Jacques Derrida

The Animal That Therefore I Am

Notify me when the book’s added
To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate. How do I upload a book?
The translated, complete text of Derrida’s 1997 ten-hour address, “The Autobiographical Animal,” focusing on the industrialized treatment of animals.
The Animal That Therefore I Am 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 to the 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.
This book is currently unavailable
314 printed pages
Publication year
2009
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
👍👎

Quotes

  • Browniehas quoted6 years ago
    this troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that it had been experienced at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing.

On the bookshelves

fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)