_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 3, pp 426 - 439 The concept of _flesh_ had a very short and fragmented career in the writings of Jacques Derrida, appearing as such in central arguments only in his reading of Antonin Artaud from 1965 and in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy from 1988. By exposing and exploring several implicit discussions of flesh in Derrida’s juridico-political texts from the 1990s, this paper outlines the conceptualization of flesh implicit in Derrida’s work and, consequently, argues (...) that this conceptualization is more coherent and significant than it may first appear. Based on this, and drawing on an argument between David Wood and Matthew Calarco about the relation between deconstruction and vegetarianism, I go on to argue that the Derridean concept of flesh offered here puts us in a better position to understand and solve some of the discrepancies and inconsistencies of Derrida’s famous attempts to answer his own “question of the animal” in his later writings. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s “question of the animal” was arguably the central philosophical axis of his last decade. In this paper, I argue that Derrida’s discussion of animals and animality started much earlier than is typically thought and that the sources and origins of this question can be traced all the way back to his earliest deconstructive texts. In addition, while it is true that the central vein of Derrida’s “question of the animal” was his deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s onto-theological definition of (...) the human Dasein, by exposing and exploring the animalistic and non-anthropocentric tones of Derrida’s earliest critiques of both structuralism and phenomenology, this paper also widens and deepens the significance of this question by revealing its origins and implications to be not exclusively Heideggerian. (shrink)