Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Animality in Lacan and Derrida: the Deconstruction of the Other

  • Published:
Sophia Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida’s last seminar, Derrida criticizes Lacan for making no room for animality in the Other, in the unconscious transindividual normativity of language. In this paper, I take into account the history of Derrida’s interactions with Lacan’s psychoanalysis to argue that Derrida’s early agreement with Lacan’s conception of subjectivity as split by the signifier gives place in his late thought to a deconstruction of Lacan’s fall into humanist metaphysics, which makes a sharp moral distinction between the animal and the human in order to subordinate animals to the domination of mankind.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Vol I, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009; Vol II, 2011.

  2. See Gary Steiner, Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013.

  3. Patrick Llored, ‘La bête, Dieu sans l’être: La déconstruction derridienne peut-elle fonder une communauté politique et morale entre vivants humains et non humains?’, Phaenex: Journal of Exisential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, vol 8, no 2 (2013), pp. 276 and 280.

  4. Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected edn, trans. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 84.

  5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, Research in Phenomenology 13, no. 1 (1983): 65–83; Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’, in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis, trans. John P. Leavey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 161–96; Jacques Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’, in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis, trans. John P. Leavey, Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 163–218. The term Geschlecht, which means ‘clan, tribe, race, generation, genus, lineage, coinage, sex, and a few things more’ enables Derrida to stress the interrelatedness of the major metaphysical distinctions such as the human-animal, man-woman, speech-writing divides.

  6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet,. trans. David Wills, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

  7. Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, Écrits, trans Bruce Fink, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 6–50.

  8. Michael Lewis, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p. 15

  9. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans Farnçois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, New York: State University of New York Press, p. 39.

  10. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire V, Les formations de l’inconscient, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998, p. 461.

  11. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993, p. 148.

  12. The Title of the Letter, p. 29.

  13. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, Écrits, p. 257.

  14. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, Écrits, pp. 671–702.

  15. See The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol I, p. 113.

  16. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, trans. Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron and M.R.L., in Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Prespectives in Literature and Philosophy (1975) pp. 31–113; reprinted in The Postcard from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

  17. ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, p. 57cf.

  18. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 214.

  19. See, Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale (1980); Résistances. De la psychanalyse (1996); Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse (2000).

  20. Jacques Derrida, Résistances de la psychanalyse, pp. 72 et sq. and Jacques Derrida, De quoi demain, pp. 279–280.

  21. Of Grammatology, p. 47.

  22. The Beast and the Sovereign Vol I, p. 11.

  23. Michael Lewis, ‘Structure and Genesis in Derrida and Lacan’, Lacan and Philosopy: The New Generation, edited by Lorenzo Chiesa, Melbourne: re.press, 2014 pp. 85–113. Lewis argues that Derrida fails to see that Lacanian psychoanalysis in its concern with the question of the genesis of the symbolic structure from nature was interested in the regional empirical sciences such as zoology, ethology, primatology. Lewis, I think rightly, criticizes Derrida for giving a rather over simplified description of Lacan’s notion of the real.

  24. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, London: The Hogart Press, p. 179.

  25. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire V, p. 461.

  26. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006, p. 215

  27. Séminaire XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, p. 215.

  28. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol I, pp. 118–9.

  29. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol II p. 230.

  30. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol II p. 236.

  31. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol II, p. 247.

  32. Of Grammatology, p. 47.

  33. Of Grammatology, p. 47.

  34. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol I, p. 130.

  35. ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, p. 22.

  36. ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, p. 22.

  37. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 50.

  38. Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, p. 161.

  39. Jacques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 104.

  40. Leonard Lawlor, ‘Deconstruction’, A Companion to Derrida, eds. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor, Wiley Blackwell, p. 125.

  41. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol I, pp. 98–99. Rousseau in Confessions compares the sovereign to the wolf: the wolf is, as all other animals that live in nature are, subordinated to its natural instincts; it is outside of both the political law of society and God’s revelation. The sovereign in political life is an outlaw, without law, just like a wolf is. This is why he is a wolf man, a werewolf; he is not only outside of the human law, he is also outside of the divine law. And as such, he is the origin of laws. He has neither law nor faith. In contrast, ordinary men, because they are neither animal nor sovereign, are expected to live according to laws and be faithful.

  42. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 78.

  43. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, The University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 292

  44. Edward Baring, ‘Ne me racontre plus d’histoire: Derrida and the Problem of History of Philosophy’, History and Theory 53 (May 2014), p. 192.

  45. Jacques Lacan, ‘On a Purpose’, Écrits, p. 305.

  46. Sarah Kofman, Lectures de Derrida, Paris: Galilée, 1984, p. 99 and 107.

  47. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, Acts of Literature, pp. 221–252.

  48. Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Atridge, Routledge, New York, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 181–220.

  49. Hook, Derek (2008) Absolute other: Lacan’s ‘big Other’ as adjunct to critical social psychological analysis? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2 (1). pp. 60–61.

  50. ‘The Law of Genre’, p. 251.

  51. ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, in trans. Mary Quaintance, Cordozo Law Review 11 (1989–1990): 920–1045, p. 935.

  52. Patrick Llored, ‘La bête, Dieu sans l’être: La déconstruction derridienne peut-elle fonder une communauté politique et morale entre vivants humains et non humains?’, Phaenex: Journal of Exisential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, vol 8, no 2 (2013), p.288.

  53. Micheal Lewis, Lacan and Philosophy, p. 93.

  54. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, pp. 75–81.

  55. Even though chimpanzee does not recognize itself in the mirror as the infant does, there are similarities between animals and humans. Experiments on the formative effects of gestalt on organisms have acknowledged that ‘it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the female pigeon’s gonad that the pigeon see another member of its species, regardless of its sex; this condition is so utterly sufficient that the same effect may be obtained by merely placing a mirror’s reflective field near the individual. Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the shift within a family line from the solitary to the gregarious form can be brought about by exposing an individual, at a certain stage of its development, to the exclusively visual action of an image akin to its own, provided the movements of this image sufficiently resemble those characteristic of its species. Such facts fall within a realm of homeomorphic identification that is itself subsumed within the question of the meaning of beauty as formative and erogenous’. (Écrits, p. 77).

  56. Leonard Lawlor, ‘Animals Have No Hand’, The New Centennial Review, Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 2007, p. 57.

  57. Derrida remarks that Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics invokes a human face in ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject’ [1988], trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Points of Suspension: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 278–80.

  58. See Geoffrey Bennington ‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very Idea)’, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction, Verso, London, 1994, p. 32. Cited in Nicholas Royle, ‘Poetry, Animality, Derrida’, A Companion to Derrida, eds. Zeynep Direk and Leonard lawlor, Wiley Blackwell, 2013, p. 525.

  59. The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 372–3.

  60. See ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds., Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gary Carlson. New York: Routledge, 1992: 3–67.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Koç University, Rumeli Feneri Yolu, Sarıyer, 34450, Istanbul, Turkey

    Zeynep Direk

Authors
  1. Zeynep Direk
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zeynep Direk.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Direk, Z. Animality in Lacan and Derrida: the Deconstruction of the Other. SOPHIA 57, 21–37 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0626-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0626-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation