Caught Naked in the Eyes of the Cat: Derrida and the Critique of Ethics and Animality
“It's OK to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings,” –Kurt Cobain, Something in the Way
The divide between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ is one that is generally taken for granted in most public thought, perhaps as obvious, where it seems ridiculous to equate one’s own existence (as a ‘human’) to a moth’s, for example. Yet, as is standard with his method, Jacques Derrida takes up the task in his book The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006) of deconstructing this binary, revealing the aporias inherent within this privileging of the human over the animal. His book begins by analyzing a situation which highlights the seemingly bizarre division of ‘man’ and ‘beast’—the shame Derrida feels with being seen naked by his cat. This event, then, lays the groundwork for the deconstruction that follows in the rest of the book to be justly understood. Derrida will go on to critique anthropocentrism in philosophy in favor of his ethics based in compassion, rather than a deontological principle to follow, called auto-affection and sufferance.
It seems only fair to begin with clarification, or at least as much clarification as we can give. To do so, it is worth breaking down the meaning and context of the title, The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). This is actually only one of many translations of the original French, “l’animal que donc je suis (à suivre).” Perhaps the best title for this essay would be David Wills’ “the animal that therefore I follow, whose logic is to be tracked in what follows.” (162) This translation is suitable as we see clearly the two main takeaways that the title presents: firstly, the ‘animal’ being followed is the ‘beast,’ or our body. Derrida’s point is that the “I am” follows the animal—the beast—and tracks its ‘logic.’ Logic here doesn’t simply mean the literal logical ties that make up reason and understanding (although, it certainly would include that), rather logic can be thought of as the ‘movement’ of the beast, such as the literal movements of the body (like when the “I” narrates its own actions while they are being done), but also the polysemic meaning that can be extrapolated from phenomenological experience. Derrida’s point is that the “I” ‘thinks’ ‘as’ the body based on what the body experiences, and the body’s logic (or identity) is ‘tracked’ by the “I.” This is essential to understanding both the animal and also the text as a whole, as the “question of following” precedes all other questions; Derrida writes that “before the question of (the) being as such, of esse and sum, of ego sum, there is the question of following.”(65) In order to tackle the question of being, for instance, we must recognize the following taking place in between the “I” and the body, which also means we must recognize the anthropological biases that will influence our approach (the result of the “I” tracking the beast in its following) to the question.
Next, and to tackle the main question of this essay, what exactly is occurring when one is seen naked by their cat? Why does one feel shame when naked in front of an animal? And are animals not themselves already naked? With other people, we feel shame in nudity because we recognize their sovereign status in the presence of our own sovereignty, having both (consensually or not) entered into a social contract of being clothed. Shame in nudity, then, is simply a broken law, or a violation of some sacred code. However, for the animal, the same cannot be said. As Derrida writes on page 5, “the animal is not naked because it is naked. It doesn’t feel its own nudity… [the animal] is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked.” The word ‘naked’ has multiple ways of being read: the exoteric reading would be imagining, in the spirit of how it has been used thus far up until this point in the essay, is as a clothesless-nudity. The animals have no thoughts of dressing themselves— for them, there is no state of nude nor dressed, and (referring again to the “logic that is tracked in what follows,”) there is no binary to assert a ‘nude-status’ onto the animal from within the animal or nature, without the “I” that would need to therefore follow the animal and name it as such.
Secondly, we can hear this word ‘naked’ in the same way that Derrida first uses it: “I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked… words from the heart.” (1) Derrida begins the seminar with this because he desires to speak on behalf of his own animal, in the same manner as when he spoke from the woman in him in Spurs, for instance. Firstly, words themselves are not naked, as they are the ‘clothing’ for the object of analysis (although saying ‘object’ still presupposes some fundamental name or referent with whatever we might be talking about, no matter how broad the concept is); he writes that “clothing would be proper to man, one of the ‘properties’ of man. ‘Dressing oneself’ would be inseparable from all the other figures of what is ‘proper to man,’”(5) This, if reading ‘dressing’ as some type of ‘naming’ or ‘giving-word-to,’ argues that naming is a fundamental part of this binary between human and animal. To speak ‘naked-words’ requires one to speak words that have never been uttered before, authentically, with simultaneously a new meaning and context from within the speaker, and a new and nonfinite polysemic possibility for interpretation on the part of the listener. This also supports the idea that to really ‘know’ something, or to make an authentic contribution, one must be able to say a concept in their own words and not repeat themselves.
And as for why one feels shame when caught in the gaze of their cat may be exemplified best by what Derrida writes on page 3, “passing across borders or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal, to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.” Derrida has 3 purposes with this statement—first, Derrida’s surrendering is that of an active passivity (or a passive activity), which ties into the notion of reaction and responsibility that we will look at momentarily. Essentially, the shame comes precisely from our unease with our own animality; our shame arises from ourselves, rather than the from in cat inherently (unlike the human other, who may inspire shame in us simply from knowing that they are there in the presence of one’s nudity, bearing witness to the bestial state and the violation our unspoken social contract). This ‘unease’ starts as a general shame, not unlike that which we feel in the presence of a human other, yet upon realizing the difference in situations, that is, the lack of a sovereign entity to bind and judge us via some social contract, we lose ‘reason for shame.’ This is what Derrida finds shameful with being seen naked by his cat. We feel naked and ashamed, but we soon remember that the cat has no knowledge of the social contract among sovereign agents; we then feel shameful for feeling shameful.
From here on out, the biggest critiques that Derrida goes on to make are his critiques of a) how we conceptualize and talk about animals in general, b) how animals function in ethical systems (that is, deontological rules regarding animals, and c) the condemnation to death inherent within ‘names’ and how, paradoxically (and through factory farming), we make animals ‘be dead.’ So, to begin, how exactly does Derrida believe we conceptualize animals? Essentially, any use of ‘animal’ or ‘non-human-animal,’ as Derrida explains, “each time the subject of that statement [the animal], this ‘one,’ this ‘I,’ does that he utters an asinanity.”(31) As a solution, Derrida propose l’animot, or instead “plural animals heard in the singular.”(47) Firstly, as is the case with gender and sex, there is no ‘one animal,’ that is, the claim ‘animal in general’ is ignorant of itself—it somehow asserts that there is an essential quality that all individual animals ‘generally’ have. This is in direct conflict with Derrida’s philosophy as a whole, one based on difference rather than similitude.
This itself is also a critique of the Aristotelian and the Heideggerian concept of animal. With Aristotle, there are 3 forms of ‘living’: firstly, the nutritive soul (i.e., a plant which must only be fed, watered, sheltered, etc.), the appetitive soul (the animal that has desires such as reproduction, and is fundamentally irrational), and the rational soul (or, the ‘god-like’ soul, depending on which translation of Nicomachean Ethics you read). If we imagine this as a pyramid, with the rational soul at the top and nutritive at the bottom, we can see (for Aristotle) humans having a physical body existing in the appetitive, whilst the rational mind can regulate and mediate the desires of the body (so that one might cultivate their virtue). This more-than-explicit privileging of humans over animals, one for instance which grants us access to virtue and duty (and, by extension, eudaimonia) inaccessible for animals.
Heidegger, on the other hand, views animals and humans as each containing different understandings and relationship to the world; humans (or, more specifically, Dasein) are ‘world forming,’ which means that they have the ability to form understandings and relationships with the world (rather than a philosophy of difference, Heidegger posits that concepts are never complete, which is the polysemic relationship we have to the world and our projects). Stones or inanimate objects are ‘worldless,’ as they have no conception of what the world is, nor a conception of what it is like to be themselves in the world. Animals, however, are ‘world poor,’ without Dasein, and while they do indeed have a world, they are unable to ‘grasp’ (for apes, at least, both literally and conceptually, as seen in Heidegger’s Hand). This is the Heideggerian separation between ‘animal’ and ‘human.’
What Heidegger gets wrong here, according to Derrida, is that Heidegger fails to transcend a Cartesian dualism. He writes on page 71 that “let us keep in mind that Descartes … was already saying … something that similarly made things questionable,” in regard to how Heidegger questions the idea of ‘man as a rational animal’ in his Letter on Humanism. Derrida writes further that “according to a trajectory that differs in highly significant ways but that, in the end… the Meditations [also] suspends this definition of man as rational animal;” Derrida wants to escape this Cartesian attitude in philosophy, such as “when Heidegger’s gesture is to move forward in the direction of a new question… concerning the world and the animal, when he claims to deconstruct the whole metaphysical tradition, notably that of subjectivity, Cartesian subjectivity, etc., insofar as the animal is concerned he remains… profoundly Cartesian.” (146) This is why Derrida has opted not to speak of the ‘animal in general’ (preferring, as we’ve seen, l’animot), so as to transcend Cartesian subjectivity. Derrida extends this critique of Cartesianism as subtly present throughout the history of western philosophy. For example, we see Derrida critique Levinas for this same issue, featuring Levinas’s response to John Llewelyn question, that being whether or not a snake has a face. ‘‘I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face.’ The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face.” (107-108) In this way, Levinas, despite the astounding progress he made in western ethical philosophy, he still operates within this same mode of subject and object, internal and external, that have allowed ethical philosophers to, for the most part, ignore animal ethics and, in the case of Descartes, perpetuate animals as mindless machines not worthy of serious ethical consideration.
So then, what does Derrida himself propose as a meaningful animal ethics? Throughout the book, Derrida makes it clear that philosophy has failed to do justice to the animal, yet Derrida makes an interesting choice by (sympathetically) criticizing the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights; in fact, the critique is virtually the mirror of the Kantian or deontologist critique. In short, the UDAR makes a couple of mistakes which Derrida cannot overlook, no matter how well-intentioned. The most foremost problem is simply (while not to assume this problem is ‘small’) the use of the term ‘rights.’ Respecting animals, or anyone, for that matter, should be done not simply as a ‘reaction’ to the situation, but as a response. A re-action can be understood by looking back to Derrida’s introduction, where repetition must be avoided so as not form “a habit or a convention that would in the long term program the very act[.]” (1) (Contextually, Derrida was saying this is regards to ‘thanking,’ but the meaning stays true and consistent here nonetheless.) The ‘re’—the reproducible, or replicable—action is not naked, nor from the heart. With a deontological ethical system, whether it be the Kantian categorical imperative, or a Vegan who swears to never use animal products, one subscribes to, not a system of responses (and not recognizing the other and their face) which remain open and unpredictable (naked), but instead an “if then” style of ethics, as if the person making the choice could be replaced by a robot, or made irrelevant with a Searlean Chinese room, where the acting person and the other become virtually irrelevant outside of their physical bodies performing the task. Deontology then, for Derrida, reduces these situations down to the situation itself and misses the point of acting ethically. Something Aristotle did correctly, then, was avoiding this by asserting instead that the truly virtuous act would be done not so as to fulfill the need to be virtuous, but rather because it is the right thing. While this still doesn’t come close to reaching the applicable flexibility of those ethics which Derrida proposes, as it still assumes the virtues are and will always be ‘good’ (or at least necessary for achieving eudaimonia), it allows for fluid response, crafted by the acting-person.
And finally, what is left for ethics, then, especially in respect to l’animot, considering that Derrida would be especially opposed to any deontological system which might guide how we come to know a better treatment of animals? Simply put, through auto-affection and sufferance. What these two concepts are to do is not to form some rules which we are to follow, but instead rid us of any rules, and promote compassion amongst (not necessarily, but mostly) living things. Derrida specifies that “every living creature, and thus every animal to the extent that it is living, has recognized in it this power to move spontaneously, to feel itself and to relate to itself.” (94) What auto-affection means is literally self-feeling; we are to see our self within the other living thing, and, thus, allow us to respond (not react) to the other from a point of naked compassion. The same is true with sufferance. Derrida writes that “the first and decisive question would rather be to know whether animals can suffer;”(27) he specifically thinks about Jeremy Bentham, the creator of both utilitarianism and the panopticon, who asks “can they suffer?” Derrida describes the importance of this question with “No one can deny the suffering, fear, or panic, the terror or fright that can seize certain animals and that we humans can witness.” (28) Derrida uses this concept of relatability-through-suffering to challenge the “war being waged”(ibid) against l’animot. This war pits against each other, “on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity.”(28-29)
In coming to know auto-affection and sufferance, when applying it to our lives, we may that find real change, the possibility for a true democracy, comes closer and closer every day. But this is only if people decide to adopt it, of course. Arguably, food has become distanced from the ‘animal’ that it may contain (i.e., a burger does not look like a cow, nuggets not like a chicken, and so on); how are we to expect people to see this compassion when ‘food’ and ‘animal’ both simultaneously rely on one another (literally, in that animals are farmed to become food), yet are the furthest from one another (i.e., animals belong as pets, or in zoos, while food belongs on a plate)? On the one hand, veganism promotes the love and recognition of animal-autonomy and compassion, yet it falls short in the same instances as the categorical imperative. Perhaps what we need, as a solution to veganism’s deontological shortage, is a vigilant mission of education set on exposing the industries based upon animal death, not in that they are doing something ‘wrong’ or ‘evil,’ but so that sufferance might be realized, and compassion could flourish—that is to say, rather than falling into the trap of re-action, we might wish, within every interaction with l’animot, to recognize its sufferance between us.
Citations
Derrida, J, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 2006. Trans. David Wills, Fordham University Press, New York, 2008.
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