“THINKING PERHAPS BEGINS THERE”: DERRIDA AND THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMAL

Abstract

The present work seeks to think about the question regarding the animal in the thinking of the Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. Assuming that the thesis of logocentrism is, as Derrida claims, above all a thesis about the animal, we try to demonstrate how the deconstruction of the privilege granted to logos throughout the history of philosophy in the West implies, as a necessary structural aspect, a certain inquiry about the animal, as that living being always seen since its lack of logos. The ethical-political implications of such a question become evident when we think of the “sacrificial structure” that this lack that constitutes the animal representes: being outside the logos means, at least, being a living being reduced to corporeality, which is understood only as availability for the exercise of power by the one who, possessing the logos, ascends to the category of sovereign. This conception of sovereignty is a distinctive feature of what has been called, for more than two millennia, philosophy. By philosophy we understand, then, a certain sovereign gesture of exclusion and demotion of the other, whether this other is the animal or writing. Just like the animal, writing is also seen from its lack of logos, from its distance in relation to the origin of meaning. Animal and writing come together or resemble each other, then, in the eyes of philosophy, as the perpetual threat of an outside over which it is not entirely possible to exercise sovereignty without loss, which leads to the suggestion that thinking perhaps begins there.