The Animal That Therefore I Am: Derrida

The Animal That Therefore I Am is a look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Jacques Derrida’s work. It is a profound philosophical investigation and critique of why man as thinking animal is distinguished from every other living species. It is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding the modern industrialized treatment of animals. It questions the line of separation drawn from earliest times 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 animal question in each of their works.

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 the first part of Derrida’s ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled “The Autobiographical Animal”.

The Animal That Therefore I Am: Jacques Derrida:
https://www.e-skop.com/images/UserFiles/Documents/Editor/derrida_cat.pdf

Additional information:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0O5z5Qj6UI

Extracts:

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” (M-D, 36)

"...I shall never forget the day that I was lying in the house about noon, everybody else being fast asleep; and happening to raise my eyes, met those of a big black spectral cat, which sat erect in the doorway, looking at me with its frightful goggling green orbs, like one of those monstrous imps that torment some of Teniers’ saints! I am one of those unfortunate persons to whom the sight of these animals are, at any time an insufferable annoyance." (Typee 29)