Demenageries, Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida is a collection of essays on animality following Jacques Derrida's work. The Western philosophical tradition separated animals from men by excluding the former from everything that was considered “proper to man”: laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, thinking. The “animal” has traditionally been considered the absolute Other of humans. This radical otherness has served as the rationale for the domination, exploitation and slaughter of animals. What Derrida called “la pensée de l'animal” (which means both (...) thinking concerning the animal and “animal thinking”) may help us understand differently such apparently human features as language, thought and writing. It may also help us think anew about such highly philosophical concerns as differences, otherness, the end(s) of history and the world at large. Thanks to the ethical and epistemological crisis of Western humanism, “animality” has become an almost fashionable topic. However,Demenageries is the first collection to take Derrida's thinking on animal thinking as a starting point, a way of reflecting not only on animals but starting from them, in order to address a variety of issues from a vast range of theoretical perspectives: philosophy, literature, cultural theory, anthropology, ethics, politics, religion, feminism, postcolonialism and, of course, posthumanism. (shrink)

This essay ponders over the dismissal of reading practices and theories that were linked to the modernist shift from ‘literature’ to ‘writing’ (écriture) in the second half of the twentieth century. It provides an intellectual genealogy of the rise and fall of the writing/reading couple, before going on to consider the cultural effects – as well as the educational and institutional consequences in academia – of the challenge to literature’s ‘cultural difference’ mounted by both cognitivist and culturalist approaches to literature, (...) in their turn away from or against ‘language’. (shrink)

The emphasis on sexuality from a queer perspective has led to what is deemed to be a radical rethinking, and what is oftentimes also a reinventing, of sexuality's medium or element, namely the body. Looking back at literary writings produced in the 1970s by some of the women engaged in the French Women's Liberation Movement, and more specifically at the ways in which the body and bodies were at once celebrated, figured and dismantled in a number of these texts, I (...) argue that a proto-queer de-normativization and reconceptualization of the body with respect to ‘sex’ and sexual duality was already at work. A serious look back at the writings of that period makes the hypothesis of an epistemological break between second-wave feminism and queer thinking and activism, or of the conceptual supersession of the former by the latter, more difficult to argue in this respect. (shrink)