The Animal That Therefore I Am: On Cats, the Bible, Derrida, and Nakedness
Volume 1: Issue 7, June 15, 2022
In July 1997, at a conference for which he had chosen the title The Autobiographical Animal, in a small town in northern France, Jacques Derrida addressed his audience on the subject of standing naked in the presence of a cat, or this cat, this specific cat with which he shared aspects of his life, and this cat with him. The lecture was entitled “The Animal That Therefore I Am”1 and its delivery and discussion lasted 9 hours. I’d like to describe some of its content.
First, Derrida detaches the reality of this cat from myth and literature, from nursery rhymes, poetry, and Alice in Wonderland’s enigmatic moggy. With its concern for animals, the natures of their existences and experiences—in short, animal ontology—it is, perhaps, Derrida’s most human work. Indeed, he announces that “I would like to choose words that are, to begin with, naked, quite simply, words from the heart.” Derrida, you say, the notorious deconstructionist philosopher of postmodernism speaking simply and from the heart? Mais oui.
You might have experienced this scene Derrida describes for yourself. Standing naked in the presence of this cat, Derrida is unsettled. The dress (dressage: training, discipline, practice) symbolic of distinction from the ‘animal’ has been removed, and in his nakedness, he is unsettled by its erasure...and something more that haunts him, and that he follows after. The cat gazes at him, and Derrida falls into a complex sympathy that takes him from Eden to Nazi Germany.
Among other things, “The Animal That Therefore I Am” is a response to Descartes’ 17th century “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) and a discourse between Nietzsche’s wonderful definition of the human as an “animal that is free to make promises”2 which accounts for its particular being (On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, 1887), Heidegger’s 1927 concept of existential subjectivity as Dasein (being there) in Being and Time3 , and Descartes’ erroneous conception of animals as automata without sentience or subjectivity. Contra Descartes, Derrida says,
I often ask myself, just to see, who I am—and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment. Whence this malaise?4
To be following, to be ‘after’ the animal returns Derrida to Genesis. The Old Testament creation myth has a false start. In Genesis 1:27, man and woman are created simultaneously on the sixth day. In Genesis 2:7, the first man is created “from the dust of the ground, and [God] breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” presented, somewhat ambiguously, subsequent to the seventh day and sanctification. In the recapitulation between Genesis 1 and 2, the first woman is not created until Genesis 2:22.5 In each case, man ‘follows’ the creation of the animal, either as a generic human, or as the specifically male. As Derrida notes, the animal becomes subject to/of man. Derrida cites two translations:
Chouraqui: “He has them come toward the husbandsman in order to see what he will call out to them”; Dhormes: “He brings them to man in order to see what he will call them.”6
From the translation of Genesis 2:19 beside me as I write: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every foul of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
For Derrida:
This “in order to see” marks at the same time the infinite right of inspection of an all-powerful God and the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn’t yet know what he really wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say “I am that I am” without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. The powerful yet deprived “in order to see” that is God’s, the first stroke of time, before time, God’s exposure to surprise, to the even that is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy.7
Derrida’s nakedness before this cat also presents him with the time before, or beyond good and evil. In the order of narrative this is not revealed until Genesis 3:7. “And the eyes of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” What, also, is this surprise of God?
It is in the brief narrative of Cain and Abel. The adversarial brothers become such only when God makes the choice to prefer the animal sacrifice made my Abel to the fruits of the field presented by Cain. “God prefers the sacrifice of the very animal that he has let Adam name—in order to see.”8 One is reminded of King Lear and the blinded Duke of Gloucester’s observation: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” (4.1.37–38). In order to see. God has opened up resentment, with the dead animal at the core.
When Abel makes the first animal sacrifice in Genesis 4:4, the consequence is his murder by Cain, ostensibly through jealousy since God favors Abel’s sacrificial lambs over Cain’s non-animal offering. Abel’s killing of the “firstlings of his flock” is the beginning of indifference to, and currency-making of, life. Cain’s killing of Abel is then reciprocal; and there is some evidence for this in God’s ambivalence toward Cain, vengeance against whom he forbids. Cain, one of the two human “firstlings” acts on the same indifference as Abel. Unlike Abel, Cain’s violence is not displaced/abjected upon the animal, but applied directly to the source of angst, his brother as sacrifice to God. He has been set an example as fatal as that set for Frankenstein’s creature. Derrida agrees with this reading in which, following Cain’s banishment,
the paradoxes of this manhunt follow one after the other as a series of experimental ordeals: “in order to see.” Having fallen into the trap and killed Abel, Cain covers himself with shame and flees, wandering, hunted, tracked in turn like a beast. God then promises this human beast protection and vengeance. As if God had repented. As if he were ashamed of had admitted having preferred the animal sacrifice. As if in this was he were confessing and admitting remorse concerning the animal.9
Returning to Derrida and the cat: At the level of the ecological unconscious, the knowledge of good and evil is the différance between nakedness and the required discipline of dress, or dressage in/against nature. In Derrida’s thought, différance plays with both ‘difference’—as understood in terms of the separation of signs, and ‘deferral/deferment,’ where meaning is eternally deferred (if this strikes you as confusing, think of a word that you thought had a ‘fixed’ meaning, and observe how its meaning is now changed, taboo, opposite, etc., and you will be in the framework of Derridean différance, of arbitrary distinctions lacking stability). The categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ and ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are destabilized when he steps out of the shower and is under the gaze of the sometime subjected subject, the cat.
What Derrida experiences, and is searching for an expression of, is pathos—the pathos in the artificial human-animal relationship. He finds pathos in the suffering of animals. The theoretical mid-point of “The Animal That Therefore I Am” unleashes a devastating critique of this suffering, and the
industrialization of what can be called the production for consumption of animal meat, artificial insemination on a massive scale, more and more audacious manipulations of the genome, the reduction of the animal not only to production and overactive reproduction (hormones, genetic crossbreeding, cloning, etc.) of meat for consumption but also of all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the putative human well-being of man.
Derrida continues:
Neither can one seriously deny the disavowal that this involves. No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one's breath away).10
This brings us to Derrida at his most provocative:
One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire. In the same abattoirs. I don’t wish to abuse the ease with which one can overload with pathos the self-evidences I am drawing attention to here. Everybody knows what terrifying and intolerable pictures a realist painting could give to the industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence to which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries.11
On either side of the question of pathos—does the suffering of animals generate compassion?—is the question of pathology. The obfuscations and denials involved in the industrial killing of animals simultaneous with a general compassion for them are themselves pathological. It’s not obvious, for example, that the soft compression of the as-seen-on-tv ‘thunder shirt’ one might put on a nervous dog in a storm derives from the autistic mechanism of Temple Grandin’s slaughterhouse chutes which do nothing to reduce the holocaust of animals, only disguise/defer its pathology for those involved, the disavowal of which Derrida speaks.
Recently, conversation with a journalist friend returned me to Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Executioner’s Song (1979, Mailer’s second Pulitzer), which concerns the life, and death by execution, of double murderer Gary Gilmore. There is a scene, close to the end of the book, nearing Gilmore’s voluntary death by firing squad where Mailer invokes the treatment of wild mustangs in a decision involving federal trial judge Willis Ritter and compensation due to the Native American tribe which regarded these horses as ‘ceremonial’ ponies. The horses were packed inside a truck with slatted board sides, “and one mustang’s leg was sticking through the slats. The people who were doing the job could have opened a door to extricate the horse, but that would have been a lot of work, so somebody just took a chain saw and cut the horse’s leg off.”12 This barbarism is, of course, intended to be seen juxtaposed with the cautious treatment attending Gilmore, following after. If we are disturbed by the chain saw amputation of a live mustang’s leg, we should be disturbed by the daily summary execution of animals bred for execution. If we oppose the death penalty for one man, complicit in his own death, how can we not oppose the massacre of the innocent? Derrida asks this in his way.
The relationship Derrida has with (t)his cat is a means of escape from the pathology of denying its subjectivity. So, as ‘silly’ as the question “Whence this malaise?” or our embarrassment in our nakedness before animals may seem—specifically, this animal that we have named in our domestic, familial setting—that uncanny moment is one of pathos, evocation, a knowledge of sympathy, and of the single day between our species and the inception of good and evil, and the objectification and subjugation of the other. I would suggest that where we find complication in critiquing the pathological God of the Old Testament is in the Miltonian sense that the transgression that led to our expulsion from Paradise into shame and even into différance was the definitive tragic-heroic gesture of the species, the Promethean moment that we would not turn back upon. The sickness of the origin myth is our thesis and antithesis. Like Cain, we have been set a trap, one set not least by scripture and the Cartesian errors that support it—into indifference and cruelty. What should one do with a trap? To avoid it altogether is to leave it carelessly to harm others. It is better to disarm it, “in order to see” that we remain animals free to make promises to ourselves and to other animals.
I hope this has given you some ideas.
Best from New Mexico,
James Reich
Derrida, J. (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am. Marie-Louise Mallet (ed.). David Wills (trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press
Nietzsche, F. (2013). On the Genealogy of Morals. Michael A. Scarpitti (trans.). London, UK: Penguin p. 43
Heidegger, M. (2008). Being and Time. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
Derrida pp. 3-4
The Bible, King James Version (1611). London: UK, Penguin.
Derrida pp. 16-17
idid. p. 17
ibid. p. 42
ibid. p. 44
ibid. pp. 25-26
ibid. p. 26
Mailer, N. (2012). the Executioner’s Song. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing p. 954