Current Events in the Philosophy Department

Derrida wrote extensively on "the question of the animal." In particular, he challenged Heidegger's, Husserl's, and other philosophers' work on the subject, questioning their phenomenological criteria for distinguishing humans from animals. Examining a range of Derrida's writings, including his most recent L'animal que donc je suis, as well as Aporias, Of Spirit, Rams, and Rogues, Leonard Lawlor reconstructs a portrait of Derrida's views on animality and their intimate connection to his thinking on ethics, names and singularity, sovereignty, and the notion of a common world.

Derrida believed that humans and animals cannot be substantially separated, yet neither do they form a continuous species. Instead, in his "staggered analogy," Derrida asserts that all living beings are weak and therefore capable of suffering. This controversial claim both refuted the notion that humans and animals possess autonomy and contradicted the assumption that they possess the trait of machinery. However, it does offer the foundation for an argument-which Lawlor brilliantly and passionately defines in his book-in which humans are able to will this weakness into a kind of unconditional hospitality. Humans are not strong enough to keep themselves separate from animals. In other words, we are too weak to keep animals from entering into our sphere. Lawlor's argument is a bold approach to remedying "the problem of the worst," or the complete extermination of life, which is fast becoming a reality.

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In “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” Derrida suggests that beyond Erinnerung, “[b]eyond internalizing memory, it is then necessary to think, which is another way of remembering.” With these words in mind, we approached some of Derrida’s most astute interpreters and asked them to respond, each in his or her own genre, to the passage below from Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, which served as the guiding question and epigraph to the issue:

What happens when a great thinker becomes silent, one whom we knew living, whom we read and reread, and also heard, one from whom we are still awaiting a response, as if such a response would help us not only to think otherwise but also to read what we thought we had read under his signature, a response that held everything in reserve, and so much more than what we thought we had recognized?

—Excerpt from “Letter from the Guest Editors”

Jean-Paul Sartre is best known as the preeminent philosopher of individual freedom. He is the one who told us that we are totally free. Robert Bernasconi shows how the early existentialist Sartre became in stages the political champion of the oppressed.

Extracts are drawn from the full range of Sartre's writings: the novel Nausea, the drama No Exit, the political essay Communists and Peace, as well as the major philosophical texts, Being and Nothingness, and Critique of Dialectical Reason. They show why of all major twentieth century philosophers Sartre was the one who most easily passed beyond the confines of the academy to a general readership.