Abstract

This article follows Jacques Derrida, who follows the animal-machine. In his lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida could easily have swapped “the animal” for “the machine” . In fact, throughout his readings of René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas, the machine emerges right alongside the animal. In defining the limits of the human, these thinkers present the animal and the machine together in order to elevate the human. Unlike the human, who responds, the animal-machine merely reacts. The animal-machine may approximate certain human actions, but it can never, according to Descartes, in Derrida’s words, “respond to our questions” and will always suffer from a “lack ..