Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts by Dominick LaCapra (review)

In this defiantly political book, Dominick LaCapra pairs Freud with Derrida to expose the psychological and historical processes underpinning the persecution of human and non-human others. The pairing is a fruitful one, lending methodological consistency to a volume which, LaCapra discloses, has ‘no linear development among the chapters’ (p. 10). For LaCapra, the principal task is the reconceptualization of subjectivity, disrupting the tendency to project the unknowable ‘other within’ (p. 2) onto an external other (classified according to sex, race, and species) who is thus demonized and scapegoated. The intersecting vocabularies and methodologies of deconstruction and psychoanalysis are more than fit for purpose here. Undermining the founding fantasy of a teleologically determined sovereign subject, both discourses forge a thinking of the future which resists anthropocentric humanism. Following Derrida, LaCapra contends that such futural thinking is circumscribed by an unflinching awareness of its own provisionality. ‘Working on and through’, he writes, ‘does not imply the achievement of closure and full identity or autonomy’ (p. 39). His account of deconstruction — now languishing out of favour — is grounded in a careful unfolding of its historicity and a patient rebuttal of the frequent charge of cultural relativism. Against the backdrop of this meticulous deflation of individual, national, and species sovereignty, LaCapra, incensed, positions the politics of Donald Trump. An ‘exponent of thought that resists criticism and self-criticism’ (p. 24), Trump is the propagator of a pompous, narcissistic politics of sovereignty which is oblivious both to the lessons of history and to the pressing environmental challenges that we currently face. Propelled by the urgency of mobilizing an effective resistance, LaCapra sets aside the niceties of disciplinary provincialism, moving swiftly between divergent discourses to hasten the transformation of the humanities into the interdisciplinary post-humanities. Occasionally this approach is frustrating: a closer engagement with existing scholarship would have enriched LaCapra’s accounts of animality, post-humanism, and the logic of messianism, for example. However, the book’s force lies not in attention to intellectual minutiae but in its incisive framing of prescient questions: Why does the ‘sacrificial mechanism’ (p. 42) which accounts for our denigration of other beings persist so strongly? How can we use deconstructive and psychoanalytic insights about selfhood to construct identities which are not rooted in violence? Such questions require collaborative responses. LaCapra’s great skill is in revivifying the methods of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, not as tools for the couch or the academy, but, in enabling ‘a dialogical relation to the past’ (p. 57), as tools with which to build a post-human future.