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Studies in Continental Thought
Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign
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Studies in Continental Thought
Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign
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Jacques Derrida's final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereigntyâthe connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida's late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life.
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Ethics & Moral Philosophy1. The Beast and the Sovereign I
Imagine yourself standing outside the corner show window of one of the few academic bookstores left in Paris, this one on the rue des Ăcoles itself. Filling the window are twenty-five books on animal life considered from various philosophical points of view. The book jackets are all colorfulâDĂŒrerâs hare, Boschâs uncanny monsters, Dutch-interior dogsâand the subtitles are all titillating: Should We Kill Them? Should We Eat Them? Are They Human? There, translated into French, is Jeremy Benthamâs treatise on the question of animal suffering. And at the bottom of this bibliolithic mountain, off a bit to each side, left and right, lying flat, apparently too heavy to be propped up, are two very plain, very thick, very oddly titled tomes: volumes one and two of Jacques Derridaâs SĂ©minaire: La bĂȘte et le souverain. âSo many books!â as an American tourist once complained to Derrida in a foreign-language bookstore in Tokyo. âWhat is the definitive one? Is there any?â (UG 71).
Even faithful readers of Derrida, especially those who have read his posthumously published Lâanimal que donc je suis (âThe Animal That Therefore I Amâ), will want to know whether the 870 book pages of the two-volume transcription of Derridaâs final seminar, devoted to questions concerning animals and political sovereignty, are definitive books and will repay the time spent studying them. The answer is of course yes, emphatically, and for more than one reason. The initial reason is simply the brilliance of the lecturer and the diligence and care with which Derrida always prepared his seminars. Such diligence and care are remarkable, especially these days, as overworked university lecturers have to get away with off-the-cuff teaching and on-the-wing classes, for the sake of âspontaneity,â as we like to reassure ourselves before dashing off to the next pointless meeting. It is nevertheless important for us to see every now and then how serious teaching is done. Clearly, the world has lost one of its great lecturers and masterful teachers. Also one of its greatest philosophers. These two volumes, like all of Derridaâs texts, are filled with multiple forms of the expression âif only we had sufficient timeâ; they are therefore both monuments of loss and mountain streams of gain, both mournfully sad and pleasurably refreshing. They show us what philosophy has lost and what, if and when it is smart, it will try to resuscitate and retainâwhat it must continue to study with the greatest application.1
The seminar is stereoscopic. It examines both an entire range of issues in philosophical treatments of âanimal lifeâ and classical questions concerning the meaning of political sovereignty in the human sphere. Yet the seminarâs vision is seamless: Derrida manages to convince us that these two apparently disparate sets of questions involving beings that represent two very different links in the great chain of being are and always have been in fact inseparable. If as Aristotle avers only gods and beasts can be nonpolitical, whereas you and I are political animals, well then, ontotheology and ethology are and must be intimate with one another in all matters political and philosophicalâif only by way of telltale exclusion.
In the present chapter, dealing with the 2001â2002 seminar (as in chapter 2, which treats the seminarâs continuation in 2002â2003), I will do little more than offer a prĂ©cis of Derridaâs seminar text, listing the principal sources and themes of each session. Only occasionally will I pause to reflect on some of the matters in questionânot a lack of engagement on my part but a result of the massive amount of material to be reported. Later chapters in the book will be more thematic and more selective; here I want to stay as close as possible to the structure and flow of the seminar. The present report itself will be minimal and inevitably unjust: I will, to repeat, merely list the primary sources for each of the thirteen sessions (ten in the second volume) and offer a succinct restatement of the themes and theses of each.
Derridaâs own retrospective description of the first year of his course for the EHESS (Ăcole des Hautes Ătudes en Sciences Sociales) yearbook, as one might expect, is quite helpful:
We pursued the research that in previous years, centering on the problem of the death penalty, had led us to study sovereignty, the political and ontotheological history of its concept and its figures. This year we deliberately privileged what intertwined this history with that of a thinking of the living being (the biological and the zoological), and more precisely with the treatment of so-called animal life in all its registers (hunting and domestication, political history of zoological parks and gardens, breeding, industrial and experimental exploitation of the living animal, figures of bestiality and bĂȘtise, etc.). The point was not merely to study, from Aristotle to contemporary discussions (Foucault, Agamben), the canonical texts surrounding the interpretation of man as a âpolitical animal.â We had above all to explore the âlogicsâ organizing both the submission of the beast (and the living being) to political sovereignty, and an irresistible and overloaded analogy between a beast and a sovereign supposed to share a space of some exteriority with respect to âlawâ and ârightâ (outside the law; above the law; origin and foundation of the law).
We studied a great many philosophical, rhetorical, political, and other indices of this overdetermined analogy (La Fontaineâs Fables and the tradition that precedes and follows them, texts by Machiavelli, Schmitt, etc.). We also attempted a sort of taxonomy of the animal figures of the political, notably from the point of view of sovereignty (always outside the law; above the laws). Alongside the lion, the fox, etc., the âcharacterâ of the wolf (in many cultures) and often the âwerewolfâ (in Europe) interested us a great deal, from Plautus to Hobbes and Rousseau.
On the permanent horizon of our work were general questions about force and right, right and justice, of what is âproper to mankind,â and the philosophical interpretation of the limits between what is called âmanâ and what is improperly and in the generic singular called âthe animal.â As âbestialityâ and bĂȘtise are supposedly proper to âmanâ in his relation to his own kind, and foreign to âthe animal,â we began from this point of view a problematizing reading of certain texts by Lacan on âbestiality,â by Deleuze (Difference and Repetition) on bĂȘtise, and by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) on the becoming-animal of man. (1:13â14)2
The thirteen sessions of the first year of the seminar, their principal sources, themes, and theses, are summarized quite roughly in what follows.
1. Principal sources: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; La Fontaine, Fables, especially âThe Wolf and the Lambâ; Pascal, PensĂ©es; Louis Marin, La Parole mangĂ©e et autres essais thĂ©ologico-politiques (1986); Plautus, Asinaria; Rousseau, Social Contract and Ămile; Ernst Kantorowicz, The Two Bodies of the King (French edition, 1989); Noam Chomsky, Rogue States (2000); Aristotle, Politics; Plutarch, Three Treatises for the Animals; the Books of Job and Isaiah, and the Psalms; Hobbes, Leviathan; Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932); Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
The session opens with the lilting refrain La . . . le, emphasizing the gender or sexual difference(s) implied in the very title of the courseâthe feminine beast and the masculine master or sovereign. This first session, which has every appearance of being chaotic because of the massive number and variety of texts with which it intends to deal, proceeds with a âwolf-like pace.â3 Yet as Derrida immediately assures his listeners, it will try to proceed also with the dove-like footfall of thinking (Nietzsche). The seminar must proceed with caution, inasmuch as the pas de loup is also a negation, the pas of pas possible. Insofar as the question of the beast and the sovereign will inevitably involve force and violenceâthe violence of might making rightâcaution is no doubt called for. If, as Plautus tells us, homo is homini lupus, if every human being is at least potentially a werewolf to the others, the seminar itself will engage in lycology, or lycanthropology, and even genealycology. For the sovereign himself, according to Rousseau, is often a wolf toward his own people. And yet here too gender differences apply: the wolf is also the she-wolf, the mother who suckles the feral founder-twins of Rome, Romulus and Remus.
Among the themes that have long interested Derrida, indeed since his Of Grammatology, has been incest prohibition, and this is one of the questions that ties human sociality to issues of ethology, and indeed to issues of âbestiality.â Such ties do not bind, however; they are not securely tied; they are not firmly drawn boundaries, neither in human societies nor in those of the âhigher apes.â What intrigues Derrida most is the porosity of boundaries and limits in all these cases, especially in that of the nature/culture distinction on which the very title of the course is based, la . . . le. What the beast and the sovereign share is their âoutlawâ status, that is, their being below or above or in some way outside the law. The figures of the beast and the sovereign are therefore joined by that of the criminal. As there are rogue wolves, banished from the pack, so there are rogue sovereigns and even rogue statesâat least according to the overwhelmingly powerful enemies of those states, which insist that their own might makes right. âInternational terrorismâ will therefore play a role in the seminar, as will the terror that at least some beasts and some sovereigns and sovereign states appear to represent.
If Plutarch insists that animals employ reason and display the finest virtues, the prevailing Western and Eastern traditions alike have insisted that animals think only how they may devour us, so that we must eat them before they eat us. That is common sense, at least among the animals that have speech as well as meat in their mouths. Such common sense has not only philosophical but also religious authority behind it: Yahweh breaks the skulls of all Leviathans, sings Psalm 78 (13â14), except for the monstrously powerful Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. For the Common-wealth itself, as Leviathan, is in some highly problematic way instituted by the creator God. Leviathan is an artificial creature with a sovereign soul and with the Godlike power to punish those who desire the stateâs protection but disdain its laws. Derridaâs reading of Hobbes is perhaps the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced reading of this first session. He brings Hobbesâs text into connection with Carl Schmittâs ontotheological political theory, following the lead of Schmitt himself, who wrote on Hobbes: the sovereign has the exceptional right to punish the evildoer, and even to tear his heart out, if such be necessary. For political foes, beyond personal enemies, are always lurking within and without the sovereign nation-state.
One could readily relate all this lycanthropic political imagery to Freudâs Wolfman, and especially to the sense that the father is always, at least in part, the wolf, but Derrida prefers to end the session with a reading of The Malaise within Culture, which we know as Civilization and Its Discontents. In the seventh chapter of that work Freud poses the question as to why other animals, which are obviously related to us, have not struggled to found a culture. Freud speculates that the primal human being may have been propelled by a new drive (Vorstoss der Libido) to organize; yet that erotic propulsion, he further speculates, may have triggered a new form of recalcitrance by the drive to destroy (ein neuerliches StrĂ€uben des Destruktionstriebes). The wolf is not merely at the door of culture but at home with us.
2. Principal sources: Hobbes, Leviathan; Schmitt, The Concept of the Political; Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la RĂ©publique (1583); Montaigne, âOn Some Verses of Virgilâ (ca. 1580); Plato, Republic and Phaedrus; Plautus, Asinaria.
Derrida begins with the eh sound of the conjunction et in the title La bĂȘte et le souverain. Because et and est cannot be distinguished by the ear, which hears only eh? it may be that the beast is the sovereign, or, more likely, that the sovereign is a beast, as fairy tales and fables often tell us. The fables concerning beasts are not restricted to La Fontaine, however; for the organized media of nation-states today fabulate as never before. Fox, too, fabulates, although Derrida does not refer by name to this particular U.S.-American media animal. Yet the session of December 19, 2001, begins by reflecting on âthe fabulous use of informationâ in government and the media in all âadvancedâ nations, above all in the United States. Two months have sufficed to show how âinformationâ is used to manipulate the citizenry and to mobilize for war. Derridaâs account of the âjubilant painâ of the images of the collapsing twin towers of the World Trade Center, broadcast over and over again, and of âthe experience of the vulnerability of the invulnerableâ (1:64), is nothing short of stunning. The auto-censorship that was immediately enforced in the United States after 9/11âthe banning, to take an example not mentioned by Derrida, of John Lennonâs âImagineâ from virtually all radio stationsâand the immediate development of techniques for inducing fear and terror in oneâs own populace, submitting both the enemy and the homeland to the force of âshock and awe,â as one administration officer put it: these events enable Derrida and us to read Hobbes with renewed energy. For, as Hobbes concedes, fear is at the heart of the Common-wealth portrayed in Leviathan, the fear that motivates citizens to obey the law and to submit to the will of the sovereign. âSovereignty makes us afraid, and fear makes the sovereign,â writes Derrida in the voice of Hobbes (1:68â69). âWe serve and protect,â says the writing on the Chicago city police cars, but if you are a Chicago bartender never refuse to serve an off-duty policeman. For, even inebriated, he is Leviathan, the force of law, and you are a fool not to feel fear.
Carl Schmitt tells us more about the philosophical tradition than he would like to concede when he says, âProtego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the stateâ (CS 54; 1:74â75). I protectâand therefore obligateâyou. Why the need to obligate? Both Hobbes and Schmitt, notes Derrida, found their politics on âa pessimistic anthropologyâ (1:75). It is Schmitt who cites La Fontaineâs fable of the wolf and the lamb as an example of âthe problem of aggression.â Derrida focuses on the problematic situation of the institution of political power by obligatory covenant, whereby the sovereign, an âimageâ of God, is in some sense the author of the covenant. Even though the sovereign Judeo-Christian God is not himself a signer, and even though no one dare speak or write in his name, that God looms behind and above the covenant as its transcendent authority. Yet the very exceptionalism of the sovereignâserving as Godâs lieutenant by making the law while being above the lawâinterrupts the embrace of subject and sovereign in the Common-wealth; that interruption becomes apparent when the beast is excluded from the covenant and the polity. Hobbes wants to avoid any direct reference to a religious or sect-based covenant, since there is more than one sect in play, all the while incorporating a Judeo-Christian foundation for the Common-wealth. To repeat, one does not contract with either God or brute beasts, if only because we do not speak the language of either. Derrida remarks on the precise wording of Hobbesâs text here, which is identical in its exclusions of both beast and God from the covenant. What gets excluded willy-nilly along with all the other beasts is in fact the sovereign beast that is God, so that the covenant is destined to crumble, or at least to tremble throughout its lifetime. In Derridaâs view, however, it is not a matter of reclaiming for either dog or god wh...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1. The Beast and the Sovereign I
- 2. The Beast and the Sovereign II
- 3. How Follow the Animal . . . That I Am?
- 4. Is There a Touchstone for All Philosophy?
- 5. Is Apophantic Discourse the Touchstone?
- 6. Conclusions and Directions for Future Research
- Index