This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida
4/5
()
About this ebook
Derrida wrote extensively on "the question of the animal." In particular, he challenged Heidegger's, Husserl's, and other philosophers' work on the subject, questioning their phenomenological criteria for distinguishing humans from animals. Examining a range of Derrida's writings, including his most recent L'animal que donc je suis, as well as Aporias, Of Spirit, Rams, and Rogues, Leonard Lawlor reconstructs a portrait of Derrida's views on animality and their intimate connection to his thinking on ethics, names and singularity, sovereignty, and the notion of a common world.
Derrida believed that humans and animals cannot be substantially separated, yet neither do they form a continuous species. Instead, in his "staggered analogy," Derrida asserts that all living beings are weak and therefore capable of suffering. This controversial claim both refuted the notion that humans and animals possess autonomy and contradicted the assumption that they possess the trait of machinery. However, it does offer the foundation for an argument-which Lawlor brilliantly and passionately defines in his book-in which humans are able to will this weakness into a kind of u nconditional hospitality. Humans are not strong enough to keep themselves separate from animals. In other words, we are too weak to keep animals from entering into our sphere. Lawlor's argument is a bold approach to remedying "the problem of the worst," or the complete extermination of life, which is fast becoming a reality.
Read more from Leonard Lawlor
Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to This Is Not Sufficient
Related ebooks
On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Custodian of Grammar: Essays on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Morphology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhy Faith Is a Virtue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsÆsthetic as science of expression and general linguistic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDisplacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLexicon of Global Melodrama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConsidered Judgment Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bergson and his Philosophy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn the Boundary: A Life Remembered Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAvailable to Chat Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFour Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCharles Dickens: Part Two Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Managing Vulnerability: South Africa's Struggle for a Democratic Rhetoric Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAdam Ferguson: Selected Philosophical Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIncarnation: The Harmony of One Love in the Totality of Reality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSchopenhauer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSuasive Iterations: Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShakespeare's Sonnets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Conquest of Bread: With an Excerpt from Comrade Kropotkin by Victor Robinson Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhilosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As Wide as the World Is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Philosophy For You
Meditations: A New Translation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bhagavad Gita (in English): The Authentic English Translation for Accurate and Unbiased Understanding Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Little Book of Stoicism: Timeless Wisdom to Gain Resilience, Confidence, and Calmness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Questions for Deep Thinkers: 200+ of the Most Challenging Questions You (Probably) Never Thought to Ask Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Good and Evil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hold a Cockroach: A book for those who are free and don't know it Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Be Here Now Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Course in Miracles: Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: Six Translations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lessons of History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Loving Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bhagavad Gita - The Song of God Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Buddha's Guide to Gratitude: The Life-changing Power of Everyday Mindfulness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Denial of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Courage to Be Happy: Discover the Power of Positive Psychology and Choose Happiness Every Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for This Is Not Sufficient
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"Having no alibi, we must recognize the urgency that a more sufficient response is required now!" (97)
This is Not Sufficient did not capture my benevolence, at least not initially. Lawlor begins his treatment of the animal question in peculiar place, Derrida's dispersal of the deceptions of so-called "globalization." What this has to do with animals, per se, never became sufficiently clear to me. This same chapter draws on the supposed historical break of the last 200 years with past human/animal relations (or all relations); as a medievalist, I always found this division dubious in Derrida, and I wish Lawlor had either abandoned it, avoided it, or, if he had time and space, revised it. He could have done more, too, to undercut the human: he uses the collective pronoun "we" and "our" and "us," e.g., "the common experience that all of us have had with our house cats." It's not always clear whether he means humans (i.e., not animals) or if he means "the beings who must follow my guidelines." If it's the latter, I'm fine: someone has to be the host(age), after all; if it's the former, I have any number of obvious problems with it (chiefly, as I've said elsewhere, that these collective pronouns interpellate "us" into being human). There's also a really bad syllogism that runs, in its Derrida-redoing-Heideggerian essence, animals lack hands, therefore they cannot think; humans cannot think, therefore they are animals (79-80). Rocks don't think either; nor do they have hands. I know Lawlor means to be talking only about weltarm beings, but still....and, one more complaint. Lawlor often emphasizes the two choices facing any animal theorist: continuism, which effaces distinctions between humans and animals, and transcendentalism, which breaks the human off entirely from the animal. This is a false dilemma, however, as there is (at least) one other possibility, which is to open up some new relation, which neither denies difference, nor institutes difference absolutely, and which, in (and for!) the face of shifting differences, practices an ethics.
Yet by the end I was with him because, thankfully, by the end he does open something new up. I'm not sure I needed an entire book--even a book as short as this one--to get there (especially because chunks of the book paraphrase Derrida, and his work on animals has been paraphrased often by now), but at least I've no strong sense of having wasted time. His overall project is to continue "twist[ing] free of Platonism" by discovering "a difference that is nondualistic [and that also] destabilizes the original decision" that established the various Platonic hierarchized pairings. Obviously enough, poststructuralism (see 68) does the trick: see Lawlor's discussion of the khora and pharmakon and his confounding of the purportedly uniquely human ability to apprehend the "as such," and thus his refusal to accord humans any pure apprehension of their own death. Through all this, Lawlor offers, in effect, a refinement of Derrida's unconditional hospitality and, in his descriptions of "weak force," an "ability to be unable," a mobilization of Derrida's discussions of the nonpower at the heart of power.
He is most useful, I think, in his insistence that none of this cannot be done without violence. Against the liberal hope for a peaceful peace, Lawlor argues--following, for example, Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror--that violence cannot be avoided: at best, it can only be minimized, reduced to only the "radical evil" (so called because it is the evil at the root) that makes/makes possible differences between an I and not-I and that, moreover, makes a "good conscience" impossible. Lawlor provides a guide for enacting just this "violence against violence" against the worst violence, that violence that tries "to eliminate the evil of the pharmakon once and for all" (e.g., the animality of the human and other not-I in the heart of the I). They key is to at once "welcome and yet guard the alterity of others" (101). We open ourselves up, give them their proper name-which protects them, which, as a "nonuniversal name" (105) marks them off from the collective--even while knowing that even a proper name, to the degree that it reduces indetermination, assimilates them to us and quantifies them. Lawlor proposes that a name be used less like a sameness that repeats and more like a date, which "does not allow itself to pass into eventless repetition" (102): in this sense, the name-as-date can never be completely assimilated, since, like a date, it always holds itself open, and holds onto, to its own time, to its time before and beyond us. Thus we can recognize the impropriety of even a proper name; there is always more there than we know, which means that we cannot receive the animal entirely: thus we "recognize that the name is a kind of shield that allows animals to be left alone" (110). For now, I can propose only one additional refinement, which I draw from Ralph Acampora: in Acampora, the welcoming, because the world and other living beings are already with/in us, is less a welcoming than an acknowledgment. It is not, as Lawlor terms it, a "reception" (73). It will take some time to determine how this alters Lawlor's emphasis on opening.