Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida's Final Seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign

6. Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

6. Conclusions and Directions for Future research In this final chapter I will review some of the issues raised in the earlier chapters—those issues that for one reason or other strike me as problematic and as needing further reading, research, and reflection . No doubt, I will have missed many issues that readers may find particularly troublesome or compelling. Yet so many matters have thrust themselves to the fore that I will clearly have great difficulty in organizing them. There will be repetitions as well as omissions, and much meandering. And, no doubt, some of the following remarks will be controversial. The danger of letting your hair down is that it may cover your eyes. My only wish is that the controversial remarks spawn, to repeat, further reading, research, and reflection. That wish is perhaps extravagant given the current academic climate, especially in the English-speaking philosophical world, although not exclusively there, which seems to dedicate itself more to vociferous position-taking these days than to careful study. Yet as extensive and as debilitating as such position-taking is, there remain—if it is not too avuncular of me to say so—a surprising number of students and faculty who are dedicated to careful and critical reading. Let the following questions and concluding rambles be addressed to them, therefore, as an expression of hope in the future. The first volume of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign raises so many issues that we are certain to find much food for thought—and for controversy—there. Perhaps the first thorny issue is Derrida’s claim that both Hobbes’s Leviathan and Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political are based on “a pessimistic anthropology.” (In that context I mentioned Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, a book that I read during my undergraduate years and that made a lasting impression on me.) Fear makes the sovereign, says Hobbes, and Schmitt adds that foes make the sovereign state. One wants to resist the identification of political life—political life at every level, including the academic—with 146 Derrida and Our Animal Others fear and aggression. One wants to forget Yeats’s reference to weasels fighting in a hole, which in any case is unfair to weasels. Resistance is difficult, however, when Departments of State and Foreign Offices, regardless of who may be president or prime minister, see foes at work everywhere. Was that not the insight granted us by the recent WikiLeaks scandal, namely, that ours is through and through a politics of paranoia? Heidegger remarks somewhere—I believe in his Introduction to Metaphysics —that “pessimism” and “optimism” are two sticks that we rub together in order to make a puny, sputtering fire. It is hardly a matter of “opting for” an “optimistic” anthropology, as if that were indeed an “option.” We live in a time of crisis—crisis of capital, crisis of all political and legal structures, crisis of educational institutions at every level, and crisis of confidence in our ability even to acknowledge the other crises—and like Horace’s hero we watch with greater or lesser degrees of equanimity as the debris falls about our ears. Derrida himself talks about the prevalence of bêtise in philosophical thinking and in all learned discourses, perhaps especially in social-political discourses. Indeed, apophantic discourse (as such) teeters tremulously on the edge of bêtise—either on the edge or already well on the far side. He identifies bêtise as the proper essence and “authenticity” of the human, which for the philosopher is grounded in the “I think,” the bêtise that accompanies all my representations. Who nowadays will imagine that our political discourses, both inside and outside the academy, manage to get safely beyond beastly stupidity? And, let us remind ourselves, such beastliness or asininity is a human prerogative, not attributable to other animals. Derrida’s fascination with Schmitt is therefore a bit like Robinson’s fear of and craving for devourment—it is double-edged and it cuts both ways. It is no accident that via the conduit of Leo Strauss leading figures in the U.S. Department of State were and still are strongly influenced by Schmitt’s heady elixir of Realpolitik and right-wing ontotheology. The pessimistic view of humankind rules, and that is its attraction: it has power; it is in power. And not merely in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. Calvinism, in various Protean disguises, dominates so much of our public...