Despite the common division of Imaginary and Symbolic realms in Lacan as respectively before and after the mirror stage, Butler reads in his second seminar that the integrity of the body can only be secured by means of nomination. And ‘to have a name,’ asserts Butler,
is to be positioned within the Symbolic, the idealized domain of kinship, a set of relationships structured through sanction and taboo which is governed by the law of the father and the prohibition against incest. […] What constitutes the integral body is not a natural boundary or organic telos, but the law of kinship that works through the name.43
Here, Butler’s vocabulary seems to echo Freud’s, with the striking difference that she glosses over the role of the totemic animal in establishing and securing that embodiment. If (clan) nomination is responsible for
42 Ibid., p. 64-5. For Kristeva, this is most acutely felt in those patriarchal societies in which female power is still strongly exercised (those with matrilineal filiation, for example, which is a classic feature of totemic societies).
materialising the body, and if the body is always taken to be the human’s animal part, it is clear that the totem animal (as that which institutes the linguistic ‘set of relationships’) is constitutive of the materiality of the body and of
nomination itself. Now we can more clearly read Butler’s Derridean concepts in her discussion of the materiality of language as a path for understanding the co-implication of animal and language in Totem and Taboo:
It is the materiality of that (other) body [Kristeva’s ontogenetic mother or Freud’s phylogenetic father] which is phantasmatically reinvoked in the materiality of signifying sounds [or totems]. Indeed, what gives those sounds [or animal bodies] the power to signify is that
phantasmatic structure. […] In this sense, materiality is constituted in and through iterability.44
Iterability is Derrida’s name for the mechanism which articulates a code and an instance. It refers to an irreducible structure of repeatability, according to which a signifier must be repeatable forever and in any context in order for it be a signifier. That repeatability secures its ideal status, as well as the ideality of the system itself. Iterability emerged as an issue for Derrida especially in his early intervention in Husserl’s thought, as a way of accounting for the ideality sought by phenomenology, and in the polemics with Austin and Searle, as Derrida’s strategy for dispensing with the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘nonserious’ uses of language. In his 1967 ‘Speech and Phenomena:
Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology’, Derrida stresses that, when using words, one must
from the outset operate (within) a structure of repetition. […] A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular. A sign which would take place ‘once’ would not be a sign. […] A signifier (in general) must be formally recognizable in spite of,
and through, the diversity of empirical characteristics which may modify it. It must remain the same, and be able to be repeated as such, despite and across the deformations which the empirical event necessarily makes it undergo. A phoneme or grapheme is necessarily always to some extent different each time it is presented in an operation or a perception. But it can function as a sign, an in general as language, only if a formal identity enables it to be issued again and to be recognized. This identity is necessarily ideal.45
If a signifier is to be recognised as one signifier, if its identity across all its uses and instances is to be assured, an ideal shape of it must exist. It does not, however, exist somewhere, or in another world as opposed to the material world where its signifying instances occur: this ideality is completely
constituted by the repetition (and repeatability) of its elements, so that its non- worldliness is neither mundane nor spiritual. Butler’s assertion that bodily materiality is conditioned by iterability now illuminates the dynamics between totem animal and totem species discussed above. Insofar as each individual animal can be recognized as belonging to a species, even though no two
animals are identical, the ideality of the concept of species is produced. As it is, a species is never a phenomenal, empirical thing; one can never experience a species. It is produced solely by the repetition of specific individual animals, despite their material (bodily) differences. Conversely, animals can only be perceived as members of the same species due to the ideality that a species invokes.
It is crucial, however, that Derrida stresses that in Husserl there are different kinds of idealities or objectivities. As Derrida argues in detail in his
45 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, ed. by John Wild, trans. by David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 50.
introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, pure objectivity for the latter would only take place in geometry, since its truths can free themselves from any material substrate and contingency. As expounded above, though,
language, too, is composed of idealities. Yet, Derrida highlights that this ideality is for Husserl of a lesser degree, due to its dependence on an actual language (langue). The discussion regarding the levels of ideality in words, concepts, and things is taken up by Husserl – and Derrida after him – entirely in animal terms, for reasons, I argue, that are essentially linked to the play of corporification and virtualisation in the animal/species dynamics. Husserl first attests language’s similarity to geometry, since the former is ‘thoroughly made up of ideal
objectivities: for example, the word Löwe [lion] occurs only once in the German language; it is identical throughout its innumerable utterances by any given persons’.46 Derrida then muses in a footnote that Husserl’s point is not altogether original, up to its animal ‘content’ (which I am here calling a structure), which had already been employed by Hegel:
In the Encyclopedia […], the lion already testifies to this neutralization as an exemplary martyr: ‘Confronting the name—Lion—we no longer have any need either of an intuition or even an image, but the name (when we understand it) is its simple and imageless representation: in the name we think’. […] Hegel also writes: ‘The first act, by which Adam is made master of the animals, was to impose on them a name, i.e., he annihilated them in their existence (as existents).’47
After stating that, however, Derrida reminds us that in Husserlian thought the ideality of a word is limited. Despite the ideal signifier’s freedom from any actual utterance, the word Löwe
46 Edmund Husserl, quoted in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, an Introduction, trans. by John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 67. 47 Derrida, Geometry, p. 67.
remains interrelated, as a German word, to a real spatiotemporality; it remains interrelated in its very ideal Objectivity with the de facto existence of a given language and thus with the factual subjectivity of a certain speaking community. Its ideal Objectivity is then relative, and distinguishable only as an empirical fact from that of the French or English ‘lion’.48
This first-order ideality is limited when compared to a second-order ideality of what Husserl terms ‘intentional content’ or ‘the unity of expression’s signification’. Here Derrida and Husserl are referring to the concept of a lion, which is not tied to any of the signifiers employed by specific languages to mean it: ‘This ideal identity of sense [the concept] expressed by lion, leo, Löwe, and so forth, is then freed from all actual linguistic subjectivity.’49
The Husserlian vocabulary of expression, intentional content, and object here mirrors Saussure’s signifier, signified, and referent, respectively. When Derrida moves on to discuss Husserl’s thoughts on the object in this chain of lions, however, we encounter the totemic dynamics of iterability that cannot furnish a firm ground for the argument. Derrida characterises the object-lion as an empirical contingency that in fact contaminates the whole chain of idealisation, without noting, however, that the animal – as
paradigmatic example of iterability chosen by himself, Husserl, and Hegel – continues to produce idealities, since even a real lion is, in a way, a signifier: But the ‘object’ itself is neither the expression [signifier] nor the sense- content [signified]. The flesh and blood lion, intended through two strata of idealities, is a natural, and therefore contingent, reality; as the perception of the immediately present sensible thing grounds idealities under those circumstances, so the contingency of the lion is going to reverberate in the ideality of the expression and in that of its sense. The
48 Ibid., p. 70. 49 Ibid., p. 71.
translatability of the word lion, then, will not be in principle absolute and universal. It will be empirically conditioned by the contingent encounter in a receptive intuition of something like the lion.50
Derrida introduces the ‘flesh and blood lion’ in order to make the point that the ideality of the concept ‘lion’ is a bound ideality, since it depends on a supposedly empirical material thing. This, finally, is contrasted with true, third- order free idealities, like that of geometrical objects, which are themselves, unlike a lion – even at the level of the object – ideal. The ideality of the lion would be bound since it would be tied to empirical existents.
In her article ‘Love of the Löwe’, Marie-Dominique Garnier, too,
discusses the lion in Derrida’s Geometry introduction, especially because of its status as ‘Derrida’s “first” animal-in-writing’.51 Garnier reads Derrida’s
multilingual reference to the ‘mot Löwe’ in relation to ‘the limitrophic apparatus of the animot, the animal in relation to the word, to naming and appellation’ and to the status of both the ‘word’ itself and proper names.52 Garnier stresses the fact that Derrida supports Husserl’s contention that ‘the word Löwe’ occurs only once in the German language, since it is an ideal signifier. This ideality is, however, limited, since it is still tied to the factical reality and historicity of the German language itself. Garnier thus shows that the word Löwe registers as some kind of fleshy manifestation of the cross-linguistic ‘concept’ of ‘the lion’:
“Flesh” occupies a strange middle ground between the two “ends” of the “word Löwe”, between naming and animality, linking “le lion en chair et en os”, the “flesh and blood lion”, to, on the other hand, Husserl’s wrestling with language. […] “Flesh” […] operates as a two-headed animal: Husserls
50 Ibid., second emphasis added.
51 Marie-Dominique Garnier, ‘Love of the Löwe’, in The Animal Question in Deconstruction, ed. by Lynn Turner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 34-53 (p. 35).
always says that the linguistic or graphic body is a flesh, a proper body, or spiritual corporeality (Geistige Leiblichkeit).53
However, Derrida resists the supposed ideality of the cross-linguistic, cross-cultural ‘concept lion’ by pointing out that this concept will depend on an empirical reference to ‘the contingent encounter in a receptive intuition of something like the lion’. Garnier explores this turn of phrase by Derrida in detail, asking ‘to what improbably species does Derrida’s “something-like-the- lion” belong’? She reads this impreciseness as a token of the cross-linguistic aspect of the material, non-translated Löwe. Therefore, she connects the French lion to lien (a tie, a bond) and lié (tied, bound) and to the homophone lions (let us tie). For her, this lion is
an anexact animal, something-like-an-animal lying in wait at the outer/utter limits of nomination, on the periphery of naming,
paradoxically ill-said, half-unsayable and yet hyper-written.54 […] [It] allow[s] reading to cross the barrier between the common and the proper.55
On the other hand, I argue that Derrida’s expression ‘something like the lion’ is an acknowledgement of the very limits of naming that Garnier
discusses: the name of the one living thing which one can encounter (in order to activate the meaning of the concept ‘lion’) is not strictly speaking ‘lion’. To answer Garnier’s question, ‘something like the lion’ belongs, rather simply, to the species ‘lion’, since ‘something like the lion’ is thus worded so as to refer to one specific animal. This one animal cannot be called by a non-translated ‘mot Löwe’ but neither can it properly be refered to by the cross-linguistic ‘concept
53 Ibid., p. 38.
54 This last adjective possibly referring to the distinctive diacritic of the word Löwe. 55 Ibid, p. 43.
lion’. This concept can only make reference to the species Panthera leo and, as Garnier discussion shows, one specific animal could only be properly named by a proper name. In my reading, Derrida’s ‘something like the lion’ refers less to a certain plurality of (linguistic) lions than to the totemic mechanism which locates a species in an in-between zone between ideal concept and material animal referent. Animal species displays the non-wordly materiality which refuses to be absorbed both by non-wordly conceptuality and material animality.
Therefore, there seem to be compelling reasons to hold that the concept of the species (which is indeed the sense of the word ‘lion’) is distinguishable from the object ‘species’ intended by it. And, since ‘species’ as an object is yet another ideality, the material object ‘flesh and blood lion’ gathered up by it is a fortiori also distinguishable from the concept of species, since a species is not in fact a flesh and blood material object. In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève provides precedence in philosophical thought for a strict separation between a species of animal and the concept of that species by arguing that
the word ‘Dog’ reveals the essence of the dog, and without this word this essence would not be revealed to man; but the essence of the dog is what realizes the meaning of the word, the dog is what allows man to develop the word ‘Dog’ into a judgment, saying: ‘the dog is an animal with four feet, covered with hair, etc.’56
56 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures of the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, ed. by Allan Bloom, trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1980), p. 107. Unpacking his ‘notation’, we could say that ‘Dog’ (in quotes) is the essence or concept of the species, dog (in italic type) is the species, and the dog (in roman type) is an individual animal.
He qualifies this statement by stating that, for both Plato and Aristotle, ‘there is a concept “dog” only because there is an eternal real dog, namely the species dog, which is always in the present.’57 In totemic terms, one could say that a clan’s name is separate from – albeit related to – the totemic species, which is, in its turn, embodied in totem animals. For Plato, the timelessness of the ideal species is represented by its eternal ‘present-ness’, whereas
individual dogs can die and, therefore, remain in the past.
It could be argued, though, that any Platonic concept follows the same logic. ‘Table’ is never the name of any specific table, but it is neither the same as the table-ness to which all of them belong: the real, Platonic table, which is always in the present. Onto the apparent privilege of animal examples here some light is shed by Kojève when he advances Hegel’s reworking of the Platonic triad of the word ‘Dog’ / the ‘real’ dog (Idea) / individual dog:
As long as the Meaning (or Essence, Concept, Logos, Idea, etc.) is embodied in an empirically existing entity, this Meaning or Essence, as well as the entity, lives. For example, as long as the Meaning (or Essence) ‘dog’ is embodied in a sensible entity, this Meaning (Essence) lives: it is the real dog, the living dog which runs, drinks, and eats. But when the Meaning (Essence) ‘dog’ passes into the word ‘dog’—that is becomes abstract Concept which is different from the sensible reality that it reveals by its Meaning—the Meaning (Essence) dies: the word ‘dog’ does not run, drink, and eat; in it the Meaning (Essence) ceases to live—that is, it dies. And that is why the conceptual understanding of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder.58
Here it seems clear that the life of the Essence (of the dog) is secured by its close relation with the flesh and blood dog. Rather than falling into the world of facticity and contingency by being embodied into instances, the Essence
57 Ibid., pp. 141, 113. Kojève places Aristotle’s deviation from Plato in this matter only on the issue of the relationship between Time and Eternity.
seems to ascend to a realm of vitality due to its participation in the living body of the dog. Linguistic conceptualisation, on the other hand, is framed here as the breaking of the Essence’s life-giving connection to the mortal dog. As pointed out by Derrida, Hegel sees linguistic conceptualisation as murder insofar as it drains the Dog-essence of its life. The productive Hegelian distinction between living Essence and dead, deadly concept depends upon an animal example for its articulation – a discussion about tables and the Essence of tables would not generate the same conclusions. As it is, these animal examples are more
essential to what they exemplify than the logic of a mere illustrative addendum might suggest. Kojève confirms it thus:
If the dog were not mortal—that is, essentially finite or limited with respect to its duration—one could not detach its Concept from it—that is, cause the Meaning (Essence) that is embodied in the real dog to pass into the nonliving word. […] This abstract Concept is possible only if the dog is essentially mortal.59
Kojève’s Hegelian formulas – as well as his explication of Platonic metaphysics – underscores the necessity of the mortality or killability of the (animal) instance for the production of the immortal (totemic) species. This Hegelian law of iterability seems to openly acknowledge its origins in the play of animation figured by totemism, insofar as it paradoxically asserts that the Concept immortalises the life of the individual only to repeatedly kill it in
linguistic murder. As Akira Lippit puts it, ‘killed by the word, the animal enters a figurative empire (of signs) in which its death is repeated endlessly. In such transmigrations, however, death itself is circumvented.’60 The similarities to
59 Ibid., p. 141.
60 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), p. 48.
the logic of totemism, in which the totem animal has to be perpetually spared only to be always liable to sacrifice, are striking, and they illuminate Derrida’s close paraphrase of Husserl’s degrees of idealities.
Recapitulating Derrida’s Husserlian discussion, the ‘flesh and blood lion’ is intended through two strata of differing degrees of idealities – namely that of the concept ‘lion’, and that of the word lion. By reaching the bodily lion as the supposed end-point of a chain of references, Derrida means to expose a material contingency at the moment Husserl would like to posit the freest ideality. As we saw, Husserl’s chain of idealisation should go along the following route, from more to less material: instance of the word Löwe – signifier Löwe – cross-linguistic concept of ‘lion’. Derrida, however, reminds us that the concept should point to the flesh and blood lion, framing thus the whole sequence between two materialities, as it were.61 Kojève reminds us, though, that traditionally metaphysics has kept species and concept of the