Of course I'm going to use my review to promote my own work on animals and posthumanism. See my "How to Make a Human," Exemplaria 20.1 (2008): 3-27 (available here): my own work would have been impossible without Derrida. Non-medievalists will be most interested in the first 10 pages or so.

Anyone following Derrida's work on animals (in translation) is already familiar with the title essay and his takedown of Lacan (where Derrida puts under question the distinctions between reaction and response and feigning and the (purportedly uniquely human capacity of) feigning to feign). Now, however, you have JD's work on animals in Descartes, Kant, Adorno (who gets a gold star here: if JD had had time to develop it, so would Nietzsche, Kafka, and Montaigne), and Levinas. And, as a special bonus, a transcription of JD's extempore remarks on Heidegger and the animal. These remarks are heartbreaking, as they're full of asides on the lines of "since we have just 10 minutes" and "I'll do it, I hope, if I have the time and the strength." He would live for another 10 years, but that hope remained unfulfilled.

At the same time, the very presentness of his remarks, his apologies for keeping people from their dinner, keeps his thought here, perhaps more than anywhere else, in the moment, contingent, freed from the pretension of speaking from a place of Truth. He takes Heidegger down for, among other things, a lack of phenomenological rigor, whereas there is no moment in Derrida that I know (which isn't very far) where he is more mitsein (can I do that?) his topic, his audience, and even his readers, whose own dinners are suspended for a time while Derrida speaks, and wonders, once again. ( )

Derrida just bein' Derrida (not snitchin' - that's Curtis just bein' Currrrtis; ask Cam'ron), with some cool ideas about humanity/selfness defining itself to itself by its (self-)consciousness of nudity in the inhuman gaze of the animal; of nudity, hence shame, being necessary to the human, and the animal being non-nude in its unclothedness; and ultimately, a tentative attempt at understanding the animal fuer sich, as opposed to animal as Unknowable (I move we retire "Other" wherever possible and replace with this term) against which humanity is defined (and is always post-, following after), and to come to terms with what the subjection of the animal means for the human. He expands Bentham's "Can they suffer?" to "Are there types of selfhood beyond the ones we know?" - and of course it follows that the man/nature duality is bunk, but that's almost by the by. There's something mad and beautiful in it - not "extend humanity to animals" but "situate the logos inside something inclusive and large, that encompasses but is not limited to it. Be Alice in Wonderland. Be Nietzsche crying for a horse. Salute the divine in a pet. When you don't know what's a mouth and what's a sex organ, imagine what it would be like to look at you and wonder the same thing."

And does Derrida have a pun for it? You better believe it. It's animot, which I can only take to be putting mots in amongst a verdance of animal-language that helps us take difference on trust, and imagine ways a skylark could be as nobly foreign as a chimaera. Don't kill the foreign just because it pins you down and stares at you and makes you feel shame. Don't let autobiography, identity, make you septic. Don't be Bellerophon.

But Derrida's better than me at saying great stuff without forcing it into the positive and the imperative, so let me leave you with a quote: "It would not be a matter of 'giving speech back' to animals, but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabuous and chimerical it may be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation." ( )