, making an exotic show out of a naked Iroquois to raise money for herself and her other lovers 231

Derrida and Other Animals (Lettres iroquoises, Letter XVI). While this is philosophical satire, a number of writings, including Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747),92 show how the French reputation for politeness does not generally extend to visitors from the New World, who are treated as spectacles rather than guests.93 Gouvest’s imaginary community is endogamous to the point of incest, another figure of sameness that binds community together in this text. Gouvest’s cannibals also have a positive relation to animals, viewed as friends or neighbours­– ­respected and eaten to absorb their virtues. Generally the endocannibalistic community is recycling qualities as well as protein. This imaginary cannibal feast establishes a community of sameness. It should, however, be related to Letter XXV which turns into an exposition on the importance of animals, and the attitude that meat-eaters should hold towards the animals they consume. This Enlightenment fancy, fed by proto-ethnographic reading, could be compared to current hypotheses concerning hunter-gatherer societies; Sykes remarks: The intimate and indivisible connection of hunter-gatherer communities to their environment has been summarised by Ingold (2000, 43–50) and Nadasdy (2007) as a kind of familial relationship, whereby huntergatherers perceive their environment as a nurturing parent and trust that it will share its resources with them, so long as they behave with respect: by killing no more than is necessary, by treating the animals’ bodies with care, by sharing the meat amongst the community, and by disposing of their remains appropriately. Within this worldview hunting is deemed to be a vital act of regeneration and, in much the same way as the phoenix rises from the ashes, the hunted animal must die in order for its soul to be released and re-clothed with flesh so that it might return to the hunter on another occasion. (Beastly Questions, 58)94

Igli suggests that everyone should be a cannibal­– i­n the sense of practising ritual endocannibalism. But the insider group expands to include animals. For what matters is the respect and love with which you treat all living beings. Europeans, he says, despise Nature, seeing the earth as a servant and animals as mere machines­– ­this has echoes today. Europeans do not respect their fellow human beings even though (or because) they have established a gulf between animals and humans so that it is alright to kill and eat the one but not the other. Iroquois, on the other hand, eat animals they have hunted both because they need food and for the same reason that they eat their parents­– ­so that their virtues are incorporated into them. Symbolic and material incorporation are one. 232

The Savage

Derrida and ‘Eating Well’ Diderot’s Tahiti practices endogamy to the point of incest, but, unlike Maubert de Gouvest’s Irocopolis, does welcome strangers with open arms to add variety to the gene pool. This fine welcoming of diversity is, however, shown by Diderot to be perilous to a small, closed community which is insufficiently resilient to deal with the introduction of foreign bodies, whether diseases such as VD or attitudes and practices such as possessiveness and fighting over women. Already in the mid eighteenth century it is clear that most Native American communities will not survive the encounter with Europeans. So how can a community be hospitable and survive? How could we relate to others within the community? Both the utopias of Irocopolis and Tahiti could be judged to fail the question of sexuate difference today, however radical they were in their day. Derrida’s ‘Eating Well’ rephrases the question of cannibalism: if we are all cannibals in that we live by consuming others literally or symbolically, then how do we regulate the relation with others, including the sexual other, most hospitably? What is to come (the Derridean à venir) could be: ‘the thinking of a responsibility that does not stop at this determination of the neighbor, at the dominant schema of this determination’ (‘Eating Well’, 284) (‘la pensée d’une responsabilité qui ne s’arrête pas encore à cette détermination du prochain, au schème dominant de cette détermination’ (‘Bien manger’, 298). The community is typically a retreat from the divisiveness of social existence as experienced today, and also by the beleaguered Maubert de Gouvest, and by many who set out for the New World. But two of the main ways of safeguarding the community­– ­demonising the outside(rs) to create coherence and identity within and­/or reinforcing if not enforcing belonging, for example, via rituals, symbolic and material practices­– ­have their own violence. Derrida returns us to cannibalism as a means of expressing the myriad messy ways in which we consume and live off others of all kinds (and they us) even in a community. He is asking that his readers do the philosophical work of constantly questioning ‘who or what is my neighbour?’ If we are all cannibals one way or another in the community, as well as in class society, how do we learn to regulate this killing and this consumption in the most hospitable way? Communities are about what we have in common, and celebrating that (eating and giving to eat), as well as negotiating differences internally and externally (eating and giving to eat). These differences have an important degree of 233

Derrida and Other Animals mobility, or becoming, and eating (together) is a figure also for that potential for change in relationships. The community may be thought of as quite small (like Crusoe’s on the island), but Derrida keeps returning his listeners to ‘the world’ in the very many senses of that word­– ­including the claim of what might be called today’s global community, and the fear that any war is now in some sense a world war. The final seminar of The Beast and the Sovereign series takes place on 26 March 2003, six days after the declaration of war on Iraq, and Derrida ends with violence, and death as a limit to violence. However, the question raised by Heidegger, which is a gesture of exclusion of animals (at least), ‘who is capable of death?’, is the final word. Before that final word, Derrida amongst other things evokes a nightmare that he had recently experienced when he was stricken by flu. The events of 9­/11 and the comparison of leaders of ‘rogue states’ to beasts in the political rhetoric of the most powerful sovereign states (the sovereign having the right to suspend right) has been the context throughout the seminars.95 The autobiographical moment is somewhat comical and self-ironising: he dreamed that he was assigned a mission of speaking before an international tribunal in favour of the case that all the tyrants of the present-day world (from Tony Blair to the Pope) should have their right of access to the logos (apophantikos as well as semantikos) recognised­– ­‘even Bush. And even Saddam Hussein!’ (Beast 2, 261; Bête 2, 360).96 The self-mocking humour lies in the solemn grandeur of the occasion, the evocation of his references to Aristotle and Heidegger, of course, and in the many literary intertexts one could think up­– i­ ncluding desert-island sovereigns who have fever-stricken dreams, or Verne’s the Kaw-djer, obliged by his ethics and his philosophy always to defend the rights of others however dangerous they may be. A serious point (and a passing reference to Nuremberg as well as the 2003 date does make this very serious as well) may be the importance of resisting exclusion especially when it is most tempting.

Notes   1. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 170; spelling will be modernised and further references given in the text.   2. Rousseau is associated with the phrase ‘le bon sauvage’, and Dryden with ‘noble savage’­– w ­ hich is not quite the same; see Hayden White, ‘The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish’, in First Images of America: 234

The Savage The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 121–35, for European desire and disgust with respect to the ‘abnormal humanity’ of the savage. See also Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), as one analysis of writings that represent Amerindians as noble.   3. See Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984).   4. Andrew Benjamin notes that Maurice Blanchot, like Heidegger, proposes the without relation: ‘the inauguration of literature is occasioned by the death of the animal’ (Of Jews and Animals, 11). It is the logic of sacrifice on which the construction of the community is possible for Blanchot. Benjamin asks: ‘what would a community or a mode of existence be like that accorded an inbuilt relation to animals and to animality?’, an already present relation instead of one necessitating a logic of sacrifice or a founding without relation (Of Jews and Animals, 12).   5. While it is estimated that the population of indigenous peoples was reduced by more than 90% by 1820, at least 10 million African slaves had been brought to the New World; however, there were only about 6 million slaves remaining by that same date (despite some reproduction) due to the harsh conditions; about 2 million Europeans had arrived in the same period and that population had grown to about 12 million.   6. See Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761), Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, avec le Journal historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale, 3 vols (Paris: chez Pierre-François Giffart, 1744). He relates that sauvages use dogs for hunting, but that these are the only domestic animals they raise, and the dogs look rather like wolves (300), from which we might infer that they are only barely domesticated.   7. Voltaire’s Recollect dictionary is probably Gabriel Sagard, Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons, situé en l’Amérique vers la mer douce, és derniers confins de la nouvelle France, dite Canada: où il est amplement traité de tout ce qui est du pays, des moeurs & du naturel des sauvages, de leur gouvernement & façon de faire . . .; avec un Dictionnaire de la langue huronne, pour la commodité de ceux qui ont à voyager dans le pays, & n’ont l’intelligence d’icelle langue (Paris: Denys Moreau, 1632). For Ursulines, see notably Marie de l’Incarnation, e.g. Lettres de la vénérable mère Marie de l’Incarnation, première supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle France (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1681). Charlevoix published La Vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, institutrice et première supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle France (Paris: L. A. Thomelin, 1724). 235

Derrida and Other Animals   8. See Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), for example chapter 2, ‘The Education of a Dissenter’, for an account of Defoe’s self-perception as a defender of the English Protestant faith against imagined Popish plots and murderers even on the streets of London.   9. In a modern rewriting of Robinson Crusoe we find Crusoe’s view of even the good savage expressed thus: ‘Quand il m’est apparu qu’en cas de besoin il n’hésiterait pas à égorger Tenn pour le manger, que Tenn en avait obscurément conscience et que cela ne tempérait en rien la préférence qu’il manifeste en toute occasion pour son maître de couleur, j’en ai conçu une irritation mêlée de jalousie contre cet animal stupide et borné, obstinément aveugle à son propre intérêt. Et puis j’ai compris qu’il ne faut comparer que ce qui est comparable, et que l’affinité de Vendredi avec les bêtes est substantiellement différente des relations que j’ai instaurées avec mes animaux. Il est reçu et accepté par les bêtes comme l’une d’elles.’ Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 182. 10. Derrida quotes from an article by Henri F. Ellenberger, originally published as ‘The Mental Hospital and the Zoological Garden’, in Animals and Man in Historical Perspective, ed. J. and B. Klaits (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 59–93. 11. Both Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal (Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens & du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes, 6 vols (Amsterdam: 1770–74); Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, ed. Yves Bénot (Paris: Maspero, 2001)) and Cornelius de De Pauw (Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine (Berlin: G. J. Decker, 1768–69)) are more extreme exponents of the powerful degeneracy hypothesis, a major topic of the day not only in philosophical works in English, French or German, but also in newspapers or school books. 12. See for example, Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 13. Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal on the Affairs of North-America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (1782)). 14. Derrida argues (and I would agree) that this is true of the whole book. The article by Francis Affergan that he cites (‘Les marqueurs de l’autre dans Robinson Crusoé: Contribution à la genèse de l’anthropologie de l’altérité’, Les Temps modernes, 44, no. 507 (1988), 22–45) references in particular The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which is typically seen merely as a long post-script. 15. See Dickason, ‘Preface’, in The Myth of the Savage, covering from 1493 236

The Savage to the early part of the seventeenth century. The encounter is characterised as one between civilisation and savagery (early stage of technology, dominated by laws of nature). A key question is the definition of civilisation (by, say, state structure, advanced technology or the degree of refinement in way of living) (xi). Of course these are relative terms. 16. Derrida refers to Robinson Crusoe as pre-colonial in his presentation of the seminar for his American audience in spring 2003­– ­presumably referring to the second wave of modern colonisation­– ­of India and Africa. 17. See Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, cited in Chapter 2 (46, 51–4). See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapter 2, for example comments in Frances Brooke’s novel The History of Emily Montague, about French settlers. 18. Indeed we do learn in chapter XVII, ‘Visit of Mutineers’, that sixteen Spaniards and Portuguese may have been adopted by Friday’s people­ – ­or at least cohabit with them in peace, but no details are given other than their poor standard of living. 19. To compare Irigaray’s understanding of ‘sharing’ the world, see my ‘Sharing the World: Luce Irigaray and the Hospitality of Difference’, in The Recent Work of Luce Irigaray, ed. Heidi Bostic, special issue of Esprit créateur, 52:3 (2012), 40–51. 20. I have presented parts of this material in a number of contexts and would like to thank the various audiences for their contributions: ‘The Imaginary Iroquois­– ­a Cannibal Host’ (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vancouver, March 2011); ‘The Iroquois in the City and the Enlightenment Imaginary’ (‘Home and Hospitality in the City’, London Group of Historical Geographers seminar series, May 2011); ‘The Community of Cannibals’ (keynote for ‘Visions of the “Coming Community”’, London, July 2011); ‘Intercultural Interactions and Translating Cultures­– t­he Savage’ (CAS Launch, Nottingham, October 2012); ‘Man and Sauvage’ (panel organised by Andreas Motsch, Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Edmonton, Alberta, October 2012). About a third of my Enlightenment Hospitality focuses on European travellers to the New World (in particular Canada), and the way in which they, and those who read about them, write about the indigenous peoples of the New World both as exemplary hosts and also as cannibals. The work in this chapter takes the argument a stage further. 21. See, for example, Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, e.g. chapter 6, ‘The Old World Embraces the New’, which discusses sixteenth-­century theories of sovereignty, and the range of positions that could be adopted with respect to Amerindians, and nevertheless end up with a route by which Europeans are justified in taking land. She points to the particular role of Roman Catholicism and the need to convert heathens, 237

Derrida and Other Animals including sometimes comparisons of natives with animals, or the sense that land was ranged but not farmed as God intended. 22. Derrida quotes a passage from Rousseau’s Emile which claims that eating large quantities of meat makes savages cruel so that ‘They go to war as they go to the hunt, and treat men like bears’ (Beast 1, 22; Bête 1, 45). 23. La Fontaine, Discours à Madame de la Sablière (Sur l’âme des animaux), ed. H. Busson and F. Gohin (Geneva: Droz, 1967). My thanks to Stephen Bamforth for directing me to this text. 24. See Gordon Mitchell Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) on Enlightenment interest in beavers, for instance Charlevoix on trade in beaver skins and on beavers as colonies­– ­relative to Amerindians, e.g. 148, 153, 154, 156, 218–19, 221, 222, 225, 228–9, 230, 231–2, 236–9. 25. Nicolas Denys, Description géographique et historique des costes de l’Amérique septentrionale; avec l’Histoire naturelle du Païs (Paris: C. Barbin, 1672). See Busson and Gohin, Introduction to La Fontaine, Discours à Madame de la Sablière, 28. 26. Of course many texts show how indigenous people become infected by the European lust for gold. Cixous makes reference to this in her ‘shipwreck film’ play co-produced with the Théâtre du Soleil, Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir: (aurores) (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 2010), 140–1, 143, in a section inspired by Jules and Michel Verne’s Les Naufragés du Jonathan. En Magellanie (Paris: Collection Hetzel, 1909)­– ­set on a desert island (L’Isle Hoste). Thanks to Martina Williams for drawing my attention to the Robinson Crusoe link to Cixous’s writing here, and to Tim Unwin for spelling out the very complex genealogy of the Verne novel (which we assume Cixous’s 1914 film-making protagonists would have read), produced posthumously and significantly altered by his son. Today Jules Verne’s original text is available: En Magellanie, ed. Olivier Dumas (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) as well as the 1909 version. 27. See www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net for English translation. There is also a translation of the Discours à Madame de la Sablière in Selected Fables, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 144–57. 28. It is important to note Plato’s fondness for dogs; in the Republic (283) he makes the suggestion, which is usually read as whimsical, that dogs and horses are more free in a democracy. Also Guardians are described as well-bred watch-dogs­– f­riendly and welcoming to anyone they know, but fearless and spirited to strangers. 29. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank C. Shuffelton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999 [1785]). Jefferson (then Governor of Virginia) responds to twenty-two questions drawn up 238

The Savage by François Marbois, secretary of the French legation to the US, who had distributed the questionnaire in Philadelphia (wanting replies from each of the thirteen states) (Introduction, vii). It was passed on to Jefferson by Joseph Jones (a member of the Virginia congressional delegation) who knew that Jefferson would be capable of answering historical, political, scientific and ethnographic questions. It was first published in France in 1785 in a restricted circulation edition­– ­just 200 copies­– ­but then Abbé André Morellet translates it and publishes it more widely as Observations sur la Virginie (Paris: Barrois aîné, 1786). Jefferson (unhappy with the translation even though he had authorised it to prevent a pirate version) authorises a new English edition later in 1787 (London: John Stockwell). Thanks to Matthew Pethers for discussing Jefferson and other American Enlightenment texts with me. 30. See for example the current furore over the work of the maverick anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968); Noble savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes­– ­The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). Other anthropologists argue that the Yanomami of Brazil live mostly peacefully, and that representing them as bloodthirsty savages feeds the powerful ideology that supports governments who would deny them their land and cultural rights. 31. This could be compared to animal deities in hunter-gatherer communities in other periods and places although such comparative ethnography has inevitably conjectural elements. The very use of the term ‘deity’ brings its own baggage and thus forecloses certain possibilities in terms of different kinds of organisation of experience and of the world. 32. David Murray’s work explores how such material on animals and religious belief, including zoolatry, fed into the debates over what constituted man as opposed to animals. Murray’s particular focus includes comparitivism and models of history in these texts, encompassing the way in which native people were represented both in the traditional Bible-based view of history, and in new versions of history stressing human progress. The eighteenth-century interest in origins­– w ­ hether of language, religion or races­– ­and the method of explanation based on tracing something to its origin, was challenged by indigenous peoples. One important area is natural religion, and the new idea of a ‘natural history’ of religion. Comparative works bringing together antiquity and modern primitives (such as Lafitau or Charlevoix) merit further study for the ways in which they use first-hand accounts of sauvages. The very nature of this comparativist approach also points to ways in which antiquity itself was seen­– ­shifting from a highpoint, from which man has declined or to which ‘we’ have cyclically returned, to a 239

Derrida and Other Animals point from which we progress. This relates to the changing significance of ruins in these texts, and particularly the fascination with ancient mounds as indications of an American antiquity (e.g. Chateaubriand). Americans’ concern with these mounds may have been mainly a form of national legitimation, the creating of a history, but it plays into broader Enlightenment concerns. A parallel enterprise was the concern with the origin of languages, and here again first-hand accounts, whether vocabularies picked up by travellers or detailed study of linguistic structures, were used to develop fundamental theories about human capacities and the extent of these capacities across races. 33. Jean-Henri Maubert de Gouvest, Les Lettres iroquoises, ed. Enea Balmas (Paris: Nizet; Milan: Viscontea, 1962 (1752)), 147–8. Scholarly consensus has made this defrocked priest the author of this anonymous epistolary novel. 34. Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’, in Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. J. Barzun and R. H. Bowen (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), 177–228; Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Pensées philosophiques, Lettres sur les aveugles, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Flammarion, 1972). 35. While even early scholars (Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Droz, 1934) or Geoffroy Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature 1700–1720 (Paris: Champion, 1922)) laid the groundwork for study of French Enlightenment representations of the Americas this often focused on exoticism. 36. See Animals in the Eighteenth Century, special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Glynis Ridley, 33:4 (2010), for a number of articles which are relevant to these questions. Paula Young Lee’s ‘The Curious Affair of Monsieur Martin the Bear’ (615–29) details a case of a man-eating, seen as cannibal, bear (Martin Brown) in the Jardin des Plantes in 1820. The three bears in the Paris menagerie, brown, black and white, were related to types of human being. 37. Baron de Lahontan, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Réal Ouellet (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1990 [1702–3]). 38. American Enlightenment writings, around the settler rebellion against the colonial master, do also cover another range of possibilities, including use of the Iroquois confederation as a political model. 39. I should just like to note the way in which Derrida typically introduces the dolphin­– w ­ hile his main interest is the anthropomorphic fabular animal, he pauses to consider briefly the reality of the life of dolphins today, and also notes the history of the title ‘Dauphin’ in France­– ­which, he suggests, is a totemic one (thus bringing the sovereign closer to that other figure outside the law, the savage). La Fontaine’s Fables are dedicated to the Dauphin. 240

The Savage 40. Elizabeth de Fontenay, ‘Un Rameau d’or pour traduire les bêtes’, Inaesthetics 2: Animality (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2011), 10–37 (15–16). 41. Derrida chooses to cite Robinson Crusoe from the edition introduced by Virginia Woolf (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 42. This is a fear of suffocation that he shares with Rousseau­– s­ ee Sarah Kofman, Le respect des femmes (Kant et Rousseau) (Paris: Galilée, 1982). 43. There are many other references throughout the seminars to consumption and burial; for instance Beast 2, 160ff; Bête 2, 232ff. (inhumation of bodies rather than incineration) or Beast 2, 232–3; Bête 2, 324–5 (Friday burying bodies of savages). It would be interesting to bring in Tournier here; see Martin Calder, Encounters with the Other: A Journey to the Limits of Language through Works by Rousseau, Defoe, Prevost and Graffigny (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003). Derrida references Tournier only via Deleuze. 44. Unca Eliza Winkfield, The Female American, ed. Michelle Burnham (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001 (1767)). There are a vast number of different versions, parodies, or adaptations of Robinson Crusoe. See Markman Ellis, ‘Crusoe, Cannibalism and Empire’, in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), 45–61, on the Robinsonade elements in The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (London: William Strahan and Thomas Cadell, 1778)­– ­in particular accounts of cannibalism that also respond to the 1770s controversies around Captain Cook’s journeys in the Pacific. See C. M. Owen, The Female Crusoe: Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010) for examples of female castaway narratives­– ­there were more than twenty-five in the eighteenth century alone. Derrida notes that it is important that the original Robinson Crusoe is specifically about a man, and not a woman, on an island (Beast 2, 2; Bête 2, 22). 45. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) worked for a time with Buffon at the Jardin des Plantes. He formulated early evolutionary theory through observing changes in molluscs in the Paris basin and speculating that organisms increase in complexity over time via adaptation to their environment (through the use­/disuse of characteristics) plus soft inheritance (pre-Darwinian natural selection theory of evolution). His theories appeared to be ruled out by the discovery of DNA, but are now controversially receiving more interest in terms of what is called epigenetics. Crèvecoeur is a strong environmental determinist­– ­within America or anywhere else, for example in the Hebrides; see Letters from an American Farmer, 74–5. 46. In Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité too man is not originally composed of different species, rather men are made 241

Derrida and Other Animals ­ifferent by different environments. Changes over time could be d reversed. 47. Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1797). Jefferson is a major interlocutor for Barton, and dedicatee of the volume (iiiff.). However, he considers that Jefferson’s argument that there are many distinct Native American languages erroneous; Barton considers that there are two main groups and even these are not radically different. 48. For an example of lack of beards and epilation linked to bestiality, see for example Tomas Ortiz, speaking to the Council of the Indies on Amerindians in 1525, cited by Levi-Strauss: ‘They eat human flesh and they’ve no notion of justice; they go about naked and eat spiders and worms and lice, all raw .­ . . They’ve no beard, and if one of them happens to start one he makes haste to pull it out hair by hair’ (Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), 80). See Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, 32, 78–80, on travellers’ and missionaries’ protestations that Amerindians are not hairy in an attempt to dispel the myth based, she argues, on link to folklore of Wild Man of the Woods, and accounts from Pliny onwards of anthropoid apes. 49. Skin or hair colour or hair type is less of a clear distinguishing mark between Mediterranean Europeans and native Caribbeans­– C ­ rusoe is clear that Friday has no black African features from his first description of him (Robinson Crusoe, 208–9). 50. Jean Pestre, ‘Canadians, Philosophy of the’, The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer (Ann Arbor: MPublishing, //­hdl.handle.net­ /2027­ / University of Michigan Library, 2003), http:­ spo.did2222.0000.141. ‘Canadiens, philosophie des’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, II: 581–2. See Walter E. Rex, ‘The Philosophical Articles by Abbé Pestré in Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 7 (1978), 251–62, for more information on the mysterious Pestré. 51. See David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian– White Exchanges (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Murray gives some examples of early modern texts that argue against the dominant colonising (or mercantile) position, which depicts needy natives, contending that it is European traders who create lack for the Indians: ‘instead of adding something, such as education, Christianity, or civilization, the effect of contact is to reduce and create a need’ (25). The dominant portrayal of naked savages is then sometimes countered by accounts of savages reduced to nakedness because of their newly acquired lust for alcohol or other trade goods (first presented as gifts). 52. Typically Derrida raises in the essay the possibility of attentiveness 242

The Savage to sexual difference (for example The Animal That Therefore, 50; L’Animal que donc je suis, 76); however, he does not go into much detail on this question of the distinction in various historical contexts between our understanding of male and female nakedness or nudity. It might be argued that what was seen as the proud nakedness of warrior savages, or as the sign of bestial degeneracy, is distinct from the reception at the time of nudity and the female nude. 53. The cannibal­– ­as a man­– ­often roasts or boils human meat in the common iconography. Yet eating raw meat brings man closer to the cannibal. 54. John Long, Voyages of an Indian Interpreter and Trader (New York: Cosimo, 2007). See 7, 13–14, 28, 32, 39, 40 49, 54, 55, 56, 59, 63ff., 73, 77, 78–9, 85, 89, 90–1, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105 and 111–12 (mixed with laudanum to avert disaster), 117, 133, 147, 154, 157, 161, 164–6 (Indian bravery in face of English officer’s hypocrisy in flogging a man for drunkenness), 171, 177. 55. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, e.g. 47, 98–9. 56. Markman Ellis briefly rehearses elements of the debate relevant to Defoe in ‘Crusoe, Cannibalism and Empire’, in particular the issue that cannibalism is usually reported rather than seen­– ­first-hand visual evidence typically relates to ambiguous traces or theatrical demonstrations of cannibalism. 57. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is a desert island survival story with Robinson Crusoe and Rousseau as two of the various intertexts; the boys are much more peaceful when living off the abundant fruit. Hunting wild pigs is the route to the arbitrary appropriation of spectacular violence against other boys as legitimate. My thanks to Lily Fairless for memories of discussing this amongst other works. 58. See Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, Notes V and VIII, discussed in Chapter 2. 59. See the second part of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, 109ff.; Discours sur l’inégalité, 164ff. 60. See Robinson Crusoe, 291. The howling of wolves in the Pyrenees fills Crusoe with horror­– ­these are ‘ravenous creatures’ ‘pressed by hunger to seek for food’­– ­who have killed a great many sheep and horses and some people too. This could be compared with Encyclopédie accounts. 61. Of course status animals do exist long before the eighteenth century­ – i­ncluding pets, exotics, and deer parks­– ­the Romans are a good example. Sometimes interpretation of animal keeping in the past is too keen to emphasise the practical economic motives­– ­food or clothing­– ­while affection and­/or prestige as well as sacred rituals may have also been significant. 62. See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of 243

Derrida and Other Animals Chicago Press, 1988); J.-J. Rousseau: La Transparence et l’Obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 63. For Jefferson’s notes on native peoples see Notes on the State of Virginia, xxiiff., 61–8, 98–113, 142–3, 156, 183ff. (treaties), 207–16 (Iroquois, 214–16; funerary rites, 215–16), 267–8 (Letter to Chastellux). There is also a letter to John Adams, June 1812, who has asked about a book which would give an account of the traditions of the Indians, 280–4. Critique of Lafitau, 281, Adair, 281–2 and De Bry, 282. 64. Women are conspicuous by their absence in the novel­– ­Crusoe’s wife is dispatched so swiftly that we do not even know her name. However, the implicit message is that women and female animals are functional for propagating the species­– ­his wife produces three children, and, at the end of the novel, Crusoe will send women from Brazil, as well as pregnant cows, sheep and hogs to his colony with an increase in the population of his island as his goal (Robinson Crusoe, 299). For an analysis of the (lack of) women in Robinson Crusoe, see Derrida, Beast 2, 54–6; Bête 2, 91–4. 65. R. John Williams, ‘Naked Creatures: Robinson Crusoe: The Beast and The Sovereign’, Comparative Critical Studies, 2:3 (2005), 337–48 (339). Williams suggests that the animalisation of the ethnic other begins with Crusoe’s early adventures with Xury when Crusoe shoots first a sleeping lion and then two other ‘mighty creatures’ (Robinson Crusoe, 49–52). Williams claims that Defoe’s ambiguous vocabulary which could refer either to humans or to animals­– ­notably the use of ‘he’, ‘them’ and ‘creature’­– ­means that first Xury, then the Africans watching the ‘ravenous creatures’, could at least grammatically be confused with the beasts (‘Naked Creatures’, 339–42). This seems broadly right to me, although the case is perhaps somewhat over-stated­– f­or example in pointing out that Defoe refers to the lion’s leg or head rather than paw or snout as these are not synonymous. Shooting the lion in the leg clearly has a more dramatic effect (making him fall over) than shooting him in the paw. 66. Robinson Crusoe’s parrot, Poll, says his own name (Robinson Crusoe, 131), Robinson’s name, and a lament (Robinson Crusoe, 152). 67. For Defoe and colonialism, see Dennis Todd, Defoe’s America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); this includes a chapter on ‘mastering the savage’ in Robinson Crusoe, and suggests that the depiction of cannibalism (as something both natural and unnatural), of Crusoe’s disgusted reaction to it, and of his spiritual journey on the island, is key to the colonial project in the New World as inter alia ‘overcoming the wilderness’. 68. This could be contrasted with Wittgenstein’s hypothesis that if lions could speak we would not understand them. See Fontenay, ‘Un Rameau d’or’. 244

The Savage 69. Derrida comments on Heidegger’s use of the term Walten and related nouns and verbs­– ­to express power, an excess of sovereignty to the point where it is not sovereignty (Beast 2, 278ff.; Bête 2, 382ff). Yet is not sovereignty always excessive? 70. See, for example, Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 15–18 (L’Animal que donc je suis, 33–7). 71. See Samuel Champlain, Voyages et découvertes faites en la nouvelle France, depuis l’année 1615 jusques à la fin de l’année 1618 (Paris: C. Collet, 1619); the map was then published in Pierre Duval’s 1653 edition of his Voyage (first edition Paris, 1619). 72. For an account of Indian and Inuit society and their relationship to land in twentieth-century British Columbia, and how it might differ from that of white Canadians, see Hugh Brody’s anthropological study, Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier (New York: Pantheon, 1982); thanks to David Murray for this reference. This is an area where industrial development and oil pipelines are an ongoing threat to traditional land use. I should note the hospitality of the Reserve that was extended to Brody for the eighteen months of his research. 73. Theories of post-modernity tend to emphasise our mobility­– i­ n fact this needs careful glossing: for instance, no doubt there has been a significant democratisation in leisure travel in significant parts of the globe, however, we should not underestimate either the displacements of the past or the exclusion of major sections of the world’s population, even the first world’s population, from these post-modern developments. 74. See Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan, expanded edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 75. Referring to First Canadians or Americans, for example, is sometimes said to be the only acceptable way of referring to the indigenous peoples of Canada or the United States, yet where do the names Canada or America come from, and what moment do they date from? And did those national boundaries have any meaning to the Iroquois for example­– ­or should I say the Five Nations, or should I say the Haudenosaunee? But perhaps the term First Canadian, say, has a real and­/or a strategic meaning today in placing those designated by it. Any name carries a history of translation, sometimes a story of violence, sometimes a story of love­– t­ he often frustrating struggle I may have in finding the right words may be a salutary reminder of these complex pasts, and sometimes it may be good not to get fixed on one expression, but to be forced into the mobility of constantly reinventing, retranslating with the changing context I am in. 76. See Joseph-François Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, 2 vols (Paris: Saugrain l’aîné, 245

Derrida and Other Animals 1724). One set of juxtaposed images is described by Lafitau as showing Huron and Iroquois, two Algonquin, two Eskimo, and then Greenland and Novaya Zemlya individuals. He borrowed images from a range of sources, but most of them are shaped by conventions from classical sculpture. Sometimes they are from John White who was more accurate and actually drew and painted from life. His material formed the basis of De Bry’s work, altered on the way. These combinations are also reminiscent of the way the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford is organised, putting together all examples of, for instance, archery, or smoking, across cultures. I am grateful to Dave Murray for these observations. 77. See the detective fiction by Sherman Alexie, for example, Indian Killer (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996). 78. Hillis Miller argues that, for any thinker, you need to understand their concept of Dasein (as human being) in relation to Mitsein (the mode of access each Dasein has to others) in order to comprehend their notion of community (see his ‘Derrida Enisled’). He claims (based on Derrida’s The Gift of Death as well as The Beast and the Sovereign 2, then unpublished) that Derrida sees each ego as inescapably solitary, and that this denial of intersubjectivity is fundamental to his concept of community as vulnerable to autoimmunity. 79. Karl Marx, ‘Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 83. 80. James Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, ed. and trans. from the Italian by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1:1 (1964), 1–25, 24. As quoted in Derrida, Beast 2, 16; Bête 2, 40. Joyce’s lecture was not published in his lifetime. 81. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 (1993)), 83. Other references tying Robinson Crusoe to colonialism can be found at xiii or 75. 82. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 48. 83. Louis James comments: ‘According to Crusoe’s male-orientated work ethic, sex, unless for procreation, was a distraction from man’s duty of making and doing: the sexual drive was too important to be wasted on women.’ See James, ‘Unwrapping Crusoe’, in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Spaas and Stimpson, 1–9 (4). In the same collection Ian A. Bell explores the absence of women in ‘Crusoe’s Women: Or, the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’, 28–44. 84. Verne’s Les Naufragés du Jonathan sees the new island community become united as one nation thanks to the war against the invading lupine savages, Patagonians, hunters from the mainland­– ­these are typical ‘bad savages’, war-like tribes who use torture and enslave their enemies (for example, Part 1, 16). They are clearly distinguished from the ‘good savages’, the Fuégiens who are peaceable and egalitarian 246

The Savage fisherfolk­– ­even if very clearly inferior to Europeans and destined to disappear­– ­and who are frequently compared to dogs both for their positive qualities (canine loyalty) and to mark their poverty of mind and of existence in general. However, it is lawless Europeans descended into savagery who are the greatest threat (especially when they can infect the community with their lupine behaviour) and for whom the greatest punishment is reserved­– a­ massacre. These prospectors are described with wolves’ eyes, ‘des yeux de loups’, in ‘Une Journée’ (Les Naufragés du Jonathan, Part 3, 440). 85. There is a more or less obsolete variant commonty­– u ­ sed in the sixteenth century for ‘community’ and for ‘land held in common’, and the etymologies for both lead us back to sources in Middle English or French (and before that in Latin) related to common (commune, communa, communia). 86. Verne’s Les Naufragés du Jonathan is a bitter diatribe against the dream of communism or socialism as he sees it, and Cixous’s play dramatises quickly the falling out between adherents of different forms of utopian or socialist dogma (for example, Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir, 123, 128, 130, 131). 87. However, community as we use it today does not tend to imply common ownership (we save that for the more ambiguous microcommunity, the commune), but usually implies either a common location (the village community) or the sharing of some features or behaviours beyond kinship, whether ethnic, religious, or other beliefs or practices (the Jewish community, the Muslim community, the black community, the gay community, the community of medics or runners even). The internet has of course greatly facilitated communities which are independent of geographical location­– a­ lthough one can certainly refer to, say, a community of scholars in much earlier periods even if communication was at a much slower pace. A community which exists because of a common physical location (often assumed to be rural, but urban communities are possible too) may appear to escape commonality of ideology or ritual, and to embrace difference, but I would argue that there is normally a focus on shared values even if the core values are tolerance and diversity (typically understood in that case as a series of more or less exotic surface differences that do not impact on a shared humanity, and indeed on belonging to the community). An ‘intentional community’ is the term used for a community of people who have chosen to form a community (usually living together) because of shared beliefs, rather than being considered as part of a community because of where they live or because of certain characteristics. Often these beliefs set that community apart from mainstream society, and relate to the sharing of resources, rejection of (external) hierarchies or to ecologically sustainable living. Yet choice or intention often becomes 247

Derrida and Other Animals blurred at least for a second generation and beyond. On a macro-level, Rousseau argues that one can assume consent from citizens so long as they continue to live in the (just) state­– ­but he is aware that this is a delicate question, and today the rhetorical ‘if they don’t like it here they should go elsewhere’ is typically a gesture of inhospitable rejection of alterity. 88. See Peter Hulme, ‘Introduction: The Cannibal Scene’, in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–38. 89. We might note that Amerindians should not be considered to have domesticated animals­– ­it makes them too close to home­– ­so the dog is designated a ‘chien sauvage’ (this is even the title of the anecdote) though it is clearly tame. 90. J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (Paris: Cuchet, 1784), 2 vols, vol. 1, 208–9. 91. There are many visual images which circulated in the Early Modern period depicting the imagined terrifying martyrdom of missionaries at the hands of the indigenous peoples, as well as written texts. Examples include illustrated works by François Du Creux or Matthias Tanner. When Crusoe sees a footprint he asks if it could be the devil­– ­or ‘some more dangerous creature­– v­ iz. that it must be some of the savages of the mainland opposite’ (Robinson Crusoe, 162), a supplement of devilishness; and he later uses the adjective ‘hellish’ to describe them (177). 92. Françoise de Graffigny, Lettres d’une Péruvienne, ed. Jonathan Mallinson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002 [1747]). 93. The Tahitian Aotourou is an interesting historical example. See Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (Paris: Cercle du Bibliophile, 1969) for the French opinion that Aotourou must be stupid like an animal (bête) because he does not speak their language as they do. 94. Sykes is citing Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000) and Paul Nadasdy, ‘The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality’, American Ethnologist, 34:1 (2007), 25–43. 95. See Derrida’s presentation of the seminar for his American audience in spring 2003, quoted in the Editorial Note (Beast 2, xiv; Bête 2, 14). 96. See Peggy Kamuf, ‘To Do Justice To “Rousseau,” Irreducibly’, Derrida’s Eighteenth Century, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Jody Greene, 40:3 (2007), 395–404, on Derrida’s provisional use of the notion of dream to qualify the state of writing­/being written while remaining blind or unconscious.

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5

The Slave1

Slavery is the establishment of a right founded on force which renders one man property to another man, who is absolute master of his life, his goods, and his liberty.2 L’esclavage est l’établissement d’un droit fondé sur la force, lequel droit rend un homme tellement propre à un autre homme, qu’il est le maître absolu de sa vie, de ses biens, et de sa liberté. (Jaucourt, ‘L’Esclavage’, L’Encyclopédie, V, 934) Slavery is not only a humiliating state for those who suffer it, but for humanity itself which is degraded by it [. . .] nothing in the world can render slavery legitimate. L’esclavage n’est pas seulement un état humiliant pour celui que le subit, mais pour l’humanité même qui est dégradée [. . .] rien au monde ne peut rendre l’esclavage légitime. (Jaucourt, ‘L’Esclavage’, L’Encyclopédie, V, 938)

In the last chapter, I focused on Derrida’s analysis of Robinson Crusoe, which shows the savage converted by homo economicus, as Marx sees him, into Crusoe’s man Friday, a servant. The wild wolf, established as a parallel to the savage in Defoe’s imagined battle of the Pyrenees, is translated into Crusoe’s much-loved domestic dog, both worker and companion. Lurking in the background to the servant is the man-thing (res) or living property, that is to say, the slave considered as equivalent to the master’s cattle (a term which shares a root with chattel and capital3) or other animals. Frederick Douglass, one of the most famous African-American abolitionists and a former slave, laments in his autobiography: ‘The dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!’4 referring explicitly to the bestialisation of men who are enslaved. If you wish to cite examples of comparisons or links between slaves and animals then there are millions of possibilities, accepting and approving as well as horrified, or analytical, throughout the very long historical and very wide geographical range of slavery. Two Enlightenment abolitionists and former slaves, living 249

Derrida and Other Animals in England at the time of writing their autobiographies, literalise the ‘metaphor’ in their description of their fear that their captors would eat them (as if they were animals) shortly after they have been kidnapped from their homes in present-day Ghana and Nigeria respectively. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano writes: ‘in the evening [we] came to a town, where I saw several white people, which made me afraid that they would eat me, according to our notion as children in the inland parts of the country’.5 Olaudah Equiano similarly recounts: ‘When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair?’6 Today is a period which is historically exceptional­– ­slavery may still exist but has been illegal throughout the world for about fifty years and has been very generally acknowledged as a crime against humanity for nearly a century. For thousands of years prior to that, slavery was widespread as a form of labour even though voices were raised against the practice in many communities. Throughout the long history of slavery the link to domesticated animals (or sometimes wild animals in different contexts) is very common. Derrida lines up the slave with the beast as a figure both uncannily like the sovereign in exteriority to the law, and structurally opposite to the sovereign master. Defoe was writing in the century which saw more slaves transported than ever before or since.7 However, the definition of the slave, as of domestication, is a more complex question than is sometimes acknowledged, even by post-colonial theorists, and there is a range of relationships that are at times accorded the name slavery. This is still an important question today, including where (as in the UK for example) there is a desire to legislate anew against modern ‘slavery’, even though slavery is already illegal throughout the world, the final nation to sign up to the abolition of slavery doing so in 1970.8 The Early Modern re-examination of the animalhuman boundary in natural science as well as philosophy, analysed in the previous chapter in relation to the ‘savage’ in the New World, accompanies a new framing of questions about liberty and slavery in the Enlightenment. Some historians and theorists have recently been exercised by what they consider to be the focus on figural slavery (for example, the situation of white American men before 1776, or white Frenchmen before 1789, or even white women) both by eighteenthcentury writers and by their readers today­– ­at the expense of consid250

The Slave eration or condemnation of the enslavement of black Africans in the New World. This chapter will analyse some of the debates over, and representations of, slavery and droit (right or law). The sovereign (the absolute monarch, say) is also a wolf, also outside the law in that he has the exceptional power to decide who is human and who is not, who has the right to live and who can be put to death like an animal. Aristotle’s view, an immensely influential line of argument through the centuries, with various religious variants, is that inferior (less rational) creatures may be considered to exist for the sake of more rational creatures. This applies both to non-human animals who live to provide human beings with sustenance of various kinds and to slaves from other ethnic groups­– i­nferior beings who serve the more rational Greeks. I shall turn from an initial consideration of more abstract questions and the metaphors of sovereignty to the reification of the animal and slave, then intimate and apparently reciprocal elements in some relations between domestic animals or slaves and their masters, and end with the terror underpinning both domus and state.

Sovereignty: masters defining slaves In a period in which slavery is legal, one might think that the definition of the term ‘slave’ could be left to the law yet this is not always straightforward.9 Modern discussions of slavery have gone on to raise even more questions about the borderline­– ­for example, whether different forms of bonded labour, or temporary enslavement, whether ‘freely’ entered into or not, count.10 Philosophical anti-slavery discussions in the Enlightenment focus on formal issues of freedom and ownership, while issues of the substantive treatment or happiness of slaves tend to be raised at least as often by apologists for slavery, who argue that their slaves have better lives than many of those who are paid (a pittance) for their work or who are unemployed and starving, or by ameliorationists who look to reform slavery to make it more humane.11 A similar pattern may be detected with respect to the rights of women or animals. Issues of substance (such as restricting freedom of movement) are critical in a different way today when the legal right of possession does not exist with respect to another human being, and therefore activists or legislators have to look to see whether power is being exercised over someone such as would be compatible with ownership.12 In my chosen texts of the Early Modern period it is critical to address the question of metaphor, animals and slaves as figures 251

Derrida and Other Animals standing for disenfranchised white men, alongside the consideration of literal, real slaves and real animals. Also crucial to bear in mind is the extent to which any comparison may involve a reshaping or even redefining of either or both terms; if it is said that men turned into slaves are like men turned into animals, this may significantly inflect the understanding of slavery based on an understanding of animality (or at least the power of ‘animal’ as a metaphor, which is not quite the same thing especially if it is a partly dead metaphor). But it might also inflect the understanding of animality, and could involve reconsidering the animal as the slave is reconsidered. However, when critics condemn the use of the metaphor of slavery to describe ‘disenfranchised white men’ readers are perhaps imagining these men as the rising bourgeoisie; the metaphor of slaves for the proletariat, as used by Crèvecoeur, while over-stating the case relative to the extreme excesses of some forms of slavery in the Americas, should not simply be dismissed except where used by apologists for slavery. The question of class is less fashionable today than sex or race, yet class analysis allows us to see the rich complexity of the various kinds of liberty: legal freedom, civil and moral freedom, economic freedom. Up to today many argue that men need to be governed­– ­even if by a benign leader (in the line of Plato or Rousseau). Verne’s 1909 shipwreck novel Les Naufragés de Jonathan is a ‘demonstration’ that a strong sovereign figure is a necessity against the idealistic anarchist rallying cry ‘ni foi ni loi’ (neither faith nor law), associated with the outlaw, or ‘ni dieu ni maître’ (neither god nor master) (Part 3, 243). The desert island tabula rasa is a classic experiment device, popular in the Enlightenment more broadly even than the direct Robinson Crusoe genealogy; Pierre Carlet de Marivaux’s play La Dispute (1744), for example, uses this scenario to resolve the much debated question whether it is men or women who are most likely to be unfaithful first. Verne and Defoe’s conclusion, from their own thought experiments, that strong government is essential entails that the authority of the benign patriarchal sovereign is underpinned by force. This is Derrida’s argument with respect to Kant; then La Fontaine’s lupine figure of the sovereign who has power over life and death raises the question at what point it would be appropriate to compare subjects to a continuum embraced by the term slave. While many today still claim the legacy of Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity, reason and progress, there has recently been another critical trend focusing on the shadows of 252

The Slave Enlightenment, including a significant feminist critique. Post-colonial historians and critics have highlighted the industrial-scale numbers of slaves transported to the New World in the eighteenth century, and so the coexistence of a massive increase in racialised slavery with the celebrated condemnation of the political enslavement of white men.13 Thus American settlers would claim freedom from English masters, or French revolutionaries would demand liberty, equality and fraternity, without apparently seeing any anomaly relative to the continuing dependence on slave labour in the colonies. (In fact English writers, with their own axe to grind, were quick to point out American hypocrisy at the time.14) Real slave labour is said to have been overlooked as an ancient practice or presented as an Oriental vice. I would argue (and have argued in my Enlightenment Hospitality) that this picture is too sweeping, and too ready to assume that twentieth- or even twenty-first-century readings represent an accurate picture of eighteenth-century writing; there is an element of identification or self-flattering guilt. Not all European references to slavery, I would suggest, were intended or read as figural without purchase on the realities of the plantations. Jaucourt’s articles in the Encyclopédie are a good example of a very pointed and specific attack on New World slavery in the middle of the eighteenth century.15 He contributed more than one quarter of this massive work, and was the most prolific of all contributors to the Encyclopédie; he should therefore be considered a major and representative figure of the French Enlightenment, even though he is far less well known today than Diderot, D’Alembert or Voltaire, and indeed often overlooked. His two articles ‘Slavery’ (‘Esclavage’) (V, 934–9) and ‘Slave’ (‘Esclave’) (V, 939–43) make an unusually long diptych at nine pages. ‘Slavery’ begins by taking a measured tone, focusing mostly on classical slavery and on circumstantial slavery­– ­those captured in war­– ­ignoring any of the ideological justifications that rest on the natural inferiority of slaves, and simply asserting the natural equality of all men. Jaucourt points to better (such as Athenian) and worse (such as Spartan) systems of laws and ways of managing slaves. However, he then suggests that Christianity was a progressive advance on barbarism in more or less abolishing slavery in Europe by the fifteenth century­– ­with an anti-clerical hint that Christianity (more precisely, Roman Catholicism) was not in a great hurry. This historical trajectory clears his path for absolute condemnation of modern colonial slavery in the New World­– a­ nd then a philosophical argument (with reference to Charles-Louis de 253

Derrida and Other Animals Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois in particular) to show categorically that there can never be any justification for slavery­– ­whether it results from war, sale, birth into slavery or ethnic or religious group (such as ‘barbares’ or heathens), and that slavery in oriental despotic states may be understandable in context but still has no philosophical justification. The Code noir, or legislative framework for slave-owning in French territories, makes frequent reference to the importance of bringing slaves up in the Roman Catholic faith. However, Jaucourt demonstrates that there can be no justification for slavery under any circumstances, including the need to convert the heathen to Christianity; he writes: ‘It was however this manner of thinking that encouraged the destroyers of America in their crimes; and that is not the only time that religion has been utilised against its own maxims, which teach us that the status of fellow man applies universally’ (‘Ce fut pourtant cette manière de penser qui encouragea les destructeurs de l’Amérique dans leurs crimes; et ce n’est pas la seule fois que l’on se soit servi de la religion contre ses propres maximes qui nous apprennent que la qualité de prochain s’étend sur tout l’univers’) (V, 938).16 Jaucourt continues that anyone who suggests that real slavery in the Americas is no worse than (figural) slavery in Europe has obviously had no experience of slavery.17 Jaucourt’s term le prochain, which he extends throughout the universe (‘la qualité de prochain s’étend sur tout l’univers’), is here translated as ‘fellow man’ (my italics); sometimes it can be rendered as ‘neighbour’ in religious phrases such as ‘love thy neighbour’. Here Jaucourt is hovering between a typically Enlightenment secularisation of religious concepts (such as fraternity, which can be translated from a religious order into a revolutionary relationship), and the strategy of using religious maxims against religion, as Voltaire was fond of doing. The noun prochain (which also functions as an adjective meaning next or imminent) is linked etymologically to the more recent adjective proche that derives from it, which means near, close (in space or time) or similar. Le prochain is a key term for Derrida­ – ­who persistently asks what purchase it has, and who or what is included or excluded. He comments, for instance, in dialogue with Nancy, that for Levinas: ‘the subject is responsible for the other before being responsible for himself as “me.” This responsibility to the other, for the other, comes to him, for example (but this is not just one example among others) in the “Thou shalt not kill.” Thou shalt not kill thy neighbour’ (‘Eating Well’, 279) (‘Le sujet est respon254

The Slave sable de l’autre avant de l’être de lui-même comme “moi”. Cette responsabilité de l’autre, pour l’autre, lui advient par exemple (mais ce n’est pas un exemple parmi d’autres) dans le “Tu ne tueras point”. Tu ne tueras point ton prochain’ (‘Bien Manger’, 293)). This prohibition on murder leads, Derrida suggests, to a chain of consequences starting with: do not make your prochain suffer, ‘thou shalt not eat him, not even a little bit, and so forth. The other, the neighbor, the friend’ (‘tu ne le mangeras pas, pas même un petit peu, etc. L’autre, le prochain, l’ami’). I might add to the list of consequences, to clarify: thou shalt not enslave, not consign to the status of property rather than man. Thou shalt not kill is addressed to, and supposes ‘him’ (another person): ‘It is destined to the very thing that it institutes, the other as man. It is by him that the subject is first of all held hostage’ (‘Eating Well’, 279) (‘Il se destine à cela même qu’il institue, l’autre comme homme. C’est de lui que le sujet est d’abord l’otage’ (‘Bien Manger’, 293)). Derrida points out that the Judeo-Christian tradition, including Levinas, never understood this as: ‘ “Thou shalt not put to death the living in general.” It has become meaningful in religious cultures for which carnivorous sacrifice is essential, as being-flesh.’ (‘Eating Well’, 279) (‘“tu ne mettras pas à mort le vivant en général.” Il a pris sens dans des cultures religieuses pour lesquelles le sacrifice carnivore est essentiel, comme l’être-chair.’ (‘Bien Manger’, 293)).18 In other words, it never encompassed animals. Jaucourt’s radical expansion of le prochain to embrace all slaves, including those in the Americas (and thus importantly including Haiti, where forty years later some of the leaders of the slave revolution echo the language of the philosophes), indeed does refer to ‘fellow man’ and still does not include any sense that our fellow might be a beast. While Crèvecoeur loves his cattle he also, a founder of American identity, sells, and eats, their flesh.19 And, two centuries later, while Heidegger and Levinas upset a certain traditional humanism they are still deeply humanistic, according to Derrida, because they do not sacrifice sacrifice: ‘The subject (in Levinas’s sense) and the Dasein are “men” in a world where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on human life, on the neighbor’s life, on the other’s life as Dasein’ (‘Eating Well’, 279) (‘Le sujet (au sens de Lévinas) et le Dasein sont des “hommes” dans un monde où le sacrifice est possible et ou il n’est pas interdit d’attenter à la vie en général, seulement à la vie de l’homme, de l’autre prochain, de l’autre comme Dasein’ (‘Bien Manger’, 294)). Yet Derrida also 255

Derrida and Other Animals suggests that the distinction between fellow man and animals facilitates the placing of some human beings on the side of ‘the animal’. The other side of the slave is the master, and so the question of slavery functioning as a metaphor implies asking the same about mastery. What does ‘sovereign’ mean? On the one hand there is the political organisation of the collectivity: Derrida brings Louis XIV observing the ‘ceremony’ of an elephant dissection­– ­the absolute monarch par excellence, and soon to be author of the 1685 Code noir, gazing upon the most enormous dead beast as violence is done to its body­– ­together with Louis XVI, whose ‘crowned’ head is cut off by the sovereign people (Beast 1, 250–3, 273–5; Bête 1, 337–40, 366–9). The sovereign by definition has the exceptional right over life and death.20 Sovereignty could also be considered from the perspective of the people governed by a foreign power: Americans ruled by the British crown (Crèvecoeur thanks Lafayette as soldier and citizen in his preface to the French version of Lettres d’un cultivateur); France occupied by Germany (in Second World War editions of Letters from an American Farmer it is America which is helping France against a foreign power);21 Chile and Argentina expanding into Patagonia and the Magellan straits, ‘Magellania’ (shown by Verne in Les Naufragés du Jonathan, and re-staged by Cixous who compares different imperial powers in the nineteenth century from the perspective of the First World War in Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir). On the other hand there is inter-individual exploitation­– ­the patriarch, master of the domus or oikos, has power over ‘his’ animals, slaves, servants, children and women­– ­but there is a legal framework that permits this, linking the dominion of individuals to the question of the collectivity. Finally there is the question of species­– ­man as the species that has free-will, self-mastery, and thus mastery over others, animals, slaves to instinct and thus able to be enslaved or domesticated. This features on both the literal and the metaphorical level. For Derrida ‘the passage of God in this landscape’ has to be tracked­– i­t is part of what he terms the genelycology: the sovereign, the wolf, man, God, the wolf-man, God-man, God-wolf, God-the-father-the wolf or grandmother-wolf, etc. (Beast 1, 58; Bête 1, 92). Men may be considered as gods or animals, thus moving up or down the great chain of being, in different contexts according to Montaigne or Hobbes. Men as animals then might mean wild wolves, divinely free, hellishly ferocious, or domestic cattle, fodder for the sovereign, Rousseau suggests. Men are presented as wolves 256

The Slave in the state of nature, remembering that Hobbes declares that the natural independence or ‘libertas’ of Native Americans means violence, a war of all against all, in order that his readers should accept their chains, agree to be domesticated, turned into cattle, sheep so that the ruler, often divinely ordained, may ‘eat’ them. This is the peace of the Cyclops’ cave in Ulysses’ story, according to Rousseau, where men and sheep alike wait to be devoured by their master de facto or de iure. I shall note briefly that the Cyclops, Polyphemos (demi-God, cannibal King, savage), loves his sheep­– i­ntimacy and affection do not exclude enslavement or exploitation and vice versa (a point I shall return to later). Crèvecoeur prides himself in extending generous hospitality to animals as if to men, and writes of his pleasure ‘sweetened with the most rational satisfaction’ (Letters from an American Farmer, 30) in feeding his cattle, amusing himself by observing them at the same time: I study their various inclinations, and the different effects of their passions, which are exactly the same as among men. The law is to us precisely what I am in my barn yard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak. Conscious of superiority they always strive to encroach on their neighbours [. . .] Some I chide; others, unmindful of my admonitions receive some blows. Could victuals thus be given to men, without the assistance of any language, I am sure that they would not behave better to one another, nor more philosophically, than my cattle do. [. . .] Thus, by superior knowledge, I govern all my cattle as wise men are obliged to govern fools and the ignorant. (Letters from an American Farmer, 30–1)

This is a complex passage with Farmer James shown as a rational, scientific, philosophical student of behaviour­– ­recalling Derrida’s example of the dissection of the elephant apparently to further knowledge­– a­ nd then, moreover, as sovereign relative to his animals. The cows are represented as like men (or indeed ‘wolves’) in following the law of the strongest until the patriarch disciplines them and makes them follow his law. This discipline is presented in benign terms­– e­stablishing equality and justice­– y­ et earlier in the same letter the Farmer had mentioned en passant that ‘every year I kill from 1500 to 2000 weight of pork, 1200 of beef’ (25–6)­– ­the Gallic vocabulary (adopted from the noble Normans) always blocking the sensitive Anglophone from the immediate link to pig or cow, and the quantity by weight disguising any sense of the individual animal. At this point, I might note, the law-abiding Crèvecoeur supports British sovereignty over America. 257

Derrida and Other Animals Derrida points to Hobbes’s assertion in Leviathan that a State is ‘instituted’ (like an artificial animal, a human imitation of God’s creation) by a common agreement that can only be made between men (Beast 1, 46–7; Bête 1, 76–8), and to his exclusion of animals and gods from covenants (Beast 1, 49–57; Bête 1, 81–91). It is of course particularly critical in Hobbes’s day, with the fear of civil war, to disallow the possibility that a citizen could disobey the law on the grounds of his covenant with God, and may still have echoes today such as in the War on Terror (with terrorists, and also States, claiming sanction from religious beliefs). Derrida notes that another anxiety lies behind this­– ­Hobbes’s word ‘covenant’ points to the Jews, a people who have a special covenant with God. Derrida underlines Hobbes’s passionate anger at the point when he accuses those who claim to have made a covenant with God of lying, calling them vile and unmanly (Leviathan, chapter 18, 230, my emphasis). Such rage is an emotion associated with the wolf in La Fontaine’s ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’; and Derrida alludes here to the rage expressed by the sovereign in pursuit of the rogue (state). Hobbes writes earlier in the work: To make covenant with brute beasts, is impossible; because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right; nor can translate any right to another: and without mutual acceptation, there is no covenant. To make covenant with God, is impossible, but by mediation of such as God speaketh to. (Leviathan, chapter 14, 197)

The immediate parallel can be noted, as Derrida does, with the ‘is impossible’. There is a caveat in the case of God for a covenant may be made with his lieutenants, but this of course returns us to the human. The question of the relation of the slave to the law is both critical and complex. To follow Derrida’s point about being outside the law: the slave, like the animal, is legally defined as a creature that cannot respond in law. Yet the definition of the slave by the law is crucial­– ­though much harder to pin down that one might imagine. It is an issue today as anti-slavery campaigners are not satisfied with the current state of international or national law as these relate to slavery, and certainly few successful prosecutions are brought, yet activists are divided as regards the exact boundaries of slavery. There are significant divides between those, the majority, who are concerned by the formal issue of a property relation, and those who 258

The Slave are more focused on the substance of treating a human as socially dead22 (even though the two are often intimately intertwined in the lived experience of enslavement). The legal definition of slavery in international law today is found at Article 1(1) of the 1926 Slavery Convention, which reads: ‘Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.’ Whichever focus, property or moral death, is adopted, the boundaries are very complex: for example, where families are concerned, in sex slavery, trafficking, or coercion by non-physical means. What is a property relation? What is the status of excommunication from humanity? The cases of workers who are locked in, brutally punished for attempts to escape, forced to work for no reward, sold on to others when required, and whose children inherit their status as forced workers, may seem straightforward instances of modern slavery, but there are many other less straightforward examples which may be illuminated by reference to the past­– ­and not only American plantation slavery I should add. Early Modern debates also often wished to restrict the definition of slave, excluding bonded labour for example. This may seem to narrow the field too much, yet too large a definition will catch so many relations in its net­– ­forms of domestic abuse in particular, which tend to be very controversial for many anti-slavery activists, and also many sweatshop workers­– ­leaving the specificity of slavery with much less strategic purchase than activists would wish. In the eighteenth century, where slavery is legal, laws related to slavery nevertheless varied very significantly by time and place, even between the American Southern states, different Caribbean islands, and French territories governed by the Code noir,23 never mind the Ottoman or Persian Empires or the various nations of Africa. In lands governed by those hailing from Europe, laws relating to reading and writing are interesting for the assumptions they betray about the humanity or otherwise of slaves who might in other respects be regarded as animals in that they can be sold, their sexuality controlled, family life prohibited, and their movement, ability to gather with others, own property, etc., severely restricted. Reading relates on the one hand to the Bible and submission to authority and thus to the justification, particularly for Protestant slavers, that they are saving souls, but, on the other hand, to possible independent thinking and rebellion, which is the greatest fear. Half of the Southern slave states prohibited reading and writing and half did not, but even that split varies according to the exact ­historical 259

Derrida and Other Animals moment as laws regularly changed, sometimes in response to an uprising. Subject slaves and free citizens: Rousseau, Plato, La Fontaine, Hobbes and the Social Contract Slaves and animals are persistent figures for men’s political subjection; this raises the question of the relationship between those deemed to be men and real slaves, animals or even women. In The Social Contract Rousseau wants to take man as he is, based on his understanding of man’s nature, as demonstrated in his Discourse on Inequality, and laws as they could be in a just state. He is writing against those who claim that man is naturally predatory, that the state of nature shows us that the law of the strongest means the war of all against all (man as a wolf to man). Derrida claims that The Social Contract is responding implicitly here to La Fontaine as well as explicitly to Grotius and Hobbes (Beast 1, 11–14; Bête 1, 31–4). Readers of Emile are aware of Rousseau’s engagement with the Fables, which he regards as totally unsuitable for children who will be seduced by the fiction (of talking animals) and fail to understand the truth (about human behaviour) as an adult would understand it (Rousseau, OC, IV, 351–7). Derrida suggests that the chapter ‘The Right of the Strongest’ (‘Du droit du plus fort’) in The Social Contract also refers back to La Fontaine’s ‘la raison du plus fort’ (literally ‘the reason of the strongest’, but more effectively translated as ‘might is right’)­– s­ ince Rousseau is indeed showing that the right of the strongest is a meaningless phrase. Rhetoric like that of La Fontaine’s wolf­/King, the reason of (might is) right, is not reason or right but tautology or fact. The Social Contract engages with a long tradition of attempts to define a just state, or to justify existing power-structures. Alongside La Fontaine and Hobbes, Plato’s Republic is an important intertext for Derrida to evoke, and more congenial for Rousseau. In Book 8 Socrates invokes the tyrant-wolf: How does the transformation of the people’s champion into a despot begin? You have heard of the legend they tell of the shrine of Lycaean Zeus in Arcadia: how one who tastes a single piece of human flesh mixed in with the flesh of the sacrificial victims is fated to be changed into a wolf. In the same way the people’s champion, finding himself in full control of the mob, may not scruple to shed a brother’s blood; dragging him before a tribunal with the usual unjust charges, he may foully murder 260

The Slave him, blotting out a man’s life and tasting kindred blood with unhallowed tongues and lips; he may send men to death or exile with hinted promises of debts to be cancelled and estates to be redistributed. Is it not thenceforth his inevitable fate either to be destroyed by his enemies or to seize absolute power and be transformed from a human being into a wolf?24

Plato’s thesis about the way in which absolute power (‘full control of the mob’) corrupts someone who was hitherto ‘the people’s champion’ is here phrased as the legendary turning of a man into a wolf. ‘Tasting’ human flesh and blood is like an infection or a drug that converts you into a (were)wolf, addicted to that diet. Derrida analyses a passage in the second chapter of the first book of The Social Contract, ‘The First Societies’ (‘Des premières sociétés’), as Rousseau’s opposition to a certain animalisation of the origins of the political in Grotius and Hobbes­– a­ n animalisation which reduces subjects to cattle (Beast 1, 11–14; Bête 1, 30–4). Rousseau like Plato turns to the case of the despot feeding off his subjects. He claims that both Grotius and Hobbes imply that the human race belongs to only about a hundred men: Behold then the human race divided into herds of cattle, each with its chief, who preserves it in order to devour it. ‘As a shepherd is of a nature superior to that of his flock, so too the shepherds of men, their chiefs, are of a nature superior to their peoples.’ (The Social Contract, 47)25 Ainsi voilà l’espèce humaine divisée en troupeaux de bétail, dont chacun a son chef, qui le garde pour le dévorer. Comme un pâtre est d’une nature supérieure à celle de son troupeau, les pasteurs d’hommes, qui sont leurs chefs, sont aussi d’une nature supérieure à celle de leurs peuples. (OC, III, 353)

This is Caligula’s reasoning as well as that of Hobbes and Grotius, says Rousseau (pointing to a notorious Roman sovereign, Romans being emblematically associated with wolves), which leads to the conclusion either that men are beasts or that kings are gods. In other words, there is a rationale for exploitation in that men and kings are performatively asserted to be radically different in kind. The sovereign regards the people as animals whom he keeps in order to devour them; the consumption of the people is not a later or contingent accident, Derrida notes, but the sovereign’s purpose. Equally, we might say with La Fontaine’s wolf in ‘The Companions of Ulysses’ that the shepherd’s (or man’s) purpose is primarily to devour his flock himself, and that is why he protects them from a(nother) wolf. In a 261

Derrida and Other Animals way this sovereign is even worse than Plato’s tyrant who has developed a taste for human flesh. Natural slaves and men who have been enslaved This leads me to the question of men who have been made slaves, which could be a contingent accident or could be because they are essentially slave-like; if the former then there is a second question: does the fact of having been enslaved make those men become slaves on the level of being rather than mere circumstance? This is a critical debate renewed at a number of historical conjunctures. If there are natural slaves then the slave trade is no more repugnant than the trade in animals. There may be ameliorationist arguments about treating these lesser beings more kindly, whether for spiritual reasons or pragmatic ones, but slavery as such is acceptable­– ­like eating meat­ – ­as indeed it has been through most of history in various parts of the world. The longstanding argument over natural slaves is not always a racial one: ‘slaves could be either social outsiders or “fallen” insiders, be gradually assimilated or vigorously excluded, making it difficult to generalize from the racially driven, highly exclusionary model that characterized Transatlantic slavery’ (Joel Quirk, ‘The Anti-Slavery Project’, 581).26 However, in the eighteenth century the vast numbers of Africans enslaved by those originally from Europe facilitated racist theorisation, rhetoric and popular beliefs, possibly fed, according to David Brion Davis, by medieval Arab stereotypes about ugly and stupid Zanj, fit only for hard unskilled labour.27 Hobbes’s De Cive is clear about masters’ rights over slaves and over animals or wives (On the Citizen, 102–5), and Rousseau is determined to challenge this in his Social Contract. This is important to his arguments about the just state, as citizens should be free. I would maintain that it also has an explicit purchase on slavery in the Americas although this has been questioned by some post-colonial theorists who would claim that Enlightenment philosophers, including Rousseau, use slavery only metaphorically to connote the disenfranchisement of white men. In this chapter, I shall take a sideways step with Derrida and question Rousseau’s use of a footnote reference to Plutarch’s treatise, which Rousseau elliptically names ‘That animals employ reason’ (‘Que les bêtes usent de la raison’). The question whether bêtes should be rendered by ‘beasts’ or ‘animals’ in the translation of Plutarch’s title here highlights a certain division­– ­bêtes is not as marked in French as ‘beasts’ is in English, but, perhaps importantly here, is less neutral 262

The Slave than ‘animals’. ‘The beast is not exactly the animal’ (Beast 1, 1) (‘La bête ce n’est pas exactement l’animal’ (Bête 1, 20)), as noted in Chapter 1.28 Rousseau’s reference to Plutarch apparently supports his argument, against Aristotle’s assertion that there are ‘natural slaves’. Rousseau claims that: ‘If there are slaves by nature, it is because slaves have been made against nature. The first slaves were made by force’ (The Social Contract, 47) (‘S’il y a donc des esclaves par nature, c’est parce qu’il y a eu des esclaves contre nature. La force a fait les premiers esclaves’ (Book I, Ch. 2)).29 But does the reference to Plutarch simply reinforce the point, and, if so, which point? What is the power of the if? The straightforward issue is whether or not some men are innate slaves, and Rousseau answers very clearly in the negative: innate liberty (free will, if you like) is definitional of humanity and thus inalienable. This of course returns us to the animal-human borderline. This decisive refusal to allow that some men are natural slaves is more radical in the Early Modern period than today.30 John Major (1469–1550, a Scottish Dominican theologian at the Sorbonne) comments of Amerindians: ‘those people live like animals ­. . . it is evident that some men are by nature free and others servile’ (quoted in Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, 129). Francisco de Vitoria (1480–1552, a Dominican at the University of Salamanca) agrees: savages are by nature slaves and ‘their food is not more pleasant and hardly better than that of beasts’ (quoted in The Myth of the Savage, 131). Aristotle has a key role in debates over despotism and slavery on account of his claim that some peoples are naturally more servile than others: Tame animals are by nature better than wild […] as between male and female the former is by nature superior and ruler, the latter inferior and subject. […] Wherever there is the same wide discrepancy between two sets of human beings as there is between mind and body or between man and beast, then the inferior of the two sets, those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them […] are slaves by nature. It is better for them, just as in the analogous cases mentioned, to be thus ruled and subject […] The use, too, of slaves hardly differs from that of domestic animals; from both we derive that which is essential for our bodily needs.31

This feeds, for example, into the work of Juan Ginés Sepúlveda in his debate with Bartolomé de Las Casas in the sixteenth century over the proper fate of the indigenous peoples of a territory ranging from Florida to Chile.32 263

Derrida and Other Animals While Cartesian philosophers maintain the break between men with souls and animals without that divine spark, Voltaire argues that animals are not simply machines. However, his openness towards animals is accompanied by a conviction that ‘man’ is not unified in a rather different sense from Derrida. Voltaire believes in polygeneticism, arguing that neither the African nor the Native American has the same origin as ‘nos peoples blancs’­– ­us white people.33 He writes in the same chapter (146) of the monumental Manners and Spirit of Nations (1756) that God has peopled each location as appropriate with different kinds of plants, animals and men, and when he describes elsewhere in the work the discovery of black men walking on all fours his implication is clear. Even where he concedes that in America there are some species of animals, such as snails and caterpillars, and ‘some races of men like our own’ (‘quelques races d’hommes semblables aux nôtres’) (Essai sur les moeurs, 385)­– t­he word ‘semblable’ may cover a multitude of sins with the emphasis on ‘similar but not the same’ rather than ‘like’. The choice of animal species for the comparison is no doubt not a neutral one. In Voltaire’s pithier Treatise on Metaphysics (Traité de Métaphysique (1734)), he imagines a visitor from Mars or maybe Jupiter (not in human form but with Voltaire’s own faculty of thinking and feeling) come down to South Africa (or ‘le pays de la cafrerie’), and looking for man.34 This rhetorical device is declared as liberating Voltaire from all his prejudices whether as a Frenchman or as a philosopher ­. . . The imaginary Martian says: ‘I see monkeys, elephants, negroes, who all seem to have some glimmering of imperfect reason. Both the one and the others have a language that I do not understand at all, and all their actions seem equally to be aimed towards a particular end’ (‘Je vois des singes, des éléphants, des nègres, qui semblent tous avoir quelque lueur d’une raison imparfaite. Les uns et les autres ont un langage que je n’entends point, et toutes leurs actions paraissent se rapporter également à une certaine fin’ (chapter 1, ‘Of the Different Species of Men’; ‘Des différentes espèces d’hommes’, Traité de Métaphysique, 3). At first sight the Martian would pick the elephant as ‘the reasonable animal’ or the animal endowed with reason (‘l’animal raisonnable’). However, as he does a practical experiment, observing young animals as they grow up, he realises that the negro animals (‘les animaux nègres’) do become slightly superior (‘un petit degré de supériorité’) to the others, although not to the level of a European­– ­for man is decidedly not one family as priests would claim.35 In chapter 5 of the same work, ‘If 264

The Slave Man has a Soul, and What That Could Be’ (‘Si l’homme a une âme, et ce que ce peut être’), again an imaginary Martian lands in Africa and is ‘surrounded by negroes, by Hottentots and by other animals’ (‘entouré de nègres, de hottentots et d’autres animaux’ (Traité de Métaphysique, 32, my emphasis)). When Voltaire discusses animal languages he claims that negroes are superior but of the same kind. Finally the Martian finds what he has been looking for: ‘At last I see men who seem to me to be as superior to the negroes as negroes are to monkeys and as monkeys are to oysters’ (‘Enfin je vois des hommes qui me paraissent supérieurs à ces nègres, comme ces nègres le sont aux singes, et comme les singes le sont aux huitres’ (32)). Having emphasised the differences­– ­in fact a hierarchy­– ­between the races of men (and between different species of animals), he will also allocate relative blame for slavery in a way that lets Europeans off the hook in his later Manners and Spirit of Nations: We only buy household slaves from negroes; we are reproached for this kind of traffic, but the people who make a trade of selling their children are certainly more blameable than those who purchase them, and this commerce is a proof of our superiority; he who voluntarily subjects himself to a master was born to have one. Nous n’achetons des esclaves domestiques que chez les nègres. On nous reproche ce commerce: un peuple qui trafique de ses enfants est encore plus condamnable que l’acheteur; ce négoce démontre notre supériorité; celui qui se donne un maître était né pour en avoir. (Essai sur les Moeurs, chapter 197, 177–8)

Voltaire combines his points in a reference to taking and using ‘negro slaves who did not flee, a kind [or species] of animal belonging to the first who seizes hold of it’ (‘des esclaves nègres qui n’avaient pas fui, espèce d’animaux appartenant au premier qui s’en saisit’).36 Thus Voltaire, remembered as the opponent of tyranny and the apostle of tolerance, and someone who does point out the worst abuses of slavery, is particularly shifty with respect to racial slavery, using unsavoury kettle logic: Africans who sell slaves to Europeans are most to blame; those who agree to be slaves are naturally slaves; Africans are clearly inferior to Europeans.37 Voltaire is a financial beneficiary of the slave trade; a parallel could be made with the selfinterest of human carnivores that Peter Singer indicates is the greatest obstacle to change, and is therefore one of the reasons why he preaches vegetarianism rather than improving the welfare of animals raised for food (Animal Liberation, xii). 265

Derrida and Other Animals The more difficult issue is what happens to men who have been made slaves (or are born into slavery, which becomes increasingly the case in the Americas)­– ­whose natural independence, which is characteristic of the state of nature for people and for animals, has been alienated de facto. Natural independence (liberté naturelle) is not the same as innate liberty (liberté innée) which cannot be alienated. Rousseau is clear that the environment has a strong effect, whether it is the macro-environment of the state and society generally, or the micro-environment of individual circumstances. Political freedom (liberté civile), such as you would find in a just state, where the social pact involves alienating natural independence in exchange for political freedom, encourages individual self-mastery (liberté morale). What about the opposite­– ­political tyranny and the enslavement of individuals? The argument is often made in the period (even in Jaucourt’s articles, perhaps following Montesquieu) that Oriental despotism contributes to the environmental pressures rendering men slavish, passive and effeminate. Is there an analogy between men turned into slaves and the imagined men (Odysseus’s companions) turned into animals in Plutarch’s treatise? Rousseau’s argument appears to be that once you are successfully turned into a beast or a slave then you are (happy to be) a beast or a slave. The fact that the companions transformed into beasts do not want to be changed back into men seems to be used to show that slaves become slavish, and no longer want to be free; however, Plutarch is in fact showing that beasts are as virtuous (and rational) as men­– ­which Rousseau surely knows, and is anyway suggested in the title, reminding anyone like Rousseau who has already read the treatise.38 Homer’s story is straightforward: Odysseus’s sailors are turned by Circe into pigs, and all are presumed to want to be returned to human form. In Plutarch’s treatise, echoed by La Fontaine, however, the animals do not want to be changed back. Their spokesman, the pig Gryllus, demonstrates that, on the one hand, compared to men, animals are generally rational, sensible, brave and faithful to their partners, and that, on the other hand, they are not one homogeneous category; for instance, only some eat meat (and even these do so in order to live, while men eat meat for pleasure).39 In addition, according to Plutarch animals are magnanimous in battle, and cannot be vanquished or enslaved: They see the fight through to the bitter end and refuse to give in because they instinctively loathe defeat [. . .] Suppose humans trap or trick 266

The Slave animals into captivity: if the animals are mature, they choose to reject food, reject thirst and choose to bring about and embrace death rather than accept enslavement. (Essays, 387, as quoted in Derrida, Beast 1, 22) Ils fuient l’état de vaincus, ils endurent et résistent jusqu’à toute extrémité pour se maintenir invincibles [. . .] Quant aux animaux que les hommes surprennent par des pièges [. . .] ils rejettent, s’ils ont atteint l’âge parfait, toute nourriture et endurent la soif jusqu’à cette extrémité, d’aimer mieux se donner la mort plutôt que de vivre en servitude. (Trois traités, 130)40

The argument ends with the animals’ case made. Is Rousseau undercutting Plutarch’s radical message? For those tempted to think that the treatise uses a typical device, the talking animal, to criticise human conduct rather than analyse animals, I should note that Plutarch, like Rousseau, is an ethical vegetarian and a supporter of animal rights (Derrida, Beast 1, 22–3; Bête 1, 45). It is possible of course that Rousseau’s summary of the text reflects the rewriting in La Fontaine’s fable rather than the original. But this too is more complicated than it might seem at first sight. La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Companions of Ulysses’ was published in the Mercure Galant in 1690. Its opening two lines run: Dear prince, a special favourite of the skies, Pray let my incense from your altars rise. Prince, l’unique objet du soin des Immortels, Souffrez que mon encens parfume vos autels.

In other words the parallel is made between the young dedicatee (Le Duc de Bourgogne) and divine power in utterly obsequious terms which, while not uncommon in the period, are often parodied in La Fontaine’s animal fables. Its conclusion again flatters its dedicatee who will punish ‘these kind of people’ (those who wish on some level to remain in animal form, particularly wolves perhaps) with his hatred. The Duke has the power of his (future) position and that of his illustrious ancestors. Following Rousseau, the later reader might note that the ruling classes typically hate those who wish to be free. In the flattering conclusion La Fontaine says of the animals who no longer want to be men: ‘Ils étaient esclaves d’eux-mêmes’: the menanimals think they are liberated because they can follow their desires, but that makes them slaves to their passions. However, the careful reader might note that, while base appetite is mentioned in contrast to noble actions, one of the passions they can follow is that for liberty as such (‘la liberté’), which is then followed by the woods (‘les 267

Derrida and Other Animals bois’), an image of natural independence outside of society and the polis: Wild liberty was dear to all; To follow lawless appetite They counted their supreme delight. All banish’d from their thought and care The glorious praise of actions fair. Where passion led, they thought their course was free; Self-bound, their chains they could not see. La liberté, les bois, suivre leur appétit, C’était leurs délices suprêmes; Tous renonçaient au los des belles actions. Ils croyaient s’affranchir, suivant leurs passions; Ils étaient esclaves d’eux-mêmes.

In this fable La Fontaine’s wolf’s point had been that men are fundamentally no better than wolves, so the noble (belles) actions are a cover, ‘protecting’ from others those whom you are keeping in order to devour them yourself. In addition, Plutarch has argued, as Rousseau does, that these are healthy, rather than base, appetites that the animals follow. It is human beings in unfree societies who have degenerate appetites. If natural independence is alienated in favour of social fellowship and political freedom then a good exchange has taken place, but if society is one of metaphorical or literal masters and slaves then natural independence may be vastly preferable. What is presented as slavery to the self might be mastery of the self. The masculine animals that feature in La Fontaine’s Fable are not, I might note, domesticated animals­– ­although Plutarch has selected the more ambiguous example of the pig.41 Rousseau selectively uses irony in this chapter for rhetorical effect, for example mock boasting that he is directly descended from King Adam or Emperor Noah himself. Therefore it is not self-evident that the reader should take at face value his modest and limited attack on Aristotle’s claim that some men are born for slavery and others for mastery, when he says (expanding my earlier quotation) that: Any man who is born in slavery is born for slavery; there is nothing surer. Slaves in their chains lose everything, even the desire to be rid of them; they love their servitude, like the companions of Odysseus, who loved their brutishness. If there are slaves by nature, it is because slaves have been made against nature. The first slaves were made by force, and 268

The Slave they remained so through cowardice. (‘The First Societies’, The Social Contract, 47, my italics) Tout homme né dans l’esclavage nait pour l’esclavage, rien n’est plus certain. Les esclaves perdent tout dans leurs fers, jusqu’au désir d’en sortir; ils aiment leur servitude comme les compagnons d’Ulysse aimaient leur abrutissement. S’il y a donc des esclaves par nature, c’est parce qu’il y a eu des esclaves contre nature. La force a fait les premiers esclaves, leur lâcheté les a perpétués. (Du contrat social, 353)

I have argued elsewhere42 that the polysemic use of the term slave in Enlightenment writing to cover both the subjects of an absolute ruler and those slaves who are legally the property of their masters can sometimes helpfully express solidarity between the two (although equally it can serve as a screen masking chattel slavery). In the quotation above, sideswipes at European apologists for the monarchy who are deemed to love their chains may confuse the issue. Rousseau’s point might then (wrongly) seem to echo Hobbes’s De Cive, which says that slaves continue tacitly to agree to be slaves by not running away. Those who are bound or imprisoned, and thus have no choice, are not (consenting to be) slaves, but the threat of imprisonment or punishment is of a different order, according to Hobbes, and submission to those threats means that slaves are agreeing to be slaves even if it is in order to escape punishment, receive food and so on (On the Citizen, 110–11). La Fontaine’s ‘The Dog and the Wolf’ presents the dog in these terms: he is so greedy he is servile and will willingly bear a collar. It could be argued that for Aristotle and Hobbes (neatly side-stepping the racial issue) those who effectively embrace servitude or enslavement are born to be slaves, and choose to be slaves, and have the character of slaves­– ­there is slippage between the elements of the semantic chain and again a touch of Freud’s kettle logic in which contradictory excuses are combined. The semantic chain can go as far as some Aristotelians and racist thinkers (such as Voltaire) do­– ­arguing that some ethnic groups are particularly suited to be slaves. Yet this claim need not be read into every eighteenth-century statement about natural slaves, as European writers at the time were acutely aware of the possibility of captivity and enslavement for Europeans. This was especially true for East Europeans who were enslaved by Turks or Persians, but also in significant numbers by West Europeans, if one returns to an earlier historical period.43 The very origin of the English word slave (and French word esclave) relates to the Slavic inhabitants of the 269

Derrida and Other Animals Dalmatian coast, while the Latin and Greek words for slave have no ethnic connotation (Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, 17–18). Davis points out that until the fall of Constantinople cut off Christian Europe from the Black Sea this was the major source of slaves. Between 1414 and 1423 no fewer than 10,000 slaves were sold in Florence alone­– ­Armenians, Circassians, Georgians, Mingrelians, Russians, Tatars, and Bulgarians­– ­ mostly women. Today there is far greater focus on the phenomenon of Transatlantic slavery which has had such enduring damaging consequences particularly in the Americas, although contemporary sex trafficking might recall a long history of abuse and exploitation of Slavic women. Racial slavery arguably also brings us closer to the animal borderline.44 Returning briefly to Defoe, the reader could consider the difference between Crusoe’s behaviour as a slave (determined to escape) and that of the young ‘Maresco’ Xury, and ask if Xury is supposed to have the character of a slave­– t­ hereby making Crusoe’s treatment of him in selling him off after their escape less repellent to Defoe’s contemporaries. Xury is presented as a Muslim (for instance, Robinson Crusoe, 45), and is referred to as a Moor by many critics, which fits well with certain details of the presentation. But enslaved Europeans in North Africa or Turkey frequently converted to Islam, and the name Maresco (Robinson Crusoe, 42) could be Spanish, which would mean that Crusoe sells a fellow European rather than a North African or ‘Moor’. Roman Catholic Spain is not of course the same as Protestant England for Defoe­– ­we must beware of homogenising Europe. Xury’s exact ethnicity in the text could be considered as floating. The racial or ethnic aspects of slavery are thus relatively complex, although this tends to be forgotten because of the recently dominant history of European and American enslavement of subSaharan Africans. However, for Rousseau, as for Montesquieu or Jaucourt, even apparent agreement on the part of a slave cannot establish a right­ – ­it is simply the law of the strongest­– ­because a human being cannot alienate his innate liberty even if he thinks he wants to.45 Jaucourt writes in the Encyclopédie: Not only can one not have property as such in persons, but furthermore it offends reason that a man who has no power over his own life can give to another, either by his consent or by any convention, the right that he does not himself have. It is therefore not true that a free man can sell himself. A sale presupposes a price; when the slave sells himself, all his goods merge with the property of the master. Thus the master gives nothing, and the 270

The Slave slave receives nothing. He would have a peculium, one might answer, but the peculium is attached to the person. The liberty of each citizen is a part of the public liberty: this quality, in a popular state, is also a part of the sovereignty. If liberty has a price for the buyer, it is priceless for the seller. Non seulement on ne peut avoir de droit de propriété proprement dit sur les personnes; mais de plus il répugne à la raison qu’un homme qui n’a point de pouvoir sur sa vie, puisse donner à un autre, ni de son propre consentement, ni par aucune convention, le droit qu’il n’a pas lui-même. Il n’est donc pas vrai qu’un homme libre puisse se vendre. La vente suppose un prix; l’esclave se vendant, tous ses biens entrent dans la propriété du maître. Ainsi le maître ne donnerait rien et l’esclave ne recevrait rien. Il aurait un pécule, dira-t-on, mais le pécule est accessoire à la personne. La liberté de chaque citoyen est une partie de la liberté publique: cette qualité, dans l’état populaire, est même une partie de la souveraineté. Si la liberté a un prix pour celui qui l’achète, elle est sans prix pour celui qui la vend. (‘Esclavage’, L’Encyclopédie, V, 937)

While some post-colonial theorists argue that references to slaves in European Enlightenment texts do not generally encompass AfricanAmerican slaves, this debate over consent surely has a purchase. I would suggest that Rousseau’s footnote reference to Ulysses’ companions, who have embraced their status as animals, instead of supporting the apparent point undermines it. As in the example of Plato’s comments on dogs, and indeed on women, in the Republic, how do we know when a philosopher is using humour? 46 Furthermore, ‘abrutissement’ (which I have italicised in the citation from Rousseau above) as a term for becoming an animal echoes the missing word in Rousseau’s citation of Plutarch’s essay. Amyot’s translation of Plutarch is ‘Que les bêtes brutes usent de la raison’­– ­Rousseau omits the word ‘brutes’ in his reference.

The animal-thing However great the injuries that one has received from a man, humanity does not permit, once one has been reconciled with him, reducing him to a condition where there no longer remains any trace of the natural equality of all men and as a consequence treating him as a beast of which one is the master to dispose of at one’s whim. Quelque grandes injures qu’on ait reçu d’un homme, l’humanité ne permet pas, lorsqu’on s’est une fois réconcilié avec lui, de le réduire à une condition où il ne reste aucune trace de l’égalité naturelle de tous les hommes, et par conséquent de le traiter comme une bête, dont on est le 271

Derrida and Other Animals maître de disposer à sa fantaisie. (Jaucourt, ‘L’Esclavage’, Encyclopédie, V, 937, my italics)

It can be argued that the very definition of slavery in the Americas is complex, and needs to take account of indigenous practices of enslavement and adoption, as well as settler enslavement of Africans, in order to specify in what ways the theory and practice of slavery do, or do not, rely on dehumanisation. There were also many forms of subjection through debt or extortionate contracts and bonds in the various feudal and capitalist systems of the eighteenth century (as today). The problem is where to draw the line in the definition of slavery and not to dilute the term too much, made a more pointed issue when one considers the line of Southern apologists for slavery who delighted in emphasising other forms of oppression such as ‘wage slavery’ in the North of America. Equally British pro-slavery writers often divert attention towards the appalling conditions for miners or child chimney sweeps; Carey notes the frequent rhetorical play on black faces (British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 124–30). There are equally a range of positions and situations of chattel slaves as of animals­– ­domestic or field is one key opposition. In Robinson Crusoe, Friday’s position is an ambiguous one between servant and slave. Yet classic stories of the period, such as that of Inkle and Yarico, remind us how easily the beloved Native American can become a useful commodity, and Crusoe barely hesitates before selling his companion Xury. As Jaucourt’s article in the Encyclopédie maintains­– ­the fundamental legal position is that the slave is less a person than a thing or a beast,47 and can be disposed of as the master wishes. In other words, although it is important to consider the nuances and differences, it is also critical to retain the definition of the slave as one who (who that becomes which) is property which can be bought or sold as animals are. As res rather than persona a slave cannot have a response­/responsibility: his position in law is, in some respects, like that of an animal, his master answers for him, hence he is outside the meaningful community­– ­which is far from saying that he cannot be punished for transgression, as indeed animals are too.48 Heidegger’s assertion that the animal is poor in world begs the question, what about the slave?­– ­do slave-owners imagine such a thing in order to justify their barbarity? According to Agamben, the slave is one of the examples of the animal in human form in the pre-modern period; and he suggests that ‘Perhaps the body of the anthropophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the 272

The Slave unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought, and the aporias of the philosophy of our time coincide with the aporias of this body that is irreducibly drawn and divided between animality and humanity’ (The Open, 12). The problem here, as so often with Agamben, is his tendency to close off the animal body in a particular frame. Some legal systems may offer more protection to a slave than to an animal, but a degree of variation is also common with respect to different species of animals in various times and places. The French Code noir, which Jaucourt details in the article ‘Slave’, may seem to give some minimal protection to slaves (as a kind of veil to distinguish between the innocent lamb who may be roasted for dinner and the slave who in theory should have committed some offence before he is slaughtered), and they have to be allowed to practise the Roman Catholic religion on Sundays and Holy Days, meaning respite from the field.49 Yet the imposed religious rituals could of course be seen as a further collective burden on Antillean slaves rather than a benefit­ – ­less ‘allowing’ than ‘obliging’. Sykes points to the frequent comparisons made between the domestication of animals and slavery. Domestication is sometimes seen analogously to slavery, and also as having elements in common, including for example in the control of breeding, deployment of castration, use of the whip, shackles and so on.50 The relationship of the hunter-gatherer to animals may be presented as more respectful, as suggested in the last chapter. In some versions of hunter-gatherer philosophy animals sacrifice themselves, and are reborn, rather than being caught by superior beings purely for their own ends. However, it can equally be argued that hunting involves a fairly remote and brutal relationship to animals whereas domestication brings greater proximity, reciprocity and affection; even if power lies with man, new inter-species communities are established by domestication. In any particular context certain domestic animals may seem more like property or more like kin, remembering that kinfolk are not necessarily equals in any sense. The importance of coat colour, which returns us to human slavery of course,51 is one of several factors that mean some individual animals are empowered, or loved, rather than all animals being enslaved in the same way (Sykes, Beastly Questions, 35–6). Stripping factory-farmed animals of individual identity comes later. The reader may wish to enquire what is meant by the pointed comparison, made for example by zooarcheologists, between domestication of animals and enslavement as reduction to a 273

Derrida and Other Animals thing­– i­n fact domestic slavery can include elements of reciprocity, intimacy and affection although it is still slavery. A question related to domestication in zooarcheological terms is that of continuing practices of the taming or training of wild and even young domestic animals. Paul Patton contrasts the violent ‘breaking in’ of horses, recommended in many traditional manuals and still practised in many places today, with a gentle communicative and dialogic approach to schooling.52 He uses the example of dressage viewed as a form of ‘radical communication’ (on the model of Willard Van Orman Quine’s radical translation), quoting Monty Roberts on silent communication between and with horses.53 Vicki Hearne goes a stage further in seeing horse and rider in terms of a merging in which each creates what the other one thinks. Patton notes that, in terms of power, ‘a fundamental asymmetry remains at the heart of the relation’ (‘Language, Power, and the Training of Horses’, 90), involving the transmission of orders, and moreover that the examples given are of rare moments of sublime performance. He presents training in Foucauldian terms­– ­while there is a qualitative difference between the cruel breaking of a horse (or dog) and the more cooperative and respectful method which draws on these animals’ capacity for negotiation, nevertheless the trained horse is executing a series of movements (however much these seem to fulfil its aesthetic destiny) ‘to satisfy the culturally-acquired desires of their trainers’ (‘Language, Power, and the Training of Horses’, 95). The strength of some of these debates is the attempt to see inter-species relations in ethical terms. However, Patton leaves his reader with little sense that the human-animal divide has been unsettled by his critique of relations between human trainers and horses­– ­even though humans too are trained, including from the perspective of Marxist and feminist accounts of the reproduction of the means of production. His wouldbe Foucauldian model of power is not very different from a classic distinction between early capitalism and liberal capitalism. From some of the earliest writings on animals or slaves that we know, the comparison between animals and slaves seems to have been an obvious path to trace. Plutarch, for example, establishes a parallel between the (treatment of a) slave and the (treatment of an) animal: Some ascribed this to the man’s miserliness (mikrologia), but others took it as the sign of a man keeping himself within his means for the correction and moderation of others. However, I for my part consider that to drive off slaves and sell them in their old age is to treat them like yoke-animals 274

The Slave and the mark of an excessively unbending nature, and one which holds there is no common bond between one man and another apart from utility. And yet we see that kindness (chrêstotês) has a wider scope than justice (dikaiosunê): for we naturally apply law and justice only to men, but as far as acts of kindness and goodwill are concerned, sometimes these flow down from our gentleness (hemerotês) as from a rich spring even as far as irrational animals. And the nourishment of horses who have failed from old age, and not only the whelping years of dogs, but also their care in old age, are the proper business of the good man. [. . .] We should not treat those who have life (psuchê) like sandals or chattels, throwing them away when they are broken and worn out by their services, but if for no other reason, for the sake of practice (meletês houneka) in kindness to men (philanthrôpia) we should train ourselves to be gentle and kind with them. I certainly would not sell even a working ox because of its age, let alone an elderly man, uprooting him from the place where he had grown up and his accustomed daily round, as though from his fatherland, for the sake of small change, useless as he will be to those who buy him just as to those who have sold him.54

Buffon organises his Natural History in such a way that he begins with useful animals, in other words domesticated animals, moves on to wild animals (which might be hunted for food), and then to carnivores as harmful to men­– ­in other words there is a hierarchy based on human requirements. He writes of domesticated animals: A domestic animal is a slave to our amusements or operations. The frequent abuses he suffers, and the forcing him from his natural mode of living, make great alterations in his manner and his temper, while the wild animal, subject to nature alone, knows no other laws than those of appetite and liberty. The history of a wild animal is confined to a few facts drawn from simple nature; but the history of a domestic animal is complicated with all the artful means used to tame and subdue his native wildness: and being unacquainted how far example, constraint, or custom, may influence animals, and change their motions, determinations, and inclinations, the design of the naturalist ought to be to distinguish those facts which depend on instinct, from those which are owing to their mode of education; to ascertain what appertains to them from what they have acquired; to separate what is natural for them from what they are made to do; and never to confound the animal with the slave, the beast of burden with the creature of God. (Natural History, VII, 88–9) un animal domestique est un esclave dont on s’amuse, dont on se sert, dont on abuse, qu’on altère, qu’on dépayse et que l’on dénature; tandis que l’animal sauvage, n’obéissant qu’à la nature, ne connait d’autres lois que celles du besoin et de sa liberté. L’histoire d’un animal sauvage est 275

Derrida and Other Animals donc bornée à un petit nombre de faits émanés de la simple nature, au lieu que l’histoire d’un animal domestique est compliquée de tout ce qui a rapport à l’art que l’on emploie pour l’apprivoiser ou pour le subjuguer; et comme on ne sait pas assez combien l’exemple, la contrainte, la force de l’habitude, peuvent influer sur les animaux, et changer leurs mouvements, leurs déterminations, leurs penchants, le but d’un naturaliste doit être de les observer assez pour pouvoir distinguer les faits qui dépendent de l’instinct de ceux qui ne viennent que de l’éducation; reconnaitre ce qui leur appartient et ce qu’ils ont emprunté, séparer ce qu’ils font de ce qu’on leur fait faire, et ne jamais confondre l’animal avec l’esclave, la bête de somme avec la créature de Dieu. (‘Discours sur la nature des animaux’, Histoire naturelle, III, 30, my italics)

This passage is interesting for a number of reasons relating to the borderline between animal and human. Buffon emphasises the huge influence that man has on domesticated animals, an influence that some would argue is in fact mutual­– ­but no mention of reciprocity is made in this conflicted paragraph. Reflecting back on the last chapter, I might ask how the account of the animal sauvage relates to homme sauvage here. More relevant to present considerations is the question whether there is denial, denegation, in the last sentence­ – ­the apparent contradiction marks a point of tension between the two phrases that I have italicised in the quotation above. A domestic animal is a slave (even clearer in the French than in the translation), but the animal made by God must never be confused with the slave which is the domestic animal, even though it is utterly natural (and sanctified by God) for man to have this empire over animals. In the section on the degeneration of animals, Buffon informs his reader that man has scattered over the globe­– y­ ou might think ‘the Negro, the Laplander and the White were different species’ (Natural History, IX, 316) (‘le Nègre, le Lapon et le Blanc forment des espèces différentes’ (Histoire naturelle, III, 645), but you would be wrong­– ­man is one species, he affirms, and the different races can reproduce together. This assertion of the possible benefits of miscegenation is noteworthy if ambiguous (since it assumes a very clear hierarchy). Changes in man (degeneration) are superficial and thus could be put right either by men returning to their original environment or by miscegenation.55 Animals are mostly confined to one environment, he tells us, but man can compensate and control nature (this is human perfectibility), and therefore live in a range of climates and habitats. The great divide for Buffon is between two continents­– ­the New and Old Worlds, broadly speaking, the Americas and Asia­/ 276

The Slave Europe­/Africa. However, I would note that slave animals do degenerate: domesticated animals are weaker in general than wild animals regardless of climate. Returning to Robinson Crusoe, I shall briefly consider how Crusoe domesticates Friday, and make a comparison with his animal family. Crusoe tells us: ‘I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life; I called him so for the memory of the time; I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my name’ (Robinson Crusoe, 209). This is one of a series of auto-affirmations of sovereignty by Crusoe­– ­what Derrida calls ‘a theatre of solitary sovereignty, of the assertion of mastery (of self, over slaves, over savages and over beasts­– ­without speaking­– ­because the point is precisely not to talk about them­– w ­ ithout speaking of women)’ (Beast 2, 28) (‘un théâtre de la souveraineté solitaire, de l’affirmation de maîtrise (de soi, sur les esclaves, sur les sauvages et sur les bêtes, sans parler, puisque justement il s’agit de n’en point parler, des femmes)’ (Bête 2, 55–6)). Self-mastery (true freedom for Kant and Rousseau) comes first; then Derrida emphasises the slave rather than the servant; women are precisely not talked about. It is important to note Derrida’s use of the term ‘theatre’­– ­one example of the theatre of power is Defoe’s (or Crusoe’s) account of the submission of the savage who will be Friday: ‘he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever; I took him up, and made much of him, and encouraged him all I could’ (Robinson Crusoe, 207). Crusoe goes on to tell his reader how ‘my savage’ cuts the head off the concussed enemy cannibal as he shows signs of waking up, and then ‘laid [the sword] down with the head of the savage that he had killed, just before me’. The reader is subjected to an excessive repetition of submission gestures as if Defoe is keen to show no ambiguity in communication­– ­any small difficulties easily overcome­– ­an imagined clarity which is critical to early colonialist ideology (209).56 We might also note Crusoe’s use of the expression ‘my man Friday’ (e.g., 230), becoming Man Friday in children’s versions­– ­the loss of the possessive still leaving the affirmation of the humanity of the savage where a European man does not need to state he is a man since this is obvious. Crusoe sees animals, and lesser men too, in terms of how they serve his self-interest; goats, for example, are to be domesticated, enclosed, to be ‘a living magazine of flesh, milk, butter, and cheese 277

Derrida and Other Animals for me’ (Robinson Crusoe, 161). Yet, forerunner of Friday, Poll is taught to speak, ‘and he did it so familiarly, and talked so articulately and plain, that it was very pleasant to me’, and lived with Crusoe ‘no less than six and twenty years’ (185–6). Equally Crusoe affirms: ‘My dog was a pleasant and loving companion to me for no less than sixteen years of my time’ (186). It is important both to acknowledge the possibility of intimacy and affection and also to affirm the illegitimacy of the power relationship.57 Jefferson is an Enlightenment thinker frequently associated with the struggle for liberation from slavery58 (and certainly with the struggle for liberating Americans from British rule), and eager to take on Buffon in his thesis that all living creatures born in the Americas are degenerate. However, he is less sure about the status of Africans than he is about Native Americans­– i­ n a number of his writings (especially his private correspondence, in so far as correspondence is ever private in this period) he presents the hypothesis that Africans are naturally inferior­– ­although at the point of writing Notes on the State of Virginia he proposes abolishing slavery and ‘returning’ Africans to Africa.59 In 1800 Gabriel’s Rebellion takes place: a literate enslaved blacksmith, owned by Prosser, had planned a rebellion in Richmond but is betrayed.60 Twenty-five slaves are hanged and a number of restrictions on free and enslaved African Americans are put in place. In a letter to James Monroe in November 1801, Jefferson ponders what should happen to such rebels­– ­could they be sent elsewhere in America (requiring the purchase of land), or to the West Indies (Saint Domingo, which we know as Haiti, viewed as particularly favourable since the malefactors might be well received there), or, as last resort, Africa. While this is a milder and more humane response than hanging, the modern reaction might be to consider that the slaves in question are still being treated like objects to be moved from place to place without their wishes being considered­– a­ move to Africa is not even ‘repatriation’ for those born in America. Clearly Jefferson did not believe that African Americans could live in American society as free people together with whites, either before or after abolition. Before abolition freed slaves might well encourage revolts. Jefferson expressed his fear of the effects of slave emancipation a number of times, often using a phrase along the lines of: ‘We have the wolf by the ear; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.’61 The expression is based on Suetonius’ biography of the Emperor Tiberius in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and reminds us again of the Hobbesian fear 278

The Slave of the wild wolf, used to justify sovereign power even to the point of terror.62 A very different example, but related in its theme of the animalslave who might turn on his masters, is that of the bears kept in the zoological gardens at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Monsieur Martin Brown, the anthropomorphically named brown bear, is seen as analogous to slaves in Haiti according to Lee’s ‘The Curious Affair of Monsieur Martin the Bear’, which refers to police reports, comic songs, pamphlets and drawings relating to the bear. The playful Martin, fed on baguettes as if a Frenchman, was famous, and much visited, in spite (or because) of the two men he had killed and eaten after they had fallen, or jumped, into his enclosure. In 1820 he was convicted of cannibalism. The revolutionary massacres of white colonists in Saint-Domingue were widely reported in the European press­ – ­the 120 killed in 1791 at Port-de-Paix were allegedly ‘roasted and eaten by the blacks’ (‘The Curious Affair’, 616). This raises the question of the metaphorical, fantasmatic or literal relationship between the animal and the slave­– ­in the context of revolutionary violence.

The pretend family of slavery Slavery is not useful either for the master or for the slave: for the slave, because he can do nothing out of virtue; for the master, because he contracts with his slaves all kinds of vices and bad habits that are contrary to the laws of society. He unwittingly becomes accustomed to the lack of all moral virtues and he becomes proud, touchy, angry, hard, voluptuous, barbaric. L’esclavage n’est utile ni au maître, ni à l’esclave: à l’esclave parce qu’il ne peut rien faire par vertu; au maître parce qu’il contracte avec ses esclaves toutes sortes de vices et de mauvaises habitudes, contraires aux lois de la société qu’il s’accoutume insensiblement à manquer à toutes les vertus morales; qu’il devient fier, prompt, colère, dur, voluptueux, barbare. (Jaucourt, ‘L’Esclavage’, Encyclopédie, V, 937)

Slaves, women, servants, children and domestic animals are all part of the household economy as figured in the domus led by the patriarch, the sovereign father. While each category is distinct (and there are distinctions within categories), there are also overlapping modalities, potential elements of intimacy and reciprocity underpinned by the structure of domination. The slave is often figured as a child­– a­ nd racial slavery is justified by the argument that these people are inferior (at best childlike). Of course many philosophes who admire the family as a site 279

Derrida and Other Animals of natural or social virtue do not see the domus including slaves as morally positive any more than despotic government. Jaucourt’s statement in the epigraph to this section argues (like Rousseau) that slavery pollutes the master; it is hard to foster individual moral virtue in a corrupt system. Diderot points in Raynal’s History to savages’ love for their children, and the fact that breast-feeding continues till at least the age of four if not six, and in the Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage he presents a panegyric to parental love in Tahiti.63 For Diderot, unlike Rousseau, the family is absolutely natural. Rousseau presents solitude as man’s natural state as noted in previous chapters, but still, like Diderot, considers virtuous family life as a most desirable state without accepting the analogy between fathers and kings or slavemasters.64 He vigorously rebuts the paternal model which is presented as benign in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), for example, in order to defend the divine right of kings. Robinson Crusoe, however, presents the relationship between Friday and his master positively as analogous to that between loving father and son. Defoe chooses to have Friday reunited with his biological father, and the high emotional nature of the reunion demonstrates the goodness of these particular savages (Robinson Crusoe, 237–9); it is a typical and useful colonial contradiction that there are good cannibals, who may become trusty servants, as well as those who must be wiped out. Yet, Crusoe is reassured that he is the more important (as spiritual) father since Friday leaves with him for Europe even though it means abandoning his blood father without news of his whereabouts­– ­and indeed, although at the very end Crusoe returns to the island and the Europeans settled upon it, Friday’s father is never mentioned again in Robinson Crusoe.65 The reader might note Crusoe’s comment: ‘I began really to love the creature; and on his side, I believe he loved me more than it was possible for him ever to love any thing before’ (216), and his peevish and jealous distress when he fears that Friday might leave him and return to his home. Thus the patriarchal relationship between master and slave erodes biological or freely chosen relationships for slaves; this was often a matter of deliberate policy on plantations (and might be loosely compared to the control of reproduction in domestic animals), but is fictionalised here in terms of the master’s love for his slave and the natural return of that love. Crusoe’s relationship to Friday is pre-figured by his relationship with the young boy Xury­– D ­ errida points out how Crusoe makes 280

The Slave Xury, who is forced to escape with him, swear a vow of fidelity, by Islamic law to bind him the more, an ‘archi-preliminary’ autoaffirmation of sovereignty (Beast 2, 28; Bête 2, 56). Crusoe naturally assumes the position of master in his dealings with his former fellow slave (Robinson Crusoe, 45–54), and Derrida juxtaposes this with two later ‘auto-affirmations of sovereignty’: Crusoe, self-styled his Majesty the Prince and Lord, at table with his animal family and Crusoe considering himself a King with three human subjects (Friday, his Father and a Spaniard). Manuel Schonhorn reads this and other elements of the text as a commentary on the politics of Defoe’s day.66 He compares the triadic nature of Crusoe’s family or estates­– ­parrot, dog, cats; Friday, Father, Spaniard (Protestant, pagan, Catholic)­– ­to the co-ordination controversy. For revolutionaries of the period, the community is the source of power and the monarch is only a third of the political nation, sharing legislative authority with lords and commons, in other words, a mixed and limited monarchy with a coordinate power. For royalists (like Crusoe) there were three estates (lords spiritual and temporal plus commons) while the monarch has indivisible power (Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics, 147–8). Crusoe’s position is antithetical to Whig orthodoxy (151); his rhetoric of absolute subordination continues with the arrival of English sailors­– ­it is not specific to animals or savages (152)­– ­and the implied contract brings no lessening of authority.67 The first implied proof of loyalty demanded of Xury in the prestory is that he should defeat a terrifying lion; the reader might ask if that takes the place of the alternative sovereign to the master Crusoe. Xury would most likely be devoured by the lion, and admits his fear immediately­– i­t requires Crusoe’s guns to kill the creature. Mastery over guns, and thus over animals, is also a feature of Crusoe’s domestication of Friday. Crusoe keeps the lion’s skin and sleeps on it, a mark of intimacy (as in the love of the wolf analysed in Chapter 3). Williams comments on this ‘metonymic trophy’: The skin marks Crusoe’s new identity as infinitely more powerful and superior to any ‘beast’, and yet more and more like a beast all the time. In many ways, the beast, as desiccated here­– r­ epresents both Crusoe and Xury: Crusoe, in the violent, powerful, bestial nature of the sovereign, and Xury, in the silenced, disembowelled, sacrificial nature of the subject. (‘Naked Creatures’, 342)

I might also note the economic value of skins­– ­in both the Old World and the New. 281

Derrida and Other Animals Crusoe himself was a former slave in Morocco (Robinson Crusoe, 41–5), but becomes a colonist and slave-owner with his own Brazilian plantation; he is on a voyage to buy slaves in Africa (‘Guinea’) and bring them back to the Brazil plantations when the fatal storm blows up at sea leading to his shipwreck.68 Having sold Xury, he does lament at a later point: ‘I had done wrong in parting with my boy Xury’ (55), but this is only because he needs labour to work his Brazilian plantation.69 Alan Downie argues that highly influential readers of Robinson Crusoe such as Ian Watt70 read out of the context of the period and of the text in full, and that in fact the main thing Defoe was promoting was colonisation of South America (first Patagonia, then in 1719 of Guiana). The key location for the novel is then the mouth of the Orinoco river. Crusoe’s wealth does not come from his island behaviour (as purely capitalist possessive individualism) but from his Brazilian plantation­– t­hough even the astoundingly fertile island becomes colonised by Europeans by his will.71 Friday is not a typical Biblical Christian name (although the possibility of Good Friday lurks within it)­– ­indeed it is not usually a human name­– i­t is more like the name of an animal or a slave. It incorporates the memory of salvation­– ­the ‘Friday’ does, and so Friday must, internalise his second birth. Crusoe is now his father, ‘for never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant’­– l­ike a child to father he ‘would have sacrificed his life for the saving mine’ (Robinson Crusoe, 212). These two points suggest the complex of domestic slavery, incorporating subjection but in a mode of intimacy. Friday’s precursors include a parrot, and most particularly a dog, as well as the animalised Xury.72 The canine elements in the relationship between master and slave are both positive and derogatory. When a servant or a slave is called a dog then it is usually pejorative. Friday names himself a dog (‘ugly dog eat all up self’, Robinson Crusoe, 238) when he has failed in his duty­– ­in the reunion scene with his father when he has no bread left to offer him­– ­and the reader might wonder: does that mean Crusoe has already called him a dog when he struggles to achieve his master’s bidding? Crusoe does call him a dog (‘ “You dog,” said I’, Robinson Crusoe, 289) when he is angry with him in Europe. In Verne’s Les Naufragés du Jonathan, the Kaw-djer, like Crusoe, has a real dog companion, Zol, who helps him with hunting (Part 2, 104), and saves his native protégé Halg from the treacherous Sirk (Part 2, 216).73 Canine imagery or comparisons are nearly always 282

The Slave associated with ‘savages’ in this novel­– o ­ ften in a positive way, but one that firmly locates the savage on a rung below civilised men. Halg’s father Karroly is described as follows: The characteristics of an animal, but of a gentle, affectionate animal, were warring with the human in this member of an inferior race whom one would have been tempted to compare less to a wild beast than to a good and faithful dog, to one of those brave Newfoundlands who can become the companion, even better, the friend, to their master. Les caractères de l’animalité, mais d’une animalité douce et caressante, le disputaient à ceux de l’humanité, chez cet être de race inférieure, qu’on eût tenté de comparer, plutôt qu’à un fauve, à un bon et fidèle chien, à l’un de ces courageux terre-neuve, qui peuvent devenir le compagnon, mieux que le compagnon, l’ami de leur maître. (Les Naufragés du Jonathan, Part 1, 4)

There are just a few exceptional cases when canine imagery is used in relation to white men, and then it is wholly negative, for example, when the reader encounters a drunken Kennedy early on: ‘a bankrupt dog besides’ (‘Un failli chien, d’ailleurs’) (Part 2, 72). This European ‘dog’ will prove to be a base villain­– fi ­ nally betraying the community to gold prospectors. When Sirdey, another villain, wants to incite his co-conspirators against the noble Kaw-djer, he says: ‘he treats you like dogs’ (‘il vous traîte comme des chiens’) (Part 3, 270), implying like slaves, and worse than the savages whom it would be appropriate to treat as dogs. I will return here to Crèvecoeur’s American farmer, a devoted husband and father,74 who prides himself on his generous treatment of both his animals and his Negroes pending their manumission. The first thing to note about the American farmer is that Farmer James is established from the outset as a virtuous man­– t­ he very first sentence of the first letter ‘Introduction’ runs: ‘Who would have thought, that, because I received you with hospitality and kindness, you should imagine me capable of writing with propriety and perspicuity?’ (Letters from an American Farmer, 11). This rhetorical question refers directly to ‘hospitality and kindness’, and hospitality is the key virtue of America as James will portray it, both between individuals and as the relationship of the collectivity to immigrants;75 moreover, it demonstrates formally his modesty and lack of civilised polish. In the same letter the approving minister compares James’s writing to the irregular luxuriance of ‘wild American plants’ with their ‘strong proof of fertility’ which Europeans may, however, judge ill placed 283

Derrida and Other Animals and useless. This indicates indirectly both the real inferiority of European products and also the failure of European judgement in preferring ‘espaliers, plashed hedges, and trees dwarfed into pygmies’ to ‘unconfined vigour’ (19).76 Farmer James is not only a good man but is shown to have sound judgement, and not to be tainted by the prejudices of the Old World­– t­he minister compares him to a tabula rasa, an image often used for America at the time.77 James’s representation of America, of the relationship between himself and his animals, and of the situation of African-American slaves, may be taken as endorsed by Crèvecoeur­– ­there are no hints that the kindly and thoughtful farmer is deluded. His correspondence, furthermore, as an exchange of knowledge, nourishes and expands the mind­– ­while the farmer does not want to be known, let alone defined, as ‘a writer’, in the end his hospitality to a visitor is extended through his Letters firmly located within the sphere of beneficent pedagogy. There are a number of short references to domestic ‘family’ slavery in the most famous version of Letters from an American Farmer­– ­the original English-language edition; we learn from James early on that ‘My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy’ (26), the use of the possessive effectively summarising the main issue­– ­as the Encyclopédie asserts: ‘one cannot have property as such in persons’ (‘on ne peut avoir de droit de propriété proprement dit sur les personnes’) (V, 937). These are mostly incidental and positive mentions (for example 24, 26, 71), until Letter IX on Southern slavery in which there is extensive condemnation of the cruelty with which plantation slaves are treated, the excessive labour and little sustenance afforded to slaves contrasted with the idleness and luxury of masters; I should note that Farmer James points out that Southern slaves have no family life (154).78 I shall return to this Letter in the final section of this chapter. Northern slaves are presented as more fortunate (156ff.), aside from the small point that they should be emancipated (156); this pious hope for the liberation of all slaves hardly seems a priority if they are so well treated (and are grateful and faithful).79 There are so many diatribes against lawyers and the excessive numbers of laws that it seems as if the legal position of slavery may be the least of problems for Farmer James. He professes that he would be happy to free his own slaves, and, finally, in extreme circumstances, when war breaks out, and he is forced to move to an Indian village, he does (207), but he was in no hurry to do so. In early Letters he is more concerned to promote his agrarian idyll by reference to how happy his slaves are, imagining an onlooker commenting: ‘Here liveth the 284

The Slave warm substantial family that never begrudgeth a meal of victuals or a mess of oats to any one that steps in. Look how fat and well clad their negroes are’ (22). Farmer James is famed for his hospitality, as I have noted. The longer French version, Lettres d’un cultivateur américain, published two years later in 1784, goes into more detail about the love between good masters and their slaves­– ­particularly in reference to the Quaker Walter Misslin­– ­the Quakers being in the forefront of the American abolition debate at the time.80 In the first extract of the work in French, published in the Mercure, the ‘author’ describes a trip to Dover (in Kent, Pennsylvania) to see this rich and virtuous man who has decided to emancipate the thirty-seven slaves he had inherited. While this is apparently in praise of the man who frees his slaves, and hence an argument for abolition one might think, the connotation of the section may rather be that slavery is not something to be too worried about, and abolition not a pressing concern, since good slaves and good masters love one another, and these slaves are happy and well treated. Crèvecoeur reproduces Misslin’s discourse to Jacques, aged twenty-eight, as he offers him freedom and pay for the work he has done since the age of twenty-one, reassuring him that he will always have a friend in his former master. The former slave dissolves in tears (Lettres d’un cultivateur américain, xvi) as he asserts that he does not want to be freed. He was so happy working for Misslin, and enjoyed so many benefits including a doctor when ill. Misslin endeavours to console him and tells him how he can survive like white men do­– ­including the detail that ‘ “you will then marry a negress who is good and industrious like you; you will raise your children as I raised you, in the fear of God and love of work”’ (‘ “tu épouseras alors une négresse sage et industrieuse comme toi; tu élèveras tes enfants comme je t’ai élevé, dans la crainte de Dieu et l’amour du travail”’) (xvii). The modern reader might note that the scandal of miscegenation is avoided in this invitation to enjoy a family life in the way that slaves frequently could not. The slaves should have been manumitted long ago says the honest Quaker: ‘Please God, the father of all men, that the Whites had never thought to traffic in your African brothers! May he inspire in all Americans the desire to follow our example!”’ (‘“Plût à Dieu, le père de tous les hommes, que les Blancs n’eussent jamais pensé à faire le commerce de tes frères d’Afrique! Puisse-t-il inspirer à tous les Américains le désir de suivre notre exemple!”’) (xvii–xviii). Jacques says that he has never been a slave: he was always spoken to as if he were white, 285

Derrida and Other Animals has been able to lend money to poor whites, his mistress never gives him orders, and he really does not want to leave. (This relates to the underlying question: what is a slave?) In response to Jacques’s pleading, Misslin agrees that he does not have to leave; he can stay on as a free man, hired by the year, but must have a week’s holiday to celebrate his liberation. Devotion is ladled on for the reader as Jacques says that he will take a week later, but just one day now, adding: ‘Since you wish it, then I accept my freedom, and let my first action as a free man be to take your hand, my master, and to clasp it in mine, bringing it closer, placing it on my heart where Jacques’s devotion and gratitude will end only when it stops beating; the second to assure you that there is no worker in the county of Kent who will be more diligent that the man who from now on will be called faithful Jacques.’ ‘Puisque vous le voulez, j’accepte donc ma liberté, et que ma première action comme homme libre, soit de vous prendre la main, mon maître, et de vous la serrer dans les miennes, en l’approchant, en la plaçant sur mon cœur où l’attachement et la reconnaissance de Jacques ne finiront que quand il finira de palpiter; que la seconde soit de vous assurer qu’il n’y a point de travailleur dans le comté de Kent qui sera jamais plus diligent que celui qui dorénavant s’appellera le fidèle Jacques.’ (xix)81

It is interesting to note that while Misslin calls Jacques ‘tu’, the slave (without an independent surname as far as the reader is concerned) calls his master ‘vous’. This would of course usually be expected­– ­yet in the context of the Society of Friends, famed for their ‘speech testimony’ or plain speaking, it is noteworthy. Quakers were supposed to address everyone as ‘thou’ rather than using ‘you’ and to avoid any honorifics to show that all are equal before God (Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 8–9). Voltaire’s four letters on Quakers in his Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises (1734), originally published as Letters Concerning the English in 1733,82 begin with his Quaker interlocutor using ‘tu’ to the Voltaire persona’s ‘vous’, and the theme of Quakers braving regular flogging because of their insistence on using ‘tu’ even to the King, threads throughout his account. Misslin’s patriarchal role relative to Jacques is thus embedded in the details of language as well as the overt message and the imagined gestures such as bringing the master’s hand to feel the testimony of his beating heart. In the unlikely event that Enlightenment readers might imagine that Jacques’s response to manumission is an isolated example, we learn that previously Misslin had sold a slave who behaved badly. No 286

The Slave criticism is made of the fact that he was yet at that point to emancipate his slaves; the punishment is deemed to be merited. The man was then sold again for the same reason and ended up in Jamaica: ‘where the bull whip soon made him more docile and well-behaved. This negro, remembering the goodness and humanity of his first master, had a touching letter written to him in which he painted his misery and his repentance’ (‘où le nerf de bœuf le rendit bientôt plus docile et plus sage. Ce nègre se rappellant la bonté et l’humanité de son premier maître, lui fit écrire une lettre touchante, dans laquelle il peignait sa misère et son repentir’). Misslin then regretted having been the cause of his unhappiness, and set off for Jamaica where he bought back his former slave, took him to Philadelphia and freed him (xx). The writer concludes: ‘Such is that worthy Friend, such you will find them in general, from one end of the continent to the other, wise, just, humane, hospitable, enlightened’ (‘Tel est ce vénérable Ami, tels les trouveriez-vous en général, depuis un bout du continent jusqu’à l’autre, sages, justes, humains, hospitaliers, éclairés’) (xxi).83 The exceptional behaviour of Quakers in freeing their slaves is also celebrated in the first version of Letters from an American Farmer, for example in the account of Nantucket: ‘this society alone, lamenting that shocking insult offered to humanity, have given the world a singular example of moderation, disinterestedness, and Christian charity, in emancipating their negroes’ (137). In the chapter devoted to the Botanist John Bertram, readers learn (to their presumed amazement) that emancipated slaves sit at his table­– e­ ven if at the lowest end (182–3).84

The community and terror: Letters from an American Farmer Crèvecoeur’s American farmer appears to be living the dream of Rousseau’s fiction La Nouvelle Héloïse­– a­ nd offers it hospitably as a living reality to the hungry subjects of Europe, who can come to be adopted as citizens by the New World. Farmer James writes that the European poor are not citizens but slaves; they become adopted as citizens in America thanks to the wise laws ‘stamping on them the symbol of adoption’ and their own industry which brings them rich rewards (Letters from an American Farmer, 43). However, Farmer James will reveal, perhaps unwittingly, how easily an ethical focus on meeting the healthy appetite of the industrious poor is destabilised when apparent relative equality and mutual aid in the New World is founded on a situation of real inequality. The community in the 287

Derrida and Other Animals New World may liberate and adopt the figural slaves of the Old World, but its social pact also allows real slaves working the land as well as the industrious Europeans on whom Crèvecoeur focuses­ – ­disingenuously Farmer James brings the two together in a kind of denial, saying of East European peasants: ‘Hard is their fate to be thus condemned to a slavery worse than that of our negroes’ (24).85 The recurring references to animals, alongside considerations of ‘race’ (savages and slaves) and sexual difference, are particularly revealing. Farmers in the New World, which seems so empty, nevertheless come to displace the indigenous peoples from their land­– ­they create starvation for some even as they feed others, as indicated in earlier chapters. In Letter III (‘What is an American?’) Crèvecoeur presents a benign image of the relationship of mutual hospitality between happy settlers and natives (75–7). His Letters come to an end with ‘Distresses of a Frontier Man’, when his disillusioned Farmer James is forced to take refuge with Native Americans because war has broken out (the War of Independence), a reminder of the earlier days of the arrival in the New World when the hospitality of indigenous peoples was essential for survival. There is thus a significant sleight of hand in the text­– ­with its would-be harmonious praise of the New World, both as regards ‘savages’, ‘necessarily’ displaced from their land, and slaves ‘needed’ to work the land­– ­in the orthodoxy he avoids. But Crèvecoeur most of all shocks any complacent reader who has been seduced by his vision of seeming harmony and plenty bestowed on the figural slaves emancipated from Europe86 by suddenly revealing, in the ninth of his twelve letters, the horrors of the American South, with a slave left suspended in a kind of cage to die, who, starving, has himself become food for insects and birds: the birds had already picked out his eyes; his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets, and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feast on his mangled flesh and drink his blood. (164)

‘The living spectre’, although blind, can hear Farmer James’s approach and begs, desperate for water. With cruel kindness, James offers him some gathered in a shell and the ‘wretched sufferer’ who has already hung for two days then asks for the gift of poison to end his torture: ‘the birds, the birds’, he says. Human violence is trans288

The Slave posed on to the voracious animal world­– ­birds of prey are acting as the agents of torture. Crèvecoeur chooses to transliterate the slave speaking in a kind of pidgin English­– ­not quite a civilised human being. The not quite human slave, a rogue slave, is delivered to the rapacity and violence of the natural world­– ­generic birds who, as pigeons would strip the corn that feeds the community, here, as raptors in a perverted frenzy, strip human flesh. This is juxtaposed with the slave-owners’ conversation over dinner concerning their view that ‘the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary’ (165)­– ­the slave had turned on his overseer. Civilised man certainly seems a wolf to man in this Letter IX, not in the state of nature but in society­– p ­ erversely it is the fear of such general lupine aggression (typical of Amerindians for Hobbes) which is supposed to force man into agreeing to live in society, but in society it is terror that makes subjects obey their sovereign and master. However, Crèvecoeur’s evocation of the most vicious side of slavery may be compared to inoculation­– h ­ e points to its evils as more of a problem than its existence as such. Farmer James’s own slaves and the animals on his farm are rather like Crusoe’s ‘domestic’ animals­– t­hey are very well treated unless they step out of line­– ­unless they eat his bees as the kingbirds do or threaten to eat his grain as the pigeons do, transgressions which end in the birds’ death in spite of his rhetoric of hospitality towards them. For the horror in the woods of the slave’s agony comes as a shock only because of the degree of violence against him (the shape of a human being in the process of being reduced to meat for other creatures, as James’s cattle will be) and the fact that it is described in such detail­– i­n a way we have been prepared for an economy that includes (the threat of) putting to death. Because kingbirds preserve his fields from the depredations of crows, Farmer James ‘long resisted the desire I had to kill them’ (29) on account of their devouring his industrious and profitable bees, but finally gives in to temptation as he feels he has carried ‘indulgence’ too far. He then writes of his ‘inviolable hospitality’ (29) to quails in permitting them to feed unmolested on the remains of the grain once harvest is in­– ­claiming that he does ‘not know an instance in which the singular barbarity of man is so strongly delineated, as in the catching and murthering those harmless birds at that cruel season of the year’ (30). Yet he is happy to catch pigeons­– o ­ nce fourteen dozen at one go­– b ­y luring them with one of ‘what we call tame wild pigeons’ (34) kept in a cage, made blind (not as a punishment like the slave but for the 289

Derrida and Other Animals not unrelated profitable purpose of both saving crops and acquiring meat) then fastened to a long string so that it calls and makes repeated fruitless short flights in an attempt to escape. The reader is struck by the juxtaposition of opposites relating to domestication and captivity: ‘tame wild’ (repeated, 35) and ‘long string’­/’short flight’, perhaps a hint of the contradictions lurking beneath the text. The author tells his addressee that the pigeons come in such multitudes they must ‘require an immense quantity of food’ (34)­– n ­ ot like the beautiful quail who are content with poor left-overs. The pigeons are slaughtered in such numbers by all the farmers that you can have as many as you can carry for a penny in the market­– b ­ ut, James writes: ‘from the extreme cheapness, you must not conclude that they are but any ordinary food; on the contrary, I think they are excellent’ (35). Hospitality has to be limited (faced with such hordes of greedy guests) for the preservation of the self, the pater familias who owns the farm, the master of the little community. I shall conclude with a comment on the reproduction of the community­– ­not only in a physical sense (including food and water that is critical to survival of course), but in a social or political sense. It seems that communities repeatedly fall on forms of terror in order to reproduce their structures of power; this is thinly disguised as materially necessary­– a­ n example is to be found in Crusoe’s defence of the land he has enclosed. When Crusoe begins to grow corn (Robinson Crusoe, 94ff.) animals (first goats and hares) are then a threat to his crops, and he names them ‘enemies’ or ‘thieves’ (128–9). His first solution is to make an ‘enclosure’ with a hedge; this is the first gesture towards private property, and lasting (therefore meaningful, social) inequality, in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Historically the significance of enclosure has been to keep out other people rather than wild animals (and this is the movement against which Thomas More writes his Utopia, about an island located in the New World), and the reader may wonder if this is Defoe’s symbolic purpose. Schonhorn notes Defoe’s repeated references to ‘hedging’ or ‘fencing’, arguing that, while it might seem unsurprising to readers that a castaway constructs enclosures, in fact this is not a feature of other shipwreck texts even if the castaways cultivate gardens or keep fowl (Defoe’s Politics, 144). At the same time ‘one of the metaphors derived from scriptural rhetoric that was associated with magistracy or monarchy was “hedge” or “fence”’ (143). Certainly Crusoe is obsessed with enclosing and fortifying his house against imagined savages as much as, or more than, wild beasts. He 290

The Slave shoots ‘some of the creatures’ (goats or hares which could have been part of his domus) and then sets his dog to guard his land­– a­ worker and guardian animal, part of the community, against the outlaws. When a second phase of attack on his property occurs with birds, who are unworried by his shooting some of their number, Crusoe immediately raises the spectre of starvation as if to justify his campaign of terror­– ­although he has survived without grain up to that point on the fruitful island. We might note the language of obligation, of being forced to use terror, which reoccurs with Crèvecoeur. Crusoe takes to hanging up dead birds in chains, ‘as we serve notorious thieves in England’, as a deterrent, ‘a terror to others’ (Robinson Crusoe, 129), exemplifying the violence of power; and also, Derrida notes, setting up the violence of the non-human that surrounds man (‘circum-dominates’ him in Heidegger, Beast 2, 288; Bête 2, 393–4). It is the violence of the other (natural world, animal, man) that is the justification of (State) terror­– ­thieves are suspended in chains, prefiguring the mutineer who will hang from the yard-arm in order to secure Crusoe’s escape from the island (Robinson Crusoe, 271–2). Crèvecoeur’s slave also hangs­– ­in a cage­– ­birds peck out his eyes, hardly disturbed by the observer’s gun. These warning messages are a kind of silent rhetoric, more powerful than casual violence, establishing a temporality­– ­a long-term domination which brings food to the master. Crusoe’s fences marking the land are also a form of writing possession.87 Crusoe’s crop is promising­– ­he will do well. Crusoe has ample food, and can even accumulate stores of dried grapes, yet, in the absence of other human beings, he must figure birds as enemies and thieves. Using the spectre of starvation he kills them and hangs them up as a spectacle to deter the others­– ­even though philosophers will tell us, contra empirical examples such as elephants, that animals are not conscious of death and cannot mourn or bury their dead. A mutinous sailor will later, on King Crusoe’s orders, be suspended aloft the ship that will rescue Crusoe­– t­his is a founding act for the community set up on his departure, with the remaining mutineers pacified into subjection. In the American South, a rebellious slave is hung up: it is not just the torture of the body given as food to the birds which is powerful, but also the visibility of the terrifying fate of the outlaw placed just outside the community. The sympathetic and shocked Farmer James, a fraternal and decent settler who, every time he sees an egg on his table regrets that ‘but for my gluttony’ the hen will never live and never lead her chicks (Letters from an American Farmer, 28),88 will neither kill the suffering slave 291

Derrida and Other Animals nor set him free. Rather he goes on to eat dinner with those who argue that such punishments of others, not recognised as semblables, are necessary for self-preservation. To return to the puzzle of Rousseau’s footnote to Plutarch: men ‘reduced’ to animals may consider that the animal state is a better one than human injustice or that slaves are better than slave-owners if they kill out of need. If slaves do not revolt that does not justify slavery, for no living creature is a slave either naturally or by right. This is an argument for a form of human social and political organisation in which no men or animals are slaves, and all are obliged to be free without state or domestic terror to keep subjects obeying their sovereign master’s law and serving his profit.

Notes   1. I have given two papers based on sections of this chapter: ‘Intercultural Encounters in the New World: Translating the Human-Animal’, as a keynote, 11 May 2013, at the Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference, ‘Intercultural Encounters’, IGRS, London; and the Malcolm Bowie Memorial Lecture, ‘The Beast and the Slave: Enlightenment Figures’, 19 March 2014, at Queen Mary University of London. I should like to thank both audiences for their helpful questions.   2. Louis, Chevalier de Jaucourt, ‘Slavery’, trans. Naomi J. Andrews, The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2012), available at http:­/­/hdl.handle.net­/2027­/spo.did2222.0000.667; ‘Esclavage’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, V, 934–9.   3. Chattel comes from the Latin capitalis, root of both capital and cattle; see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 30. In the Code noir the slave is referred to as meuble (furniture) in the article concerning inheritance.   4. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960), 94–5.   5. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Commerce of the Human Species, the first directly abolitionist publication in English by an African, which was first published in 1787. Cugoano is much less well known than Douglass; even his dates are uncertain, which would make him typical of many African slaves of the Enlightenment period, and there is no attested image of 292

The Slave him. Douglass, by contrast, was one of the most photographed men of the nineteenth century, some claim the most photographed American­ – ­always the image of dignified manhood and far from bestial as commonly understood. Thanks to my colleagues Celeste-Marie Bernier and Zoe Trodd for sharing their work on the visual representation of nineteenth-century African-American abolitionists, including also Sojourner Truth (who escaped to freedom in 1826 with her baby daughter).   6. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789). There is a famous portrait of Equiano which shows him as a highly respectable eighteenth-century citizen. Another example of Enlightenment response to the bestialisation of the slave would be Ignatius Sancho (1729–80), a former slave who was seen by anti-slavery campaigners in England, or perhaps made himself be seen, as emblematic of the ‘humanity’ of Africans.   7. Todd argues for the importance of indentured servitude in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders; see his Defoe’s America.   8. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Oman in 1970; see Joel Forbes Quirk, ‘The Anti-Slavery Project: Linking the Historical and Contemporary’, Human Rights Quarterly, 28:3 (2006), 565–98, for an overview of this­– ­and the extent to which slavery continues today in spite of the formal global abolition. Thanks to Zoe Trodd for this and other references.   9. Certainly the question of what is appropriate treatment for a slave (which has an intimate if complex relationship with what a slave is considered to be) varies hugely even when you compare situations that are very close in location and time. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), indicates the problem with any generalisation even in his restricted field in that the different states legislated differently at different times over the two centuries or so, and there were very different levels of enforcement. Southern law fundamentally reduced enslaved persons to property, yet the recognised fact that they were also moral agents or ‘thinking property’ thoroughly complicated jurisprudence, making for a ‘messy and often complex’ legal system (13). 10. The claim is sometimes made that there are now more slaves than at the height of the slave trade­– ­yet that depends on shifting the definitions so that, for example, bonded labour is included today but not in the past. Rejecting estimates that place the number of slaves as high as 200 million, Kevin Bales advances the comparatively modest figure of 27 million, as a ‘cautious, conservative estimate based on documented cases of real slavery’ (Quirk, ‘The Anti-Slavery Project’, 578). See Bales, 293

Derrida and Other Animals Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 11. Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), argues that some sentimental eighteenth-century literature which seems to critique the cruelty of slavery could in fact have shored up slavery with an ameliorationist position (11). 12. See the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery which came out of symposia in response to what is seen as the current lack of legal clarity. 13. See, for example, Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26:4 (2000), 821–65; Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Sugar production intensified and the majority of slaves were ‘exported’ from Africa to the Americas during the eighteenth century; France had the richest colony the world had ever known in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), until the slave revolution in 1791 and then Independence in 1804. See also Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) for the impact of Haiti on Enlightenment thinking (as well as vice versa). A number of twenty-first-century works have highlighted the ‘forgetting’ of Haiti in the twentieth century, even though there is so much to say about the putting of Enlightenment thought about slavery and liberty into practice in the Haitian revolution­– ­alongside other elements inspiring the bloody struggle for emancipation. 14. The English abolitionist Thomas Day co-wrote a poem with a fellow lawyer entitled The Dying Negro (1773–5). It was dedicated to Day’s hero Rousseau in an introductory essay appearing in 1774, which was an early example of the case made that those in America claiming liberty are slave-owners­– ­before Samuel Johnson’s famous observation to the same effect in 1775. See Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 75–80. 15. For more information on the indefatigable Louis de Jaucourt, see Jean Haechler L’Encyclopédie de Diderot et de .­ . . Jaucourt. Essai biographique sur le chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995) or Madeleine F. Morris, Le Chevalier de Jaucourt. Un ami de la terre (1704–1780) (Geneva: Droz, 1979). Other relevant articles by Jaucourt include ‘Liberté naturelle’ and ‘Traite des nègres’. The entry ‘Nègres’ is unsigned. For more information on the development of abolitionism in the French Enlightenment, see David Williams, ‘Encounters with Black Otherness in the Late Enlightenment: The Art of Abolitionism’, in Thresholds of Otherness ­/Autrement Mêmes: Identity and Alterity in French-Language Literatures, ed. David Murphy and 294

The Slave Aidin Ni Loingsigh (London: Grant and Cutler, 2002), 33–56, which also cites a range of other useful work in this area. 16. No doubt there is a particular anti-clerical sideswipe here at the Spanish and the Roman Catholic Church from someone whose Protestant family were forced to worship in secret after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 17. The article ‘Slave’ includes a great deal of factual detail, first enumerating the types of slave in ancient time, and then the stipulations of the Code noir governing slaves in the French Caribbean. These are left as needing no comment. Jaucourt also discusses the horrors of French slavery in the Americas and the Code noir in the article ‘Maron’ on runaway slaves. 18. See also Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 356–420 (363). 19. See Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of Cattle Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). 20. See Kelly Oliver, ‘Elephant Eulogy: The Exorbitant Orb of an Elephant’, in The Animal Question in Deconstruction, ed. Turner, 89–104. She follows Derrida’s account of the autopsy as a ‘counter-fable’ helping us to remember ‘that sovereign power is erected on death, particularly the death of animals’ (90). 21. See, for example, the Introduction to Crèvecoeur, Qu’est-ce qu’un Américain, trans. Howard C. Rice (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the Institut français de Washington, 1943). This Second World War publication celebrates the rapprochement between France and America since the Enlightenment, remembering that the American revolution attacked the idea that authority comes from on high as a hereditary hierarchy and ‘the idea of a clan of masters and a people of slaves’ (‘l’idée d’un clan de maîtres et d’un peuple d’esclaves’) (2). 22. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 23. Where slavery is legal then laws are mostly to control slaves, and secondarily to protect or civilise them (such as the Code noir’s insistence on Sunday worship in the Catholic faith). Laws concerning animals equally seek to protect and control­– ­plus there is the element of control of animal products such as meat or milk. 24. The Republic of Plato, ed. Francis Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 285. 25. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Bennington provides his own translation of Rousseau rather than use a published version. 26. There are at least as many systems of slavery throughout history that are not based on racial criteria as those that are; even in the eighteenthcentury Americas, the most notorious period and place in this respect, the racialisation of slavery is not complete­– ­in Trinidad there are more 295

Derrida and Other Animals black slave-owners than white, even if white slave-owners own more slaves. White slaves are not unknown in the Caribbean. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, for the argument that the bestialisation of the slave is common to all slave systems and not just a feature of racialised slavery. 27. David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8–12. 28. Betts uses the neutral translation ‘animals’ for bêtes, as does Robin Waterfield in his translation of the treatise ‘On the Use of Reason by “Irrational” Animals’, in Plutarch, Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 383–99 (Amyot’s translation of Plutarch is ‘Que les bêtes brutes usent de la raison’). Bennington translates Rousseau’s reference as one to ‘That Beasts Have Reason’­– A ­ myot’s ‘brutes’ (an ironic counterpoint for Plutarch), as a qualifier of bêtes, is indeed left out by Rousseau. 29. See Derrida, Beast 1, 20–1; Bête 1, 43, on the fact that Rousseau gathers together Aristotle, Grotius and Hobbes here, although there are key differences between them, notably the fact that Aristotle defines man as a political creature (or, I would say, as an animal who naturally develops into a political creature) while Hobbes writes De Cive to break with this tradition. I should also add that the reference to Aristotle can be interpreted by post-colonial critics as a diversion from contemporary slavery into classical slavery­– ­however, thinkers such as Aristotle were regularly invoked in the debates over the Americas. Aristotle’s notion that some peoples are naturally slavish was deployed to justify colonial practices. Thus a reference to Aristotle is not necessarily taking the reader away from these questions, but could be the opposite. 30. Yet, returning to questions of class, many, globally and domestically, apparently continue to believe that some are born to serve. 31. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 33–4. 32. See Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959). 33. Voltaire, Manners and Spirit of Nations; Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, ‘Pointless Debates Over America’ (‘Vaines disputes sur l’Amérique’), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland (Paris, 1877– 85), vol. 12, chapter 146, 385–90, 385. My translations. 34. Voltaire, Treatise on Metaphysics; Traité de Métaphysique (1734), ed. Temple Patterson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, second edition 1957). My translations. 35. I should note that what is to me clear racism is sometimes excused by 296

The Slave the many apologists for Voltaire on the grounds that the importance of his struggle against organised religion trumps other considerations. His anti-Semitism is forgiven because it is seen as integral to his critique of church teaching. 36. Voltaire, Précis du siècle de Louis XV (1768), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 15, chapter 27, 313. This is part of the massive Manners and Spirit of Nations project. 37. I should say that a footnote is added citing Aristotle, but then conceding the guilt of Europeans in encouraging the slave trade. 38. There are in fact two references to Ulysses’ companions in the first book of the Social Contract; the second is to the Cyclops’ cave which is peaceful while the men (and, I would add, sheep) are waiting to be devoured by Polyphemos, who is here for Rousseau perhaps a cannibal King rather than a cannibal savage or wolf. 39. Ulysses asks Circe: were any Greeks changed into wolves or lions? (Fontenay, Trois traités, 125). The nymph answers yes, but the chosen interlocutor for Plutarch, Gryllus, is a pig. In Homer, although friendly wolves and lions greet Odysseus and his fellow sailors, the companions are specifically changed into pigs. 40. This is of course running against many thinkers who see animals as naturally subordinate to man. Derrida comments on the series of hierarchies master-slave, man-beast, man-woman with particular reference to Hobbes (Beast 1, 29–30; Bête 1, 55). 41. Apart from the wolf, there is a bear (who is a relative beauty in the woods), and a lion (a sovereign in the wild rather than a subject in Ithaca). This choice of animals makes a significant distinction from many versions of the Circe episode that underline the Homeric description of the porcine metamorphosed men as ‘having been made servile in their bondage to the sorceress’ (Warner, No Go the Bogeyman, 266). Warner comments, for example, on the rewriting by Apollonius of Rhodes: ‘The fawning which in Homer conveys the emasculation of her victims’ bewitched condition returns here as contemptible domesticity, tameness, loss of individuality, sheepishness’ (267). Warner suggests that there may be a gender issue at stake in the choice of a pig, an issue raised in Chapter 6. 42. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapter 7, ‘Revolution and Rights’, in relation to the abolitionist Abbé Grégoire. 43. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapters 4 and 5, on Enlightenment Persia and Turkey respectively. 44. The question of ethnic groups and slavery could also consider Cromwell’s sale of Irish and Scots rebels to Barbados. One interesting work in this context is Alexandre-Olivier Oexmelin (or Exquemelin), Histoire des Aventuriers, des boucaniers et des flibustiers d’Amérique (Paris: La Sirène, 1920). This was first published in Dutch in 1678; 297

Derrida and Other Animals the French translation was first published in 1686. It tells a number of stories of the harsh treatment of Frenchmen bought and sold in the Caribbean­– a­ lthough typically for specific periods such as seven years and so not identical to the enslavement of Africans. 45. This point has particular purchase in relation to women; see for example the case of The Story of a Fair Greek of Yesteryear (Histoire d’une Grecque moderne), published in 1740 by Antoine Prévost d’Exiles, or Abbé Prévost as he is more commonly known, thought to be based on one or more true stories. I discuss this in my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapter 6. 46. Plato says dogs show a fine philosophic instinct, a passion for knowledge and understanding. It requires a footnote from the editor, Cornford, to reassure the reader that ‘the ascription of a philosophic element to dogs is not seriously meant’ (The Republic, 64) since animals do not have reason. For readers who regard Plato’s suggestion that female Guardians should be treated as equals to men as a joke, see my Feminine Economies: Thinking Against the Market in the Enlightenment and the Late Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), chapter 2. 47. See Eugene D. Genovese, for example, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Pantheon, 1965). 48. While it is generally true that animals are not considered to have responsibility in law, there is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a history of this borderline; see for example Edward Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: Heinemann, 1906). 49. The Code noir was introduced by Louis XIV in 1685 (the same year as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which opens the way to systematic persecution of French Protestants) to govern the treatment of slaves (and, indeed, the rights of free ‘negroes’) in the French colonies. It begins with the expulsion of all Jews from French colonies­– ­a classic act of autoimmunisation as Derrida would put it. See also Cixous, Le dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), Théâtre du Soleil Programme 2003, no pagination, on the expulsion of the Huguenots: ‘Louis XIV immunized the kingdom against itself’ (‘Louis XIV porte au Royaume un coup auto-immunitaire’). 50. See also Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror Books, 1997). 51. The weight placed on skin colour in the Americas (but also, if differently, in Ottoman or Persian slavery in the Early Modern period) might be compared to the significance of animal pelts in its fetishisation of skin as surface. Paula Young Lee suggests that the black and brown bears in the Paris menagerie were seen as representing respectively blacks and mulattos in Saint-Domingue­– a­ lthough she does not imply that the neighbouring polar bear was seen as the white man; see ‘The 298

The Slave Curious Affair of Monsieur Martin the Bear’, Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies, 33:4 (2010), 615–29. However, this analogy reminds us that while lighter skin colour was generally valued, the metis or mulatto was often viewed with particular suspicion as liable to be duplicitous, or to get ideas above their station, unlike the happy-golucky black slave portrayed in some accounts as perfectly content with their lot. 52. See Paul Patton, ‘Language, Power, and the Training of Horses’, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Wolfe, 83–99; Patton pays due homage to Vicki Hearne although he finds some of her conclusions rather ‘poetic’; and to Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto. 53. Monty Roberts, The Man Who Listens to Horses (New York: Random House, 1997); the 1998 film by Robert Redford, The Horse Whisperer, is sometimes said to be based on Roberts. 54. Judith Mossman’s translation of a quote from Plutarch’s Cato the Elder, 5. See Plutarch, ‘Vie de Caton le Censeur’, in Les Vies des hommes illustres, trans. Jacques Amyot and ed. Gérard Walter (Paris: Pléiade, 1951), vol. I, 751–92, 758–60. 55. Buffon suggests possible experiments to prove his hypothesis, for example, taking the Senegalese to Denmark, and, without allowing them to interbreed with Danish natives, see how long it takes (it may be centuries) for the Senegalese to go white! 56. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 57. It is interesting how this is staged in various Hollywood representations of the history of slavery in the Americas­– ­from the devoted Mammy of Gone With the Wind (1939) to the revelations of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). Tarantino’s vile and cruel white master has lived his life surrounded by black slaves and has more intimate relations with some of them than with other white men or women­– ­most strikingly old Stephen, who playacts Uncle Tom in front of other white people but who governs his master as well as loving him, and is as vicious as the worst slaver. The film is straightforward in its assault on slavery, and spectatorial pleasure lies in the violent revenge on slavers, but it is more complex in suggesting some of the ways lives and emotions are inevitably intertwined in the proximity of domestic life. 58. In a letter to Edward Coles in August 1814, Jefferson professes himself against slavery and argues that the degenerate condition of ‘negroes’ is (partly?) due to slavery­– h ­ e hopes that it will be abolished. In the meantime masters should treat slaves as well as possible (Notes on the State of Virginia, 284–7). However, he only formally freed two of his many slaves in his lifetime­– b ­ oth of them believed to be his sons by his slave Sally Hemings. His daughters by Hemings ran away (or were allowed 299

Derrida and Other Animals to leave) and were not pursued. In spite of DNA and other evidence, some Jefferson scholars continue to assert that it is implausible that the great man fathered children on one of his slaves . . . 59. For Jefferson’s writings on Africans in Notes on the State of Virginia, see 77–8 (Albinos), 94, 142–52; a letter from Richard Price, 270; and a letter from Benjamin Banneker (an African-American freed slave, and a mathematician, who sends him his Almanac), 271–4. Jefferson replies seeing Banneker as a possible example of African intellectual potential, and sends the Almanac on to Condorcet (275–6); however, later correspondence casts this in a different light. Abbé Grégoire, famed for his abolitionist and egalitarian stance contra Jefferson, is mentioned in Jefferson’s Letter to Joel Barlow of October 1809 (279–80)­– ­casting doubt on Grégoire’s evidence or his judgement on Africans. This undermines his response to Banneker, whom he now says has a mind of common stature .­ . . Peter Singer argues forcefully in the context of animal liberation that even if there were real differences between people in terms of physical and mental abilities, even if there were genetic links between IQ and race, it should not mean that there should be systematic discrimination­– t­he moral principle of equality is not a statement of fact about equality (Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Random House, 1975), 4); he quotes Jefferson approvingly . . . 60. See Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 61. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes (discussing slavery and the Missouri question), Monticello, 22 April 1820. Other examples of his using this include a conversation with Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Monticello, 18 July 1824. See http:­/­/www.monticello.org­/site­/jefferson­/wolf-ear. 62. Both Jefferson and John Adams seem to have had copies of La Fontaine in their libraries and discuss wolves and sheep in their letters to each other. 63. See my Feminine Economies, chapter 4, for Diderot’s concern with parental love in the Supplement. His representation of children in Tahiti as valuable has been seen by some modern commentators as ­ut this, making them into (proto-capitalist) commodities (res)­– b while an interesting line of enquiry, is too simplistic. His account should also be related to the changing understanding of parenthood­ – ­particularly maternity­– ­in the eighteenth century, for instance in relation to Rousseau’s Emile, and the influence of that work with regards to breast-feeding. 64. For Derrida on Rousseau’s Robinsonian solitude and singularity, see Beast 2, 64–9, 199; Bête 2, 106–12, 281. 65. Friday’s father appears in one of Crusoe’s dreams complaining about 300

The Slave the villainy of the pirate sailors in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Beast 2, 138; Bête 2 203). 66. Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 67. According to Schonhorn Defoe’s position on this varied­– ­he argued for balance between the three estates throughout Queen Anne’s reign (Defoe’s Politics, 150), but perhaps was aligning again with Tory royalists in 1719 at the time of writing Robinson Crusoe. 68. Crusoe converts his fellow Brazilian planters to the slave trade as easy profit by telling them of his journeys to Africa: ‘how easy it was to purchase upon the coast for trifles, such as beads, toys, knives, scissors, hatchets, bits of glass, and the like, not only gold dust, Guinea grains, elephants teeth etc., but negroes, for the service of the Brazils, in great numbers’ (Robinson Crusoe, 59). This is appealing (in spite of the dangers of the seas) at a time when, he tells his reader, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns controlled the trade, keeping prices high. 69. Crusoe’s friend, the captain who rescued him in his first adventure, buys him a bonded servant (in Lisbon) to work for him in Brazil for six years (Robinson Crusoe, 57). The relationship of bonded service to slavery is a complex one today as then. Crusoe buys himself a ‘negro slave’ (58) and another European servant. 70. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). 71. See Alan Downie, ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Eighteenth-Century Contexts’, in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Spaas and Stimpson, 13–27. 72. See Williams, ‘Naked Creatures’, 339 (Robinson Crusoe, 49–52). 73. The only case of a real dog who is presented in a negative light in this novel is an episode which allows Dick to show strength early on by confronting a fierce dog on the docks who is attacking Sand, the beginning of their devoted friendship (Verne, Les Naufragés du Jonathan, Part 2, 64). 74. See for example, Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 25–8. 75. In the French Lettres d’un cultivateur the opening of the first letter refers specifically to the Farmer’s ‘hospitalité américaine’ (1). 76. The contemporary reader may think of Buffon or indeed of Raynal­– ­to whom Crèvecoeur dedicates his work. The point is rather different in the French edition which focuses more on the Farmer’s interest for European readers because they find his Letters (like American plants) exotic (4–6). 77. See Manning’s note, Letters from an American Farmer, 228. 78. Derrida points out that sexual differences are kept under wraps in almost all of the philosophical treatises on the animality of the animal (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 36, 40; L’Animal que donc je suis, 301

Derrida and Other Animals 59, 64); I would add, here, or discourses on the slave or savage­– e­ xcept for breeding, sex work. 79. Crèvecoeur’s account of benevolent or, rather, paternalistic northern slave-owners (or former slave-owners) may be compared with the even more self-serving version of Southern slaveholders who ‘declared their own social system superior to alternatives and a joy to blacks as well as whites. Viewing the free states, they saw vicious Negrophobia and racial discrimination and a cruelly exploited white working class. Concluding that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery or something akin to it, they proudly identified “Christian slavery” as the most humane, compassionate, and generous of social systems’. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1. As the title indicates, this is at least as much about slaveholders’ beliefs about themselves as it is about attempting to convince (or dupe) others. 80. See Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012) for a recent account of eighteenth-century Quaker debates over slavery and the slave trade. Thanks to Matthew Pethers for recommending this and other works on Enlightenment America. In spite of his Quaker beliefs, William Penn did not outlaw slavery in his American colony, and slaveholding was common in early Pennsylvania. The London Quakers banned Friends from trading in slaves in 1713­– a­ n injunction that was largely ignored, and so was repeated in 1727. It is in 1758 that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (the centre for Quakers in the region) makes slave trading an enforceable breach of Quaker discipline. Carey does not refer to Crèvecoeur, either in this book focusing on an earlier period or in his British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. 81. The Encyclopédie article ‘Slave’ notes that, according to the Code noir, ‘Freed men are obliged to show particular respect to their former masters’ (my translation) (‘Les affranchis sont obligés de porter un respect singulier à leurs anciens maîtres’) (V, 942). 82. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Voltaire emphasises the Quakers’ belief in absolute equality and presents an idyllic account of the community in Pennsylvania­– t­he only one, he tells his reader, where relations with the indigenous people are perfectly harmonious and based on mutual respect. He does not mention slaveholding although in the early eighteenth century it is estimated that about 10 percent of the population of Pennsylvania were slaves, and in the period 1706–30 three-quarters of Quaker leaders owned slaves (Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 13, 179). 302

The Slave 83. Misslin also occurs in the ‘Description abrégée de la secte des Quakers ou Amis’, Lettres d’un cultivateur américain, 172–98. 84. Compare Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, where he praises Quakers but makes no mention of slavery. On the whole the term ‘slave’ is used figurally rather than literally in this work. 85. Crèvecoeur also uses the term slaves figurally in writing about the Orient, following a dominant Western tradition in this respect: ‘Almost everywhere, liberty, so natural to mankind, is refused, or rather enjoyed but by their tyrants; the word slave is the appellation of every rank, who adore, as a divinity, a being worse than themselves, subject to every caprice, and to every lawless rage which unrestrained power can give’ (Letters from an American Farmer, 162). 86. In fact, as Manning argues, there are hints of violence earlier: ‘the animals on James’s farm behave themselves as beasts in his fable of American Enlightened order, but even this most ordered allegory seems to be predicated on violence and depredation. The spectre of anarchy inheres in Letter II’s image of harmonious farmyard governance; to a perhaps surprising extent, cruelty and ferocity structure the narrative even in its earlier, more optimistic phases’ (Letters from an American Farmer, xxvi). She mentions, for example, the battle between the kingbird and the bees. 87. See my ‘Lucretia’s Silent Rhetoric’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. VI (1984), 70–86. 88. ‘It might have been a gentle useful hen leading her chickens with a care and vigilance which speaks shame to many women. A cock, perhaps, arrayed with the most majestic plumes, tender to its mate, bold, courageous, endowed with an astonishing instinct, with thoughts, with memory, and every distinguishing characteristic of the reason of man!’ (Letters from an American Farmer, 28). As Derrida puts it­– n ­ ot to speak of women (Beast 2, 28; Bête 2, 56).

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6

Women and Other Animals: Working Metamorphoses1

Things are not so simple.2 In truth, they are less simple than ever. As always when sexual differences are in play. (Incidentally, I’ll venture to say to all those who­– o ­ ften in the press, as you know­– s­ peak ironically of people who, like me for example, are fond of issuing warning, saying, ‘Things are not so simple,’ those to whom irony comes easily when they are faced with this systematic warning, I believe it’s primarily because they want to hide from themselves, forget or deny something to do with sexual differences. There’s always a clandestine debate raging about sexual differences.) (Derrida, Beast 1, 220) Les choses ne sont pas si simples. Elles sont en vérité moins simples que jamais. Comme toujours quand il y va des différences sexuelles. (D’ailleurs, je me risquerai à dire que tous ceux qui, souvent dans la presse, vous le savez, ironisent contre ceux qui, comme moi par exemple, ont coutume de mettre en garde en disant ‘Les choses ne sont pas si simples’, ceux qui ironisent facilement contre cette mise en garde systématique, je crois, c’est mon hypothèse, qu’ils voudraient d’abord se masquer, oublier ou dénier quelque chose des différences sexuelles. C’est toujours un débat clandestin qui fait rage au sujet des différences sexuelles.) (Derrida, Bête 1, 294)

Derrida’s key reference in volume 2 of The Beast and the Sovereign, alongside Defoe, is Heidegger­– ­who pursues the line of Aristotle and Descartes in establishing a very sharp demarcation, indeed a gulf, between man and other animals. Heidegger is also frequently evoked by Derrida in a number of different texts (notably Geschlecht I and II) for his evasion of sexual difference. Heidegger opposes truly human poetic creativity to mechanical technology which, for him, has something of the repetitive and mindless animal about it. This is rather different from the way in which the term ‘technology’ is deployed by many other philosophers today or by ethnographers or archaeologists. Whether particular technologies or technological advances are admired or deplored by different thinkers, most consider their definition of technology as integral to the hominisation of man. In other 304

Women and Other Animals words, animals are said not to use technology­– ­now that philosophers have to admit that animals use tools (thanks to research by biologists observing not only mammals but also birds), they still cling to the idea that the significant difference is that animals do not make tools, and hence, unlike men, cannot progress. This is of course a return to creativity in some respects, although Heidegger might argue that these technologies are invented to make men like unthinking animals rather than progress as human beings. Derrida painstakingly deconstructs these oppositions both in Heidegger and in ethnologists, which, I might note, easily lead us towards class difference, although in this chapter I shall focus on sexual difference. By analysing the way in which women are positioned as animals with respect to their relationship to technology (unable to invent tools) or to mechanical or repetitive work (including sex work where the worker’s body is the animal machine), I hope to clarify the arbitrary nature of the classifications which shift as the occasion demands­– ­so long as women, animals, foreigners and the lower orders are somehow in their place. I shall take the particular example of weaving, amongst other domestic labours. The woven web, textile or, finally, veil can also return us to a labour history of immigrations (Huguenots, Jews, and South-East Asians, for example) and racisms directed at the animalised and feminised other. A further dimension to this is the way in which some women writers re-imagine bestial metamorphosis, questioning the ranking of high and low in itself as well as women’s location in the ranking. But I shall start with the poetic (women too can be poets) and domestic debunking of men who lay down the law about men and animals.

Fables: Duffy’s ‘Mrs Aesop’ If I place so much emphasis on the fable and the fabulous, it is undoubtedly [. . .] because of fables, like La Fontaine’s, that put on the political and anthropological [anthropomorphic in French] stage beasts that play a role in civil society or in the state, and often the statutory roles of subject or sovereign. But there’s another reason for my emphasizing the fabulous. [. . .] as the fables themselves show, the essence of political force and power, where that power makes the law, where it gives itself right, where it appropriates legitimate violence and legitimates its own arbitrary violence­– t­his unchaining and enchaining of power passes via the fable, i.e. speech that is both fictional and performative, speech that consists in saying: well, I’m right because yes, I’m right because, yes, I’m called Lion and, you’ll listen to me, I’m talking to you, be afraid, I am the most valiant and I’ll strangle you if you object. (Derrida, Beast 1, 217) 305

Derrida and Other Animals Si j’insiste tant sur la fable et sur le fabuleux, c’est sans doute [. . .] à cause des fables, comme celles de La Fontaine, qui mettent en scène politique et anthropomorphique des bêtes qui jouent un rôle dans la société civile ou dans l’Etat, et souvent les rôles statutaires de sujet ou de souverain. Mais il y a une autre raison à mon insistance sur le fabuleux. C’est que, comme d’ailleurs le montrent les fables elles-mêmes, l’essence de la force et du pouvoir politiques, là où il fait la loi, là où il se donne le droit, là où il s’approprie la violence légitime et légitime sa propre violence arbitraire, eh bien, ce déchaînement et cet enchaînement du pouvoir passent par de la fable, c’est-à-dire par de la parole à la fois fictionnelle et performative, une parole qui consiste à dire: ‘Eh bien, j’ai raison parce que oui, j’ai raison parce que oui, je m’appelle le lion et que, vous allez m’écouter, je vous parle, prenez peur, je suis le plus vaillant et je vais vous étrangler si vous objectez.’ (Derrida, Bête 1, 290–1)

Fables found or ground philosophy and political action even as they are denied­– ­yet they are ‘false knowledge’ about the world and relations, setting up self-evident truths: a woman is not a man, a man is not a beast. The poet Duffy subtly undermines that power of the fable and the fabulist: the one who knows and lays down the law, the one who fait savoir­– ­makes known, perhaps makes knowledge I might suggest (Derrida, Beast 1, 34–6; Bête 1, 61–3). Is woman always a little bête? Does she hang in suspense between the adjective (whether referring to simple intellectual inferiority or to a slightly higher human stupidity in language as exemplified by Bouvard and Pécuchet) and the noun (the dumb beast)? When man, above all the philosopher (Aristotle or Heidegger), insists on the difference between man and the animal then it seems to me that it is also woman who silently enters into play as the non-man, the other to man. The ‘philosopher’ can stand here not only for the professional but also for the circulation of philosophemes both in philosophy and in everyday discourse. The uncertainty over whether a woman can be ‘man’ has been signalled in a number of feminist analyses.3 The possible, intermittent omission signalled in some texts can of course be applied to other categories of subordination depending on historical and spatial context­– ­as suggested in Chapters 4 and 5. The would-be absolute hierarchy established between the one who controls thought and word and those who do not is signally flexible according to context. The animalisation of the other is a tactic (not even necessarily a strategy) which has always been to hand since the relation between men and other animals has been central since the beginning of pre-history, judging by the first works of art traced on 306

Women and Other Animals cave walls (early writing) or the first little statuettes that have been found around early dwelling places. Animals are not only good for eating but also good for thinking, imagining, figuring.4 Animals can be divinised, reified, abjected, as the bodily par excellence and, as I pointed out in Chapter 3, Derrida tells his audience more than once in The Beast and the Sovereign: ‘in the place of the beast one can put, in the same hierarchy, the slave, the woman, the child’ (Beast 1, 33) (‘à la place de la bête on peut mettre, dans cette même hiérarchie, l’esclave, la femme, l’enfant’ (Bête 1, 60)). Animals play a role in figuring relations between men and women­ –n ­ ot simply quotidian misogyny such as abusive naming (cow, sow, pussy)­– t­he animal­/feminine is also at stake in what Michèle Le Dœuff has termed the philosophical imaginary, something which is not cut off from the everyday, far from it, but nevertheless has a certain specificity. Le Dœuff summarises her hypothesis as follows: The narrow version states that the interpretation of imagery in philosophical texts goes together with a search for points of tension in a work. In other words, such imagery is inseparable from the difficulties, the sensitive points of an intellectual venture. The broader version states that the meaning conveyed by images works both for and against the system that deploys them. For, because they sustain something which the system cannot itself justify, but which is nevertheless needed for its proper working. Against, for the same reason­– ­or almost: their meaning is incompatible with the system’s possibilities. The real work of these essays takes place, each time, somewhere between these two extremes: between the location of a difficulty and that of a contradiction.5 Version minorée­– i­nterpréter les séquences en images des textes philosophiques (au sens large) va de pair avec la recherche des lignes de tension d’une œuvre; ou encore l’imagerie est solidaire des difficultés, des points douloureux d’une entreprise. Version majorée­– l­e sens porté par les images travaille à la fois pour et contre le système qui les met en œuvre. Pour, en ce qu’elles sont fondatrices de ce que le système ne peut pas justifier mais qui est en même temps nécessaire à son fonctionnement. Contre, pour la même raison, ou peu s’en faut: leur signification est incompatible avec les possibilités du système. Le travail réel se situe, en fait, chaque fois entre ces deux extrêmes, entre le repérage d’une difficulté et celui d’une contradiction.6

This difficulty or contradiction frequently returns to a doxal hierarchy: man-woman, man-animal. 307

Derrida and Other Animals I shall refer to the poetry of the British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy (1955–), as a way of approaching the brisure between animal imagery and the moralising, would-be universal system supported by the images in philosophical or fabular writing­– ­fables as quasiphilosophy, legislative discourse. Duffy juxtaposes the universal with marginal, concrete details which finally undermine rather than underpin the generality of the moral observation or lesson. She questions and challenges received ideas and philosophical dicta, sometimes using the device of simple, apparently ingenuous questions, posed by a woman who emphasises physical work and material life (such as cooking or sex), to a famous man, celebrated for his creativity or his insight into human nature, the nature of man. In The World’s Wife collection (already cited in Chapter 3), she allows the imaginary female partners of famous or notorious men to speak. These liberated female voices are sometimes angry, sometimes wistful, scatological, caustic, or lovelorn, but they are freed to be less than proper, more than property, sometimes quite dirty as in the example of the bird shitting on the sleeve in ‘Mrs Aesop’. I shall cite this poem in extenso as it seems to me to work as an excellent supplement to Derrida’s analyses of fables in The Beast and the Sovereign­– t­ aking his political into the personal. Derrida shows how teaching (dispensing knowledge) and politics (political action) claim to be without fable, for fabula is first of all merely familiar speech, even song, and then mythical narrative­– ­a simulacrum of knowledge (Beast 1, 34; Bête 1, 62). Yet, he asks, what if political discourse, and even the political action that results, even putting to death or acts of war, ‘were constituted or even instituted by something fabular, by that sort of narrative simulacrum’ (Beast 1, 35; Bête 1, 62)? Duffy’s Mrs Aesop reminds us that fables are ‘pretend knowing’ or ‘false knowing’, a lupine mask of knowing (Beast 1, 35; Bête 1, 62) although they have been fossilised into ‘common sense’: Mrs Aesop By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory. He was small, didn’t prepossess. So he tried to impress. Dead men, Mrs Aesop, he’d say, tell no tales. Well, let me tell you now that the bird in his hand shat on his sleeve, never mind the two worth less in the bush. Tedious. Going out was worst. He’d stand at our gate, look, then leap; scour the hedgerows for a shy mouse, the fields for a sly fox, the sky for one particular swallow 308

Women and Other Animals that couldn’t make a summer. The jackdaw, according to him, envied the eagle. Donkeys would, on the whole, prefer to be lions. On one appalling evening stroll, we passed an old hare snoozing in a ditch­– ­he stopped and made a note­– ­ and then, about a mile further on, a tortoise, somebody’s pet, creeping, slow as marriage, up the road. Slow but certain, Mrs Aesop, wins the race. Asshole. What race? What sour grapes? What silk purse, sow’s ear, dog in a manger, what big fish? Some days I could barely keep awake as the story droned on towards the moral of itself. Action, Mrs A., speaks louder than words. And that’s another thing, the sex was diabolical. I gave him a fable one night about a little cock that wouldn’t crow, a razor-sharp axe with a heart blacker than the pot that called the kettle. I’ll cut off your tail, all right, I said, to save my face. That shut him up. I laughed last, longest. (Duffy, The World’s Wife, 19)

Aesop is seen as the Father of the fable, although there are earlier Aramaic examples. Little is known of his life although he is placed in the seventh to sixth century bc, and is typically represented as an outsider­– ­perhaps even an ugly black slave­– ­who loves the idea that those who are exploited can turn the tables on the powerful.7 Yet Duffy imagines this humble individual as a husband who wants to be the master in his own home­– ­he insists that his wife listens to him (in both senses). Any emphasis on humility, if there is one, returns us to the natural order of power­– ­the donkey is not a lion8 even if he would like to wear his skin. This Aesop speaks prudently as a man who knows his place and the place of everything­– ­a jackdaw is not an eagle.9 This is the monotonous tautology of the repetitive series of fables: the one is not the other, the lower is not the higher, the weaker is not the stronger and so on, in an endless succession of examples. The tortoise might arrive before the hare, but it would be too stupid to believe that the tortoise is simply faster­– ­no, it is just more reliable, a better bet. There is even a certain tradition of mocking naive readers who, knowing that speed is of the essence, send a tortoise. There are times when one prefers solidity to rapidity of course, but what we have here is a crystallisation of traits, a petrification of animals into 309

Derrida and Other Animals animots (the neologism Derrida uses to conjure up ‘the animal’ imagined by philosophy or, say, psychoanalysis against the rich plurality of animaux). ‘Mrs Aesop’ is a poem which puts Aesop’s moral world, in which any creature serves to illustrate a maxim, into contact with the sensible, sensual, complex, material world privileged by his wife. The universe of the concrete produces exceptions to the fabulist’s rules, or rather, the possibility of exceptions to the auto-validation of legislative discourse. Since ‘the imaginary which is present in theoretical texts stands in a relation of solidarity with the theoretical enterprise itself (and with its troubles)’ (Le Dœuff, Philosophical Imaginary, 6) (‘l’imaginaire présent dans les textes théoriques est solidaire de l’entreprise théorique elle-même (et de ses douleurs)’ (Le Dœuff, L’Imaginaire philosophique, 14)), this implied critique of the fabulous details, this evocation of the concrete animal (the old hare who snoozes in a ditch, the strolling pet tortoise), disturbs the legislative function of the fable and thus ‘the coercive force of its application and its implementation’ (Derrida, Beast 1, 207) (‘la force coercitive de son application et de sa mise en œuvre’ (Derrida, Bête I, 278)). Moreover it diminishes the power of a would-be monolithic image by multiplying images even as it evokes the powerlessness of the moralist, the one who lays down the law. The earthy, even coarse, wife mocks the sexual impotence of the father of the fable as she reveals the lack of imagination on the part of the one who uses images to make law and to regulate living. ‘The reference to women (or to any other subject deemed “unfit” for philosophy) allows this powerlessness to be overlooked, for there it is projected, in a radicalized form, on to a subject who is even situated on this side of the search for speculative truths’ (Le Dœuff, Philosophical Imaginary, 112) (‘La référence à la femme (ou à tout autre sujet “inapte” à la philosophie) permet de méconnaître cette impuissance [de la spéculation philosophique], puisque la voilà projetée, après avoir été radicalisée, sur un sujet qui se situe même en-deçà de la recherche des vérités spéculatives’ (Le Dœuff, L’Imaginaire philosophique, 148)). Of course, the inapt subject par excellence is the beast­– ­the beast figures all the other unfit subjects, including women of little faith or reason who need to be excluded from philosophy. Duffy is producing a counter-discourse which stands against the fabulist if not the philosopher, no longer the one who masters and who projects powerlessness on to the other­– ­the sow’s ear that will never be a silk purse (a commonplace which has a clear reference to female pretensions). Mrs Aesop simply inquires 310

Women and Other Animals (if a little waspishly): but what silk purse, what sow’s ear? Her questions make us think, force us to use our critical faculties instead of swallowing ready-made truisms whole. The poem juxtaposes well-known Aesop’s fables with doxa, proverbs and popular clichés in a similar style, with little care for the various provenances, all are of the same order, the same chorus of ‘we all know’ verities. Intertexual circulation is the life of these doxa. My first example is: ‘the bird in his hand shat on his sleeve, /­ never mind the two worth less in the bush’. The English proverb ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’10 has two possible significations according to commentators­– e­ ither that hunters do not want to risk their precious falcons or hawks unless the prey is worth it; or that it makes sense to hold fast the captured prey rather than going after new targets. The latter meaning recalls La Fontaine’s fable, ‘The Little Fish and the Fisher’ (‘Le Petit Poisson et le Pêcheur’)11 whose moral runs: ‘In some things, men of sense /­ Prefer the present to the future tense’ (‘Un Tiens vaut, ce dit-on, mieux que deux Tu l’auras (L’un est sûr, l’autre ne l’est pas)’). La Fontaine was indeed inspired by one of Aesop’s fables: ‘The Fisherman and the Little Fish’ which ends: ‘I should be a very simple fellow, if I were to forego my certain gain for an uncertain profit.’12 This economic prudence is reminiscent of Crusoe on his island. Duffy juxtaposes the emphasis placed on keeping hold of your property with shit, the figure for gold for Freud, the reality of work for the scornful housewife who mocks the fastidious miser who sees himself as the creator of something fabulous­– f­ or the thing that he thinks he possesses shits on him­– ­raw animal life. Duffy’s Mrs Aesop persona passes swiftly from the tedious bird story to the dreary walks. When Aesop habitually hesitates at the threshold of the conjugal home, following his own maxim ‘look before you leap’,13 he is once again showing his prudence­– ­and I might note that the advice is frequently given to men thinking of getting married.14 One might also recall Montaigne’s analogy, which Derrida cites, between marriage and a caged bird for whom the grass is always greener whichever side of the bars he finds himself. Duffy’s examples do not have a necessary relationship to sexual difference, but at the same time, sex is always in play. Birds can be young women, and bush, female pubic hair­– t­erms which, if not always pejorative can certainly be dismissive­– ­‘bush’ can, by metonymy, refer to the woman you can ‘have’ (sexual relations often linguistically and materially bound up with possession). Thus, as well as the birds themselves, the birds’ habitat can be sexualised as the place 311

Derrida and Other Animals of encounter. Towards the end of the dramatic monologue, it is the female voice responding aloud with ‘a little cock that wouldn’t crow’, a fable about a flaccid phallus. The ‘dog in a manger’, who deprives the cows of their sustenance although he would not eat such lowly food himself, comes from a fable often attributed to Aesop­ – ­and again often has a sexual connotation.15 In French (and other European languages) there is a similar story about the gardener’s dog who continues to guard his cabbages after his master’s death­– ­the dog here is at least faithful, while the English-language animal is simply spiteful in his exercise of power. Molière, however, sexualises this in the feminine in a pejorative manner that brings the French expression closer to the English one: ‘But, madame, if he loved you, you wouldn’t want him, and yet you do not want him to be another’s. That is just what the gardener’s dog does.’ (‘Mais, madame, s’il vous aimait vous n’en voudriez point, et cependant vous ne voulez point qu’il soit à une autre. C’est faire justement comme le chien du jardinier.’)16 The only pleasure for Aesop when he walks out with his wife is his hunt for animots­– ­the animals which he can use, monetise, convert sententiously: the shy country mouse (rat des champs for the French), the sly fox, the one swallow that couldn’t make a summer. This last phrase is to be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, from the consideration of the method to determine the proper function of man, that is to say the activity of the soul in accordance with reason (an activity named reason)­– ­which he distinguishes here from the life of sensations of the animals.17 Aristotle evokes a solitary swallow to suggest (even prove) that this active reason must function in the long term. Perhaps his readers understand as well that solitude is not appropriate for active reason­– ­men must act together, for instance in the polis or with friends. A suspicious person might imagine that if a woman occasionally exercises the power of reason, then she is like a single swallow­– ­she does not make a summer, she is not thereby to be deemed rational nor are women in general thereby to be deemed rational. She may be the exception that proves the rule. The lesson for us women­– w ­ e have to accept our natural limits and not follow the bad example of the fox who claims, when she cannot reach the grapes, that she has not taken them simply because they are sour (not yet ripe).18 Philosophy: Is just the formal idea that discourse must involve exclusion or discipline, that admissible modes of thought cannot be undefined. It is perhaps a 312

Women and Other Animals general form of exclusion, capable of being given a variety of different contents without itself being essentially allied to any of them. This is why the object of exclusion is not properly definable. But then this nameless, undefined object, this indeterminable otherness, can only be described metaphorically: I mean by making use of an available signifier, seized upon by philosophical discourse to pinpoint a difference. A signifier is, of course, a term expressing some discrimination. (Le Dœuff, Philosophical Imaginary, 115) Serait une forme générale de l’exclusion susceptible de recevoir un certain nombre de contenus, mais elle-même non-solidaire d’un contenu particulier. C’est pourquoi l’objet de l’exclusion n’est pas proprement déterminable. Mais alors, ce sans-nom, cet indéfini, cette altérité mal désignée, ne peut être dénoté que par métaphore, j’entends par la capture d’un signifiant disponible, dont le discours philosophique s’empare pour épingler une différence. Un signifiant, c’est-à-dire évidemment le terme d’une discrimination. (Le Dœuff, L’Imaginaire philosophique, 151)

Here I would suggest the discrimination, in both senses of the word, man-woman. But in so far as the activity of separation, of division, is philosophically creative (the field is created by its exclusions), philosophy creates itself in what it represses and, this object of repression being essential to it, is endlessly engaged in separating, enclosing and insularising itself. And the old wives’ tales and nannies’ lore are always ‘obscuring’ the clear light of the concept­– ­not because the repressed in general might be overwhelming by nature, but because the finite stock of admissible procedures is never sufficient. All thought presupposes an undefined area, a certain play of structures, a certain margin of free-floating around codified procedures. (Philosophical Imaginary, 115) Mais, en tant que ce geste de séparation, de partition, est créateur du philosophique (le champ est créé par ses exclusions), la philosophie se crée dans ce qu’elle réprime, et, ce refoulé lui étant essentiel, elle n’en finit jamais de s’en séparer, de se clore, de s’insulariser. Et les contes de bonnes femmes, les enseignements de nourrice viennent sans cesse ‘obscurcir’ la claire lumière du concept. Non en raison d’une dynamique quelconque qui serait propre au refoulé en général, mais parce que le stock fini de procédures licites ne suffit pas. Toute pensée suppose une zone d’indétermination, un certain jeu des structures, une certaine liberté de flottement autour des procédures codifiées. (L’Imaginaire philosophique, 151)

Aristotle’s evidence, if that is what it is, is quite problematic: it is of course literally true that one swallow does not make a summer (or 313

Derrida and Other Animals spring, in the French version . . .). It is also true that neither summer nor spring need swallows either in the plural or the singular­– ­it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for either season. What is summer (or spring)? It is quite difficult to pin down, indeterminate. Seasons are defined by men in specific areas of the globe, particularly in Europe where there are periods of the year when typically you notice a change in temperature and light, and so generally a change in vegetation and animal life­– ­a statistical difference, quantitative rather than innate.19 So­– t­he long term conjured up by more than one swallow (we do not know exactly how many are required­– ­rather like the ‘plus d’une’ that Derrida comments on extensively in Politics of Friendship), makes me think of Aristotle, philosopher of virtuous masculine friendship from which women are explicitly excluded, which must be actively practised during a certain period at least. Reason is defined between men. This reason is not unrelated to power, ‘la raison du plus fort’. Derrida points out in his analysis of ‘The Heifer, the Goat, and the Ewe, in Society with the Lion’ that the three animals juxtaposed to the masculine lion, who first divides the food into four parts then has reasons to take all of it, are all female and all related to the lamb (Beast 1, 213–14; La Bête, 285–7).

Work and technology: women as animals I am tout à l’heure going to consider some stories which end with women metamorphosing into animals, via the relationship between women, work and technology. There is a parallel between women’s work­– h ­ istorically considered as invisible work, not creative or significant­– a­nd animals’ work and technology. The Cartesian animal is a machine rather than creating or using machines. This is particularly true of animal work outside the context of domestication. The spider’s web or the silkworm’s cocoon are considered as natural products rather than labour let alone technology. A horse’s ploughing is work to the extent that field slaves may be considered to work­– a­ t the mercy of the perception of their owner. Darrieussecq’s Truismes, which I shall discuss later, suggests the ambiguity of sex work in particular­– ­is it a job? Is it an extra to a job? Can it be acknowledged? And while her protagonist explicitly becomes more or less like an animal, this also has a less explicit relationship to the mechanical nature of what she is doing. The first two examples of metamorphosis, which I shall eventually come to, occur in the context of classic tales of hospitality (and 314

Women and Other Animals indeed hospitality classically, typically, involves the telling of a story­ – ­the guest may be entertained but often, in his turn, entertains his host with a yarn). Hospitality is frequently both the subject and the context of stories. The great example is Homer; the tale of the wandering Odysseus, a foreigner, dependent on the hospitality of strangers, is an urtext of hospitality for later periods. Homer was also the source of my earlier masculine example of metamorphosis­– ­the ambiguous case of Odysseus’ companions, changed into animals by Circe, a tricky feminine ‘host’, who was not to be trusted. This is a tale the dispossessed Odysseus tells to King Alcinous, didactic entertainment for his royal Phaeacian host, indicating a series of examples of inhuman inhospitality, also including the episode with the Cyclops when men have to pretend to be sheep (food) in order not to be eaten. Hospitality is traditionally set up to be between men, although women often provide the labour to support it. Marie NDiaye provides a modern example in Trois Femmes puissantes in which the father of the first story was famed for his hospitality, and clearly drew pride in this patriarchal role. At the time when the story takes place he is a broken old man, enjoying his food rather than offering it to hordes of guests­– a­ nd at night he becomes a bird perched in the tree at the threshold of his home. His estranged daughter comes as close to him as she has ever been, and probably ever will be, when she joins him as a bird in the tree­– a­ kind of possible communion outside pernicious social roles.20 Hospitality is certainly a relation between men in the Homeric model, where mortal women without men do not travel, are not guests, and are endangered by acting as hosts­– b ­ ut the story may tell more than the assertions or sententiae about a woman’s place or indeed about hospitality.21 In Homer women are in their homes and they weave22­– i­ndeed in many myths, legends, texts and fairy tales up to at least the Renaissance women weave (and spin). This feminine hand weaving is both related to female oppression and an opportunity for women to attempt to express themselves and to manipulate the often oppressive situations in which they are caught. There is of course a historical, economic, sociological reality behind these stories: weaving as textile production was critical for human society for many thousands of years­– ­anthropologists used to say 8,000 but apparently the current estimate is more like 27,000.23 For most of this pre-history and history, in most places, women were the spinners and weavers of thread­– a­ nd often in the home (with its possibilities of enclosure, even incarceration).24 If we jump to a later 315

Derrida and Other Animals period such as the nineteenth century then of course there are textile mills or factories in Europe­– ­often with a relatively feminised work force­– ­and here too there is both exploitation of, and opportunities for, women. The slipping of sexual control of women, always disturbing to society, is marked in this shift to working outside the home for wages. I should also note in passing the case of textile production in sweatshops today.

Techne and metis I should like to take a look at some definitions of technology, bearing in mind the relation between definition, ideology and power, and consider how the term has functioned in Derrida’s writing, in particular the articulation (that is, linkage and separation) of nature and culture. While a thinker may be broadly in favour of technology or not (and Heidegger notoriously is not), a degree of technology is typically seen as integral to the hominisation of man by ethnographers and philosophers­– ­it is simply a question of where the breaks are made, what is deemed to be the cut off between man and animal, and then, in some cases, what is the point at which technology is deemed to have gone ‘too far’. In terms of dictionary definitions it is worth comparing the English and the French: Le Petit Robert gives for la technologie: ‘The study of techniques, tools, machines, materials’ (‘Etudes des techniques, des outils, des machines, des matériaux’). Closer to our everyday sense of technology is the adjective technique and noun la technique: The set of procedures [often translated as techniques] used to produce a work or to obtain a desired result. [. . .] 2. The set of methodical procedures, based on scientific knowledge, employed in production. [. . .] The set of procedures prescribed, scientifically developed, which are employed in the investigation and transformation of nature. Ensemble de procédés employés pour produire une œuvre ou obtenir un résultat déterminé. [. . .] 2. Ensemble de procédés méthodiques, fondés sur des connaissances scientifiques, employés à la production. [. . .] L’ensemble des procédés ordonnés, scientifiquement mis au point, qui sont employés à l’investigation et à la transformation de la nature.

The OED, rather surprisingly relative to our everyday usage (but in fact rather like la technologie), gives for technology: ‘1615 gk techno logia 1. A discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts. B. practical arts collectively 1859. 316

Women and Other Animals 2. The terminology of a particular art or subject; technical nomenclature 1658.’ It is interesting to see here the articulation of techniques with the discussion or study of techniques in technology. Derrida often wound a narrative around the (scientific or philosophical) gesture of closure­– t­he preference for the closed system, which, in the case of speech, oral communication, say, the technique of writing would contaminate from the outside. I am using the term technique advisedly, as technology is often supplementary in this way or the supplement is seen as a technique. For Derrida the system is open, up to a point; to use a term from weaving, there are always loose ends and they cannot easily be tied off without remainder. There is a degree of continuity between nature and technology (such as Freud’s mystic writing pad) as the ‘prosthetic device continuous with the system it supplements’.25 What is interesting is the degree of articulation (continuity and detachment) of open and closed. Derrida returns to the question of technology (already implicit in 1967 texts such as Of Grammatology or Writing and Difference) specifically in a series of lectures on Heidegger, two of which are reproduced in Psyche. He does not refer to weaving specifically, but his writing plays with the text­/textile­/texture possibilities­– ­for example referring to threads (les fils), which is even more evocative in French, with its sense of filiation, than in English. For Heidegger, thought must be kept: protected from any original and essential contamination by technology. The concern, then, was to analyze this desire for rigorous non-­ contamination and, from that, perhaps to envisage the necessity, one could say the fatal necessity of a contamination­– ­and the word was important to me­– o ­ f a contact originarily impurifying thought or speech by technology. (Derrida, Of Spirit, 10) à l’abri de toute contamination originaire et essentielle par la technique. Il s’agissait donc d’analyser ce désir de non-contamination rigoureuse et, dès lors, peut-être, de prendre en vue la nécessité, on pourrait dire la fatalité d’une contamination, et le mot m’importait, d’un contact impurifiant originairement la pensée ou la parole par la technique. (De l’esprit, 26)

Technology, for those who are suspicious of it, is always that which comes after an acceptable level of complexity, and introduces an unacceptable level of complexity and simultaneously deskilling. Where speech is the privileged mode of communication in a narrative then the technique of writing is a foreign invasion; however, handwriting might be acceptable­– ­to Heidegger for instance, with a 317

Derrida and Other Animals typewriter representing unthinkable mechanisation. Then we have the typewriter as natural relative to the word-processor and so on. Conversely, for those who are passionately excited about (new) technology­– p ­ recisely it must be new, a break with the past, a qualitative leap forward. We are back to the question of man’s ‘perfectibility’, progress or degeneration, mapped in Chapter 4­– ­set against the ahistorical animal. In ‘Heidegger’s Hand’ (‘La Main de Heidegger’) Derrida analyses Heidegger’s claim that man’s hand is for offering, giving (indeed se donner), and intimately related to thinking-speaking. Handwerk (handicraft, and the carpenter, not the weaver, is Heidegger’s preferred example) is opposed to profit-oriented money-making utility­– ­the mechanical. The hand holds the essence of man. This is completely different from hands (in the plural) which could work a machine, or a monkey’s prehensile ‘organs’ which are for grasping (‘Heidegger’s Hand’, 173; ‘La Main de Heidegger’, 428). Handwriting (closer to speech­/body) is thus better than the typewriter which destroys the word (178; 434). Christopher Johnson has explained how Derrida draws on cybernetics26 and ethnology of pre-history27 to show that technology is not just the question of (post-)modernity but ‘that technology has always been in different ways the determining question of humanity, of the human, of becoming-human­– ­so-called “hominisation”’, yet it would ‘always have to exceed the “human” in the narrow sense of the term, to include the animal, the animate, or [. . .] the articulated’.28 Technology is thus, for Derrida, neither simply an add-on, the invention of the fully formed human, nor is it uniquely human. The increasing fluidity of the boundary between man and machine is not simply part of a post-human future, but is integral to a prehistoric past. Leroi-Gourhan (Derrida’s main source on the ethnography of pre-history) argues in Gesture and Speech (Le Geste et la parole) that ‘it is impossible to explain the evolutionary emergence of language and of human intelligence without reference to the circuit of positive feedback between the human brain and the technosphere, the most complex interventions of the human animal in the environment being mediated through the hand’ (Johnson, ‘Machine and Animal’, 107). This is very different from Heidegger’s sense of the hand, used to differentiate between man and ape. The Indo-European root for the Greek techne is teks, meaning weaving as well as fabricating or shaping with an axe (as Duffy’s Mrs Aesop has an unfeminine mind to do). Thus, I should like to add that 318

Women and Other Animals weaving and textiles could be said to be actually at the heart of early understandings of technology.29 Another Greek term for weaving is the polysemic metis, meaning cunning (or practical wisdom) and weaving; it is the name of Athene’s mother who was swallowed by her father Zeus because he feared her first male child would usurp his place.30 Athene, with her totemic owl, is famously not of woman born (she emerges fully armed from Zeus’ head), although she does have a mother incarcerated in her father’s body, and she does have an affinity for the domestic feminine task of weaving. Nevertheless she is more often remembered today for her wisdom or even her warrior qualities. In ancient Athens, each year on her birthday when a procession wound up to her statue on the Parthenon, the maidens of the city offered up to Athene a cloth they had woven over the past year. However, it has been argued (by Irigarary amongst many others) that she is her Father’s daughter, the woman as bearer of the patriarchal system, and thus weaving is done in support of male power. And so I shall turn later to some weaving stories which take us down a slightly different path from Heidegger who, as Derrida points out, never mentions sexual difference in his writings on Geschlecht (meaning race, lineage, stock, community, generation, sex) despite the clear relevance of this. Foreigners and animals There is a relationship between all this and the reception of the foreigner. A fairly positive picture is often painted of the welcome given by England to French Protestants, facing Catholic persecution in France.31 The word refugee is dated to the Huguenots who fled after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. However, English hospitality was divided and self-interested. The interest of those such as Henry Savile (British Envoy in Paris) and his brother George Viscount Halifax (who had the ear of Charles II) related at least in part to the fact that the Huguenots were good hard-working citizens who were not a burden­– ­and brought technical skills and secrets particularly in the manufacture of textiles­– ­which Louis XIV would regret losing to a commercial rival. However, many British weavers had long protested the impoverishing the natural subject and enriching the stranger; by nourishing a scorpion in our bosoms; by taking the children’s bread and casting it to dogs; and (more particularly), first, by multitude of retailers 319

Derrida and Other Animals (for the more men exercise one trade, the less is every one his gain), and secondly, by the strangers’ policy, which consisteth either in providing their wares in such sort that they may sell better cheap than the natural subject, or else by persuading our people that they do so.32

The Huguenots are thus scorpions who sting their hosts, and dogs­– ­a generic term for lower beings as in the case of Friday, for example. In July 1615 the Weavers’ Company ‘urged that the strangers employed more workmen than were allowed by statute, and then concealed them when search was made­– t­hat they lived more cheaply and therefore sold more cheaply than the English­– ­that they imported silk lace contrary to law’ (Agnew, Protestant Exiles, index volume, 14). In 1621 the Company claims that the French Protestants neglect the law (obliging them to have English apprentices to learn their new trades), and so ‘keep their mysteries to themselves, which hath made them bold of late to devise engines for working of tape, lace, ribbon, and such, wherein one man doth more among them than seven Englishmen can do; so as their cheap sale of those commodities beggareth all our English artificers of that trade and enricheth them’ (Agnew, Protestant Exiles, index volume, 14). The enriched foreigners naturally increase in number, and the increase in demand leads to a rise in the price of food and rent as Agnew reports­– ­all disastrous for the native Englishman who argues for keeping the numbers of textile workers small, the prices of products high, and the cost of living low. These apparently rational economic concerns of a relatively dominant group of master workers (the owners of their own means of production) impinge on any subaltern group­– ­women workers as well as foreigners. Native masters will employ women, children or immigrants cheaply if they need the extra hands, but will resist competition especially from those perceived as competing unfairly, say, because of their technical sophistication. Resistance can take an aggressive form, encapsulated above in the typical dehumanisation of the refugees by comparing them to scorpions or dogs. Animals are woven into the texture of this narrative. The animal is associated with the mechanical­– ­it is a natural machine (without a soul for Descartes). Heidegger’s monkey does not have the hand that gives, but hands such as those that hold or work a machine. Huguenots (and Jews) are dehumanised by animal epithets. I shall seize this opportunity to cite Derrida’s work on silkworms in a book he co-produced with Cixous entitled Voiles.33 Voiles, like many titles chosen by Cixous or Derrida, is heavily pregnant with meaning. In 320

Women and Other Animals the French, the word is available both in the masculine (meaning ‘veil’) and in the feminine (meaning ‘sail’), a sexual distinction that Derrida had already drawn attention to in Eperons and Glas. The word takes him to the Greek (the unveiling of truth), and to a Greek woman, Penelope, spinning a story about weaving a shroud­– ­fending off a new husband and the possibility of reproducing, of new life, with this evocation of death in her seemingly infinite production (‘A Silkworm’, 22; ‘Un ver à soie’, 25–6). Voile also takes Derrida to the Hebrew, to the veil in the Temple, and to his father’s silk tallith or prayer shawl, a possible shroud. Between the Greek and the Jew there is also the North African confessor, Saint Augustine. To us today, a meditation on the veil must surely also touch on the Muslim veil­– ­the very codification of racial-religious-sexual difference­– ­so ‘difficult’ for us feminists born in a secular, liberal, post-colonial world and so ‘difficult’ for the French Republic that it must ban even headscarves in its state schools. ‘Voiles’ cover(s) both Cixous and Derrida; the titles of each of their sections are also the subjects of lengthy speculation. ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own. Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’ is Geoffrey Bennington’s translation of the untranslatable: ‘Un ver à soie. Points de vue piqués sur l’autre voile’, Derrida’s section of Veils. The translation keeps, inter alia, the important reference to soi as in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’,34 or more generally as in possession, mastery of the worm. However, the Anglophone reader has to remember that ‘ver’ (the worm in silkworm) is a key signifying syllable throughout the book, directing us ambiguously towards truth and Word (la vérité, le Verbe). Translatability and untranslatability of truth or knowledge (Cixous’s title is ‘knowledge’ but with sight encoded within the term ‘savoir’) as well as of persons is critical in the post-colonial world, critical to hospitality. I touch upon the complexity of Derrida’s text­– ­and quote it at length because of the relationship between the medium and the message­– ­and the passions it can provoke. In the following extract Derrida recounts his childhood passion for cultivating silkworms, whose strange bodily fluid with due care should translate into a precious textile, but whom he does not raise commercially but rather as little guests.35 The story of the young boy in the heat of the holidays in El-Biar is one of hospitality. Hospitality to silkworms (making love to themselves in the boy’s fantasy of sexual indifference) may seem to stretch a point too far. However, Derrida has argued that, ‘If you don’t do justice to hospitality toward animals, you are also excluding gods.’36 (‘Si l’on ne fait pas droit 321

Derrida and Other Animals à l’hospitalité envers l’animal, c’est aussi le dieu qu’on exclut.’)37 Homer and Ovid show the danger of excluding gods. Hospitality to animals is a limit case, on the borders of the question of hospitality, that is raised in a number of texts by both Cixous and Derrida. But hospitality to the silkworm not only raises questions of the border between animal and human (that inflects so many sexist and racist discourses), but also makes the reader reflect on the issue of the relationship between employer and employee, boss and worker, master and slave, husband and wife­– ­any relationship where the surplus value produced by the one is appropriated by the other. I was above all struck by the impossible embodied in these little creatures in their shoebox. It was not impossible, of course, to distinguish between a head and a tail, and so, virtually, to see the difference between a part and a whole, and to find some sense in the thing, a direction, an orientation. But it was impossible to discern a sex. There was indeed something like a brown mouth but you could not recognize in it the orifice you had to imagine to be at the origin of their silk, this milk become thread, this filament prolonging their body and remaining attached to it for a certain length of time: the extruded saliva of a very fine sperm, shiny, gleaming, the miracle of a feminine ejaculation, which would catch the light and which I drank in with my eyes. But basically without seeing anything. The silk-producing glands of the caterpillar can, I’ve just learned, be labial or salivary, but also rectal. [. . .] The self-displacement of this little fantasy of a penis, was it erection or detumescence? I would observe the invisible progress of the weaving [. . .] It did not separate itself from its work. [. . .] Love made itself make love right next to the watching dreaming child. [. . .] (I was forgetting to say that, by its essence, all this could only have been possible, in my memory in any case, in summer, in the heat of the holidays in El-Biar) namely that the silkworm buried itself, came back to itself in its odyssey, in a sort of absolute knowledge, as if it had to wrap itself in its own shroud, the white shroud of its own skin, in order to remain with itself, the being it had been with a view to re-engendering itself in the spinning of its filiation, sons or daughters­– ­beyond any sexual difference or rather any duality of sexes, and even beyond any coupling. In the beginning, there was the worm that was and was not a sex, the child could see it clearly, a sex perhaps but which one? (‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, 88–90) J’étais avant tout en arrêt devant l’impossible incarné en ces petits vivants dans leur boîte à chaussures. Il n’était pas impossible, certes de distinguer entre une tête et une queue, et donc, virtuellement, de faire la différence entre une partie et un tout, et de trouver un sens à la chose, une direction, une orientation. Mais il était impossible de discerner un sexe. Il y 322

Women and Other Animals avait bien quelque chose comme une bouche brune mais on ne pouvait y reconnaître l’orifice qu’il fallait bien imaginer à l’origine de leur soie, à ce lait devenu fil, à ce filament prolongeant leur corps et s’y retenant encore un certain temps: la salive effilée d’un sperme très fin, brillant, luisant, le miracle d’une éjaculation féminine qui prendrait la lumière et que je buvais des yeux. Mais sans rien voir, au fond. Les glandes séricigènes de la chenille peuvent être, je viens de l’apprendre, labiales ou salivaires, mais aussi rectales. [. . .] Le déplacement de soi de ce petit phantasme de pénis, était-ce érection ou détumescence? J’observais le progrès invisible du tissage [. . .] Il ne se séparait pas de son œuvre. [. . .] L’amour se faisait faire l’amour sous les yeux de l’enfant rêveur. [. . .] (J’oubliais de dire que, par essence, tout cela ne pouvait avoir été possible, dans ma mémoire en tout cas, que l’été, dans la chaleur des vacances, à El-Biar), à savoir que le ver à soie s’ensevelissait lui-même, revenait à lui-même dans son odyssée, dans une sorte de savoir absolu, comme s’il lui fallait s’envelopper dans son propre linceul, le linceul blanc de sa propre peau, pour rester auprès de soi, l’être qu’il avait été en vue de se réengendrer soi-même dans la filature de ses fils ou de ses filles­– ­au-delà de toute différence sexuelle ou plutôt de toute dualité des sexes, et même de tout accouplement. Au commencement, il y eut le ver qui fut et ne fut pas un sexe, l’enfant le voyait bien, un sexe peut-être mais alors lequel? (‘Un ver à soie’, 82–4)

In the first two paragraphs of ‘A Silkworm’, Derrida evokes first childhood memories of women knitting, the most domestic scene, before turning to the Odyssey and its most famous royal weaver, Penelope, making and unmaking a shroud in her bedchamber. The silkworm combines the homecoming as return to self, and the weaving of the shroud, but is it also the fabric and the recipient? Derrida also reminds us in ‘A Silkworm’ that Freud claims (in Femininity) that weaving is the one art or technology invented by women, and that they invented it out of feminine modesty­– ­to hide their lack of penis.38 But it is more of an imitation (of natural pubic hair), or an extension of nature, than an invention: ‘A woman would weave like a body secretes for itself its own textile, like a worm, but this time like a worm without worm, a worm primarily concerned to hide in itself its non-being’ (Veils, 60). (‘Une femme tisserait comme un corps sécrète pour soi son propre textile, comme un ver, mais cette fois comme un ver sans ver, un ver d’abord soucieux de dissimuler en soi son non-être’ (‘Un ver à soie’, 58)). As we ‘know’, women are, while men have, the phallus. (I have put ‘know’ in scare quotes to indicate that here it may not have the standard sense of knowing; equally the same trick could be played with the terms: women, men, are, have and phallus.) The reproducers of men, naturally women 323

Derrida and Other Animals are to be protected from pernicious outside influences that contaminate their purity. And women’s weaving (or cooking) in the home is a natural production, like the silkworm’s thread, unmeasured and unpaid. Domestic labour does not count in the GDP­– ­notoriously a man has only to marry his housekeeper for National Income to go down. What do technology, politics or economics have to do with it? The history of textile production shows associations of masters combining to keep their secrets and their profits­– ­largely excluding women (‘protecting’ their wives) but freely using women (sometimes country girls who have migrated to the city) as very cheap, unprotected, labour on the quiet.39 The Encyclopédie and Académie plates which hint at that shadowy history are part of a project that will damage associations of craftsmen as it furthers the rise of capitalism, as Geraldine Sheridan indicates. Weavers struggle against technological progress, and against cheap labour whether in the shape of women or foreigners (such as the Protestant refugees), in the fear that it will drive their own wages down, in the seventeenth century and in centuries to come. Women are disassociated from technology and yet they are also (like) technology, supplementary, even machines without souls, like animals in some accounts. But even if they become nightingales (like Philomela) or spiders (like Arachne) in the myths I am about to recount they continue communicating on some level­– t­here is a possibility of repetition which relates memory to a generalised technology of inscription. These women weavers can tell­– i­f only ‘mechanically’­– ­ of the violent contamination (rape) from which patriarchy says it will protect them if only they are docile. The silkworms are on the very margins or limits of naming­/the unnameable of hospitality and of sexual differentiation. In some ways they function above all in Derrida’s text as language­– ­helped by the trick of a name (ver à soie). But they are also workers, producers, and the fact that, as he points out, they are in some senses indistinguishable from their product, might remind us of Marx’s commodity fetishism and consumer capitalism, even while Freud on fetishism is never far away.

Metamorphoses I shall now re-tell three stories from the Classics­– ­one from Homer and two from Ovid –before passing on to contemporary femaleauthored stories of metamorphosis. These tales of three famous 324

Women and Other Animals weavers, Penelope, Philomela and Arachne, relate to power relations, sexual relations and language or representation, and have been rewritten or represented many times over the centuries to fit particular social and political moments. These archetypal stories enable a schematic focus on women’s work, which is unusual in general, and rare in discussions of technology in particular, where the paradigm is typically masculine. They encapsulate a number of possibilities including the celebration of women’s labour, creativity and wit, but also the exploitation and abuse of women, not only by men but by a particular kind of female (the father’s virgin daughter). In a chapter entitled ‘Circe’s Swine: “Wizard and Brute”’, Marina Warner observes: The Christian commitment to an embodied self [. . .] envisages identity inhabiting a particular form whose unique integrity will be perfected in heaven. Yet the seductive invitation of metamorphosis­– o ­ f turning into something other­– ­has continued to suffuse fantasies of identity, on the one hand holding out a way of escape from humanity, on the other annihilating the self [. . .] Metamorphosis is possibly the most inventive and rewarding manoeuvre that can be made in the face of fear: to change into a beast, to turn the monster into a person can effectively reverse the process of demonization and correspondingly place the terror in a different perspective. (No Go the Bogeyman, 263)40

Penelope, Philomela and Arachne The classic tales of Penelope, Philomela and Arachne are three extreme stories of weaving and sexual power relations­– ­and thus a good antidote to Heidegger’s veil over such matters. Penelope is perhaps the most famous weaver thanks to the Odyssey­– ­though she is certainly not the only weaver in Homer. For example, Clytemnestra uses her cloth in killing her returning husband;41 the ‘monstrous’ nymphs Calypso and Circe weave; and when the adulteress Helen is first introduced in the Illiad she is weaving a purple cloth which, like an early Bayeux tapestry, tells the story of the Trojan war. Penelope is famously besieged by suitors in her home in Ithaca: convinced that Odysseus is dead they want to marry his widow and inherit his kingdom. In the meantime she must entertain them and they are eating her out of house and home­– h ­ er home is no longer her own. She is forced to be a hostess, which is a very uncomfortable position for a mortal woman whose husband is not there. A woman alone is vulnerable to ‘rape’ or rapt. Many of her maid servants are indeed 325

Derrida and Other Animals raped, and then punished for their ‘unfaithfulness’ with death by hanging on Odysseus’ return­– ­compared to doves or thrushes caught in a snare. All these tales, I should add, get retold and analysed in many different contexts by many different people.42 At certain times critics have wished to cast doubt on Penelope’s famous virtue on the basis that she did not need to do anything so complicatedly crafty as she does: why does she not just snub her suitors, tell them to go away?43 This assumes that these powerful men simply ‘fancy’ her and will be put off by her rejection. It is rather like the modern assumption that Menelaus wants Helen back simply because he loves her, without taking account of the fact that his claim to his kingdom is actually staked through her, for it was her father’s kingdom that he inherited through his marriage to her. Penelope’s menacing and greedy guests want the wealth and power that goes with the role of husband to the Queen; she is protected from being taken only by the precarious stalemate she has established between rival contenders while she weaves a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. The choice of a royal shroud for Odysseus’ father is of course not neutral. At night in her bedchamber (where they cannot see) she unweaves what has been woven. Penelope is advised and supported by Athene, her husband’s patron, although the relationship between the woman and the goddess has its uneasy moments. Athene is the divine weaver and the wise or crafty one. While we might see Penelope as her mortal equivalent, Odysseus is in fact the more suitable avatar since, in the Greek sense of ‘household’, Penelope is his property. However wise the mortal woman might be, metis as cunning is associated particularly with Odysseus, rather than with Penelope.44 Derrida points to metis as the crafty way in which Zeus asserts his sovereignty (over his father Cronos) in his analysis of Odysseus’ declaration of his single sovereign authority in the Iliad­– ­quoted by Aristotle in relation to the Prime Mover (Derrida, Rogues, 15–17; Voyous, 35–8). God and the patriarch are thus invoked together­– ­but not purely as strength, also as ruse. Furthermore Derrida claims that: ‘The attribute “ipsocentric” intersects and links with a dash all the others (those of the phallus, of the father, of the husband, son, or brother)’ (Rogues, 17) (‘L’attibut “ipsocentrique” traverse et unit d’un trait tous les autres attributs (ceux du phallus, du père, de l’époux, du fils ou du frère)’ (Voyous, 38)), bringing together mastery in political theology and more modern forms of paternalism in democracies. Yet metis as trickery or even delinquency is more often publicly condemned (rogue individuals or states)­– ­a gesture to 326

Women and Other Animals which Derrida turns in the second chapter of Rogues entitled ‘License and Freedom: The Roué’ (‘Licence et Liberté: le roué’). He reminds his reader that debauchery originally meant worklessness or unemployment, and then leads to libertinage which brings us to seduction­ – ­usually, he recalls, in the masculine (Rogues, 20; Voyous, 42). Plato characterises democracy as a brightly coloured patchwork garment­ – ­the sort of beauty, like the fanning of a peacock’s tale, particularly attractive to women (Rogues, 26; Voyous, 49). Democracy is both liberal in a good sense and libertine, in the sense of idle young men likely to do mischief. Libertines, rogues, sovereigns all have their place in power’s self-assertion and its condemnation of others­– m ­ etis being a technique to maintain and equally to undermine. But how does the ‘seduction’ of women, the leading astray or carrying off of women, fit into this pattern? Philomela’s story is to be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI: she is raped by her brother-in-law, the Thracian Tereus, who is supposed to be bringing her to visit his wife, Procne, her beloved sister. Alongside other considerations, Tereus is bound to his fatherin-law, Pandion, by an oath that he will treat Philomela as his child. He was Pandion’s guest, and now has Pandion’s daughter, Philomela, in his charge. Incest and the breaking of an oath of hospitality thus add to his crimes. He drags his sister-in-law to a gloomy castle and imprisons her; when she threatens to reveal her shame and his ignominy to the world he cuts out her tongue­– a­ nd continues to rape her. When he finally returns to his wife with a tale of her sister’s death, Philomela begins to weave a scarlet design on a white ground and after twelve months has completed her story in this form. She has it carried to her sister who, dressed as a Maenad in the festival of Bacchus, breaks down the gates of the steading where Philomela is imprisoned and releases her. Together they slaughter Procne and Tereus’ son, Itys, dismember him, and Procne serves him to her husband­– o ­ nly revealing the truth when he has finished the meal and calls for Itys. Bloody Philomela bursts in with the boy’s severed head. Eating human flesh is treating men as men treat other animals, and is at the origin of the werewolf myth of metamorphosis. All three are translated into birds: Philomela into the nightingale noted for its beautiful song, Procne into a swallow, Tereus into a hoopoe. Arachne is the low-born mortal, the daughter of a dyer, whose weaving contest with Athene is also recorded by Ovid in Metamorphoses, Book VI. Athene’s textile shows the gods in all their solemn glory, and in the corners the human beings whom they 327

Derrida and Other Animals have punished for their hubris by transforming them into mountains or birds. Meanwhile Arachne depicts the King of the Gods, the epitome of patriarchal power, in a range of animal or other animate forms which he takes on in order to rape mortal women: she shows Europa deceived by the bull, Asterie and the eagle, Leda and the swan, Antiope and the satyr and many others. Then she depicts, with perfect realism, other male gods in disguise taking their pleasure on women who have no power to resist them. Athene can find no flaw in this authentic masterpiece, and so she tears it to shreds and repeatedly strikes Arachne on the head with a shuttle. Arachne ‘found her plight beyond endurance’ and hangs herself­– ­the same ignoble death meted out to Penelope’s maids raped by her suitors. Athene takes pity on her rival and transforms her into a spider­– ­so she continues hanging, spinning and weaving her web. Some critics have accepted that this is one in a series of warnings against pride or offending the gods. Others have seen it as a representation of two rival textile industries, Cretan and Athenian, with their respective religions. In each pantheon there is a goddess who is the inventor of weaving; Arachne would thus be a spider goddess as exists in many cultures, including the Navajo. The textile industry promoted trade and guaranteed economic strength in the ancient world: Arachne’s weaving is more skilful but Athene is stronger.45 In all three stories we hear of the power of women’s weaving in the context of extreme inequality­– ­a rhythmical means to ward off violent sexual aggressors for Penelope; a source of fame and a way of showing the true nature of the gods as deceitful sexual aggressors for Arachne; the only means of communicating the rape she has suffered, and thus wreaking revenge, for Philomela. Pallas Athene is, I have suggested, usually seen as her father’s daughter, voting for patriarchy against matriarchy­– ­for example in the case of Orestes, who avenged his father by killing his mother Clytemnestra, who took her revenge on her errant husband, who had sacrificed their daughter, using her woven cloth. Orestes was then pursued by the Furies, old spinsters at their most violent.46 The contest between low-born Arachne and this daughter of the King of the Gods could remind us that skill is, in part, an ideological construct dependent on the power of those (self-)designating certain workers as skilled and thus as higher earners in better conditions. If we turn to the Early Modern period, that brief moment when­– a­ ccording to many histories­– ­women were excluded from weaving, we find that they were in fact, as Sheridan’s research has shown, still involved in 328

Women and Other Animals textile production. Women were typically paid less (if they were paid at all) than the lowest paid men even when it was acknowledged that the job was the same, but where possible were branded as unskilled. In this period we need to consider the power of guilds as well as social ideology concerning women. Equally this affects the construction of the human against the animal, as in Derrida’s analysis of Heidegger. Men may be skilled while animals are instinctive; even if differentiation may be made for the sake of competition (show dogs or horses for example), the animal must not be seen as independently creative. Women turned into animals (however good the spider is at weaving) are thus ‘properly’ returned to the body.

Porcine metamorphosis: from Ulysses’ companions to Darrieussecq When a human being is metamorphosed into an animal this can be seen as a representation of dehumanisation or abrutissement in general, but, once literature specifies an animal and perhaps gives some details of life post-metamorphosis, then it matters which animal is chosen. A modest example might be the myopic mole.47 I would note La Fontaine’s joke in ‘The Companions of Ulysses’ about the gender ambiguity of the mole. He describes the transformation into animals thus: Their reason, at the first light sips, Laid down the sceptre of its reign. Then took their form and features The lineaments of various creatures. To bears and lions some did pass, Or elephants of ponderous mass; While not a few, I ween, In smaller forms were seen, . . . In such, for instance, as the mole. D’abord ils perdent la raison; Quelques moments après, leur corps et leur visage Prennent l’air et les traits d’animaux différents: Les voilà devenus ours, lions, éléphants; Les uns sous une masse énorme, Les autres sous une autre forme; Il s’en vit de petits: exemplum ut Talpa.

The Latin tag ‘for example the mole’ (feminine in French, la taupe) is usually taken to be a gesture of complicity, a kind of wink, to the 329

Derrida and Other Animals young Duke of Burgundy who may have experienced Despautère’s or other Latin grammars, with their fondness for this example of a word which is both masculine and feminine in Latin. The other beasts are characteristically masculine both grammatically and in terms of their connoted qualities­– ­lion, bear, wolf; though all have powerful distinct maternal-feminine versions too, these are secondary to the universal masculine. So why does La Fontaine include the ambiguous mole? This returns the reader to the problematic significance of the joke which may simply be light relief or ornament, or may carry some tension, something repressed elsewhere but critical to the case. Perhaps the ‘small’ detail of the mole hints at the obscure question of gender as well as other hidden meanings in the fable since s­/he works underground while the enormous animals are very much above ground, little worried about falling prey to others. La Fontaine’s Dedication refers to war and its glorious virtues. In Plutarch’s discourse, aligned with Homer, Circe is trying to persuade Ulysses to renounce such a risky life, and live forever as a god­– ­but in the sense of divine Venus rather than Mars, eternal amorous bliss rather than martial conquest. The animals La Fontaine uses in this fable, aside from the joke of the mole, tend to be large carnivorous mammals, apex predators, typically representing sovereign power: lion, bear, wolf. The elephant may be vegetarian but has war-like connotations thanks to Hannibal, and his sheer size makes him seem the opposite of vulnerable. La Fontaine does not evoke domestic animals as spokesmen, and does not use the traditional pigs with all their complex set of connotations. Duffy’s poem ‘Circe’ stays closer to Homer in emphasising the transformation into swine, and, like Plutarch, chooses to see men as more useful in the shape of pigs: I’m fond, nereids and nymphs, unlike some, of the pig, of the tusker, the snout, the boar and the swine. One way or another, all pigs have been mine – under my thumb, the bristling, salty skin of their backs, in my nostrils here, their yobby, porky colognes. I’m familiar with hogs and runts, their percussion of oinks and grunts, their squeals. I’ve stood with a pail of swill at dusk, at the creaky gate of the sty, tasting the sweaty, spicy air, the moon like a lemon popped in the mouth of the sky. But I want to begin with a recipe from abroad which uses the cheek­– a­ nd the tongue in cheek at that. Lay two pig’s cheeks, with the tongue, 330

Women and Other Animals in a dish, and strew it well over with salt and cloves. Remember the skills of the tongue­– ­ to lick, to lap, to loosen, lubricate, to lie in the soft pouch of the face­– ­and how each pig’s face was uniquely itself, as many handsome as plain, the cowardly face, the brave, the comical, noble, sly or wise, the cruel, the kind, but all of them, nymphs, with those piggy eyes. Season with mace. Well-cleaned pig’s ears should be blanched, singed, tossed in a pot, boiled, kept hot, scraped, served, garnished with thyme. Look at that simmering lug, at that ear, did it listen, ever, to you, to your prayers and rhymes, to the chimes of your voices, singing and clear? Mash the potatoes, nymph, open the beer. Now to the brains, to the trotters, shoulders, chops, to the sweetmeats slipped from the slit, bulging, vulnerable bag of the balls. When the heart of a pig has hardened, dice it small. Dice it small. I, too once knelt on this shining shore watching the tall ships sail from the burning sun like myths; slipped off my dress to wade, breast-deep, in the sea, waving and calling; as three black ships sighed in the shallow waves. Of course, I was younger then. And hoping for men. Now, let us baste that sizzling pig on the spit once again. (The World’s Wife, 47–8)

Duffy’s poem celebrates cooking, an activity which we could interpret here as showing women as the agents, rather than the objects, of transformation and metamorphosis­– a­ s the sorceress nymph Circe is through her offer of refreshments. Cooking is a form of technology if we consider how the term has functioned in Derrida’s writing, in particular the articulation of nature and culture. Women’s work, I would argue, is culturally central and yet (or, therefore) downgraded as natural. Cooking is part of domestic labour, and notably of the technique of hospitality­– ­a cultural practice that, at best, however labour-intensive, will seem natural and effortless. It is important, in other words, that the work is magically made invisible. The poem could also be understood as the preparation of a cannibal feast like the vengeance wrought by the sisters Philomela and Procne­– ­and there is a foregrounding of the linguistic play of cannibalism in the double meanings of flesh, hardened heart and so on. This could encourage a readerly response of nausea (a desire to vomit from the mouth rather than take anything into the mouth), for instance as 331

Derrida and Other Animals ‘the sweetmeats slipped ­/ from the slit, bulging, vulnerable bag of the balls’ remind readers of oral love and sex, with ‘eating’ literalised in the poetic image. In Marie Darrieussecq’s novel, pork products arouse particular disgust and nausea as the narrator’s body identifies with the pig.48 This could return to Vivien’s solitary lady with the she-wolf, but, even if the reader gags, old Circe has the magic power of transformation and nereids and nymphs to share her thoughts, beer and cheek with, while Darrieussecq’s protagonist finds solace in a community of pigs. Duffy treats the love of men, as opposed to pig meat, as something nostalgic. Nostalgia is a major theme in The Odyssey but largely in the vein of Odysseus’ longing for home­– H ­ omer lavished little care on the women or men his wily trickster, or Athene, the father’s daughter, use and abuse. In Duffy’s poetic revenge fantasy amorous lyricism is reserved for hopeful youth­– n ­ ow tongue is to be firmly in cheek. Duffy’s Circe, older and wiser, a more domestic goddess, has known many men, some better than others, but all with ‘piggy eyes’. The reader could interpret that as greedy eyes, men who are out for what they can get. I shall turn now to a French novel which is at least as unflattering about men (except for a werewolf), but very positive about living pigs as opposed to Duffy’s purely culinary celebration of pork: Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales (Truismes).49 This outlines the brutality of men towards women in far greater detail­– ­Duffy focuses on the empowerment of the older, more cynical woman, who recollects the closed ears and lying tongues as she turns them into tasty food. In earlier chapters, following Derrida, the most significant animal has been the wolf even if other beasts have made an appearance. The title in English, Pig Tales, gives away Darrieussecq’s focus more immediately than the French (if the dust jacket does not do so, as it does in a number of editions)­– ­while la truie is a sow, le truisme (with masculine gender) is a truism, an apparently self-evident truth. Transformation into a wolf not only has a long history, dating back at least to Plato as indicated earlier, but also continues to be a popular focus of books and films­– ­overwhelmingly in the masculine. Metamorphosis into a pig is not unknown­– ­there are Ulysses’ companions, an example I have chosen as I tracked Derrida’s intertexts, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), a famous case of an allegorical dystopia­– ­but is much less widespread, as indicated by the fact that many languages have a word for werewolf, but not for a person who transforms into a pig. Darrieussecq is even more unusual in that, while illustrious predecessors focus on the male 332

Women and Other Animals pig (Napoleon is Orwell’s anti-hero), her title in French refers to a sow, her narrator is female (as in her subsequent novels), and it is the female experience of metamorphosis which is resolutely foregrounded. This focus on the female brings out a factor that already underlies many pig tales. Warner points out that pigs are not only imagined as gluttons but also, for example in medieval schemes of morality, as lustful (No Go the Bogeyman, 278). She also notes that Plutarch’s rehabilitation of animals in the voice of the pig Gryllus focuses particularly on notorious female examples such as the sow of Crommyon or the vixen of Teumessus (277), and claims that behind the ‘elective beast’ stands the witch (283). In some respects Darrieussecq’s tale of the sow is that of an antiwerewolf. She is constantly exploited and regularly threatened with being eaten. She is the one who bleeds rather than the one who makes others bleed or drinks blood. Her menstrual bleeding as a woman, and coming on heat as a sow, is foregrounded, but the reader is also aware of the lifeblood which pours from a pig as s­/he is stuck with a knife and is used in a number of dishes (such as black pudding, an even more celebrated dish in French culture than in British). Even in secular or Christian culture, where the pig is not forbidden as it is in Jewish or Islamic religions, there is a dirtiness associated with the pig both literally and verbally­– ­the filthy swine troughing up swill and rolling in its pigsty­– w ­ hich is quite different from the connotations of the little lamb, whose sacrifice is related in all three major monotheisms to purity and salvation rather than matters of the body. Not that the slaughtered lamb, often eaten after the ritual sacrifice, is any less dead. The pig is everyday, familiar not only in a farmyard but also in a sandwich and the many pork products beloved of the French charcuterie, while the wolf is a wild outlaw, rarely seen in Europe except in a zoo. The myth of the wolf is its savage ferocity­– ­feared but also admired for his free spirit and bravery. A sow is more often seen as grotesque and degraded even if sometimes friendly and approachable.50 They join each other in appetite­– ­but the lean wolf’s hunger seems linked to strength and exercise while the pig is defined by men as lazy and greedy and therefore fat. Darrieussecq allows, however, a werewolf to enter the scene­– t­ he most satisfactory of her sow’s lovers. Initially it is only the name of the wolf­– ­the name of a luxury company Loup y es-tu, echoing a children’s song (‘Promenons-nous dans les bois’) that plays on the delight and fear aroused by the wolf who might eat you that I touched on via Cixous in Chapter 3. The song says that we are safe 333

Derrida and Other Animals to walk in the woods so long as the wolf is not there, then asks him if he is there ‘Loup y es-tu?’, and the wolf replies with the information that he is putting on first his shirt, then his trousers and a succession of other garments until he is ready to come out and hunt his prey in the woods. It is the scary antithesis of a striptease, and no doubt relates to a man covering his nakedness all the better to seduce as well as terrify, as in the Perrault tale, an innocent. When our heroine finally meets Yvan, the owner of the company, about three-quarters of the way through her trials, she is shocked to discover that he changes at full moon, but then delighted at the beauty of the wolf­– ­they enjoy an idyllic love affair which contrasts sharply with the many unhappy and exploitative relationships the sow has experienced up to that point. The physical agony of changing, as the body stretches and cracks, is shared by the heroine and Yvan. This suffering is something which features in a number of written and filmic werewolf tales, but in the case of Pig Tales, it is more unusual because of the context of a narrator who is experienced in physical pain as a sex worker and as a female who menstruates (a different lunar month) and whose body can be transformed by pregnancy and childbirth. The attempt to keep the body ‘normal’ or even ‘appetising’ relates to the satire directed at the beauty industry, with women its primary target, although men too suffer. One of Darrieussecq’s significant characters is an African who uses skin-whitening products with disastrous consequences­– ­the other side of Buffon. His wealth and influence coexist with the constant presence and danger of racism. Racial questions are not always raised overtly in the novel but the depiction of casual racism against Muslim men and women and ‘Negroes’ aligns the various forms of dehumanisation without merging them. While I have referred to the anonymous protagonist of Pig Tales as exploited (and she surely is), this is not a term that she uses herself. Darrieussecq uses a sweetly naive voice for her narrator, who is pleased to be found ‘appetising’, and betrays apparently endless comprehension of men’s ‘needs’ for any kind of sexual service (even when it ends in the death of the young girl in question) as well as their ‘need’ for women’s domestic and other labour. She turns the tables only when it is her own mother who is about to kill her in order to sell her dead flesh on the black market (selling her living flesh she can understand). Some readers find the ingénue tone of the narrator irritating (particularly in translation)­– i­t is, however, interesting to relate it to famous French philosophical contes such as Voltaire’s 334

Women and Other Animals Candide or L’Ingénu. Darrieussecq’s protagonist’s almost infinite understanding and tolerance of others, even when we are dealing with a vicious Fascist leader, can be read on at least two levels. The first, more Voltairean, is pure satire at the ignorant or even wilful lack of political and social analysis on the part of much of humanity. If a politician says he wants a more healthy society, or men say they like healthy, wholesome girls, our protagonist takes this at face value rather than doing the work of analysing the politician’s plans for a violent ‘purification’ or condemning the men’s desire for women who show no signs of sexual pleasure. This leaves the reader to do the work of analysis­– ­a form of education. The second reading, which can coexist in an uncomfortable juxtaposition with the first, is an animal one­– ­our heroine’s pleasure in what others might find dirty or disgusting, linked to her understanding of the animal from the werewolf to the bat. The werewolf, who devours human flesh every full moon (pizza delivery boys if they are easiest), may simply be seen as a Voltairean satire of big business and convenience food, yet the narrator writes lyrically of a beautiful love affair. There are numerous feminist analyses of the appropriation of women’s labour power, in the widest possible sense, in a patriarchal society­– ­and Darrieussecq’s dystopia is certainly a patriarchy although her narrator does not become a feminist. Animals too are exploited and consumed by carnophallogocentric societies, and the sow feels greater kinship with fellow beasts. Kelly Oliver points to Beauvoir’s analysis of female animals in particular­– w ­ ho, like women, are considered inferior and bear an unfair burden compared to their male counterparts, both because their lives are really consumed with a greater share of reproduction and also because of (masculine) human perceptions of femaleness.51 However: Even while de Beauvoir repeatedly appeals to animals and their different lifestyles to make her case against patriarchal stereotypes, in the end, she takes up the existentialist mantle that grounds the groundlessness of man on his absolute difference from animals. Animals are fixed and determined by biology; man is not. Animals are incapable of self-reflection and meaning making; man is reflective and meaning making. Animals are merely reproductive and repetitive; man is productive and creative. Woman, then, moves from man’s other and the second sex only by making the animal so radically other that it cannot be even second in relation to the human because it is so different in kind. (Animal Lessons, 173)

Oliver here makes the now very familiar case against Beauvoir that she ‘accept[s] the patriarchal devaluation of reproduction in favour 335

Derrida and Other Animals of production’ (173). However, she is more novel in also taking up the animal cause alongside the feminist one in her critique of the mother of feminism (more sinned against than sinning, I would say, but that is another story). Darrieussecq’s sow-woman empathises with other animals (and vivants more generally, including trees), especially birds and bats, implying more solidarity with them than with other women. She loves a pet guinea pig which her first partner, the dishonourable Honoré, slaughters and leaves in a blouse pocket for her, as he has killed her pet dog. The violence exercised against animals (and lesser humans52) as well as the horrors lurking in the food chain are brought home to the reader in numerous ways, including the protagonist’s visceral disgust­– ­nausea­– ­at rillettes. Darrieussecq is quite subtle in her points, although her protagonist is portrayed as a naive innocent; yet, like Duffy, the novelist has been greeted with a mixed response­– ­she is very popular, the novel was a best-seller and now quite often features on syllabi, but when the English translation first came out the New York Times reviewed it as ‘a ham-fisted fable’ (everyone has to respond to the work with plays on words). The reviewer, Tobin Harshaw, writes: ‘Darrieussecq, a first-time novelist at 27, approaches fiction with all the nuance of a Trotskyist pamphleteer, favoring a portentous matter-of-factness that insists on being taken seriously. Only the French can explain why they have chosen to do so.’53 Amanda Craig observes in The Times, ‘What is really objectionable about Pig Tales is the absence of beauty and pity which, as Nabokov observed, is the hallmark of The Metamorphosis. [. . .] Her combination of erotica, intellectual pretentiousness and melodrama is, dare we say it, peculiarly French. It is something the British reader will unerringly detect as pure hogwash’.54 Both these reviews seem aggrieved that the young, French woman author is pretending to something (seriousness, intellectual credibility) which, in Craig’s case, she would prefer to reserve for the male canon, notably Kafka. This reminds me of the discussion of bêtise in Derrida. Some readers find it frustrating that Darrieussecq’s use of animal metamorphosis leads to a conclusion that is one of retreat from human political struggles rather than active engagement with them. One context for this dissatisfaction is that when the novel first came out there were, as there continue to be, real worries about the rise of an extreme right-wing party (the Front National) in France­– ­a phenomenon grotesquely satirised in the novel in images reminiscent of Derrida’s analysis of fraudulent political fables cited above and in Chapter 1. Darrieussecq has said 336

Women and Other Animals that the novel is intended to be more anarchist than humanist­– ­and I could interpret that anarchism as a reference to the outlaw sans foi ni loi or the beast.55 The animal is of course defined as outside politics, and even sensitive readers of the novel tend to reproduce the oppositional thinking of the ‘uniquely human’ (Jones, Representing Repulsion, e.g. 212, 214, 217). The issue of lining up exploitations, as in a way I am doing, following Derrida’s suggestion of the substitutability of beast, slave, woman or savage in a number of structures, does not mean, however, either that these situations are identical or that there will necessarily be solidarity even within categories let alone across them.

Love and money in Marie Ndiaye’s Ladivine My final example will be Marie Ndiaye’s novel Ladivine (2013),56 in which money depressingly delineates the human, and the love of ‘dogs’ is deployed as a minimal alternative. Both economic and gift exchange feature on the long list of ways in which philosophers like to specify man, to distinguish man from other animals, forming the critical hierarchy that Derrida has interminably analysed. Animals are said not to be fascinated by gold as a scarce commodity (and hence high in value, a means of distinguishing between the quality of men quantitatively­– ­and thus related to social class), nor as a medium for exchanging value, nor as a durable store of value­– ­it does not intoxicate nor create dependency in them. Consequently they are also said not to be able consciously to engage in excessive expenditure, potlatch or other forms of attempted undoing or creative unthinking of economic relations. Simply they live without. Marcel Hénaff, amongst others, has argued in relation to animals: Recognition as acceptance takes place through postures and procedures of reciprocity (such as attitudes of appeasement, mutual grooming, and sharing of space), but never through objects given as tokens and kept in exchange for others that are given either immediately or later (which has nothing to do with the sharing of food among various mammals or with the mating rituals of certain birds, reptiles, and insects). Adam Smith sensed this quite well: ‘Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.’ It seems that humans alone resort to the procedure consisting of committing oneself by giving something of oneself as a token and substitute of oneself.57

Derrida’s work would of course take us towards asking about the symptomatic in this confident assertion­– ­why do we desire to specify 337

Derrida and Other Animals ourselves in this way? I should note that biologists and zoologists­– ­many still heavily influenced by Darwin (or neo-Darwinism)­– ­would argue that maximising behaviour, the cornerstone of economic rationality, is common across all living beings.58 NDiaye’s Ladivine juxtaposes failed relations of exchange between human beings of four generations with more successful relations between human beings and ‘dogs’ (whose material or spiritual or indeed ontological status is ambiguous). I have placed the word ‘dogs’ in inverted commas as it could be argued that this is less about real dogs, or a fictional representation of real dogs, than about aspects of relating which are projected onto what is described as the large brown dog (or large brown dog(s), that is to say, a general category rather than a specific instance).59 Initially these seem to be casual references, but when Malinka­/Clarisse first goes with her future husband Richard to Langon, she is struck by the number of cats in the street and is reminded of her mother’s fear of cats as of ‘dogs, about which she had once let slip that they sheltered inside themselves human beings who had been struck by ill fortune. How could you believe such a thing?’ (‘des chiens au sujet desquels elle avait laissé échapper, un jour, qu’ils abritaient sous leur peau des humains frappes d’un sort funeste. Comment croire une telle chose?’) (Ladivine, 66). Relationships between human beings are soured, frozen or end in violence in NDiaye’s novels, largely I would argue because of the social divides of race, sex and class intermingled. Race is rarely named explicitly, and the novels often leave characters or places unlocated as well as dislocated ethnically and geographically.60 Instead there are ambiguous phrases such as ‘In the region where Malinka’s mother was born, where Clarisse Rivière had never been’ (‘Dans la région où la mère de Malinka était née, où Clarisse Rivière n’était jamais allée’) (Ladivine, 15). The word région is difficult to translate because it comfortably, and thus ambiguously, covers different areas of France but also different parts of the globe. Only once is the explosive word ‘négresse’ (50) dropped, like a bomb, in the café where Clarisse is working and her mother has found her­– ­apart from that one insult the reader is left floating with references to lighter or darker skin or quality of hair that can, but need not, relate to what is understood as racial difference. Shortly after this violent and seemingly explicit naming Clarisse takes steps to remove her mother entirely from her life as Clarisse­– r­ etaining the role as the daughter Malinka only on the first Tuesday of each month. Yet race is conflated in the novel with questions of economic difference­– ­it is her mother’s class position as 338

Women and Other Animals a cleaner that is explicitly a major source of shame for the daughter from the time she starts school. ‘Clarisse Rivière’s mother was only a poor creature’ (‘la mère de Clarisse Rivière n’était qu’une pauvre femme’) (17). Language conjoins the financial with the moral in both English and French­– s­ he is a poor thing, not fit for the role of, say, a great or noble Cornelian heroine. When her mother, still in a certain way young and attractive at home in her one-room flat, dresses to go out she is humble: ‘old-fashioned style, modest, working-class’ (‘d’allure vieillotte, modeste, prolétaire’) (20). And it is only when Clarisse, abandoned by her financially successful husband, starts a relationship with a man, Freddy, who is himself an abused stray dog from the most disadvantaged social stratum, that she can begin to reveal her mother. Money as a substitute for love, money which then cannot be spent, is a feature of relationships between a number of characters. The first protagonist Malinka renames herself Clarisse as part of her repudiation of her maternal origin­– s­ave on the one day when she brings money and a small gift such as perfume to her formerly adoring mother each month (except for the months when she herself is becoming a mother of a solitary daughter). This is not quite so impersonal as the monthly standing order Clarisse will later receive from her adored husband, Richard, after their separation­– t­he reader learns that he ‘would send her money that she didn’t use’ (‘lui envoyait de l’argent qu’elle n’utilisait pas’) (Ladivine, 98), money which she cannot bear to touch because it comes in place of love or even care. Clarisse searches for suitable gifts for her mother as she ‘couldn’t bear to bring her only a dry envelope full of bank notes’ (‘ne pouvait se résoudre à ne lui apporter qu’une sèche envelope de billets’) (18), and Clarisse does actually every month visit a mother rendered ‘difficult, full of hate and lunatic’ (‘difficile, hargneuse et lunatique’) (14, my italics), but nevertheless this dutiful appearance is not what her mother wants. Clarisse shuts her out of her life when she longs to be part of it­– ­and she has nothing else apart from objects to love, small objects which she inspires with life, not things that are important for their monetary value. Even when Clarisse is, to her mother, clearly pregnant, the daughter closes down any possibility of referring to a life in which she is indeed married and expecting a child. Just as monthly menstruation is the physical demonstration for a fertile woman that she is not with child, so the rhythmic ritual of the flow of money from Richard to the wife he no longer sees, or from Clarisse to the mother she makes invisible, becomes part of not being with. 339

Derrida and Other Animals Clarisse’s much loved daughter Ladivine (named after Clarisse’s mother although they are kept secret from one another) chooses as a schoolgirl to prostitute herself rather than to have amorous relationships with fellow teenagers. She goes to the houses of middle-aged men without pleasure (though also without aversion)­– b ­ ut has no need of the cash they give her since her parents are generous to her: ‘she would hardly ever use the money. She would pile up the bank notes in an old stocking that she would stuff under her bed, nothing else’ (‘elle ne se servait presque pas de l’argent. Elle entassait les billets dans un vieux collant qu’elle fourrait sous son lit, rien d’autre’) (Ladivine, 181). This singular straying is revealed to the reader in a flashback as the now married and respectable Ladivine expresses her empathy with the unimpressed sex workers in Berlin. No convinc­ nly that her ing motivation for her adolescent behaviour is given­– o parents failed her in their inability to make moral judgements in any respect. In a sense this then relates to Clarisse’s extreme reserve, her smooth and frozen quality which frustrates her husband as well as her daughter, a moral repression which derives from her relentless guardianship of the secret of her maternal origin from the world and simultaneously her withholding of any information about Clarisse’s life from Malinka’s mother.61 A key example of money substituting for emotional expenditure, which is analysed in particular detail by Clarisse’s daughter, is the money sent every month by Richard Rivière to Clarisse. The latter knows nothing of her husband’s flourishing luxury car business: Although, Ladivine knew, she had received from him each month a significant sum which she would never touch. [. . .] Ladivine knew that, from the bottom of her modest heart [. . .] Clarisse Rivière had judged it cruelly off-hand to see herself helped out by a monthly standing order. She would have liked to get a letter each month and had a cheque come with it that would not have upset her at all, quite the opposite. Richard Rivière had been happy to tell his bank to pay a certain sum on a certain date so that he never had to give it another thought and that was exactly, Ladivine had guessed, what had hurt Clarisse Rivière, that he had taken care so that he wouldn’t be obliged to think of her, even once a month. That was why Clarisse Rivière had struggled with money problems even before she met Freddy Moliger, she was happy to have money from Richard Rivière but could not agree either to get it that way or to demand more consideration. 340

Women and Other Animals Bien qu’elle eût reçu chaque mois de lui, savait Ladivine, une somme importante à laquelle elle ne touchait jamais. [. . .] Ladivine savait que, du fond de son cœur modeste [. . .] Clarisse Rivière avait jugé cruellement désinvolte de se voir aidée par virement mensuel. Elle aurait aimé recevoir chaque fois une lettre et qu’un chèque l’accompagnât ne l’aurait nullement froissée, au contraire. Richard Rivière s’était contenté d’ordonner à sa banque de payer telle somme à telle date afin de ne plus avoir à y penser et c’était précisément, avait deviné Ladivine, ce qui avait fait mal à Clarisse Rivière, qu’il eût pris soin de ne plus être obligé, ne serait-ce qu’une fois par mois, de penser à elle. Voilà pourquoi Clarisse Rivière s’était débattue avec les problèmes d’argent avant même de rencontrer Freddy Moliger, elle voulait bien de l’argent de Richard Rivière mais ne pouvait consentir à le percevoir ainsi ni à demander plus d’égards. (Ladivine, 294)

The conclusion of the novel has husband and mother together after the trial of Clarisse’s murderer (Freddy, a dangerous stray dog), which is the first time that they catch sight of each other or even know of each other’s existence. Importantly they are together with a dog (although neither of them particularly like dogs) which is a kind of metamorphosis of Clarisse, and perhaps also of her daughter, named after her mother Ladivine. The final words of the book are: The large brown dog came in delicately on slender, trembling paws. She stroked the rough fur between his small straight ears, and the dog turned his knowing eyes, his chaste eyes towards her. This made her burst with happiness. She was convinced that he had come to teach them all he knew, that in order to do that he had put up with a great many torments and much exhaustion. He was bringing them Malinka’s beating heart, and perhaps, she thought, in the fervour of her joy, also the promise of a new light cast on each day. Le grand chien brun entra avec délicatesse sur ses pattes fines, frissonnantes. Elle caressa son poil rêche, entre les oreilles petites et droites, et le chien tourna vers elle ses yeux savants, ses yeux chastes. Elle en eut un éblouissement de bonheur. Elle fut certaine qu’il était venu leur apprendre tout ce qu’il savait, qu’il avait traversé pour cela bien des tourments et des fatigues. Il leur rapportait le cœur palpitant de Malinka, et peut-être aussi, pensa-t-elle dans l’ardeur de sa joie, la promesse d’une clarté nouvelle posée sur chaque jour. (Ladivine, 403) 341

Derrida and Other Animals I would note the adjectives that apply both to the physical and the mental­/moral­ – ­délicatesse could refer to the grace of the dog’s gait or to his sensitivity; fin in the context of paws is presumably a physical feature (and one that ties him to the slim Ladivine senior and to her daughter, their elegant body shape typical of a certain region) yet is often used for acute intelligence. This is the last example in what the novel presents as a series of dogs­– ­without it being clear what the relationship is between them either physically or spiritually or metaphorically. None of them is given a name. They certainly resemble each other both physically and in character­– ­typically they are described as efflanqué or emaciated; they are large and brown (sometimes rust coloured). The first of the series of important dogs is described as an Alsatian, but in general the breed is not given. Sometimes their unkempt nature is emphasised; in chilly Germany, for example: ‘the dog’s fur was thin and worn on his sides’ (‘le chien avait le poil peu fourni et râpé sur les flancs’) (Ladivine, 78). These details suggest dénuement­– ­the quality of the dogs is conjured up privatively. The same few adjectives are repeated, ‘le grand chien brun’­– f­requently these are simple words­– t­here is no luxury in the language. Dispossession appears as a kind of virtue or purity. This could be related to natural man­– l­e sauvage: man as animal. Simplicity is part of the strength of the animal. Yet equally animal nakedness can be seen as the opposite of (civilised) humanity: the primitive stasis of those who need as opposed to progress, commerce and achievement, epitomised perhaps in the 4 x 4 jeeps sold by rapacious Europeans at a great profit in the jungle thanks to Richard Rivière. The dirty beast may be seen as disgusting or as having a noble lack of care for appearance. I should note that dogs and other animals appear in the novel not only as creatures but as common similes for human beings; after Ladivine’s disappearance, for instance, her daughter Annika describes her love for her unhappy dishevelled father in terms of ‘his lack of interest in his appearance, as if he were a magnificent animal who could not imagine that people found him handsome nor understand that he was admired’ (‘son désintérêt pour son propre aspect, comme s’il était un superbe animal qui ne pouvait savoir qu’on le trouvait beau ni comprendre qu’on l’admirait’) (331). There is a certain tradition (for example in La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Dog and the Wolf’) of presenting the dog as servile­– ­as man’s slave. Ladivine senior and her daughter Malinka­/Clarisse can equally be seen as servile, as indeed can the protagonist of Pig Tales; con342

Women and Other Animals versely, the reader can understand them as loving and caring, refusing to play the game of competition. NDiaye’s En Famille is more ambiguous towards dogs, many of whom are guard dogs, subordinate to their masters and identifying with their interests, expressing their feelings (as a slave might identify with a master). ‘Fanny’, as the protagonist is called (although we know that is not her name), is ‘not recognised’ by the guard dogs at her grandmother’s house from the beginning of the novel. This is a physical manifestation of the lack of recognition shown by her family who have rejected her to the point of apparently not knowing who she is. The reader might expect a dog to have a natural memory, say of smell, but these dogs have internalised their masters’ values. More extremely, much later in the novel, Fanny will be killed and eaten by her cousin (and former lover)’s dog. Although on the mythical level this enables her second birth, a kind of metamorphosis into the kind of human being (we might imagine a white one with French features) who can be recognised by the provincial bourgeois family, on a literal level it is a disturbing moment for the reader. In the human economy animals have traditionally been domesticated both for work and for purposes of social distinction. Dogs have long had a monetary value on both counts­– u ­ p to relatively recently the major use value, and thus exchange value, of dogs was their labour power, including shepherding, guarding, hunting and traction­ – ­which continues today although their more social and emotional functions have overtaken these practical skills in importance for post-agricultural societies. In terms of social distinction, there is a significant quantitative explosion from the eighteenth century onwards with respect to luxury pets, of considerable financial value for breeders, although there is a noble pre-history to this. NDiaye’s dogs in Ladivine are explicitly not part of these familiar economies­ – ­unlike, for example, her novel En famille where the guarding function of dogs, and the pet as extension of the owner, is critical. Or indeed her short story ‘A Day in the Life of Brulard’ (‘Une journée de Brulard’) in which a Great Dane, pedigree pet of the very rich Rotors, eats the poor little mongrel which functions in a loving and mediating way much closer to the scruffy dogs of Ladivine­– a­ lthough these are symbolically large dogs.62 All the simple canine characteristics of size, quality of coat and so on operate in Ladivine on both the figural and the literal plane of description simultaneously­– ­just as, in terms of plot, magical-spiritual explanations coexist with possible emotional-psychological motivations which draw the story closer 343

Derrida and Other Animals to the everyday. One example of this would be the large brown dog which appears to follow Ladivine’s eight-year-old daughter Annika in Germany after her mother’s disappearance in, we assume, Africa (Ladivine, 329–33). Annika knows this is her mother, and that could easily be a child’s response to loss. Yet the reader knows that indeed the final scene involving her mother alone in the African forest suggests that at the point of death Ladivine instead chooses a path of metamorphosis into the large brown dog friend which adopted her in that foreign country. The generic qualities of large and brown,63 and the known power of the human fancy to console us, leave it entirely open for a magical and a realist interpretation to coexist. Dogs do act as mediators; there is psychological vraisemblance in the projection of emotions onto animals, especially dogs, and especially at difficult moments. A little girl who has lost her mother sees her mother in a stray dog (the transformation scene in the forest would then be style indirect libre­– ­what the daughter might imagine); an old lady who has lost her daughter sees her daughter in a stray dog. The dog is adopted as a replacement. At the same time, and crucially, there is the magical or spiritual side­– ­the dog as spirit guide, the transmigration of souls. The dog adopts the person and guards them. In Ladivine money does not typically facilitate exchange but rather blocks reciprocity64­– ­the possibility of mediation through neutral tokens ultimately damages living relationships. Even on the level of buying and selling goods, expenditure or receipt of money is unsettlingly allied to the possibility of fraud. Ladivine’s husband Marko is driven to distraction by accounts of disastrous holiday scams on the internet (Ladivine, 160–2), before he even leaves Germany to be indeed comprehensively ripped off (203, 209). The final deal that her father Richard does (which is narrated to the reader while all the previous successful sales were summed up rather than depicted) is a swindle that cleans him out (385–6). By displacing loving and caring on to the figure of the dog, who offers freely a gaze, companionship, caresses, fidelity, interesting questions are raised about the remainder in the capitalist system. Unlike human beings, dogs are creatures which, in our society today, can still be legally bought and sold­– t­ hey have a monetary value. They can legally be forced to work for their owners’ profit. Stray dogs, or badly behaved dogs or old unwanted dogs, like the escaped, or rebellious, slaves depicted in the museum visited in the course of the disastrous holiday, can be rounded up and even destroyed, as Richard’s father’s dog is put down after his death (104).65 The large brown dog is then a radical figure of value in a 344

Women and Other Animals relation to an other which is both utterly domestically familiar (the beloved pet dog) and also so far from being our brother that we legislate that ‘it’ should be an object rather than an agent in exchange.

Conclusion around eating and writing Women need to respond. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Derrida comments at length on Hobbes’s utter and scathing rejection in Leviathan of the idea that there can be a direct covenant between man and God or between man and beast­– e­ ven though the institution of sovereignty retains a fundamental theological basis (Beast 1, 46–57; Bête 1, 76–91). This double exclusion ‘is for a reason of language. The beast does not understand our language, and God cannot respond to us [. . .] In both cases there could not be an exchange, shared speech, question and response, proposition and response, as any contract, convention, or covenant seems to demand’ (Beast 1, 55) (‘pour une raison de langage. La bête ne comprend pas notre langage, et Dieu ne saurait nous répondre [. . .] Dans les deux cas, il ne saurait y avoir échange, parole partagée, question et réponse, proposition et réponse, comme semble l’exiger tout contrat, toute convention, tout covenant’ (Bête 1, 88)). He goes on to quote Hobbes: ‘To make covenant with brute beasts is impossible; because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right; nor can translate any right to another: and without any mutual acceptation, there is no covenant’ (Leviathan, chapter 16, ‘Of the first and second natural laws, and of contracts’, 77) (Beast 1, 55; Bête 1, 89). He then affirms in defiance of this Cartesian position: I shall not hesitate to say brutally, as I in fact think, that all that is brutally false, that it is false to say that beasts in general (supposing any such thing to exist) or so-called brute beasts (what does ‘brute’66 mean?) do not understand our language, do not respond or do not enter into any convention. I shall not hesitate to recall the often refined understanding that many of said beasts have of our language; nor even to recall that even if they probably don’t make literal, discursive conventions with men, in our languages and with a notary public present, on the one hand, there are nevertheless all sorts of conventions, i.e. agreements or disagreements acquired by learning and experience (and so not innate or natural), between what one calls animals and what one calls humans (and I am not just thinking of all the relations that are organized in domestication, training (in horse riding, for example), and then taming, and then organization of territory, marking of frontiers and interdictions­– ­[. . .] the 345

Derrida and Other Animals political history of menageries and zoos, but there is, beyond these forms of violence, which, moreover, have their human equivalents, I mean all sorts of human zoos and menageries); and on the other hand, conversely, no one can claim [. . .] that the human conventions at the origin of states always or even most often take the form of literal, discursive and written contracts, with mutual and rational consent of the subjects concerned. (Beast 1, 55–6) Je ne me hâterai pas de dire brutalement, comme je le pense, que tout cela est brutalement faux, qu’il est faux de dire que les bêtes en général (à supposer que quelque chose de tel existe) ou les bêtes dites brutes (que veut dire ‘brutes’ ?) ne comprennent pas notre langage, ne répondent pas ou n’entrent dans aucune convention. Je ne me hâterai pas de rappeler l’intelligence souvent raffinée que beaucoup desdites bêtes ont de notre langage; ou même de rappeler que si, sans doute, elles ne passent pas avec les hommes de conventions littérales, discursives, dans nos langues et devant notaire, eh bien, d’une part, il y a toutes sortes de conventions, c’est-à-dire d’accords ou de désaccords acquis par apprentissage et expérience (donc non innés ou naturels), entre ce qu’on appelle des animaux et des hommes (et je ne pense pas seulement à tous les rapports qui s’organisent dans la domestication, le dressage, par exemple l’équitation, et puis le domptage, et puis l’organisation du territoire, le marquage des frontières et des interdits­– [­. . .] de l’histoire politique des ménageries et des zoos, mais il y a, au-delà de ces violences, qui ont d’ailleurs leurs équivalents humaines, je veux dire toute sorte de zoos et de ménageries humaines [. . .]; d’autre part, inversement, personne ne peut prétendre (et surtout pas Hobbes) que les conventions humaines à l’origine des Etats prennent toujours et même le plus souvent la forme de contrats littéraux, discursifs et écrits, avec consentement mutuel et rationnel des sujets concernés. (Bête 1, 89–90)

Derrida glosses this as deconstructive practice, showing that what is deemed proper to man is both to some extent common with animals and also not proper to man in all purity. Duffy is the first woman (and first openly lesbian or bisexual person, and first Scottish person) to be elected poet laureate to the British crown. This honorific post, which entails composing verse for state occasions and nationally significant events, has great symbolic importance. It could be said that Duffy has made it­– ­reached the highest level­– ­in spite of her many characteristics, including a relatively working-class background, which might seem to debar her. But I might note, first, how hard it was for a woman to be elected. Ten years before she was finally named to the post in May 2009 there 346

Women and Other Animals was a campaign for her, but a rather more establishment figure was chosen once again in the shape of Andrew Motion. In 1992, when Cixous gave one of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, she pointed out how excluded women are from the academic and literary establishment in France­– ­and equally how the word misogyny is taboo in reference to, say, the selection of Nobel Prize winners (at that point she said, 510 men and 24 women), or indeed anything else (‘We Who Are Free, Are We Free?’, 213). There have also been unsuccessful feminist campaigns to have Duffy elected to the highly prestigious honorary post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University (she is currently in such a post at Manchester Metropolitan University). She has consistently been the target of those who would seek to portray her either as a bitter man-hating feminist or as an ‘easy’ (implying facile) poet beloved of school-children (or both)­– ­not a suitably sublime genius. It is true that Duffy has become a favourite of the school syllabus, and perhaps, in some way, that impact and the fact that it means she keeps company with the canon of dead white males who also feature on exam syllabi rankles. In 2012, the man who was indeed appointed as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (Geoffrey Hill, an older more academic male poet who is indeed very ‘hard’) attacked Duffy in the press, comparing some of her poetry to ‘Mills and Boon’, a particularly misogynist comparison both for the poet and for her admirers (deemed to be, if not ‘housewives’, certainly naive and romantic readers)­– a­ nd strangely inappropriate. Mills and Boon, the production line romances with an overwhelmingly female readership, that have gradually sexed up their content from vanilla syrup to something more raunchy, are a favourite point of comparison for successful men who wish to disparage their female rivals. In an article in the Observer magazine, the well-known historian David Starkey is quoted as denigrating the historical novelist Philippa Gregory as ‘good Mills and Boon’. The article also notes that she has a PhD in History from Sussex, and that her novels are meticulously researched.67 I am reminded of the critiques of Darrieussecq as hamfisted and pretentious, and failing to be Kafka . . . Although Duffy devoted herself to poetry (and theatre) from a very young age, sending off poems to a magazine at the age of fifteen and publishing her first collection at eighteen, interestingly she also did a degree in Philosophy. Her poetry is far from naive­– ­her use of the everyday is well judged, and it is often the relationship between the philosophical or moral universal and the quotidian detail that is telling. The question of the way in which language functions is 347

Derrida and Other Animals always implied if not foregrounded. She often sets up a complex web of intertextuality which deceives in its apparent simplicity­– ­like a spider’s web. In any case it is Duffy, this Scottish woman from a working-class background, a woman whose poetry is often found to appeal to children and teenagers as well as adults, a woman who lives openly with another women although she has relationships with men, and has a daughter­– ­well-known biographemes frequently rehearsed in the press­– ­who is now the poet laureate who is supposed to write poems to mark occasions of great national importance. These events might be, for example, noting the fall from the sublime to the ridiculous, deaths, marriages, royal birthdays­– ­revealing the gap between the symbolism (the nation) and the body, the blood, the sovereign’s family. This reminds me of discussions around inheritance­– ­if it should always be the male line that is dominant­– ­the genealogy of a system in which power is transmitted biologically. As noted in the quotation from Derrida earlier, the roles of subject and sovereign are frequently staged in anthropomorphic fables­– o ­ r more generally or more specifically, ‘the essence of political force and power, where that power makes the law, where it gives itself right, where it appropriates legitimate violence and legitimates its own arbitrary violence­– ­this unchaining and enchaining of power passes via the fable, i.e. speech that is both fictional and performative’ (Derrida, Beast 1, 217). ‘He who laughs last, laughs longest’­– ­Mrs Aesop’s last word is: ‘I laughed last, longest’. I should like to propose that Mrs Aesop­– ­obviously a shrew, who silences her man by threatening to castrate him (and maybe for men, for such a man, silence is castration, and we all know that ‘dead men tell no tales’) with ‘an axe ­/ with a heart blacker than the pot that called the kettle’­– ­in laughing makes us laugh too. Mrs Aesop’s threats may remind us of the political violence that is the force of the law; political discourse rests on the fabular simulacrum of knowledge (Beast 1, 35; Bête 1, 62). She responds by holding up a mirror­– ­pot to kettle. Everyday domestic objects include concave kitchen pots and pans, but also phallic knives and axes, the axe a more masculine physical object which can nevertheless be wielded by a housewife whose muscles may have been exercised in kitchen labour against a ‘small’ man. The axe is both practical and violent, here qualified as ‘razor-sharp’, terrifying but also an expression often used for intelligence­– ­sharp. Clytemnestra kills her husband with an axe. Mrs Aesop is no longer afraid of domestic terror. From time to time the poetry of words, 348

Women and Other Animals animated words and animals (animots even), and women’s laughter, may be ripostes to the fraudulent (in Derrida’s words) logomachia of rules laid down by reasonable men.

Notes   1. The section of this chapter on technology was first given as a keynote lecture at the Australian Society for French Studies annual conference in Brisbane (July 2009), and then revised versions were presented at Nottingham Trent University (October 2009) and at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (April 2010); it was then published as ‘When is a Technology not a Technology? When it’s Women’s Work’, in Tekhne, Technique, Technologie, ed. Greg Hainge et al., a special issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies 48:2 (2011), 129–43. The section on Carol Ann Duffy was presented on 19 March 2013 at the ‘Esthétique, philosophie et questions de genre’ workshop in Paris, organised by Michèle Le Doeuff, sponsored by CRAL and the CNRS­/ EHESS, as ‘La Femme: est-elle bête? La réponse de Mme Esope’. Part of the section on Marie NDiaye was presented as ‘NDiaye’s Ladivine: Money and Love’ at a panel (‘Economies of Excess’, 8 March 2014) organised by Mairead Hanrahan at the Twentieth and Twenty-FirstCentury French and Francophone Studies conference, New York. I should like to thank those who invited me and the audiences for their generous interventions.   2. Derrida inserts this parenthesis into a discussion of marionettes often seen as feminine, and easily represented as phallic, if only because hard or stiff and erect (Beast 1, 220–5; Bête 1, 294–300). He points out that the Greek or Roman phallus (a simulacrum) was originally a kind of marionette.   3. See Bourke, What It Means To Be Human, for a recent account of the exclusion of women from the human over the last couple of centuries or so, for example 6–7 for quotations from the zoologist Desmond Morris and the example of Linnaeus.   4. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976 (1966)); La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).   5. Michèle Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 3.   6. Michèle Le Dœuff, L’Imaginaire philosophique (Paris: Payot, 1980), 11–12.   7. La Fontaine bases his account of Aesop’s life on Maximus Planudes’ late thirteenth-century version. Aesop can be presented as a cricket, singing all day long, under the sway of the Muses, levelling the distance between high and low, but Duffy rarely accepts these origin myths at face value­ – a­ scepticism seen also in her poem ‘Eurydice’ cited in Chapter 3. 349

Derrida and Other Animals   8. See Aesop’s fable ‘The Ass in the Lion’s Skin’ or ‘The Farmers, the Donkey, and the Lion Skin’, which is ‘A story about a donkey, urging us not to yearn for more than we deserve’, in Aesop’s Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), Fable 323, 155.   9. Laura Gibbs’ translation of Aesop’s Fables contains two versions of the tale ‘The Jackdaw and the Eagle’; the first runs: ‘When an eagle seized a sleek and glossy lamb from the flock and carried it off in his talons as a feast for his chicks, the jackdaw decided to do the same thing. Accordingly, he swooped down and clutched at a lamb, but his claws got tangled in the wool on the lamb’s back and he could not escape. The jackdaw said, ‘It serves me right for being such a fool! Why should I, who am only a jackdaw, try to imitate eagles?’ (Fable 341, 163). The second is more explicitly violent in the punishment for hubris: ‘There was a jackdaw who saw an eagle carry away a lamb from the flock. The jackdaw then wanted to do the very same thing himself. He spied a ram amidst the flock and tried to carry it off, but his talons got tangled in the wool. The shepherd then came and struck him on the head and killed him. ­/ The fable shows that when someone lacking in strength tries to imitate someone stronger, he proves that he is not only weak but stupid, and his foolish behaviour can even put his life at risk’ (Fable 342, 163). Gibbs also draws attention to an alternative Greek prose version of the fable, in which the shepherd captures the jackdaw and brings it home for his children (Aesop’s Fables, 164)­– a­ slave pet, we might say. 10. See John Ray, A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs, 4th edition (London: 1768), 79, image 94, in Eighteenth Century Collections Online, at http:­/­/find.galegroup.com­/ecco. 11. Fables, Book V, Fable 3, 1668. ‘A bird in the hand’ is often used to translate the story’s final moral; see La Fontaine, ‘The Little Fish and the Angler’, Selected Fables, trans. James Michie and with an Introduction by Geoffrey Grigson (London: Penguin, 1982), 57–8. ‘A bird in the hand is reckoned ­/ Worth two that you haven’t yet shot. ­/ The first bag’s certain, the second /­ Is not’ (58). Or ‘The Little Fish and the Angler’, La Fontaine’s Fables, trans. Sir Edward Marsh (London and New York: Everyman, 1952), Book V, Fable III, 95–6. ‘A bird in th’ hand is worth two in the bush’. 12. ‘A fisherman who lived on the produce of his nets, one day caught a single small Fish as the result of his day’s labor. The Fish, panting convulsively, thus entreated for his life: O Sir, what good can I be to you, and how little am I worth? I am not yet come to my full size. Pray spare my life, and put me back into the sea. I shall soon become a large fish, fit for the tables of the rich; and then you can catch me again, and make a handsome profit of me. The Fisherman replied: I should be a 350

Women and Other Animals very simple fellow, if I were to forego my certain gain for an uncertain profit.’ See ‘The Fisherman and the Little Fish’, at www.litscape.com­/ author­/Aesop. Duffy also makes a reference to the ‘big fish’. 13. The proverb features as a ‘cure for melancholy’ in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 9th edition (London: Cundee, 1800), 82. The book was published under the pseudonym Democritus Junior. 14.

And though they seeme wives for you never so fit, Yet let not harmfull haste so far out run your wit: But that ye harke to heare all the whole summe That may please or displease you in time to cumme. Thus by these lessons ye may learne good cheape In wedding and all things to looke ere ye leaped



(John Heywood, A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546) 15. The dog in a manger is depicted in numerous paintings; see, for example, Claude Cardon (born Claude Lorraine Clark), British artist, 1864–1937; Walter Hunt, 1861–1941, ‘The Dog in the Manger’, 1901. 16. Molière, La Princesse d’Elide, IV, 5, 1664. See also Félix Arturo Lope de Vega, The Dog in the Manger, trans. David Johnston (London: Oberon, 2004); El Perro del Hortelano (1618) is literally the gardener’s dog. This too turns the fable into a story about a woman acting like a dog in the manger in the sexual realm. The countess Diana falls in love with her secretary who is the lover of her maid: she will neither marry him herself nor let her maid wed him. 17. ‘Life seems to belong even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be shared even by the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has reason; of this, one part has it in the sense of being obedient to reason, the other in the sense of possessing reason and exercising thought. And, as “life of the rational element” also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies reason, and if we say “a so-and-so” and “a good so-and-so” have a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre-player and a good lyreplayer, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being added to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case [and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when 351

Derrida and Other Animals it is performed in accordance with the appropriate virtue: if this is the case], human good turns out to be activity of soul exhibiting virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. ­/ But we must add ‘in a complete life’. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1, vii, 16). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, ed. Lesley Brown, Oxford World’s Classics, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11–12. 18. ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ is the fable from which derives the phrase ‘sour grapes’. ‘A famished fox saw some clusters of ripe black grapes hanging from a trellised vine. She resorted to all her tricks to get at them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them. At last she turned away, beguiled herself of her disappointment, and saying: The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought. /­ Moral: Revile not things beyond your reach’ (www.litscape.com­/author­/Aesop). 19. Aesop’s fable of the young man and the swallow, in which he removes his jacket at the sight of a single bird, returns rather to economic prudence. The cautious proverb or saying ‘Cast n’er a clout till May be out’ is in similar vein. 20. Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women, trans. John Fletcher (London: MacLehose, 2012); Trois femmes puissantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), is most striking for its use of birds rather than the dogs which will be my NDiayan example later in this chapter: in the first story the distant father has a secret life as a bird; in the second the long-suffering wife Fanta is seen by her husband as a buzzard who attacks him; in the final section Khady Demba ends as a bird. However, there is a brief moment when Khady Demba remembers a group of women attacking a dog because a chicken has been stolen. This beaten dog prefigures in a way the stray Freddy Moliger in NDiaye’s Ladivine. For NDiaye’s innovative use of birds in this novel and elsewhere, see Shirley Jordan, ‘La Puissance de Khady Demba’, in Une femme puissante: l’oeuvre de Marie Ndiaye, ed. Daniel Bengsch and Cornelia Ruhe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), 263–83. My thanks to Shirley Jordan for sending me this article, and also for helpful conversations about NDiaye over coffee in the Bibliothèque nationale. 21. See my ‘Hospitality and Sexual Difference: Remembering Homer with Luce Irigaray’, in Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘The Greeks’, ed. Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 149–64, or Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 2. I argue that the Odyssey, a text that has been rewritten many times, presents a range of complex assertions, sometimes in contradiction with the stories told, about the relationship between women and men rather than a simple binary opposition. 352

Women and Other Animals 22. In Homer’s Greece weaving was a job for noblewomen assisted by their handmaidens­– ­spinning was a servant’s role. 23. See Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 21–2. 24. Although this is a complex history; for example histories of Navajo or Dine weaving sometimes suggest that it was only or largely women who were weavers, but this is not the case. See Wesley Thomas, ‘Male Weavers of Diné Nation: Our Stories and Experiences’, from the exhibition, ‘Weaving in the Margins: Navajo Men as Weavers’ (Santa Fe: Museum of Indian Arts and Cultures), at http:­ /­ /www.miaclab.org­ / exhibits­/maleweavers­/male_weavers.html. 25. Christopher Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 151. 26. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1949 (1948)). 27. See André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole. Technique et langage, 2 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–65). 28. Christopher Johnson, ‘Derrida: the Machine and the Animal’, Paragraph 28:3 (2005), 102–20 (102–3). 29. Tisser (to weave) comes from the Latin texere which gives us textilis and in French textile (adjective) and le textile: textiles are definitionally woven (though not necessarily of course). Le texte comes from textus which means tissu­/trame. (NB in English ‘text’ has a particular sense of authority.) Note also texture, which can refer to the texture of a cloth or of an oeuvre. 30. (Un)related terms to be considered would include le métier which means a job or a craft (mechanical­– ­as Rousseau says, the hands work more than the head), linked to technique. It also means a machine, especially one for weaving or spinning, for example the Jenny or the Jacquard (1800). Métis means mixed, e.g. a fabric of linen and cotton. It can be used in the racial sense (giving us métissage and métisser). In English ‘metis’ refers specifically to the offspring of a person of European ancestry and a Native American. 31. To take a recent popular example­– ­the October 2013 edition of the Eurostar magazine Metropolitan had a feature entitled ‘The French Connection’ focusing on Huguenots who came to London (68–73). It asserts: ‘this invasion was the first serious test of London’s toleration of outsiders, and the city took it well, with just a few grumbles about the whiff from the garlic sausages that the newcomers hung to dry outside their windows’ (70). 32. Burghley papers (John Strype, Annals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1824), vol. iii, Part ii, 571) report of the Lord High Treasurer’s speech to parliament (1588) in relation to a ‘Bill Against Strangers and Aliens Selling 353

Derrida and Other Animals Wares by Retail’. Quoted in Rev. David C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV or The Huguenot Refugees and their Descendants in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Reeves and Turner; Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1874) 2 vols plus index volume. First edition published 1866. Index volume, 11. 33. Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own. Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); ‘Un ver à soie: points de vue piqués sur l’autre voile’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Voiles (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 23–85. 34. See Bennington’s note in Cixous and Derrida, Veils, 93. 35. See Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human, chapter 5, ‘Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida’s Sexy Silkworm’, 131–51, and Michaud, ‘On a Serpentine Note’, in Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida, for analyses of this text. 36. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 142. 37. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité: Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1997), 126. 38. Derrida refers to Cixous’s play on this in La (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 39. There are two patterns: masters exploiting their family (wives and daughters as more or less unpaid clandestine labour in the homeworkplace) or keeping their own family safe while using young girls from outside the family circle. Geraldine Sheridan cites figures relating to the average age of women workers who died at the Hôtel de Dieu in Lyon in the eighteenth century: in some decades this was twenty-two, though it rose to thirty later in the century. See Sheridan, Louder Than Words: Ways of Seeing Women Workers in Eighteenth-Century France (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009). 40. Warner gives a number of examples of the rewriting of Circe by authors typically anxious about the dehumanising effect that her sorcery has on men, and refiguring this for their day: Horace, Augustine, Spenser, Milton, Keats, Joyce, to name but a few. 41. Clytemnestra is linked to two tapestries­– t­he purple one which she invites Agamemnon to walk upon, and the robe in which she and her lover entwine him in the bath. 42. One of the most interesting of recent rewritings is Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), which has the hanged maids as a chorus. Another recent example is the one-woman show Penelope Retold, devised and performed by Caroline Horton (2014). 43. An interesting comparison is Lucretia, whose husband is in a military camp drinking and boasting with other officers, with the result that 354

Women and Other Animals they ride back to Rome to check on their wives. She is virtuously weaving with her women while the other wives are partying. Sextus Tarquin is inflamed with lust at this sight and returns later to ask for her hospitality­– ­she cannot refuse as he is a kinsman and friend of her husband. Her modesty both inspires transgressive desire and gives him a route to force her to accept his sexual advances (the threat of falsely being accused of having taken a slave as a lover). See my Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau, chapter 6. 44. See, for example, Pietro Pucci, ‘Mêtis’, ‘Ulysses: “My Name is No-one,” The First Dramatization of Metis’, trans. Michael Syrotinski, in Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 657–9; ‘Mêtis’, ‘Ulysse: “Mon nom est personne”, première mise en scène de la “mêtis”’, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 784–5. Pucci’s particular example is Odysseus’s deceiving of the blinded Cyclops. 45. See Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth and Society in Ancient Times (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994). 46. Cixous takes pleasure in representing these ‘Erinyes’, particularly in La Ville parjure where their thirst for violent revenge with no mercy is almost comical in its contrast to modern notions of justice­– ­in this instance relating to the case of contaminated blood. Men’s justice in the play tends to serve the interests of power while the mother who has lost both her sons seeks truth and reconciliation through the guilty confessing. The Furies are a problematic chorus. 47. See Marta Segarra, ‘Deconstructing Sexual Difference: A Myopic Reading of Hélène Cixous’s Mole’, in Turner, The Animal Question in Deconstruction, 142–57, for some examples of moles in the ‘demenagerie’ of deconstruction. 48. Margaret Atwood is another feminist writer to pay attention to the human-animal borderline. In the third instalment of her dystopian trilogy, MaddAddam, humans find eating ‘Frankenbacon’ from pigoons (pigs with human neocortex tissue) rather close to cannibalism (MaddAddam, 28). The novel also has a scene of real cannibalism when Zeb eats a piece of Chuck in order to survive (95)­– h ­ is cheek I assume. 49. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, trans. Linda Coverdale (London: Faber and Faber, 1997); Truismes (Paris: P.O.L, 1996). 50. I could cite P. G. Wodehouse’s collection of short stories, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1935), which has been successfully adapted for television in two separate series (1967, 2013–14). 355

Derrida and Other Animals 51. Oliver, Animal Lessons, chapter 6, ‘The Beaver’s Struggle with SpeciesBeing: De Beauvoir and the Praying Mantis’, 155–74. 52. Here I could mention the hypocrisy of the anti-abortionist, priests and politicians in the novel. 53. New York Times, 6 July 1997. 54. The Times, 17 July 1997. 55. Darrieussecq quoted in John Lambeth, ‘Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq’, The French Review, 79:4 (2006), 806–18, 814, as translated in Katie Jones, Representing Repulsion: The Aesthetics of Disgust in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French and Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). My thanks to Katie Jones for giving me a copy of her book on learning of my interest in Darrieussecq. 56. Marie Ndiaye, Ladivine (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 57. Marcel Hénaff, ‘The Aporia of Pure Giving and the Aim of Reciprocity: On Derrida’s Given Time’, in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 215–34. 58. See Bernard Crespi, ‘The Evolution of Social Behaviour in Microorganisms’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 16:4 (2001), for an argument about the existence of complex social behaviours (including ‘cheating’) and communication even in bacteria. This goes considerably beyond the normal territory of animal rights advocates­– ­indeed major figures such as Peter Singer or Tom Regan can be very shy about where to draw the boundary between those animals that should be treated with consideration and those life forms that need not be. I should say that Crespi is not making an argument for any moral consequences from these discoveries in microbial ecology, and indeed, from a theoretical or sociological point of view I might be quite concerned about the way in which competitive pro-social behaviour is given as the root of human social behaviour. Thanks to Eva Giraud for drawing this article to my attention. 59. I should say that, while I read the series of encounters with dogs, or the dog, in Ladivine as an ultimately successful negotiation of difference in the direction of friendship, Andrew Asibong argues that NDiaye’s work ‘obsessively returns’ to what he calls horrific kinship. He sees the animals in her works as abject or grotesque. Admittedly this argument is made in a chapter published prior to the publication of Ladivine. See Asibong, ‘Moja sestra: Marie NDiaye and the Transmission of Horrific Kinship’, in Transmissions: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema, ed. Isabelle McNeill and Bradley Stephens (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 95–112. 60. In Ndiaye’s En famille (Paris: Minuit, 1991) the reader might assume that the protagonist’s father and perhaps her fiancé are of a different race, perhaps North African, to the français de souche of her mater356

Women and Other Animals nal family and their rural environment­– t­hus she would be of mixed race. However, race is never named, only ‘difference’, and the French word étrangeté and other related terms mean both strangeness and foreignness. 61. Clarisse is not physically repressed in the sense that she has a full sex life. 62. Marie Ndiaye, ‘Une journée de Brulard’, in Tous mes amis: nouvelles (Paris: Minuit, 2004), 111–66. See Michael Sheringham, ‘Ambivalences de l’animalité chez Marie Ndiaye’, in Une femme puissante: L’oeuvre de Marie NDiaye, ed. Bengsch and Ruhe, 51–70, for analysis of this short story and other works by Ndiaye with respect to animality. 63. The dogs are always referred to in the masculine as ‘le chien’, even when they are supposed to be the avatars of female characters. See my comments earlier, e.g. Chapter 1, on the differences between French and English in terms of the attributing of personhood and­/or sex to animals. 64. This is also the case in Richard’s new life­– ­for example in his relationship with the obese son of his new partner (also a Clarisse). 65. The museum that Wellington shows Ladivine and Marko and the children around is full of images of punishment of slaves or other colonised subjects (Ladivine, 236). 66. I would recall that Rousseau omits the term brute in his reference to Plutarch’s treatise on animals in The Social Contract; see Chapter 5. 67. Observer magazine, 28 July 2013, 16. Successful men can of course make similar sexist points without using that precise comparison. Stephen King, who could surely afford to be generous, uses a feature on him in the Guardian Weekend (21 September 2013, 18–24) to point out that he agrees with the character in his latest novel who brands the Twilight series ‘tweenager porn’ (24). He goes on to criticise another female novelist for lack of productivity and asserts his lack of enthusiasm for both the Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey. He does not at any point criticise any male writers.

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7

Wanting Conclusions

Through their dogs, people like me are tied to indigenous sovereignty rights, ranching, economic and ecological survival, radical reform of the meat-industrial complex, racial justice, the consequences of war and migration, and the institutions of technocultures. It’s about, in Heen Verrans’s words, ‘getting on together.’ (Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 98) The tyranny of human over nonhuman animals [. . .] has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. (Singer, Animal Liberation, vii)1 Our time is afraid of losing, and afraid of losing itself. But one can write only by losing oneself, by going astray, just as one can love only at the risk of losing oneself and of losing. (Cixous, ‘We Who Are Free, Are We Free?’, 203)

Blindness, textual and historical Derrida’s writing invites the pursuit of its own blind spot (as his ‘leur propre tache aveugle’ is usually translated), as he locates these in systems of writing and reading.2 I do not even want to begin to dream of my own particular spots, stains or patches of misreading. However, my plan was to supplement Derrida’s extraordinary thinking of the animot in at least two ways: the first would be by opening up his long eighteenth century (if such a thing exists, as he would say)3 to writings from and about the New World of that epoch concerning two more figures outside the law, the savage and the slave. Not only figures but historical individuals and peoples who cannot even be comfortably located in the past, much as, in the world of UN Declarations of Human Rights, it should have been the case. The second supplement (with no intention of making this secondary) is that of expanding his thinking of sexual difference to incorporate women writers writing on or across the animal-human borderline. The metaphysical opposition between man and animal is largely 358

Wanting Conclusions used to define man, typically flattering the self and his semblables, sometimes with the benefit of excluding lesser men from the category of brother. However, this commonplace and philosophical tradition, with its forceful pronouncements based on little evidence or observation, has very real consequences for animals not only in the past but also today and tomorrow. The claim that there can be no crime against animals underpins legal and social permission given to violence against animals. Derrida references zoos, circuses, industrial abattoirs, and experiments inter alia, pointing out that, even where national laws prohibit certain forms of cruelty towards animals, no country makes it illegal to kill animals for food (Beast 1, 109–10; Bête 1, 156–8). The crucial question of the ethical duty to a being who, or which, has not been defined as a semblable remains unresolved. Derrida does not want to resolve this, however, by having recourse to animal rights calked on human rights­– ­since these precisely are systematically dependent on Cartesian or Kantian philosophies in which animals are reduced to machines without reason or personhood (Beast 1, 111; Bête 1, 158). Just as philosophical pronouncements concerning the abyss between man and animal are not cut off from relations between humans and animals in the world, so my questions concerning others systematically or intermittently excluded from the protection of the sovereign may largely involve the analysis of texts (since that is my profession), but texts are never self-contained either in their production or their consumption­– ­macro and micro-histories do more than haunt them, and vice versa.

Self-positing man and Enlightenment ‘We’ posit ourselves as rational, first of all amongst so many other attributes, and one of the major questions to be asked is: who are ‘we’ who claim the privilege of conceptual thought. Of course the discourse is not unique to free adult, white males (property owners to boot), but my use of he­/man language throughout the book is an attempt to remember or signal the many exclusions at particular points. If women are not always one of ‘us’ then perhaps it is appropriate to use women writers to help with the thought experiment of a relation to the other that is not simply a matter of asserting the self as plenitude and the other as lack, but a hospitable opening to the other if only momentarily, the space of a different thought experiment or poem. The Enlightenment is often represented, in something of a 359

Derrida and Other Animals c­ aricature (if not a self-seeking one) as the age of reason, but Derrida is interested in the many fissures in this, if only by seeing the importance of Rousseau as well as Kant. Focusing on the relationship to animals suggests: The lack of foundation, and indeed the naked self-seeking (a)  (maybe bêtise) of much ‘rational’ philosophical discourse which resorts so swiftly to assertion on the subject of animals and their lack of x (whatever x happens to be)­– a­ nd concomitantly man’s full portion of x­– ­with little or no evidence for either. This self-positing includes self-flattering sins as a counterpoint to the qualities­– t­he transcategorial category of bêtise, for example, is only a property of rational creatures. (b) The privilege of reason as x­– ­what animals do not have and man has in full. The hesitation over allocating ‘full’ quantities of reason to (c)  lesser human beings, whoever these happen to be at a particular conjuncture. Against this, zoology could point to the widespread rational (for instance, maximising) behaviour of a range of animals­– ­whether zoology chooses to concoct experiments for, say, primates to test their logic or teach them sign-language (worrying in certain ways, in its anthropocentrism, for example), or declare that maximisation is true of all life including microbes (disturbing in other ways, such as its universalising of the economic and of competition). While there are clearly many differences between human beings and other animals, as there are indeed between dolphins and ants or between hummingbirds and crabs, most of the dividing factors that focus purely on an abyss between human and animal are either disproven by zoological research (for instance, man as the only tool-user and then the only tool-maker) or as yet inconclusive. So much depends on definition­– ­man might be the only animal who wears clothes but, to take an utterly perverse example, what is the accumulation of sand and shell around a lug worm? And not all men wear clothes. Man is above all defined as rational, able to think and use conceptual language; but we do not know very much about the language of many animals­– ­this is an inference based on little data. Where tests have been conducted on primates for instance (often under quite unnatural and cruel conditions, as Haraway points out), it has been suggested that a degree of reasoning can be observed. If the distinction becomes not so much that we reason and animals do not, but that we reason more and we think animals reason less, then this is a much weaker 360

Wanting Conclusions claim. We are left with the fact that within humanity not all humans are known to reason at the level of Einstein­– ­or even at the level of the top 1 per cent who are those designing major innovations to help humanity progress. Even this assumption that humans are differentiated by their variable power of reasoning or abstract thought needs to set aside the major role of environment, circumstance and choice in human development of any potential­– ­never mind the differentiation between human beings and creatures whose language we cannot speak although we regularly judge them by their apparent (in)ability to comprehend human tongues.

The state and terror Derrida’s analysis of Machiavelli suggests that while the sovereign is defined as the one who respects his commitments, the strong prince will combine this truth, proper to man, with what is presented as bestial force­– a­ nd Derrida relates this to powerful states today who might not always respect UN resolutions (Beast 1, 82–5; Bête 1, 121–5). La Fontaine’s ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ suggests that it is foolish to put one’s trust in reason, in the sense of being right, of winning an argument with evidence-based logic, if one is in a position of relative weakness­– t­he rationalisation and rationalising of the strong will trump you and they will eat you because they can, and because they are always hungry. This is relevant to sovereign super-states today, and not only the US­– R ­ ussia is another obvious contemporary example, although humanities academics in the West today perhaps feel less implicated and therefore cite it less often, in terms of ‘security’. It is also relevant in terms of animals: agribusiness is supported by states that pay lip-service to the welfare of animals and also only lip-service to the welfare of human consumers, granted the many contamination and other health scandals related to the appalling conditions in which millions of animals are kept and the diet and drugs they are fed. The lamb is the innocent victim of the wolf, but at the same time an example like Little Red Riding Hood. Fables, with their political moral, tell certain subjects not to wander off into the woods where outlaws and rogues will tear you to pieces. Stay in the fold where the shepherd and his guard dogs will tend you­– ­until the shepherd wants to eat you, sell you to be eaten, or if you are really past your best, throw you to the dogs­– ­and this is why he is feeding you, or even just permitting you to feed in the interim (if one considers that the 361

Derrida and Other Animals grass was originally common to all). The domestic is underpinned by the State, and so is the market, and vice versa. In an Oxford Amnesty lecture, Cixous declares: ‘I will speak of our deceiving societies, of our prisons disguised as democracies, of our wolves wearing the smile of the lamb’ (‘We Who Are Free, Are We Free?’, 210). She claims that: ‘A poet will never be the president of a great state, no woman who is a woman, nobody whose tongue is free, will ever be president’ (204), and in an assertion about French society that recalls some readers’ response to those of Duffy’s poems that imagine female violence: The society of Lies distinguishes acceptable from unacceptable murder. Pitiful and therefore acceptable is the murder committed by some ‘unhappy man’ who couldn’t help raping and murdering two little girls, or that of the ‘poor young fellow’ who doesn’t even know why he beat and killed eight old ladies. But what is inexplicable, monstrous, appalling, incomprehensible is the crime of that unnatural woman who has poisoned her husband. A woman kills: we are horrified. A man kills, nothing could be more natural. That’s what our society thinks: if a woman gets killed, we’re used to that, we understand that. (212)

Thus the sovereign state, and the society of semblables, democracy as the wolf disguised as a lamb, has ‘phobias’ (as she puts it) against outsiders, immigrants and uppity women­– ­as well as embracing the sacrifice of animals­– ­set up as the outside of humanity.

Returning to animals I have referred occasionally to Agamben’s The Open as symptomatic of the recurrence of the traditional Cartesian or religious model in a post-modern guise, more particularly in a post-Heideggerian guise that is so close to Heidegger that the difference is almost imperceptible. He writes, for example in relation to anthropogenesis: ‘In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin, Western politics is also biopolitics’ (The Open, 80). The key point is ‘of man’­– ­human beings are made up of animal and some spark (however defined) that makes them human. In a ‘now’ the ‘anthropological machine’ is apparently ‘idling’, but still even this claim means little for animals as opposed to the human body. Most references in Agamben to the animal refer in fact to whatever part of man is seen as not truly human­– ­it is then a matter of definition­– ­which bits are defined as human. The real focus of 362

Wanting Conclusions interest is always man. However, confusingly, ‘observations’ (in the loosest possible sense) of what appear to be real non-human animals, such as spiders or ticks, suddenly pop up in the argument­– a­ s if, say, an experiment by a biologist on one tick (even over a period of eighteen years) could prove or disprove much about ticks, let alone cows or chimpanzees. One issue to raise again briefly, as I have done throughout the book, is the question of what we eat and the spectre of starvation. While vegetarians such as Peter Singer convincingly argue that global vegetarianism would enable feeding far more starving people (Animal Liberation, xiv), hunger, as well as gastronomy, and feeding the poor (those poor defined as part of the community, not those outside it necessarily) who can only afford battery chickens, continue to be evoked to justify violence. This is violence not only against animals but also against people; imagined scarcity of resources is a reason not to welcome, and even to expel, migrants for example, as Robinson Crusoe chases away and then finally slaughters the animals who attack his crops. In ‘Eating Well’ Derrida asks if it is by chance that women and vegetarians are just beginning to be included in the concept of the subject or citizen at the moment of the deconstruction of the subject (‘Eating Well, 281; ‘Bien Manger’, 295). For Derrida this is not a question of reason, nor of the rational pursuit of protein in the face of hunger, but of a structure of sacrifice which has not yet been overcome, if it can be overcome, and that is denied (in the strong sense of the word) both by those who advocate vegetarianism and by carnivores. Levinas argues that the first commandment is ‘Thou shalt not kill’­– t­ his is what the face of the other signifies­– b ­ ut if he will not give animals a face, will not let them enter this ethical space, what does face mean (Beast 1, 237; Bête 1, 316–17)? Of course, as Derrida points out, it would be possible (say, in terms of rights) to create a new boundary such as would bring great apes into the category previously labelled man, or more broadly all animals with faces as opposed to those considered not to have faces. To return to the question of denial here, I would note that many animal rights philosophers, such as Regan or Singer, hesitate at the question of the boundary of the animal. In the first chapter of Defending Animal Rights, ‘Ethical Theory and Animals’, Regan writes that ‘some ­non-human animals’ (42) are ‘subjects of a life’ (43) and so ‘have a basic moral right to respectful treatment’, hence there should be abolition of meat eating and animal experiments. However, he does not elucidate which living creatures are not ‘subjects of a life’. 363

Derrida and Other Animals While abolition of meat eating as animal rights campaigners would wish remains highly controversial­– ­indeed it is not even clear that conditions for animals raised to be eaten are improving globally­ – ­the criticism of experiments on animals has made greater headway in the West in terms of reduction of numbers and improvement of conditions. The designation of the animal as machine allowed the scientific followers of Descartes in the Early Modern period to engage in extraordinarily cruel vivisection, since the animal’s cries of pain (for instance when a dog’s feet were nailed to the floor) were seen as mechanical reactions rather than sentient responses. Despite some advances, experiments on animals continue to be presented as essential by the scientific community. Just as, in ‘Eating Well’ and ‘Violences contre les animaux’, Derrida takes the issue of what we eat into a more general area of regulation of violence against all living creatures, and the question of cannibalism, in The Beast and the Sovereign, for instance in the Eleventh Session, he takes the question of experiments (and zoos) into the area of curiosity and the ‘pursuit’ of knowledge more generally. As others (notably Foucault) have done, he emphasises this pursuit as a drive to want to know and to have power over the object of knowledge­– ­so, again, desire plays its part, and we are not purely in the realm of reason here as scientists may claim (Beast 1, 276–304; Bête 1, 371–405). His focus for analysis in this session (and it is mentioned earlier) is an example of an autopsy­– ­so less controversial in itself than vivisection­– ­but, precisely this spectacular dissection of an elephant before the King evokes the broader field which, for Derrida, it is necessary to understand in order to move towards an ethical decision.

Women and emotion Women are both part of man’s ‘we’ (indeed they even have the vote and are allowed to go out on their own, in spite of the likelihood of attack, in most parts of the world) and yet not quite part of it. The women’s writing I have selected is not sentimentally romantic but does focus on the ambiguities of feeling alongside reason­– a­ s Rousseau does, and indeed some other key thinkers do, yet this is something which is written out of particular canons, including sometimes the Enlightenment canon, while a separate category is set up such as the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. This is not, however, only a question of later categorisation, much (political) philosophy does prefer to turn aside from love in favour of reason­– 364

Wanting Conclusions ­ r, should an emotion be called for, then in favour of fear or anger. o Even some post-modern philosophers tend to perpetuate the exclusion of women today, alongside the exclusion of love, until a point in their argument when sex is required. Thus Agamben’s The Open, for example, is content to leave women aside 90 per cent of the time, but then introduces sexual fulfilment as ‘an element which seems to belong totally to nature but instead everywhere surpasses it’ for ‘the man’ (The Open, 83). The reader may ask in a spirit of generosity­– ­is this, however, homo rather than vir? Agamben then cites Walter Benjamin and I will give the quotation in full: Sexual fulfilment delivers the man from his mystery, which does not consist in sexuality but which in its fulfilment, and perhaps in it alone, is severed­– n ­ ot solved. It is comparable to the fetters that bind him to life. The woman cuts them, and the man is free to die because his life has lost its mystery. Thereby he is reborn, and as his beloved frees him from the mother’s spell, the woman literally detaches him from Mother Earth­– ­a midwife who cuts that umbilical cord which the mystery of nature has woven.4

I think it best if I refrain from commentary. Regan and Singer are two of the best known animal rights philosophers; both tend to place themselves firmly in the field of the philosophy of ethics, and are keen for this not to be confused with feminine sentiment. In the preface to Singer’s seminal Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, first published in 1975, and remarkable for this, he gives the example of an English ‘lady’ who invites him to tea and proceeds to serve ham sandwiches as she talks about her love for pets. Singer and his wife, he explains sternly to the reader, do not have pets, do not ‘love’ animals, but want to end cruel exploitation (Animal Liberation, viii). While the reader may feel that the lady in question (who may of course not exist, perhaps this is a fable) deserves to be mocked, I did feel a pang of sympathy for his host (here perhaps she should be marked as a hostess, never quite so good) whose hospitality has so spectacularly rebounded that she has achieved decades of anonymous notoriety for her dim sentimentality and pretension. Singer argues that ‘the basic moral principle of equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members of our own species’ (ix), and considers that in order to gain acceptance for this ethical stance he must set aside any question of love. He points out correctly that you do not have to love mistreated racial minorities in order to be concerned about equality, and then 365

Derrida and Other Animals that, because of the accusation that those who protest against cruelty are ‘sentimental, emotional “animal lovers”’, ‘serious political and moral discussion’ is excluded (ix). In addition he raises the spectre of focusing on cuddly animals­– ­horses rather than pigs, badgers rather than rats. It is not perhaps that a man must not love animals­– ­but one must not be seen to be an animal lover. If I were a member of ‘a racial minority’, as perhaps I am, I might feel that someone who allowed me to be equal, though not identical of course, but who would not want to love me (as Singer and his wife do not love animals according to this preface), maybe would not even like me, was in a somewhat strange position of austere moral superiority as they fought on my behalf. The French abolitionist movement founded in February 1788 by Nicolas de Condorcet and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville was known as the ‘Société des amis des noirs’­– ­the society of friends of black people. This focus on friendship­– ­granted the history of the treatment of friendship by philosophers (notably Aristotle) as necessitating a degree of equality­– ­seems well chosen to me at least on the level of the hope which must sustain such radical movements. The response that black slaves or former slaves might not want to be friends with white abolitionists does not seem to be borne out in general in this period­– a­ lthough the society could hardly rule for the emotions of all individuals. Friendship, a form of love, goes beyond rage or pity for suffering victims. Love may well be neither necessary nor sufficient (as exploitation can certainly coexist with what is called love), but it can also be a reciprocal experience of relating to an other which fires the understanding. Rousseau’s account of beneficence sees the emotion of pity­– ­a surge of emotional identification which, he claims, animals too can feel up to a point­– ­and the rational understanding of justice as equally necessary. Reason alone, he warns, can turn into reasoning a reason why the other does not really need or merit my support, indeed why I am perfectly entitled to exploit the other (animal or slave). Singer does not claim to be utterly free of emotion, however; he allows rage, pointing out that of course anger and outrage are stirred by cruelty to animals as they are by concentration camps, but ‘Nowhere [. . .] do I appeal to the reader’s emotions where they cannot be supported by reason’ (Animal Liberation, x). Similarly Regan believes reason to be much more important than emotion in his important and influential argument for animal rights (Defending Animal Rights, 59), since emotions often blind. Although he does confess to deploying emotion; his example is of ‘Anger. Rage. 366

Wanting Conclusions Pity. Sorrow. Disgust’ at reading of animal suffering (Defending Animal Rights, 63)­– ­these feelings are certainly more acceptable than love. (Yet rage does recall La Fontaine’s wolf, Hobbes’s sovereign.) Singer, Regan and other animal rights philosophers have to contend with those who wish to restrict rights to human beings in a way that in practice often includes only some categories of humans, those deemed to be rational (not too young or too mad or bad, for instance), while sometimes accusing animal activists of preferring animals to men (with the fixed cake of sympathy lurking in this argument). Regan claims on the contrary that the ‘philosophical considerations that ground the rights of nonhuman animals are the same considerations that most adequately ground the rights of human beings, the most vulnerable among us in particular’ (Defending Animal Rights, 86). Hearne and Haraway too are somewhat cautious about love, especially devotion as expressed by pet-owners, although less nervous than Singer. Haraway comments: ‘Being a pet seems to me to be a demanding job for a dog, requiring self-control and canine emotional and cognitive skills matching those of good working dogs’ (The Companion Species Manifesto, 38). She points to the dangerous dependence for a pet on an economy of affection while working dogs depend more on their skill. Hearne is a trainer, as well as a philosopher and poet, who is appalled by what she sees as cruel sentimentality towards horses and dogs who are treated inappropriately for their species, and thus become unhappy and confused. She is also, however, sceptical about animal rights in the abstract as these seems to be about making animals weigh in the same scale as humans rather than paying attention to their specificity. Her work is all about communication and relationality by which both partners acquire rights. There is then a sense of emergent ontologies rather than pre-existing fixed ones. However it is phrased, the reader might well nevertheless want to use the word ‘love’ as s­/he reads of the powerful relationships developed over time between Hearne and various animals. Some readers are disturbed by the elements of force and coercion, which might indeed be dangerous in less adept hands. However, there is little there which is not analogous to the training of human beings­– ­also characterised by the exercise of power whichever model of education is used. Haraway uses the term strange kinship for the potential relation between a woman and the animal who shares her house, claiming that ‘all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness 367

Derrida and Other Animals in relation’ (The Companion Species Manifesto, 50). She is not in favour of ‘unconditional love’ (33), nor the adoption, characterised by neurotic narcissistic fantasies, of furry children (35). However, when she writes of her relationship with the Australian shepherd, Ms Cayenne Pepper, she tells her reader: ‘Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is an historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy’ (3). I should note here the focus on domestic animals­– ­Hearne is particularly horrified by the treatment of great apes by well-intentioned scientists who are seeking to discover to what extent primates can communicate with humans. For her, the sharing of very high proportions of DNA is less of an issue in a communicating relationship than the sharing of a history­– ­both the long history of domestication and the shorter history between individuals. This is another way of re-thinking the categorisations beloved of philosophers. In Darrieussecq’s novel Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, or Truismes, discussed in Chapter 6, there is a scene in which the heroine, beginning her metamorphosis into a sow and thus also beginning to enjoy sex just when she is becoming less attractive to most men, is caught by bodyguards at a private (political) function at a swimming pool. As she is apparently too unappetising to rape: They merely fooled around a bit with their dogs. And then they looked sort of grossed out and stopped us just at the best moment. One of the men pulled out his revolver and said, ‘The bitch should be shot.’ I hadn’t seen anything but males. It’s only now that I get what he meant. (Pig Tales, 53–4) Ils se sont juste un peu amusés avec leurs chiens. Et puis ils ont eu l’air comme qui dirait écœurés et ils nous ont arrêtés juste au meilleur moment. Un des hommes a tiré son revolver et il a dit: ‘il faut abattre cette chienne’, moi je n’avais vu que des mâles. C’est maintenant que je comprends le sens de cette phrase. (Truismes, 65)

The play between the human and the animal here could be interpreted at considerable length. The brutal, bestial, guards despise the young woman for her animal ugliness and try to punish her by getting their dogs to rape her­– ­but become nauseated when she responds to the dogs and begins to enjoy the experience. (I should recall that women’s pleasure in sexual relations with men is considered undesirable and ‘unhealthy’ in this dystopian world too.) At this point one calls her 368

Wanting Conclusions a bitch as a figural insult, but he really does want to slaughter her as an animal. She takes the comment literally (trying to remember a female dog)­– ­just as she had responded to the male dogs as living, desiring and desirable creatures rather than understanding that she was being symbolically punished. Without rushing to recommend the response of bestiality, any more than I would literally advocate the response of anorexia in relation to Vivien’s protagonist in ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, I would argue that this imagined scene of degradation stages some positive sense of pleasure and rapport with animals that are neither seen as the same (since the protagonist does not think that she is a bitch, she thinks that she is a woman) nor as totally other such that there could be no relationship. When one man pulls out a gun and says ‘kill the bitch’ (abattre being rather more general than ‘shoot’, and often used for animals), it might remind an Anglophone reader (to shift to a world where there are only boys and animals) of ‘kill the beast’ in Golding’s desert-island fable Lord of the Flies­– ­the wild pigs are slaughtered for food, a pig’s head becomes a totem, and then the fat boy Piggy is an obvious target as a scapegoat. I offer Darrieussecq’s hallucinatory writing of flesh experiences, of suffering and of pleasure, between woman and sow as a complement to Derrida’s analysis of the zoomorphic apparitions in political philosophy which seem to conjure away the animal body as much as they conjure it up.

Stupid conclusions and gesturing to the future In Archive Fever, and indeed almost all his writing, Derrida argues for a responsibility for tomorrow linked to the mourning, remembrance and preservation of the past involved in the kind of work I have tried to do in this book. This could be seen as a hospitality to the future or a caring for the future in the face of the suicidal­– a­ nd murderous­– t­endencies of autoimmunity in sovereignty, including democratic states, and the unexpected monsters that may well emerge. Atwood’s dystopian novels imagine many of these­– ­whether in human form in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or genetically spliced creatures both gentle and beastly in the trilogy that runs from Oryx and Crake (2003) through The Year of the Flood (2009) to MaddAddam (2013). For monsters do not only come in human form to terrify us­– t­he business of capitalism, and here particularly agribusiness, is busy creating many chimeras for consumption. No doubt society will try to domesticate these for better or worse. 369

Derrida and Other Animals In The Animal That Therefore I Am Derrida singles out Bentham for proposing changing the very form of the question regarding animals that had dominated philosophy up to that point (and has continued to prevail to a large extent). I give a longer quotation in Chapter 1, but here will recall that Bentham writes in 1780: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior race of animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. (Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 17, 311, footnote)

He famously ends this passage: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?’ Today the subjection of animals has reached unprecedented proportions (as Derrida remarks already in a ‘today’ of 1997 when he gives the paper ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’), while men do all they can to hide it from themselves. Genocide is going on not only in the disappearance of species but in the continued existence or even overpopulation (say, of chickens) in the most monstrous circumstances. Derrida, and some of the philosophers of animal rights, turn appreciatively to Bentham and the question of animal suffering­– ­and even to allow the response of pity as Regan does, but pity can be theorised (contra Rousseau) as a distancing mechanism rather than one of empathy. The question should be broadened to that of feeling, sensation and sentiment, in general­– ­since the animal’s ability to feel love may be as interesting in some respects as their ability to feel pain. The privileging of thought over emotion­– ­and the assertion of an absolute divide between the two­– c­ ould be argued to be a phallogocentric construct. I would say that love is not blind(ing) but a blind spot, not so much in Derrida’s writing, although he does spend more time on philosophers’ quasi-transcendental bêtise, but in some of the strongest writers amongst those who question the necessity of sacrificing the animal, and indeed animals, for the sake of semblables. There is a bêtise, of course, in defining and concluding. Yet for Derrida the rigorous analysis over time of what ultimately emerges as undecidable creates the space of a decision­– ­there would be no ethical decision to be made if the answer were pre-programmed by ‘our’ knowledge or ‘our’ reason. Thus I would suggest that, if it were possible, that 370

Wanting Conclusions decision be informed not only by reason, not only by pity, rage or fear, but also by love. And I shall leave the last word to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who phrases it in the form of a question: ‘Nowadays we don’t think much of a man’s love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren’t we bound to stop loving humans too?’5

Notes 1. The specificity of ‘black and white’ here calls to American history in particular of course. 2. See Kamuf, ‘To Do Justice To “Rousseau,” Irreducibly’, on Derrida’s use of the term ‘blind spot’. 3. See Bennington, ‘Derrida’s “Eighteenth Century”’, on the need for scare quotes around any period in the context of Derrida’s deconstruction of naive periodisation. 4. Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 1 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1996), 487. 5. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, quoted in The Guardian 2, 25 April 2007, 3.

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Bibliography

Works by Jacques Derrida L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Gallilée, 2006). ‘L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre)’, in L’animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 251–301. De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’, Cahiers de l’Herne. Jacques Derrida, 83 (2004), ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, 117–29. H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire (Paris: Galilée, 2002). Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). Psyche. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Séminaire La Bête et le souverain I (2001–2002), ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2008). Séminaire La Bête et le souverain II (2003–2003), ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2010). Voyous: deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003).

Co-authored works (with Anne Dufourmantelle) De l’hospitalité: Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997). (with Jean-Luc Nancy) ‘“Il faut bien manger” ou le calcul du sujet’, in Points de suspension. Entretiens, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 269–301. (with Jürgen Habermas) Le ‘Concept’ du 11 septembre: Dialogues à New York (octobre-décembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori (Paris: Galilée, 2004). ‘Responsabilité du sens à venir’, conversation avec Jean-Luc Nancy, in Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2004). ‘Violences contre les animaux’, in Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, 372

Bibliography De quoi demain ­. . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard and Galilée, 2001), 105–27. (with Hélène Cixous), Voiles (Paris: Galilée, 1998).

Works in translation Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’, trans. David Wills, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121–46. The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow)’, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28:2 (2002), 369–418. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009). The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). ‘Foreword’, in Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), x. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, with an introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Éperons, les styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

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Derrida and Other Animals Co-authored works in translation (with Christie V. Macdonald) ‘Choreographies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 23–42. (with Jean-Luc Nancy) ‘ “Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Points ­. . . Interviews 1974– 1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 255–87. (with Anne Dufourmantelle) Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). (with Hélène Cixous) Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). (with Hélène Cixous and Verena Andermatt Conley) ‘Voice I . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 50–67. (with Verena Andermatt Conley) ‘Voice II . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 68–93. (with Lucette Finas and Verena Andermatt Conley) ‘Voice III . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 95–8.

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Index

abolition of slavery (campaign for), abolitionists, 9, 36, 230, 249, 250, 251, 253, 278, 284, 285, 292–4n, 297n, 299n, 300n, 302n, 366 contemporary anti-slavery activists, 251, 258–9 see also Encyclopédie (‘Slave’, ‘Slavery’); slave (manumission) Abraham, 44, 100 Adams, John, 244n, 300n Aesop, 124, 157, 172n, 191, 308–12, 348, 349n, 350–1n, 352n; see also Duffy (‘Mrs Aesop’) Aeschylus, 145, 148–9; see also Cixous (La Ville parjure) Affergan, Francis, 236n Africa (Africans), 43, 149, 177n, 185, 187, 204, 206, 212, 218, 230, 235n, 237n, 242n, 244n, 249, 251, 259, 262, 264–5, 270, 271, 272, 277, 278, 282, 284, 285, 292n, 293n, 294n, 298n, 300n, 301n, 321, 334, 344, 356–7n Agamben, Giorgio, 36–42, 132, 273 bare life, 36, 38–9, 42, 62n, 132, 174 The Coming Community, 226 Homo Sacer, 37, 41–2, 62n, 63n, 72, 104n, 174n The Open, 27, 35, 37–41, 61n, 62–3n, 97, 108n, 272–3, 362–3, 365 see also Dasein Agnew, David C. A., 320 Alexie, Sherman, 246n America (North), 21, 28, 29, 30, 32, 39, 49, 58n, 70, 78, 85–6, 98, 102, 108n, 172n, 173n, 182–303, 371n; see also Adams; colonisation; Crèvecœur; degeneracy theory; Jefferson; Native Americans

anarchism, 252, 303n, 336–7; see also capitalism; Cixous (Les Naufragés); Verne Animal Philosophy (Atterton and Calarco), 16, 49 animal rights, 23, 24, 26, 27–8, 44, 49–50, 57n, 59n, 61n, 64n, 267, 300n, 356n, 359, 364–7, 370; see also ethics; Regan; Singer animals companion animals, 5, 13, 18, 19, 45–7, 160, 165, 176n, 214–15, 219, 243n, 249, 273, 278, 282–3, 310, 336, 343, 344, 345, 350n, 358, 365, 367–8; see also cats; dogs; domestication; Haraway; silkworms cruelty of, 48, 71, 74, 76, 90–1, 94–5, 96, 98, 101, 112, 115, 139, 143–4, 146, 148, 157, 158, 160, 161, 256, 275, 288–9, 301n distinction from the human, 1–5, 7, 12–14, 18–20, 33–5, 38, 50, 53, 99–100, 107n, 108–9n, 119–20, 130, 140–1, 177n, 183–5, 189–92, 195–6, 201–24, 251, 254–6, 276, 304–6, 314, 316, 335, 337, 345–6, 358–61, 363–4, 370; see also human and gender (grammatical), 13–14, 107n, 137, 165n, 166n, 177n, 329–30; see also moles; sexual difference as machines, 3, 193, 210, 232, 264, 305, 314, 320, 324, 359, 363; see also Descartes singular or plural (e.g. the animal or animals), 9, 10, 13, 20, 51, 137, 147, 203, 310, 314; see also animot and suffering (cruelty to animals), 4, 5, 7, 9, 15, 20–1, 24–8, 35, 43, 47,

391

Derrida and Other Animals animals (cont.) 58n, 59n, 65n, 93–5, 119–20, 130, 140, 163, 173n, 180n, 202, 205, 215, 255, 265, 274, 289, 336, 359, 360–1, 363, 364, 365, 366–7, 370; see also animal rights; Bentham; hunting totemism, 127–8, 197, 240n, 319, 369 translation of bête as animal or beast, 10–13, 262–3, 296n see also apes; bears; bees; birds; caterpillars; cats; cattle; chickens; deer; dogs; dolphins; donkeys; eagles; elephants; foxes; goats; hares; horses; insects; jackdaws; lambs; language; lions; mice; moles; parrots; pigeons; pigs; sheep; silkworms; snakes; spiders; tortoises; wolves animot, 8–9, 20, 55n, 310, 312, 349, 358; see also animals (singular and plural) Anouilh, Jean see Le Loup anthropology see ethnography apes, 5, 26, 48, 53, 63n, 65n, 97, 133–4, 202–3, 207, 219, 242n, 264, 265, 318, 320, 360–1, 363, 368 appetite (real or figural) see food Aravamudan, Srinivas, 60n Aristotle, 8, 18, 33, 42, 52, 63n, 136, 140, 192, 234, 251, 263, 268, 269, 296n, 297n, 304, 306, 326, 366 De anima, 38 Nicomachean Ethics, 312–14, 351–2n Politics, 140, 263 Asibong, Andrew, 356n Athene, 319, 326–8, 332; see also Ovid: Arachne Atterton, Peter see Animal Philosophy Atwood, Margaret, 355n The Handmaid’s Tale, 369 MaddAdam, 11, 56n, 355n, 370 Oryx and Crake, 369 The Penelopiad, 354n The Year of the Flood, 6–7, 54n, 369 Augustine, Saint, 43, 321, 354n autobiography, 8, 14, 16–17, 43, 59n, 60n, 162, 180n, 208, 234, 249, 250 autofiction, 1, 146, 150

autoimmunity, 31, 32, 60n, 78, 80, 87–8, 127, 132, 203, 204, 246n, 298n, 369 Bailey, Brett, 108n Bales, Kevin, 293–4n Balmas, Enea, 198–9, 231 Balzac, Honoré de, 173n Bamforth, Stephen, 238n Banneker, Benjamin, 300n Barber, Elizabeth Wayland, 355n Barnes, Djuna, 162 Barney, Nathalie, 172n Barthes, Roland, 106n Barton, Benjamin Smith, 206–7, 242n Bataille, Georges, 38 Batchelor, Kathryn, 165n Bateson, Gregory, 117 Baudelaire, Charles, 126, 175n ‘Femmes damnées. Delphine et Hippolyte’, 137–40, 172n bears, 5, 74, 190, 238n, 240n, 279, 297n, 298–9n, 329, 330 beasts see animals Beauvoir, Simone de, 50, 335–6 beavers, 191, 193–5, 198, 202, 212, 238n; see also language (animal access to); skin bees, 3, 212, 289, 303 Behnke, Elizabeth, 176n Benjamin, Andrew, 50–2, 62n, 103n, 106n, 235n Benjamin, Walter, 365 Bennington, Geoffrey, vii, 11, 63n, 148, 171n, 321, 354n, 371n Bentham, Jeremy, 25, 35, 36, 370; see also animals (suffering) Benveniste, Emile, 77, 112 Berger, Anne E., 50, 55n, 63n Berger, John, 18, 25 Bernier, Celeste-Marie, 293n bête/bêtise, 2, 11–13, 17, 56n, 119, 125, 129–30, 172n, 202–3, 209, 248n, 305, 336, 360, 370 Bettelheim, Bruno, 112, 157–60, 162, 168n, 175n, 179n Bible, 37, 173n, 197, 209, 219, 239n, 259 Genesis, 35, 44, 207, 208, 209, 219, 220, 224–5 see also Abraham; Christianity; god; Noah

392

Index birds, 65n, 101, 140, 146, 158, 162, 175n, 210, 288–91, 303n, 305, 308, 311–12, 315, 326, 327, 328, 336, 337, 350n, 352n, 360 caged, 72, 117, 289–90, 311 see also animals; chickens; eagles; jackdaws; pigeons; swallows Blanchot, Maurice, 235n; see also community boats (sea voyages), 123, 130, 131–2, 135, 140, 142, 195, 210, 291, 331; see also shipwrecks Bougainville, 248n Bourgogne, Duc de, 267, 330 Bourke, Joanna, 35–6, 349n Bowie, Malcolm, 147, 176–7n Brazil, 190, 218, 239n, 244n, 282, 301n; see also Chagnon Brody, Hugh, 245n Brontë, Emily, 145–6 Brooks, Peter, 103n Brune, Elisa, 114 Bruyere, Vincent, 64n Buck-Morss, Susan, 294n bulls see cattle Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc comte de, 10, 84, 92–3, 98, 101, 106n, 107n, 108n, 182–3, 186–7, 195–6, 201–3, 206, 208, 210, 212, 213–14, 217, 219, 230, 241n, 275–7, 278, 299n, 301n, 334; see also degeneracy theory Burton, Robert, 351n Calarco, Matthew see Animal Philosophy Caligula, 261 Calder, Martin, 241n Campbell, Emma, 178n cannibals, cannibalism, 72, 85, 87, 90–2, 107n, 114, 153, 161–2, 168n, 182, 183, 185–6, 188, 189, 190, 191, 196, 197–9, 203–6, 210, 211–12, 218, 222, 225, 226–33, 237n, 240n, 241n, 243n, 244n, 250, 257, 260–1, 277, 279, 280, 297n, 315, 327, 330–2, 335, 343, 355n, 364; see also Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); food; savages capitalism, 188–90, 191–2, 195, 199, 223–4, 228, 272, 274, 282, 300n, 324, 344, 370; see also Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); money

Carey, Brycchan, 272, 286, 294n, 302n Caribbean, 190–1, 199, 242n, 259, 273, 287, 295–6n, 297–8n; see also Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); Haiti Carroll, Lewis, 18, 43 Carter, Angela, 174n, 179n ‘The Company of Wolves’, 71, 111, 150, 158–60, 174n ‘Werewolf’, 130, 161, 179–80n ‘Wolf Alice’, 141, 155, 160, 167n caterpillars, 264, 322–3 Cato, 72, 81, 83 cats, 13, 16–17, 18–19, 34, 99, 114, 144–6, 149, 175n, 176n, 208–9, 214–15, 218, 307, 338, 371; see also animals (companion animals); lions cattle, 5, 6, 13, 24, 27, 52, 54n, 58n, 62n, 80, 89, 140, 200, 202, 205, 219, 244n, 249, 255, 256, 257, 261, 274, 275, 289, 292n, 307, 312, 328, 351n, 363; see also domestication Celan, Paul, 43–4, 102n Chagnon, Napoleon, 239n; see also Brazil; ethnography Champlain, Samuel, 220–1, 245n; see also maps Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier, 196, 200, 206–7, 222, 235n, 238n, 239n; see also missionaries Chateaubriand, François-René, 240n Cheyfitz, Eric, 245n chickens, 6, 46, 65n, 291, 303n, 352n, 363, 370 cocks, cockfighting, 46, 64–5n, 303n, 309, 312 see also birds child, childhood, children, 3, 14, 18, 36, 70, 81, 83, 87, 91, 96, 97, 99, 101, 105n, 107–8n, 112, 116, 122, 128, 141, 145–6, 148, 154, 157–8, 160, 161–2, 164, 166n, 167n, 168n, 170n, 179n, 189, 192, 209, 218, 244n, 250, 256, 259, 260, 265, 272, 277, 279, 280, 285, 300n, 307, 319, 320, 321–3, 327, 333, 334, 338–42, 344, 347, 348, 350n, 357n animals figured as, 69, 368 indigenous peoples figured as, 87, 185, 186, 282

393

Derrida and Other Animals slaves figured as, 279–80, 282 see also fairytales Chomsky, Noam, 32 Christianity, 35, 41, 73, 90, 97, 148, 183, 184, 186, 188, 195, 197, 198, 203, 205, 220, 224, 230, 264, 243n, 253, 254, 255, 270, 282, 287, 297n, 302n, 325, 333, 355n Catholicism, 185–6, 237–8n, 253, 254, 270, 273, 281, 295n, 319 Protestantism, Huguenots, 189, 197, 219, 220, 236n, 259, 270, 281, 295n, 298n, 305, 319–20, 324, 353n Quakers, 285–7, 302n, 303n see also Bible; god; missionaries Circe, 78–80, 266, 297n, 315, 325, 330, 331, 332, 354n; see also La Fontaine; Plutarch; Ulysses; Warner Cixous, Hélène, 43, 52–3n, 130–1, 139, 166–7n, 176–7n, 182, 322 and (her) cat(s), 13, 19, 34, 145–6, 175n and writing, 144, 146, 152, 164–5, 177n, 320–1, 347, 358, 362 writings L’Amour du loup, 144–6, 165n Le Dernier Caravansérail, 298n La, 354n ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (‘Le Rire de la Méduse’), 164, 165–6n ‘Love of the Wolf’ (‘L’Amour du loup’), 110, 113, 118, 120, 122, 139, 144–56, 160, 161–2, 163, 165n, 167n, 168n, 175n, 177n, 178n, 199, 333; see also love Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir, 209, 210–11, 238n, 247n, 256; see also Verne The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune née), 152, 176n Reveries of the Wild Woman (Rêveries de la femme sauvage), 177n Stigmata, 55n, 144, 147, 165n, 167n, 175n La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes, 178–9n, 355n ‘Voice I’ see Derrida Voile Noire Voile Blanche, 168n Voiles see Derrida

‘We who are free, are we free?’, 24, 165, 347, 358, 362 Clarke, Jackie, 58n class, 2, 88–9, 97, 99, 128, 133, 178n, 189, 202, 203, 210, 211, 226, 227, 233, 252, 267, 296n, 302n, 305, 320, 337, 338–44, 346, 348; see also Marx Clytemnestra, 325, 328, 348, 354n; see also Aeschylus Code noir, 61n, 254, 256, 259, 273, 292n, 295n, 298n, 302n; see also colonisation; law; race; slavery Coetzee, J. M., 26 Disgrace, 43, 59n, 63n Elizabeth Costello, 59n, 63n Foe, 43 The Lives of Animals, 26–7, 43, 59n Collie, Joanne, 165n colonisation, colonialism, 24, 32, 34, 46, 55n, 86, 90, 101, 115, 184, 188–9, 190–1, 196–7, 199, 200, 209, 212, 215–16, 219, 220, 221–2, 224, 228, 230, 231, 237n, 240n, 242n, 244n, 246n, 253, 277, 279, 280, 282, 296n, 298n, 357n; see also Code noir; Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); missionaries; Native Americans; savages community, 26, 29–31, 36, 52, 67, 78, 80, 127–8, 161, 182, 184, 191, 195, 197, 216, 222–3, 226–8, 230–4, 235n, 246, 247–8n, 272, 281, 283, 287–91, 302n, 319, 332, 363, 364; see also fraternity; friendship; hospitality Condorcet, Nicolas, 300n, 366 contamination, 114–15, 128, 317, 324, 335, 355n, 361; see also race (miscegenation); wolves (werewolves) contracts, agreements, 3–4, 54n, 73, 83, 86, 102n, 117, 127–8, 131, 141, 176n, 223, 258, 270–1, 272, 281, 345–6; see also law; responsibility; Rousseau Cook, Captain James, 215, 241n cows see cattle Cranston, Maurice, 87, 89 Crespi, Bernard, 356 Crèvecœur, J. Hector St John, 230, 295n, 302n

394

Index Letters from an American Farmer, 98, 108n, 187, 188–9, 206, 214, 237n, 241n, 252, 255, 283–5, 287–90, 291, 301n, 303n Lettres d’un cultivateur américain, 229–30, 256, 285–7, 301n, 303n see also America; degeneracy theory crocodiles, 130 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, 250, 292–3n Dahl, Roald, 157, 179n D’Alembert, Jean see Encyclopédie Darrieussecq, Marie, 347 Pig Tales (Truismes), 314, 332–7, 342–3, 368–9; see also pigs (sows) Darwin, Charles, 29, 39, 108n, 241n, 337–8 social Darwinism, 44 Dasein, 40, 61n, 246n, 255; see also Agamben; Heidegger; Hillis Miller Davis, David Brion, 262, 269–70, 292n Day, Thomas, 294n De Bry, Theodor, 106n, 244n, 246n De Pauw, Cornelius, 183, 236n deer, 64n, 92–3, 95, 107n, 243n Defoe, Daniel, 22, 51, 250, 293n Robinson Crusoe, 9, 42, 85, 90, 107n, 182–248, 249, 252, 270, 272, 277–8, 280–2, 289, 290–1, 300–1n, 311, 363 see also Robinsonades degeneracy theory, 98, 187–8, 191, 206, 217, 230, 236n, 243n, 276–7, 278, 299n, 318; see also Buffon; De Pauw; Raynal Deleuze, Gilles (and Félix Guattari), 11, 40, 114–15, 119, 125, 130, 170n, 241n Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition), 12–13, 56n, 173n A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux), 103n, 159–60, 170n, 176n, 180n Delphy, Christine, 161, 180n Denys, Nicolas, 191 Derrida, Jacques The Animal that Therefore I Am (L’Animal que donc je suis), 2–3, 7–10, 14–21, 24–6, 33–6, 37, 42–3, 50, 53–4n, 55n, 57n, 60n, 69, 201, 208–9, 212, 220, 242–3n, 245n, 301–2n, 370

395

Archive Fever, 369 The Beast and the Sovereign I (La Bête et le souverain I), 3–7, 9, 10–14, 15, 17, 19, 21–4, 29–33, 35, 37, 41–2, 52–3, 54n, 55n, 56n, 60n, 61n, 67–109, 110–23, 124–5, 127–8, 129–30, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138–9, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 157, 164–5, 166n, 169n, 170n, 172n, 175n, 176n, 180n, 184, 186–7, 191, 192, 195, 202–3, 238n, 240n, 250, 251, 256–7, 258, 260–3, 266–9, 271, 292, 295n, 296n, 297n, 304, 305–8, 310, 314, 336, 337, 345–6, 348, 349n, 358–64, 369–70 The Beast and the Sovereign II (La Bête et le souverain II), 9, 10, 21–2, 30, 43, 80–1, 85, 105n, 107n, 110, 118, 166n, 169–70n, 176n, 182–248, 277, 281, 291, 300–1n, 303n, 304–5, 369 ‘Choreographies’, 123, 171n ‘“Eating Well”, Or the Calculation of the Subject’ (‘“Il faut bien manger” ou le calcul du sujet’), 14, 15, 27–8, 58n, 93, 174n, 233–4, 254–6, 363, 364 ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’, 15 ‘Fors’, 166n Geschlecht I, 304, 319 Geschlecht II ‘Heidegger’s hand’, 304, 318, 319 The Gift of Death, 246n Glas, 22, 152, 321 ‘Hostipitality’, 295n ‘Majesties’, 104n Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie), 87, 170–1n, 317 Of Hospitality, 321–2 ‘Of Spirit’ (De l’esprit), 317–18 Politics of Friendship (Politiques de l’Amitié), 88, 127, 314 ‘Rams’ (‘Béliers’), 43–4 ‘Responsibility – Of the sense to come’, 28 Rogues (Voyous), 22, 29–30, 32, 60n, 63n, 70, 77–8, 87–8, 102n, 105n, 109n, 173n, 326–7 Specters of Marx (Spectres de Marx), 103n Spurs (Eperons), 123, 171n, 321

Derrida and Other Animals Derrida, Jacques (cont.) Veils (Voiles), 320–3, 354n ‘Violences contre les animaux’, 59n, 93, 364 ‘Voice’ I, II, III, 123, 171n ‘White Mythology (‘La Mythologie blanche’), 8, 63n Writing and Difference (Ecriture et la différence), 317 Descartes, René, Cartesian, 18, 25, 33, 34, 43, 50, 129, 141, 170n, 176n, 191, 193, 202, 212, 219, 221, 264, 304, 314, 320, 345, 359, 362, 364; see also animals (as machines) Dickason, Olive Patricia, 184, 208, 236–7n, 237–8n, 242n, 263 Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 121 Diderot, Denis, 92, 107n, 187, 231 Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (Supplément au voyage de Bougainville), 199, 233, 280, 300n; see also Bougainville see also Encyclopédie; Raynal disgust, 47, 132, 133–5, 136, 140, 156, 205, 235n, 244n, 331–6, 342, 367, 368–9 dogs, 13, 36, 47, 54n, 63n, 64n, 68, 70, 73, 76, 78, 90, 92, 93, 95, 118, 125, 126, 133, 138, 156, 172n, 175n, 182, 194, 195, 200, 214–15, 218, 229–30, 235n, 238n, 247n, 248n, 249, 269, 271, 274, 275, 278, 281, 282–3, 291, 298n, 301n, 309, 312, 319–20, 329, 336, 337–45, 351n, 352n, 356n, 357n, 358, 362, 364, 367, 368–9 bitches, 13, 54n, 125, 135, 140, 368–9 see also animals (companion animals); domestication; wolves dolphins, 202–3, 240n, 360 domestication (domestic animals and slaves), 3–4, 6, 8, 42–3, 45–7, 55n, 64n, 67–8, 69, 89, 91, 92, 95, 112–13, 117, 140, 157, 179n, 185, 190, 196, 200, 213–16, 219, 220, 235n, 248n, 249, 250, 251, 256–7, 263, 268, 272, 273–84, 289, 290, 292, 297n, 299n, 314, 330, 343, 345–6, 358, 362, 367–8, 370; see also animals; cattle; dogs; Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); sovereign

donkeys, 95, 309, 350n Donne, John, ‘Sappho to Philaenis’, 139, 140, 175n Doré, Gustave, 71 Douglass, Frederick, 249, 292–3n Downie, Alan, 282 Duffy, Carol Ann, 124, 139, 166–7n, 203, 308, 336, 346–9, 349n, 362 ‘Circe’, 330–2 ‘Demeter’, 162 ‘Eurydice’, 124, 165, 349n ‘Little Red Cap’, 142, 151, 162–3 ‘Mrs Aesop’, 150, 305–14, 318, 348, 351n ‘Mrs Beast’, 134 ‘Mrs Midas’, 150, 180n ‘Queen Herod’, 180n Dugatkin, Lee Allan, 236n Duhamel, Georges, 58n Duncan, Glen, 114 Durrell, Gerald, 1, 57n Dutilleux, Henri see Le Loup eagles, 309, 328, 350n education, 21–2, 47, 48, 57n, 75, 100, 114, 182, 184, 192, 194, 197, 209, 218, 219–20, 221, 233, 236n, 242n, 259–60, 274–6, 284, 308, 315, 320, 321, 335, 341, 345–6, 347, 360, 367–8; see also missionaries; reading; Rousseau (Émile) Egerton, Douglas R., 300n elephants, 29, 31, 256, 257, 264, 291, 295n, 301n, 329, 330, 364 Ellis, Markman, 241n, 243n Encyclopédie, 90–7, 101, 107n, 158, 216, 243n, 294n, 324 ‘Canadians, Philosophy of the’ (‘Canadiens, (Philosophie des)’), 197, 207–8 ‘Deer’ (‘Cerf’), 107n ‘Slave’ (‘Esclave’), 253, 294n, 302n ‘Slavery’ (‘Esclavage’), 249, 253–4, 270–2, 279–80, 284 ‘Werewolf’ (‘Loup-garou’), 121 ‘Wolf’ (‘Loup’), 90–2 ‘Wolf (Hunting)’ (‘Loup (Chasse)’), 92–7, 107n ‘Wolf-catcher’ (‘Louvetier’), 92 Enlightenment, 24, 35–6, 67, 73–4,

396

Index 77, 80–109, 120–3, 158, 166n, 169–171n, 182–303, 359–60, 365; see also Adams; Bentham; Buffon; Cugoano; Diderot; Encyclopédie; Equiano; Graffigny; Jaucourt; Kant; Rousseau; Sancho; Voltaire environmental disaster, 23–4, 101, 215; see also Attwood Epicurus, 99 Equiano, Olaudah, 250, 293n ethics, 5, 6, 9, 14, 18, 23–4, 26–7, 35, 41–2, 49–50, 51, 58n, 59n, 64n, 69, 77–8, 98, 119–20, 132, 136, 146, 177n, 179n, 183, 195, 233–4, 254–5, 267, 274–5, 287, 300n, 312, 340, 351–2n, 356n, 359, 363–6, 368, 371; see also animal rights; faces; responsibility; virtue ethnography, 34, 48, 74, 84–6, 97, 106n, 159, 182–248, 304–5, 315, 316, 318, 362–3 Evans, Dylan Sebastian, 168n Evans, Edward, 298n exile, 80, 105n, 141, 154, 178n, 261, 319–20; see also Huguenots; shipwrecks; Tsvetaeva fables, 5, 6, 8, 33, 42–3, 72–80, 82–3, 102, 104–5n, 106n, 114, 125, 145, 157, 172n, 182, 191–6, 202–3, 214, 240n, 267–8, 295n, 303n, 305–14, 329–30, 336, 342, 348, 350–1n, 352n, 361–2, 365, 369; see also Aesop; La Fontaine; language (political rhetoric) face(s), 8, 17–18, 35, 61n, 68, 114, 139, 151, 174n, 272, 309, 331, 363; see also ethics; Levinas; teeth Fairless, John Michael, 172n Fairless, Lily, 243n fairytales Beauty and the Beast, 134, 163 The Goat and her Three Kids, 157 Hansel and Gretel, 159 The Little Mermaid, 134 Little Red Riding Hood, 71, 112, 120, 132, 138–9, 142, 150–2, 157–65, 168n, 174n, 175n, 179n, 226–7, 361 Three Little Pigs, 157 The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, 157 see also Carter; Duffy

famine see food farming, 2, 6, 24, 46, 47, 95, 98, 100, 101, 108n, 188–9, 199–200, 214–16, 224, 228, 238n, 257, 273, 289–92, 303n, 332, 333, 343; see also Crèvecœur; domestication; food fathers, patriarchy, 58n, 64–5n, 71, 73, 102, 103n, 108n, 112, 113, 131, 127–8, 145, 157, 159–64, 166n, 168n, 200, 252, 256, 257, 279–82, 283, 285, 290, 300–1n, 302n, 309, 310, 315, 319, 321, 324, 325, 326, 328, 332, 335, 342, 344, 352n, 356–7n; see also children; Freud; household economy; mothers feigning, deception, 19–20, 71–2, 100, 115, 116, 129, 134, 334, 338–40, 344, 356n disguise, 20, 30, 102, 103n, 120, 122–3, 158, 328, 362; see also Plautus see also language (lying) Fischer, Sibylle, 294n fish, fishing, 3, 29, 46, 124, 134, 135, 140, 175n, 210, 215, 223, 247n, 311, 350–1n Flaubert, Gustave, 19, 130, 203, 306 Fontenay, Elizabeth de, 100, 109n, 203, 219, 244n food (eating), 65n, 84, 102, 133, 135, 157, 189, 199, 210–12, 215, 216, 223, 233, 243n, 257, 263, 267, 269, 290, 291, 312, 314, 315, 320, 330–6, 337, 359 appetite (real and figural), 67–8, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79–80, 84, 87, 88–102, 112, 113–14, 116, 120, 121, 123, 125, 128, 132–5, 137, 143–4, 148, 151–3, 157–65, 167n, 185, 212, 213–14, 243n, 267–8, 275, 287, 290, 333, 334, 361; see also sexual difference (lust); wolves carnivores, meat eating, 4, 15, 18, 19, 31–2, 58n, 59n, 71, 74, 89–96, 98–9, 100–1, 135, 139, 144, 148, 157, 158, 160, 173n, 189, 199, 205, 212, 214, 238n, 255, 257, 262, 265, 275, 288, 290, 291, 330, 332, 333, 336, 359, 363, 369; see also dogs; domestication; hunting; lions; tigers; wolves

397

Derrida and Other Animals food (eating) (cont.) cooking, raw food, 100, 210, 242n, 243n, 308, 324, 330–2; see also cannibalism; savages famine, starvation, politics of food, 5, 6, 59n, 73, 87, 89, 91–2, 95–6, 97–9, 101, 102, 132, 167n, 203, 210, 211, 243n, 251, 288, 291, 363 industrial production of (factory farming), 2, 6, 24–7, 47, 58n, 59n, 273, 358, 359, 361, 370 taste, 67, 71, 88–9, 91–2, 98, 99–100, 153, 205, 212, 262 vegetarianism, 4–5, 11, 26–8, 50, 54n, 58n, 59n, 79, 95, 98, 99–101, 109n, 212, 265, 267, 330, 363–4, 365; see also Rousseau; Singer see also cannibalism; contamination; rum foreigners, strangers, étrangers, 71–2, 97, 100, 112, 115, 116, 132, 135, 137, 139, 141, 145, 149–50, 227, 233, 238n, 303, 315, 319–21, 324, 344, 353n, 356–7n; see also immigration Fort, Bernadette, 173–4n Foucault, Michel, 41, 97, 274, 364 foxes, 19, 67, 193, 308, 312, 352n France, 32, 88, 196, 199, 256, 338; see also language (French language) fraternity, 17, 70, 77, 87–8, 100–1, 119–20, 126–31, 142, 151, 159–60, 163, 173n, 184, 192–3, 203, 226, 230, 252–3, 254, 264, 291, 292, 359, 362, 370; see also community; ethics; Rousseau; state Freccero, Carla, 64n freedom, free will, liberty, 4, 7, 24, 32, 41, 48, 56n, 67–9, 73, 78, 82, 86, 99, 112, 125, 130, 133, 142–3, 146, 150, 155, 156, 162, 164, 165, 182, 188, 190, 192, 196, 200, 206, 210, 212, 216, 218, 238n, 250–3, 256, 257, 262–3, 266–8, 270–1, 274, 277, 278, 284, 294n, 300n, 303n, 308, 327, 333, 344, 362; see also abolition; man; nature; outlaws; savages; slaves; wolves Freud, Sigmund, 49, 71, 103n, 269, 311, 317, 323, 324 ‘From the History of an Infantile

Neurosis (The “Wolf Man”)’, 111, 112, 120, 157, 166n, 180n friends, friendship, 1, 14, 15, 27, 33, 57n, 83–4, 93, 99, 105n, 108n, 114, 117, 122, 156, 168n, 172n, 173n, 180n, 198–9, 232, 238n, 255, 283, 285, 297n, 301n, 312, 314, 333, 344, 355n, 356n, 366; see also Christianity (Quakers); community; Derrida (The Politics of Friendship); love frontiers (boundaries, borders), 1–3, 5, 7, 9–10, 16, 19–20, 23, 28, 31, 35, 38, 42, 49, 53, 54n, 70, 97, 112, 120, 164, 172n, 178n, 183–5, 186, 189,192, 196, 200, 201–24, 227, 231, 234, 245n, 250, 251, 258–9, 263, 270, 276, 298n, 318, 322, 324, 345, 355n, 356n, 363; see also animals (distinction from the human); man fur see skin Furies, 328, 355n; see also Cixous (La Ville parjure); Clytemnestra gender see animals (gender); human (he/ man language); language; sexual difference Genet, Jean, 22, 43, 152, 178n genocide, 7, 25, 27, 28, 55n, 183, 203, 228, 370; see also ethics; Holocaust; terror Genovese, Eugene D. (and Elizabeth Fox), 298n, 302n gift/gift exchange, 147–8, 155, 177n, 211, 242n, 288, 318, 337; see also hospitality; love Giraud, Eva, 356n goats, 145, 157, 191, 195, 205, 210, 212, 214, 277–8, 290, 291, 314; see also Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) god (theology), 9, 23, 27, 37–8, 42, 43, 54n, 62n, 72, 82, 109n, 117, 131, 189, 219, 239n, 256, 258, 264, 321, 326; see also Christianity; Islam; Jews; Zeus gold see money Golding, William, 243n, 369 Gouvest, Jean-Henri Maubert de, 182, 197–8, 231–3, 240n Graffigny, Françoise de, 232 greed, 84 animal, 73, 269, 290

398

Index human, 83, 191, 198, 291, 326, 332, 333 see also dogs; wolves Greenblatt, Stephen, 299n Greene, Jody, 104n Grégoire, Abbé, 297n, 300n Gregory, Philippa, 347 Griffin, Miranda, 178n Grimm, brothers, 157–8, 160, 162 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, 92–3, 107n Grosrichard, Alain, 103n Grotius, Hugo, 260, 261, 296n Guattari, Félix see Gilles Deleuze Guyer, Sara, 27 Haechler, Jean, 294n hair, 111, 133, 134, 155, 207–8, 242n, 250, 311, 323, 338; see also skin Haiti, 101, 255, 278, 279, 298n; see also Caribbean; slavery (slave rebellions) hands, 161, 213, 286, 315, 317–18, 320, 353n; see also Heidegger; technology Hanke, Lewis, 296n Hanrahan, Mairead, 165n, 178n Haraway, Donna, 47–8, 64n, 360–1, 367–8 The Companion Species Manifesto, 45, 47, 299n, 358, 367–8 Primate Visions, 26 Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 47–8, 65n see also animals (companion animals) hares, 155, 290–1, 309, 310 Hearne, Samuel, 180n Hearne, Vicki, 47, 274, 299n, 367–8 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 11–12, 14, 21, 22, 27–8, 33, 34–5, 37, 40–1, 42, 50, 51, 55n, 57n, 61–2n, 143, 170n, 176–7n, 182, 188, 189, 205, 210, 213, 221, 223, 234, 235n, 245n, 255, 272, 291, 304–5, 306, 316–20, 325, 329, 362; see also Dasein; hands; technology Helen of Troy, 325, 326; see also Penelope; Ulysses Hénaff, Marcel, 337 Henri, Adrian, 150, 162 Heywood, John, 351n Hillis Miller, J., 31, 61n, 246n Hitler, Adolf, 27–8, 58n

Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 30, 67, 72, 73, 75, 81–9, 98, 104n, 107n, 109n, 115–16, 122, 131, 142, 163, 164, 176n, 216, 256–7, 260–1, 278–9, 289, 296n, 297n, 345–6, 367 Leviathan, 54n, 81, 86, 87, 106n, 258, 345 On the Citizen (De Cive), 3–4, 72, 81–7, 102, 106n, 117, 190, 262, 269, 296n see also Rousseau (on Hobbes) Holmes, Diana, 171n Holmes, John, 300n Holocaust, 7, 15, 25–7, 30, 38, 43, 44, 55n, 58n, 62n; see also genocide homosociality see fraternity horses, 4, 8, 29, 36, 45, 47, 52, 89, 95, 134, 155, 186, 238n, 243n, 274, 275, 299n, 314, 329, 345, 351n, 366, 367 hospitality, 14, 52, 66n, 72, 79, 90, 105n, 145, 161, 184, 211, 228, 229–30, 231, 233, 237n, 245n, 257, 283–5, 287, 288, 289–90, 301n, 314–15, 320, 321–3, 324, 359, 369 adoption, 96–7, 108n, 112, 115, 133, 137, 145, 148, 161, 164, 177n, 186, 189, 237n, 272, 287–8, 344, 368; see also wild children and sexual difference, 77, 233, 315, 321–3, 325, 327, 331, 352n, 354–5n, 359, 365 sharing, 13, 18, 27, 36, 47, 49–50, 99, 191, 226, 227, 230, 232, 237n, 247n, 337, 368 and the state, 53n, 69, 87–8, 184, 227, 233, 248n, 287–8, 319–20; see also community; fraternity host, hostess, hôte, 12, 68–9, 77, 85, 315, 325, 365 household economy (family), 112–13, 115–17, 256, 279–87, 315, 326, 354n, 362; see also children; domestication; fathers; law (of the household); marriage; mothers; sexual difference Hulme, Peter, 248n human, 51–2, 67, 100, 119–20, 130, 182, 188, 192, 196–7, 200–24, 254–6, 318, 358–61, 362–3; see also animals (distinction from

399

Derrida and Other Animals human (cont.) the human); freedom; language; reason; sexual difference; souls; technology dehumanising, 5–6, 29–33, 41, 51, 97, 107–8n, 127–8, 203–5, 218, 222, 244n, 261–73, 282, 292, 305–7, 320, 329, 334, 354n; see also Agamben (bare life); metamorphosis; savage; sexual difference; slavery he/man language, 7, 9–10, 15, 55n, 88, 162–4, 306–7, 359, 364–5 natural man, 74, 83–7, 98–101, 111, 182–3, 199–200; see also Buffon; Native Americans; Rousseau; savage humour, irony, laughter, 1, 7, 14, 113, 115, 122, 123, 124, 142, 154, 160, 164, 172n, 178n, 194, 198–9, 208, 218, 234, 268, 271, 279, 296n, 298n, 304, 309, 329–30, 331–2, 348–9, 355n; see also Duffy; Plato hunting, hunters, 3, 4, 5, 24, 28, 29, 45–7, 82, 91, 92–6, 98, 100, 107n, 112, 129, 137, 143–4, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 179n, 185, 188, 189, 196, 200, 204, 209, 214, 215, 223, 228, 232, 235n, 238n, 239n, 243n, 246n, 273, 275, 282, 311, 312, 334, 343; see also nomadism immigration, 28, 211, 283, 287–8, 305, 319–20, 353n, 362, 363; see also colonisation; hospitality insects, 62n, 63n, 120, 242n, 288, 337, 360, 363; see also bees; silkworms; spiders ipseity, 60n, 69, 70, 77, 87–8, 112, 127, 326 Irigaray, Luce, 17, 49, 50, 66n, 140, 159, 175–6n, 180n, 226, 237n, 319 Iroquois, 85, 91, 198–9, 220–1, 222, 226, 231–2, 240n, 244n, 245n, 246n; see also Gouvest; Native Americans Islam, 41, 247n, 270, 281, 321, 333, 334; see also god islands, 1, 9, 80, 166n, 186, 188, 189, 190–1, 199, 210, 211, 215, 218, 219, 221, 223–5, 226, 228, 234, 241n, 243n, 244n, 246n, 252, 259, 280, 282, 290, 291, 311, 369; see

also Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); More; Verne jackdaws, 309, 350n; see also Aesop; birds James, Louis, 246n Jaucourt, D. J. chevalier de, 121, 249, 253–4, 255, 266, 270–3, 279–80, 294–5n; see also Encyclopédie Jefferson, Thomas, 108n, 187, 189, 196, 206, 207, 217, 230, 238–9n, 242n, 244n, 278, 299–300n; see also America; degeneracy theory Jesuits see missionaries Jews, Judaism, 7, 25, 27, 31, 35, 51–2, 97, 103n, 174n, 203, 247n, 258, 298n, 305, 320–1, 333; see also Benjamin (Andrew) Johnson, Christopher, 317–18 Johnson, Samuel, 294n Jones, Katie, 337, 356n Jordan, Shirley, 352n Joyce, James, 224, 225, 246n, 354n Kafka, Franz, 17, 59n, 63n, 336, 347 Kamuf, Peggy, vii, 21, 248n, 371n Kant, Immanuel, 19, 28, 34, 69, 70, 77, 105n, 109n, 142, 219, 252, 277, 359–60 Kay, Sarah, 178n Kofman, Sarah, 241n Kojève, Alexandre, 38 Krell, David, 55n Kristeva, Julia, 49 Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan, 353n Lacan, Jacques, 19, 34, 50, 57n, 117, 119–20, 121, 127–8, 130, 140, 180n, 208, 219 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 196, 200, 206, 222, 239n, 244n, 245–6n La Fontaine, Jean de, 10, 33, 42–3, 104n, 105n, 114, 144, 172n, 182, 210, 260, 267, 300n, 349n, 350n Address to Madame de La Sablière (Discours à Madame de la Sablière), 191–6, 198, 202, 238n ‘The Companions of Ulysses’(‘Les Compagnons d’Ulysse’), 73, 78–80, 261–2, 267–8, 271, 329–30 ‘The Heifer, the Goat, and the Ewe’ (‘La Génisse, la Chèvre et la Brebis’), 145, 195, 314

400

Index ‘The Little Fish and the Fisher’ (‘Le Petit Poisson et le Pêcheur’), 311, 350n ‘The Mice and the Screech Owl (‘Les Souris et le Chat-huant’), 191–2 ‘The Monkey and the Dolphin’ (‘Le Singe et le Dauphin’), 202–3, 240n ‘The Wolf and the Dog’ (Le Loup et le Chien’), 73, 125, 133, 269, 342 ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ (‘Le Loup et l’Agneau’), 72–8, 102, 105n, 106n, 111, 195, 252, 258, 300n, 361, 367 Lahontan, Baron de, 196, 200, 207 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 206, 241n lambs, 3, 13, 52, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75–8, 89, 90, 106n, 111, 112, 113, 114, 122, 144, 146, 147–8, 151, 154, 160, 161, 175n, 177n, 182, 195, 227, 258, 273, 314, 333, 350n, 361, 362; see also La Fontaine; sheep Lane, Jeremy, 58n language, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 25, 50, 83, 88, 110–11, 115, 125, 132, 138–9, 144, 149, 150, 153, 178n, 196, 206–7, 209, 224, 239n, 240n, 242n, 244n, 248n, 255, 257, 264, 274, 277, 286, 291, 332, 342, 347–8 animal communication, 136, 140–1, 194, 218–19, 265, 278, 344, 360–1, 367, 368–9; see also apes, parrots as attribute of man, 3, 7, 18–19, 39, 130, 140, 192, 203–4, 212, 216–19, 258, 264–5, 306, 318, 345, 360 conjunction of physical and linguistic, 16, 17, 35, 342; see also Duffy (‘Mrs Aesop’) French language, 11, 13–14, 20, 55n, 130, 137, 139, 144, 149, 166n, 174n, 176n, 324, 339; see also sayings; translation lying, 19–20, 258, 331–2, 362; see also feigning political rhetoric, 21, 29–33, 67, 68, 74–5, 78, 106n, 217, 226, 234, 260, 281, 291, 308, 348; see also fables responding, 18–19, 43, 50, 73, 136, 141, 159–60, 200, 219, 229, 345–6; see also responsibility

and sexual difference, 67, 113, 125, 141, 176n, 325, 359; see also sexual difference see also animals (singular and plural); reading; sayings law, 14, 28, 29–33, 53, 68, 69, 73, 77, 102, 127, 142, 213, 216, 217, 223, 226, 257, 258, 260, 275, 281, 284, 287, 289, 292, 305–6, 310, 320, 348, 359 of the household, 112–13, 117, 163, 256; see also household economy law of the strongest, 69, 76–8, 86, 102, 129–30, 214, 257, 260, 270, 314, 361 laying down the law, 42, 74–5, 77–8, 130, 306, 310, 349; see also sovereign outside the law, lawlessness, 4, 31, 68, 80, 121–2, 136, 150, 158, 159, 163–4, 182, 183, 186, 188, 200, 223, 226, 240n, 247n, 250, 251, 258, 268, 303n, 337, 358; see also anarchism; outlaws; rogues separates man from beast, 4, 73, 119, 136, 143, 200, 258, 275, 298n, 345–6; see also animals; responsibility and sexual difference, 77–8, 113, 116, 122, 162–4, 165–6n, 310; see also sexual difference and slaves, 36, 200, 251–2, 253, 258–60, 272–3, 279, 293n, 294n, 295n, 302n, 370; see also Code noir; slavery see also Code Noir; Kant; natural law; sovereign Lawlor, Leonard, 9, 50, 66n Le Beau, Claude, 220–1 Le Doeuff, Michèle, 17, 307–8, 310, 312–13 Leahy, Michael P. T., 19 Lee, Paula Young, 240n, 279, 298–9n Leroi-Gourhan, André, 213, 318, 353n lesbians, 123, 131, 137–40, 166–7n, 172n, 173n, 175n, 346, 348 Levinas, Emmanuel, 17, 18, 33, 34, 35, 41–2, 61n, 63n, 68, 119, 128, 139, 151, 254–5, 363 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 53, 168n, 242n, 307; see also ethnography Linnaeus, Carl, 39, 97, 349n

401

Derrida and Other Animals lions, 6, 31, 67, 139, 145, 149, 195, 204, 244n, 281, 297n, 305–6, 309, 314, 329, 330, 350n London, Jack, 70, 71 Long, John, 211, 243n Lope de Vega, 351n Louis XIV, 187, 256, 298n, 319 Louis XVI, 187, 256 Le Loup (ballet), 163–4, 180–1n love, 43, 188, 312, 321–2, 326, 332, 337–45, 347, 351n, 354n, 355n, 358, 365–8, 370–1 of (pet) animals, 5, 13, 17, 47, 48, 63n, 255, 257, 273, 336, 345, 365–7, 370 of animals by savages, 198–9, 232, 273 of slave or servant, 249, 268, 272, 280, 285 of wolves, 17, 110–96, 281, 332, 333–5; see also Cixous; wolves Lucretia, 354–5n McGinn, Thomas A., 169n Machiavelli, Niccolò, 32, 361 McMichael, Polly, 167n Mallet, Marie-Louise, 14 man see human Manning, Susan, 108n, 301n, 303n maps, mapmaking, 200, 220–1, 245n Marin, Louis, 78, 90, 105n Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de, 252 Marvin, Garry, 157, 170n, 173n marriage, 3, 58n, 72, 77, 112, 115–17, 127, 156, 158, 160, 163, 168n, 173n, 180n, 244n, 283, 309, 311, 322, 324–8, 339–41, 344, 348, 351n, 352n, 354–5n, 362; see also Duffy; fathers; household economy; Montaigne; mothers; NDiaye; sexual difference Marx, Karl, 85, 223–4, 226, 249, 274, 324 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 55n, 176n metamorphosis, 69, 111, 120, 266–8, 271, 297n, 305, 314–15, 324–45, 352n, 368; see also Darrieussecq; La Fontaine (‘The Companions of Ulysses’); wolves (werewolves) mice, 26, 191–2, 308, 312 Michaud, Ginette, 354n Miller, Christopher, 294

Miller, Nancy K, 165n missionaries, 126, 180n, 184, 185–6, 195, 196–7, 200, 209, 230, 235n, 237–8n, 248n; see also Charlevoix; Christianity; Lafitau moles, 329–30, 355n; see also animals (gender) Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as, 203, 312, 351n money, 115–16, 134, 231, 265, 286, 318, 337–45, 357n gold, 134, 191–2, 238n, 283, 301n, 311, 337 see also capitalism Money, Darcy, 45 monkeys see apes monsters, 20, 80, 100, 121, 156, 163, 170n, 190, 226, 231, 325, 369–70 devils, demonisation, 186, 214, 230, 233, 248n; see also cannibals see also terror; Warner; wolves (werewolves) Montaigne, Michel de, 34, 43, 72, 75, 104–5n, 116–17, 190, 197–8, 256, 311; see also marriage Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 231, 254, 266, 270 More, Thomas, 290 Morris, Desmond, 349n Morris, Madeleine, 294n Morris, Thomas D., 293n mothers, motherhood, 112, 113, 115–16, 133, 137, 145, 149, 153, 157, 159, 161–4, 166–7n, 177n, 178–9n, 319, 328, 330, 334, 336, 338–41, 344, 348, 355n, 365 breast-feeding (suckling), 78, 280, 300n grandmothers, 71, 120, 138, 142, 150, 157–62, 168n, 175n, 180n, 256, 343; see also fairytales see also children; marriage; shewolves; wild children Murray, David, 239n, 242n, 245n, 246n Naas, Michael, 55n nakedness, nudity, 16, 207–9, 229, 231, 242–3n, 334, 342, 360; see also shame names, naming, 10, 19–21, 34, 113, 125–6, 140, 145, 201, 202,

402

Index 219–22, 244n, 245n, 277, 282, 286, 290, 319, 324, 338–42; see also Hearne; language; sovereign Nancy, Jean-Luc, 15, 27–8, 57n, 88, 107n, 174n, 213, 226, 254 Native Americans and Canadians, 55n, 72, 85–6, 91–2, 96, 97, 102, 108n, 121, 182–248, 257, 263, 264, 272, 278, 288, 289, 353n, 358; see also savages nature, natural, 81–102 natural independence see freedom natural law, 4, 82, 84, 109n, 143, 237, 358 natural reason, 83, 187 state of nature, 68, 72–4, 81–7, 98–101, 111, 122, 182–3, 188, 199–200, 223–4, 257, 260, 266 the wild, 46, 82, 97, 112, 150, 164, 182, 214, 224, 244n, 297n see also man (natural man); Native Americans; savages; wolves nausea see disgust NDiaye, Marie, 199 ‘A Day in the Life of Brulard’ (‘Une journée de Brulard’), 343 En Famille, 343, 356–7n Ladivine, 337–45, 356n Three Strong Women (Trois femmes puissantes), 315, 352n neighbour (le prochain), 15, 17, 198–9, 232–4, 254–6; see also fraternity; man Neveux, Georges see Le Loup New World, 6, 51, 64n, 85–6, 89, 98–9, 100, 101, 180n, 182–303, 358; see also America; Native Americans Noah, 54n, 199–200, 215, 268 nomadism, 72, 214–15, 221; see also hunting; savages nostalgia, 1, 18, 40, 332 Novak, Maximilian E., 236n Odysseus see Ulysses Oexmelin (Exquemelin), AlexandreOlivier, 297–8n Oliver, Kelly, 48–50, 108n, 109n, 166n, 170n, 295n, 335–6 Orestes, 328 Orwell, George, 131, 332–3 outlaws, 29–30, 32, 68, 72, 73, 74, 78,

80, 104n, 111, 113, 118, 122, 136, 137, 142, 145, 154, 162–5, 174n, 195, 200, 223, 226, 231, 252, 261, 291, 333, 337; see also rogues; sovereign; wolves (werewolves) Ovid, 322, 324 ‘Arachne’, 324, 325, 327–9 ‘Lycaon’, 120, 227 ‘Philomela’, 324, 325, 327, 328, 331 Owen, C. M., 241n oxen see cattle Paine, Thomas, 187 parrots, 214, 218, 244n, 278, 281, 282–3 Pascal, Blaise, 12, 104–5n patriarchy see fathers Patterson, Charles, 26, 54–5n, 58n Patterson, Orlando, 295n, 298n Patton, Paul, 274, 299n Penelope, 321, 323, 325, 326, 328, 354n Penn, William, 302n Penney, Stef, 108n, 173n perfectibility, 4, 7, 67, 86, 93, 99, 192, 195–6, 209–16, 276, 305, 318; see also Enlightenment; man; reason Perrault, Charles, 158, 334 Perrin, Marie, 174n Pethers, Matthew, 239n, 302n Petit, Roland, 163, 180–1n; see also Le Loup pigeons, 99, 146, 205, 221, 289, 290; see also birds pigs, 54, 71, 109n, 157, 179n, 227, 243n, 244n, 257, 266–8, 297n, 330–7, 355n, 366, 369 sows, 54, 307, 309, 310–11, 332–7, 368–9; see also Darrieussecq pity, 25–6, 35–6, 87, 160, 161, 183, 336, 366, 367, 370–1 Plato, 32, 63n, 117, 194, 252, 327 Phaedrus, 144 Republic, 71, 72, 88, 193, 194, 227, 238n, 260–2, 271, 298n The Statesman, 219, 220 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 71, 72, 104n, 115–16, 117, 122, 163, 169n, 172n Pliny, 242n Plutarch, 78–9, 95, 100, 109n, 262–3, 266–8, 271, 274–5, 292, 296n, 297n, 330, 333, 357n

403

Derrida and Other Animals political rhetoric see language politics of food see food (famine) Prévost, Abbé, 108n, 298n prostitution, sex work, sex slavery, 116, 134–5, 169n, 259, 270, 334, 340; see also Darrieussecq proverbs see sayings Pushkin, Alexander, 113, 118, 120, 126, 131, 146–7, 149–50, 153–6, 162, 167–8n, 176n, 177n, 178n; see also Tsvetaeva Quakers see Christianity (Quakers) Quirk, Joel, 262, 293n race, 2, 55n, 99, 123, 128, 193, 203, 224, 227, 240n, 252–3, 262–5, 269–73, 288, 295–6n, 296–7n, 298–9n, 300n, 319, 322, 334, 343, 356–7n, 358 blackness, 9, 36, 58n, 108n, 126, 131, 149, 173–4n, 177n, 249–51, 262, 264–5, 278–9, 301n, 309, 334, 338–9, 366, 371n; see also Code noir; slavery (racial slavery) miscegenation, 206, 276, 285, 299n, 353n, 356–7n origin (monogeneticism, polygeneticism), 196, 206–8, 239–40n, 276–7 Slavonic races, 269–70; see also Tsvetaeva whiteness, 123, 126, 207–8, 250, 253, 264, 278–9, 366, 371n see also Jews; Native Americans rape, 18, 114, 324, 325–8, 354–5n, 362, 368–9 Ray, John, 350 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, 107n, 187, 206, 217, 236n, 280, 301n reading, 22, 43–4, 118, 121, 165, 259–60, 278 reason, 27, 42, 52, 77, 82–4, 86, 93, 187, 192, 196, 200, 211, 252, 260, 261, 360, 363, 364–5, 366–7, 371 and animals, 33, 36, 78, 112, 129–30, 158, 262, 264, 298n, 303n, 351–2n, 359, 370 defined by men, 142, 312–14, 349, 361 defines man, 7, 33, 86, 142, 197,

200, 212, 213, 216–17, 251, 264, 312, 351–2n, 359–61 refused women, 112, 130, 141–2, 310, 312, 314 see also law; nature Regan, Tom, 28, 59n, 356n, 363–5, 367, 370 religion see god responsibility, 7, 9, 15, 23, 25–6, 28, 35, 54n, 119, 136, 141, 143, 197, 233, 254–5, 272, 298n, 369; see also contracts; ethics; language; law; man Rifkin, Jeremy, 58n, 295n Roberts, Monty, 274, 299n Robinsonades, 85, 223–4, 225, 241 rogues (rogue animals, rogue states), 29–33, 60n, 78, 79, 88, 106n, 136, 163, 164, 226, 234, 258, 289, 326–7, 361 Ronell, Avital, 11 Roudinesco, Elizabeth, 28, 59n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4–5, 16, 43, 80, 93, 102, 104n, 105n, 106n, 108–9n, 163, 183, 196, 214, 234, 241n, 243n, 266–8, 277, 280, 294n, 295n, 300n, 353n, 360, 364, 366, 370 on Hobbes, 72, 81–7, 98, 122, 163, 260–1, 296n and sovereignty, 5, 87, 256–7, 260–3, 277 and vegetarianism, 4, 98, 99–101, 109n, 205, 212, 238n, 267; see also food as (were)wolf, 80–1, 118–19, 121–3, 128, 143, 169n writings Confessions, 90, 118–19, 121–3, 143, 169n Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité), 5, 73–4, 81–9, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98–102, 106n, 107–8n, 109n, 122, 143, 199, 210, 212, 215–16, 223, 241–2n, 243n, 260, 266, 290 Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les sciences et les arts), 81, 105n The Social Contract (Du contrat social), 78, 82, 98, 109n, 216, 223, 224–5, 248n, 252, 256–7, 260–3, 266–71, 292, 296n, 297n, 357n

404

Index Émile, 100, 106n, 119, 121, 223, 224–5, 238n, 260, 300n Essai sur l’origine des langues, 100 La Nouvelle Héloïse, 98, 99, 287 Rêveries, 80, 215 rum (alcohol), 100, 210–12, 242n sacrifice, 2, 5, 26, 27, 28, 44, 46, 80, 135, 153, 160, 161, 209, 235n, 255, 273, 282, 328, 333, 362, 363, 370 self-sacrifice, 46, 127, 133, 148, 153, 273 see also Abraham Said, Edward, 224, 225, 246n San Domingo/Saint Domingue see Haiti Sancho, Ignatius, 293n Sandler, Stephanie, 167n, 178n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18 savages (sauvages), 5, 6, 7, 10, 16, 40, 51, 69, 72, 74, 86–7, 90, 92, 102, 107n, 111, 121, 160, 182–248, 249, 257, 263, 276, 277, 281–3, 288, 290, 297n, 302n, 337, 358 ‘good’ savages, 190, 221–2, 234–6n, 246–7n and hospitality, 211, 227–33, 284, 288 see also cannibalism; Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); missionaries; Native Americans sayings, 63, 67, 70–1, 80–2, 102, 114, 115–16, 120, 124, 136, 163, 211, 308–14, 350–1n, 352n; see also language Sayre, Gordon Mitchell, 238n Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von, 56n Schmitt, Carl, 32, 84, 106n Schonhorn, Manuel, 281, 290, 301n Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 126 Segarra, Marta, 50, 355n semblables see fraternity sexual difference, 17, 58n, 77–8, 88, 110–81, 166–7n, 169n, 174n, 197, 199, 201, 203, 217, 218–19, 225, 226, 227, 229, 242–3n, 244n, 246n, 252, 253, 271, 274, 277, 297n, 301–2n, 304–57, 359, 368 castration, 71, 150, 166n, 201, 273, 348 incest, 53, 227, 231, 232, 233, 327 and language, 88, 110–11, 113, 136,

141–2, 162–3, 164–5, 166n, 169n, 308–14, 327–8, 346–9, 357n; see also human (he/man) lust, sexual appetite, 17, 112–13, 116, 123, 125, 137, 144, 231–2, 327, 332, 333–5, 340, 355n, 357n, 365, 368–9; see also food (appetite, real and figural); lesbians; prostitution; rape menstruation, 159, 160, 161, 333, 334, 339 misogyny, 64n, 169n, 307, 347 phallus/phallic, 15, 17, 24, 78, 131, 140, 312, 323, 326, 335, 348, 349n, 370 virginity, 60n, 133, 134–5, 139–40, 164, 175–6n, 325 see also marriage shame, 16–17, 23, 108n, 127, 208–9, 327, 338–40; see also nakedness sheep, 4, 38, 52, 75–6, 79, 80, 89, 90, 120, 123, 148, 155, 243, 244n, 257, 297n, 300n, 315; see also lambs Sheridan, Geraldine, 324, 328–9, 354n Sheringham, Michael, 357n shipwrecks, castaways, 91–2, 130–1, 132, 133, 210, 218, 225, 228, 238n, 252, 282, 290; see also boats; Cixous (Les Naufragés); Defoe (Robinson Crusoe); Verne silkworms, 63n, 314, 320–3, 324, 354n Simondon, Gilbert, 12 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 26, 58n Singer, Peter, 49, 59n, 61n, 66n, 265, 300n, 356n, 358, 363, 365–6, 367; see also animal rights skin, 29, 36, 44, 94, 136, 141, 145, 150, 152–3, 155, 156, 157, 178n, 188, 189, 199, 206, 207–8, 214, 221, 225, 231–2, 238n, 281, 298–9n, 309n, 322, 330, 334, 338, 341, 342, 368; see also beavers; Tsvetaeva slavery, slaves, 3, 4, 5, 9, 36, 69–70, 73, 87, 99, 101, 102, 112, 115, 116, 121, 184, 190, 200, 214, 217, 218, 230, 246n, 249–303, 307, 314, 322, 337, 355n, 358, 366, 370 animals as slaves, 52, 69–70, 73, 251, 256, 273–7, 289–90, 342–5, 350n

405

Derrida and Other Animals slavery, slaves (cont.) as animals, 38–9, 50–1, 55n, 97, 249–51, 252, 256, 264–5, 266–71, 272–3, 274–5, 282, 292, 293n, 337 as children see children classical slavery, 251, 253, 269 definition of, 51, 250, 251, 258–9, 272, 286, 293–4n; see also Code noir; laws emancipation (manumission), 278, 283, 284, 285–7, 294n; see also abolition figural slavery, 88, 89, 123, 250–4, 256, 260–1, 262, 267–8, 269, 287–8, 302n natural slaves, 262–70 Oriental slavery, 253, 254, 259, 266, 269, 298n, 303n, punishment of, 259, 269, 273, 278, 288–92, 344, 357n racial slavery, 9, 55, 185, 187, 203, 235n, 253, 262, 264–5, 269–70, 271, 272, 278–9, 284–9, 292–3n, 309, 366 rebellions, 259–60, 278, 279, 289, 291, 294n see also race; prostitution snakes, 35, 222 Socrates see Plato solitude, 22, 78, 80, 85–6, 88, 90, 105n, 118–19, 122, 130, 136, 151, 159, 161, 163, 169–70n, 179–80n, 197, 221, 223–6, 246n, 277, 280, 300n, 312, 332, 339; see also sovereign; wolves Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 371 souls, 54n, 137–8, 153, 184, 191–4, 201–2, 217, 232, 259, 263, 264, 312, 320, 324, 344, 351–2n; see also Descartes; man sovereign, sovereignty, 3, 5, 29–33, 41, 63n, 67–78, 80, 84, 86, 104, 112, 115, 117, 131, 143, 155, 165, 166n, 188, 191, 195, 197, 200, 212–15, 217–18, 224–5, 240n, 245n, 250, 251, 252, 256–8, 260–1, 277, 281, 289, 292, 297n, 305, 326, 327, 330, 348, 358, 359, 361, 362, 367, 369 as beast (wolf), 3, 29–33, 52, 67–70, 72, 74–8, 81–2, 89, 111, 113, 147, 251, 260–2, 330

as god, 256, 261, 326, 328, 345 see also god and land, 218, 225, 237n, 256, 290–1; see also maps over animals, 5, 185, 186–7, 213–14, 217–18, 256, 295n; see also domestication self-mastery, 69, 77, 191, 256, 266, 277 solitude of, 80, 85, 88, 118, 225, 277 state, 29–33, 60–1n, 69, 77–8, 113, 234, 361, 362; see also rogues tyrants, tyranny, 5, 29, 36, 67, 71–2, 88–9, 93, 102, 111, 182, 234, 260, 262, 265, 266, 303, 358, 370 see also Hobbes; Rousseau spiders, 62n, 242n, 314, 324, 328, 329, 348, 363 Spiegel, Marjorie, 298n Stalinism, 164, 167n, 168n, 178n; see also totalitarianism Starkey, David, 347 Starobinski, Jean, 199, 243–4n starvation see food Stiegler, Bernard, 12–13 Still, Judith, 57n, 61n, 66n, 105n, 106n, 107n, 108n, 169n, 171n, 174n, 180n, 212, 237n, 243n, 253, 268, 297n, 298n, 300n, 303n, 352n, 355n stranger see foreigner stupid/stupidity see bête/bêtise swallows, 308, 312–14, 327, 352n Sykes, Naomi, 44–7, 64–5n, 107n, 179n, 232, 248n, 273 technology, 3, 25, 33, 45, 196, 212–13, 218, 237n, 281, 304–5, 314–19, 323–5, 326–7, 331, 353n, 360; see also domestication; hands; Haraway teeth, 71, 89, 99, 101, 115, 127, 136–8, 151, 152, 161, 164, 175n, 179n, 210, 227, 301n terror, terrorism, 5, 7, 14, 29–33, 60–1n, 64–5n, 78, 87, 90, 91, 101, 106–7n, 110, 113–14, 115, 121, 130, 142, 151, 156, 162, 164, 183, 200, 225–6, 231, 251, 258, 279, 289, 290–2, 325, 348 theology see god Thomas, Wesley, 353n tigers, 31, 48, 143–4, 151, 204

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Index Todd, Dennis, 244n, 293n tortoises, 309, 310 totalitarianism, 26, 40–1, 131, 168n, 184; see also sovereign (tyrants) Tournier, Michel, 236n, 241n training see education translation, untranslatable, 22, 43, 121, 144, 185, 196, 219–22, 225, 229, 245n, 274 translation problems, 10–14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 42, 55n, 87, 89, 107n, 110, 118, 125, 139, 147, 149, 153, 165n, 166n, 169n, 173n, 176n, 177n, 192–3, 254, 260, 262–3, 296n, 321, 332, 338 Trodd, Zoe, 293n Truth, Sojourner, 293n Tsvetaeva, Marina, 113, 118, 120, 122, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 146–7, 149–50, 152–6, 161, 162, 163, 166–8n, 173n, 177–8n; see also Cixous; Pushkin Tuck, Richard, 106n Turner, Lynn, 166n Uexküll, Jacob Von, 39–40, 62n, 189 Ulysses, 73, 78, 80, 100, 224, 257, 261, 266, 267, 271, 297n, 315, 322–6, 329, 330, 332, 352n, 355n; see also Circe; Helen of Troy; La Fontaine; Penelope Unwin, Tim, 238n USA see America utopia and dystopia, 98, 226, 227, 233, 247n, 332, 335, 355n, 369; see also Atwood; Darrieussecq; More Valéry, Paul, 124–5 vampires, 113, 115, 118, 128, 152–3, 167n vegetarianism see food Verne, Jules, 211, 234, 238n, 246–7n, 252, 256, 282–3, 301n Vivien, Renée, 113, 167n, 171n, 172n ‘The Cruelty of Precious Stones’ (‘Cruauté des Pierreries’), 125–6, 172n L’Être double, 175n ‘Forest Betrayal’ (‘Trahison de la forêt’), 143–4, 146 ‘Friendship between Women’ (‘L’Amitié féminine’), 173n ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ (‘La

Dame à la louve’), 118, 122, 123–43, 148–9, 155, 170n, 172n, 173n, 174n, 176n, 332, 369 ‘Mocked by Thirst’ (‘La Soif ricane’), 140, 174n ‘Nut-brown Maid’ (‘Brune comme une noisette’), 134, 174n ‘Paradoxical Chastity’ (‘La Chasteté paradoxale’), 175–6n ‘The Saurian’ (‘La Saurienne’), 130 ‘The Sisters of Silence’ (‘Les Sœurs du silence’), 172n ‘The Veil of Vasthi’ (‘Le Voile de Vasthi’), 172n see also Barney Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 73–4, 87, 104n, 107n, 183, 185, 207, 231, 253, 254, 264–5, 269, 296–7n Candide, 73, 101, 334–5 L’Ingénu, 220, 334–5 Letters Concerning the English (Lettres philosophiques), 286, 302n, 303n Manners and Spirit of Nations (Essai sur les mœurs), 264–5 Treatise on Metaphysics (Traité de Métaphysique), 264–5 Warner, Marina, 170n, 297n, 325, 333, 354n Watt, Ian, 282 weaving, 46, 305, 315–16, 317, 318, 319–23, 324, 325–9, 352n, 353n Weil, Kari, 59n, 63n werewolves see wolves Wiener, Norbert, 353n wild children, 96–7, 107–8n, 141, 161, 188, 189 Mowgli, 112, 137 Romulus and Remus, 112, 115, 137 see also Carter Wilde, Oscar, 131 Williams, David, 294n Williams, Martina, 58n, 168n, 238n Williams, R. John, 217–18, 244n, 281, 301n Winkfield, Unca Eliza, 205 witches (sorcery), 78, 114, 130, 158, 159, 297n, 331, 332, 333, 354n; see also Circe Wittgenstein, 19, 244n

407

Derrida and Other Animals Wodehouse, P. G., 355n Wolfe, Cary, 15 wolves, 4, 5, 6, 13–14, 17, 28–9, 32, 45, 52, 54–5n, 63n, 67–109, 110–81, 182, 186, 189, 190, 195, 199, 200, 214, 226–7, 231, 235n, 243n, 247n, 249, 251, 256–7, 258, 260–1, 267–8, 269, 278–9, 281, 289, 297n, 300n, 330, 332–5, 361–2, 367 she-wolves, 70, 71, 96, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 161, 164, 166n, 169n, 332: Helga, 123, 125, 128, 129, 130–3, 136–8, 140–3, 149; see also wild children

werewolves, 32, 69, 81, 91, 104n, 113, 114–15, 118, 120–2, 128, 143, 152–3, 158–9, 161, 163, 168n, 169n, 170n, 175n, 178n, 179–80n, 227, 260–1, 327, 332–5; see also Carter (‘Werewolf’) see also Cixous; La Fontaine; Rousseau (as (were)wolf) women see sexual difference Wood, David, 16, 18, 24, 26, 53–4n Woolf, Virginia, 321 Zeus, 172n, 260, 319, 326 zoos, 3, 25, 108n, 187, 199–200, 279, 333, 346, 359, 364

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