Pas de Loup

In his first seminar on the topic of 'The Beast and the Sovereign', given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) on 12 December 2001 (published as part of The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 1), Derrida begins by invoking the phrase à pas de loup, meaning to walk with the light step of the wolf, stealthily, lightly or warily, on tip-toes, silently or just barely heard. The pas de loup, which signals the approach of his seminar topic, also announces the proximity of an animal or human:

the wolf itself is named there in absentia, as it were; the wolf is named where you don't hear or see it coming; it is still absent, save for its name. It is looming, an object of apprehension; it is named, referred to, even called by its name; one imagines or projects toward it an image, a trope, a figure, a myth, a fable, a fantasy, but always by reference to someone who, advancing à pas de loup, is not there, not yet there, someone who is not present or represented; you can't even see its tail; as another proverb says: 'When you speak of the wolf, you see its tail', meaning that someone, a human this time, shows up just when you are talking about him or her.

(P. 5)

The wolf, he suggests, poses for us 'thorny frontier questions': not just the physical animal, the wolf has historically served as a figure for animality in general, the beast whose fabular savagery provides us with a recurrent motif for the non-human, from the Capitoline wolf of Rome's foundational legend to the nursery tale of Red Riding Hood. As Derrida points out, however, the wolf has also, conversely, served as a recurrent figure for the human, whether in a Hobbesian understanding of man's base wolfish nature (homo homini lupus), Rousseau's confessional representation of himself as a werewolf (loup-garou), or Freud's Wolf Man, Sergei Pankejeff, whose dream of seven staring wolves sitting in a tree outside his childhood bedroom window provided one of psychoanalysis's most notorious foundational case-studies.

The step of the wolf is also, though, in the idiomatic French, the pas de loup, the not-wolf or no wolf, the wolf who is not there; 'perhaps even', Derrida declares, 'there is no such thing as the wolf ': 'There is only a word, a spoken word, a fable, a fable-wolf, a fabulous animal, or even a fantasy (fantasma in the sense of revenant, in Greek; or fantasy in the enigmatic sense of psychoanalysis, in the sense, for example, that a totem corresponds to a fantasy); there is only a another "wolf " that figures something else' (p. 5). The Wolf Man's dream, in Freud's tortuous reading, also famously figures something else, standing in for an erased scene of parental intercourse witnessed by the child: even the wolves Pankejeff drew for Freud as an example of his dream looked more like sheepdogs. Pankejeff so took to Freud's celebrated name for him that in later life he would answer the telephone with 'Hier spricht der Wolfsmann', himself becoming the literal embodiment of the fantasised wolves that never were.

In The Nets of Modernism, Maud Ellmann takes up these 'lycanthropic metamorphoses' in an ingenious reading of the Wolf Man's psychoanalytic career against the punningly lupine Virginia Woolf 's parallel interests in animality and representation. Woolf, too, recounted a 'lycanthropic trauma' of a childhood memory or hallucination, having once seen the horrifying face of an animal staring back over her shoulder in her mirror: 'I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened.' In To The Lighthouse, James Ramsay's father is imagined as cast outside the window of the Ramsays...