might bring cats and ideas together:
[Jacques Derrida] in "The Animals that Therefore I am", locates a fault line between "poetic thinking" and "philosophical knowledge" in the latter's unwillingness or inability to register the experience of being seen by a non human animal. Real thought about animals is for Derrida is what philosophy has had to deprive itself of in its efforts to secure the human subject so that whatever thinking about them we do have is 'poetic thinking.' that has either not been concerned to make binding claims about the difference between human beings and other animals or has actively sought to suspend such claims.
Derrida is especially concerned to particularize talk about animals, to move philosophical discussion from 'the animal' as opposed to 'the human' toward the experience of individual animals. His own contribution to this movement is a description of the anxiety he feels when being seen and above all when being seen naked by his cat. As he experiences it, the cat's gaze is "vacant to the extent of being bottomless, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps...good and bad...unreadable, abyssal, secret...
...Derrida expresses frustration at definitions of language which exclude animals from its use and seeks to orient discussion of what language is to the situational event of communication...Derrida thus seeks to open philosophy up to the concrete and current problems... in the science of animal language and to suspend the distinction between animal communications and human language that philosophy has erected and policed.
From what I can tell Derrida views binary opposition (animal versus human language) as denoting a real opposition rather than the linguistic structure underlying, not reality, but words. I do not know enough to conclude this, enough about deconstruction. I can suggest however, that, if Derrida was not misinterpreted, he has been borrowing his cat's catnip.
Derrida is especially concerned to particularize talk about animals, to move philosophical discussion from 'the animal' as opposed to 'the human' toward the experience of individual animals. His own contribution to this movement is a description of the anxiety he feels when being seen and above all when being seen naked by his cat. As he experiences it, the cat's gaze is "vacant to the extent of being bottomless, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps...good and bad...unreadable, abyssal, secret...
...Derrida expresses frustration at definitions of language which exclude animals from its use and seeks to orient discussion of what language is to the situational event of communication...Derrida thus seeks to open philosophy up to the concrete and current problems... in the science of animal language and to suspend the distinction between animal communications and human language that philosophy has erected and policed.
From what I can tell Derrida views binary opposition (animal versus human language) as denoting a real opposition rather than the linguistic structure underlying, not reality, but words. I do not know enough to conclude this, enough about deconstruction. I can suggest however, that, if Derrida was not misinterpreted, he has been borrowing his cat's catnip.
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