Between the Political Animality and the Animality Political

Abstract

Jacque Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Vols I trans. Geoffrey Bennigton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), ISBN978-0-226-44429-0; 978-0-226-14430-6, Pages 349; 293. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Beast and the Sovereign is a collection of last seminars in two volumes given by Jacques Derrida from 2001-2003 on the relation between animality and sovereignty. In the seminars, Derrida pushes on a "certain analogy between the beast and the sovereign, the beast that sometimes seems to be the sovereign, like the beast that is outside or above the law" (4). It is in fact the extension of his earlier project on sovereignty in Politics of Friendship (1997) and Rogues (2004). The beast is not just a trope, he argues, but something against which sovereignty of the sovereign is established. Derrida claims that "beast is not alone" because the sovereign is the beast's friend. They live in the same territory-outside the field of law. Contrary to Schmitt, Derrida argues that sovereignty can, more or less, be related to "pre-political, before the nation-state, sovereignty of the state-free-citizen, of the citizen-state" (21). It seems to me that our advocacy for the absolute freedom of citizens is a desire for the "return of the beast" or return to the pre-political state of life. He shows the pre-political sovereignty of the citizen, in which the "savage man" or the "beast" would enjoy the same happiness of absolute freedom. The beast is "alone," "independent," "unique," "indivisible," and does not relate to others for its world. Likewise, the sovereign enjoys "isolation," "exception," is "set off," "separated" and holds exceptional power to suspend laws. Derrida offers a critique of Giorgio Agamben's formulation of bios and zoe in Homo Sacer and State of Exception in order to show the incompatibility in his idea of sovereign power as the reason of the stronger. Derrida shows the problematic of relating the animal to either side of the distinction between bios and zoe. He says, "Agamben's text: does the animal come under bios or zoe ? ... man defined as zoon logon ekhon, the animal, the living being possessed of logos. What does that mean? ... the whole tradition we are speaking has been governed by this definition, the difficulties of which ... depending on whether one accepts or not Agamben's proposed distinction between 'essential attribute' and specific difference,' a distinction I found to be fragile" (337). The same logic Derrida persists, in and through a critique of Martin Heidegger's attempt to attribute the logos as reason and power, which overpowers Being. Heidegger treats animality as "nonpower" or "nontruth" or nonBeing and says that animality does have a characteristic of "disturbing, a little frightening, both intimate and terrible," which he associates with the Greek Deinon in Introduction to Metaphysics (242-43). …