#animot

[floucault]

Nein, aber nein, meine Katze, die mich im Schlaf- oder im Badezimmer anblickt, diese Katze, die vielleicht nicht "meine Katze" noch "meine Kätzin" ist, kommt hier nicht, um, als Botschafterin, die gewaltige symbolische Verantwortung zu repräsentieren, die unsere Kultur dem Katzengeschlecht seit jeher auferlegt hat, von La Fontaine bis Tieck [...], von Baudelaire bis Rilke, Buber und so vielen anderen. Wenn ich sage "es ist eine reale Katze", die mich nackt sieht, dann deshalb, um ihre unersetzliche Einzigartigkeit zu markieren. Wenn sie ihrem Namen entspricht/ auf ihren Namen hört/ antwortet [...], dann tut sie das nicht als Fall einer Spezies "Katze", noch weniger einer Gattung (genre) "Tier" oder eines "Tier"-reichs (règne "animal"). Es ist zwar wahr, dass ich sie als Katze oder eine Kätzin identifiziere. Aber noch vor dieser Identifizierung kommt sie zu mir als 'dieses' unersetzliche Lebewesen, das eines Tages meinen Raum betrat, diesen Ort, an dem es mir begegnen, mich sehen (voir), ja sogar (voire) mich nackt sehen konnte. Nichts wird in mir je die Gewißheit aufheben können, daß es sich hierbei um eine Existenz handelt, die jedem Begriff gegenüber rebellisch ist.

Jacques Derrida, “Das Tier, das ich also bin” (Passagen Verlag,Wien: 2010. S.28)

[blockreview]

It is all too evident that in the course of the last two centuries [traditional forms of animal exploitation] have been turned upside down by the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of intervention into their object, from the transformation of the actual object, and from the milieu and world of their object, namely, the living animal. This has occurred by means of farming and regimentalization at a demographic level unknown in the past, by means of genetic experimentation, the industrialization of what can be called the production for consumption of animal meat, artificial insemination on a massive scale, more and more audacious manipulations of the genome, the reduction of the animal not only to production and overactive reproduction (hormones, genetic crossbreeding, cloning, etc.) of meat for consumption, but also of all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the putative human well-being of man.

Jacques Derrida

[blockreview]

In the first place there are texts signed by people who have no doubt seen, observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal. Their gaze has never intersected with that of an animal directed at them (forget about their being naked). If, indeed, they did happen to be seen furtively by the animal one day, they took no (thematic, theoretical, or philosophical) account of it. They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them.... The experience of the seeing animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. In sum they have denied it as much as misunderstood it. From here on we shall circle round and round this immense disavowal, whose logic traverses the whole history of humanity ....

Jacques Derrrida

[blockreview]

You will recognize [Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond] as one of the greatest pre- or anti-Cartesian texts on the animal that exists. Later we will pay attention to a certain mutation between Montaigne and Descartes, an event that is obscure and difficult to date, to identify even, between to configurations for which these proper names are metonymies. Montaigne makes fun of ‘Man’s impudence with regard to the beasts,’ of the ‘presumption’ and ‘imagination’ shown by man when he claims, for example, to know what goes on in the heads of animals; especially when he presumes to assign them or refuse them certain faculties …. On the contrary, he deems it necessary to recognize in animals a ‘facility’ in forming letters and syllables. This capacity, Montaigne assures us with assurance, ‘testifies that they have an inward power of reason which makes them so teachable and determined to learn’ ….

Jacques Derrida

[blockreview]

"It is less 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, institution, technics, clothing, lie, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, tears, respect, and so on–the list is necessarily without limit, and the most powerful philosophical tradition within which we live has refused the "animal" all those things) than of asking whether what calls itself human has the right to rigorously attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution. Thus, were we even to suppose–something I am not ready to concede–that the "animal" were incapable of covering its tracks, by what right could one concede that power to the human, to the "subject of the signifier"? Especially from a psychoanalytic point of view? Granted, every human can, within the space of doxic phenomenality, have consciousness of covering its tracks. But who could ever judge the effectivity of such a gesture? Is it necessary to recall that every erased trace, in consciousness, can leave a trace of its erasure whose symptom (individual, or social, historical, political, and so on) will always be capable of ensuring its return? And is it necessary, above all, to remind a psychoanalyst of that?"

-Jacques Derrida

[animalsinthecity]

Sophy Tutle's animal skulls