The Last Animal at the End of the World

ABSTRACT

This essay reads Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am with William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea in order to consider how figures of apocalypse and animality map onto what Derrida calls the “bottomless gaze,” or a point of view of non-reciprocity and inhumanness that challenges humanist and posthumanist interpretations of the “animal other.” I contend that the notion of lastness becomes a powerful negative force that brings us to a limit or an end of our human investment in thought itself. By imagining other perspectives through which to impossibly think beyond and against life, Derrida’s and Blake’s works explore posthumous or unlived figurations of thought that take us away from the norms of life, survival, and progress.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Julie Murray and Lauren Gillingham for including me in this issue, and to David L. Clark for his criticism and support, as well as for inviting me to speak on his panel “Lifelessness” at the 2017 NASSR conference. A longer and different version of this piece is forthcoming in a volume edited by Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak.

Notes

1 All references to Blake’s texts, unless otherwise noted, are to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake and will be given parenthetically.

2 For a reflection on this “primal scene” of looking, see Sliwinski.

3 I borrow this notion from Bion, Second Thoughts.

4 I develop this reading of lastness in my book Last Things.

5 For the notion of partage, see Nancy, Le Partage des voix.

6 Also see Lippit’s brilliant meditation on The Animal That Therefore I Am, “Therefore, The Animal That Saw Derrida.”

7 In his “Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” Blake writes:

How ridiculous it would be to see the Sheep Endeavouring to walk like the Dog. or the Ox striving to trot like the Horse just as Ridiculous it is to see One Man Striving to Imitate Another Man varies from Man more than Animal from Animal of Different Species. (656)

To imitate the life of the other, Blake implies, is a mark of false humanist exuberance.

8 Compare this with Kant’s perception of the violence and disconnectedness he sees when he peers through a microscope in Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770 (159).

9 Julie Carlson and Daniel O’Quinn have remarked to me that the flea might also be citing a theatrical pose attributable to John Kemble, particularly his role in Sheridan’s Pizarro. I thank both of them for their suggestions.

10 On this sense of trans-, see Colebrook, “What is It Like To Be Human?” and Kelley, “Tranimals.”

11 I allude here to the mode of perception Terada describes in “Looking at the Stars Forever.”

12 On different inoperative “uses” of the body, see Agamben, The Use of Bodies.