Jacques Derrida is the only post-modern philosopher we are considering this year.
The Modern period was "the long 19th century" which is from about 1789 (French Revolution) to 1914 (WWI). The modern focused on the "self" and the post-modern critiques this focus on the "self". The moderns felt we could know the true world, the world as it really is.
The 3rd matter that the moderns considered was the progress of the world. Post-moderns are cynical about the progression f the world. The 4th item that moderns considered was the transcendance of man and post-moderns tend to critique this as well.
Post-modernity transcends disciplines: music, architecture, art, literature, cinema etc.
The impressionists were early post-moderns.
Derrida mentions many post-modernists: Foucault, Lacan, Heidigger, Sartre, Levinas. They critique and deconstruct but they don't offer any alternatives to the moderns. That is not their "job."
RECOMMENDED READING
Marshall - All That is Solid Melts Into Air: the Experience of Modernity - internal critique of modernism, not a post-modernist critique.
Robert Salomon - Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (A History of Western Philosophy).
Deconstruction
We started with a brief deconstruction of the book itself. [Sadly, neither Lauren nor I had initially noticed that the cover image was of part of a cat's face with the eye looking at the gazer.]
Foreword - sets out the structure of the book - 2 sections from a 10-hour lecture over 2 days, then a section that he did at the end in response and without preparation. The 4th and last section he wrote several years later.
Starts by wanting to entrust himself with words that are naked, words from the heart. Reading this text, our last text, brought us back to Plato's Phaedrus and its critique of writing and of language.
Pg 3 - Derrida speaks about man being an "animal at unease with itself." What are we uneasy about? Death, purpose of life, consciousness of good and evil within each of us, our shame.
pg 8 - the issue of responding. Reacting is different than responding. Some people (aka Descartes) claim that animals only react and don't / can't respond. This seems patently untrue in just what we can observe ourselves with the animals around us - though Stephen says scientists will deny that animals can respond rather than just reacting. I disagree with this assessment. Even without anthropomorphizing animals, as someone who works and lives with animals daily, it would be hard to deny that animals respond. We don't have to call it by human names (which are just descriptors not absolutes) such as happiness or sadness or grief but it's not just reflex.
Laura asked about Peter Singer and why Derrida doesn't refer to him. He does mention rights of animals on page 88 but he doesn't support this idea. I too found it interesting that he doesn't mention him. I remember reading Singer in the early 1980s so Derrida should certainly have been aware of him in 1997. Singer's thoughts (which have modified since the 1980s) about how we define humans vs animals and what happens if we extend those definitions (and rationales for how we treat animals) to humans that don't meet our criteria (such as the very young, the mentally incapacitated).
Pg 13 - the notion of being "seen" - he speaks that scientists have not been "addressed" by animals. He also begins to make a gender differentiation and groups previous philosophers, all men, as philosophers and theoreticians who have "never been seen that addressed them."
Pg 14 - Derrida speaks about an immense disavowal, of centuries of philosophers ignoring "the seeing animal", the animal that is seen but is seeing, men who have "seen the animal without being seen by it."
pg 15 Derrida goes back to Genesis alot in his analysis of man and animal. In Genesis the animals came 1st and so man "follows" animals. Derrida in the original French is playing with the word "am" or in French "suis". The title is "The Animal That Therefore I am". In French "I am" is "Je suis" and suis has the double meaning of I am and I follow.
pg 19 Derrida is considering Heideggers's assessment of the difference between animal and man and their awareness of the world around them. Man is full of "world" whereas animals are poor in world. Heidegger spoke about being "as-such" which animals lack. pg 142
pg 20 Promethean and Adamic (Greek and Abrahamic) versions of our views of ourselves. Promethean stories are pre-Socratic. Existed at the same time and in 6th c. BC there was "The Great Transformation" - Karen Armstrong has written about this.
pg 25 & 29 - 2 hypotheses
#1 - around 200 years ago we moved from one way of treating animals to another which was a systematic war on animals, he calls it a genocide as it was an attempt to eradicate a gene pool. Bentham was mid 18th c.
#2 Limitrophy - limits are not lines - it's a living thing - things feed it, things sprout from it - we see this man/animal limit fray when we look at dolphins, Great Apes etc Also some people don't match up with many of the defining 'limit' of what it is to be human. The border is porous.
[I think we should consider the border to be a cell membrane rather than a solid wall/border etc - a cell membrane allows movement across it and change and it itself can change].
#39 - pharmakon - to be able to hold to hold to different ideas at the same time - good and bad at the same time - Socratic idea (may have been referred to in the Phaedrus)
Paradox - also to be able to hold 2 ideas that are different in your mind at the same time - for Socrates writing was like this as it was bad as it prevented the normal dialectical aspects of a discussion but it was good as it allowed something to be preserved.
Laura mentioned that Aristotle developed a numerical system to prioritize different values depending on circumstance
pg 54 - "problematize" - making something a problem - Derrida actually wants to re-problematize things - go back to things which the older philosophers (Kant, Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan) considered - and look at where we have come to and re-look and question it all and see what is 'true' - Pos-Moderns want us to question everything, take it all down to essentials and think about them, consider them.
Levinas asked whether animals have a face. He felt they didn't (obviously didn't pay any attention to science)
The 4th section is where Derrida considers Heidegger. "As-such"; difference between stone (no world), animals (poor in world) and humans (world-makers)
Recommended Reading - Frederich Schiller "Letters on an Aesthetic Education"
We had our last session in the GLS reading room and it was nice to have a relaxed and social discussion - admittedly about a very difficult text. I'm eager to continue reading books that have come up this year, connected to our readings - and some of the gaps we didn't get a chance to read like Aristotle and Augustine etc. Though we won't have the weekly deadlines, I think it is still going to be a busy summer of reading.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Derrida: The Animal That Therefore I am
Derrida, Jacques: The Animal That Therefore I am. trans David Wills New York: Fordham University Press, 2008
I had a really hard time with this book. I was looking forward to it as a great way to examine and discuss humankind and our place in the world. I was also looking forward to reading a more modern (or I guess I should say post-modern) philosopher and I've always had a soft spot for French intellectuals - but I was really foundering trying to understand this book and why it was set out (said or written) the way it was. I found it needlessly verbose, too many part sentences and doubling back or repetition or side journeys to something else that made it difficult for me to figure out - or even remember - where Derrida had started the sentence or paragraph or thought. I can't imagine trying to follow this in person - at the Cerisy conference itself.
I think for me to understand this book adequately I would have to sit down and take every paragraph and try to sum it up in my own words and then see where that takes me. Unfortunately I don't have anywhere close to the time to even try to start this.
Looking online to try and understand Derrida a bit more I see that he has been a controversial figure, with some philosophers even denying that he is a reputable philosopher. Some, such as Noam Chomsky, have called him an obscurantist, and right now I am having trouble arguing against that label. I do feel that I need to give him more effort though - I'm not quite ready to throw him out as not worth my time. I am looking forward to discussing him in class and I hope Stephen can provide some guidance on why he writes/speaks this way and what the basis for it is.
He starts out by speaking about being naked in front of his cat and having his cat look at him. Why was he embarrassed or ashamed? Derrida says that some think that "what in the last instance distinguishes [animals] from man, is their being naked without knowing it." pg 4-5 Derrida says this therefore without consciousness of good and evil. For me I have trouble with this last part. Why bring good and evil into it? Yes, humankind has quite often - though not universally - made nudity shameful for some bizarre reason but is consciousness of our nudity what leads to good and evil? I can't think so.
He mentions Montaigne and his cat and it reminds me that I do want to go back and reread Montaigne this summer (I'd like to reread almost all the texts we read this year but there is only so much time and so many other texts to read - it's sort of like travel - I want to go back to places I've enjoyed or which I didn't spend enough time in but there are so many other places to travel to...).
As a post-modernist, French continental philosopher, Derrida is big on exploring the words used. he spent quite some time discussing what we mean by "respond". He digresses into a section from Alice: Through the Looking Glass and I found that very interesting. It made me want to go and read Lewis Carroll as I hadn't realized he had so much in the book. This could be a good summer read.
Derrida says (pg 8) that you can't speak to animals and they don't really reply. It is a tough one - you can't hold a philosophical discussion with a dog or cat but for the more responsive animals (dogs, horses, primates etc) they are very attuned to our communications even if it is more to tone and body language than the words we use. They are responding to our communications though. It's not just reaction (reflex). On pg 11 Derrida speaks about the cat, coming before man biblically (and this discussion seems odd in that he spends quite a bit of time discussing how we can't just say "The Animal" referring to all of non-humankind. There are bigger differences between a trout and a giraffe than between a man and an orangutang. Speaking about the cat coming before man and speaking biblically seems to be putting alot of weight onto a basis that ignores evolution and when man evolved to "man" vs what was happening with various animal species at the same time). From this, the animal being before man in the biblical creation of the world, Derrida goes on to mention that the animal looks at man and has its own point of view (pg 10-11).
One area where Derrida reminded me very much of Montaigne is this habit of writing on a subject and trying to do so logically, with a discussion of what you are basing your assessment or opinion on, going through this somewhat scientifically and then having this "basis" be doubtful sources or at the very least in Derrida's case, sources that I would have imagined he would have spent much of his career deconstructing and discrediting. He seems (and maybe I'm just not getting it) to use the Bible and other such sources (Prometheus myth) as the basis for drawing conclusions to then hypothesize about (and God told Adam that he had dominion over all the animals - therefore the animals were 1st and then God made man 'in his own image' and then told Adam to name the animals and that they were under his dominion). This seems odd to me and even odder is that Derrida will spend pages on the wording of various versions of French translations of Genesis and how they differ and what we can take from the words and I just want to say "But these are translations of a ancient text that itself was cobbled together from millenia of oral story telling. All the wording of a translation is telling me is what the translator might have had in mind or operant when he wrote it." What am I missing here?
Derrida speaks of nudity as passivity, the involuntary exhibition of the self. Again, I have trouble with this. (pg 11) He then goes on to say we could call this denuded passivity "the passion of the animal." Even just rereading this text, to try and flesh out the brief notes I scribbled down while reading, makes me frustrated and irritated by his detours and connections. They just don't make sense to me. From nudity to passion of the animal to Cain and Abel to people following and the colour of someones eyes and then seers and the apocalypse - all this in 3 paragraphs on one page!!
On the same page, pg 12, he speaks about the cat's gaze [at him naked] and says:
One tactic Derrida does which frustrates me the most is begin to say something that seems like I can grab hold of it such as: "Other than the difference mentioned earlier between poem and philosopheme, there would be, at bottom, only 2 types of discourse, two positions of knowledge, two grands forms of theoretical or philosophical treatise regarding the animals." So, disregarding that I didn't pick up on him having mentioned a difference between poem and philospheme, and looking back I can't find what he is referring to; and disregarding that he can't just say "2 types of discourse" and leave it at that he has to elaborate on 2 positions of knowledge and 2 grand forms etc etc - all of this terribly distracting when I'm trying to track down the concrete nugget of what he is saying: 'There are only 2 of something to do with animals" but he doesn't say what those are right away. He starts with saying "What distinguishes them is obviously the place, the body of their signatories" - okay, I don't really know what he means here but maybe when I read the 2nd type of discourse, it will start to become clear, but Derrida doesn't go on to mention the second of his 2 types of discourse. He goes off on those who have seen but never "been seen" by animals, and addressing animals, and then Descartes and his epoch - but then he has to go off on a tangent about the word epoch but he can't say what his problem with the word is, he just has to digress and say it makes him uneasy, and veer back somewhat to his 1st category of signatories and then veer off again talking about "quasi-epochal configurations" and all the while I'm screaming inside saying "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 2nd TYPE OF DISCOURSE??" and flipping back and forth to see if I missed it - and I"m still not really 100% sure about what the 1st type is, nor what the problem with 'epoch' is and what this "addressing of animals" or being addressed by an animal is. Eventually Derrida wanders back to his 2nd type and says "As for the other category of discourse, found among those signatories that are first and foremost poets and philosophers ..." and I'm thinking wait a minute, I thought the 1st type were signatories, now I have to go back and try and figure out what he means by signatory because I skimmed over that part at the beginning of the small section because I wanted to see what the 2nd type was. On this second type Derrida says that these poet/philosopher signatories are "those men and women who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them, before even having the time or the power to take themselves off (s'y dérober), to take themselves off with clothes off or in a bathrobe, I as yet know of no statutory representative of it, that is to say, no subject who does so as theoretical, philosophical, or juridical man, or even as citizen. " pg 14.
I read that very small section over and over and I still have no idea what he means, what the point of it is, where is gets us in a discussion about humankind and non-humankind. The 1st kind seems to be the scientists and the second the poet/philosophers but I could have got that in under 20 words. I just don't understand what this confusing, long, complicated, obscure 300+ words added to the discussion. And that is just one page or so of this 160 page book.
Derrida spends a long time discussing, deconstructing 2 translations of Genesis (pg 15-18) and comes back to this repeatedly though the rest of his discourse. He then speaks about how animals have been thought to have sadness or melancholy because they can't speak. This seems very anthropomorphic and anthropocentric and (which I think is, ironically, humankind's biggest sin) to imagine that animals would mourn not speaking when they do communicate otherwise, to assume that our method of communication would be of value to them or coveted by them. Derrida dwells on god giving Adam the power to name animals and that being named gives power (which can be true) and causes us to be invaded by sadness. "Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying" pg 20 - I don't see this consequence or reaction.
It's funny that Derrida speaks so much about the power God gave Adam when he allowed him to name all the animals but what about the word God, Elohim, Yahweh etc. Who gave that word to God? I guess some people would feel that God gave it to us but ...
On pg 22 Derrida asks "if the animal has time" and notes that Heidegger says that "remains a problem."
I think that I am going to have to come back to this text later, when I've read other texts and what other people have thought. I feel uncomfortable with how inaccessible this is. I understand the need for specialized terminology for things especially when you are dealing with things that aren't part of everyday life. I don't want to call a pair of Gelpi retractors "those reverse tweezer kind of things for spreading open the abdomen, you know the ones with the pointy ends" because that is inefficient and imprecise for my purposes but my difficulty reading Derrida doesn't seem to be so much a matter of terminology as a matter of verbosity, lack of focus and lack of forward motion. I read through the 1st section and through the last section but trying to write about these and to flesh out my scribbled notes is too frustrating because even to try and note down what has bothered me about Derrida takes hours and hours of flipping back and forth to try and tease out a complete thought to even consider, much less understand.
I had a really hard time with this book. I was looking forward to it as a great way to examine and discuss humankind and our place in the world. I was also looking forward to reading a more modern (or I guess I should say post-modern) philosopher and I've always had a soft spot for French intellectuals - but I was really foundering trying to understand this book and why it was set out (said or written) the way it was. I found it needlessly verbose, too many part sentences and doubling back or repetition or side journeys to something else that made it difficult for me to figure out - or even remember - where Derrida had started the sentence or paragraph or thought. I can't imagine trying to follow this in person - at the Cerisy conference itself.
I think for me to understand this book adequately I would have to sit down and take every paragraph and try to sum it up in my own words and then see where that takes me. Unfortunately I don't have anywhere close to the time to even try to start this.
Looking online to try and understand Derrida a bit more I see that he has been a controversial figure, with some philosophers even denying that he is a reputable philosopher. Some, such as Noam Chomsky, have called him an obscurantist, and right now I am having trouble arguing against that label. I do feel that I need to give him more effort though - I'm not quite ready to throw him out as not worth my time. I am looking forward to discussing him in class and I hope Stephen can provide some guidance on why he writes/speaks this way and what the basis for it is.
He starts out by speaking about being naked in front of his cat and having his cat look at him. Why was he embarrassed or ashamed? Derrida says that some think that "what in the last instance distinguishes [animals] from man, is their being naked without knowing it." pg 4-5 Derrida says this therefore without consciousness of good and evil. For me I have trouble with this last part. Why bring good and evil into it? Yes, humankind has quite often - though not universally - made nudity shameful for some bizarre reason but is consciousness of our nudity what leads to good and evil? I can't think so.
He mentions Montaigne and his cat and it reminds me that I do want to go back and reread Montaigne this summer (I'd like to reread almost all the texts we read this year but there is only so much time and so many other texts to read - it's sort of like travel - I want to go back to places I've enjoyed or which I didn't spend enough time in but there are so many other places to travel to...).
As a post-modernist, French continental philosopher, Derrida is big on exploring the words used. he spent quite some time discussing what we mean by "respond". He digresses into a section from Alice: Through the Looking Glass and I found that very interesting. It made me want to go and read Lewis Carroll as I hadn't realized he had so much in the book. This could be a good summer read.
Derrida says (pg 8) that you can't speak to animals and they don't really reply. It is a tough one - you can't hold a philosophical discussion with a dog or cat but for the more responsive animals (dogs, horses, primates etc) they are very attuned to our communications even if it is more to tone and body language than the words we use. They are responding to our communications though. It's not just reaction (reflex). On pg 11 Derrida speaks about the cat, coming before man biblically (and this discussion seems odd in that he spends quite a bit of time discussing how we can't just say "The Animal" referring to all of non-humankind. There are bigger differences between a trout and a giraffe than between a man and an orangutang. Speaking about the cat coming before man and speaking biblically seems to be putting alot of weight onto a basis that ignores evolution and when man evolved to "man" vs what was happening with various animal species at the same time). From this, the animal being before man in the biblical creation of the world, Derrida goes on to mention that the animal looks at man and has its own point of view (pg 10-11).
One area where Derrida reminded me very much of Montaigne is this habit of writing on a subject and trying to do so logically, with a discussion of what you are basing your assessment or opinion on, going through this somewhat scientifically and then having this "basis" be doubtful sources or at the very least in Derrida's case, sources that I would have imagined he would have spent much of his career deconstructing and discrediting. He seems (and maybe I'm just not getting it) to use the Bible and other such sources (Prometheus myth) as the basis for drawing conclusions to then hypothesize about (and God told Adam that he had dominion over all the animals - therefore the animals were 1st and then God made man 'in his own image' and then told Adam to name the animals and that they were under his dominion). This seems odd to me and even odder is that Derrida will spend pages on the wording of various versions of French translations of Genesis and how they differ and what we can take from the words and I just want to say "But these are translations of a ancient text that itself was cobbled together from millenia of oral story telling. All the wording of a translation is telling me is what the translator might have had in mind or operant when he wrote it." What am I missing here?
Derrida speaks of nudity as passivity, the involuntary exhibition of the self. Again, I have trouble with this. (pg 11) He then goes on to say we could call this denuded passivity "the passion of the animal." Even just rereading this text, to try and flesh out the brief notes I scribbled down while reading, makes me frustrated and irritated by his detours and connections. They just don't make sense to me. From nudity to passion of the animal to Cain and Abel to people following and the colour of someones eyes and then seers and the apocalypse - all this in 3 paragraphs on one page!!
On the same page, pg 12, he speaks about the cat's gaze [at him naked] and says:
"seeing oneself seen naked under a gaze behind which there remains a bottomlessness, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret."Sigh. It's at times like this, when I'm reading something so impenetrable and when I feel that, despite being reasonably intelligent and educated and functional in the world, I need extensive training and background or conditioning just to understand someone's thinking - that I feel like someone in the crowd watching the Emperor parading down the avenue naked and I'm applauding his beautiful clothing and some little boy is going to call out "But the emperor isn't wearing any clothes' and I'll realize that I've been sucked in to going along with what the crowd says is true and worthy and that it is all a sham. I can't help feeling that Derrida is making this all too complex, too "significant", too obscure; that he is spending way too much energy trying to read whole universes into simple words. I don't deny or dispute for a moment that language is powerful, that we assign meaning to words and accept all the baggage that goes along with that, often without questioning it or even thinking about it - and I think it's good to do that, to stop and say 'wait a minute, who says that this means that and therefore automatically must imply this and lead to that' but what Derrida is doing seems way more tenuous than that. I'm only on page 12 and all I have is questions but it doesn't feel like questions to which there are any answers no questions which will help me to any greater understanding of anything.
One tactic Derrida does which frustrates me the most is begin to say something that seems like I can grab hold of it such as: "Other than the difference mentioned earlier between poem and philosopheme, there would be, at bottom, only 2 types of discourse, two positions of knowledge, two grands forms of theoretical or philosophical treatise regarding the animals." So, disregarding that I didn't pick up on him having mentioned a difference between poem and philospheme, and looking back I can't find what he is referring to; and disregarding that he can't just say "2 types of discourse" and leave it at that he has to elaborate on 2 positions of knowledge and 2 grand forms etc etc - all of this terribly distracting when I'm trying to track down the concrete nugget of what he is saying: 'There are only 2 of something to do with animals" but he doesn't say what those are right away. He starts with saying "What distinguishes them is obviously the place, the body of their signatories" - okay, I don't really know what he means here but maybe when I read the 2nd type of discourse, it will start to become clear, but Derrida doesn't go on to mention the second of his 2 types of discourse. He goes off on those who have seen but never "been seen" by animals, and addressing animals, and then Descartes and his epoch - but then he has to go off on a tangent about the word epoch but he can't say what his problem with the word is, he just has to digress and say it makes him uneasy, and veer back somewhat to his 1st category of signatories and then veer off again talking about "quasi-epochal configurations" and all the while I'm screaming inside saying "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 2nd TYPE OF DISCOURSE??" and flipping back and forth to see if I missed it - and I"m still not really 100% sure about what the 1st type is, nor what the problem with 'epoch' is and what this "addressing of animals" or being addressed by an animal is. Eventually Derrida wanders back to his 2nd type and says "As for the other category of discourse, found among those signatories that are first and foremost poets and philosophers ..." and I'm thinking wait a minute, I thought the 1st type were signatories, now I have to go back and try and figure out what he means by signatory because I skimmed over that part at the beginning of the small section because I wanted to see what the 2nd type was. On this second type Derrida says that these poet/philosopher signatories are "those men and women who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them, before even having the time or the power to take themselves off (s'y dérober), to take themselves off with clothes off or in a bathrobe, I as yet know of no statutory representative of it, that is to say, no subject who does so as theoretical, philosophical, or juridical man, or even as citizen. " pg 14.
I read that very small section over and over and I still have no idea what he means, what the point of it is, where is gets us in a discussion about humankind and non-humankind. The 1st kind seems to be the scientists and the second the poet/philosophers but I could have got that in under 20 words. I just don't understand what this confusing, long, complicated, obscure 300+ words added to the discussion. And that is just one page or so of this 160 page book.
Derrida spends a long time discussing, deconstructing 2 translations of Genesis (pg 15-18) and comes back to this repeatedly though the rest of his discourse. He then speaks about how animals have been thought to have sadness or melancholy because they can't speak. This seems very anthropomorphic and anthropocentric and (which I think is, ironically, humankind's biggest sin) to imagine that animals would mourn not speaking when they do communicate otherwise, to assume that our method of communication would be of value to them or coveted by them. Derrida dwells on god giving Adam the power to name animals and that being named gives power (which can be true) and causes us to be invaded by sadness. "Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying" pg 20 - I don't see this consequence or reaction.
It's funny that Derrida speaks so much about the power God gave Adam when he allowed him to name all the animals but what about the word God, Elohim, Yahweh etc. Who gave that word to God? I guess some people would feel that God gave it to us but ...
On pg 22 Derrida asks "if the animal has time" and notes that Heidegger says that "remains a problem."
I think that I am going to have to come back to this text later, when I've read other texts and what other people have thought. I feel uncomfortable with how inaccessible this is. I understand the need for specialized terminology for things especially when you are dealing with things that aren't part of everyday life. I don't want to call a pair of Gelpi retractors "those reverse tweezer kind of things for spreading open the abdomen, you know the ones with the pointy ends" because that is inefficient and imprecise for my purposes but my difficulty reading Derrida doesn't seem to be so much a matter of terminology as a matter of verbosity, lack of focus and lack of forward motion. I read through the 1st section and through the last section but trying to write about these and to flesh out my scribbled notes is too frustrating because even to try and note down what has bothered me about Derrida takes hours and hours of flipping back and forth to try and tease out a complete thought to even consider, much less understand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)