![]() ![]() In this regard, the work collected in Demenageries responds convincingly: without departing from Derrida, these essays explore other terrain, other fields, accruing new languages en route back to Derrida. The task of following Derrida involves not only tracing the paths that he's opened in his work, but the discursive forces he's inscribed therein. Such blurring is not only an effect of following Derrida, of staying near his idiom, but also a crucial dimension of Derrida's critique: throughout his writings and seminars on animals, Derrida questions the lines that separate human beings from animals, sovereigns from beasts, and men from women, among many other thresholds this subject makes visible. It marks the historicity of Derrida's time, the moment of his thought, of his momentous thought, and invokes the challenge of following this moment with the possibilities Derrida calls forth.Īs one might imagine in a collection that follows Derrida closely, the lines between extension, elaboration and mimicry are frequently blurred in the chapters that constitute Demenageries. The volume raises an intriguing question about Derrida's seminars and publications on animals, but also about writing on those seminars: Is the subject of a volume such as this the discourse on animals and animality or Derrida himself? And what is the status of the ‘after’ that this volume inscribes in its relation to Derrida's thought? Is this a temporal designation or declaration of allegiance? To each question, the answer that emerges in Demenageries is some of both: the volume provides a useful guide to navigating Derrida's thought - not only on the subject of animals, but more broadly - at the same time it challenges the ways in which animals figure in and are figured by the humanities and social sciences. What sort of promise? Are these promises to which the editors refer held in Derrida's work, withheld as it were as work to come, or are they promises made by Derrida, as the next step beyond or after his discourse on animals? After Derrida, they suggest, thinking about animals has changed, and he has left behind a promise, or promises for thinking of animals, for a discourse on animals to come, to follow. ![]() The editors describe the volume as a ‘tribute to the promises held by thinking of animals after Derrida’. Taken together, the volume represents the first attempts to step into the spaces opened by Derrida's thought on animals. In brief overview, Garnier and Michaud open the volume with sustained readings of Derrida's own iterations, while Simma moves to questions of spirituality and ethics provoked by Derrida's work on animality the next three chapters address literary works, Berger at Countess de Ségur's children's literature, Lavery at Kafka, and Rother at Coetzee, foregrounding Derrida's continued influence on the question of literature and the new horizons his work on animality makes possible Morris brings Derrida's thought on animals and animality to bear on Canetti and the question of ‘Africanity’, while Siegel engages more broadly the question of postcolonial ethnicity and its relations to ethnography and anthropology in the wake of Derrida's interventions David Wills closes the volume with a brilliant reading of birds and birdsongs in a singularly melodic homage to Jacques Derrida. The anthology itself represents the second incarnation of an Oxford Literary Review special issue on Derrida and animals, ‘Derridanimals’, which appeared first in 2007. Morris, James Siegel, and David Wills and moves across the fields of literature, philosophy, ethics, and anthropology. Berger, Joseph Lavery, Adeline Rother, Rosalind C. Berger and Marta Segarra, Demenageries includes contributions from a range of scholars seasoned and emerging, Marie-Dominique Garnier, Ginette Michaud, Claudia Simma, Anne E. How to think the animal and to think of animals after Jacques Derrida? How to follow his thought forward? These challenges form the premise of Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida, a collection of essays that responds to Derrida's interventions on the subject of animals and animality.
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