We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Derrida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human [le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rational animal, in opposition to the animal that would be neither political nor rational. It must, (...) however, be noted right away that despite what might be called the animalistic tropism of Derridean deconstruction, it does not include a thesis maintaining the continuity between human and animal. If it is unquestionable that deconstruction refrains from making animality .. (shrink)

Before explaining what we understand by the philosophy of touching in the thought of Jacques Derrida, it is perhaps necessary to say that Derrida's thought presents at its core one of the last great philosophies of the animal, namely, of non‐human life. Our thesis is that there can be no question that Derridean deconstruction is a philosophy that concerns the animal, that is, it is a thought that not only reflects on the animal, but which more originally is reflected in (...) it. the pharmacological reading of life is what defines the singularity of Derrida's philosophy of the animal, the consequences of which are considerable for taking the interests of animals into account. By interiorization, as a process that is carried out by touch, one must also hear the fact that for the animal touch becomes a self‐touching: touching is firstly a being touched by oneself. (shrink)

Book Symposium on Gary Steiner's Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Le jour du Grand Pardon, présence du blanc, mon taleth immaculé, le seul taleth vierge de la famille,Comme les plumes des coqs et poules que Haim Aimé veut blanches pour le sacrifice d’avant Kippour,Le rabbin les égorge dans le jardin après les avoir tâtées sous l’aile en tenant le couteau entre les dents,puis passées au-dessus de nos têtes en prononçant nos noms, inoubliables bêtes blanches ensanglantées...