The animal in Derrida

A year and a half after his death, a new book by Jacques Derrida has been published which reviewer Didier Eribon calls “fulminating” in his review for the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “L’Animal que donc je suis” (Galilee), which — at 232 pages — I take to be a major extension (or full version) of the 50-page essay by the same title published in 1999 in L’animal autobiographique, the proceedings of the third Cerisy Decade around JD’s work, held in 1997. Comments Eribon:

The book begins with a Satresque reflection on the view of the other: when foreign eyes look at me, am I not forced to ask myself who I am? Even if the foreign eyes belong to an animal. A cat. This is truly the opening scene, from which Derrida develops his reflection. It’s when he sends himself to the bathroom to take a shower that he notices that his cat is watching him. The ‘buck naked’ philosopher can’t help himself: a feeling of shame, humiliation takes hold of him. So he asks himself: What does it mean to live with an animal? What does it mean for us? What does it mean for them?” (via signandsight magazine roundup)

The Derrida industry has been going on unabated. There’s a new little series (the “Carnets” published by Editions de L’Herne) which has brought out 7 (seven) little black paperbacks of Derrida essays, including “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’,” a 70-page essay first published in the large (630 pages) Jacques Derrida “Cahiers de l’Herne” homage issue. At one level these little single-essay booklets seem like a quick way of profiteering from the JD label (or “labelle” as the french pronounce the word), on the other hand, they are very handy and elegant pocketable versions of texts that otherwise need to be “consulted” (rather than read for pleasure) in bigger unwieldier tomes or, often, in academic reviews and quarterlies available only to those with University library access.

Looking at those little black “Carnets” reminds me of an earlier version — slightly higher but basically of the same design and lay-out — of that series from l’Herne in the 70ies. It’s founder — the strange, particled, right-wing (or just disgruntled-with-Sartrian orthodoxy) revolutionary novelist, essayist and journalist Dominique de Roux, author of excellent books on Céline and Witold Gombrowitz, unhappily untranslated, among others — had offered to publish a first collection of my writings in French translation in that series back in 1974, the rider, however, being that I would “quickly” translate Ken Kesey’s largish novel Sometimes a Great Notion into French, in exchange. I declined in not so polite terms — which didn’t phase Dominique and we remained friends until his untimely death in 1977 from a heart attack on the way to or from covering another revolution or independence struggle in Lusitanian Africa.