Discussion: Derrida The Animal That Therefore I am

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.