Derrida and Our Animal Others by Krell David Farrell;

Author:Krell, David Farrell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Heidegger would worry about the extension of the word existence here; Derrida would worry about the claims of perceptual experience. The young philosopher who carries out the research I am suggesting should share both worries—but not to the extent that it hinders the work of comparison and contrast. It may be that neither Derrida nor Heidegger is musical enough to affirm as Merleau-Ponty does throughout his writings the claim that Buytendijk ascribes to von Uexküll: “Every organism is a melody that sings itself” (172).

Apart from one general reference to Heidegger in Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior (229), which cites Husserl and Scheler and praises the movement called phenomenology, Heidegger’s Being and Time is seemingly absent from Merleau-Ponty’s horizon. Yet as the two very important references to the death of the organism imply (220, 240), and as the entire conceptuality of Merleau’s Phenomenology of Perception will demonstrate, Being and Time is the event that Merleau-Ponty is waiting for. He would of course have known nothing of the 1929–1930 lecture course, published twenty-two years after his death; yet the fundamental ontology of Dasein as being-in-the-world would offer the project titled La structure du comportement an entirely new footing. It is therefore regrettable that Derrida consistently ignores it. After a while, killing the father becomes a bootless exercise, and more is lost than gained. The sympathy that Derrida so rarely shows for Merleau-Ponty—the Louvre exhibition titled Memoirs of the Blind and Touching Jean-Luc Nancy are perhaps the exceptions—should not inhibit that young researcher I have been appealing to here. Merleau-Ponty, somewhere between Heidegger and Derrida, and doubtless susceptible to the criticisms of both, makes his own contributions to the theories of beast and king, as in the following passage from Structure, with which I will close my plea:

The human being is not an animal with reason. The appearance of reason and spirit do not leave intact a sphere of instincts enclosed within that being. Gnosic troubles that affect the categorial attitude translate into the loss of sexual initiatives. The alteration of higher-order functions reaches down to the level of montages we call instinctive, and the ablation of higher-order centers leads to death, even though some animals survive perfectly well without the brain. “If the human being had the senses of an animal it would not have reason” [says Herder, cited by Goldstein]. The human being can never be an animal: its life is always either more or less integrated than that of an animal. Yet if the supposed instincts of a human being do not exist apart from the spiritual dialectic, that dialectic, correlatively, cannot be conceived of outside of the concrete situations in which it is incarnated. One does not act by spirit alone. Spirit is either nothing or it is a real, and not an ideal, transformation of the human being. Because spirit is not a new sort of being but a new form of unity, it cannot repose in itself. (196)

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