The Gaze Called Animal: Notes for a Study on Thinking

Over the course of several days in 1997, Jacques Derrida delivered a long lecture to attendees of a conference in Cerisy called “The Autobiographical Animal.” As part of his opening remarks, the philosopher recounted a curious little scene that served to introduce the central theme of the larger address that followed. The scene begins when Derrida reports that each morning, with an almost ritualistic regularity, he is followed from his bedroom into the bathroom by his cat, an unnamed feline, he insists, that is a real little cat, not the mere figure of a cat: “It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions” (2008, 6). The action picks up when Derrida finds himself naked before this little cat, naked in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, an encounter, he reports, that he always has a “bad time” (j’ai du mal) overcoming (4). The regular meeting never fails to flood him with shame, especially if he is caught face-to-face, if the cat observes him frontally naked, as if with a view to seeing. The scene comes to an end when the cat invariably leaves the bathroom, looking for her breakfast or asking to be let out. After the presentation of this strange theme, Derrida begins to weave a remarkable set of variations, not least of which is treating the encounter as a contemporary iteration of the Biblical Fall, that first, painful moment when the human became aware of its own interiority—a coming to know oneself that means knowing oneself ashamed, in short, a consciousness of good and evil—the original primal scene, which the philosopher points out, occurred under the gaze of a rather famous Biblical animot.¹

One feels tempted to try to name Derrida’s theme: Moments when the animal regards me. The point of view of animals. An animal looks at me. The experience of the seeing animal. In the beginning, since time, since so long ago, the animal has been looking. Seeing oneself seen naked under the gaze called animal. Or perhaps simply: The gaze called animal. It is a slightly unsettling motif. Upon first hearing, it might sound like a coy play on one of John Berger’s (1991) more familiar and comforting themes: “Why look at animals?” But in one of his characteristic deconstructive reversals, Derrida is instead attempting to glean significance from occasions when one feels seen by that which we call animal.²

Despite the delicate playfulness of the opening scene, Derrida’s long lecture quickly evolves into a fierce Sturm und Drang. The bathroom encounter is followed by an ambitious pronouncement about the current “epoch” of thinking on animals, an age beginning with Descartes and his animal-machines: “At bottom,” Derrida thunders, there are “only two types of discourse, two positions of knowledge, two grand forms of theoretical or philosophical treatise regarding the animal” (2008, 13). It is, of course, the first that preoccupies him. Of this category he names a handful of philosophical giants—Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, Lévinas—thinkers that have all seen, observed, analyzed, and reflected on the animal, and yet, Derrida insists, have never been seen seen. Each has failed to draw significance from those moments when the animal “looks at me”: “They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systemic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them” (13). Although their philosophical discourses might be sound, Derrida proposes that their thinking proceeds in the form of a disavowal, as if they have never been regarded by someone “deep within a life called animal” (14). This remarkable opening movement is followed by a series of three “micrological” readings in which Derrida puts his working hypothesis to the test. As a whole, the lecture sounds as if the philosopher were attempting to let the animals loose in the hallways of his profession.

As for that other...