A concern with the presence of the animal in literary and philosophical texts has played a central role within a large number of Derrida's last writings. As will be seen the question of the animal – a question posed for and within deconstruction – can be located within deconstruction itself. In other words, it is not as though the animal is merely another topic to be taken up. There is a strong interrelationship between the history of philosophy and the continual positioning and repositioning of the animal within it. The latter comprises what has already been identified as the figure of the animal within philosophy (the philosophical tradition's creation and incorporation of the animal). As the project of deconstruction has taken as one of its defining ambits of operation the history of metaphysics, as the latter is conventionally understood, to take up that history is already to engage with the history of the animal within philosophy, i.e. with the animal's figured presence within the philosophical. As such, it is possible to begin with the question of deconstruction precisely because that question already involves a relation to the conventions of the history of philosophy. Beginning with deconstruction therefore is to begin with its presence as a question.
The question – what is deconstruction? – precisely because it eschews a concern with the essence and as a result does not work with the presumption that the question itself harbours deconstruction's own sense of propriety, stages, from the start, the concerns that are addressed by deconstruction. The staging and the address pertain both to the form of the question as well as to its specific content. Once both the language of essences and theories of reference have been displaced, a displacing occurring in the name of deconstruction, then answering questions of this nature, the question after deconstruction, is to acknowledge the presence of a question that remains to be answered. Rather than working with the assumption of an already given answer, or even the criteria in relation to which any answer would have to be developed, there would need to be another beginning. This for Derrida is inextricably bound up with the ‘event’. Of the latter he writes that
there is only the event where it is not awaited [ça n'attend pas] where one no longer waits, where the coming of that which happens interrupts the awaiting.1
Such a set up gives rise to a reformulation of the question: what is naming given a deconstruction of metaphysics? Accepting the exigency of such a question, an exigency that recognises the absence of any pre-given answer, means that the question should be viewed as opening up thought as it resists the already present determinations that the question of identity traditionally brings with it. Allowing for this opening positions a concern with deconstruction in relation to modes of thought as opposed to the continual exegesis of Derrida's writings. While those modes can be provisionally identified with the philosophical, it is equally the case that what can then be developed is deconstruction. The point of departure is in this instance a specific text by Derrida. What has to be taken up, however, are the demands arising from that particular text. If deconstruction is, among other things, the creation of openings for thought – deconstruction's event – the project of deconstruction entails the creation of the complex weave in which modes of repetition intersect with forms of invention. The opening takes up the way Derrida's engagement with ‘play’ (jeu) and ‘interpretation’, as they appear in his 1966 text ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, form an integral part of a deconstruction of ‘humanism’.2 Such a deconstruction brings into question the assumed centrality of anthropocentrism within the history of philosophy.
There are two assumptions at work within the anthropocentric bias that pervades the history of philosophy. The first is that philosophy's traditional concern with the animal was to specify that which is proper to human being. This occurred as part of the latter's radical differentiation from the animal. The second, which has already emerged in the earlier engagements with Heidegger and Blanchot, is that the properly human is situated without relation to the animal. As such not only is the animal refused the position of other to the human (where alterity brings with it an already present sense of relation), its death cannot be authentic. The death of the animal is inscribed within an identity-giving logic in which the identity that is given involves the necessarily human. The animal is sacrificed to this end. From the first instance therefore a deconstruction of humanism is already to take up philosophy's hold on both the animal and animality.
Derrida's text opens with ‘play’.3 More significantly, the opening is with the nature of the relationship between ‘play’ and representation. That relation is at work within interpretation. This is not a simple beginning as play and interpretation have already staged specific concerns. As such, play as that which is positioned counter to representation has a type of continuity within the philosophical. What the continuity of play brings in to consideration, however, are the stakes of play itself. The term ‘play’ is marked in advance. Derrida situates it as much in relation to the ‘indefinite’ as he does to the ‘indeterminate’. In the context of this chapter, rather than pursue play's structural setting, what will be taken up is the relationship between play and what is identified by Derrida as ‘the name of man’ (le nom de l'homme). The significance of this identification is that it demonstrates that humanism is articulated within the concepts and the language of metaphysics. Therefore a concern with naming and thus the position of naming within philosophy – a concern already reiterated in the formulation ‘the name of man’ – is central to any understanding of how the name ‘man’ is deployed and, as importantly, how its position is secured.
Two passages provide the setting for pursuing this analysis. The first, from Derrida's examination of the place of representation in the work of Artaud, involves the relationship between representations, limits and forms of finality.
Because it has always already begun, representation therefore has no end [fin]. But the closure [la clôture] of that which does not have an end [fin] can be thought. Closure [La clôture] is the circular limit within which the repetition of difference repeats itself indefinitely. That is to say its space of play [son espace de jeu].4
Central to the argument presented in this passage is the relationship between repetition, as a stated concern, and what could be described as the implicit temporality of the ‘indefinite’. The second passage occurs at the end of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ and pertains in the first instance to the two differing senses of interpretation that traverse the broad concept of ‘interpretation’ and in the second to issues arising from a direct consideration of ‘sign’ and ‘play’. The first sense of interpretation is defined by the project of uncovering and deciphering truths or revealing origins. The second sense, which for Derrida is positioned initially in relation to Nietzsche, has an importantly different orientation. It begins to displace the hold of ‘man’ and representation over play.
The other which is no longer turned towards the origin, affirms play and tried to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, throughout his entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.5
Derrida adds in relation to these two different senses of interpretation that it is not simply a matter of choice, as though the philosophical project can be circumscribed and repositioned by opting for one rather than the other, and as though choice was positioned outside the field in which the decision took place. Such a move would have to assume the absence of an already present sense of co-implication. Hence, when it is a question of delineating how a response to this difference is to be staged, he argues that ‘from the start it is necessary to try and think the common ground and the differance of this difference.’6 While Derrida goes on to note the possibilities that this opens up, what is of interest at this stage is the relation between this definition of the philosophical task and what has been identified as ‘the name of man’.
There are two elements that need to be noted. In the first instance the name, thus actions done in the name of humanism or a prevailing anthropocentrism, need neither name ‘man’ nor the human. Indeed, what the name names may be silent in regard to ‘man’ since the ‘dream of presence’, origins and ‘the end of play’, the ‘end’ here would be ‘play’ having been overpowered, can be taken as defining anthropocentrism. ‘Man’, along with the figure of the animal, may be an unnamed presence within that definition. The second element therefore which as has already been intimated is central to the name's history has been the continual definition of human being as inherently distinct from both the animal and animality in general. The relation to the animal is not a contingent matter. Human propriety is established, in general, by and through its continual differentiation from the animal (the work of the without relation).
The substantive question still remains: how is ‘the name of man’ to be understood? The question addresses naming and as has been indicated writes philosophy's recurrent concern with the link between naming and justification into its already staged encounter with the animal. Moreover, the animal can always be reintroduced into the philosophical such that an account of animals would deploy the same metaphysical system that was used elsewhere and which accounted for their exclusion, an exclusion occurring as the result of the operative presence of the without relation. There are therefore two related components at work here. The first is the definition of the human as distinct from the animal. In this instance the absence or presence of either the ‘soul’, ‘world’ or ‘logos’ (in all their permutations) is central.7 The second, as noted above, is that the process of accounting for animal kinds and thus divisions within the domain of animals prompts questions inevitably presented within the same metaphysical structure as questions concerning specificity and thus the essential in general. A clear instance of the latter occurs in Plato's Meno. In trying to define the specificity of virtue – not the differing modalities of virtue but virtue itself – Socrates switches tack and uses an animal as an example, asking in relation to the ‘bee’ what is its essential being (ousia) (72a). The force of this question is that it then defines difference in relation to an unchanging conception of the essential. Within the argumentative structure of the Dialogue it is this move that allows the virtues to be reintroduced. What Socrates is after is the ‘form’ (eidos) of virtue (72c). While the answer will be different in the case of the bee, the of the question has an important similarity that comes to the fore when the question of naming returns. To name the ‘bee’ and to name ‘virtue’ are only possible if, in both instances, the essential is named. For Plato, as is clear from arguments elsewhere in the Meno and the Cratylus among other Dialogues, naming demands the essential.
What this means is that the animal is only included in terms that account either for generation or classification.8 That inclusion is itself connected to the related exclusion of a possible recalcitrant animality. Were the latter to be introduced it would not simply complicate strategies of exclusion it would also work to undo the metaphysical system that equates animal presence with differing modalities of classification. If animal presence is limited in this way – i.e. it is present only within a metaphysics of classification – it means that human being remains untouched by the animal. The animal and the human, or to be more precise human and non-human animals, remain without any relation to each other as classification includes them in a way that works to hold them apart. This position is, of course, a reiteration of the constituting without relation that can be taken as defining the location of the human with regard to animality.
The force of Derrida's argument concerning the ‘name of man’, an argument that defines an already present interconnection between metaphysics and humanism, entails that an engagement with one is ipso facto an engagement with the other. As such, the question of modes of thinking that are not determined by the tradition of metaphysics can be approached from either direction. Moreover, what is also established is a relationship in which it becomes possible to return to the question of the specifically human, knowing that the question would no longer have been posed either in terms of essences or in a way that delimits the human, a delimitation that is itself a form of classification, in its radical, thus all encompassing, differentiation from the animal. Indeed, responding to the question of the specifically human would have been made possible by taking up the position advanced by Derrida in relation to the two different forms of interpretation. The claim is that the project that emerges from these opening considerations demands thinking the nature of the difference between the human and the animal. In sum, therefore, it will be argued that, as a consequence, what matters is not the difference between the animal and the human but how that difference is itself to be thought.9 Hence, the project here will be to establish a link between the conception of ‘closure’ (la clôture) at work in the passage from Derrida cited above, and the movement that connects affirmation and the attempt to ‘pass beyond man and humanism’.10
The reason for concentrating on the question of ‘closure’ is that it appears in Derrida's text on Artaud's theatre in terms of its differentiation from any simple positing of an end. As has been mentioned, what is distanced by that differentiation is a conception of other possibilities within the philosophical as arising from the mere assertion of a counter move. Derrida's formulation is important since what it affirms is the work of ‘play’ thought within the setting of an indefinite (in other word, the always to be defined) and thus indeterminate (the always to be determined) modality of repetition. While not argued for in the context in which it is advanced the formulation allows for the continuity of ‘play’ though now positioned predominantly within the affirmation of repetition. What this then entails is the location of a discontinuous form of continuity as given within the primacy of relations. This conception of relationality, it will be argued, is of fundamental importance to a mode of philosophical thinking whose point of orientation is deconstruction.
The history of metaphysics envisages a state of affairs in which the continuity of play will have been brought to an end. What is central here is not the impossibility of this envisaged undertaking, an impossibility established by its deconstruction thereby opening up the link between deconstruction as a strategy within philosophy and what Derrida identifies in later writings as the ‘incalculable’.11 Centrality needs to be given to what this understanding of metaphysics actually attempts to end. In other words, more is at stake than the claim that the tradition of metaphysics aspires to forms of finality. The position here is that what matters is that those forms refuse a conception of relationality and repetition that is positioned by the ‘indeterminate’ and the ‘indefinite’. Accepting this as a point of departure moves the concern away from having to do no more than follow arguments internal to Derrida's texts. Those arguments need to be opened up to a broader set of trajectories. What defines the latter can be described as working with the primordiality of relation; moreover, it is a primordiality that allows the animal to play a decisive role within the construction and thus the task of the philosophical. Nonetheless, it should still be noted that the already present nature of relationality is a topos that is itself intrinsic to the project of deconstruction.
Central to the history of metaphysics has been the attempt to position and define that which is proper to the being of being human.12 However, the sense of propriety in question continues to be established by setting up a position in which the human is marked by the constitutive absence of a relation to animality (animality including both human animality as well as non-human animals). This absence, as indicated, is the founding without relation. The animal brings relationality to the fore. Moreover, the animal opens up the possibility for distancing the hold of what can be described as the traditional metaphysics of relation, a position in which the without relation figures as a constitutive element and as such creates an opening in which there can be another thinking of relation. In order to develop what is meant by relationality and allow the question of the animal to remain central, §47 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right will be taken as the point of departure.13 This section of Hegel's text stages the animal and the human in ways that exemplify the complex problems of relationality. It occurs in the discussion of ‘Property’ within the general treatment of ‘Abstract Right’. One of the primary concerns of this part of Hegel's text is the relation that the person has to itself. It is precisely this relation thought in terms of a form of possession that defines the self's relation to itself. What is of significance is that the relation has to be willed. It cannot be passive. It is the lack of will on the one hand and the animal's relation to pure externality on the other that establishes one of the fundamental divides between human and non-human animals in Hegel.
The section of text from the Philosophy of Right reads as follows (the Addition (Zusatz) has also been included).
As a person, I am myself an immediate individual; if we give further precision to this expression, it means in the first instance that I am alive in this bodily organism which is my external existence universal in content and undivided, the real pre-condition of every further determined mode of existence [bestimmten Dasein ist]. But, all the same, as person, I possess my life and my body [als Person habe ich mein Leben und Körper], like other things, only in so far as my will is in them.
The fact that, considered as existing not as the concept explicit but only as the concept in its immediacy, I am alive and have a bodily organism, depends on the concept of life and on the concept of mind as soul – on moments which are taken over here from the Philosophy of Nature and from Anthropology.
I possess [Ich habe] the members of my body, my life, only so long as I will to possess them. An animal cannot maim or destroy itself, but a man can.
Addition: animals are in possession [haben] of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it [aber sie haben kein Recht auf ihr Leben, weil sie es nicht wollen].
The ‘person’ possesses life and thus takes ownership and reciprocally responsibility for their body. The person therefore is defined in terms of a type of relationality. The ‘I’ that is alive within the ‘bodily organism’ is implicated in an already present relation. Note, however, that the relation is between internality and externality defined as occurring in the same form. The body is externality. The body, however, is a possession. The possessor of the body is defined as ‘a person’. The ‘bodily organism’, Hegel notes, is the precondition for all other relations. Those other relations are ‘determined modes of existence’. A clear instance of this relation – a relation that presupposes bodily presence – is the dialectical relation between Master and Slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit.14 (While it cannot be pursued in this instance a question posed by this relation is the extent to which the structure of recognition that defines that relation between self and other actually involves the presence of bodies. It may be the case that bodies, once again, are no more than a mere precondition.) In sum, the determination that defines the master/slave relation does not entail a form of having or possession. It may, however, presuppose it.
In the case of the formulation in the Philosophy of Right the importance of relation lies in the definition of the ‘person’ in terms of a relation that is internal to the person. Equally, animals are defined in the same way. Animals possess themselves. Their ‘soul’ is in their bodies. Hence there is a relation. And yet, as soon as the affinity is announced it is withdrawn. The absence of a willed relation between the ‘I’ and its life or body in the animal means that it does not have ‘a right’ (Recht) to that life. The willed relation provides the connection between person and life. The capacity for the animal to be killed cannot be accounted for in terms of the animal's inability to possess its body. The animal cannot be equated with mere bodily existence. Rather, the potential for the animal to be killed is due to the absence within the conception of possession proper to the animal of a willed relation between body and soul. There are therefore two sites in which relationality is defined internally. Moreover, the two sites differ radically in regard to the absence and presence of the will. The will needs to be understood as a locus of activity. Willing is a continual relation between the body and soul in the ‘person’. The absence of the will entails that the continuity of animal life has a necessarily distinct form. What this means is, of course, that the nature of the difference between the ‘person’ and the animal is such that there cannot be a relation between them. It is clear that the question of how this state of without relation is to be understood is a question fundamental to any sustained conception of a philosophical positioning that takes relationality as an original condition while indicating at the same time the importance of the animal to such a concern. (With regard to the animal, as was noted, the without relation is the relation of non-relation.)
‘Man’ (‘Der Mensch’) comes into its own through the realisation of a ‘potentiality’. There is a ‘taking possession of oneself’ (Besitznehmen) (§57). In the process ‘Man’ will ‘become his own property’. As such there is a limit in which natural existence takes on a form of determination. This limit opens up as freedom and thus the basis of Ethical Life and is continually defined in terms of internal and external relations that position both the animal as well human animality as an essential outside. Animals have a conception of ‘law’ (Gesetz). They only have it, however, ‘as instinct’ (als Instinkt) (§209). What limits instinct and thus that which functions as the limitation of animal law is the impossibility that its contents can be known. The absence of this knowledge means the necessary separation from forms of universality. What has been designated as the without relation with regard to its operation within the Philosophy of Right needs to be situated within this network of concerns.
The without relation sustains a form of difference. In other words, the difference between the animal and the human is defined in terms of the without relation. Moreover, it is not just a definition, it allows for the death of the animal. The ‘will’, ‘knowledge’ and an already delimited outside work together to construct the locus of difference. If there is an element that complicates this set up then it is the way Hegel will define the ‘sensual man’. The animal and the ‘sensual man’ (the latter is a position that can be reformulated in terms of human animality) have a similar status. Neither can ‘transcend’ their determined and delimited state in order to see themselves, to use the formulation of the Philosophy of Nature, ‘in thought as universal’ (§350). In animals, this is due to the dominance of ‘instincts’ and ‘drives’. In the ‘sensual man’ it is the failure of the ‘will’. The reciprocity in this instance needs to be noted. The failure of the ‘will’ is the triumph of the instincts and the drives, hence the triumph of animality within ‘Man’. Once the will triumphs then animality in ‘Man’ is overcome. Overcoming is establishing the setting in which ‘Man’ cannot have any form of relation to the animal and, as significantly, to what can be identified as a recalcitrant animality, i.e. the residual presence of the human as animal. While the failure of the will and thus the emergence of animality within the human introduces a complication in the process of the without relation what is established nonetheless is a form of difference. If the form were to be questioned and thus the nature of the difference to be examined then another sense of complication emerges.
In §47, as has been noted, Hegel argues that the ‘I’ in having, possessing, its body and thus in being in possession of its life is able to cause self-harm. Possessing its body, identifying its body with its life (the latter also being owned), the ‘I’ is able to dispense with the life through an act of choice. Self-harm, even the destruction of self, presuppose these relations. The animal's inability in this regard is due to the dominance of feeling. Intuition and feeling account for its worldly presence nonetheless the animal cannot be ‘aware of itself in thought’.15 The difficulty here is neither the assumption in relation to what the animal does or does not know, nor is it provided by the necessary generality that the word ‘animal’ brings into consideration. The difficulty arises for other reasons even though both these points need to be noted.
The difficulty that emerges has to do with the way difference is constituted. Difference, in this context, is the without relation. The problem is not that there aren't differences between human and non-human animals. Rather it is the equation of that difference with the exclusivity of the without relation. Difference thus constituted has to establish a border that is defined from the start not only by the necessity for a form of security but also by the impossibility of any type of porosity. Such a conception of difference is constituted through a founding act of separation, an act that works with definitions. The animal for Hegel is pure particularity. Human animality can be overcome in the human and thus through the assertion of will it can be negated. The animal itself is already positioned such that any relation to the human – a relation that would have to take place in terms of either the specific logic of recognition or the more general work of negation – is marked by an ineliminable contingency. Animals as ‘individual subjects’ have a relation to externality. However, it is not a relation to external others – the animal, for Hegel, is from the start deprived of relations of alterity – but to external objects. However, the animal, Hegel argues, in the Philosophy of Nature (§351) is also in relation with itself. The animal
because it is a self-subsistent self is equally in relationship with itself, it positions its being for-self as distinct from [its] non-organic nature, in relationship with it. It interrupts this relationship with the outside world, because it is satisfied, because it is sated – because it has sensation, is a self for itself. In sleep the animal submerges itself in its identity with Universal Nature, in the waking state it forms relationships with individual organisms but also breaks off this relationship; and the life of the animal is the alternating fluctuation between these two determinations.
The relations into which the animal enters are always between particulars. Indeed, there is an inherent necessity that this be the form of relationality. The specific determination of a particular will always have to be given. Moreover, that determination is not given by the animal. The animal's relation is continually marked by utility. For Hegel the animal cannot recognise itself in that relation, if recognition were to mean it would have taken itself over as animal. Nor, moreover, can the animal grant existence through the process of recognition.16 The impossibility of the animal being present – not mere presence but the presence of production – within a dialectic of recognition further reinforces the position in which the animal cannot figure as an ‘other’.
While the animal has a relation to that which is external to it, the limit of the relation is the interconnection between animality and sensation. The animal is only ever connected to the external in terms of need. Once need no longer pertains then relationality loses its necessity. The animal then sleeps. As such, that which is external to the animal cannot take on the quality of an other. There is, however, an important reciprocity here. Precisely because the animal is able to be killed, it has the quality of an object and therefore not as the other to the human,17 (thereby reiterating the impossibility of thinking, in this context, the animal as other). The without relation works therefore to eliminate both the possibility of animal others as well as there being that which for the animal would be other to it. Taken together they eliminate, through a form of immediacy the space in which it is possible to think the alterity of the animal. The refusal of a connection between animality and alterity is not just a consequence of the without relation, it is the form that it takes. The merely ethical response to this position in which the animal is simply granted the status of ‘other’ fails to understand that the animal's exclusion from the domain of alterity is not itself an ethical position. It results from the way the without relation works to establish the propriety of human being.
While they are still to be developed there are two direct conclusions that can be drawn here. The first is that the without relation is the mark or form of a difference in which the quality of that difference fails to be thought. In other words, the ground of difference is itself internal to the definitions that establish it. (Difference, in such a context, only arises in its being posited.) The second is connected insofar as were difference to be thought – a thinking that would define an importantly different philosophical project – then a relation would have to be introduced. While the second of these conclusions appears obvious what it necessitates is the introduction of a relation that is not the simple negation of the without relation. The reason why this is the case involves the following considerations. The inability of the animal to function as an other and thus the related failure to position the animal within a genuine relation of same and other cannot be overcome simply by insisting that the animal be able to occupy such a position, as though all that were involved was the move from the absence of a relation to its presence. The absence of a relation means that difference was simply posited rather than thought, reciprocally therefore the introduction of relation would involve the introduction of another conception of difference. However, rather than being introduced such that difference did no more than occupy a place in a simply posited relation, difference would need to be reconsidered in its own right. In other words, recalling Derrida, what would matter is the difference of this difference.
A way into such a project would begin with the recognition that the absence of relation was a self-defined finality. The introduction of a relation, a move in which the with would be the key term, would demand taking up the temporality of the now emergent relation. Rather than the continuity of the without relation there would be the need to think difference as the continuity of a relation. In the first instance the separation would have occurred such that the without relation, as a formal condition, involves a founding and constituting act of separation. In the case of the second, in which relationality can be rethought and, as a consequence, reformulated, the border would have moved and thus would have opened itself up such that continuity rather than being simply passive would have an inherent form of activity. The activity – thus continuity – in question would be defined in terms of negotiation. (Relations as mediate would have taken the place of immediacy.) Once it can be argued that the with is not the negation of the without that defines the without relation then, as has been intimated, what comes to be reposed is the question of the with. Moreover, responding to the with entails taking up its ‘relation’ to the indefinite and indeterminate, (two terms which can now be seen as the marks of the continuity of mediation). The key to the with lies as much in its refusal of an identity through negation – a formulation in which the ‘with’ would be no more than the negation of the ‘without’ of the without relation – as it is the inherent interconnection between it and repetition. (This interconnection not only repositions the with it re-enforces its actative dimension.)
In the opening section of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Derrida responds to Levi-Strauss’ argument that the move to the ‘sign’ overcomes the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible with the counter-argument that the sign is itself ‘determined by this opposition’.18 Derrida's engagement with ‘structure’ is not in terms of its actuality. Rather, the concentration is on what it has presupposed, limited and delimited. Structure's insistence on a centre and thus on a fixed point of origin necessitates that, in Derrida terms, ‘the principle of organisation of the structure limits what might be called the play of the structure [le jeu de la structure].’19 Integral to the operation of Derrida's own text is the movement between the recognition of the impossibility of a simple counter-assertion on the one hand and the commitment to the already present possibility of ‘play’ on the other. Even though not argued for explicitly in the text, ‘play’ in this instance needs to be understood as a potentiality that has been constrained in advance. Even though it means attributing to this formulation a terminology that is not automatically Derrida's, what this repositioning of ‘play’ entails is that the work of deconstruction becomes, in part, the engagement with that potentiality. Engagement is as much noting that which delimits as it is tracing the effect of its release. One way in which that engagement can be understood is in terms of a return. However, the return in question would be neither to an origin nor to an already determined understanding of philosophy's terminology or modes of procedure. The return can be understood as the ‘event’ announced at the beginning of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’. The ‘event’ is described by Derrida in the following terms.
The event of rupture … would perhaps be produced when the structurality of the structure [la structuralité de la structure] had to start to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in every sense of the word.20
This formulation contains a number of significant elements. Three, all of which are interrelated, need to be noted. In the first instance there is the explication of the process of coming to be thought in terms of repetition. In the second, disruption, hence the ‘event’, is a modality of repetition. Finally, the object of thought is not ‘structure’ as though it were either a given or an end in itself but what has already been identified as ‘the structurality of the structure’. The force of the overall argument can be followed along two interconnected paths. In the first instance what is important is the movement into structure. In other words, the process of structuration becomes the locus of thought and as such the rethinking. The second is that once the movement is thought and thus prior to structure taking form and thus already involved in the after-effect – again a process – which is the attempted restriction of play, there is an almost axiomatic severance with both determination and definition. The severance in question has the quality of an origin. However, the origin is not a point of origination. Rather, it is an original play of differences within which difference can be both positioned and thought. Furthermore, this original play becomes a way of arguing that the indeterminate and the indefinite always precede determinations and thus modes of finitude. In sum, finitude is an after-effect.
There is an important reciprocity here insofar as this sense of original play is connected to the infinite. However, the complex problem that emerges is how that infinite is to be thought and how, moreover, the relationship between an infinite defined in terms of potentiality and finitude is to be understood? Beginning to respond to the demand of these questions necessitates pursuing the already noted interconnection, and therefore a matrix of concerns, between repetition, relation and the indefinite and the indeterminate. This will be undertaken within the setting provided by animality's recalcitrance since it involves, as has been indicated, an affirmation of the primordiality of relation.
Allowing for the recalcitrance of animality is already to blur a clear distinction between human and non-human animals. The justification for such a move can be located within the philosophical tradition itself insofar as there is a set of terms – ‘sentiment’, ‘feeling’, ‘sensuality’, ‘memory’, etc. – that unite, if only fleetingly, the human and the animal. Precisely because they unite they identify a setting in which a strict divide would then need to be introduced, a divide that, while it may maintain human animality, indeed allowing for the development of human biology as part of the philosophical (Aristotle, Descartes, etc.), will nonetheless effect a separation such that animality can never be identified with that which is proper to human being.21 However, the presence of moments of overlap or connection between the human and animality indicates that the latter is a term that involves, at the outset, an automatic imbrication between the human and the non-human. Equally, an imbrication, thus an overlap rather than an identity, also pertains in the case of the voice. While the human voice can be identified with reason (logos), it is also the case that there are forms of animal communication that have a connection to types of reasoning.22 Aristotle argues, for example, that both humans and certain animals (e.g. bees, wasps, ants) have a sense of the polis (which will be different in each instance) since they act together with a common goal.23 While this is a position that cannot be generalised – animals, for Aristotle, have differing relations both to the political and to practical wisdom – what it indicates is the presence of complexities that have to be overcome. Again, the originally complex relations could be taken as the setting in which the animal/human relation – though it would become relations – was worked out. Were that to occur then the with, itself the site of a founding plurality, would have gained ascendancy. Occupying such a position would mean that rather than the without relation determining the philosophical task, original difference would have given the philosophical a radically different configuration.
The without relation has to work to efface the marks of animality's presence, even though it is predicated on a founding event of plurality, an event occasioning it yet effaced in the actualisation of a form of singularity. The without relation should be understood therefore as an attempt to formalise and thus make substantive an already present informal set of relations. As part of the same process the without relation, as that which is imposed on the site of an original plurality, singularises the relation in the sense that the divide is then between the human and the animal such that each element of the divide takes on a single and thus unified presence. In the case of the animal this may involve later distinctions between the tamed and the wild; nonetheless, what endures is the singularity of the animal in its opposition to the human. Reciprocally, what is also introduced is a unified and singular conception of human being. Taken as a whole not only is the conception of the animal/human relation (a relation positioned by the without relation) undone by the affirmation of with, it is also the case that the conception of human and animal demanded by the without relation is undone and thus reworked at the same time. The with reintroduces relationality such that it can then be argued that this reintroduction, itself a form of repetition, is the affirmation of an always already present relation. Again, the relation will have always been relations. ‘Play’ is one of a number of possible names for this plurality.
Continuing this project involves accounting for this plurality. As a beginning it needs to be understood as reiterating the original condition that is refused in the move to the singularisation of both human and animal identity. The way into this particular conception of plurality is provided by its status as always ‘already present’. Hence, the question that arises here concerns the quality of what has been designated as the ‘already present’. Given what has emerged from the opening consideration of Derrida's text, such a set-up – the insistent presence of the ‘already present’ – would need to be characterised by the indefinite and the indeterminate. Moreover, the move from the already present to forms of presence – a move in which ‘closure’ (clôture) identifies the place of infinite repetition – has to be understood in relation to a reworking of the distinction between potentiality and actuality. The demand that arises, while occurring within deconstruction, would nonetheless need to be addressed back to specific formulations it has been given. An address is of necessity a limit. What arises here, and it arises from following that which is at work in Derrida's argumentative strategies, is a threefold task. What has to be taken up is the following: in the first instance, a conception of the infinite defined in terms of potentiality and finitude as actuality; in the second, a delimitation of the future in terms of the affirmation of a set of relations that are already in play; and finally understanding the event of interruption as a modality of repetition. Allowing these three elements to be developed within a setting that has been explicitly created by the animal's presence within philosophy, a presence no longer structured by the without relation, not only continues deconstruction, understood as a mode of thought characterised by the necessity of an opening that occasions work, it reinforces the place of the animal within the deconstruction of metaphysics.
While an insistence on the relationship between potentiality and finitude may mark a point of divergence from Derrida (if only because it registers the presence of a different philosophical vocabulary), what is of greater interest is the contrast between abstraction as the overcoming of particularity on the one hand, and, on the other, finitude as the after-effect of the relationship between potentiality and actuality. While abstraction has different fields of operation, insofar as Dasein, as an abstraction as set out earlier, operates differently to the conception of ‘man’ at work in the relations that structure the conception of community in Blanchot, it is part of a movement that effaces the hold of the particular while at the same time presenting the particular with a conception of its (the particular's) identity. Hence the link between the work of figures and the differing modes of abstraction. What holding to the originality of potentiality and actuality entails is that not only are identities after-effects, particularity is such an effect. Prior to the particular there is the network of relations allowing for the affirmation of identity. The network is always informal. Nonetheless, its constitutive elements can be dated, described and thus they have a history.
1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Une certaine possibilité impossible de dire l’événement’, in Gad Soussana (ed.), Dire l’événement, est ce possible? (Paris: L'Hartmann, 2001), p. 84 (my translation).
2. There have already been a number of important contributions to a deconstruction of humanism. One of the most sustained and provocative is David Wood's ‘Comment ne pas manger – Deconstruction and Humanism’, in H. Peter Steeves (ed.), Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999). Wood's argument repositions the animal such that it exists for its own sake and thus the question is a relation to the animal given within an overriding structure of responsibility for animals. Part of the argument then leads to vegetarianism. While acknowledging the force of that position the argument deployed here is with the way elements of the history of philosophy constructs the presence of animality. Moreover, Derrida identifies this larger context in a number of places. Emphatically, it occurs in Fichus as part of a discussion of Adorno's argument concerning the comparability between the treatment of Jews and the treatment of animals. See J. Derrida, Fichus (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002), pp. 54–6.
3. While this chapter is concerned with deconstruction as a mode of philosophical work it concentrates, as indicated, on Derrida's 1966 text ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours de sciences humaines’, in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967) (English translation, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); at times the translations have been modified). Henceforth ED and WD respectively. The justification for concentrating exclusively on this text is due to the inherent connection between a deconstruction of humanism and the question of the animal.
4. ED/WD 367/250.
5. ED/WD 427/292.
6. ED/WD 428/292.
7. While there are many examples that join both the ‘soul’ and ‘logos’ the position advanced by Plotinus in the Enneads 1.53 is of particular interest since he argues that ‘true man’ corresponds with the ‘rational soul’. The treatment of the animal and the body involves a complex relation with this identification. While there is a form of compound that brings body (soma) and soul together, the animal and the human are still defined as without relation precisely because of this founding identification.
8. Other instances of this position can be found in Hegel. See, for example, §24 of the Logic and §370 of the Philosophy of Nature (G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)). All subsequent references are in the body of the text. The numbers refer to sections.
9. This is a point that Derrida made in an interview shortly before he died. Having identified the importance of the difference between humans and animals he goes on to argue that his project
is not against [contre] difference, it is against [contre] the oppositional limit which from one side of the frontier would mark the possibility of speech, laughter, the economic, clothing, tears, mourning, death – for Heidegger the animal does not die – and that from the other there is neither the ‘as such’, nor mourning, nor signification, nor response. (Derrida, ‘Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean Luc-Nancy’, Rue Descartes, no. 52 (2006), pp. 86–99, at p. 99)
10. Derrida's other sustained reflection on the question of humanism is ‘Les fins de l'homme’ in Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1972), pp. 129–64.
11. The question of the incalculable is central to the argument advanced in Force de loi (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994) in which Derrida identifies deconstruction with justice. Of specific importance in this text is Derrida's argument that ‘the incalculable justice commands calculation’ [la justice incalculable commade de calculer (61)]. This is an obligation to move from one to the other. While it cannot be taken up in detail in this context what is of genuine interest here is twofold. In the first instance it concerns the way this division recalls a distinction between the infinite and the finite. In the second, while the obligation – in Derrida's terms ‘it is necessary to calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable’ [il faut calculer, négocier le rapport entre le calculable et l'incalculable (62)] – can be expressed in terms of finitude, in this context the resultant calculation is only possible because of an already present sense of the infinite, i.e. the incalculable.
12. This is a philosophical concern that finds expression as much in Descartes’ identification of human being with res cogitans as in Heidegger's insistence on a distinction between individuated bodily existence and Dasein. I have taken up the latter in my ‘Who Dwells? Heidegger and the Place of Mortal Subjects’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, vol. 10 (2001), pp. 80–102.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) (G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Werke 7) ((Frankfort: Suhrkamp, 1986)). All subsequent references are in the body of the essay. The numbers refer to sections.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 111–19.
15. This is the position already noted as occurring in the Philosophy of Nature: see §350.
16. It is not difficult to see Derrida's encounter with the cat that marks the opening of L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006) ‘as a profound meditation on the possible role of the animal within another dialectic of recognition’.
17. For Kant ‘domestic animals’ are products of ‘human labour’. They have the same quality as ‘crops’, precisely because they have been produced. Thus for Kant, animals
can be used, exploited, or consumed (killed). Despite the connection established through work and production humans and animals remain distinct because the human ‘gives consent’ to actions that involve work and production. Humans cannot be herded to war as though they were owned. (And this despite the power of monarchs.) The act of giving consent to war and thus to participation in battles that may result in death occurs because each human unlike an animal is assumed to be a co-legislative member of the State.
While it would be facile to argue that animals ought have the same position, this justification of the killing of animals would be impossible if the without relation no longer functioned and the actual ground of difference had to be thought within the primordiality of relation. See Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice §56 (I. Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice. Part 1 of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999)).
18. ED/WD 412/283.
19. ED/WD 409/278.
20. ED/WD 410/280.
21. Voltaire uses what is being termed here as animality's recalcitrance to make the following observation.
Is it because I speak to you that you judge that I have feelings, memories and ideas? And yet, I am not talking to you, you see me enter my house in an agitated manner, looking for a paper with worry, opening the desk where I remember locking it away and reading it with joy. You judge that I experience the feelings of affliction and of pleasure, and that I have memory and knowledge.
Give the same judgment then to the dog who has lost its master, who with painful cries has searched all the usual paths, who enters the house, agitated, worried, who descends, who goes from room to room, who finally finds in his room the master that he loves, and which is evidenced by his cries, by his jumps and his caresses. (Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), p. 64)
22. I have taken up the question of the relationship between human voice and animal sounds in my ‘Raving Sybils, Signifying Gods: Noise and Sense in Heraclitus. Fragments 92 and 93’, Culture, Theory and Society, vol. 46, no. 1 (2005).
23. While this is a topic that warrants detailed treatment in its own right this position is advanced by Aristotle in his History of Animals (487b).