I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Spätwerk

392 Spätwerk Among the dreams Adorno recorded for his unfinished dream book, there is one that turns up the contrast with the daytime recording of seemingly resolved and remembered transference proceedings. It’s a school dream about a school day. But the high school is now fifty years old and former student Adorno has been invited to contribute to the Festschrift thus occasioned . In his dreams the musical direction of the high school is ceremoniously transferred to him. That the transference is where the heat still is becomes evident via the physical return of his “repulsive” music teacher, who honors him. “Afterwards a grand gala ball was held. I danced there with a huge yellow-brown hound—in my childhood such a hound dog played an important role. He walked upright and wore a frock coat. I followed the hound’s lead completely and, though I am otherwise without any talent whatsoever for dancing, I had the feeling that for the first time in my life I could dance, sure-footed and uninhibited. Occasionally we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up highly satisfied.” (mid-September 1958, Traumprotokolle, 70). In his “Fichus” lecture (held in Frankfurt on the occasion of his receipt of the Adorno Prize in 2001) Derrida contemplated his “dream” of a book he wished to compose in seven interminable chapters in which he would explore and establish his relationship to Adorno, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School. “The seven chapters of this history, of which I dream, are already writing themselves, of this I am confident. What we today share with one another, testifies to it without doubt.” Derrida attends carefully to the many factors one most likely might at first anticipate as separating deconstruction from the Frankfurt School. By the third chapter, however, we arrive at a plan for establishing common ground, namely the interest Spätwerk 393 in psychoanalysis that Derrida shared with Adorno and Benjamin. But it is not until chapter 7 that there appears a direct hit of proximity or continuity between Derrida and Adorno. This chapter proposal doubles as the plan for Derrida’s Spätwerk. Now I come to the chapter that I would take the greatest pleasure in writing, because it would open a path that is the least traveled, if it has even been opened yet, but which, it seems to me, counts among the most significant for a future reading of Adorno. It concerns that which one designates with a general singular noun, something that always shocks me anew, as the animal. As though there were only one. Beginning with scattered sketches or references . . . I would attempt to show. . . that we are dealing here with premises that must be unfolded with great care, indeed with the appearance at least of a thinking and acting revolution of which we are in great need in living together with those other living beings called animals. Adorno recognized that this new critical ecology (I would prefer to speak of it as “deconstructive”) would need to confront two fearsome powers that at times are opposed to each other, at other times stand allied. On one side the most powerful idealist and humanist tradition of philosophy. “Human domination of nature,” Adorno clarifies, “is directed against animals. . . . Animals play virtually the same role for the idealist system that the Jews play for the fascist system.” The animals would be the Jews of the idealists, who thus would be nothing other than virtual fascists. Fascism begins when one verbally abuses an animal , indeed the animal in man. To scold the animal in man or “abusively call man an animal—that is genuine idealism.” Twice Adorno speaks of “schimpfen” [to scold, abuse verbally, name call, insult]. On the other side, however, . . . one would need to confront the ideology that conceals itself behind the dubious interest that in turn, on occasion all the way to vegetarianism, the fascists, the Nazis and their Führer seemed to take in animals.1 The last time I saw Derrida was my first opportunity to introduce my dog Elli to him. I like to think that Elli was the first animal to sit in his public audience. During the closing panel discussion, Derrida asked several times and with emphasis where Elli was in the audience; he wanted to know that she was there; he wondered whether she was listening or whether she would perhaps respond. In the course of the discussion Derrida underscored that he had...