THE INFINITE DEBT OF THE HUMAN TOWARDS THE ANIMAL

Abstract

The philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul Shepard, while rarely encoun- tering the other, nevertheless prove to be surprisingly complementary. Derrida acknowl- edges the impossibility and necessity of the human/animal frontier, thinking the human/ animal relation in a paradigm of seeing and being seen, conceived in particular in the context of a sphere of the intimate. Shepard's not merely biological but ontological interpretation of evolution argues that humans need animals, not only metabolically but for their mental development. From the positive dependence of the human on the animal follows an infinite debt that can never be repaid; but in attempting to do so lies the responsibility and destiny of the human, that most animal animal.

Keywords:

• Jacques Derrida
• Paul Shepard
• infinite debt
• intimacy
• evolution

Notes

1 An initial version of this essay was presented at the “Minding Animals” conference, Newcastle, Australia, in July 2009, at the invitation of Matthew Chrulew.

2 Shepard cites Derrida here or there, but without much conviction and in a very superficial way.

3 Derrida's relation to the animal is quite symptomatic: deeply interested in the animal, he has, however, never sought to really know the revolution carried out in ethology and comparative psychology over thirty years.

4 The following lines on Derrida come from a lecture that I was invited to deliver at the Franco-Japanese institute of Tokyo in 2007.

5 “ne se sont jamais vus être vus par l'animal.” Derrida writes “ne se sont jamais vus vus par l'animal” (L'Animal 31); “have never been seen seen by the animal” (The Animal 13). [Translator's note.]

6 I have attempted to systematically conceptualize this approach to ethology. See Lestel, “What Capabilities for the Animal?”

7 The quality of hubris was absolutely forbidden for the ancient Greeks. It was indeed what drove the poor foolish humans to rival the Gods. It was the mortal sin par excellence. The stories of sex that later obsessed the Christians appear pathetic by comparison.

8 For a deepening of this notion, see Lestel, “Like the Fingers of the Hand.”

9 Ruyer, who draws heavily and not flavourlessly from the English anti-Darwinian reactionary Samuel Butler, recalls that in one of the latter's novels [The Way of All Flesh – Trans.], a doctor prescribes “a course of the larger mammals” to a depressed patient.

10 A fundamental question has been completely neglected until now: what does it mean to live within a species, and can we conceive of living beings that are not part of a species?

11 On this idea that the West is at war against animals, see Lestel, “La Haine de l'animal,” and the work of Florence Burgat.

12 But such an aspiration only reveals itself retrospectively.