Rethinking Human-Animal Ontological Differences: Derrida's “Animot” and Cixous' “Fips”

Abstract

Dominant philosophical discourse has long attempted to reinforce the human-animal opposition that privileges the human and relegates the animal to a state bereft of logos, spirit, consciousness, and reason. Yet the recent watershed in the emerging multidisciplinary field of animal studies decisively rejects the hierarchically based human-animal distinction. Among recent scholarship, the work of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous is exemplary. Jacques Derrida's seminal text The Animal That Therefore I Am and Hélène Cixous’ Stigmata engage in a profound reflection on the anthropocentric fallacy that humans are privileged vis-à-vis animals. I argue that Derrida's concept of the “animot” establishes criteria inherent to animals that change their stature in relation to humans, which I relate to Cixous’ autobiographical narrative. As I show, Cixous’ primal encounter with the dog Fips produces a stigma that ruptures the barrier between the human and the animal; its dehiscence reveals a profound human animality generated by shared suffering. Derrida's and Cixous’ post-anthropocentric reflections are pivotal to rethinking ontological difference between animals and humans based on shared suffering, finitude, and compassion that ethically raises the stakes of the question of the animal and destabilizes established notions of what is intrinsically human.

Keywords:

• Derrida
• Cixous
• Animal
• Human
• Suffering
• Compassion

Notes

1. Descartes writes of the animal as a machine. Kant's comparisons with the animal serve to settle the question of the human. Kant's “I think” excludes the animal. Heidegger's dasein is anchored in I am. Levinas names animals without a face, the subject is host, not animal. Lacan argues that animals could never approach what it means to be human because they cannot pretend to pretend.

2. The recent work of Cary Wolfe, Alice Crary, Matthew Calarco, Dominick LaCapra, and Stanley Cavell, among others breaks with the hegemonic Cartesian discourse that privileges the thinking human subject. They refute anthropomorphism and ethnocentrism and their work is exemplary in the emerging field of animal studies.

3. I interpret Derrida's focus on Heidegger as his disappointment in Heidegger's use of the animal to reinforce his argument on the human subject, particularly since Heidegger rigorously considered the animal question.

4. I do not have time within the scope of this article to retrace, for example, Wittgenstein's argument on knowing the pain of the other, but I refer to it here to call for acknowledgment of the other's pain in the hope of conveying a critical point in the human-animal question (253).

5. Matthew Calarco's point on this subject regarding Heidegger's focus on the domestic animal is pertinent here: “To draw any conclusions about ‘animality’ or the world relation of animals per se based on the example of domestic animals is, to say the least, a questionable way of proceeding” (26).

6. Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the grammè—or the grapheme—would thus name the element (2004, 9).

7. Dominick LaCapra makes a significant contribution to the field of animal studies with this pivotal point: “… [W]hen humans behave in ways that appear to be distinctively human—indeed in ways that may suggest certain differences between them and other animals of a less self-serving kind, for example, with respect to all-too-human practices of victimization, torture, or genocide—humans, in a self-serving paradox, are said to be bestial or to regress to mere animality. This would seem to be a prototypical scapegoating gesture that blames the victim” (156).

8. In Derrida's interview with Elizabeth Roudinesco, he argues for maximum respect between animals and humans (73).