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Two (slightly less heavy) contributions to a discussion on animals

I've settled down to start on the Derrida piece this afternoon. Although I'm wary of bogging us down with too much reading, I'd like to suggest two additional short pieces on the non-human animal, and its place in contemporary society.

John Berger's "Why Look at Animals" was published in 1980, and is often considered to be the founding piece of writing for the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies. John Berger is an Art Historian by training, as well as a fiction-writer, and best known for his 1972 book, "Ways of Seeing."

You can access the entire essay here. And it's a short one.


The second is a piece of fiction by multi-disciplinary author Annie Dillard. Dillard is sort of a strange mix of theologian, natural historian, literary critic, and poet. This short story is a different kind of commentary on the place of the animal in human society.

The full (also delightfully short and sweet!) story can be found here.

I was also able to find a pdf version of one part of the Derrida piece on JSTOR, if someone wants to check it out.

The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)
Jacques Derrida, David Wills
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), pp. 369-418
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276


Also, noting this is a shorter 50 page version, we might be able to combine it for a larger discussion on philosophy and animal-ness. Eh?

Like:
DESCARTES: Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (Chapter 5: here)

HUME: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Of the Reason of Animals: here)

DARWIN: The Descent of Man (Chapter 3/4: Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals: here)

ALLEN: Animal Consciousness (here)

CHOMSKY: Human Language and Other Semiotic Systems (can't find it online yet - has to be there) (Semiotica. Volume 25, Issue 1-2, Pages 31–44)

Reading 1: Derrida

The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session.

The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction--dating from Descartes--between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses tothe question in the work of each of them.

The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises.

The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.