El presente artículo analiza las posibilidades de resistencia ético-políticas que habilitan la deconstrucción de la dicotomía humano-animal. Se argumenta que el concepto de carno-falogocentrismo visibiliza las taxonomías de subordinación que constituyen la matriz de inteligibilidad de las estructuras de dominación modernas, al establecer nexos oblicuos entre binomios jerarquizados. En este sentido, se sostiene que la deconstrucción interseccional de la maquinaria carno-falogocéntrica posibilita la apertura a otros modos de comunidad en los que no hay una propiedad que delimite (...) un espacio de lo común, sino la promesa de construir otros modos de existir con y entre los otros en la diferencia radical. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo nos focalizaremos en una posición particular con respecto a la responsabilidad ética que debemos a los vivientes no humanos. Se trata de la postura de Derrida. Estudiaremos la manera en que el pensador francés aborda la cuestión del animal, centrándonos en la relación entre el viviente humano y el viviente animal, y las violencias sacrificiales que el primero ejerce sobre el segundo. Analizaremos primeramente el concepto de genocidio animal, y cómo este se diferencia de las violencias (...) más tradicionales hacia los animales. Veremos que Derrida describe a nuestra cultura como un «carno-falogocentrismo», donde la violencia hacia el animal tuvo siempre un lugar constitutivo, aunque en los últimos dos siglos atravesó transformaciones alarmantes. A continuación, consideraremos la compasión como reacción ante el genocidio; veremos que esta compasión no nos lleva hacia una erradicación total de la violencia, sino a una economía de ella que se rige por la pregunta «¿cómo comer bien?». Finalmente, nos plantearemos el interrogante acerca de los derechos animales, y observaremos que Derrida considera necesario pero insuficiente reconocer esos derechos. (shrink)

L’écoféminisme repose sur l’idée qu’il existe d’étroites « connexions » entre la domination des femmes et la domination de la nature : malgré leur apparente hétérogénéité, ces deux phénomènes convergeraient en une seule et même « matrice de domination ». C’est une telle thèse que nous souhaitons explorer ici : quel peut bien être ce « système » qui les relie en un tout? Comment penser les liens entre les différents axes de domination, sans pour autant les confondre en une (...) unité indistincte? Notre lecture de l’écoféminisme s’articulera autour du concept de « carno-phallogocentrisme » forgé par Derrida, qui semble approprié pour nommer synthétiquement cette thèse. Quels sont le sens et la pertinence de ce concept? Que vise-t-il : un travers particulier à la civilisation occidentale ou une structure commune à toute culture, voire inhérente à la conscience humaine? En quoi éclaire-t-il non seulement les rapports de domination dénoncés, mais toute la tradition philosophique occidentale? L’enjeu sera d’évaluer l’ambition constamment affichée par l’écoféminisme de constituer un nouveau paradigme, susceptible de dépasser enfin le fond misogyne et écocide de la civilisation occidentale. Peut-on vraiment lire l’écoféminisme non pas comme un courant particulier au sein de la pensée occidentale, mais comme son renversement? (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is known for his attempt at including the perspective of woman in his philosophical work. His efforts received the acclaim of women philosophers, despite the fact that his philosophy remains marked by the omission of any mention to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. The topic of this paper shall not be woman, as in Derrida’s 1972 conference Spurs, but phallogocentrism. That is, the economy, dynamic and limits of this concept as a critique of history, or rather, as (...) the history of the lie, the term by which Derrida seems to conceive of the possibility of any history whatsoever. We agree that phallogocentrism in Derrida’s hands enabled anti-philosophical forays by which to include woman as singularity in the male-dominated French philosophy of the 1970s. However, we also argue that the specter of man was maintained untouched throughout Derrida’s work, thereby suggestion that deconstruction overlooked what may very well be the primary prohibition in Western thought. (shrink)

This paper intends above all to highlight three fundamental interconnected questions: (1) without reifying it in a theoretical-systematic philosophy, to highlight Derrida’s Deconstruction as a “philosophical idiom” – that of différance or of the ab-solute otherness – endowed, therefore, with specific “theoretical” assumptions (khôra, messianic and trace); (2) to highlight and to clarify the meaning of the “Derridian exception” concerning the issue of the animal and animality within the context of the sacrificial philosophical-cultural Westernness; (3) to highlight the relevance of (...) the issue of the animal and animality in order to re-think, in new terms, the question of the human itself – still essentially structured in the light of a metaphysical subjectivity –, underlining the invaluable contribution of Deconstruction to rethink the exceptionality of the human among the living beings and to bring the war for compassion to a successful end, thus contributing to the emergence of new Lights for the promise of the “coming” [“à-venir”] of another humanity and, consequently, of another civilization. (shrink)

El concepto ontológico de «deseo» ha sido elaborado por el dualismo falogocéntrico a partir de las ideas de falta, privación, materia, caída, prohibición o culpa, con la intención de erradicar del cuerpo viviente la energía activa y creadora de lo real, y remitirla a la trascendencia inaccesible del espíritu puro. Habida cuenta del modo en que la diferencia sexual femenina ha sido inscripta por el falogocentrismo hegemónico del lado de la falta, la pasividad, la materia y el mal, el (...) vaciamiento del deseo coincide estrictamente con la eliminación del cuerpo materno y la dominación patriarcal. En tal contexto, el presente artículo se propone restituir el deseo a su potencia de creación en mediación materno-material. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on recent artworks by South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. I read these for the ways in which the discourse of species works within and against the humanist sacrificial economy of the subject that Jacques Derrida calls “carno-phallogocentric”. Drawing on Derrida's “metonymy of ‘eating well,'” Achille Mbembe's analysis of colonial violence, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that these works inscribe and disturb a speciesist, sexual, and racial politics of animalization, and do so (...) by figuring a transgressive animality that stalks the “origins” of “the human” and troubles its carnivorous and colonial relations of “eating the other.” The works render ambiguous the humanist border that separates “man” from what he calls “the animal” and thicken the singular division between edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative eating. I suggest that this figures what Haraway might call an “eccentric subject”, one that not only holds open the possibility of a nonanthropocentrism but, as Haraway would say, “nourishes indigestion” at the heart of “carno-phallogocentric” power. But this is risky practice, as a recent controversy about reading Mntambo's work shows. (shrink)

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art, and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe) this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the (...) performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice. (shrink)

At his last conference in France, on 8 June 2004, in Strasbourg, under the title “Le souverain bien – ou l’Europe en mal de souveraineté”, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), always very concerned about Europe and about the future of Europe, dared to admit that he dreamed, without the slightest Eurocentrism or identitarianism, of “a Europe whose universal hospitality and new laws of hospitality or the right of asylum would make it the Noah’s Ark of the 21st century” – since the Bible (...) (Gen. 6-9), Noah’s Ark [Tevat Noah] symbolizing the covenant, that is, Elohim’s alliance with Noah and “every living being” (Gen. 9, 15). Through the problematic of unconditional hospitality – which, as we try to point out, translates the singularity of this biblical alliance as well as underlines the singularity of Deconstruction as a philosophical idiom –, it is the silhouette of this dream of Derrida, as well as its juridical and political scope and implications not only in the European scene but also in the so-called Globalization scene, that we try to sketch here, showing how such a dream deconstructs, that is, denounces and critically re-thinks presumption and violence of the carno-fallo-logo-centric register of philosophical-cultural Westernity. (shrink)

Ce texte privilégie les motifs de la mort et de la peine de mort re-pensés à partir de la temporalité (messianique) dans l’intention de soulever un trait de l’Auseinandersetzung qui a dicté et toujours aimanté le rapport de Jacques Derrida à la pensée de Heidegger. On s’efforcera de déceler et remarquer ce qui soustrait la déconstruction derridienne non seulement à la Destruktion heideggérienne mais aussi à la mémoire gréco-abrahamique dont elle a su bien hériter en devenant un idiome philosophique exceptionnellement (...) unique dans le contexte de l’occidentalité philosophico-culturelle dans son combat insurrectionnel pour la lumière des Lumières à venir. Une exceptionnalité qui se marque dans la ténacité de sa déconstruction des symptômes et des figures du « carno-phallogocentrisme » de cette tradition gréco-abrahamique, dont la peine de mort est peut-être le signe majeur. (shrink)

«A excepção Derrida – o “eleito secreto” dos animais» pretende sobretudo evidenciar três questões fundamentais de todo interligadas: 1.) Sem a reificar numa filosofia teórico-sistemática, destacar a Desconstrução de Derrida como um “idioma filosófico” – o da différance ou da alteridade absoluta – dotada de pressupostos “teóricos” específicos (khôra, messiânico); 2.) Destacar e esclarecer o significado da “excepção derridiana” no tocante à questão do animal e da animalidade no contexto da sacrificialista ocidentalidade filosófico-cultural; 3.) Destacar a relevância da questão do (...) animal para repensar, em novos termos, a questão do próprio humano/sujeito – ainda essencialmente estruturado à luz de uma subjetividade metafísica –, sublinhando a inestimável contribuição da Desconstrução para repensar a eventual excepcionalidade do humano entre os viventes e para levar a bom termo a guerra pela compaixão, contribuindo assim para o surgimento de novas Luzes para a promessa do “por-vir” [«à-venir»] de uma outra humanidade e, consequentemente, de uma outra civilização. (shrink)