The Politics of Friends:

Animals and Deconstructive Opportunity

Jessica Carey

Dr. David L. Clark

English and Cultural Studies 774
December 9, 2005
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The question of the animal and animality in relation to the human is, to use a

Derridean turn of phrase, arguably not one question among many, but rather a question

that is constitutive of all other philosophical questions. In any case, this is an assertion

that forms a central premise of much of Derrida’s work. His consequent deconstructive

treatment of the subject and reconfiguration of the borders and limits that obtain between

human and non-human animals open up new opportunities for a productive

deconstruction of notions of responsibility and of ethical relations between humans and

non-human animals. However, it is crucial to insist that such openings remain mere

opportunities unless actively taken up in the spirit of inheritance; that is, inheritance in

the Derridean sense, which can include a counter-signature, or a “strange alliance

between following and not following, confirming and displacing; and displacing is the

only way to pay homage, to do justice” (“Following Theory” 10). Specifically, it is

important to investigate the ways in which Derrida does not exhaust the implications of

his own moves with regard to animals. Hence, here I make a first attempt at identifying

some of these implications, particularly those associated with responsibility and sacrifice,

stemming from Derrida’s work with the subject and with limits or borders between

species.

By this point in history, it is clear that the concept of a sovereign, inert, delimited

and self-sufficient subject has formed the basis of a highly problematic ethical and

political legacy. On the one hand, to state it too quickly and bluntly, the Cartesian figure

of the subject has propelled humanity into everything it knows; as Simon Critchley notes,

“[t]he possibility of the subject is the very possibility of philosophy” (53). On the other

hand, however, as Derrida and many others have pointed out, the idea of the sovereign
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subject has engendered in humans a sense of opposition and aggressive othering that

bears at least partial responsibility for the most horrific epistemic and physical violence

of modernity. With particular regard to animals, Derrida situates this violence in a

framework of carnophallogocentrism, which privileges “a certain interpretation of the

human subject, which itself will have been the very lever of the worst violence carried

out against nonhuman living beings” (“Violence Against Animals” 65). The psychosocial

frame of carnophallogocentrism accomplishes such violence by “install[ing] the virile

figure at the determinative center of the subject . . . The subject does not want just to

master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh”

(“Eating Well” 280-81). I will return to the issue of sacrifice, but the point here is that

physical violence stems from the epistemically “violent institution of the ‘who’ as

subject” (“Eating” 281)1. For example, Derrida ascertains an act of such institution in

Lacan’s insistence upon the division between response and reaction as establishing

subjecthood (“And Say the Animal Responded?” 127). In this light, the urge among

some theorists to dispense with the concept of the subject is perhaps understandable.

However, in his rigour Derrida cannot bring himself to ignore the first

consequence of the notion of subjectivity: that presently it structures the world as we

know it, positively and negatively. The preliminary problem with discarding subjectivity

lies in the fact that, as Derrida points out, there has never been any consensus upon what

a subject is (“Eating” 264), in part because so many supposed “liquidations” of the

1 See also “Force of Law”: “carnivorous sacrifice is essential to the structure of, which is to say to

the founding of the intentional subject as well and to the founding, if not of the law [loi], at least of

right [droit], the difference between law and right…” (247).

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concept are, in fact, instances of the subject being “re-interpreted, re-stored, re-inscribed”

(257). Consequently, those who wish to shed the subject succeed, in a sense, in

entrenching a more monolithic definition of the subject, in their very supposition that the

subject is a single idea that can be eradicated. Furthermore, Derrida suspects that those

wishing to liquidate the subject have not fully digested the implications of such a move,

for even the merely “reinterpreted” subject still has not satisfactorily answered “what

becomes of those problematics that seemed to presuppose a classical determination of the

subject . . . and second: who or what ‘answers’ to the question ‘who’?” (258). However,

the most fundamental problems associated with discarding the subject, for Derrida,

pertain to accommodating all the potential ramifications of successfully removing such a

keystone of human culture and society. First, doing so “recall[s] the essential ontological

fragility of the ethical, juridical, and political foundations of democracy and of every

discourse that one can oppose to National Socialism in all its forms” (266). While

elsewhere Derrida sees deconstructive opportunities and a site of responsibility in the

undecidability of ethics and politics (“And Say” 128, “Force of Law”), it is definitely

worth noting the wide-ranging risk entailed in refiguring subjectivity. In a similar vein,

while the incalculable is the ideal with regard to ethics and justice, Derrida cannot

entirely set aside the usefulness of calculability in practical terms, with regard to these

very concepts. Presently, “[t]here has to be some calculation” (“Eating” 272) in order to

bring ideals into any concrete existence, which does not preclude finding a future, post-

subject means of negotiating ethics and politics, but asserts that the calculating mediation

of the subject is the only means currently available.

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Derrida’s exacting and vigilant treatment of the subject is justified, for all of the

above reasons; however, there are signs that his continual, slow deconstruction of the

issues threatens to halt altogether in certain instances. Specifically, Derrida seems

somewhat more attached to the idea of the subject than is initially evident in his analysis,

as a point of cessation in Derrida’s deconstruction occurs in his assertion that “the subject

is a pause, a stance, the stabilizing arrest, the thesis, or rather the hypothesis we will

always need” (“Eating” 286). There is a definite sense in which an invocation of “need”

is different, in kind, from a cautionary reminder to those who seek quick erasure that the

subject “is unforgettable” (268). His slight resignation to the subject is only more

striking in the context of his overarching radical contention that the concept is indeed

deconstructible. With regard to the subject, Derrida argues at the beginning of “Eating

Well” that it “has already been deconstructed (and . . . moreover, has deconstructed

‘itself,’ offered itself since forever to the deconstruction of ‘itself,’ an expression that

encapsulates the whole difficulty)” (259). In fact, much of Derrida’s work on animals is

concerned with deconstructing the subject, and it is important to note that he hardly views

the process as futile; in fact, he follows his above warning that calculation is the only

means of enacting ethics and politics with an assurance that “ceaselessly analyzing the

whole conceptual machinery [of this framework] . . . transforms; it translates a

transformation already in progress” (274). Derrida’s overall commitment in this regard

calls upon us to respond to his reticence to entirely give up the subject in the spirit of

Cary Wolfe’s assertion, in another context, that he is “not so much taking issue with

Derrida as taking him at his word” (79) when critiquing him.

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In fact, if Derrida clings to the subject, not much of it has survived his

deconstruction. The only remainder of the subject that he cannot responsibly dispose of

is “a singularity that dislocates or divides itself in gathering itself together to answer to

the other, whose call somehow precedes its own identification with itself” (“Eating” 261).

Lest we interpret this formulation as a mere austere refiguration of the classical subject,

Derrida then stresses that “it is neither certain nor a priori necessary that ‘singularity’ be

translated by ‘who,’ or remain the privilege of the ‘who’” (262). Seemingly, Derrida is

describing the post-deconstructive subject as a mere node of being that finally resists

transcendent identity. Such identity may be impossible, in fact, given the instability of

the ex-appropriation that seeks to materialise the originary being-thrown of being; it can

only achieve a “relative stabilization of what remains unstable, or rather non-stable. Ex-

appropriation no longer closes itself; it never totalizes itself . . . It implies the

irreducibility of the relation to the other” (270)2. Here, Derrida’s notion of the subject

begins to appear analogous in certain ways to the formulation of selves set forth by

scholars of the posthuman like Donna Haraway, even if the originary source of

“subjectivity” is completely inverted. Derrida’s notion of a self that is forged in relation

to the call of the other can stand as a somewhat Levinasian-flavoured expression of

Haraway’s stated premise that “beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do

not preexist their relatings” (6). However, this comparison is just as fruitful for its

disjuncture as for its identification, for ultimately it merely throws into starker relief the

significance of the aforementioned inversion of the source of subjectivity. Specifically,

Haraway’s insistence that we should not “mistak[e] potent consequences to be pre-

2 All italics in the original, unless noted.

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existing foundations” (6) accentuates the degree to which Derrida’s basis for subjectivity

remains metaphysical at its core, even if its most compelling form for him is the “‘yes,

yes’ that answers before even being able to formulate a question, that is responsible

without autonomy, before and in view of all possible autonomy of the who-subject”

(“Eating” 261), which succeeds in radically dislocating and de-humanising the

foundation of the subject from the outset. What initially appears, then, as an abolition of

transcendent identity altogether is in fact a relocation of transcendence within the

metaphysical realm, to an area that precedes all so-called autonomous determinations of

the sovereign, individual human subject. Perhaps this framework provides further insight

into why Derrida is convinced we will always “need” the subject, if only as a

manifestation, however refashioned, of metaphysical underpinnings. It is important not

to underestimate the radical possibilities for the entire spectrum of life that stem from this

relocation, some of which will become clear in my discussion of responsibility and

différance, yet it is similarly essential to continually recognise the metaphysical

framework that Derrida continues to work within.

Indeed, the marriage of radical possibility and metaphysical context that

characterizes the definition of the subject extends to Derrida’s post-deconstructive

reckoning of responsibility. Derrida overtly states as much in his declaration that “it is in

relation to the ‘yes’ or to the Zusage presupposed in every question that one must seek a

new (post-deconstructive) determination of the responsibility of the subject” (“Eating”

268). Responsibility, then, belongs to the particular originary transcendence that

precedes all manifestations of the deconstructed subject. Derrida emphasizes this point

even more clearly in his assertion that he is “talking about a responsibility that is not deaf
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to the injunction of thought . . . there is a duty in deconstruction . . . The subject, if

subject there must be, is to come after this” (272). Not only does Derrida elucidate the

secondary manifestation of subjecthood in this rich passage, but responsibility’s

particular mode of belonging to the transcendent background also becomes clearer; it

exists in active, reflexive engagement with selves despite its transcendence, in a dynamic

that is thus “anything but precritical” (274). Existing before the subject, in every possible

sense, means that responsibility is also fundamentally excessive (272, 286); a sweeping

and frequent refrain of Derrida’s that situates itself quite lucidly within that relationship.

Perhaps the most significant implication of the system of responsibility Derrida builds is

its virtually universal applicability: in pre-existing the human, it maintains “the rigor of a

certain inhumanity” (276)3. While some might view the inhumanity of responsibility as

an unanswerable and thus silly injunction to non-human animals to face responsibilities

as figured by humans, the far more useful and significant consequence of this model lies

in its fostering of a rethinking of human responsibility. For instance, the Levinasian

imperative that the “subject is responsible for the other before being responsible for

himself as ‘me’” (279) no longer has any grounds to limit the field of others to humans,

as all others and their attendant responsibilities originate prior to a figuration of human

subjectivity, and “are at work everywhere, which is to say, well beyond humanity” (274).

As Wood argues, “if we already know or determine the call of the Other as human, then

we have failed to understand its radicalism” (“Comment” 28), an outcome which I assert

would also amount to a critical failure of radical hospitality to the other. Clearly,

3 For a further development of the inhumanity of the source of subjectivity, see “And Say the

Animal Responded,” p. 134.

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maintaining the metaphysical context for responsibility opens up certain radical new

avenues for the concept.

On the other hand, Derrida’s refusal to forgo the transcendent realm as the

scaffolding for responsibility and the subject also sustains an intrinsic distance within the

relationship that renders it aporetic, thus obstructing free passage along such avenues.

First, no matter the extent of incalculable responsibility involved, the othering

engendered by the metaphysical framework still imposes a separation: the “other, the

neighbor, the friend . . . is no doubt in the infinite distance of transcendence” (“Eating”

279). Thus, although Derrida’s relocation of transcendence to a place prior to the subject

all but mandates excessive responsibility to all others, it maintains a notion of subjectivity

premised in the metaphysical realm, which perhaps still renders it too easy to forget

responsibility to others who do not obviously share this type of subjectivity: “what

remains buried in an almost inaccessible memory is the thinking of a responsibility that

does not stop at this determination of the neighbor” (284). Yet, Derrida’s framework

insists upon the primary division of othering as the very mechanism of its maintenance of

originary and universally applicable responsibility, for

[s]omething of this call of the other must remain nonreappropriable,

nonsubjectival, and in a certain way nonidentifiable, a sheer supposition,

so as to remain other, a singular call to responsibility . . . This obligation to

protect the other’s otherness is not merely a theoretical imperative.

(276)

Apparently, then, the embrace of a radical responsibility requires a reinscription, of sorts,

of subjectival isolation.
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Along the same lines, another aporetic tension resulting from preserving

metaphysical transcendence as the backdrop in his treatment of responsibility is the

impassable separation that necessarily emerges in the very manifestation and action of the

subject. Specifically, in Derrida’s model, the finite subject is differentiated from, and

comes after, the infinite transcendence to which responsibility belongs, thus maintaining

an eternal aporia that must constantly negotiate two fundamentally different and separate

manifestations of being. With regard to responsibility, the aporia obtains in the necessity

for the finite subject to calculate the incalculable; “[t]here must be some calculation . . .

[yet] I believe there is no responsibility, no ethical-political decision, that must not pass

through the proofs of the incalculable or the undecidable” (“Eating” 272-73). The

incalculable compels us with its purity, while the calculable obliges us with its power to

materially enact for the concept of responsibility “as many things as allow it to inscribe

itself in history, law, politics, existence itself” (“On Forgiveness” 44), yet the two poles

remain separate and homogenous. I do not mean to imply that the site of the aporia is a

mere impasse; to be sure, Derrida continually demonstrates that the tension of its

heterogeneity is potentially endlessly productive, and that “[d]econstruction always finds

itself and moves itself between these two poles” (“Force of Law” 251). Perhaps the most

fruitful quality of deconstructive work, so figured, is that “it leaves no respite, no rest”

(“Eating” 286). However, the inherent divisions and separations that attend the

relationship mean that the risk involved in resting, even for a moment, can become dire

immediately.

At times, the obstructions intrinsic to the aporia of responsibility do seem to allow

Derrida to rest for a moment regarding the issue of responsibility to non-human others.
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The fact that there is an imperative responsibility to such others in Derrida’s model is

established; the issue at hand is determining the extent of Derrida’s work in the direction

he has plotted. Derrida’s seeming allergy to vegetarianism may seem surprising at first,

given his commitment to exploring all radical sites of responsibility. However, upon

inspection it becomes clear that Derrida’s most fervent objection to vegetarianism is that

he sees the vegetarian decision as having renounced the hard work of aporetic tension.

He argues that “casting doubt on responsibility, on decision, on one’s own being-ethical,

seems to me to be—and is perhaps what should forever remain—the unrescindable

essence of ethics: decision and responsibility” (“And Say” 128). Consequently, because

of the seeming ethical certainty of vegetarians, he cannot “believe in absolute

‘vegetarianism,’ nor in the ethical purity of its intentions” (“Violence” 67). As Wood

argues, “Derrida’s ambivalence toward vegetarianism seems to rest on the restricted,

cautious assessment of its significance; one which would allow vegetarians to buy good

conscience on the cheap” (“Comment” 32). Beyond the issue of ethical conscience, for

Derrida vegetarianism also seems to block the dynamic of uncertainty so crucial to

deconstruction in practical terms, in that it irrevocably decides upon the calculation arm

of the justice aporia. It not only represents an attempt to “change things in the no doubt

rather naïve sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically controlled intervention”

(“Force” 236), but in doing so it falls out of the realm of responsible decision altogether,

and into a mere act of following a rule or program (251). Meanwhile, those who wish to

institute animal rights are guilty of the same rashness that plagues those wishing to

eradicate the subject: they reinscribe the system of domination they are trying to abolish

in their attempt to extend traditional subjectivity-based rights, by “reproduc[ing] the

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philosophical and juridical machine thanks to which the exploitation of animal material

for food, work, experimentation, etc., has been practiced” (“Violence” 65). Moreover,

like vegetarians, often they too grasp only the calculation arm of the aporia: as Wolfe

argues with respect to utilitarian animal rights activists like Peter Singer, for Derrida they

“reduce[] ethics to the very antithesis of ethics by reducing the aporia of judgment in

which the possibility of justice resides to the mechanical unfolding of a positivist

calculation” (69). Derrida succeeds, then, in identifying some of the most crucial

problems with vegetarianism as it relates to the deconstructive process.

However, in doing so, it seems that Derrida allows himself to leave the issue of

responsibility and vegetarianism mired in the aporetic obstructions it can fall prey to,

momentarily making him prey of a similar risk. Derrida is no doubt deeply concerned

about what he calls the unprecedented genocide of non-human animals (“Animal” 394),

and committed to “think the war we find ourselves waging” around the issue of

compassion for animals as “not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a

necessity” (397). Therefore, it is regrettable that he abandons the deconstructive

opportunities of vegetarianism at the threshold of its perennial failure to confront the

aporetic test. When Derrida concludes in “Eating Well” that it is our responsibility to

determine “the best, most respectful, most grateful, and also the most giving way of

relating to the other and relating the other to the self” (281-82), there is no reason

consistent with deconstruction why he should “ignore the larger issue of whether or not

vegetarianism is generally a more respectful and grateful way of relating to other animals

than is meat-eating or others modes of eating” (“Deconstruction,” Calarco Sec. II, Par.

12). An exploration along these lines would involve seeing vegetarianism as potentially
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an ongoing negotiation, a continual choice “to reinvent it in each case, rejustify it,

reinvent it at least in the reaffirmation and the new and free confirmation of its principle”

(“Force” 251). In other words, vegetarianism is always a calculation of sorts, but it can

exceed mere calculation to be “a decision that cuts and divides” while still submitting

itself to “the test and ordeal of the undecidable” (252), which is strikingly available to our

experience in this framework’s assertion of the necessary abyss between species. The

ongoing vegetarian choice is an attempt to address the imperative that the aporia of

responsibility “cannot and should not . . . serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-

political battles” (257), and that “for this surplus of responsibility that summons the

deconstructive gesture . . . a waiting period is neither possible nor legitimate” (“Eating”

286), but it is not necessarily a declaration that vegetarianism solves or ends the

problematic of responsibility in these acts of responding to urgency and engagement. In

comparison, the furthest Derrida is willing to overtly go in endorsing the potential of

vegetarianism is his assertion that he is not speaking of the issue “in order to start a

support group for vegetarianism, ecologism, or for the societies for the protection of

animals—which is something I might also want to do, and something which would lead

us to the center of the subject” (278). While seeming to understand its deconstructive

potential at the end, Derrida strangely displaces and defers vegetarianism as a fruitful

manoeuvre4, thus appearing to underestimate it overall. That said, I do agree with

Matthew Calarco:

4 It is, in fact, a double displacement: he claims he is not arguing for such an action at the moment,

and also that, if he was, he would “support” such actions rather than participate in them.
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Derrida is seeking to do little more than create the conditions of possibility

for another way of rethinking the forms of relation that obtain between

these singularities. To demand of deconstruction that it do more than this

is to deprive it of its radicality, of its ability to incessantly question the

categories and decisions that guide ‘positive’ ethical and political projects.

(“Borders” 24)

However, as I have illustrated, it would have been possible, and perhaps quite rewarding,

for Derrida to explore more fully the potential in vegetarian deconstruction. As I have

argued, the inherent divisions and delimitations of a metaphysically-based aporetic

structure of being require constant work in order to avoid the pitfalls of classic notions of

the subject and responsibility, so to abandon vegetarianism as a viable deconstructive

option because some vegetarians have failed to maintain a rigourous deconstructive

negotiation of the aporia is unfortunate.

Another facet of Derrida’s work dealing with animals that both radicalizes and

replicates the separations intrinsic to the metaphysical legacy involves what he calls

limitrophy (“Animal” 397-98), or discerning and deconstructing the barriers between and

within species. On one hand, Derrida enlists différance to complicate the traditional

hierarchy of animals, rendering the differences between them horizontal rather than

vertical, and situating entities in a relational system of being that is reminiscent of

semiotics. On the other hand, although he wants to recast the border between humans

and non-human animals and “multiply its figures, to complicate, thicken, delinearize,

fold, and divide the line precisely by making it increase and multiply” (398), the figure of

the abyss that accompanies this refiguration threatens to reiterate old boundaries.
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Derrida’s notion of différance is perhaps the best example of his ability to

translate the “infinite distances” stemming from the metaphysical context into a

productive rethinking of being that resists naturalized, uncritical judgments and

hierarchies; or, as Calarco argues, différance “insists on multiplication and complication

where essentialist gestures have homogenized, reduced, or screened out important

differences” (“Borders” 24). Attention to singularity is the primary leveling force of

différance; when Derrida asserts that his particular cat is not “the exemplar of a species

called cat” (“Animal” 378), he defies the impulse to categorise, which in turn recasts the

topography of being as a multitudinous field of relationships. “The animal is there before

me, there close to me, there in front of me . . . It surrounds me . . . And from the vantage

of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also . . . it

can look at me” (380). Here, again, Derrida shows affinity with Haraway, who avows

that “We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh.

Significantly other to each other, in specific difference . . . ” (2-3), thus affirming the role

of recognizing differences in forming relational meanings. Derrida seizes upon

acknowledging sexual difference, in particular with regard to animals, as a factor that

complicates traditional categories and overturns their invested denial of difference

(“Animal” 404; Wolfe 65-66). The deconstruction of categorisation also results in a

reexamination of elements thought to be integral to the human category. In this regard,

Derrida notes, “it is difficult to reserve, as Lacan does, the differentiality of signs for

human language only, as opposed to animal coding” (“And Say” 126). With this simple

gesture, as Wolfe argues, Derrida is

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showing how the difference in kind between human and animal that

humanism constitutes on the site of language may instead be thought of as

difference in degree on a continuum of signifying processes disseminated

in a field of materiality, technicity, and contingency, of which ‘human’

‘language’ is but a specific, albeit highly refined instance.

(79)

Ultimately, the embrace of différance potentially mitigates some of the antagonism in the

othering process that is so inevitable in the divided metaphysical context Derrida must

inhabit. Not only does différance cooperate in an attempt to “rearrange [the subject], to

subject it to the laws of a context that it no longer dominates from the center” (“Eating”

268), but its sheer multiplicity “requires a thinking of differance and not of opposition”

(269). Différance clearly constitutes a particularly valuable translation of the figures of

difference endemic to the system at hand.

Interestingly, différance is the obvious motor behind Derrida’s stated desire to

multiply, rather than efface, the borders between humans and non-human animals, yet the

result of this rethinking of borders involves certain consequences somewhat less radical

than their blueprint. Sensibly enough, especially in light of his attention to différance,

Derrida criticizes the propensity among philosophers to create a “vast encampment of the

animal” (“Animal” 402), and sees it as a deconstructive responsibility to point out that

“there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in any way be

homogenized, except by means of violence and willful ignorance, within the category of

what is called the animal or animality in general” (416). Moreover, deconstructing the

divisions between all animals involves a “move from ‘the ends of man,’ that is the
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confines of man, to the ‘crossing of borders’ between man and animal. Crossing borders

or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal—to the animal in itself, to the

animal in me and the animal at unease with itself…” (372). It is crucial to remember,

however, that doing so hardly erases such borders. In fact, this instance does not include

any actual surpassing of the border between man and animal; if anything, arriving at the

border only provides deeper identity to self, in the “animal in me.” As Calarco argues,

with reference to the French pun of pas in, for example, Of Hospitality, “whenever one is

dealing with death and borders, it is a matter of a certain ‘step’ and ‘not.’ To cross a

border . . . one must take a step in that direction. At the same time, both borders and

death mark the impossibility or impermissibility of such a step (one cannot or ought not

cross)” (“Borders” 19). In any case, the border remains, thus at least partially reinforcing

the delimited subjectivity that founds itself in differentiation from transcendence. While

recognizing differences may help us understand the other, simultaneously the process can

further reinscribe essential distances, rendering any relationship to an animal “[w]holly

other, like the (every) other that is (every bit) other found in such intolerable proximity

that I do not as yet feel I am justified or qualified to call it my fellow” (“Animal” 381).

Evidently, even with the radical detour through différance, we ultimately return to

subjectival distance in this framework.

Accordingly, Derrida continually refers to the distance between others as an

abyss. Even here, though, Derrida initially manages to maintain a measure of

deconstructive tension: when his cat’s gaze “offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the

human” (“Animal” 381), there is a sense that the limit does not serve merely as a

fortification of the barrier between self and other, but also as “[t]he animal expos[ing] the
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world to the look of the outside” (Lippit 1115). Furthermore, Derrida appears to question

the extent of the abyssal separation between beings somewhat in wondering whether he

must “give in to the other violence . . . in depriving the animal of every power of

manifestation, of the desire to manifest to me anything at all, and even to manifest to me

in some way its experience of my language, of my words and of my nudity?” (“Animal”

381). The radicality of this desire for communication across borders cannot compare,

however, to that of certain segments of animality theorists contending that “we are not

alone—even the body is many. Thousands of parasites make their home on my body; yet

even to say that they are ‘on’ my body is problematic. They partially constitute this body;

we share it and we are it. The animal is not other” (Steeves 7). Derrida is, indeed, unable

to relinquish the notion of the other in general, as is understandable given his

philosophical setting, which compels him, as I have argued, to “give, tirelessly, . . . my

attention to difference, to differences, to heterogeneities and abyssal ruptures as against

the homogenous and continuous” (“Animal” 398). However, his commitment to the

existence of the particular abyss between humans and non-human animals is unusually

rigid, and remains a definite site for further deconstructive work. For Derrida, denying

an abyss between animals and humans amounts to “a biologistic continuism, whose

sinister connotations we are well aware of” (398); consequently, he seems to want to

rather uncharacteristically preclude any questioning of this abyss at all, calling this

foreclosure “the price to be paid in the ethico-political denunciation of biologism, racism,

naturalism, etc.” (Of Spirit 56). To this end, Derrida seems continually compelled to aver

that “discussion is closed in advance, one would have to be more asinine than any

beast . . . to think otherwise” (“Animal” 399), and that to consider any contiguity between
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animals and humans “would be an asinanity . . .I won’t therefore devote another second

to the double stupidity of that suspicion” (415). Here, the sense of allergy seems to

transcend mere attention to difference, and enter the realm of reinscribing human

exception. This seeming deconstructive limit stands in such stark contrast to Derrida’s

assertion of shared trace, language, and even the bases of subjectivity across species

boundaries, that we should conceive it as a stalling point in his difficult process, rather

than an inherent flaw: a stalling point that is all too reasonable given the inherent

divisions that must constantly be negotiated within the differential subjectival context that

Derrida maintains is our inescapable condition.

Similar opportunities for further deconstructive work emerge in Derrida’s

treatment of the issue of sacrifice with regard to non-human animals. For Derrida, the

institution of carnophallogocentric sacrifice, whether “real” or symbolic, is “essential to

the structure of subjectivity” (“Force” 247), presumably in that it reinforces and redefines

the process of othering that pervades the Enlightenment paradigm of being. As with the

subject, this brand of sacrifice belongs to “a time, not long ago and not yet over” (“Force”

246). Thus, while Derrida insists that carnophallogocentrism must be deconstructed

(“Violence” 68), such a process is made doubly difficult. Not only does the concept

constitute a “‘sacrificial structure’” (“Eating” 280) that saturates current understandings

of life in a similar and related manner to subjectivity in general, but also, whereas the

subject has been continually deconstructed and questioned since its inception,

carnophallogocentric sacrifice remains largely a matter of uncritical and apparently

inescapable inhabitation in our culture. As Derrida illustrates the entire difficulty, even in

attempting to deconstruct other philosophers’ treatment of sacrifice, we are re-valuing

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sacrifice in our very desire for them to “sacrifice sacrifice” (279). This perhaps explains

the atypically anthropological atmosphere that seems to suffuse Derrida’s discussion of

the concept: carnophallogocentric sacrifice must be identified as an issue before he can

commence deconstructing it. Hence, it is in this area that the reader becomes intensely

aware that deconstruction of carnophallogocentric sacrifice is truly a work to come.

One site for further investigation is the delineation of differences between what

Derrida calls real sacrifice, and symbolic sacrifice. Symbolic sacrifice involves all of the

non-literal “modes of the conception-appropriation-assimilation of the other” (“Eating”

281). As Calarco points out, the coverage of this concept is even more expansive than it

sounds, including the appropriation of “universalizing of a singular being under the name

“human,” even if this occurs in the name of justice for all human beings”

(“Deconstruction” Sec. II, par. 8). Appropriately, Derrida notes that in this and many

similar fashions, “[v]egetarians, too partake of animals, even of men” (“Eating” 282), and

that throughout our cultures, we “like to ‘eat the other’” (“Violence” 68). Non-human

animals, Derrida argues, straddle the limit between symbolic and real sacrifice, as they

are the object of both literal and figurative “executions of ingestion, incorporation, or

introjection of the corpse” (“Eating” 278). Symbolically, the sacrifice of the animal has

as many implications as can be imagined. Interestingly, however, many figures of animal

sacrifice serve to determine the limit of the human, thus retracing the classic subject

boundaries and reiterating Derrida’s assertion that carnophallogocentric sacrifice and the

discourse of subjectivity are intertwined. For example, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues that

“[t]he animetaphor is . . . incorporated as a limit, an absolutely singular and cryptonymic

idiom . . . At the edges of the mouth, where the metaphor has ceased, one senses, perhaps
 21

tastes, the end of the world as such” (1121). Paradoxically, then, the act of eating the

animal further distances it, placing it firmly in the realm of the symbolic: as David Clark

notes, in the carnophallogocentric structure the “consecration of flesh-sharing is its

erasure, the spiritualization and denegation of its gory reality” (45). Similarly, Wolfe

argues that “[t]he overt artificiality of the trophy, or ornament, its self-advertisement as

symbolic, ensures that the continuity between the animal and the human need not be

seriously entertained” (103). In other words, symbolizing the animal allows the human to

remain the only thing that is “real.”

Perhaps such delimiting action explains why, in the carnophallogocentric

framework Derrida describes, humans as humans never become subject to a real sacrifice.

While he claims that the symbolic sacrifice of humans is “impossible to delimit”

(“Eating” 278), shortly we can infer that the process does indeed have a limit in

carnophallogocentric discourse; it stops before the injunction that “[t]hou shalt not kill

thy neighbour” (279). Essentially, the concept of murder is the exception that is made the

exclusive property of humans in the discourse of sacrifice. For his part, Derrida

recognizes the fact that the real sacrifice of animals is made possible through a

“justification of putting to death, putting to death as denegation of murder” (283).

However, his refusal to make this crucial point elsewhere, in conjunction with his

assertions that vegetarians practise sacrifice too and that “[n]o doubt we will never stop

eating meat—or, as I suggested a moment ago, some equivalent, a substitute for some

carnate thing” (“Violence” 71), elicit my sympathy for David Wood, who argues that “the

way [Derrida] sets up the issue is so as to incorporate and interiorize the actual eating of

animals inside the symbolic eating of anything by anyone” (“Comment” 30). Calarco is
 22

technically correct in his criticism of Wood: it is “not at all Derrida’s point,” strictly

speaking, that “the attempt by vegetarians to resist “real” sacrifice is futile since no one is

altogether capable of avoiding a more general, “symbolic” sacrifice (“Deconstruction”

Sec. II, par. 9). By the rigourous standards of Derrida’s deconstructive method, it is not

appropriate to conclude too quickly in any discussion of sacrifice that meat is always and

immediately murder according to rule. Indeed, in deconstructing the

carnophallogocentric structure, the injunction against the murder of neighbour-humans

would itself have to undergo a careful deconstruction. However, it is somewhat

disappointing that Derrida does not examine further and more explicitly the implications

of maintaining a category of beings that can be sacrificed in both real and symbolic

terms, especially since this model of sacrifice makes possible situations that Derrida was

earlier attempting to avoid at all costs: the atrocities committed against humans premised

on contiguity between human and non-human animals. As Adorno notes:

The possibility of the pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of

a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which

he repels this gaze--"after all, it's only an animal"--reappears irresistibly in

cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to

reassure themselves that it is "only an animal," because they could never

fully believe this even of animals.

(qtd. in Lippit 1119)

Here, real sacrifice of humans becomes possible only in translating the act into an

instance of animal sacrifice. Clearly, a deconstructive opportunity lies in further

 23

interrogating this loophole that is so catastrophic for both humans and non-human

animals.

In a related manner, another site of further deconstructive potential with regard to

sacrifice concerns responsibility. Derrida contends that eating well “is a rule offering

infinite hospitality” (“Eating” 282). If this is so, it is perhaps appropriate to begin to

apply Derrida’s reconfigurations of responsibility for all others to the notion of eating

well. His re-placement of responsibility prior to subjectivity, as I have argued, renders

responsibility to the other as applicable to all others, including those not currently

recognised as neighbours. However, it seems that Derrida’s application of this

conclusion to the realm of eating well gets irrevocably stuck at the issue of how to treat

the vegetal other with infinite hospitality and responsibility (“Eating” 269, 281). After

all, it is undeniably the case that, as John Caputo remarks, “[w]e have to eat and we have

to eat something living. That is the law of the flesh” (qtd. in Clark 52). Noting Derrida’s

concern in this regard, Calarco notes that in vegetarianism there is a risk of “creat[ing]

another set of fixed borders (this time between the sentient and non-sentient) that Derrida

would find equally problematic (“Deconstruction” Sec. II, par. 2). In attempting to

address this problem, perhaps it is possible, while refraining from a sense of complacent

certainty, to commit ourselves to a thinking of specificity and différance with regard to

eating well in the vegetable kingdom, exercising our responsibility for the other by acting

as respectfully as we possibly can, based on all available evidence. Specifically, it is not

necessary for the “Benthamite reference to suffering . . . that Derrida quotes approvingly

[to] suggest precisely a fundamental continuity” (Wood, “Thinking with Cats” 134); it is

enough if it suggests a call to responsible respect, even across différance. Provisionally,

 24

then, perhaps a deconstructive vegetarianism would choose to calculate the incalculable

in the form of a continually negotiated attempt to eat well by consuming those others that

show far less evidence, and far less evolutionary reason, for suffering as motile others do.

It is a difficult deconstructive negotiation, certainly, yet perhaps worth exploring in the

deconstruction of carnophallogocentrism to come.

Undoubtedly, the question of animality remains a fertile one for the purposes of

supplying the tension that feeds ongoing deconstructive work. Derrida’s many

provocations and unearthing of new aporias in this area perhaps stand as one of his

impossible gifts to the futures of deconstruction.

 25

Works Cited

Calarco, Matthew. “Deconstruction Is Not Vegetarianism: Humanism, Subjectivity, and

Animal Ethics.” Forthcoming in Continental Philosophy Review.

---. “On the Borders of Language and Death: Derrida and the Question of the Animal.”

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7.2 (August, 2002): 17-25.

Clark, David L. “On Being ‘the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with Animals

After Levinas.” Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject. Eds. Barbara Gabriel and

Susan Ilcan. Kingston and Montreal: Queen’s UP, 2004. 41-74.

Critchley, Simon. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and

Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso, 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. “And Say the Animal Responded?” Trans. Cary Wolfe and David Wills.

Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2003.

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---. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994.

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---. “Following Theory.” Life. After. Theory. Eds. Michael Payne and John Schad.

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---. “Force of Law.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. 230-

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---. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel

Bowlby. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

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---. “On Forgiveness.” On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and

Michael Hughes. Thinking in Action Series. London: Routledge, 2001. 27-60.

---. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” Trans. David Wills. Critical

Inquiry 28.2 (Winter 2002): 369-418.

--- and Elisabeth Roudinesco. “Violence Against Animals.” For What Tomorrow . . . A

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Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant

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Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “Magnetic Animal: Derrida, Wildlife, Animetaphor.” MLN 113.5

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Steeves, H. Peter. Introduction. Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life.

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Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and

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---. “Thinking with Cats.” Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental

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