Abstract
The main purpose of this chapter is to discuss the “animal issue” starting from the tradition inaugurated by Jacques Derrida, who focused on animality as both a theoretical and a material entity. What is animality? What does it mean to be animals rather than humans? Thinking about animality means thinking about the humanity we want to become: what we have been, what we are, and, of course, what we could be. A humanity that lives by crushing the corpses of history, like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, is a false humanity: it is bestiality that tries to be different from animality—which is precisely what we should go back to in order to save the world and ourselves from the unbearable lightness of the animal slaughterhouse.
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Notes
- 1.
As shown by Slavoj Žižek (2012: 408–416)
- 2.
Derrida (2008: 4ff.) talks about an encounter with his cat when the latter saw him naked, making him feel ashamed (which is no coincidence: shame, ever since Plato, has been the principal sentiment of early philosophy). In that encounter, Derrida looked at the cat and the cat looked back at Derrida, in an emblematic passage from object of the gaze to subject of the gaze. Moreover, in this encounter, we shift from the idea of “a cat” to the disarming awareness that the animal is a singular unrepeatable uniqueness, which cannot be reduced to the aberrant “nameless” term “a cat.” It is in front of the animal, of that single animal—in an apparently Sartrean but actually Heideggerian anecdote—that Derrida discovered the discomfort, the shame, the embarrassment of feeling naked and being mirrored and observed by the nakedness of the other, in a nakedness that we mistakenly believe to only belong to animals.
- 3.
In this regard, see Derrida’s analysis (2008).
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Caffo, L. (2020). Animality Now. In: Cimatti, F., Salzani, C. (eds) Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9_15
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