The Issue of the Limit between Human and Animal in Jacques Derrida’s Philosophy

Abstract

The most robust and least controversial conceptual pair in philosophy is possibly that opposing man to animal. The Cartesian inheritance of a radical separation based on a criterion that is presumably part of the essentiality of humans, and is refused categorically to other animals, can be traced in the main speeches of modernity and contemporary thinking. In this article we will address the challenge that Derrida will make of the fence in which humans have secluded the other animals, and his denun- ciation of the dogmatism with which they have been unilaterally denied what man has granted exclusively to himself. And this is not in order to postulate any biological continuity; nothing could be farther from the intention of a thinker who has indeed found his strongest philosophical stimulus in difference and in heterogeneity; it is, rather, in order to consider this gulf in all its complexity and to become aware of density of its intricacies. The sole purpose is to persuade ourselves to think about animals in a different way and to reconsider our being in the world with them.