The frontier or abyss– and animals as good to think

This book will examine Jacques Derrida's contribution to a longstanding philosophical and political debate around defining the human with and against the animal, and thus constructing the nature of ‘man’ (a term used advisedly) in a way that has typically evoked a significant division, if not an abyss, between human beings and other animals, often with devastating consequences both for animals and for those presented, or, to some extent at least, perceived as, animals in human form. For however secure a frontier seems to be, it can always be breached for better or worse. My title, calked on a light comic autofiction that typically sees human beings as animal types and the life of various other animals as equally fascinating in its diversity, refers to ‘Derrida and other animals’. The ‘other’ implies that Derrida is an animal and one of many animals who will be the subject. A stronger sense of ‘other’, common in theoretical discourse, would suggest that animals are the other to the man. This book will operate in between those two senses of ‘other’, paying close attention to Derrida's analysis of the shifting borders erected around the human in attempts by numerous thinkers at different points in history to make it a more homogeneous category, as well as of counter-attempts to disturb that homogeneity. The most obvious boundary for the category of the human is that with the animal, yet it is as difficult to define ‘the animal’ as it is ‘man’.