Our Sovereign Others: Phantasms, Heidegger, Animality

Abstract

This essay considers the relationship that Derrida explores in The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II between Robinson Crusoe’s fantasy of a “living death” and Martin Heidegger’s structure of the “as such.” I make the case that what Derrida refers to as the auto-hetero-affective dimension of the phantasm involves a very dangerous yet fruitful mode of critique.

Humans as Animals and Things in Pre-Buddhist China

“…I briefly examine here four logically separable strands of durably influential thinking on the animal/human divide: (a) the belief in the unique endowment of human beings to have a soul, and, hence, a unique status among living things that is "high and distinctive," (b) the Anglo-American legal position, indelibly stamped by Hobbes and by Locke, that humans, unlike animals, are unique in two respects: humans are both crueler and more vulnerable than any animal, according to Hobbes, and humans (aside from slaves, possibly) alone have the self-reflexive capacity to regard their bodies as valuable property, (c) "equal rights" talk, as it has developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and (d) the "scientific" position expressed in many modern papers, that the human brain is somehow more complex and, hence, wondrous than the brains of animals. As we will see, each of these four positions, however beautifully articulated by their proponents, is liable to grave objections, as is a fifth position marked out by Heidegger and Derrida, which has understandably drawn many philosophers into its orbit (Fics 2015). The purpose of this section is simple: to show that, in nearly all cases, the modern Euro-American discussion of the human/animal divide begins with different suppositions and ends on different notes.…”