Notes

Chapter 1

1     Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 1.

2     Timothy Clark, ‘By Heart: A Reading of Derrida’s “Che cos’è la poesia?” Through Keats and Celan’ in Oxford Literary Review, 15:1 (2012): 72, n.1.

3     See Clark, ‘By Heart’, 43.

4     Jacques Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ [1988] in Elizabeth Weber, ed. Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 291.

5     Jacques Derrida, ‘Istrice2: Ick bunn all hier?’ in Elizabeth Weber, ed. Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 302. Schlegel’s fragment – compared to a hedgehog – is entirely isolated and cut off from the world.

6     Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ 295.

7     Ibid.

8     Derrida, qtd. in Derrida, Animal, 36.

9     Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, eds. Veils, trans. Geoff Bennington (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001) 17–92. Compare the classical account in Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ [1927] in On Sexuality, V.7 in the Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1991) 345–58.

10   Derrida, Animal, 37.

11   Jacques Derrida, ‘Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida’ [1984] in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism (London: Methuen, 1987) 196. Described as ‘authorised but authorless’, the seminar depended on the editors’ transcription of Derrida’s remarks, and those editors are unnamed.

12   Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty V. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014) 257.

13   See Ranjanna Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

14   Sigmund Freud, ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ [1917] in On Sexuality, V.7 in the Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1991) 279.

15   Freud, ‘Virginity’, 279, the speculation is with approving reference to the work of Sandor Ferenczi.

16   Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty V. II, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017) 232.

17   Derrida, Death Penalty II, 232–3.

18   Derrida, Animal, 28.

19   Donna J. Haraway, ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary’ [1987] in Simians, Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991) 129.

Chapter 2

1     Jacques Derrida, ‘Mnemosyne’, trans. Cecile Lindsay in Memoires for Paul de Man, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 31.

2     My Talks with Dean Spanley (2008) [Film] Dir. Toa Fraser (UK/NZ: Icon Film). Dean Spanley is now re-published as one volume containing both Lord Dunsany’s novella Dean Spanley and Alan Sharp’s screenplay, ed. Matthew Metcalfe with Chris Smith (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008). The film trailer is accessible here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135968/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. Accessed 22 May 2020.

3     See Tom Tyler, ‘Quia Ego Nominor Leo: Barthes, Stereotypes, and Aesop’s Animals’ in Mosaic, 40:1 (2007): 45–59.

4     One of the first lessons of Jacques Derrida’s work on ‘the animal question’ is that the definite article performs a work of capture designed to police a firm boundary between the human and the animal. See his The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

5     I discuss the vexed relation between ‘trauma studies’ and ‘animal studies’ in ‘Voice’ in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) 518–32.

6     See Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’ [1893] in Studies on Hysteria No. 3 in the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991) 53–72.

7     Hunting for more Tokay, Wrather takes Fisk to the Nawab, who coincidently refers to the Dean as Old Wag Spanley, referring to the name he was known by at Oxford by virtue of his initials (Walther Arthur Graham Spanley).

8     Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo: Some Correspondences Between the Psychical Lives of Savages and Neurotics’ [1913] in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005) 1–166.

9     See Ranjanna Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). There she suggests that ‘psychoanalysis and ethnology participate in the same episteme, one that sustains, through calm violence, the sovereign subject of Europe’ (68).

10   For one of the most helpful commentaries, see Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

11   Derrida, Animal, 36.

12   Derrida references numerous examples in Animal 36–8.

13   See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005).

14   See Freud, ‘Totem & Taboo’, 140–3.

15   Ibid., 128, emphasis added.

16   Freud, ‘Totem & Taboo’, 141. Richard J. Smith strongly states that Darwin himself would not recognize what Freud writes in his name; see ‘Darwin, Freud and the continuing misrepresentation of the Primal Horde’ in Current Anthropology, 57:6 (2016): 838–43. Freud’s gesture is fascinating – to call upon the ‘father of evolution’ to supply an origin that is not there.

17   See Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) 248–57 and Elissa Marder, ‘The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt’ in Parallax, 15:1 (2009): 5–20.

18   See Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Totemism, Regions, and Co-management in Aboriginal Australia’ conference paper at Crossing Boundaries, the Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Vancouver, B.C. 1998. http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/1187/rose.pdf. Accessed 20 May 2020.

19   See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 56–89.

20   Kristeva, Powers, 12–13.

21   Ibid., 61, 63.

22   The narrative of reincarnation might itself be understood as a topic invested in minimising maternity.

23   Kristeva, Powers, 75.

24   Ibid., 102.

25   Ibid.

26   Sharp, 193–4.

27   Compare the very different intimacy between urination, menopausal women and equine hormones in Donna J. Haraway ‘Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability’ in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) 104–16.

28   The Dean says as much later in the film, during one of the ‘animalseances’.

29   With so many doubles structuring this film together with the uncertainty regarding the veracity of the Dean’s memories and the status of reincarnation, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ is strongly evoked. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Art and Literature, V. 14 of The Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985) 336–76.

30   See Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), 123. It is ambiguous as to whether Lippit affirms this view.

31   Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ [1929] in the Penguin Freud Library V.12 Civilization, Society & Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991) 288–9, n.1.

32   Maud Ellmann links Freud’s theory of the human repression of olfaction with his own relationship with Wilhelm Fliess and the latter’s investment in the nasal aetiology of hysteria; see her ‘Noses and Monotheism’ in Maureen O’Connor, ed. Back to the Future of Irish Studies (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011) 165–76.

33   Freud, ‘Civilization’, 289, n.1.

34   Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject,’ in Elizabeth Weber, ed. Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 282.

35   Sara Guyer, ‘Albeit Eating: Towards an Ethics of Cannibalism’ in Angelaki, 2:1 (1997): 64.

36   Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 282. Originally published in Topoi, 7:2 (1988), 113–21.

37   Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 282.

38   Prior to ‘Eating Well’, Derrida published ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’ [1977] in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986) xi–xlviii. ‘Fors’ was thus originally published only two years after the publication of Derrida’s first major critical engagement with Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Facteur de la Verité’[1975] in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 411–98. Scholarship has yet to grapple with the relations between these colossal essays, though that might begin with the long and pointed parenthesis in which Derrida addresses Lacan’s reputed repudiation of ‘Fors’. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign V. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009) 145.

39   Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 282.

40   Ibid., 280.

41   See Lynn Turner, ‘Insect Asides’ in Lynn Turner, ed. The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) 54–69.

42   Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 277.

43   Ibid., 280. Levinas’s inability to think the ‘face’ as anything other than human has been the topic of extensive debate, e.g. John Llewelyn ‘Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)’ in Robert Bernasconi, eds. Re-Reading Levinas, or Deborah Bird Rose ‘Bobby’s Face, My Love’ in Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2011) 29–41.

44   Remarkably, Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s recent exegesis on the theological commandment and its Levinasian afterlife, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ first published in Italian in 2011, includes only one brief reference to Derrida (to Politics of Friendship and the fraternal), a scholar that she lauded as a primary influence in her For More than One Voice (trans. Paul A. Kottman [Stanford University Press, 2005]). More remarkably, she makes only one oblique reference to an unnamed ‘some’ who ‘now hold that the prohibition against killing may extend even to animals and take into account the biblical question about their slaughter, when it comes to homicidium it is only man (homo) that is spoken of’. See her ‘The Archaeology of Homicide’ in Adriana Cavarero and Angelo Scola, eds. Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Political and Theological Dialogue, trans. Margaret Adams Groesbeck and Adam Sitze (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) 79. Otherwise, she completely ignores the ethical question of non-human others.

45   Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 281.

46   Ibid., 282.

47   Discussed further in Lynn Turner ‘Hors d’Oeuvre: Some Footnotes to the Spurs of Dorothy Cross’ in Parallax, 19:1 (2013): 3–11.

48   Melanie Klein, ‘Weaning’ [1936] in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (London: Vintage, 1998) 291, emphasis added. See also Lynn Turner, ‘Fort Spa: In at the Deep End with Derrida and Ferenczi’ in Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano, eds. Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) 103–20.

49   Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978) 231.

50   Sara Guyer elaborates the demotion of the mouth in ‘Buccality’ in Gabrielle Schwab, ed. Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 80–1.

51   Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, 282.

52   Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’ [1972] in The Shell and The Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994) 125–38.

53   Derrida, ‘Fors’, xxxvii.

54   Ibid., emphasis original.

55   Ibid., xxxvii, xxxviii, emphases original.

56   Derrida re-describes this demetaphorization as a ‘hypermetaphorization’; see ‘Fors’ xxxviii.

57   Ibid., xxxviii, emphasis original.

58   Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, 128.

59   Derrida, ‘Fors’, xvi

60   Ibid., xxxix.

61   See also Vicki Kirby ‘Original Science: Nature Deconstructing Itself’ in Derrida Today, 3:2 (2010): 201–20.

62   The script makes the direct analogy (243), deleted but deducible in the film itself.

63   Dunsany, 247.

64   See Derrida, Animal, 4, Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 135, n.6.

65   Erica Fudge argues that a prime function of the pet is to ‘come home’; see Pets (Stocksfield: Ashgate, 2008).

66   For Derrida’s critique of the difference between the proper death of Dasein and the perishing of the animal in Heidegger, see Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 30–1. I elaborate on this question in the final chapter of this volume.

67   Sharp’s script has Fisk also mention Wag to Mrs Brimley: this is edited out in the film, 267.

68   In spite of Fisk’s earlier protestations that he could never hope to have another dog like Wag – one of the ‘seven great dogs’ alive at any time according to his idiosyncratic mythology.

69   Henslowe showed his own distress over her death earlier in the film.

70   Rather more jovial than Fisk, Mrs Brimley is not unlike him in her literality: when someone dies, that is all there is to it; she may be talking to a chair but it was apparently just like that when her quiet husband was alive.

71   Derrida, Animal, 12, and Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 149.

72   Laurence Rickels, ‘Pet Grief’ in gorillagorillagorilla, Diana Thater ex. cat. (Köln: Walter König, 2009) 71.

73   Rickels, ‘Pet Grief’, 72.

74   Ibid.

75   Derrida, Animal, 8.

76   Kelly Oliver reverses the stakes and asks after the now established ability of elephants to mourn in ‘Elephant Eulogy’ in Lynn Turner, ed. The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) 89–104.

77   Derrida, Beast 1, 294.

78   See Derrida, Beast 1, 280–94. Incidentally, while Derrida does not know either the source or the manner of death of ‘la bête’ in question here, Dawne McCance unearths the female sex of this elephant, who died aged seventeen in Versailles, having been gifted from Portugal to France in a further exercise of sovereign power. See Dawne McCance, The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La vie la mort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) 99.

79   Derrida, Beast 1, 299.

80   Derrida, Animal, 27

Chapter 3

1     Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 12–13, italics original. The apparent quotation is not noted in the text.

2     Julia Kristeva, ‘The Impudence of Uttering: Mother Tongue’, trans. Patricia Vieira and Michael Marder, in Psychoanalytic Review, 97:4 (2010): 679.

3     Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

4     Oliver is addressing continental philosophy, not eco-feminism that explicitly invokes intersectional analysis. For the recent state of play in eco-feminism, see Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, eds. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

5     See Lynn Turner, ‘Animal and Sexual Differences: Kelly Oliver’s Continental Bestiary’ in Body and Society, 19:4 (2013): 120–33.

6     Beauvoir, qtd. in Oliver 165.

7     Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983. Rites of Passage, The Tate Gallery, London, 1995.

8     Kristeva ‘Impudence of Uttering’, 679.

9     Kristeva does not appear to have directed her attention to ‘the animal’ or animality as such at all. For a rare appropriation of her work in the context of animal studies, see Ruth Lipschitz, ‘Abjection’ in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) 13–29.

10   Kristeva’s defence of the singularity of language as human is given an especially tendentious assertion when she remarks that this is the case ‘even in the most handicapped speaking subject’ (‘Uttering’ 685). This implicitly counters the right’s based discourse of utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, tendentious in his own way regarding the capacities of nonhuman animals vis-à-vis humans with disabilities – acutely discussed in Dawne McCance, ed. Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction (State University of New York Press, 2013).

11   Famously, Kristeva’s earlier forays into what she names the feminine were all vehicled by male modernist poets, such as Mallarmé and Celan. In 2001–2003 Kristeva published three books with Columbia University Press under the title of Feminine Genius (Le Génie Féminin), and these were devoted to Hannah Arendt, Colette and Melanie Klein, respectively.

12   Kristeva, ‘Uttering’, 686.

13   See Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn, ‘Animals, Art, Abjection’ in Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare, eds. Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 90–104, and Kelly Oliver, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Oliver notes that when Kristeva subsequently returned to ‘Totem and Taboo’ in her work on revolt, the animal has almost entirely disappeared from her account. See Oliver, 298, and Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

14   See Christopher Powici, ‘Who Are the Bandar-log?’ Questioning Animals in Rudyard Kiplaing’s Mowgli Stories and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Buffalo Gals, Wont You Come Out Tonight?’ in Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater, eds. Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2005) 179. Curiously, while Powici reads Kristeva widely – and notably Revolution in Poetic Language – he does not cite Powers of Horror at all.

15   Powici, ‘Who Are the Bandar-log?’ 179.

16   Derrida, Animal, 7.

17   What will be the biggest in a series of mass extinction events since the one that devastated the dinosaurs is now in train (made visceral by the devastating fires in Australia in the winter of 2019), see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2015).

18   Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ [1929] in the Penguin Freud Library V.12 Civilization, Society & Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991) 289, n.1.

19   The Woman (2011), [Film] Dir. Lucky Mckee, USA: Modernciné, trailer accessible here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1714208/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 The film loosely follows a previous horror film about a cannibal family, the last remaining member of which is the Woman – Offspring (2009) [Film] Dir. Andrew van den Houten, USA: Modernciné, written by Jack Ketchum. At the time of writing, a sequel to The Woman had just been screened in film festivals: Darlin,’ directed by Pollyanna McIntosh (co-written by McIntosh and Jack Ketchum), USA: Hood River Entertainment, 2019.

20   See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

21   Cary Wolfe with Jonathan Elmer, ‘Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Sacrifice and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs’ in Cary Wolfe, ed. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago University Press, 2003) 116.

22   Barbara Creed, [1993] The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2007).

23   Pollyanna McIntosh gave a considered interview on sexual violence in cinema: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pollyanna-mcintosh-and-staci-layne-wilson/id1453745253?i=1000432164016&mt=2

24   The Sundance film festival screening of the film infamously drew hostile responses from some male audience members: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3lUAZLB4JY

25   Penn Bullock, ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments about Women’ The New York Times, 8 October 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html. Accessed 15 February 2017. For a fuller discussion of the ‘domesticated fetish of the term pussy’, see our editor’s ‘Introduction’ in, Turner, Sellbach and Broglio, eds. Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies 6.

26   See Sabrina Siddiqui and Lauren Gambino, ‘Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation to Supreme Court Gives Trump Major Victory’ The Guardian, 6 October 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/06/brett-kavanaugh-confirmed-us-supreme-court. Accessed 22 February 2019.

27   For example, see Elizabeth Cowie’s collection of writings from the 1970s to the 1990s: Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996).

28   Kristeva, Powers, 63.

29   Angela Bettis has frequently taken roles in horror films, often roles that exploited her slight frame for the surprise of supernatural or other powers. She played the title role in the 2002 television remake of Carrie and also starred in Lucky Mckee’s earlier cult horror film, May (2002) USA: 2 Lop films. May, intriguingly, narrates precisely the confusion between literal and symbolic anthropophagy. This is hilariously articulated when Bettis’ character has an unfortunate date with an artist making ‘statements’ about love as cannibalism only to encounter someone who cannot demarcate between a bite and a kiss.

30   Mark Wigley precisely links metaphysics and the home economy; see his The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Harvard: MIT Press, 1995).

31   Wolfe with Elmer, ‘Subject to Sacrifice’, 101.

32   See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008) 17.

33   The novel does name the dogs and specifies that there are four. See Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee, The Woman (Gauntlett Press, 2016).

34   The novel describes Darlin’ as ‘making believe’ that she is the ‘animal woman’ and as such strong enough to chase down and eat men. Ketchum and McKee, The Woman 96.

35   Freud, ‘Civilization’, 293.

36   Ibid., emphasis added.

37   Ibid., 289, n.1.

38   The colonial imaginary of soap is detailed in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

39   Kristeva, Powers, 102. Ruth Lipschitz gives an excellent account of the concatenated abjection of race, gender and species in her ‘Skin/ned politics: Species Discourse and the Limits of “The Human” in Nandipha Mntambo’s Art’ in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 27:3 (2012): 546–66.

40   Sigmund Freud (from his essay ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’), qtd. in Ranjanna Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 47.

41   Khanna, Dark Continents, 49.

42   Ibid., 52. Kristeva too remarks on the ‘dark continent,’ even providing an entry for this phrase in Alain de Mijolla, ed. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 A-F (USA: Macmillan Reference, 2005) 365. She voices criticism of Freud’s inability to theorise female sexuality and notes the ‘murky’ quality of this phrase without, however, acknowledging the colonial component at work. Kristeva’s genealogy of subsequent work on female navigation of Oedipus concludes with her own work.

43   During the years I taught this material, several cases were widely reported regarding the actual long-term abduction of (white) women, typically within secret cellars in domestic houses. See for example Kirwan Randhawa and David Gardner, ‘Ohio Dungeon: Three Women Rescued from Chains in Basement Prison after Ten Years’ Evening Standard, 7 May 2013. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/ohio-dungeon-three-women-rescued-from-chains-in-basement-prison-after-ten-years-8605438.html and Mark Landler ‘Austria Stunned by Case of Imprisoned Woman’ NYTimes, 29April 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/world/europe/29austria.html

44   Gayle Rubin, ‘The “Traffic” in Women’ in R. Reiter, ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) 33–65.

45   Rubin, ‘Traffic’, 26.

46   Donna J. Haraway, ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary’ [1987] in Simians, Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991) 130. I note the work of Derrida on the complexity of ‘Geschlecht’ in his several essays on this term in the work of Heidegger, also written in the 1980s in my ‘Critical Companions: Derrida, Haraway and Other Animals’ in Julian Wolfreys, ed. Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, 2nd Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 63–80.

47   The works cited are: Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and, Hortense Spillers ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ Diacritics, 7:2 (1987): 65–81. Both references, along with the commissioning and first publication of Haraway’s ‘Gender’ article, predate the inception of the term ‘intersectionality’ associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw and her ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1 (1989): 139–68.

48   Haraway, ‘Gender’, 145, emphasis original.

49   Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 25.

50   Haraway, ‘Gender’, 146.

51   Darlin’ refers to the Woman as ‘the animal lady’.

52   Wolfe with Elmer, ‘Subject to Sacrifice’ 101.

53   Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009) 17–18.

54   Derrida, Beast 1, 23.

55   Ibid., 9.

56   Ibid., 278.

57   Arguably this extraction of words of thanks is more humiliating in this film than her sexual assault, in which the withering returned gaze of the Woman either causes Cleek to simply give up on the assault or to lose his erection and be unable to continue.

58   In personal correspondence regarding the contrasting oral appetites of the Woman and Darlin’, Ruth Lipschitz acutely commented, ‘The “cum panis” of The Woman’s outlaw orality is indeed a kinship of eating (heteropatriarchy’s life) blood, and not one of sharing out (ginger)bread (men).’ 16 April 2019.

59   Kristeva, Powers, 2.

60   Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, 187.

61   Kristeva, Powers, 57.

62   Ibid.

63   Ibid., 57–8, emphasis mine.

64   Ibid., emphasis mine.

65   Ibid., 61.

66   Kristeva affirmatively references Levi-Strauss with regard to the logical connection between the incest taboo and the exchange of discrete units. See Powers, 63. The major work referenced is Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, eds. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, Revised Edition (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969).

67   Claude Levi-Strauss, qtd. in Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Woman as Sign’ in M/F, 1 (1978): 52. Cowie’s article was a key step in releasing feminist theory from a requirement for realism as the best method of accounting for the reality of women’s experience and turning instead to an engagement with signification. In so doing, however, she maintained a logic of presence, given that sender, receivers and signs all retain their own integrity. For a deconstructive critique of the limits of this engagement see Lynn Turner ‘Des Jeunes Nées: For a Confusion of the Tongue, the Lip, & the Rim’ in Issues in Contemporary Culture & Aesthetics, 1 (2005): 171–8.

68   Jacques Lacan, qtd. in Cowie ‘Woman as Sign’ 60, emphasis mine.

69   Kristeva, Powers, 58.

70   Ibid., 70.

71   See Judith Butler, ‘Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness’ in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford University Press, 1997) 31–62.

72   Compare this wiliness, uncontrollability and absolute non-representability that Kristeva aligns with the maternal-feminine (cast in an animalized figure) with the force that Lee Edelman attempts to ascribe to the fundamentally non-reproductive and antisocial queer, he of ‘No Future’. One might ponder Edelman’s commitment to the Lacan of the 1950s in order to make this argument. See Lee Edelman, ‘The Future Is Kid Stuff’ in No Future: Queer Theory & the Death Drive (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004) 1–31.

73   See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, [1947] trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) 6–7.

74   Derrida, Beast 1, 102. I return to this problem in the final chapter.

75   Kristeva, Powers, 75.

76   Ibid., 70.

77   The term plays on the established overlap of speciesist and misogynist use of feminine animal nouns. See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat [1990] (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

78   The novel suggests that the Woman does identify with the dogs that she can hear through a carnivorous fantasy of wildness of ‘tooth and claw,’ 163

79   Kristeva, Powers, 72.

80   Ibid., emphasis added.

81   Ibid., 73.

82   Oliver, Animal Lessons, 293. Oliver perhaps over-reads Kristeva’s amendment to Freud, i.e. it is somewhat misleading to claim that Kristeva departs from Freud in order to prioritise ‘the mother over the father.’

83   See Derrida, Animal, 42–3.

84   Luce Irigaray did not simply deny Freud’s identification of blindness with castration but derided his inability to see anything that is not the same as the phallus. See her canonical essay ‘The Blindspot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’ in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 11–132.

85   Sigmund Freud, qtd. in Ranjanna Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 47.

86   Wolfe with Elmer, ‘Subject to Sacrifice’, 101.

87   Carol Adams, ‘Why Feminist-Vegan Now?’ in Feminism & Psychology, 20:3 (2010): 303–17.

88   Derrida, Beast 1, 23.

89   See Derrida Beast 1, 65: ‘And as for orality between mouth and maw, we have already seen its double carry [portée], the double tongue, the carry of the tongue that speaks, carry’s the carry of the voice that vociferates (to voci-ferate is to carry the voice) and the other carry, the other devouring one, the voracious carry of the maw and the teeth that lacerate and cut to pieces’.

90   At 5’11,’ the actress, Pollyanna McIntosh, casts an imposing figure.

91   See Jacques Derrida, ‘Ninth Session’ in The Death Penalty V.II, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017) 288–324.

92   Cary Wolfe, ‘Learning from Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies and Who Comes After the Subject’ in What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010). Wolfe summarises it thus: ‘it is the blind, the disabled, who “see” the truth of vision. It’s the blind who most readily understand that the core fantasy of humanism’s trope of vision is to think that perceptual space is organized around and for the looking subject: that the pure point of the eye (as agent of ratio and logos) exhausts the field of the visible; that the “invisible” is only-indeed merely-that which has not yet been seen by a subject who is, in principle, capable of seeing all.’ 132, emphasis original.

93   Oliver, Animal Lessons, 247–8.

94   Terri Tomsky acutely observes how prisoners at Guantánomo were severely punished for implicitly taking other animals (in this case iguanas) as pets by surreptitiously feeding them and in so doing gaining a feel of their own humanity. The gesture of domestication was seen to participate in the ‘normative’ construction of humanity construed according to ‘ideas of power, privilege, belonging, self-assurance and self-definition’ from which they were barred. Tomsky also notes that the regime at Guantánomo abjected the prisoners not just from the category of the ‘human’ but even from that of the ‘animal’. Below both, the prisoners lobbied to have the same rights they saw accorded to animals (notably the guard dogs). See Terri Tomsky, ‘Iguanas and Enemy Combatants: Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism through Guantánamo’s Creaturely Lives’ in Kaori Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry et al. eds. Cosmopolitan Animals (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) 205–8.

95   The last chapter of this volume develops Derrida’s work on the death penalty and cruelty in which cruelty draws on ‘cruor’: blood that flows.

96   Oliver, Animal Lessons, 126.

97   This other ending is so secret that I missed it for some time! I thank a postgraduate student from my MA module, ‘Sex Gender Species’, in which this material was tested, for alerting me to it.

Chapter 4

1     Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate – on “Freud”’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 344. Derrida is keeping Freud to his word, his ‘often far-fetched speculation’.

2     Luce Irigaray, ‘The Blindspot in an Old Dream of Symmetry’ in Speculum of the Other Woman [1974], trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 51. Reproduced with the permission of Cornell University Press.

3     Ada, Countess of Lovelace, qtd. in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (California: Strawberry Press, 1992).

4     See, for example, Griselda Pollock, ‘Killing Men & Dying Women: A Woman’s Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting in the 1950’s’ in Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, eds. Avant-Gardes & Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) 221–94, or Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

5     See Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ [1920] in On Metapsychology, The Penguin Freud Library V. 11, trans. Strachey, James (London: Penguin, 1991) 283–86. The dialectical logic that drives man to overcome this initial privation is elaborated in Chapter 6 of this book in the context of the vanity of anthropocentrism.

6     Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 268.

7     Luce Irigaray, ‘Gesture in Psychoanalysis’ [1985] in Sexes & Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 89–104.

8     Swinton became known as an actress in the experimental early queer films of Derek Jarman such as The Last of England (1987) Film} Dir. Derek Jarman (UK/West Germany:Anglo Internalional Films).

9     Derrida, ‘Envois’, 113, 159.

10   See Hershman Leeson’s startlingly brilliant performance project which constructed the identity of one Roberta Breitmore, an identity that could be performed by herself or another and even extended to a social security number and visits to a therapist. See Meredith Tromble, The Art & Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See also her later documentary concerning the emergence of feminist art in the United States: !Women Art Revolution! A (Formerly) Secret History (2010) [Film] Dir. Lynn Hershman Leeson, USA: Hotwire Productions.

11   Conceiving Ada (1997), [Film] Dir. Lynn Hershman Leeson, USA: Hotwire Productions), trailer accessible here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118882/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0. Accessed 20 May 2020.

12   Founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, Ada Lovelace Day is now held every year on the second Tuesday of October. It features the flagship Ada Lovelace Day Live! ‘science cabaret’ in London, UK, at which women in STEM give short talks about their work or research in an informal, theatre-like setting. https://findingada.com/. Accessed 20 May 2020.

13   Absent Presence (2005), [Film] Dir. Hussein Chalayan, UK/Turkey: BM Contemporary Art Centre, 15 minutes) was also exhibited as a five-screen installation in the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2005. The whole film can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/97742845. Accessed 20 May 2020. While they have not had the same level of exposure, Chalayan has made several other short films that also engage genetic anthropology such as Temporal Meditations (2003) and The Art of Fashion (2009).

14   These seminars are generating a great deal of attention with the French edition now published: Jacques Derrida, La vie la mort séminaire (1975–1976) (Paris: Seuil, 2019). For a significant commentary, see Dawne McCance, The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La vie la mort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

15   McCance, Life Death, 11.

16   Ibid., 11–12.

17   Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 334.

18   Ibid., 275.

19   Ibid., 283.

20   I developed this line – incorporating the SF of Sandor Ferenczi and the latter’s anxiety regarding his own speculative departures from the House of Freud – in my ‘Fort Spa: In at the Deep End with Derrida and Ferenczi’ in Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano, eds. Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) 103–20.

21   My ‘Fort Spa’ also noted, as will become the case here, that this signature, SF, is necessarily promiscuous. See Donna Haraway’s Pilgrim Award acceptance comments: ‘SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far’ in SFRA Review, 297 (2011): 12–19.

22   Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 276, emphasis original.

23   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 299.

24   Ibid., 317. See Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 284.

25   Derrida Jacques, ‘Envois’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud & Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 66, emphasis added.

26   Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 285.

27   Ibid., 275.

28   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 306.

29   Ibid., 308.

30   Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 284.

31   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 314.

32   Ibid., 315.

33   Ibid.

34   Derrida ‘To Speculate’, 322. At this point Derrida exchanges ‘fort/da’ with ‘fort:da’.

35   Ibid., 283.

36   Ibid., 318.

37   Ibid. See Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 284, n.1.

38   See the discussion of Derrida’s critical relationship to the mirror of autobiography in Chapter 6 of this volume.

39   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 320.

40   Ibid., 322.

41   Ibid.

42   Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 285.

43   I.e. Go to the war (and don’t come back). Ibid., 286.

44   Ibid., 285, n.1.

45   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 283.

46   Ibid., 269.

47   Ibid., 269.

48   Ibid., 283.

49   See Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 342–3.

50   Ibid., 285.

51   Ibid., 285.

52   Ibid., 293

53   Ibid., 339.

54   Foreshadowed in the opening credits when the letters o and i of ‘Conceiving’ are animated and effectively mate. Is this how zeroes and ones reproduce?

55   Sharon Lin Tay, ‘Conceiving Ada: Conceiving Feminist Possibilities in the New Mediascape’ in Women: A Cultural Review, 18:2 (2007): 188. One could counter all of Tay’s assumptions. For example, she suggests that Conceiving Ada resists the formula of the classic realist film text (beginning with a disequilibrium and ending with restoration), yet the film precisely carries this out as a flawed ethical imperative (the disequilibrium is the lack of justice to women, especially Ada: its restoration is the revivification of Ada in the child born in our present time of emancipation).

56   Carole Cadwalladr is a key journalist reporting on the still ongoing scandal of Facebook’s harvesting and management of data and its relationship with amorphous companies such as Cambridge Analytica. See her TED talk: https://www.ted.com/speakers/carole_cadwalladr

57   Ada Lovelace as A. A. L. translated and added substantial notes to Federico Luigi, Conte Menabrea’s ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq’ (1842) in Scientific Memoirs, V.3. See Betty Alexandra, Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter & Her Description of the First Computer (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1992).

58   According to Doron Swade, ‘Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage’s world his engines were bound by number… What Lovelace saw – what Ada Byron saw – was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation – to general-purpose computation – and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada.’ See Fuegi, J; Francis, J, ‘Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 “Notes”’ in Annals of the History of Computing, 25:4 (October–December 2003): 16–26.

59   I am paraphrasing the film’s script. For an account of Ada’s gambling, see Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 1999).

60   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 95.

61   Irigaray has written of this expulsion, along with that from her teaching post at the University of Paris, Vincennes, in her book co-authored with Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) 14–16. She does not name Lacan.

62   Amy M. Hollywood, ‘Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray & the Philosophy of Religion’ in The Journal of Religion, 78:2 (1998): 236, n.17. It is unfortunate that no sustained conversation ever emerged between Derrida and Irigaray. The frankly rather strange handful of footnotes indexing Irigaray in On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy carefully date their references to publications from This Sex Which Is Not One onwards (listing only English translations), thus bypassing Speculum. One note even remarks that Derrida is ‘not certain’ whether Irigaray’s work ‘intersects’ with that of Nancy or not. See Derrida On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy [2000] trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) 332, n.31.

63   Luce Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’ [1980] in Sexes & Genealogies, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 23–53. This elliptical poetic text has attracted substantially less commentary than has ‘Gesture’. Hollywood’s work is a notable exception; see ‘Deconstructing Belief’.

64   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 97. She does not mention the conference was on Derrida’s work.

65   Ibid.

66   Irigaray, ‘Blind Spot’, 78, emphasis original.

67   Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 25.

68   Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Verité’[1975] in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 411–98.

69   Derrida, ‘Facteur de la Verité’, 444, emphasis added. The infamous ‘exchange of letters’ has produced its own archive, key texts of which are to be found here: John P. Miller and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

70   Derrida, ‘Facteur de la Verité’, 442.

71   Ibid., 444.

72   Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 25. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One [1977] trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 78. (Irigaray’s discontinuity with Kristeva can be gleaned from this gesture.)

73   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 92.

74   Ibid.

75   Ibid. 93–4.

76   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 92. Frankly this could be taken at face value as the persistent condition of everyday sexism, but in this context of a genealogical economy, it sounds resentful.

77   Ibid.

78   See Penelope Deutscher’s investigation of ‘eating the other’ between Irigaray and Derrida in ‘Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)’ in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10:3 (1998): 159–84.

79   Ibid. 98.

80   See Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 205–18.

81   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 98.

82   Ibid. 95–6.

83   Ibid. 97.

84   Ibid.

85   Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 31.

86   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 97.

87   Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 31.

88   Irigaray’s ‘Gesture’ hyphenates the game – fort-da – whereas Derrida uses a forward slash until he makes the point of the possession of da when the reel is shown to never really go away – fort:da.

89   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 99. Arguably this both accepts a discrete choreography of the masturbating boy (entirely penile, relentlessly outwardly directional) and accepts a discrete map of the working of his body. Compare the speculative ‘genital amphimixis’ proposed by Sandor Ferenczi discussed in my ‘Fort Spa: In at the Deep End with Derrida and Ferenczi’, in Desire in Ashes.

90   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 99

91   Ibid.

92   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 292.

93   Irigaray, ‘Gesture’, 100, emphasis original.

94   Ibid. Incidentally, the third section of ‘To Speculate’ is named ‘Paralysis’.

95   Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 28.

96   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 306.

97   For her derisive citation of Freud’s account of the little girl’s genitals as posing ‘nothing to be seen’, see Irigaray, ‘Blind Spot’, 47–8.

98   Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 38, n.6.

99   Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 341.

100  The accusation of ‘essentialism’ has severely hindered Irigaray’s Anglophone reception, partly due to the dissonance between ‘gender’ and ‘sexual difference’.

101  Ada used various bird names for herself and others, including ‘Carrier Pigeon’. See Toole, 30, for example.

102  Johnny Golding heard these homonyms when listening to early drafts of this chapter. In light of the question that Derrida often asks himself, discussed in Chapter 6 in this book, we could also ask here, ‘Who am I?’ and thus ‘Who am I following?’

103  Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, 41.

104  The bird contrasts Emmy’s other, earlier, agent the virtual copy of her dog she names Gods-Dog. As a virtual interlocutor, Gods-Dog tells tales on Emmy, preventing her from keeping a secret.

105  See Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 312.

106  Derrida, ‘To Speculate-on “Freud”’, 358.

107  Dawne McCance, ‘Death’ in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

108  McCance, ‘Death’, 121.

109  Compare Swinton in her titular role in Orlando (dir. Sally Potter, UK, 1992).

110  Not only does palindrome indicate a proper name that can be spelled backwards and forwards, it also indicates a segment of DNA in which the nucleotide sequence in one strand read from end is the same as the sequence in the complementary strand read from the opposite end.

111  Mignon Nixon, ‘The She-Fox: Transference & the “Woman Artist”’, in Catherine Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, eds. Women Artists at the Millennium (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 275–301.

112  Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology’ [1914] cited in Nixon, ‘She-Fox’, 277–8.

113  Nixon, ‘She-Fox’, 278. Nixon also notes the path that Melanie Klein opened for examining precisely negative transference in women.

114  Ibid., 277.

115  Freud, qtd. in Nixon, ‘She-Fox’, 276.

116  There is some biographical support for the heavy-handed control of Lady Byron, desperate to offset any inherited wildness that Ada might inherit from her Romantic father. See James Essinger, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Launched the Digital Age through the Poetry of Numbers (London: Gibson Square, 2017) 46–8. However the feminist point remains: why concentrate on the mother as the root of Ada’s woes?

117  Derrida, ‘To Speculate’, 356.

118  Ibid., 355.

119  Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon [1967] trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011) 65, emphasis added. The citation within this quotation is from Husserl, whose transcendental reduction is here under Derrida’s review.

120  McCance, Life Death, 71. McCance reports that the nineteenth-century eugenics movement explicitly linked ‘deafmutes’ with ‘foreigners’ and with immigration (92).

121  Imagining the computer as ‘wetware’ is a ‘dry’ inversion of the opposition circulated in early cyberpunk novels in which the ‘hardware’ of technology was counterposed by the ‘wetware’ of the body.

122  See Paul de Man, ‘The Concept of Irony’ in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996) 165–6.

123  Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination [1972] trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981) 63.

124  McCance, Life Death, 139.

Chapter 5

1     Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’ [1996], trans. Eric Prenowitz, ed. in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) 140. Reprinted by permission of the press.

2     The first two papers published in English translation from Derrida’s address at the 1997 colloquium, L’Animal Autobiographique, were: Derrida Jacques. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28:2 (2002): 369–418 and ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’ trans. David Wills, in Cary Wolfe, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003) 121–46.

3     See Lynn Turner, ‘When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence between Animots’ in Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies, 2:1 (2010): 60–85. www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/. A shorter piece was also published that year, bringing Derrida’s unconditional ethics and Haraway’s companion species into proximity with Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses: Carla Benzan, ‘The Lives and Deaths of Carolee’s Cats: Intimate Encounters, Gentle Transgressions and Incalculable Ethics’ in C Magazine International Contemporary Art, 107 (Autumn 2010): 5–11. Benzan also remarked on the paucity of scholarship that would admit the feline subject matter into the feminist canon of Schneemann’s practice.

4     Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People & Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008); Hélène Cixous, ‘The Cat’s Arrival’ in Parallax, 12:1 (2006): 22. While the metallic gleam of the ‘cyborg’ seems to still distract some readers – Haraway’s announced ‘irony’ notwithstanding – her development of relating with non-human species should not have come as a surprise from the author who once wrote, at length, of ‘primatology’ as a ‘genre of feminist theory’: Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) 279–382.

5     With regard to Cixous and Haraway, in particular, this chapter builds on my subsequent publications, especially: Lynn Turner, ed. The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); ‘Critical Companions: Derrida, Haraway & Other Animals’ in Julian Wolfreys, ed. Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, 2nd Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 63–80; ‘Telefoam: Species on the Shores of Cixous and Derrida’ in Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter and Manuela Rossini, eds. European Posthumanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2016) 56–69.

6     The foundational text here remains Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Infamously, ‘SEC’ was reproduced along with further extended lessons on the vicissitudes of performative speech acts in Derrida’s Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

7     The popular uptake of ‘the performative’ largely drew on the work of Judith Butler and Peggy Phelan, e.g. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) and Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

8     Jacques Derrida, ‘Composing “Circumfession”’ in Caputo John D. and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. Augustine & Postmodernism: Confessions & Circumfession (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) 21.

9     See my ‘Wind Up: The Machine-Event of Tape’ in Astrid Schmetterling and Lynn Turner, Visual Cultures as … Recollection (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013) 29–52.

10   See Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 71–160 (first given as a keynote address at the Material Events: Paul de Man and the AfterLife of Theory conference at the University of California, 2000).

11   Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, 73.

12   In my ‘Insect Asides’ I followed the insects preserved in amber, briefly and elliptically referenced in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, in Turner, ed. The Animal Question in Deconstruction, 54–69.

13   Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, 74.

14   See René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, V.1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 108.

15   Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’ in Signs, 28:3 (2003): 801–31. Haraway’s When Species Meet was the third book to be published in what is now a highly influential book series: Posthumanities, edited by Cary Wolfe.

16   On this distinction see Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter and Manuela Rossini, ‘Dis/locating Posthumanism in European and Literary Critical Traditions’ in European Journal of English Studies, 18:2 (2014): 13–20.

17   Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) 97. See also her ‘Companions in Conversation’ with Cary Wolfe in Donna J. Haraway, ed. Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016) 261.

18   Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, Ron Broglio, ‘Introducing The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies’ in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) 8.

19   Turner, Sellbach, Broglio, eds. Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, 9.

20   Derrida, Animal, 51.

21   Ibid., 69–70. Descartes sentence reads: ‘But as for me, whom am I [qui suis-je], now that I am supposing that there is some supremely powerful and, if it is permissible to say so, malicious deceiver, who is deliberately trying to trick me in every way he can?’

22   Derrida lists the ‘malicious deceiver’ in Descartes as ‘the most cunning of the animals’, Animal, 70.

23   Directly addressed in, for example, Cixous’s Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and Derrida’s H.C for Life, That Is to Say …, trans. Laurent Milesi (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).

24   See Turner, ‘Telefoam’.

25   Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’ in Derek Attridge, ed. Acts of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) 221–52.

26   Hélène Cixous, ‘From My Menagerie to Philosophy’ in Dorothea Olkowski, ed. Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) 40, Hélène Cixous, La (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976) 91. Steve Baker first mentioned Cixous’s early use of the term animot to me.

27   Cixous, ‘Menagerie’, 44. The English translation of ‘Menagerie’ appears with an epigraph from Derrida’s text ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ (1988), in which poetry is likened to a hedgehog. Cixous’s text also appears – without that epigraph, as ‘De La Ménagerie à la Philosophie’, the chapter succeeding ‘Arrivée du Chat’ in her novel Messie (Paris: Des Femmes, 1996).

28   Interior Scroll, first performed in 1975, subsequently performed on numerous occasions in various venues, sometimes incorporating group elements sometimes remaining the individual performance of Schneemann herself. Interior Scroll is also widely exhibited as photographic documentation – in vertical series that suggest both a strip of film and a scroll – including the text that Schneemann recited.

29   Thyrza Nichols Goodeve notes that these references were to the art historian Annette Michelson; see her ‘“The Cat Is My Medium:” Notes on the Writing and Art of Carolee Schneemann’ Art Journal Open, 29 July 2015. http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=6381

30   This implicit ‘ban’ is discussed and revoked in Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

31   On the revised law of ‘all “experience” in general’, see Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 318.

32   Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 2, italics original.

33   Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 22.

34   ‘Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me’ was a popular song written by Albon Timothy and Michael Julien, first recorded by Shirley Bassey in 1959.

35   http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/index.html

36   Carolee Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) 264.

37   Eye/Body, 1963; Meat Joy, 1964; Interior Scroll, 1975; Up to and Including Her Limits, 1976. First dates given: all performances performed on numerous occasions in various venues, sometimes incorporating group elements sometimes remaining the individual performance of the artist. Fuses, 18 min, colour, silent 16mm film, 1965. Meat Joy now warrants a whole other engagement with the use of animal meat as metaphor.

38   Jones, Body Art. It should be noted that Jones takes little account of the development of Pollock’s extensive work beyond 1987.

39   Conversation with the artist, March 2008.

40   Breaking Borders, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, 2007 and Remains to Be Seen, CEPA Gallery (Buffalo: New York, 2007). The curators were David Liss and Photios Giovanis.

41   See, for example, ‘A Tribute to Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019)’ The Brooklyn Rail, April 2019. Of the several contributors to this ‘In Memoriam’, Ann McCoy, Heide Hatry and Thryza Nichols Goodeve all acknowledged the radicality of the feline content of Schneemann’s work. https://brooklynrail.org/2019/04/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Carolee-Schneemann-1939-2019

42   Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997) 49.

43   Jacques Derrida, ‘Choreographies’. Interview with Christie McDonald. Points. Interviews, 1974–1994 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994) 50.

44   Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics 264.

45   Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000) 170.

46   This question is asked, and answered in variously sentimental and sanctimoniously anti-anthropomorphic ways with regard to dogs on this website: http://ask.metafilter.com/28246/Is-my-dog-kissing-me. Accessed 23 November 2007.

47   J. Hillis Miller, ‘What Is a kiss? Isabel’s Moments of Decision’ in Critical Inquiry, 31 (Spring 2005): 724.

48   Luce Irigaray works metaphor and metonymy together to address both a positive symbolization of the feminine through labial multiplicity (in excess of, rather than in opposition to, phallic unicity and the logic of the same) and to link this symbolization to a new political, poetic and symbolic speech and ‘speech’ by women most notably. See her ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’.

49   Hillis Miller, ‘What Is a kiss?’, 731.

50   Derrida regularly distances the semiotically inclined and delimited ‘polysemy’ from dissemination as that which ‘cannot be pinned down at any one point’. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981) 58 italics original. See also Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, 57.

51   Hillis Miller, ‘What Is a kiss?’, 725.

52   Ibid., 728.

53   For an extended discussion of cetacean communication, see Lynn Turner, ‘Voice’ in Turner, Sellbach, Broglio, eds. Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies 518–32.

54   Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics, 264

55   Schneemann qtd. in Steve Baker, ‘What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like?’ in Nigel Rothfels, ed. Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 73. Baker’s subsequent and more sympathetic account of Schneemann doesn’t remark on the technological tropes that facilitate Schneemann’s remark (in favour of a more art historical reportage of the artist’s account). I address this in the last section of this chapter.

56   Carol Adams, ‘Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition’, in The Sexual Politics of Meat (London: Continuum, 2010).

57   Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

58   See Haraway, When Species Meet, 19–27.

59   Derrida frequently remarks on this accrual of credit by the being who calls himself ‘Man’; see, for example, Animal, 30.

60   Derrida, Animal, 13.

61   Dawne McCance, ‘Death’ in Turner, Sellbach and Broglio, eds. Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, 117–19.

62   Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’ [1987], trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Psyche: Inventions of the Other, V. II, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 2008) 42.

63   Heidegger, qtd. in Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, 43.

64   As I first advocated in my ‘Critical Companions’.

65   Derrida, Animal, 34.

66   Ibid., 62–4, emphasis added. See Turner, ‘Critical Companions’.

67   Derrida, qtd. in Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 50.

68   Heidegger, qtd. Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 51. See also Derrida, Animal, 36. Heidegger’s three theses on ‘world’, from his The Fundamental Problems of Metaphysics, have now drawn myriad commentaries in animal studies.

69   Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 51.

70   Ibid., 53.

71   Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 55.

72   Derrida, Animal, 26. Derrida gives greater indication of his critical relation to the discourse of ‘rights’ in the interview ‘Violence Against Animals’, in Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, eds. For What Tomorrow …, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) 62–76. This should not be taken for any kind of disengagement with the plight of actual animals – whose deadly instrumentalization at the hands of Man is absolutely under scrutiny here. For a detailed account of the problems within philosophies of animal rights in light of the ethics of deconstruction, see Dawne McCance, Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction (New York: SUNY, 2013).

73   See Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 77–9.

74   Derrida, Animal, 14. Derrida too does not cite ethological sources but addresses himself to the pronouncements that philosophy has made regarding the animal.

75   Haraway, When Species Meet, 21.

76   Ibid., 24.

77   Haraway, Companion Species, 2.

78   Ibid., 1.

79   Ibid. Manuela Rossini is one of few scholars to engage the erotic play that is also very much at stake in this text. See her ‘Coming Together: Symbiogenesis and Metamorphosis in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues’ in Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini, eds. Animal Encounters (Leiden: Brill, 2009) 243–58.

80   That Derrida writes that it is the ‘ear of the other that signs’ is hardly an otocentrism (especially if one eats well with ‘all the senses in general’). See Jacques Derrida, ‘Roundtable on Autobiography’, trans. Peggy Kamuf in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (New York: Shocken Books, 1985) 51.

81   Thryza Nichols Goodeve ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World: Donna J. Haraway in Conversation with Thryza Nichols Goodeve – 20th Anniversary of Modest_Witness’ in Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™(New York and London: Routledge, 2018) xiiiv.

82   Donna J. Haraway, ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary’ [1987] in Simians, Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991).

83   Haraway, Companion Species, 2.

84   Haraway, When Species Meet, 11.

85   Ibid.

86   Derrida, Animal, 27; Haraway, When Species Meet, 22.

87   Derrida, Animal, 27.

88   Ibid.

89   Haraway, When Species Meet, 240.

90   See Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) 289.

91   Along with Haraway’s sometimes frustrated, sometimes hospitable relationship to Derrida (elaborated in my ‘Critical Companions’), she has also been infuriated by what she perceived as an anti-domestic romance of the wild in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. See Haraway, When Species Meet, 27–30. Ronald Bogue gives perhaps the most detailed response to this in his ‘The Companion Cyborg: Technics and Domestication’ in Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark, eds. Deleuze and the Non/Human (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) 163–79.

92   Haraway, Companion Species, 2. Since Haraway’s Manifesto was published, there has been a massive increase in theorization of microbial life; see, for example, Astrid Schrader, ‘Microbial Suicide: Towards a Less Anthropocentric Ontology of Life and Death’ in Body and Society, 23:3 (2017): 48–74.

93   Haraway, Companion Species, 103.

94   See Butler, Gender Trouble and in particular her subsequent Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

95   Marc Shell, ‘The Family Pet’ in Representations, 15 (Summer 1986) 126.

96   Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely beside Ourselves (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 2013) is situated in the aftermath of a human family’s adoption of a chimpanzee. As with historical cases such as that of Nim Chimpsky, the aim was to teach the chimp sign-language and include the chimp as one of the human family. The novel suggests that the learning relations are multi-directional and the human daughter has been as much shaped by this experience as has her chimp sibling.

97   Shell, ‘Family Pet’, 130. (He is referring to the Gospel of Paul.)

98   Ibid.

99   Shell, ‘Family Pet’, 141.

100  Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 327. Note also Derrida’s critique of the Freud who purported to only describe ‘femininity’: Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Véritè’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud & Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 481, n. 60.

101  Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ Oncomouse™ (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) 265.

102  Haraway, Companion Species, 11.

103  Derrida, Animal, 12.

104  Haraway, Companion Species, 96.

105  Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) 103.

106  Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 6.

107  As anticipated, Haraway drew deeply allergic responses to ‘Make kin, not babies!’, including from those she ‘holds dear as “our people” on the Left’ (Staying with the Trouble, 208, n.18). One profoundly misguided review of the book directly accused Haraway and Anna Tsing (!) of genocidal fantasy: ‘Haraway’s former (profoundly system-oriented) Marxian technofeminism has given way, then, to something called multispecies feminism: a tendency pioneered also by Anna Tsing characterized by a barely disavowed willingness to see whole cities and cultures wiped from the planet for the sake of a form of thriving among “companion species” involving relatively few of us.’ See Sophie Lewis, ‘Cthulhu Plays No Role for Me’ Viewpoint Magazine, 8 May 2017. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me/

108  Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 140.

109  Ibid., 139. Again, Haraway is careful to set up groups who choose symbionts and those who reproduce by choice without so doing, in explicit avoidance of eugenic selection.

110  Derrida, Animal, 28.

111  Shell, ‘Family Pet’, 141.

112  Ibid., italics original.

113  Haraway, When Species Meet, 22–3.

114  Her Catholic upbringing is referenced several times in this interview: Donna J. Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thryza Nichols Goodeve (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 24.

115  Derrida, Animal, 3–4, italics original.

116  Ibid., 4, emphasis original.

117  Ibid., 17, emphasis added.

118  Ibid., 4.

119  Ibid., emphasis added.

120  Ibid., 50. Compare the destinerrance of the letter – even the self-addressed letter – of the postal principle discussed in Chapter 4.

121  Derrida, Animal, 1, emphasis added.

122  See Turner, ‘Critical Companions’.

123  Derrida, Animal, 5.

124  Ibid.

125  Haraway, Modest_Witness, 23.

126  Ibid. 24.

127  Ibid. While Haraway – together with other feminist science studies scholars – insists that the experimental life was key to gender ‘in the making’, and not least since women were excluded lest their empathetic engagement should interrupt proceedings, she later remarks that she was surprised at her own silence on the conscripted labour of the animals involved (e.g. the bird asphyxiating in the air pump). See Haraway, ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’, xiii–xviii.

128  For a discussion of the overlapping relations between Haraway’s reworking of the ‘modest witness’ and her partial or ‘situated’ knowledge, see ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’.

129  Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 66, emphasis original.

130  Derrida, Animal, 4.

131  Ibid., 50.

132  Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyché: The Invention of the Other’ in Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, eds. Psyché: The Invention of the Other V. 1 (Stanford University Press, 2007) 1–47. The force of this ‘invention’ turns against the calculation of the other.

133  Derrida asks after Lacan’s conservatism regarding ‘the animal’ in ‘And Say the Animal Responded’. While he discusses a number of essays in Lacan’s Ecrits, the most famous and influential one at stake in this reflection is ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ [1949] in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005) 75–81. The ‘mirror recognition test’ was developed in 1970 by psychologist Gordon Gallup, Jr. to attempt to establish whether non-human animals could recognize themselves. Notwithstanding the anthromorphic yardstick of what it is to recognize one’s kind, some species, including the Great Apes, Cetaceans and Corvids, have been able to do so. Michael Zizer suggests that Lacan was quite aware of ethology contemporary to his own writing, and that would have challenged his specular system if admitted; see ‘Animal Mirrors’ in Angelaki, 12:3 (2007): 11–33.

134  While one might argue that the mirror stage does not offer a point-for-point reflection since the immature infant misrecognizes itself as more capable in the mirror, that misrecognition is teleologically endowed to impel the emergence of human subjectivity.

135  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 21.

136  Ibid.

137  Marta Segarra, ed. The Portable Cixous (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

138  Turner, ed. The Animal Question in Deconstruction.

139  Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’ [1996], trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) 144. See also Turner, ‘Telefoam’, for further commentary on the Anglophone reception of Cixous.

140  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 16.

141  David Wood named Derrida’s insistence of the overlap of the domestic sphere and philosophical process as ‘uncanny’. See his ‘Thinking with Cats’ in Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton, eds. Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought (London: Continuum, 2004) 132.

142  Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, 73.

143  Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993) 86, n.14.

144  For a useful – though highly modest – discussion of these overlapping themes in their work, see Hélène Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida as a Proteus Unbound’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007): 389–423.

145  Derrida, Aporias, 35.

146  Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune Née (Paris: Union Générales d’Editions, 1975).

147  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 21.

148  See Turner, ‘Telefoam’, for a discussion of the telephone in Cixous (prompted by Derrida’s remark: ‘[A]re there more telephones or animals in the life and works of Hélène Cixous?’ in his H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

149  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 32.

150  Ibid.

151  Ibid. The persistence of doors and their surprising traversal inevitably suggests – and revises – Kafka’s well-known formulation of the condition of the law. Unlike the ‘man from the country’, the cat passes the door and thus retouches the law. See Kafka, The Trial, Johnny Golding drew my attention to the air of Kafka marked by Cixous’s door.

152  Numerous writers have commented on the glimmer of recognition offered by ‘Bobby the Dog’ to the dehumanized prisoners in the camps only for Lévinas to erase an ethical maxim from his barks since the animal is ‘too stupid, trop bête’ to be able to universalize this relation. See, for example, John Llewelyn qtd. Wolfe, Zoontologies 17.

153  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 22.

154  Ibid.

155  Ibid.

156  Cary Wolfe, ‘Exposures’ in Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe, eds. Philosophy & Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) 8.

157  See Turner, ‘Telefoam’.

158  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 33, Messie, 79.

159  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 33.

160  Derrida, Animal, 50.

161  Cixous, ‘Cat’s Arrival’, 22.

Chapter 6

1     Jacques Derrida, ‘Tympan’, Margins of Philosophy [1972] trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982) x, n.1.

2     Derrida, ‘Tympan’, x.

3     See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 244; Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 24.

4     The French word makes use of the ‘a’, as with differance. Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xi. Usefully glossing the inference of Derrida’s critique of this central Hegelian movement, Bass notes, ‘there is nothing from which the Aufhebung cannot profit’. See ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, 20, n. 23.

5     Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xxv.

6     Derrida, Animal, 29

7     Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xxv, emphasis original. The stamp (Fr. timbre) on a postcard echoes the vibrating timbre of ‘Tympan’. See David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) 54.

8     Lynn Turner, ‘Insect Asides’ in Lynn Turner, ed. The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) 65.

9     Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xxv.

10   While ‘Tympan’ attracts relatively modest attention within its detailed pages, John Mowitt’s theorization of the ‘percussive subject’ could be fruitfully read alongside the concerns of this chapter. See John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 23.

11   Dancer in the Dark (2000), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, United States, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, UK, Norway, Iceland, Argentina, Taiwan, Belgium: Zentropa Entertainments. The trailer is accessible here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168629/. Accessed 20 May 2020.

12   Cary Wolfe, ‘When You Can’t Believe Your Eyes (or Voice): Dancer in the Dark’ in What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010) 185.

13   See Michel Leiris, [1948] Scratches: Rules of the Game Volume 1, trans. Lydia Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

14   Jacques Derrida, Glas [1974] trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1986).

15   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xii.

16   Ibid., xvii.

17   Ibid., xxiii.

18   Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 73.

19   Veit Erlmann, ‘Descartes’s Resonant Subject’ in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22:2–3 (2011): 28

20   Erlmann, ‘Descartes’s Resonant Subject’, 28

21   Derrida only names ‘ambush’ on xv. See also xxvi.

22   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xv.

23   For Lacan’s explicit naming of the relation of phallus to logos, see his ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ in Ecrits [1966] trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) 685–96.

24   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xxvii.

25   Ibid., xxiii.

26   Dogville (2003), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, UK, Norway: Zentropa Entertainments. Antichrist (2009), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Poland: Zentropa Entertainments. Melancholia (2011), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany: Zentropa Entertainments.

27   She wrote that ‘it was extremely clear to me when I walked into the actresses profession that my humiliation and role as a lesser sexually harassed being was the norm and set in stone with the director and a staff of dozens who enabled it and encouraged it’. 17 October 2017, @bjork. https://www.facebook.com/bjork/posts/10155782628166460

28   Wolfe’s earlier version appeared in Electronic Book Review in 2001: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/musicsoundnoise/operatic

29   Jacques Derrida, ‘And Say the Animal Responded’ in Cary Wolfe, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). As discussed in Chapter 3 of this volume, Derrida’s first major critical essay on Lacan was ‘Le Facteur de la Verité’ [1975] in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 411–98.

30   Cary Wolfe, ‘Cinders After Biopolitics’ in Jacques Derrida, ed. Cinders, [1987] trans. Ned Lukacher (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014) vii–xxx.

31   It is striking that a number of recent books on Von Trier name ‘Woman’ as their topic by means of a dedicated use of Lacan and Žižek, yet do not cite Wolfe’s perhaps ‘impure’ engagement. See, for example, Ahmed Elbeshlawy, Woman in Lars Von Trier’s Cinema, 1996–2014 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) or Rex Butler and David Denny, eds. Lars Von Trier’s Women (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

32   Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).

33   Wolfe, ‘When You Can’t Believe’, 205

34   See her subsequent co-authored volume, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality (London: Verso, 2000).

35   Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 1987).

36   Wolfe, ‘When You Can’t Believe’, 185. I refer the reader back to the brief discussion of Derrida’s devastating critique of exactly this move in ‘Le Facteur de la Verité’, discussed in Chapter 4.

37   See Jacques Derrida, ‘… That Dangerous Supplement …’ in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 141–64. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Self-Interview’ in The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994). This is a ‘Self-Interview’ in which, yes, he both asks and answers his own questions.

38   Jacques Derrida, ‘For the Love of Lacan’ in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 55.

39   Wolfe, ‘When You Can’t Believe’, 185.

40   Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 36.

41   Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject’, [1988] Peter Connor and Avital Ronell (trans.) Points … Interviews 1974–1994, Elizabeth Weber ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 280, emphasis added. See also Derrida, Animal 31–2.

42   Derrida, ‘Facteur de la Verité’, 474, n.51.

43   Derrida, ‘Voice II’, 168.

44   Žižek, qtd. in Wolfe ‘When You Can’t Believe’, 199.

45   For the same, albeit more influential, manoeuvre, see Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

46   Derrida ‘Dialanguages’, trans. Peggy Kamuf in Elizabeth Weber, ed. Points … Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 140.

47   This is part of a pincer movement with Dolar, who accuses Derrida of the same thing, making the same error of ‘depriv[ing] voice of its ineradicable ambiguity’. See Dolar, Voice, 42.

48   Žižek, qtd. in Wolfe, ‘When You Can’t Believe’, 199, Žižek, ‘Self-Interview’, 195–196, emphasis added.

49   Derrida, ‘Voice II’, 163, emphasis original.

50   Ibid.

51   Ibid.

52   We might note that while Selma refuses Jeff’s ever-ready attentions as anything beyond friendship, she otherwise articulates herself very much in relation to her imaginary father as the ruse for her son.

53   Sarah Dillon and Sarah Jackson’s comments on the first draft of this chapter were particularly useful for this section.

54   Wolfe only mentions the first of these movie scenes, when Cathy’s translation of the film for Selma is purely spoken, 187. The second scene emphasizes that the soundtrack that Selma hears, instead of seeing the screen image, is thus also felt.

55   Wolfe, ‘When you can’t believe’, 194.

56   Arguably this is not the only reference to Cabaret in Dancer: Selma’s muted transformation of the sound of the oncoming train (prior to her ‘I’ve seen all there is to see’ number) contrasts to Sally Bowles’s (Liza Minelli) decadently wanton scream in the railway tunnel in front of the innocent newcomer Brian Roberts (Michael York) as a train thunders above their heads.

57   Cornelia Vismann, ‘“Rejouer les Crimes” Theatre vs. Video’ in Cardozo Law Review, 11:2 (1999): 167.

58   See Vismann, ‘Rejouer’, 168. The case in question was the notorious one committed by Corporal Lortie, who ran amok in a government building in Quebec in the 1980s, later stating that the government had his father’s face (Vismann, 163).

59   Derrida, ‘Voice II’, 163.

60   Indeed Drew Daniel writes, ‘As everyone knows, you cannot close your ears.’ He goes on to cite Lacan: ‘In the field of the unconscious, the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed.’ See Drew Daniel, ‘Queer Sound’ in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Revised Edition, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 63.

61   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xvii. Somewhat allusively he also implies it is to take shelter instead in the uncanny uterus – ‘the most familiar of dwellings’.

62   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xvii, n.9.

63   Ibid., emphasis added.

64   Vismann, ‘Rejouer’, 171.

65   Ibid., 175.

66   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xiii.

67   Ibid., xiii, n.5

68   Wolfe argues that Dancer’s own message departs from the narrative of Selma’s fate: however, in practice he says very little about the scene of her execution other than that she with ‘radical passivity’ chooses to ‘do nothing’ (193). Moreover, Selma’s collapse prior to her execution rather dulls the force that Wolfe attributes to her ‘NO!’ – as does the guilt regarding Gene’s eyesight that motivates her self-sacrifice.

69   Jacques Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell in Elizabeth Weber, ed. Points … Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 278.

70   Jacques Derrida, Glas [1974], trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Michael Naas, ‘Derrida Floruit’ in Derrida Today 9:1 (2016): 13.

71   Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty V. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 33, 54, 55, 71, 73, 78, 170, 175.

72   Ibid., 42.

73   Ibid., 145.

74   ‘Life death’ is discussed in Chapter 4 of this volume. See Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate – on “Freud”’ in The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud & Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 285. Derrida’s resistance to the death penalty by means of his beating heart is discussed in the last chapter of this book – the chapter in lieu of conclusion.

75   See Wolfe, ‘When You Can’t Believe’, 193. Wolfe, following Žižek, following Lacan, affirms the ‘act as feminine’ and as suicidal.

76   See Derrida, Death Penalty I, 15 (with regard to Rousseau).

77   I think it is Bodoni bold, as used here. NB. All of Selma’s songs were written by Björk.

78   Derrida, ‘Tympan’, xxv.

79   Derrida, Animal, 135, emphasis original.

80   Derrida, ‘Dialanguages’, 143.

Chapter 7

1     White God (2014), [Film] Dir. Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary: Proton Cinema.

2     Film trailer accessible here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2844798/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_1

3     Swedish House Mafia, ‘Save the World’, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXpdmKELE1k. Accessed 1 August 2017. This video was brought to my attention by Carla Freccero’s presentation ‘What’s in a Name?’ at the Queer Animal Symposium, King’s College, London, June 2012.

4     Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, trans. Gil Anidjar, in Gil Anidjar, ed. Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 247.

5     Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, trans. Gil Anidjar, in Gil Anidjar, ed. Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 252–3. This essay was first published simultaneously in French and English, trans. Mary Quaintance in Cardozo Law Review, 11:219 (1990): 920–1039. In 1994 Derrida published a revised French edition and this ‘complete’ version is the one re-translated for Acts of Religion, cited here.

6     Mary Beth Haralovich qtd. in Annette Kuhn, [1982] Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd Edition (London and New York: Verso, 1994) 34. This structural gendering is hardly limited to cinema; see, for example, Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991).

7     Kuhn, Women’s Pictures, 34. In a brilliant rejoinder to this entire problem, the very last episode of Hulu television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (after a seven season run) destroyed the conditions of possibility of its own legend while maintaining both the life and sexual independence of its eponymous heroine – now one among many such slayers rather than the exception.

8     Dylan Hallinstad O’Brien, Review of White God in Feral Feminisms, 6 (2016) 119–22. Lassie Come Home (dir. Fred. M. Wilcox, US, 1943) revolved around a young boy and his devoted pet dog; The Incredible Journey (dir. Fletcher Markle, US, 1963) is the journey of three pets finding their way home. Erica Fudge, Pets (Stocksfield: Ashgate, 2008).

9     Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Hoglund, Nicklas Hallen, eds. ‘Introduction’, in Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 9.

10   That some refer to this revolutionary uprising as a ‘psychotic outbreak’ seems wilfully misleading. See, for example, Peter Bradshaw’s review in The Guardian, 26 February 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/26/white-god-review-kornel-mundruczo

11   Spartacus, dir. Stanley Kubrick, US, 1960. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, dir. Rupert Wyatt, US, 2011.

12   Dinesh Wadiwel, The War Against Animals (Leiden: Brill, 2015) 269.

13   Unlike the ape leader, Caesar, as he justifies breaking his own law against the killing of other apes by saying to his foe, ‘You are not ape’; see Johan Hogland, ‘Simian Horror in Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ in Animal Horror Cinema.

14   Talionic justice is abbreviated by the biblical phrase ‘an eye for an eye’. See Exodus 21.24–5; Leviticus 24.20; Deuteronomy 19.21

15   See Jacques Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ in Elizabeth Weber, ed. Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 288–99.

16   Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ 295.

17   Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, V.I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009) 17–18.

18   Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

19   Dayan, 39, 252. See also Bénédicte Boisseron, ‘Afro-dog’ in Transition, 118 (2015): 15–31. Boisseron’s discussion of ‘cyno-racial kinship’ invokes both Dayan’s work and Fuller’s film.

20   White Dog (Dir. Sam Fuller, 1982, US: Paramount Pictures). Trailer available here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084899/

21   Sheila Roberts, ‘White God Interview: Director Kornel Mundruczo’, 27 March 2015. http://collider.com/white-god-kornel-mundruczo-interview/. Accessed 20 May 2020.

22   Jacques Derrida, ‘Force and Signification’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001) 5, italics original.

23   Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 247.

24   John Greco discusses White Dog in his blog Twenty Four Frames. https://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/white-dog-1982-sam-fuller/

25   Romain Gary, Chien Blanc (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970).

26   The dog was played by five other dogs (credited as Hans, Folsom, Son, Buster and Duke).

27   Susanne Schwertfeger also suggests the potential correlation between Carruthers and the dog’s first trainer; see her ‘Re-education as Exorcism: How a White Dog Challenges the Strategies for Dealing with Racism’ in Gregersdotter, Hoglund, Hallen, eds. Animal Horror Cinema, 138.

28   A great deal of care evidently went into training this dog to ‘play dead’, with his head softly hitting the ground.

29   Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 329, emphasis original.

30   Jacques Lacan qtd. in Derrida, Beast 1, 97. See Jacques Lacan, ‘A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology’ in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005) 137.

31   This transubstantiation of animal into human is reminiscent of Freud’s interpretation of animal phobias: ‘In every case it was the same: the fear was basically of the father, where the children under examination were boys, and had merely been displaced on to the animal.’ Freud, ‘Totem & Taboo’, 128.

32   Derrida, Beast 1, 110.

33   Ibid., 107.

34   Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty V.I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014) 141. These seminars took place from 1999 until 2001.

35   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 141.

36   Much publicity and discussion around the film noted that these were real dogs, not CGI ones, running through Budapest, that they were trained with care and adopted by the end of the film’s production. See Katherine Tarpinian’s interview with the dog trainer Teresa Ann Miller, ‘How 200 Dogs Were Trained to Act in “WHITE GOD,”’ 15 April, 2015. https://creators.vice.com/en_uk/article/mgp3j8/how-200-dogs-were-trained-to-act-in-white-god

37   Gil Anidjar, ‘A Note on “Force of Law”’ in Jacques Derrida, ed. Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 228.

38   Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’. [1949] in Ecrits, 75–81.

39   See Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Sky Horse Publishing, 2007). For a discussion of horse whisperer Monty Roberts’s practice of ‘starting’ rather than ‘breaking’ horses in light of observing wild mares discipline errant young horses, see Paul Patton, ‘Language, Power and the Training of Horses’, in Cary Wolfe, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).

40   The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper, US, 1974. In the film’s cannibal family, ‘Grandpa’ is described as a former slaughterhouse worker, presumably at the plant seen en route to the old family homestead.

41   Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minnesota University Press, 2009) 87. At the time of writing, a petition was in circulation against a new level of ‘high speed’ slaughter and the extreme levels of loss of care in service to the machine and the demands of capital. See Scott David, ‘America’s Horrifying New Plan for Animals: High-Speed Slaughterhouses’ The Guardian, 6 March 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/06/ive-seen-the-hidden-horrors-of-high-speed-slaughterhouses.

42   Noëlie Vialles, Animal to Edible, trans. J. A. Underwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 53–4.

43   Shukin, Animal Capital, 91.

44   Ibid., 97–8. Nicole Shukin and Sarah O’Brien, ‘Being Struck: On the Force of Slaughter and Cinematic Affect’ in Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon, eds. Animal Life and the Moving Image (Basingstoke: BFI Publishing, 2015) 187–202. In an interview, Mundruczó affirmatively compares White God to Strike, taking the dogs for the workers: ND/NF Interview: Kornél Mundruczó by Yonca Talu, 20 March 2015. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/ndnf-interview-kornel-mundruczo-white-god/

45   The nadir of this knock-on effect perhaps is in the Maroon 5 pop video, Like Animals, in which the self-conscious equation of montage and butchery is seemingly designed to attract young women viewers even as the lead singer is also, for the narrative purpose of the song, both a butcher and a stalker. The blow here instigates submission rather than revolution.

46   As Shukin and O’Brien acknowledge, in light of Jonathan Burt’s work on ‘pro-animal’ films, this logic is hardly confined to Eisenstein.

47   The interior slaughterhouse scenes were filmed in an abattoir exterior to Budapest, the courtyard used for the film is that of the city’s National Heritage Protection Centre (correspondence with Eszter Timár, Budapest, January 2018).

48   Vialles notes the loss of skills and loss of confrontation with and acknowledgement of individual animals in Animal to Edible, 52.

49   Vialles, Animal to Edible, 46.

50   See Charlie LeDuff ‘At a Slaughterhouse, some things never die’ in Cary Wolfe, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003) 183–98 and Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialised Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

51   Deuteronomy 14:14, qtd. in Vialles 73.

52   Vialles, 33.

53   The environmental considerations of such a vast and polluting production of waste are discussed here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sue-cross/horse-meat-slaugtherhorse-veganism_b_2684502.html

54   Vialles, Animal to Edible, 66.

55   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 96.

56   Ibid. Italics original.

57   Tobias Menely, ‘Red’ in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Prismatic Ecology (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014) 24.

58   Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1849.

59   Claire Jean Kim discusses the trainer’s abusive trick of maintaining sightlines between dog and owner so that they will continue fighting for their owner. See her ‘Michael Vick, Dogfighting and the Parable of Black Recalcitrance’ in Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 253–82.

60   See Kim, Dangerous Crossings.

61   See Gil Anidjar, ‘Le Cru: Derrida’s Blood’ in theory@buffalo 2015, 8–22.

62   Vialles, Animal to Edible, 92.

63   Dawne McCance fleshes out Heidegger’s faith that the animal cannot die but merely ‘perishes’ as a consequence of the animal’s inability to apprehend the world as such by means of language. See her ‘Death’ in Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) 122.

64   Kelly Oliver, ‘See Topsy “Ride the Lightning”: The Scopic Machinery of Death’ in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50 Spindel Supplement (2012): 76.

65   Or even ‘immigrants’. The political situation in Budapest under the ever-more right-wing premiership of Viktor Orban is directing increasing hostility towards refugees. See Joe Wallen, ‘Hungary Is the Worst:’ Refugees Become Punch-bag Under PM Viktor Orban’ The Independent, 13 July 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hungary-refugees-immigration-viktor-orban-racism-border-fence-a8446046.htmlOrban has also explicitly targeted feminists, banning the teaching of ‘Gender Studies’ in Hungarian universities. See Maya Oppenheim, ‘Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban Bans Gender Studies Programmes’ The Independent, 24 October 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hungary-bans-gender-studies-programmes-viktor-orban-central-european-university-budapest-a8599796.html

66   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 23.

67   Ibid., 231.

68   Oliver, ‘See Topsy “Ride the Lightning”’, 77.

69   Shukin, Animal Capital, 154. As she notes, films of executions were common subjects in early cinema, whether of humans or animals.

70   Shukin, 160.

71   Ibid.

72   This is not simply about abolitionism’s partial form that looks only to mitigate ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ but about the use of drugs to make it appear that no pain has been caused. For example, Oliver, ‘See Topsy “Ride the Lightning”’.

73   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 276.

74   Elizabeth Rottenberg, ‘Deconstructing Death: Derrida and the Scene of Execution’ in New Formations, 89/90 (2016) 34.

75   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 116.

76   Derrida cites Rousseau in this regard; see Death Penalty I, 15.

77   Ibid., 116.

78   Ibid., 2, italics original. Derrida is thus in explicit critical dialogue with the Michel Foucault of Discipline and Punish; see Death Penalty I, 42.

79   Ibid., 2–3.

80   Ibid., 23, emphasis added.

81   Ibid., 42. Oliver expands the theatrical aspects of Derrida’s critical implication of ‘speculative philosophy’ but leaves the question of idealism and the sense of speculation as a gamble out of her analysis; see her ‘See Topsy “Ride the Lightning”’, 75–6.

82   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 258.

83   Ibid.

84   Ibid., 256.

85   Ibid., 257.

86   The one exception is the spoiler-savvy hint to ‘a stirring moment of submission’ in J. Larsen’s 4* review. http://www.larsenonfilm.com/white-god

87   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 49.

88   Ibid., 220.

89   Lili only says, ‘I love you too’ to Hagen much earlier in the film, when she is playing her trumpet to them both in the bathroom of her father’s apartment. Then there is no suggestion of disequivalence or a question of the status of their relation.

90   Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, 291.

91   Derrida, Death Penalty I, 257.

92   Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, 297.

93   See Timothy Clark, ‘By Heart: A Reading of Derrida’s “Che cos’è la poesia?” Through Keats and Celan’ in Oxford Literary Review, 15:1 (2012): 43–78. Clark also remarks on Derrida’s radical revision of how we might understand the hedgehog as that entity both turned in and turned out – heteropoetic perhaps – rather than able to stand alone to ‘figure the Ideal of the Romantic text as unconditioned’, as it did for Schlegel (46).

94   Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ 289.

95   Ibid., 299. Nicholas Royle remarks that this ‘demon of the heart’ is unattributed, thus he takes it as Derrida’s name for the poem itself. See Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 137.

96   Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 270.

97   Derrida, Beast I, 108.