Blindness, textual and historical

Derrida's writing invites the pursuit of its own blind spot (as his ‘leur propre tache aveugle’ is usually translated), as he locates these in systems of writing and reading. I do not even want to begin to dream of my own particular spots, stains or patches of misreading. However, my plan was to supplement Derrida's extraordinary thinking of the animot in at least two ways: the first would be by opening up his long eighteenth century (if such a thing exists, as he would say) to writings from and about the New World of that epoch concerning two more figures outside the law, the savage and the slave. Not only figures but historical individuals and peoples who cannot even be comfortably located in the past, much as, in the world of UN Declarations of Human Rights, it should have been the case. The second supplement (with no intention of making this secondary) is that of expanding his thinking of sexual difference to incorporate women writers writing on or across the animal-human borderline.

The metaphysical opposition between man and animal is largely used to define man, typically flattering the self and his semblables, sometimes with the benefit of excluding lesser men from the category of brother.