Edna’s Touch

How are we supposed to reply to something or to someone when it is not clear just what it is we are dealing with and what it is that is being asked of us? Can we speak meaningfully about responding rightly or wrongly in cases like this – as readers, as intimates, as citizens, as human beings? What can guide us, normatively speaking? How do we tell what form of response we owe an other when that other appears inscrutable to us, and, as in the case of Elizabeth Costello, when the other appears as inscrutable to herself as she appears to us? Where do we begin? What might get in the way of a reply that is just, in every sense of just, not callous, insensitive, indifferent? I would claim that this is the central theme and the organizing principle of The Lives of Animals: the question of how we should respond and reply, how we should answer and be answerable to others, the question of human responsiveness or lack of it in the face of suffering.

French Thinking About Animals, 2015

This essay situates some of the dilemmas of the effort to think with non-human animate being in the Western philosophical tradition by examining the posthumous work of Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. 1 I argue for the usefulness of Derrida's work on animality for crafting a queer ethics of relating to the living in general, just as his notion of spectrality offered a way to grapple with the traumatic persistence of (historical) affect in the present. Nevertheless, even as Derrida reaches toward a referent by insisting on the particularity and singularity of his (female) cat, what he animates is the lively density of intertextual feline figures in the history of literary and philosophical thinking and writing about questions of figure and reference and questions of inscription (as "cat scratch"). Thus, even as Derrida seeks to literalize the allegorical search for the elusive figure of the animal other as a mode of chercher la femme, his work subtly demonstrates the figural inter-implications that shadow the discourses of feline femininity (involving both sex and species difference) in efforts to meet and face animate alterity. Derrida's theoretical practice can be understood to be "always already" queer theory, if queer theory is understood in one of its valences, that is, as an immaterial de-normativization that works at the level of language, thought, and ideology to critique, but in a viral fashion, by replicating terms and repurposing them so that their operation moves down paths that are overgrown with the bushes of normative philosophical thought. 2 These paths are inscriptions, they don't quite open up; but they leave-or are-traces, and can be followed, like the tracks that Derrida is following in The Animal. Key terms that have emerged from deconstructive gestures include queer, though "queer," I think, carries with it-as the wind does scent-faint but specific whiffs of sex/sexual identity/sexuality. Derrida thus helps us to understand how theory is always already queer, and to affirm this queerness further. Derrida's later work that moves toward the non-human living also has the potential to invest another queer theoretical domain-let's call it animal theory-with a meditation on subjectivity that brings with it traditions of Western philosophizing on the human and non-human. Animal theory is a queer theory in this respect: that it displaces humanism, de-normativizes subjectivity, and turns us toward not difference but differences, one of the most emphatic of Derrida's lessons having been the impossibility of a reference to "the" animal in favor of singular, differential, abyssal relations. 3 Derrida's thinking on-about and with-animals, by displacing the humanist subject (in both anthropocentric and universalist senses), can thus assist the ethical aspirations of a queer theory devoted to refashioning that subject in

In ‘L'Animal que donc je suis’, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and other animals, human faultiness becomes a sign of our exclusive capacity for self-consciousness, freedom and awareness of mortality. While Derrida's argument is compelling, he neglects to explore the connection between the human domination of animals and the male domination of women. Throughout ‘L'Animal’, Derrida equivocates between ‘man’ and ‘humanity,’ and between the biblical figures of Ish and Adam. In so doing, he repeats a gesture that he himself has insightfully criticized in other philosophers, such as Levinas. By articulating the distinctions that Derrida elides, I suggest a way of reading Genesis which avoids this difficulty, but also continues Derrida's project.

Research in Phenomenology, 2008

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be s...

Somatechnics, 2018

Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) invites a way of looking that coincides with work done by scholars of feminist new materialism with an eye toward queering binary and static concepts of species, gender, and the relation between them. A close look at one fleeting, slow-motion image of horses racing on a track reveals a pattern of ‘diffraction,’ in the critically productive sense that Karen Barad uses the term, such that we see neither camera movement, human movement, or animal movement proper, but movement that is ‘of’ all three bodies, but not ‘in’ any given one. The film perpetually defers the dichotomy between animal and human as it is classically conceived in order to reconfigure it. That diffractive pattern recurs throughout the film, in its use of slow motion, lateral camera movements, and the overlapping of multiple movements and rhythms. Throughout its running time, The Lobster suspends the process of becoming in motion, emphasizing the experiential aspect of this ‘-ing’ that bodies do. The film draws vision sideways, rippling and redoubling itself; in the process, it shifts attention from a human state or an animal state – states that, according to conventional logic, exist on one side or another of a dividing line, and which certain types of movement might transcend – to transitivity, or the movement of movement itself.

Matter. Journal of New Materialist Research, 2021

Drawing on a body of literature that considers narrative meaning emerging in intraspecies entanglements, in this paper I read Gwen John's letters revolving around her relationship with the many cats she lived with throughout her life. I am particularly interested in throwing light at moments when a woman's body makes strong connections with the animal's body blurring the boundaries between humans and nonhumans through a cosmological ethics of care. In doing so, I follow trails of Deleuze's and Guattari's idea of becoming-animal, as it is fleshed out through a narrative analysis of a modernist woman artist's letters.

This paper argues for a reversal: from the thinking mind's abstractions back to the affective body's perceptual sensorium. For, it is constantly ignored that perceptual orders of pre-linguistic communication have the ability to undermine representational epistemologies, at least insert doubt, hesitation. Should one open up to, listen and allow the direct communication of the pre-epistemic semiosis of "animal" affects and the postepistemic soteria of "mystic" affects that are unfurling 24/7, then representational epistemologies may be revolutionized. However, to engage in this "perceptual turn" and move beyond representation back to these 'always-already' perceptual 'contacts' involves the difficulty of not "thinking anew", but of cultivating attentional intensities of listening and wonder (that displace the "European" ego) over merely thinking of "alternative epistemologies" (that maintain the "European's" ego's presumed universal voice to name reality for itself and others). Should the transformation of attention displace and discipline the thinking self then a more realistic source for change may begin to arise. The transformation of the self via these sensorial and intuitive affects rather than through language forms a lacuna for western subjectivity.

Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology, ed. Stephen Moore, 2014

The opening chapter in DIVINANIMALITY: ANIMAL THEORY, CREATURELY THEOLOGY, ed. Stephen D. Moore, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014),[pp. 17-35], is an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of animality in THE ANIMAL, THAT THEREFORE, I AM and in THE BEAST AND THE SOVEREIGN and what it means for the tradition of ethics that has waged war on animality, assumed sovereignty, distorted vision, and how Derrida points in new directions of relationship and spirituality, as well as how this analysis complements Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of inter-animality and inter-corporeality.

In 1974, the Catalan artist Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950) presented in Barcelona, Imatges del zoo, an installation evoking provocative tension between freedom and captivity, nature and culture, civilization and cruelty. In order to criticize living conditions in zoos, the exhibit combined photographic documents on zoological parks with live caged animals—including Miralles herself, who was locked in a cage, thus becoming both agent and part of the artistic artifact. One year earlier, Miralles had explored this very kind of critical blurring of borders (human and animal, life and death, natural and artificial, etc.) in the exhibit Naturaleses naturals, in which she mixed pebbles, grass, a tree, sand, two live hens, and hundreds of live snails with stuffed birds and pigeons. In Matances (1976-1977) the artist presented a series of photomontages that included works depicting dead animals. Following the path of the field of Animal Studies, which problematizes dichotomies as subject/object or animate/inanimate, my contribution aims to explore the continuities of being in Miralles’ work. The uninterrupted connection between animals, bodies, natural elements, objects, and other aliens (such as the tree-woman and the dressed tree, two of her most significant performances) reveals an idea of subjectivity that goes beyond the humanist paradigm. It also promotes a rethinking of the notion of alterity, which means no longer what is alien to the self: it conveys, on the contrary, the idea that otherness is a necessary condition of one’s identity.

At a distance of more ten years from publication (2000 French/2005 English translation), with this essay I will re-read, comment and discuss, in different way and in form of anthological sketch, the Derridean volume ‘On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy’, focusing in particular on its ‘tangents and its metonymies’, its manifold entanglements with the metaphysics of touch and bodily connections. Making use of the geometrical figure of the tangent, Derrida affirms that "[if] philosophy has touched the limit [my emphasis-J. D. ]. of the ontology of subjectivity, this is because philosophy has been led to this limit”. To touch is to touch a limit, a limit without depth or surface. How have we regarded touching in the past? The body? My thesis, here, is that if Derridean reflection remains mostly anchored to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, it is inspired nevertheless by a different deconstructive gesture/s similar to different geometric tangents (the deconstructive practice is similar to the tracing of many tangents). Discussing in particular Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Derrida’essay ‘Deconstruction of Christianity’ and devoting an entire section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels, Derrida gives us numerous and special considerations on deconstruction and the deconstruction of touch in Christianity, admitting as well the enormity of this task. A reflection on the Kas Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” will follow in an exemplary way. Following a discussion of touch and the body in both animal and human spheres, in the closing section of the essay, I will comment on the Patrick Llored’s essay A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida, recently published in A Companion to Derrida (2014). This study addresses highly topical questions such as: ‘What does it teach us about touch, but also about the body and the life of the animal? To what extent is it capable of renewing our knowledge [connaissance] of non-human life and of generating an animal ethics reconceived from top to bottom? If touching is coextensive with the living body, that implies not only that we place the haptical question at the centre of reflection on the animal, but also that we take into account the consequence that is most disruptive for us today (A Companion, p. 512). And conclude along with Patrick Llored that the question of touch promises to transform everything we have understood until now about animality.