The Ends of Man, Derrida & The Animal That Therefore I Am

I remember being thoroughly perplexed when I first read this work last spring when Dr. Diane Davis gifted me a copy of it. I didn’t know what was a pretense from a feigned feint, a joke from a wit, science from myth. These limits, "that is to say, indivisible threshold[s]" (133)  are still very difficult, if not impossible, to locate, but fixing them is not my main concern upon my return and re-tracing of the text.  I still am confused, but I have since ceased to view this wounded state of unknowing in a negative light. 

     In a sense the desire for self-certainty in thinking turns the home into a citadel. Does the House or Truth of Being require a Guardian? What if one “awakens and leaves, without turning back to what he leaves behind him[?]. He burns his text and erases the traces of his steps. His laughter then will burst out, directed toward a return which no longer will have the form of the metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor, doubtless, “beyond” metaphysics, the form of a memorial or a guarding of the meaning of Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being. He will dance, outside the house, the active Vergesslichkeit, the “active forgetting and the cruel (grausam) feast of which the Genealogy of Morals speaks. No doubt that Nietzsche called for an active forgetting of Being: it would not have the metaphysical form imputed to it by Heidegger” (136). This quote comes from a lecture Derrida gave in October of ’68 in New York. The lecture was later published under the title, “The Ends of Man.” In this younger Derrida one sees the beginnings and/or the ends of The Animal That Therefore I am.

     In a footnote to “The Ends of Man” Derrida writes, “The deconstruction of the end and of man takes place on the margins of philosophy: in titles and footnotes” (Note 15). The title of the essay reveals the playful possibilities of the limits and question of man. “In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper”(134).

Where to being in teasing out such a statement? I’m not sure, “naturally I am going to skip a lot, I am going to walk by skipping, we don’t have time to follow things in a continuous way” (142). Derrida puts the trace of ‘man’ under erasure.

     In the Essay “And Say the Animal Responded” Derrida reframes the question of the critique of humanism in a way that opens up new avenues for thinking ‘the animal’ and ‘the human.’ In a way it resuscitates a more ancient meaning but also breathes a new life into the meaning of ‘the animal,’ etymologically derived from the PIE *ane- "to blow, to breathe" and related to the Greek anemos meaning "wind.”

It is not just a matter of asking whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gifts, laughter, crying, respect, etc.-the list is necessarily without limit, and the most powerful philosophical tradition in which we live has refused the “animal” all of that). It also means asking whether what calls itself human as the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever posses the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution. 

     Man has not been able to cover the tracks of its “wounded reaction not to humanity’s first trauma, the Copernican (the earth revolves around the sun), not irs third trauma, the Freudian (the decentering of consciousness under the gaze of the unconscious), but rather to its second trauma, the Darwinian” (136). Lacan was not able to cover his anthropocentric tracks, even though he roots man’s superiority over the animal as based in a lack, defect, or fault. And neither am I, but I can erase them, or should I say...

Eros, Economics, and Analysts: Working Through Ahmed's Affective Economies

Sara Ahmed’s essay “Affective Economies” toes the ephemeral threshold between the ordinary and the fantastic. Ahmed returns to a previous reading of Marx as the first analyst of the symptom by analogizing affective intensities to the circulation of commodities. Signs are converted into affective intensities not because of a property that inheres to them, but due to the surplus of sticky associations they gain as an effect of the process of circulation.

Ahmed reads against the grain of traditional interpretations of emotions in arguing that it is the nonresidence of emotions that makes them binding. Emotions are not a positive presence that may be possessed or contained nor are they psychological dispositions that originate solely within the subject. She takes the Marxist analogy further through the concept of commodity fetishism. Just as commodities in their ‘objective’ form conceal the hidden histories of labor and exchanges within a capitalist economy, “feelings appear in objects or as objects with a life of their own, only by the concealment of their personal histories, of production and labors, and circulation and exchange” (120-1). The analogy she says breaks down without reference to the exchange value/use-value distinction. It is here where she aligns herself more closely to the psychoanalytic school of thought. (I think it’s interesting that in an essay about the materialization of borders, she both entrenches and breaks down the borders between disciplines and academic pedantry.) Psychoanalysis offers a method of understanding emotions in relation to the unconscious. She differs from a strictly Lacanian version of psychoanalysis because she views “the subject” within the affective economy as “simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination” (121). Lacan, according to Ahmed, on the other hand adopted a view in which the subject is the “settlement” (121) of the signifier. She indicates that this would lead one to conceive of affects as a positive presence. Rather she would see the unconscious as a lack of presence or “the failure to be present – that constitutes the relationality of subjects and objects (a relationality that works through the circulation of signs)” (121). The unconscious in this view is not an unconscious that is possessed by or contained within the contours of the subject, but represents the absence of such a possibility or the grappling with fixing or materializing those contours. Repression then operates not as a repression of a feeling but through the displacement of the idea that caused it. Understanding affect as a form or language of the unconscious that works through the process of differentiation and displacement allows her to analyze the associative or metonymic process of substitution that occurs in the slippage between the figures of the asylum seeker, the terrorist, and the criminal. These figures gain a calcified affective value, being associated primarily with the fear of loss, yet remain spectral in their ties to particular, physical manifestations. Through temporal and rhetorical juxtaposition the figures become substitutable for one another. 


The Australian Tampa crisis illustrates this point in a dramatic fashion. Here the red ship loomed on the horizon of the public's imagination as an object of terror, even though people were fundamentally unaware as to what the threat actually was. Since media coverage was restricted, the incessant barrage of the same image of the lone ship gained an intensity through its circulation. Lone Bertleson and Andrew Murphie analyze in detail the event in an essay titled "An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Felix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain" in the Affect Theory Reader. The perception of the ship was anything but merely representational, all people had was the repetition of a singular image. Bertleson and Murphie  said that the ship 

becomes the mark, the possibility of a new event (a new virtual potential for things to happen differently), of a set of new physical territories (actual borders, detention centers, ship's decks, islands, bodies), and of a set of new existential territories (these include virtual potentials, physical places, new modes of living, new laws, new sign systems, discourses, rhetorics, new feelings and emotions, new powers to affect and be affected). In sum a new field of expression arises, a refrain that potentializes other refrains (142). 

Here the relationship between a singular image and the question of alignment is especially explicit. The crisis occurred during a time when a conservative government needed an issue to rally around to justify its recent increases in security policies. The ship offered a new opportunity for the possibility of redirecting affective investments into a highly mediatized figure of the asylum seeker. The asylum seekers were denied access because of the possibility that they had ties to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist organizations. Since it becomes increasingly difficult to mark or differentiate exactly what a good asylum seeker looks like, any potential stranger or alien can be metamorphosized into a 'bogeyman.' 

On this basis Ahmed is able to twist the typical distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, since at least Aristotle, if not earlier, is often argued to be in reference to a particular object, whereas anxiety lacks a stable referent. Ahmed on the other hand contends that fear is often less a question of the approach of a particular object than an approach to a vaguely outlined object. The lack of a stable referent intensifies rather than diminishes fear. Fear evokes the ontological questions of security, vulnerability and the bordering of bodies and nations.

Ahmed writes:

My argument is not that there is a psychic economy of fear that then becomes social and collective: rather, the individual subject comes into being through its very alignment with the collective. It is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies (128).

Fear is first an impersonal affect, or the condition, and it is through the process of alignment that a subject establishes its borders. There is first a state of insecurity a la Dillon, and then the marking of dangers allows us to create ideas of security. Ahmed argues that it is the fear of the loss of an object that is more profound than the actual object of fear. For example we fear what an inauthentic asylum seeker would steal from us more so than an actual asylum seeker. We fear their supposed disruption to the traditional family values, economy, and stability of the nation more so than the actual threat posed by a person to us. We are not afraid of the black other because actually seeing them instill fear that is completely contained within this body, but because affects open up past histories of intense signs that are attached to the present figure. In this way fear affects “relation between the objects feared (rather than simply the relation between the subject and its objects)” (128). In this way too affects operate within an economy that implies a socialized and materialized totality of values or affects rather than simply a subjective state felt. To a certain extent fear is contained within particular figures, but this is only as a result of the histories and sticky association temporarily evoked in relation to this figure. It makes sense that these negative affects would be intensified by not being able to locate them. It is the inability to designate who is and is not a terrorist that gives terrorism its force as an idea. When one hears an alarm but does not know what it is referencing is more powerful of a feeling because one does not know how to act in relation to the alarm. The inability know, the absence of a referent, seems to be at the heart of the feeling in the first place.

I wonder what the flipside would like. It seems that Socrates makes a similar point about Love in The Symposium. Socrates takes Eros through a topsy-turvy turn. Rather than viewing Eros as the attempt to unify a particular person with their unique lost half, Eros is understood as a form of Beauty that can be seen in many things. In the traditional view love would end the second the chase is over, once the object of desire was obtained. Eros for Socrates can be embodied in multiple and many referents and it is in viewing Eros as an eternal form that allows for a more intense experience of connection. Acknowledgment of the fact that there are many things rather than a singular person that are worthy of love lets one truly bask in its glory. Yet it also entails an understanding that one cannot ever completely obtain the feeling of love. The lack is still omnipresent but it is in the act of detaching the affect from a particular object or subject that intensifies it and lets it circulate more freely.