Demenageries. Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida

Demenageries, Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida is a collection of essays on animality following Jacques Derrida's work. The Western philosophical tradition separated animals from men by excluding the former from everything that was considered "proper to man": laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, thinking. The "animal" has traditionally been considered the absolute Other of humans. This radical otherness has served as the rationale for the domination, exploitation and slaughter of animals. What Derrida called "la pensée de l'animal" (which means both thinking concerning the animal and "animal thinking") may help us understand differently such apparently human features as language, thought and writing. It may also help us think anew about such highly philosophical concerns as differences, otherness, the end(s) of history and the world at large. Thanks to the ethical and epistemological crisis of Western humanism, "animality" has become an almost fashionable topic. However, Demenageries is the first collection to take Derrida's thinking on animal as a starting point, a way of reflecting not only on animals but starting from them, in order  to address a variety of issues from a vast range of theoretical perspectives: philosophy, literature, cultural theory, anthropology, ethics, politics, religion, feminism, postcolonialism and, of course, posthumanism.

CONTENTS

Thoughprints, Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra    3

1. Animal Writes: Derrida's Que Donc and Other Tails, Marie-Dominique Garnier  23

2. On a Serpentine Note, Ginette Michaud  41

3. Ver(s): Toward a Spirituality of One's Own, Claudia Simma  73

4. When Sophie Loved Animals, Anne E. Berger  97

5. Deconstruction and Petting: Untamed Animots in Derrida and Kafka, Joseph Lavery  125

6. Say the Ram Survived: Altering the Binding of Isaac in Jacques Derrida's "Rams" and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Adeline Rother  145

7. Crowds and Powerlessness: Reading // kabbo and Canetti with Derrida in (South) Africa, Rosalind C. Morris  167

8. "Tout Autre est Tout Autre", James Siegel  213

9. Meditations for the Birds, David Wills  245