Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory Book

"Having no alibi, we must recognize the urgency that a more sufficient response is required now!" (97)

This is Not Sufficient did not capture my benevolence, at least not initially. Lawlor begins his treatment of the animal question in peculiar place, Derrida's dispersal of the deceptions of so-called "globalization." What this has to do with animals, per se, never became sufficiently clear to me. This same chapter draws on the supposed historical break of the last 200 years with past human/animal relations (or all relations); as a medievalist, I always found this division dubious in Derrida, and I wish Lawlor had either abandoned it, avoided it, or, if he had time and space, revised it. He could have done more, too, to undercut the human: he uses the collective pronoun "we" and "our" and "us," e.g., "the common experience that all of us have had with our house cats." It's not always clear whether he means humans (i.e., not animals) or if he means "the beings who must follow my guidelines." If it's the latter, I'm fine: someone has to be the host(age), after all; if it's the former, I have any number of obvious problems with it (chiefly, as I've said elsewhere, that these collective pronouns interpellate "us" into being human). There's also a really bad syllogism that runs, in its Derrida-redoing-Heideggerian essence, animals lack hands, therefore they cannot think; humans cannot think, therefore they are animals (79-80). Rocks don't think either; nor do they have hands. I know Lawlor means to be talking only about weltarm beings, but still....and, one more complaint. Lawlor often emphasizes the two choices facing any animal theorist: continuism, which effaces distinctions between humans and animals, and transcendentalism, which breaks the human off entirely from the animal. This is a false dilemma, however, as there is (at least) one other possibility, which is to open up some new relation, which neither denies difference, nor institutes difference absolutely, and which, in (and for!) the face of shifting differences, practices an ethics.

Yet by the end I was with him because, thankfully, by the end he does open something new up. I'm not sure I needed an entire book--even a book as short as this one--to get there (especially because chunks of the book paraphrase Derrida, and his work on animals has been paraphrased often by now), but at least I've no strong sense of having wasted time. His overall project is to continue "twist[ing] free of Platonism" by discovering "a difference that is nondualistic [and that also] destabilizes the original decision" that established the various Platonic hierarchized pairings. Obviously enough, poststructuralism (see 68) does the trick: see Lawlor's discussion of the khora and pharmakon and his confounding of the purportedly uniquely human ability to apprehend the "as such," and thus his refusal to accord humans any pure apprehension of their own death. Through all this, Lawlor offers, in effect, a refinement of Derrida's unconditional hospitality and, in his descriptions of "weak force," an "ability to be unable," a mobilization of Derrida's discussions of the nonpower at the heart of power.

He is most useful, I think, in his insistence that none of this cannot be done without violence. Against the liberal hope for a peaceful peace, Lawlor argues--following, for example, Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror--that violence cannot be avoided: at best, it can only be minimized, reduced to only the "radical evil" (so called because it is the evil at the root) that makes/makes possible differences between an I and not-I and that, moreover, makes a "good conscience" impossible. Lawlor provides a guide for enacting just this "violence against violence" against the worst violence, that violence that tries "to eliminate the evil of the pharmakon once and for all" (e.g., the animality of the human and other not-I in the heart of the I). They key is to at once "welcome and yet guard the alterity of others" (101). We open ourselves up, give them their proper name-which protects them, which, as a "nonuniversal name" (105) marks them off from the collective--even while knowing that even a proper name, to the degree that it reduces indetermination, assimilates them to us and quantifies them. Lawlor proposes that a name be used less like a sameness that repeats and more like a date, which "does not allow itself to pass into eventless repetition" (102): in this sense, the name-as-date can never be completely assimilated, since, like a date, it always holds itself open, and holds onto, to its own time, to its time before and beyond us. Thus we can recognize the impropriety of even a proper name; there is always more there than we know, which means that we cannot receive the animal entirely: thus we "recognize that the name is a kind of shield that allows animals to be left alone" (110). For now, I can propose only one additional refinement, which I draw from Ralph Acampora: in Acampora, the welcoming, because the world and other living beings are already with/in us, is less a welcoming than an acknowledgment. It is not, as Lawlor terms it, a "reception" (73). It will take some time to determine how this alters Lawlor's emphasis on opening.