Abstract
Derrida has been preoccupied by the animal from the beginning to the end of his life. It can be found from the first to the last texts, but its presence is always subjected to new formulations and explications, as if the question of the animal in Derrida’s thinking could never be exhausted: indeed, nothing and nobody can seemingly exhaust it… Our reading takes this inexhaustibility as its starting point in order to examine one of the last concepts reworked by Derrida towards the end of his life, to which his readers have hitherto paid scant attention: the concept of vulnerability. This article probes into the possibility for this concept to allow us to reread in depth Derrida’s relevant texts as a unified body of works, albeit without claiming to exhaust their meaning(s).
Highlights
Reading and understanding the problem of vulnerability in Derrida is a difficult task owing first to the fact that the philosopher’s writings on the question of the animal are complex
In what way would this matrix of questions give birth to the question of the world? And to the question of finitude? For the haptical is not just a sense among others, and in a way it is not even a sense, sensu stricto because, to every finite existence, it recalls what is coming-so as to present it with something, whatever it may be, whatever being it may be, but while marking, with the gift of this presentation, the limit at which or from which the presentation announces itself.[4]. If this coextensivity of touch and the animal’s living body has at once an ethical and ethological dimension, which are always inseparable in Derrida, it requires a change in the way we look at the animal towards a recognition of what could be called a haptic community between humans and animals, which signals towards the question of vulnerability as it is thought through by Derrida
Let us begin by asking ourselves some semantic questions, in order to make explicit the importance of the Derridean concept of unpower, regarding the terms used by Derrida with a view to elaborating his conception of vulnerability, while wondering about the words ‘passivity’, ‘passibility’ and ‘passion’ in the sentence ‘The question is disturbed by a certain passivity. It bears witness, manifesting already, as question, the response that testifies to a passibility, a passion, a not-being-able.’. What does it all mean? This means that Bentham’s question is first analysed by Derrida as a problem related to a thought about testimony since Derrida speaks of a ‘response that testifies’, an expression which indicates that vulnerability, far from being a theoretical, abstract concept, far from stemming from an intellectual thinking about animality, signals directly towards an empirical datum in the first instance and which can be observed all the more since Derrida here reiterates the same idea several times with four synonymous, yet never identical terms: ‘passivity’, ‘passibility’, ‘passion’ and ‘nonpower’
Summary
Reading and understanding the problem of vulnerability in Derrida is a difficult task owing first to the fact that the philosopher’s writings on the question of the animal are complex. This means that Bentham’s question is first analysed by Derrida as a problem related to a thought about testimony since Derrida speaks of a ‘response that testifies’, an expression which indicates that vulnerability, far from being a theoretical, abstract concept, far from stemming from an intellectual thinking about animality, signals directly towards an empirical datum in the first instance and which can be observed all the more since Derrida here reiterates the same idea several times with four synonymous, yet never identical terms: ‘passivity’, ‘passibility’, ‘passion’ and ‘nonpower’ Each of these terms says something singular about vulnerability, but what Derrida insists on, through this alleged repetition, is that vulnerability is first a question of testimony insofar as it is the very existence of this animal vulnerability which depends on this testimony, a dependency which underscores even further this vulnerability which thoroughly defines animal life. Regardless of the question of knowing how to break out of animal vulnerability, there is no doubt for Derrida that this unpower at the heart of any animal life compels us to think through the animal question first as a question about sensibility in order to be able to extend it to other political issues at stake, without any ontological separation in reality coming in between the sensible and the political according to Derrida’s perspective: ‘And what of this inability [impouvoir]? What of the vulnerability felt on the basis of this inability?’ Why does Derrida say about vulnerability that it is felt from this inability or unpower? If one starts from the idea that vulnerability is provoked by the power of man over animals, this vulnerability, as the introduction of non-power into the life of the animal, turns out to be a deliberate choice by man consisting in withdrawing power from the animal in order to reappropriate it
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