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6 - Women and Other Animals: Working Metamorphoses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

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Summary

Things are not so simple. In truth, they are less simple than ever. As always when sexual differences are in play. (Incidentally, I'll venture to say to all those who– often in the press, as you know– speak ironically of people who, like me for example, are fond of issuing warning, saying, ‘Things are not so simple,’ those to whom irony comes easily when they are faced with this systematic warning, I believe it's primarily because they want to hide from themselves, forget or deny something to do with sexual differences. There's always a clandestine debate raging about sexual differences.)

(Derrida, Beast 1, 220)

Les choses ne sont pas si simples. Elles sont en vérité moins simples que jamais. Comme toujours quand il y va des différences sexuelles. (D'ailleurs, je me risquerai à dire que tous ceux qui, souvent dans la presse, vous le savez, ironisent contre ceux qui, comme moi par exemple, ont coutume de mettre en garde en disant ‘Les choses ne sont pas si simples’, ceux qui ironisent facilement contre cette mise en garde systématique, je crois, c'est mon hypothèse, qu'ils voudraient d'abord se masquer, oublier ou dénier quelque chose des différences sexuelles. C'est toujours un débat clandestin qui fait rage au sujet des différences sexuelles.)

(Derrida, Bête 1, 294)

Derrida's key reference in volume 2 of The Beast and the Sovereign, alongside Defoe, is Heidegger– who pursues the line of Aristotle and Descartes in establishing a very sharp demarcation, indeed a gulf, between man and other animals. Heidegger is also frequently evoked by Derrida in a number of different texts (notably Geschlecht I and II) for his evasion of sexual difference. Heidegger opposes truly human poetic creativity to mechanical technology which, for him, has something of the repetitive and mindless animal about it. This is rather different from the way in which the term ‘technology’ is deployed by many other philosophers today or by ethnographers or archaeologists. Whether particular technologies or technological advances are admired or deplored by different thinkers, most consider their definition of technology as integral to the hominisation of man.

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Derrida and Other Animals
The Boundaries of the Human
, pp. 304 - 357
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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