"Animals Have No Hand": An Essay on Animality in Derrida

"Animals Have No Hand"

An Essay on Animality in Derrida

I. Introduction: Not the Worst, the Least Violence

We are trying set up the possibility of a more sufficient response to what Derrida, in L'animal que donc je suis, calls a "war of the species." This war is part of globalization, which is itself a form of war, a form of pacification of all opponents; it is, in fact, as Derrida says in "Faith and Knowledge," "globalatinization" (1998a). But with globalatinization, we see as well that its universal movement erodes the borders between nation-states. The erosion of the borders, for Derrida, increases the probability of the worst happening. The structure of the worst amounts to making two into one: it is a form of totalization. Or, it attempts to separate one from the other in order to make one alone: man apart from animal, man apart from the parasite, man unscathed and apart from (to use one of Derrida's "old names") the "pharmakon." In "Plato's Pharmacy," we encountered the pharmakon as the "mixture-element," the element which is itself a mixture (1972a, 146; 1981, 127). But more importantly, the pharmakon is ambivalent; it has no value in itself (it is nevertheless not monovalent) (1972a, 144–45; 1981, 126–27); the pharmakon in fact destabilizes all value positing. The pharmakon then is violence itself (or even radical evil in the sense of evil at the root, "arche-violence" [1967a, 164–65; 1974, 112]), violence that we are not able to eliminate, a violence that indicates a fundamental weakness or fault in us, in all living beings. The worst violence, however, consists in precisely the attempt to eliminate the evil of the pharmakon once and for all. In contrast, what we are seeking is a more sufficient response to this worst violence, a response that is more sufficient than the reductionism of biological continuity and the separationism of a metaphysical opposition. All attempts bound up with the question of the self (the autos or ipse), such as animal rights (based on the idea of human rights), fall into one of these two sides: biological continuism or metaphysical separationism. The more sufficient response means that we do not and should not want to completely eliminate the minimal violence. What we are seeking is a lesser violence, even the least violence.

To approach this more sufficient response, we are going to enter into some of Derrida's most difficult but also most powerful argumentation. It is well known that all of Derrida's reflections on animality engage his reading of Heidegger, especially in "Heidegger's Hand (Geschlecht 2)." For Derrida, what always defines Heidegger's thinking (or, more precisely, what defines one of the voices of Heidegger's thinking) is the idea of gathering, Versammlung, rassemblement. As Derrida says: "gathering together (Versammlung) is always what Heidegger privileges" (1987c, 438; 1987b, 182). Thanks to this article, we shall see that Heidegger's claim, found in What is Called Thinking, that apes (and more generally animals) have no hand (and have no hand precisely in the singular) implies that they do not have access to gathering, and that means to the phenomenological "as such" (1987c, 355; 1987b, 173). And especially they have no access to the "as such" of death (Heidegger 1961, 51; 1968, 16; 1959, 90). The lack of access to death proper explains why, for Heidegger, animals cannot be the privileged beings by means of which one is able to reopen the question of being. They do not question their own being. In contrast, as is well known, Dasein is able to question its own being since the possibility of death as such defines its proper being. Only from this possibility is it possible to reopen the question of being. To render the claim uncertain that we, as...