Derrida’s Cat or Daniel’s God?
Following God to the Deconstructed Subjects in
the Book of Daniel
Derrida’s Cat or God
Derrida calls for a subject that would be deconstructed, which is to say, a subject that is not “identical to itself”.1
It would be “a subject that would no longer include the figure of mastery of self, of adequation to self, center and origin of the world”.2 Derrida “would define the subject rather as the finite experience of non-identity to self, as the underivable interpellation inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the other, with all the paradoxes or the aporia of being-before-the-law”.3 The subject would thus be “a singularity that dislocated or divides itself in gathering itself together to answer to the other, whose call somehow precedes its own identification with itself, for to this call I can only answer, have already answered, even if I think I am answering ‘no’”.4
This call does not have to be a linguistic one. It is marked also by silence and secrecy. As Derrida challenges the human subject as being marked by the very concepts his “deconstructed subject” resists, he looks to the call from the other as nonhuman, that which has been excluded from the human order, and so remains other to the human subject. He writes: “I hear the cat or God ask itself, ask me: Is he going to call me, is he going to address me?”5
The “subject”, Derrida writes, is above all linked to “the law, as subject subjected to the law, subject to the law in its very autonomy, to ethical or juridical law, to political
1 EW, 261. 2 Ibid., 266. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 261. 5 TATTIA, 18.
77 law or power, to order (symbolic or not)”.6 Instead of continuing to see the figure of the human as a sovereign entity either enforcing the law as the sole sovereign subject of, or as the sole subjects to, the law, Derrida reorients the question to what he calls divinanimality.7 It is a matter of thinking beyond the law as a convention or contract of mutual benefit amongst human subjects. As I discussed in the first chapter, for Derrida, justice and responsibility necessarily exceed the order of calculable law or a given prescription and program towards, and in relation to, the other.8 To respond responsibly for Derrida is more than this, it is to answer the call of the other. He recognises this call in the gaze of his cat. “This real, singular cat occupies a crucial threshold in Derrida’s philosophical knowledge. She (for this cat is in fact une chatte) allows him to see something of the otherness of all non-human animals”.9 But it is not only a case of non-human animals but of the nonhuman or ahuman. Derrida asks: “Must not this place of the Other be ahuman?”10 Because they are thought not to respond in language, animals – and one could add, gods – are excluded from the human order, founded on the possibility of responding responsibly in language, that is, to be able to account for oneself autonomously before the law and sovereignly enforce the law. But Derrida posits a two-fold argument in response to this. First, that there can be no response that is entirely devoid of what is thought foreign to it, namely reflex or so-called instinctive automaticity.11 In other words, the division separating a human response from an animal mere reaction is not assured. Secondly, that responsibility may present itself in other modes than as a response of linguistic transparency and accountability. One way to understand Derrida’s point is through the response “here I am”. In The Animal that Therefore I am, Derrida writes that he is interested in “here I am” as a response because:
‘Here I am’ as responsibility implies this self-presentation, this autotelic, autodeictic, autobiographical movement, exposing oneself before the law… because ‘Here I am’ as responsibility implies the possibility of ‘responding,’ of answering for oneself in the response to the appeal or command of the other.12 For Derrida the other who “calls” is an animal other. But seemingly, it is also the call of God. Drawing upon Levinas’ concept of ethics as a respect for the other formulated through the “after you”, Derrida argues that this does not just mean “ ‘go ahead at the
6
EW, 259.
7 TATTIA, 132. 8 EW, 272-273, 286.
9 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 186. 10
TATTIA, 132.
11 Ibid., 112. This is also what Derrida argues in “Signature, Event, Context”, about citation or citability. 12 TATTIA, 111.
78 elevator, etc., it means ‘I come after you,’ and I come to myself, to my responsibility as an ego, in some sense, only from the other”.13
The other is there before me, and I receive the order from the other who precedes me. That is the situation when faced with the other, and he not only goes ahead of me, must go ahead of me, but is there before me. So I say ‘After you,’ and it’s my first address to the other as other.14
As he puts it in Rogues, “as with the coming of any event worthy of this name, of an unforeseeable coming of the other, of a heteronomy, of a law come from the other, of a responsibility and decision of the other – of the other in me, an other greater and older than I am”.15 Since Derrida calls for a response to the “other” as what is nonhuman, his call is situated between “cat or God”, or as “divinanimality” as that which has been excluded from the human order. Reorienting humanity to following in the double meaning of “je suis” as “I am” and “I follow”, Derrida reflects on what it means to follow animals, to come after animals. He writes that the ethical imperative towards the other to say “after you”, to allow the other to be a sovereign firstcomer must be thought in terms of the other as any other, without calculation. This other is thus also – and perhaps especially – a nonhuman other. In the delineation of the nonhuman other as “cat or God”16
in The Animal
that Therefore I am, Derrida does not pose the question explicitly as to what it might mean
to follow God as the nonhuman other in the context of the question of the animal. But as Chrulew states, in the bathroom scene, it is in God’s gaze that a turn is set in motion towards response and responsibility for the other.17
As for the question of whether (and if so, how), Derrida will address the nonhuman other, it would appear that his prime response is: “here I am”. Despite it appearing to be Derrida who is the one to address these figures of otherness, his emphasis on response would signal the utterance of “here I am” not as a sovereign self-introduction but precisely as a response before the law of the other: yes, here I am, you have already seen me, I am
responding to you. His cat or his God would not address him with words, in language, and
so his response is an attention to their being-there, his following them, his already having-
being-seen by them. Hence, Derrida’s figure of the animal other here is that of his cat as an
13 BS I, 238-239. 14 Ibid., 239. 15 R, 84. 16 TATTIA, 18.
79 irreplaceable, irreducible living being.18 His God figure, on the other hand, remains something of a haunting remainder, closely associated with the God of Genesis. Are “cat or God” exchangeable figures for the nonhuman, for the “other” as ahuman? And what would such exchangeability signify?
The generality and singularity of the “here I am” is encapsulated in Derrida’s discussion of Abraham who answers God: “Here I am” in Genesis 22, in the infamous story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham is silent about the call he has received from God, and “in not saying the essential thing, namely the secret between God and him, Abraham doesn’t speak, he assumes the responsibility that consists in always being alone, entrenched in one’s own singularity at the moment of decision”.19
Derrida argues that the self-presentation of the “here I am” that would be followed by the lawful and ostensibly responsible spoken confession and account of this call is in fact what would lead to a loss of singularity and a risk of generality, automaticity, and thus irresponsibility. As soon as one speaks, “as soon as one enters the medium of language, one loses that very singularity, precisely because language is always to some extent general, it can never be entirely singular. One therefore loses the possibility of deciding or the right to decide. Thus every decision would, fundamentally, remain at the same time solitary, secret, and silent”.20 What Derrida’s “here I am” signifies, then, is the singularity of the one who is called by name and who must decide on a response, but the generality that encloses this singular subject in language. Crucially, for this context, the “I” responds to the God who is other. Referring to the “here I am” in the context of the animal adds another dimension to this ethical demand.
What Derrida shows with the “here I am” is that any response bears in it the traces of automaticity, that is frequently reserved for the animal instinctive reaction, and that responsibility can be deconstructed. In terms of automaticity, Derrida argues that iterability is essential to every response, “to the ideality of every response,”21
and that this iterability
18 Waldau complains about how a single nonhuman pet, namely Derrida’s cat, can stand for the entire array
of nonhuman animals. “It is not at all clear how a relationship with a cat living in our carpentered world throws light on relationship possibilities with wild animals living in their own communities.” Waldau,
Animal Studies, An Introduction, 182. What Waldau misses, however (a point I will go on to discuss in
regard to Daniel’s God) is that this cat is precisely not every other but is his other, the cat is his particular
unsubstitutional cat. The cat only becomes the figure for otherness more generally after that fact in light of
the logic that no other exists as a general, abstract figure of otherness: every other figures also in a particular relationship, and so is a “my other”.
19
GD, 59-60.
20 Ibid., 60. 21 TATTIA, 112.
80 “can and cannot fail to introduce nonresponse, automatic reaction, mechanical reaction into the most alive, most ‘authentic,’ and most responsible response”.22
It is the case of the iterable trace as a type of “machine” that cannot be reduced to my intention, reason, or presence, and so cannot be wholly accounted for.23 This is not only the case for the written word, but is a function of language or any communication. My language is never only my own, my utterance “exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining with the other, and returning to the other”.24 In other words, the “here I am” as a response is a repeatable, iterable structured response that in itself as a general phrase or repeatable set of signs denotes the automatic and non- autonomous “I” who answers to the other who is already there, before him or her. Wolfe writes
‘we’ are always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very being – not just in the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical embodiment, vulnerability, and mortality, of course, but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity.25
At the same time, however, “here I am” is the response that signals an excessive responsibility of an undecidable law to and from the other. It is a matter of testimony and trust in the face of the other who calls me into being, whom I cannot wholly know and whose call asks something of me. Derrida terms this the “aporia of responsibility”,26 in the tension between knowing what one is doing in acting responsibly but at the same time one is not actually being responsible if one is merely acting according to the knowledge presented to us, this would be “the technical deployment of a cognitive apparatus”.27
Hence the very condition for responsibility is also simultaneously the impossibility of responsibility. Even if I say “no”, or think I have said “no” a response has been given. But there is simultaneously always the possibility of saying “yes” to the other. As Calarco states: “The Other leaves a trace of the shock of encounter within me, and how I respond to that trace – whether I affirm or negate, avow or disavow – constitutes ethics, properly speaking.”28
Derrida continues to argue that there is no “discourse or address of the other
22 Ibid. 23
SEC, 8.
24 MO, 40.
25 Cary Wolfe, “Humanist and Posthumanist Antispeciesism”, in The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue, ed.
Paola Cavalieri (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009), 57.
26
Ibid., 24.
27 Ibid., 24.
81 without the possibility of an elementary promise”.29 This is perhaps nothing more than an elementary promise of a relational response that in itself always already promises the
possibility of an affirmation or acknowledgement. The yes “will have implied and will
always imply the trustworthiness and fidelity of a faith”,30 that is, a trust in the other that resides in not knowing the other or the other’s response.
“Responsibility and faith go together,” Derrida writes in The Gift of Death, “however paradoxical that might seem to some, and both should, in the same movement exceed mastery and knowledge”.31 This ties in with his notion of a deconstructed subject because it is a matter of recognising a lack of mastery, a non-mastery, but simultaneously in acknowledging the relationality, response and responsibility with and to the other who goes before me, who I come after and answer to. As already mentioned, in The Gift of
Death, Derrida stages the aporia of responsibility through the figure of Abraham in
Genesis 22. Derrida attempts to show that secrecy and responsibility must be thought together “in responding, hence in answering to the other, before the other and before the law, and if possible publicly, answering for itself, its intentions, its aims, and for the name of the agent deemed responsible”.32 But this is crucially an unknowable other. God “is himself absent, hidden and silent, separate, secret, at the moment he has to be obeyed”.33 To be God he must remain other: “If the other were to share his reasons with us by explaining them to us, if he were to speak to us all the time without any secrets, he wouldn’t be the other, we would share a type of homogeneity.”34 The relation set up between the deconstructed subject as a “here I am” and the call of the other, then, is inextricably relational but never wholly transparent or symmetrical. What does it mean to follow Derrida’s God in the face of an animal other? Or is it, in cat or God, that the cat is a kind of divinity in Derrida’s eyes?
29 FK, 83. 30 Ibid. 31 GD, 6. 32 Ibid., 26-27. 33
Ibid., 57. Derrida is here talking about Paul’s God and his God being the same as Abraham’s God. Ibid., 58.
82
Following God to the Deconstructed Subjects in the Book of Daniel
Daniel is a multifaceted book in the biblical archive, normally divided into two parts, chapters 1-6 and 7-12. Jan-Wim Wesselius calls it “a kaleidoscopic work” because of its variations in genre, style and language.35 The book is pseudepigraphic, antedated, bilingual (Hebrew and Aramaic). It is a text that is rife with diverse influences36 and has a long and influential trajectory, on the genre of apocalypse and particularly on the Book of Revelation, to which I will turn later.37 Lawrence M. Wills draws attention to the didactic elements of Daniel and their probable relation to oral folk tales.38 As Jennifer L. Koosed and Robert P. Seesengood point out, it is a collection of stories that have been popular especially among children, particularly known for its lions.39 The first six chapters are commonly described as court legends while the last six are usually classified as apocalyptic literature.40 But this benign association with children’s stories and neat taxonomy masks the way in which the Book of Daniel presents two radically different visions of the political as animal, visions of the complex and shifting relationships between power and powerlessness. By “political” here I mean the social relations, powers and hierarchies that determine who rules over other creatures and who is in turn ruled or subjected. In Daniel, the political is animal: animality is a spectrum that runs from the domesticated to the wild, from pet to prey, where the boundaries between who and what are never entirely delineated. The two visions in Daniel are cobbled together in a manner
35 Jan-Wim Wesselius, “The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of its
Aramaic”, Aramaic Studies 3. 2 (2005), 242.
36
John J. Collins argues that the ancient mythological motifs used in Daniel must be understood in light of the interest in such traditions and myths in the Hellenistic age. He suggests that in the Hellenistic Near East such ancient material was drawn from an interest that was complementary to an increased use of pseudepigraphy. “Antiquity was thought to be superior to the present. Therefore writings and traditions which either were or claimed to be ancient enjoyed special prestige.” John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision
of the Book of Daniel (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press for Harvard Semitic Museum, 1977) 102-103.
37 For more on the Daniel imagery and its influences in apocalyptic texts see for instance G. K Beale’s The
Use of Daniel in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and in the Revelation of St. John (Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1984).
38
See Lawrence M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, Ancient Jewish Court Legends (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990).
39 Jennifer L. Koosed and Robert Paul Seesengood, “Daniel’s Animal Apocalypse”, in Divinanimality:
Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press,
forthcoming), 2.
40 These two parts are often read separately, or at least classified differently, but Wesselius puts forward an
interesting argument for its unity, calling the book a “linear literary dossier”. Wesselius’s argument is based on the correlation he traces between the language (particularly the Aramaic) and structure of Daniel with two other biblical books, Genesis 37-50 and Ezra, which Daniel mirrors. Wesselius, “The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of its Aramaic”, 241-283. Koosed and Seesengood suggest that the theme of the animal actually shows more continuity between the two parts of the text than conventional scholarship normally allows. “The distinction between the beast and the sovereign is unstable in both parts of Daniel, and in both parts of Daniel, the distinction is maintained by God.” Koosed and Seesengood, “Daniel’s Animal Apocalypse”, 7.
83 akin to the hybrid animals of Daniel’s dreams, making it a strangely composite work; the two parts even speak different languages.41
The first half of Daniel presents a fantasy for successful assimilation, incorporation