The NOT Derrida Wars

I'm back blogging, and we already have a small, low-level fight about Derrida. I think most of us really don't want this to become another chapter in the Derrida Wars. However, the current discussion has provoked some comments from me.

First, Graham Harman began this round with this post here, arguing that Derrida refuses to ever be responsible for his claims. This prompted this extension of that argument by Job Cogburn over at APPS. And it also prompted this defense by Eric Schliesser. And I made this comment, basically saying I think their particular passage doesn't do the work they think it does. But I wanted to expand on some of these thoughts.

First, I think this very strong, affective hatred that Cogburn talks about is interesting. It is one I feel for, say, Heidegger (okay, maybe only Heidegger). What interests me about such an anger is what it can do, how it can be intellectually and productively useful. I sometimes think it can only be useful if the person who gets you so angry is herself an amazing philosopher. Heidegger, his many faults aside, is certainly an amazing philosopher. And therefore, I have learned as much in my articulating my disagreements with Heidegger, than I have from many thinkers I generally agree with. This anger is also a really different feeling from the dislike, apathy, or simple disagreement I might have with other thinkers. Those feelings tend to simply make me not interested in reading those thinkers' books, rather than that intellectually useful. Anyway, I think that Cogburn and Harman have it wrong in their criticisms of Derrida. My hope, though, is that their hostility is philosophically useful for them.

Second, the more important note on the idea of Derrida, and political and ethical engagement. First, let us just say that personally, Derrida was involved in quite a few political and ethical stances on specific and concrete things (I was about to make a list of some, when I realized that Wikipedia beat me to it). That's not the important part. Derrida's philosophy in many places is a direct refutations of Heidegger's own beautiful soulism. I am thinking here particularly of "Force of Law" and Rogues, texts in which Derrida argues for the necessity of calculation in any ethical and political act. Rather than continue in a certain strain of Continental philosophy that refuses any sort of consequentialist politics, and therefore refuses any policy action that cannot be perfect, Derrida challenges us to commit to the need of calculation. This is huge. If we are to follow Jane Bennett's suggestion in Vibrant Matter that what we need are "enabling instrumentalizations", this will mean a some sort of calculative relationship, but an ethical one. I definitely think Derrida helps push into such directions, which certainly means into accountability (literally).

Holy pre-ordering, Batman!

Well, three major books are finally coming out in English translation, all now available for pre-ordering off of Amazon.

The second volume of Derrida's lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign are set to come out. Excitement.

Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory is up for pre-order. I get a lot of emails and search hits of people looking for news on the English translation, so here you go.

And lastly, Foucault's The Courage of Truth. I haven't been able to pick up a French version of this yet, so when I get the book will be my first time reading these lectures in any language.

In the case of Derrida and Foucault, these are the last lectures of their life.

Derrida, Again

Some discussions won't go away. Here is one of them.

See Peter, Chris, and Eric.


Look, if one needed to resist Derrida in order to speak and think, I am on record as having nothing against that. There was certainly a time in my own philosophical life where that was true. Where a certain Derridaism prevented a certain set of philosophical questions that I was involved in, and I needed to reject Derrida (personally, if nowhere else) in order to think them.

But still, this idea that Derrida was never invested in creating his own philosophical positions seem to either come from too narrow of a reading of Derrida, or too narrow of an idea of philosophy, or both. If you look at the 'late' Derrida, he is clearly trying to work out ideas of cosmopolitanism, friendship/fraternity, and hospitality. Frequently in a non-anthropocentric register. He did so both through recourse to other texts, but also through a profound number of insights of his own that were not mere textual glosses. And these are far from his only philosophical productions in his some 40 odd year career as a philosopher.

Also, none of this should be taken as an attack on Laurelle, on whom I know relatively little. Just wanted to clarify.

The metalepsis of immunity and autoimmunity

Levi has a nice post in response to my post on Luhmann. It does a good job of explaining a bit more of the back ground on issues like risk, systems/environment, immunity, etc. However, it has also made me think that a longer post on immunity and autoimmunity might be needed over here.

For me, as well as for many other thinkers, the issues of biopolitics are bound up with the issues of immunity. For example, in Foucault we are given schematics of power that correlate to responses of disease. So, Foucault explains that responses to leprosy elucidate sovereign power, responses to plague elucidate disciplinary power, and responses to smallpox elucidate governmentality and biopower.[1] But something else emerges in Derrida[2] and in Esposito[3], rather than responses to certain diseases being models or instances of different logics of power, immunity becomes a way of thinking the social itself, a metaphor or map for community and violence. Esposito warns us that in Derrida's formulation of immunity, there seems to be no space (or only an infinitesimal space) between immunity and autoimmunity. I think this is why Esposito turns more and more to Luhmann, for whom immunity provides both a positive and negative influence on a system.
However, as Miller points out (after prompting from Mitchell) in For Derrida, autoimmunity is a "figure of a figure" (p. 124), or a metalepsis. What does that mean? Well, it means that the concept of immunity isn't particularly a natural one, but already a metaphor used to understand the way particular systems of our bodies work. In this case, I really suggest Donna Haraway's "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies"[4] and Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending. In Haraway's case you get an interesting story about the way certain discourses of the immune system work within the coordinates of a military-industrial complex. In Cohen you receive a longer work about how the very idea of immunity and self-defense (two different historical concepts, as Cohen points out) arise and go on to explain the notion of the way the body protects itself. This all means that certain societal arrangements became a figure for understanding the body, and that certain ways the body regulates itself has become a figure for understanding society.
This metalepsis of immunity is something we have to grapple with if we want to seriously understand the concept of immunity. This becomes all the more true if so much is suppose to depend on this issue of immunity; questions of killable and protected, of community and estrangement, of self and other.


[1] See Discipline and Punish and Abnormal for the first two examples. The smallpox example is in Security, Territory, Population.
[2] The major texts that Derrida deals with immunity are "Faith and Knowledge", in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and in Rogues [Thanks to Matt for reminding me]. Hagglund's Radical Atheism is rightly mentioned as a great source on this concept, but I also suggest J. Hillis Miller's For Derrida and W.J. Thomas Mitchell's "Picturing Terror".
[3] Esposito's notions on immunity is worked out in his trilogy Immunitas, Communitas, and Bios. Also in his most recent book, Third Person.
[4] Haraway's work provides a nice contrast to Derrida, as well. Derrida's concern is the way that immunity slips into auto-immunity, but Haraway's essay is provoked by the death of a close friend who died of AIDS (immuno-suppression, not autoimmunity). Also, she has an interesting footnote where she observes that obsession with autoimmunity seems to come at the cost of concerns over things like parasites, which leads us to not "take responsibility for the differences and inequalities of sickness globally." (p. 252, n. 2)

Once more to the Derrida, dear friends, once more.

There have been any number of new posts on the Derrida question since I last posted on it. For sanity's sake, I'm not going to try and link to all of them.

Instead, I want to talk about two really funny things that have occurred because of this discussion. (1) The revival of this video, and the even cooler discovery of a freakin' sequel!!! All of the name callings, the misunderstanding, the pettiness and territorial pissings might be worth it, just for how funny those videos are.

(2) The other funny thing comes from the Why Can't I Quit You: Derrida Edition. Any number of people have repeated some version of they don't know how they ended up in the middle of drama drama derrida, and also they have constantly repeated to end this ceaseless and unending debate. It's funny, because it's the practice of deconstruction, just taken the viral form of social networking. Or a Kafka novel, which are pretty funny, too. Either way, you get drawn in, and you can never, ever, get off.

The Derrida Question, or, The Question of the Derrida

For those that don't know what I am talking about, here are a bunch of links. Make sure to read comments, for that is where a lot of the action is taking place: here, here, here, here, here, and here. Whew. As you can see there is a lot of meta-discussion going on here: about tone, about accusations, about all sorts of very personal things. This is among people I generally like and respect in my interactions with them. So, I hope you all forgive me (particularly those involved) if I ignore the questions of tone and rudeness and the whatnot that occurred in the virtual vacuum (devoid of vocal and body expressions). I'll just try to talk about the philosophy.

Part of the reason I call this the Derrida question is this discussion has rapidly very little to do with Derrida (look at how many people cite any passages by Derrida). It has far more to do with a philosophical assemblage that seems to be going by the name Derrida and derridians. By which I mean there seems to be a way that Derrida and derridians (which just aren't the same thing) have effected different people engaging in this discussion in very different ways. Derrida has been a source of joy (in a very Deleuze's Spinoza sense of that term), and a source of sadness for others. There are also two Derrida's here: The first is Derrida the actual writer and philosopher. For some of us this Derrida has been a wonderful intellectual provocateur. I have both new thoughts and more rigorous thoughts because of my interactions with Derrida's work. The second Derrida is institutional, and has very little to do with Derrida the philosopher or Derrida the person. In both Levi's and Harman's cases, I think this Derrida was suffocating for them. Both of them have talked about the sort of push back to doing work that wasn't commentaries from their pro-Derrida grad programs. In one of these posts Harman even talks about how derridians didn't exactly support his book Tool-Being. I can't speak for Matt on this one, but for me Derrida's talking the animal question seriously has allowed far more freedom for me to take the animal question seriously. This became particularly true after the English translation of The Animal that Therefore I Am came out. This isn't because I have had to do any commentaries on Derrida (though occasionally I've been pressured to do so), or because I (or hell, most other people in the animal studies community) use Derrida as some sort of trump card. Rather, it is because a certain level of institutional legitimacy has been conferred on doing animal studies from a continental perspective. I have several stories of the times I have been laughed at when people found out I writing about animals, as if that wasn't a proper topic for philosophy. Those incidents have decreased significantly in the last three years. A good part of that is the work of Derrida coming into translation. Another big part of that is the efforts, rigor, and passion of people like Matt.
So, there are people who have found Derrida intellectually provocative, and people who have been bored or drained by reading Derrida. There are people who have found Derrida institutionally enabling, and people who have found Derrida institutionally stifling. And if we are able to engage in assemblages with either Derrida that allow for joy has only very little to do with if we are reading Derrida 'correctly' or not. When we come to Derrida, the context of those who have read Derrida around, the types of Derrida works we start by reading and what we are writing at that time. All of that is going to play a far greater role into defining our relationship to a thinker like Derrida than, you know, what Derrida actually did or did not believe.
But all of this is why debates over Derrida somewhat boring to me. Sure, I might role my eyes a bit at Levi's attacks on Derrida (sorry Levi), but I find Levi's work useful. And I have no doubt that Levi's polemical relationship to Derrida has contributed to Levi's philosophy that I have found enabling. Levi might roll his eyes when I find Derrida for thinking outside of anthropocentrism, but my hope is that he judges my work outside of the citational apparatus (and I'm pretty sure he does).
With that said, on the questions raised here, my reading of Derrida is the same as Matt's (he and I disagree elsewhere). And as Peter points out, there are plenty of people engaging seriously with Derrida that do not feel he is a correlationist (or always one, anyway).

Arguments for Eating Animals: Bad Faith, Disavowal, and Addiction

This post is immediately inspired by a comment Tim Morton made in this post by Levi, but I've been planning on writing something like this for a bit.

Those of us who argue for vegetarianism and veganism hear a wide plethora of arguments for eating animals (or against vegetarianism and veganism). Frequently they are delivered in the form of questions. Occasionally there are questions given by the genuinely curious, but usually these are questions meant to delegitimatize the veg position. These questions tend toward gray areas, morally complex areas, in order to legitimate a whole host of behaviors that are not particularly morally complex. It is like if I said I'm against killing people, and someone goes, "Well, what about to protect yourself from immediate harm?" And then I go, "Okay, I mean against killing people who aren't attacking you." Then the person responds, "Well, what about Hitler? Wouldn't you have killed Hitler?" And then you go, "Okay, I am against killing people who aren't mass murders". And then the person goes, "Well, say you have a chance to kill Hitler before he became Hitler, wouldn't you kill Hitler." And then, with all those exceptions, the other person goes out and kills the first person they run into. This whole argument is bollocks, and obviously bollocks. The philosophical argument is less about if you should or shouldn't be vegetarians and vegans, and more about why people don't buy the arguments. This is a major point made by Bill Martin in his Ethical Marxism, and I am in full agreement. So, what drives these arguments for eating animals?

Well, one argument is that these arguments are based in bad faith, in the way that Sartre describes in Anti-Semite and Jew. However, rather than anti-semitism, we are dealing instead with speciesism. John Sanbonmatsu makes almost this exact argument in his paper he delivered at ICAS. In this case, the same fears that drive one to hate the Jew also drives one to hate the Animal. It is an argument that comes out of a great deal of insecurity, a great deal of personal hatred turned outward against animals, and it is by destroying animals that the one with bad faith manages to reassure oneself.

A related but different argument can come from the psychoanalytic concept of Verleugnung, of disavowal. This is a major argument advanced by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In this case there are two major disseminations of disavowal. The first is a disavowal of that there is no such thing Man on one side of the line, and Animal on the other side. The second disavowal is of the violence we do to other animals. As Derrida puts it,

Neither can one seriously deny the disavowal that this involves. No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide[.] (pp. 25-26)

This passage also hints at a third disavowal, a disavowal of disavowal. A forgetting of forgetting. We'll return to this point.

I've gone rather quickly over the issues of bad faith and disavowal. There are long and complicated philosophical histories and theoretical nuances I've jumped over. But I wanted to move into another point, one that doesn't seem to be out there. This is something I've been thinking about for a while, but the way that Morton/Bryant say the following point is nice:

Moreover, as Morton likes to put it, the Big Mac is not comfort food (a semiotic determination), but rather the Big Mack is comfort. That is, the Big Mac interacts physiologically with our bodies in a variety of ways that produce particular Stimmung.

What does that mean? Well, it means that particular kinds of food don't make you feel better just by nostalgia or magic. Rather, it chemically alters your mood, like coffee in the morning. Particular foods are remarkably addictive. It is from this perspective I can understand that I can understand something from Pollan that has never made sense. At one point he argues that saying we can eat without animal flesh is like saying we can reproduce without sex. That has always floored me, because who in their right mind believes that eating an animal is the same as having sex? Well, an addict would go there. That gives the particular logic of the flesh eater an entirely other dimension: these aren't the domination of the speciesist acting in bad faith, this isn't the psychoanalytical disavowal, rather this is the incoherent, and rather lame, excuses that one hears from addicts all the time. Anyone who has ever hung out with people who feel the pressure to stop their addiction has probably heard variations of these excuses. "You aren't so pure yourself", "I play the lottery to help the schools and children", etc. Now, there are some draw backs that some people might have with the rhetoric of addiction to talk about flesh eaters. One is that it seems to turn the flesh eater into victim. Not only are animals victimized, but those who eat animals are also victimized in their eating of them. The reductio ad absurdum of this is something like, "Why do you make me eat you by tasting so good?". Of course, part of the issue is taste has nothing to do this (whatever you may feel now; coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol didn't taste so good the first time. And parenting advice often features long discussions and how to get children to eat flesh). But the other point is that oppression and domination are seldom so easily one sided. While the animal is not oppressing the addict, the addiction certainly is. And like with many addictions, this one is certainly causes us all sorts of harms. Do I really need to engage the long laundry list of the ways that cheap animal flesh and products are causing rampant health issues and environmental issues? This shit (often literally) is killing us, but very few of us are even willing to cut back, much less get off the sauce entirely. Another objection in talking about addiction is it makes veganism sound like a hard thing to do. Many of you have read or heard Francione make the arguments that we need to present veganism and simple and easy step. Except... you know... it usually isn't for most people. Many people have trouble going vegan, and many of them relapse again and again (just like addicts). I'm not sure which is strategically a better idea, presenting veganism as a hard but important thing, or presenting it as an easy thing. But the truth is that for most people going vegan won't be easy. Lastly, an objection in talking in terms of addiction, it lets many people off the hook. They can say, "I can't help it, I'm an addict." Well, that just sounds like another lame excuse. More importantly, if it is an addiction then that means different steps need to be taken to combat this issue.

Now, I'm not sure it is addiction. And I am certainly not sure if it is addiction over bad faith and disavowal (it's probably all three and then some). Earlier Derrida hinted at the disavowal of disavowal. In many ways that is what we are stuck with in the present discussion. Vegetarians and vegans are forced to basically take arguments for eating animals as legitimate. Any discussion on what propels to keep eating meat is taken as an illegitimate discourse because it assumes that vegetarianism and veganism are won arguments. That means that the sort of theoretical discourses that exam other forms of systematic violence are not usually or publicly brought to the issue of other animals. However, I find this discussion to be both more useful and philosophically rewarding than to deal with the "So, if you were a life boat and you had a Picasso, a horse, and your mother..." one more time.

A certain fragility of the infinite

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while knows that questions of vulnerability, finitude, and precariousness are returning philosophical questions for my work. (See here and here for a couple of examples). Several other thinkers have used the idea of finitude to think us outside of an anthropocentric ontology, ethics, and politics (see Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Cora Diamond, and Cary Wolfe). Now, in one sense of this thinking vulnerability is just a fact, an almost unfortunate fact, that has to be taken into account. In more positive accounts, Butler's for one, precariousness isn't just a passive fact demanding to be taken into account. Rather, the reality of shared vulnerability produces important facts-- like sociality and plasticity, like the common and contingency. (As a side note here, when Wolfe writes on vulnerability he focuses on Diamond and Derrida, which is certainly interesting. But I wish in that chapter he had spent more time with Luhmann, I think a strong second-order systems account of vulnerability would be wonderful).
So, on the one hand, finitude is simply fragility, and as such needs to be paid attention to in the same way we stamp "Caution: Fragile" on boxes. On the other hand, finitude isn't fragility or simply fragility, it is also a productive power upon which all sorts of adaptive strengths come from (indeed, adaptation and evolution are entirely bound up with the notions of finitude). What happens, though, when we start flipping this around? In a real way, it is hard to say, because life seems to need some measure of death, but there are several literary resources at hand. For example, the vampire here enters the scene as a being defined by certain finitudes (the Hunger, fear of sunlight, etc), but also a belief that one day, the might not die. Many authors seem unsure if the great age of vampires make them powerfully devious, or if their very immortality makes them more predictable, more rigid. I started thinking about this while reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (don't hate). Butcher himself can't seem to make up his mind, attributing both realities to his vampires depending on what he wants done in his text. In another example, we can think of the Highlander tv series. In it Duncan MacLeod is always is always running into other immortals that he has known through his 400 plus years of existence. And almost all of them seem like pure trauma cases from psychoanalysis, constantly repeating the same traits again and again throughout the centuries. Immortals seem to almost never change, and all of them seem completely predictable. I am actually curious what other vampire stories and stories of immortal beings (including gods) have come down on in this idea of if immortality tends to produce a certain asociality and rigidity. A certain fragility of the infinite.

Animal Capacity and Vulnerability.

First an announcement: The interblog reading group on Bennett's Vibrant Matter is putting together the finishing touches on the schedule, but the key thing is that the discussion is likely to begin the week of the 22nd-29th. So, if you want to be following along at home --and you know you want to-- that should give you enough time to pick up the book. Now on to the post:

When it is time to write about the changing attitudes towards animals that is emerging, I think special attention will have to be paid to youtube (and online videos in general). It is one thing for science to talk about the capacities of certain animals, and even for you to know about it, and another to see an elephant painting a picture. As a matter of fact, watching youtube videos of animals have even become a methodology of scientific research (and oh yeah, some animals can dance to a beat as well). In short, what the constant stream of animal videos are doing is affectively proving to many us that everything we thought we knew about what divided the human from all other living beings-- THE animal-- is wrong. We are learning that the multiplicity of other animals are both more alien from us and more alike to us than we had originally believed. That is why it is always so interesting when we find out beavers have created a structure big enough to be seen from space or that chimps make and use tools (sorry Stiegler), and there is of course an youtube video of those chimps as well. All of this goes to support what Derrida claimed in Rogues, namely:

Although I cannot demonstrate this here, I believe– and the stakes are becoming more and more urgent– that none of the conventionally accepted limits between the so-called human living being and the so-called animal one, none of the oppositions, none of the supposedly linear and indivisible boundaries, resist a rational deconstruction– whether we are talking about language, culture, social symbolic networks, technicity or work, even the relationship to death and to mourning, and even the prohibition against or avoidance of incest– so many ‘capacities’ of which the ‘animal’ (a general singular noun!) is said so dogmatically to be bereft, impoverished (p. 151).

What is at stake here is what Derrida has frequently called the 'propers of Man', those capacities that Man believed she alone had access to. It is a system of anthropocentrism that is destabilized by all of these animal capacities. This focus on animal capacity or generally anti-anthropocentric capacity, however, seems to contradict another important theoretical development in the political, ethical, and ontological domains of animal philosophy: namely the focused on a shared sense of vulnerability.

This notion of vulnerability is found in thinkers as similar yet diverse as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, and to some degree in Jean-Luc Nancy and his notion of exposure. It is a concept I have found particularly useful (you can see some of my public work on this here and here), and I am sure many other young scholars have as well. The concept of vulnerability seeks to reorient our philosophical commitments away from what we can do and more to our sense of precariousness or finitude (as an aside, in the back of my mind has been the thought that thinking vulnerability alongside Bruno Latour's notion of trial by strength, but it hasn't gone anywhere yet). Therefore, a focus on animal capacity seems to contradict (or at least is rendered to a mere curiosity by) the commitment to vulnerability. Indeed, Cora Diamond has remarked that the moral basis of vegetarianism is endangered by arguments that seek to confuse the boundary lines between the human animal and the non-human animal.

Now, I haven't been able to work through this seeming contradiction, but my gut impulse is that it isn't a contradiction, of if it is, it is a necessary one. Regardless, my thoughts are that both projects are important, and it is only by being brought in explicit dialogue with each other that either stand a chance of being more successfully forwarded.

Update:
Peter definitely puts my aside on Latour far more clearly than I did:

He has an aside on Latour and I think it’s a telling remark: the “trials of strength” aspect really is all about vulnerability, not a hyperconfident will to power.

But yeah, you really do have to read Heidegger if you want to understand Derrida

Without a doubt, probably the funniest video I have ever seen:


(h/t Adam)

I also wanted to suggest this new post by Levi on ideology. I am working on a longer response, but just in case I don't follow through, you should go read it. Really short version: (1) I mostly agree, and (2) Isn't it funny that he is engaging in ideology critique with those that engage exclusively or primarily in ideology critique? (and I don't mean intellectually weak or contradictory, I just mean humorous).

Punch an animal in the face if you love humanity! (Or, I promise, I don't hate humans).

One of the more peculiar charges made against those advocating for the liberation of animals, particularly those who advocate for animal rights, is that we somehow hate humanity. That our desire for animal welfare, animal emancipation, etc., is based on an animus to humans. This is something I come across all the time, but let me just highlight three of the more philosophical versions of this argument.


José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, p. 103

It is inconceivable that no study from the ethical point of view has even been made of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, analyzing its standards and actions. I bet one would find that English zoophilia has one of its roots in a certain secret English antipathy toward everything human that is not English or Ancient Greek!

Elisabeth Roudinesco, in her dialogue with Derrida in For What Tomorrow..., p. 67.

What strikes me about such an excessive claim [that Great Apes deserve rights] is that it would establish a sort of division between what would be human and what would be nonhuman. To bring great apes into the order of human rights, it would be necessary to exclude the mentally ill.

And just a page later.

Just as, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the terror of ingesting animality can be the symptom of a hatred of the living taken to the point of murder. Hitler was a vegetarian.

And last up, Roberto Esposito, in his Bios, p. 130.

More than ‘bestializing’ man, as is commonly thought, it [Nazism] ‘anthropologized’ the animal, enlarging the definition of anthropos to the point where it also comprised animals of inferior species. He who was the object of persecution and extreme violence wasn’t simply an animal (which indeed was respected and protected as such by one of the most advanced pieces of legislation of the entire world), but was an animal-man: man in the animal and the animal in the man.

Before I get any further, I was wanted to share with your Derrida's wonderful reply to Roudinesco, p. 68.

The caricature of an indictment goes more or less like this: "Oh, you're forgetting that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were in a way zoophiles! So loving animal animals means hating or humiliating humans! Compassion for animals doesn't exclude Nazi cruelty; it's even its first symptom!" The argument strikes me as crudely fallacious. Who can take this parody of a syllogism seriously even for a second? And where would it lead us? To redouble our cruelty to animals in order to prove our irreproachable humanism?

As absurd as that last line is, in a way it is Ortega y Gasset's position. He argues that hunters show both the authentic form of respect of humans and other animals!

I've never understood these arguments against animal liberationists. I once compared it to the arguments that people make that extending the same rights to homosexuals in our society is passing special rights for homosexuals. It doesn't make any sense, but is often repeated. It is, therefore, somehow effective on an intuitive level for many of the people making the arguments. Because I don't share these intuitions, these sorts of arguments confuse. Like Derrida, I wonder how such an argument could be taken seriously, even for a second! But not only are they taken seriously, they are repeated, again and again, by serious people. What is it about these absurd arguments that are so effective, so appealing to people?

I really don't have a good answer. On some level, it seems as evidence for both Foer and Derrida that we are at war with other animals. If we are at war, than supporting animals is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

That has a certain elegant appeal for me, but I don't honestly think that is all (or maybe even most) of what is going on. The real desire is for human exceptionalism. And there is some sort of linkage that I miss between human exceptionalism and human well-being. To attack the doctrine of exceptionalism is seen, therefore, as an attack on the human as such. (Ditto on the weird arguments against same-sex marriage). But it is that weird hidden linkage that makes no sense to me. Why do we need an exceptionalism?

Strong Humanism, Weak Humanism, Beyond Humanism

This post follows up on my earlier post about Leigh Johnson's concept of weak humanism. Again, I encourage you to take the time to listen to her dialogue, here. Also, as a note, she has further clarified her position in a blog post. Considering the majority of my response to the podcast had been written before that was posted, I will include my responses to clarification in a second post, and my first post will not be edited to respond to her new points, but hopefully I will have a part two up tomorrow.
***

Johnson begins her argument by stating she wants to defend human rights, philosophically. She feels in order to do that she needs a proper thought of humanism (and here is my first question: Does she really need a humanism here? What about a philosophical anthropology? Would she, like Judith Butler is attempting, be able to make the argument for human rights from a non-anthropocentric anthropology that avoids any sort of humanism?). Contrasting earlier modalities of humanism (which she terms 'strong humanism,' in that the traits of humanism that mattered were positive attributes such as autonomy, rationality, etc.), she proposes a new type of humanism (which she terms 'weak humanism,' not because the humanism is weak, but because the humanism is based upon qualities like weakness, vulnerability, precariousness, etc.). Strong humanism sets the bar of admittance to the human subject too high, which not only leaves out groups that might not be able to make strong claims on rationality and autonomy, but more importantly does nothing for groups that are systematically expropriated from categories of strong humanism. In this, her work follows not only poststructuralist criticisms of humanism, but perhaps more strongly follows decolonial criticisms of humanism: the work of people like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Slyvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, etc. The decolonial tradition has criticized humanism for its colonialist, imperialist, eugenicist, and frankly genocidal contours. These thinkers have shown how humanism not only justified colonial expansion, but also systematically denied admittance to the human subject to racialized and sexed bodies. Or, if racialized and sexed bodies were granted admittance, it was only as mimic men. After this critique, all of these thinkers make a second move; a call for a new humanism, one which will be true and real. While Johnson doesn't spend a lot of time explaining the critique against strong humanism, one assumes that all of this is in the background of her work. And if that assumption is made, it is not at all surprising that she too is constructing a new, true and real, counter-hegemonic humanism.
One of the major differences between her work and many of the decolonial thinkers is that whereas most decolonial thinkers simply assert the need for a new and true humanism, Johnson spends her time advancing the necessary step of a philosophical anthropology to support the new and true humanism. (There are, of course, several notable exceptions of decolonial thinkers who do engage in this necessary step. I would feel particularly amiss if I didn't mention the work of Slyvia Wynter again, who makes the strongest arguments in this direction, even if I ultimately disagree with her). Johnson's humanism of weakness and vulnerability is one that seeks to define the human in terms of a shared sense of being wounded, hurt, tortured, killed. One that seeks to privilege sentience over sapience as the primary quality necessary for an ethical and political response. Weakness and finitude are brought into the discussion not just to create a lower admittance into the human, but also because it is at the level of finitude we need an ethics and a politics. It is only because of our shared finitude that we are infinitely responsible for le tout autre. In this I would like to say I am agreement with Christopher Long's comment that it is at the basis of our vulnerability we are actually talking about a strength. The fiction of the autonomous and atomistic individual is an anemic fiction, actually weak because it cannot feed upon the powers of the common, a common that is possible only because of a shared finitude. Our responsibility to the wholly other is not, in this view, a burden. It is rather a practice of joy, an affirmation of life.
It is here that my confusion (or perhaps a critique hidden as confusion, though I honestly want to advance in the spirit of confusion, not critique) begins. I am working on how the concepts of abandonment, exposure, and vulnerability can be a way of entering into the dialogue of community that we find in Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Derrida, Agamben, and Esposito. But for me, such a community can never be a community of humans, but must be a community of animals (including humans!). When we look at capacities like vulnerability, percarity, suffering, joy, are we looking at capacities that are unique to the human? Are these the categories that make us human? That separate and demarcate the human from other animals? Or, are these the categories that come not from our humanness but from our animalness? Are not vulnerability and finitude the affirmation that we are one animal among others? An animal among other animals that suffer, that celebrate, that mourn and are mourned. As Butler argues in her Frames of War, "The point, however, would not be to catalog the forms of life damaged by war, but to reconceive life itself as a set of largely unwilled interdependencies, even systemic relations, which imply that the 'ontology' of the human is not separable from the 'ontology' of the animal. It is not just a question of two categories that overlap, but of a co-constitution that implies the need for a reconceptualization of the ontology of life itself" (pp. 75-76). Are we not talking about, ultimately, not a humanism of weakness but an animalism of weakness? Can we not think, along with Derrida, who contends in The Animal That Therefore I Am:

Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish. (p. 28).

If we are going to advance that our morality is tied up with mortality, how can we remain anthropocentric? Does not an argument for a shared vulnerability demand we jettison the anthropocentrism that got us in our present situation in the first place?
That is, I think, where my confusion has to open itself up to critique. This is where we have to go beyond humanism. I don't think it is enough to say, 'I am only concerned with human issues, and am therefore not trying to think animal issues.' I understand that one has a finite resources to work on certain political and ethical issues, but we are not talking about that right now. We are instead talking about the philosophical underpinnings for action, and those cannot exclude the wholly other because your current responsibility is not a response to that other. To paraphrase Derrida, one has to think without alibis. Not only can you not exclude the wholly other (and at this second that stands in for other animals), but it is necessary to understand the interlocking of oppressions. I don't know if I have time to go into this now, but let me advance one argument here. If you are able to expropriate beings into 'merely' animals, and if that 'animal' suffering is not considered equal to 'human' suffering, how do you stop anything? How do you stop the torture of 'terrorists' who are, as you know, animals? How do you stop the genocide of those that are, as you know, subhumans? How do human rights work if the victims' very humanity is exactly what is contested? (I am wish I had more posted on this issue. I have a rough draft of a conference paper on this exact question. I am not in total agreement with it anymore, but it might be considered interesting for showing some of the ways I am trying to explore these questions. Read it here). It seems that the only way for a weak humanism to work is for it to stop being a humanism at all.

Derrida Jokes

Graham has a few famous questions and answers of academics over at his blog, including a couple of funny Derrida ones. It made me want to tell one of my favorite stories I ever heard about Derrida (that probably never happened). I'll quote from Leland de la Durantaye:

A telling (if apocryphal) Kansas appearance: An audience member stood up and recounted the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and her friends finally meet the wizard, who is powerful and overwhelming until Toto pulls away the curtain to reveal a very small man. "Professor Derrida, are you like that?" the audience member asked. Derrida paused before replying, "You mean like the dog?"

Biblography on Derrida on animals

EJ on a recent post about early and late Derrida asked for more sources where Derrida talks about animals. I think that is something we could all benefit from. So, I am sure I have not tracked them all down, and hope some of you can add stuff I have missed. Also, Derrida frequently had small discussions of animals that don't exactly make into a sustained work (a long and interesting footnote in The Postcard, for example. A couple of references in Glas, etc.), and not to mention other works that are not specifically about animals but go out their way to refuse an anthropocentrism that another author might have created. I know I should work out all the listing by original publication date (or alpha by title), but I'm lazy and this is a blog post. So, I won't worry about it here for the rough draft, hopefully as we collect a fuller list, I will work it into a more useful format.

All works by Derrida:

"Eating Well" (an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy)

"On the Limits of Digestion" (an interview with Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, and I have to say I found out that Derrida used the trope of digestion in his later lectures only after I had always started to do so).

Aporias

"The Ends of Man"

The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Sovereign and the Beast

On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy

Of Spirit

"Heidegger's Hand (Geschlecht II)"

"Heidegger's Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlect IV)"

The chapter "Violence Against Animals" in For What Tomorrow (with Elisabeth Roudinesco)

"Fichus"

Obviously his lectures on cannibalism and eating the other probably also contain some work on animals, but I have been unable to track down publications of those lecture series in either French or English, anyone know if they are somewhere?

Alright, what have I missed?

On Early and Late Derrida

This is the sort of post that blogs are basically made for: an intuitive argument that I believe is right but that I haven't dotted all the Ts and crossed all the Is yet. So, this is something I am putting out there to see if people think I should keep working at or if there are some obvious objections I am ignoring here.

This post makes use of a distinction between early Derrida and late Derrida. Such a distinction is, of course, obviously problematic and overly schematic. Simon Critchley, for example, categorically rejects such a distinction, stating that, "In my experience reading Derrida, the closer one looks, the harder it is to find any substantial difference between earlier and later work" (Critchley; Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity p. 96). My argument is not that there exists some clear demarcating line between early and late Derrida, or that elements of one doesn't exist in the other. But, I also believe that an ahistorical reading of an author, that doesn't take into accounts changes that occur during a thinker's long and productive career is a particularly good reading, either.

There are two elements that I feel are particularly worth paying attention into understanding a shift from an early Derrida to a late Derrida is (1) his relationship to Heidegger and (2) the centrality of resisting certain disavowals. These two points are not unrelated, but are held together through what Derrida called the question of the animal. As the question of the animal intensifies in Derrida's thought we see a continued distance being placed between Derrida and Heidegger, and so often and repeatedly over the question of the animal (from the 1968 The Ends of Man, to his 2001-2002 lectures The Sovereign and the Beast). And if we are to take Derrida at his word, that the most fundamental disavowal for him is the disavowal of the animal, then it should come as no surprise to us that his more political and ethical writings should become more central in his work at the same time that the question of the animal enters his work with a stronger and greater frequency. The argument here isn't just that you can't understand Derrida without understanding his work on animals, though that is part of my argument, it is also that you can't understand the specific shift of his work away from a strong heideggerianism and towards a strong political and ethical focus without understanding the way the question of the animals plays in the economy of Derrida's writing.

Book lust

Over at cross-x I keep a thread posting about various just very recently released or unreleased books I am excited about. I've decided that once a week I will perform the same function here. I won't post about the books I've already posted there, you can check it out if you are interested. Except to post one book I am *particularly* interested in.

The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I
(description from the Univ. Of Chicago Press website)

When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.



The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.



Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
(due out in November)

Peter Singer

I recently finished teaching Peter Singer's Animal Liberation to my The Animal and the Ethical class. I hadn't read this book since I was an undergrad (not that long ago, but still, long enough), and I was amazed as I taught how much I generally liked the book. I didn't particularly care for the book when I read it last, partially because I was full of a new found poststructuralist hatred of utilitarianism, and partially because even though I was a promoter of vegetarianism, it was all about the environment and nothing about animals themselves.
Reading it now, I am really taken with it. Sure, there are large parts I disagree with or would do differently (and his short history of specisism reveals how much better at genealogy people on this side of the philosophical divide are at that sort of thing), but it's smart, politically compelling, a strong mixture of nuance and moral outrage. If you haven't read it, or haven't read in a long, long time, I suggest picking it up. I'd be more than willing to discuss it with people. I am, in general though, surprised by how much people doing "critical" animal studies often wish to immediately distance themselves from Singer. It's fashionable, but I think it would be intellectually disingenous for me to do so at this point. I find Animal Liberation no more or less problematic than I find either Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am or Agamben's The Open.

Speaking of Derrida, I taught the first part of The Animal ... right before I started teaching Singer, and one of the weirdest things is that I am pretty sure that in many ways Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am is a response to Singer's Animal Liberation. A paper still remains to be written on this "secret" dialogue, but if there is interest I might post some of the things that make me feel this way.

EDIT: I know I said it was fashionable, but before I forget, I want to note two serious thinkers who obviously don't feel the need to automatically distance themselves from Singer. Leonard Lawlor and David Wood have both at least made footnotes supporting that there is a strange relationship between Derrida's thought and Singer's.

The Aporias of Killing Well: On Donna Haraway's When Species Meet (part one)

Avoiding God-Tricks

Killing well should be felt in a sort of tension, if not outright rejection, of the commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill. We can never escape that to live is to kill, and that “eating also means killing” (p.296). Outside of the Christian beginning and end (the Garden of Eden and the Jeremiahian prophetic end time when the lion shall down with the lamb), there is no way to escape this brute fact. This is where Haraway wants us to begin ethically (if by that word we mean the way to navigate the knotted kinships that emerge when species meet), in the unavoidability to killing. In order for one to follow the imperative Thou Shalt Not Kill, one has to decide that some lives are no longer lives. These lives can be bacteria, plants, animals, other humans; regardless one has to perform a god-trick that turns life into not life. This is why she believes that “[p]erhaps the commandment should read, ‘Thou shalt not make killable’” (p. 80). In other words, we can only say, “I do not kill” if we have made certains lives killable, utterly discardable. Thou shalt not kill can never be a commandment of the cosmopolitical, but only of the biopolitical (and those that hear the resonances with Agamben’s own brand of biopolitics are not mistaken. Not only is The Open mentioned, but Homo Sacer finds itself appearing in a footnote on chickens). Killing well, as an ethical principle, seeks to avoid the naiveté, innocence, and purity of those that seek not to kill; and introduce instead the very real and messy situation that is life. One should expect to get one’s hand’s dirty when species meet. Perhaps, though, this leads us to the first aporia of killing well.
The end of When Species Meet is taken up with trying to explore how to eat and kill well. In trying to explore this idea, Haraway relates the story of a departmental dinner. In this dinner, one member of the department who is hosting the dinner serves a feral pig that he hunted and killed and roasted in front of everyone. Haraway spends time to explain that the host is opposed to factory farming, and hunts only according to strickly conservationist principles. She also does her best to invite her own feelings of ambiguity to the dead pig roasting in front of her. The story continues, the guests become divided between those who feel there is nothing wrong with the pig being roasted, and those that feel the department should only offer vegan meals. She feels in what must be mutually exclusive discourses the possibility for cosmopolitics, for a real sharing and playful argument. Instead, the discussion is shut down for politeness sake, and rather than roasted pigs cold cut slices are served in the future. I share with her this sense of frustration, that a sort of liberal relativism came and shut down the possibility for politics. Indeed, can anyone truly argue that cold cuts are somehow a better option than roasted pig hunted by a conservationist? Here, though, something else is revealed. Among the story of this and another dinner, among the details of how careful the hunting is, among the possibility for possibilities, she slips this sentence in, “In the sense I have tried to develop in this book, I respect Lease’s hunting practices in my bones, and I eat his food with gratitude” (p. 299). And that’s that. No matter the “indigestion” she feels in the tug of war on her gut between vegans and the hunted meat, she made a choice. If to live is to kill, then that means we have to make choices. Who do we kill? How do we kill them? Even if we make no one killable, are some more killable than others? Would Haraway eat a feral dog if offered to her, or a feral human? I don’t mean these last questions facetiously, but to underscore the question: Are some lives more killable than others? And this last question seems to be dodged by the book (and by Haraway?) through her analysis of killing well. For her the political seems to reside in the back and forth of debate, in discussion, in playful and serious dialogue. The political is the space mediated, that she finds herself in, and where we are drawn in opposite directions. And I agree, the political can be found in disagreement. However, the political also has to be in the decision. One has to pick sides; that is also what it means to live in a world where living means killing. Her concept of killing well is clearly meant to be in the same pack as Derrida’s interview “Eating Well,” but perhaps it would have also been useful to look at his essay, “The Force of Law.” In that essay, Derrida traces out both the impossibility and inevitability of making a decision. Neutrality is the ultimate god-trick, and non-neutrality is both the mark and guarantor of immanence (for more on this last point see anything by William Haver. Particularly, “The Ontological Priority of Violence: On Several Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean Genet's Work” and “Queer Research; or, How to Practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility.”). To live is to kill, and discussions (no matter how cosmopolitical) does not escape that we must choose sides. This is the first aporia of killing well.