Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Series Editor's Preface
- OPENING
- PART I
- 2 Living and Being: Descartes' ‘Animal Spirits’ and Heidegger's Dog
- 3 The Insistent Dog: Blanchot and the Community without Animals
- 4 Indefinite Play and ‘The Name of Man’: Anthropocentrism's Deconstruction
- PART II
- ANOTHER OPENING
- Index
4 - Indefinite Play and ‘The Name of Man’: Anthropocentrism's Deconstruction
from PART I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- Series Editor's Preface
- OPENING
- PART I
- 2 Living and Being: Descartes' ‘Animal Spirits’ and Heidegger's Dog
- 3 The Insistent Dog: Blanchot and the Community without Animals
- 4 Indefinite Play and ‘The Name of Man’: Anthropocentrism's Deconstruction
- PART II
- ANOTHER OPENING
- Index
Summary
Opening
A concern with the presence of the animal in literary and philosophical texts has played a central role within a large number of Derrida's last writings. As will be seen the question of the animal – a question posed for and within deconstruction – can be located within deconstruction itself. In other words, it is not as though the animal is merely another topic to be taken up. There is a strong interrelationship between the history of philosophy and the continual positioning and repositioning of the animal within it. The latter comprises what has already been identified as the figure of the animal within philosophy (the philosophical tradition's creation and incorporation of the animal). As the project of deconstruction has taken as one of its defining ambits of operation the history of metaphysics, as the latter is conventionally understood, to take up that history is already to engage with the history of the animal within philosophy, i.e. with the animal's figured presence within the philosophical. As such, it is possible to begin with the question of deconstruction precisely because that question already involves a relation to the conventions of the history of philosophy. Beginning with deconstruction therefore is to begin with its presence as a question.
The question – what is deconstruction? – precisely because it eschews a concern with the essence and as a result does not work with the presumption that the question itself harbours deconstruction's own sense of propriety, stages, from the start, the concerns that are addressed by deconstruction. The staging and the address pertain both to the form of the question as well as to its specific content. Once both the language of essences and theories of reference have been displaced, a displacing occurring in the name of deconstruction, then answering questions of this nature, the question after deconstruction, is to acknowledge the presence of a question that remains to be answered.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Of Jews and Animals , pp. 74 - 92Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010