Informal Observations

David Wills (bio)
Brown University

A review of Krell, David Farrell. Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013.

Over the past twenty years David Krell has often eschewed the standard format of scholarly publications in favor of, for example, philosophical fiction (Son of Spirit; Nietzsche: A Novel); or books that allow themselves a more informal tonality and a type of modest pedagogical ambition, as in the case of Derrida and Our Animal Others. He dedicates his first two chapters to summarizing the Beast and the Sovereign seminars that Derrida gave in 2001–2003. The three following chapters discuss The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger on the animal, and Heidegger on apophantic discourse. A conclusion then proposes some directions for future research.

Yet Krell’s modesty is accompanied by a forceful denunciation of the parlous state of current intellectual effort, particularly as it participates in the “flatten[ing] and banaliz[ing of] our powers of expression” as a function of the “waxing illiteracy of our time” (158). Thus, whereas he mourns the loss of academic rigor and the sidelining of work within the literary and philosophical humanities, he finds those disciplines to be complicit in their own demise, descending to “rather vapid self-righteous discourses on biopower and biopoliticking,” or contributing to “exchanges within and without the walls, in our departments and colleges as well as at conferences, [that have] become increasingly mindless, overhasty, and testy” (93, 149).

A major aim of Derrida and Our Animal Others is therefore to hold up the late work of one philosopher as a shining example of how research and pedagogy should be conducted, even though Krell knows full well that the style of Derrida’s teaching and writing can produce reactions of impatience and charges of obfuscation. Krell is one of those (as am I) who have no doubt that Derrida’s work is to be admired and emulated, and his book is therefore replete with observations and commentaries that demonstrate the philosophical acumen and pedagogical strategies of the series of seminars—and writings around those seminars—that turned out to be Derrida’s final major undertaking before his death in 2004. One might, in that respect, call Krell’s book unapologetically partisan: for example, he finds Derrida’s somewhat contentious, even combative critique of Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign “utterly devastating,” “exactly right” in substituting a philology of “rhetorical flourish” for the deconstructive reading he promotes (15).

So modest, in one sense, is Krell’s project of presenting philosophical thinking and teaching as it should be, that he is content to have the blow-by-blow commentary of “The Beast and the Sovereign” seminars, their “themes” and “theses,” fill well over a third of his book. Each sub-chapter in that first section begins with an annotated summary of the topics covered in each of the twenty-three seminars, including bibliographical sources. The same the section concludes with the admonition (tongue-in-cheek, I presume) concerning what “the granting agencies” could have done “for philosophy instead of against it”: i.e., “they could have used that money to fly dozens of us to Paris” (75). That summary even finds fit to discuss typos that appear in the English translations, restricted almost exclusively to incorrect German usages such as the scharfes ‘s’ (8n). Krell’s book is, in that way, about nothing if not attention to detail, and Derrida is especially valued for being the paragon of minutiae-minding (even if he was himself capable of typos and other inaccuracies).

“The Beast and the Sovereign” summaries lead into a similar discussion of The Animal That Therefore I Am, although by this point in Krell’s book, and for the remainder, Krell’s commentaries become more exegetical, as he expands the scope of his analysis to embrace a number of other topics, or to expand on—even gently critique—Derrida’s approach. For example, Krell attends to Heidegger’s concept of Benommenheit as developed in his1929–30 seminar, and he discusses Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s essay on “Logos” from 1951. Krell is at his strongest when it comes to his exhaustive knowledge of the Heideggerian corpus, and he similarly demonstrates a laudable erudition when he turns his attention to classical Greek. If only for that philological richness, Derrida and Our Animal Others is a treasure, what we might call a thesauretical treasure.

The soft approach of Krell’s project persists into his “Conclusions and Directions for Future Research,” the final chapter, whose title has to be an ironic comment on the bureaucratization of academic work—one imagines trying to fit the chapter into the three-centimeter space provided for such reflections on a grant application or sabbatical report form. That informal tonality makes this a book that one reads with considerable interest and a widening smile. It allows for some digressive, even peculiar asides —for example, on Willem Defoe (53) or on wine (125) —and for many self-reflexive moments of allow-me-if-I-mays, or self-deprecation concerning the foolishness or awkwardness of what is being proposed (165). At one point he sums up a series of reflections with the sentence: “Thought-provoking questions or suspicions—to which I have no replies and no anodynes” (122). But none of that prevents serious conceptual developments such as his proposing an idea of “pantology,” an “everythinging” (137) that might better understand, or be better related to Heidegger’s equilibrium—if that is what it is—of revealing and concealing. And in such passages this reader had his own form of revelatory moment. The “pantology” discussion occurs in the chapter on Heidegger’s “Logos” essay, in which Krell analyzes extensively the sense of logos as legein (from gleaning to reading), and the moment just referred to is followed and reinforced by a series of excellent paragraphs that move through Heraclitus and Plato all the way to Hegel and finally Melville’s Pierre, one of whose characters hears “the busy claw of some midnight mole in the ground” (138–9).

Krell can sometimes be such a mole, which is an admirable animal other, as Nicholas Royle has superbly detailed). One of the tunnels that David Krell persistently digs through is the story of the “missing third” of Derrida’s “Geschlecht” essays, which he mentions in a couple of notes (27, 101) before dedicating a brief discussion to it as part of his directions for future research, maintaining that “among the ‘missing links’ in Derrida’s oeuvre none is as potentially important” (148). For Krell, that link is constituted in particular by certain presumptions concerning Derrida’s reading, in “Geschlecht III,” of Heidegger’s reading of Georg Trakl, and the belief that the essay will open to us a new intersection of—for want of better terms—the personal and the political, an intersection that reveals an earlier (1984–85) casting of issues that will resurface in the final seminars.

I say that Krell has “belief” in the importance of the missing essay in the sense that, one imagines, he hopes being able one day to write a book like this one on the “Geschlecht” series, which indeed forms a fascinating confluence of Derrida’s ideas. But I say “belief” also to recall the trust, faith or credence that Derrida holds to be the basis of every utterance and every communication, a question that gets particularly thematized, in “The Beast and the Sovereign” seminars, via Robinson Crusoe’s praying. Krell’s belief in the importance of the missing “Geschlecht” essay can be interpreted as his prayer or entreaty that the lines of communication to that essay be kept open, and, more generally, that we continue to trust in what new work by, and commentary on, Derrida might bring forth. But does Krell himself have that faith? In the closing pages of Derrida and Our Animal Others he asks whether it is “possible to take seriously Derrida’s claim that every statement or assertion, even the sparklingly clear statement of explicit argumentation, is preceded by a silent plea” (161). Yet that is indeed what Derrida claims, and he expects it to be taken seriously. No message whatsoever could be sent out, across the adestinational void that he has insisted on elsewhere, unless it were accompanied by or inhabited by the structure of such a plea, praying to arrive, to be heard, to be entertained (un entretien is an interview in French) by “another” who is similarly praying. Put perhaps too crassly, for it is not reducible to interpersonal communication: no communication without some form of trust, without there being faith or “prayer” (and of course the more or less blind faith one puts in God to hear one’s prayers is the paradigm of that operation). Given that, what I read as Krell’s hesitation to take this idea of Derrida’s seriously is somewhat surprising, as if he were somehow struggling with the idea even as it presents itself to him as a grand avenue for future work and thinking.

Yet the fact of a type of surprise should be understood as a positive feature of Krell’s writing, and of the modesty of the project of Derrida and Our Animal Others. It is as if, in writing this and other books, those written and those still to come, Krell were both praying and being attuned to what reaches him from another, not stridently declaring what he knows to be the case, but rather preferring to proffer these comments and reflections for whomever wishes to listen, even as he listens to what might come back to him from what he has written. Such readiness for surprise has nothing to do with philosophical naivety but represents instead an openness and ethics of academic exchange that we would do well to emulate.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Beast and the Sovereign Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.
• —. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
• Royle, Nicholas. “Mole.” L’animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galilée, 1999. 547-62.