On the Borders of Language and Death:

Derrida and the Question of the Animal

Matthew Calarco

Over the past two decades, Jacques Derrida has devoted considerable attention to what he calls “the question of the animal.” Although most readers have paid scant attention to this theme, Derrida himself has repeatedly insisted on its importance for a proper understanding of the strategies underlying many of his recent writings. What I hope to demonstrate in this essay is that Derrida’s short book on the themes of language and death entitled Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the Limits of Truth should be read as yet another installment in the series of works dedicated to the question of the animal, and furthermore that it is with respect to theme of animality in particular that we can begin to discern Derrida’s unique position in contemporary theory with regard to the key motifs of finitude, language, and relation.

As is often the case, Derrida’s posing of the question of the animal occurs within the context of a reading of Heidegger. This trend is continued in Aporias where Derrida takes as his guiding thread Heidegger’s often cited but seldom deciphered pronouncement from “The Essence of Language” regarding language, death, mortals, and animals:

Die Sterblichen sind jene, die den Tod als Tod erfahren können. Das Tier vermag dies nicht. Das Tier kann aber auch nicht sprechen. Das Wesenverhältnis zwischen Tod und Sprache blitzt auf, ist aber noch ungedacht.

[Mortals are they who can experience death as death. The animal cannot do so. But the animal cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.][1]

Before examining Derrida’s discussion of this passage, and as a means of approaching the central stakes of his argument in Aporias, I want to first make a brief detour through Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of these lines in his book Language and Death.[2] In this work, Agamben takes Heidegger’s remark as his point of departure in order to argue that the latter’s thinking of finitude and language remains mired in negativity, and, consequently, that the task for post-Heideggerian thought—assuming that thought is called to venture beyond the negative, and ultimately nihilistic, ground of contemporary politics and ethics—is to develop a non-negative, or affirmative, notion of finitude. For Agamben, such a project entails abandoning the idea that man’s relation to death and language constitutes any possibility proper to man. In contrast to Heidegger, human death and language is refigured by Agamben as radically ex-appropriating, and it is beginning from this site of exposure that Agamben unfolds his subsequent works on human community and politics.

My purpose for this schematic recall of Agamben’s argument is twofold. First, Agamben’s critical remarks on Heidegger’s thinking of death as a possibility proper to man present in an abbreviated form one of the main strands of the argument that Derrida develops in Aporias, an argument that I shall examine in more detail in the following pages. On this issue, Derrida’s work converges not only with that of Agamben but also with other prominent critical readers of Heidegger such as Blanchot and Levinas.[3] Second, by pointing out this convergence among key post-Heideggerian thinkers, we will be able to gain a clearer perspective on Derrida’s divergence from this tradition. The split becomes especially apparent when we begin to think through the status of “the animal” in Heidegger’s writings as well as in contemporary politics/ethics. For Agamben, Levinas, and Blanchot, as for much of contemporary post-Heideggerian or “Continental” thought, the question of the animal has been a non-question. Thus, even as the task of thinking through the conditions of an affirmative, post-metaphysical, post-humanist conception of community remains a central theme, there has been very little attention devoted to the implications that such notions of community might have for contemporary animal ethics and politics. Continental thought, it seems, has remained content with continuing and deepening Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical humanism, while leaving his subtle anthropocentrism and binary distinctions between man and animal intact. In the analysis of Derrida’s Aporias to which we now turn, I shall attempt to show how Derrida offers a critical challenge to this anthropocentric tendency in Continental thought and what the implications of this challenge might be for contemporary reflections on finitude, language, and relation.

I

To begin, let us recall the passage from Heidegger’s “The Essence of Language” cited above:

Mortals are they who can experience death as death. The animal cannot do so. But the animal cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.

Toward the end of the first half of Aporias, Derrida, referring to the “unthought” essential relation between language and death, writes: “It is this unthought that holds us in suspense here [Cet impensé nous tient ici en haleine]” (A 35/PF 322). Derrida’s response is one of suspense because Heidegger’s formulation here is at the same time “trenchant” and “prudent,” raising questions on both sides (A 35/PF 322). On the one hand, Heidegger definitively denies the animal the capacity for language and an experience of death as such, but, on the other hand, he does not further authorize himself to explicitly say what the essential relation between language and death is that would separate mortal from animal in this experience (A 36/PF 322). We are thus confronted with the following questions: How might the possibility or the capacity for language that characterizes the mortal relate to an experience of death as such? Is there an experience of death as such outside of, or beyond, the possibility of language? And what would be the consequences for Heidegger’s sharp distinction between mortal and animal here if there were no experience of death as such, even for mortals?

Heidegger’s formulation of these relations (i.e., the mortal’s and animal’s relation to language and death) in “The Essence of language” remains vague and open-ended, posing as many questions as answers. This leads Derrida to look to other places in Heidegger’s writings that deal with a similar problematic in order to begin to think through this unthought. Much of Derrida’s effort in Aporias is taken up with a close reading of the sections on death at the beginning of Division Two in Being and Time. In these paragraphs Derrida finds a discourse similar to the one we have extracted from “The Essence of Language.” The dominant theme for Heidegger in these pages of Being and Time is the possibility of gaining access to an experience of death as such, an experience that Heidegger argues is open to Dasein (i.e., the mode of being characteristic of human beings) alone. Hence in Being and Time as well, a strict and indivisible border can be located between the experience of death open to the mortal and animal, or in the language of Being and Time, Dasein and animals as living entities.[4] We should recall that Derrida originally read Aporias as a paper at a 1992 conference entitled “Le passage des frontières,” the crossing or passing of borders. At stake for Derrida, then, will be the consequences and implications of the rhetoric of borders in Heidegger’s discourse on death, and how these borders are crossed—indeed are always already crossed.

As Derrida suggests, whenever one is dealing with death and borders, it is a matter of a certain “step” and “not.” To cross a border, or to cross over to death, one must take a step in that direction. At the same time, both borders and death mark the impossibility or impermissibility of such a step (one cannot or ought not cross). Death and borders are figures of passage as much as nonpassage. Derrida captures this double sense in the variously translatable phrase: “Il y va d’un certain pas,” “It involves a certain step/not,” where pas in French means both step and not (the sentence can also be translated in another register as “He goes along at a certain pace”). The step/not that is most interesting for Derrida is the one that becomes a problem, that is to say, the step that crosses borders and renders compromised the indivisible edge that is intended to hold the identity of a border in place (a border that one ought not cross, e.g., the “illegal” crossing of a national border). The step/not that becomes a problem helps to identify the multiple senses in which borders themselves can be understood as problematic. If we attend to the etymology of the word “problem,” recalling the Greek problēma—which signifies both pro-tection and pro-jection, something thrown in front of oneself, either as a task to accomplish or as a shield used to guard against danger—we can clearly see that borders are problematic in both senses: they serve as protection and project. This notion of the border as problematic is in direct tension with the title word of Derrida’s essay: aporias. Being in a state of aporia means that there is no longer any problem; that is to say, there is no longer any project, or shield against danger, in the place of the aporia. The place of aporia is a point of nonpassage and absolute exposure. If the aporia is the place where there is no longer any problem, it is not because one has been given answers or solutions that make any further attempts at passage unnecessary. Rather there is no longer any problem because no amount of projection or protection will overcome the experience of the aporia and render possible an impossible passage.

The aporia has been a constant and important figure throughout Derrida’s work, and he recalls its constancy for us here in Aporias. He notes in particular that the 1967 essay “Ousia and Grammē” and the more recent book The Other Heading have much to say about the motif of the aporia that prefigures Aporias. Since I will be unable here to reconstitute the dense and difficult arguments of these previous works, it will have to suffice to extract from these writings a logic of the aporia, or more precisely a plural logic of the aporia (A 20/PF 316). Derrida gives three aspects of this logic, or three different ways of understanding the place of the aporia in his writings: 1) as a nonpassage in the sense of an impermeability, an uncrossable border; 2) as a nonpassage stemming from the fact that there is no limit, or a limit that is so permeable as to not limit crossing; 3) and as a nonpassage in the sense of an antinomy or contradiction without solution, without a method or path that would allow us to find our way through.

With this plural logic of the aporia in mind, we can begin to appreciate more fully the variously impossible and aporetic dimensions of the question that opens Derrida’s analysis of death in Aporias: “Is my death possible?” (A 21/PF 317). What makes this question aporetic is that the syntagm “my death” is infinitely substitutable insofar as it can circulate from speaker to speaker, but at the same time “my death” marks something that is absolutely irreplaceable and singular: my death. No one can die for me in the sense of definitively taking away or exempting me from my death. What further complicates any answer to this question is the difficulty of knowing what one is talking about when speaking about death. As Derrida suggests, concerning death: “Fundamentally, one knows perhaps neither the meaning [sens] nor the referent of this word” (A 22/PF 317).

As is well known, for Heidegger too death signals an impossibility, the impossibility of Dasein’s existence. However, Heidegger’s determination of this impossibility is couched in terms of a possibility proper to Dasein; death is the possibility of an impossibility that is most proper to Dasein. According to Heidegger, it is this most proper possibility of Dasein that ontic sciences such as anthropology, ethnology, and biology overlook in their accounts of life and death. The task of the existential analytic as Heidegger understands it is to uncover the implicit pre-determinations of the being of man and death that underpin these sciences, which, it seems, no longer pause (if they ever have) to ask such fundamental questions, but instead presuppose a given meaning of both man and death.

Derrida brings this distinction between the ontico-scientific approach to death and Heidegger’s existential analysis into sharp relief for us with his readings of historian Philippe Ariès’s and anthropologist Louis-Vincent Thomas’s accounts of the history of death in the West. Derrida notes that, in these exemplary anthropological/historical texts “foaming with knowledge [regorgent de savoir], one never finds any precaution like the one Heidegger takes,” (A 25/PF 319) when speaking about the “being” of death in the following sentence: “By its very essence, death is in every case mine, insofar as it ‘is’ at all” (BT 284/SZ 240). Insofar as they never pause to raise the question of being concerning death, these historians, in the most facile manner, grant themselves knowledge of death when they are in reality only working within an implicitly presupposed interpretation of death’s meaning.

But Derrida sharpens the differences between (on the one hand) the precautions of the existential analytic concerning the being of death and (on the other) the unquestioned presumptions of ontic sciences only to follow Heidegger up to a point. In tracking this distinction between Heidegger and the ontico-scientific approach to death, Derrida is seeking to identify what he calls a classical logic of presupposition at work in Heidegger’s thought, a logic in which the implicit, pre-ontological understanding of death that grounds ontic sciences (and metaphysics and theology as well) is brought to light and made explicit as a presupposition. For Derrida, this Heideggerian logic is as necessary as it is problematic, both in the more common sense of that word as well as the etymological senses we recalled above. The Heideggerian employment of the logic of presupposition is to a certain extent necessary since it helps to avoid the presumption that one can easily know what one is talking about concerning death (the difficulties that currently beset the medical, legal, and scientific discussions of death, as well as the various positions on euthanasia, attest to the impossibility of knowing for certain what death is, and where and when it begins and ends). But, on the other hand, the deployment of this logic by Heidegger is problematic insofar as it is accompanied by the institution of a new and different pro-ject, a new set of borders—not the least of which is the sharp border he erects between the ontic sciences and the existential analytic.

Closer to our own concerns here is another border that is presupposed by Heidegger’s logic of presupposition: the distinction between sterben and verenden, dying and perishing. The stakes that surround this border are formidable, for they ultimately come down to, or revolve around, the determination of the proper essence of Dasein over and against living beings. For Heidegger, proper methodology dictates that the existential analysis of Dasein ought to come first; that is, the existential analytic should be seen as superordinate to an ontology of life. Once the existential analysis of Dasein is carried out, this same methodology would further necessitate an existential analysis of death. The ontical sciences do not follow this methodology, and in the process they fail to correctly characterize the death that is proper to Dasein; in short, since they fail to begin with an analysis of the Being of Dasein, they tend to interpret Dasein’s death in terms that belong properly to living beings—but as Heidegger insists (and it is this insistence that is at ultimately stake here for Derrida) Dasein is not, or at least, not simply, a living being. Indeed, what the existential analysis of death uncovers (an analysis we should recall that is secondary to and grounded on a determination, established in §§2-4 of Being and Time, of Dasein as an entity capable of questioning and of a preontological understanding of Being), is that Dasein is unique among all entities in being capable of properly dying (eigentlich sterben), of having a proper death or a death proper. Dasein does indeed have a biological death like other living beings (for Dasein this intermediate phenomenon of death is called “ableben” [demise], the death of living beings other than Dasein is called “verenden” [perishing]) but insofar as one is Dasein, one never simply perishes in the way that living beings do.

Dasein’s properly dying, the finitude that is linked to Dasein’s Being as possibility (Möghlichkeit) and potentiality-for-Being (Seinkönnen), is attested or witnessed to in the call of conscience. Things that are merely living (nur Lebenden) such as animals are unable, according to Heidegger, to attest to their proper finitude and that is why they merely perish. Without ear or language, living things are unable to hear the call of conscience or the voice of the friend that calls them toward properly dying and the possibility of experiencing death as such. Derrida is right to suggest that this distinction made by Heidegger between properly dying and perishing is not simply a linguistic distinction (une distinction de langage), but that nevertheless the difference comes down to a matter of language (du langage) (A 35/PF 322). More precisely, the difference between properly dying and perishing hinges on the possibility of the “as such” which is linked to the possibility of language in the form of speech. Here we would do well to recall our opening citation from “The Essence of Language.” Although this text was published some three decades after Being and Time and appears later than the other key texts that discuss the distinction between humanity and animality (the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics [1929-30], the Parmenides lectures course [1942-3], the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” [1946], and “What are Poets For?” [1946], to list a few of the more prominent texts that take up this theme), there is a remarkable continuity in Heidegger’s affirmation of the mortal’s ability—and the animal’s inability—for speech and an experience of death as such.

With the stakes of this passage now more clearly before us, we should take a moment to reformulate and re-raise our opening questions concerning the experience of death and language prefigured here. What would happen to the distinction between mortal and animal if mortals were unable to experience death as such? Or, conversely, if the inability to speak did not preclude an experience of death as such? Or if the ability to name death did not guarantee access to death as such? What if death refused any and every testimony or attestation, refused any “as such”? And what would be the consequences for Heidegger’s existential analytic in Being and Time if the distinction between dying and perishing could no longer be sharply or definitively drawn? What status might the existential analytic have once these questions were raised for thought? These are the questions that motivate Derrida’s analysis of death in Aporias, and the point of posing them is perhaps this: we can no longer continue in good conscience—and it is nothing less than an unthinking form of good conscience that has prevented these questions from being raised—to grant Heidegger’s existential analytic the fundamental status it currently has in contemporary thought without, at the very least, raising these questions as questions. And if it is indeed the case that thinking through these questions leads us to understand that the distinctions between man and animal, and dying and perishing, no longer hold— or fail to hold absolutely, or perhaps hold otherwise, or are more complicated than we tend to believe—then the various conceptual systems and institutions (ethical, political, religious, economic, etc.) based on such seemingly indivisible borders should also come into question. Before we can further explore these latter questions, however, we need to return briefly to the question of death.

For Derrida, then, it is ultimately a matter of contesting Heidegger’s transformation of the impossible, aporetic character of death into a possibility proper to Dasein, as well as questioning the various disciplinary and conceptual delimitations that follow from this transformation. This contestation reaches its apex in the closing pages of Aporias where Derrida explicates the central role that the motif of possibility plays in the existential analysis of death. Here Derrida recalls for us that Heidegger’s emphasis on possibility (die Möglichkeit) as the definitive mode of Dasein’s Being is not meant to be taken as a description of Dasein, but rather as something that Dasein must assume. This possibility-to-be-assumed by Dasein is a possibility in a double sense: it speaks to the imminence of the future as that which one must expect, and it also relates to the classical understanding of possibility as capability or potentiality. Death is a possibility for Dasein in both of these senses, and when Dasein comes face to face with its own finitude, it encounters potentiality in its most fundamental form: Seinkönnen, potentiality-for-Being:

Der Tod ist eine Seinsmöglichkeit, die je das Dasein selbst zu übernehmen hat. Mit dem Tod steht sich das Dasein selbst in seinem eigensten Seinkönnen bevor. (SZ 250)

Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. (BT 294; translation modified)

La mort est une possibilité d’être que le Dasein a lui-même à assumer. Avec la mort, le Dasein s’at-tend lui-même dans son pouvoir être le plus propre. (PF 332)

What is translated here by Macquarrie and Robinson into English as “stands before itself,” and by Derrida into French as “s’at-tend lui-même,” is the German reflexive verb “steht sich . . . bevor.” Heidegger tells us that with death, Dasein “stands before itself” in its ownmost Seinkönnen. Derrida’s translation of this phrase as s’at-tend lui-même is meant to complicate this standard translation (and the existing French translations as well: Vezen’s French translation translates steht bevor as rendez-vous and Martineau uses se pré-cède) and to underscore the paradoxical, aporetic temporality of death and dying. Derrida’s use of s’at-tendre, “awaits itself,” here can be understood in three different senses: 1) I, myself, await myself—simple self-presence in the face of death; 2) awaiting oneself in the expectation of death as awaiting something wholly other, some arrivant; and 3) waiting for death as awaiting each other, waiting for each other. Derrida suggests that this third construction, which in a sense can be related to the second, is perhaps what is most originary with respect to death. This would mean that when one is with death awaiting oneself, one can only be awaiting the other; which is to say, that one perhaps never relates to one’s death as such, but only to the dying and demise of the other in a “contretemps of mourning” (contretemps du deuil) (A 66/PF 333). Concerning one’s own death, the other—the death of the other, one’s ownmost self as other, death “itself” as other—is perhaps always primary.

Against Derrida, Heidegger would likely insist that this “truth” of originary mourning (we should note that, strictly speaking, Derrida offers no argument, claim, or proof for the truth value of the impossible work of mourning since the anachronic temporality of s’at-tendre refuses any such demonstration) is precisely the untruth of inauthentic dying. Authentic death, according to Heidegger, happens at the limits of truth. In order for Dasein to relate authentically to death, to make death its ownmost possibility, a truth of death must be assumed and witnessed. Death is the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there, and, if the relation to death is to be authentic, then this certainty must be acknowledged and awaited in anxiety. Inauthentic Dasein flees in fear from this truth, taking refuge in idle talk and the they-self’s conception of death where “one dies” but never me. Derrida’s contretemps of mourning—where the other’s death is always first and constitutive of my most proper Jemeinigkeit, and where my “own” death is never actually my own but instead the site of a radical ex-appropriation of the self—would perhaps have struck Heidegger as simply another instance of such inauthenticity and untruth.

But can we, with Heidegger, be certain of the capacity to assume the truth of authentic death as the possibility of the impossibility of existence? Is “my (authentic) death” truly possible? According to Heidegger, for death to be grasped as the possibility of the impossibility of existence, this possibility must be unveiled in and through the understanding (Verstehen): “The more unveiledly this possibility gets understood, the more purely does the understanding penetrate into it as the impossibility of any existence at all” (BT 307/SZ 262). But is it possible for this particular possibility (the impossibility of existence) to be unveiled as a possibility? Wouldn’t the possibility of the impossibility of existence immediately disappear as a possibility? Isn’t there rather an utter impossibility here?

At the very least, Derrida would insist, there is an aporia and a possible-impossible question (A 75/PF 336). This question unfolds within the space of a single, long paragraph (A 75-6/PF 336), certainly one of the densest and most important in the entire book. Proper attention to this paragraph would merit a paper length treatment in itself, but, in closing, I will here limit myself to a brief consideration of its central themes. Derrida’s possible-impossible question runs as follows: “What difference is there between the possibility of appearing as such of the possibility of an impossibility and the impossibility of appearing as such of the same possibility?” (A 75/PF 336). The possibility that Derrida is referring to is, of course, the possibility of the impossibility of existence, the possibility of the end of Dasein’s existence. On Heidegger’s account, the end of Dasein’s existence marks the disappearance or the annihilation of the as such. Dasein’s death means that there can no longer be any relation to the phenomenon as such; in death, phenomenology reaches its limit. But, and this is Derrida’s point, if death marks the end and the impossibility of the relation to the phenomenon as such, then it is precisely this impossibility that cannot appear as such. By definition, the disappearance of the as such is what refuses to appear as such.

Despite appearances, Derrida is engaged in more than mere wordplay here. The consequences of privileging the impossibility of Dasein’s ownmost possibility are immense for Heidegger’s existential analytic. If Derrida’s suggestion that the disappearance as such of the as such cannot appear as such is correct, then several of the founding distinctions of the existential analytic are threatened and contaminated from within. If Dasein’s only relation to death is a relation to the disappearing of the disappearance of the as such, then this is, as Derrida notes, “also the characteristic common both to the inauthentic and to the authentic forms of the existence of Dasein, common to all experiences of death (properly dying, perishing, and demising), and also, outside of Dasein, common to all living things in general” (A 75/PF 336). In other words, if death as such cannot appear as such for Dasein, then Dasein’s proper death cannot be neatly and cleanly distinguished from its improper death (ableben), or even from the “mere” perishing (verenden) of the animal and other living beings. Dasein would lose its distinguishing characteristic if it could not experience death as death.

Now it might seem that by attempting to disrupt the strict binaries that separate the authentic from the inauthentic, properly dying from perishing and demise, and Dasein from animals and other living beings, that Derrida is attempting to collapse all experiences of death into an indifferent sameness. He is cognizant of this risk, and immediately adds that the “common characteristic” he is speaking about “does not mean homogeneity, but rather the impossibility of an absolutely pure and rigorously uncrossable limit . . .” (A 75/PF 336). The point for Derrida here is not to erase the sharp distinctions between the various modes of death and dying but to open them up to contamination and multiplication. In other words, he does not want to obfuscate the many differences between the kinds of living/dying that characterize human beings and animals; rather he is pointing out that the drawing of single or essential limits is itself what obscures important differences both between humans and animals as well as among humans themselves and animals themselves. There is not one difference that separates “The Human” from “The Animal” with respect to death any more than there is a single experience of death common to all animals as such or all humans as such. Such would be the conclusion reached by way of the “logic” of différance, which insists on multiplication and complication where essentialist gestures have homogenized, reduced, or screened out important differences. Derrida intimates the consequences of this differantial thinking for Heidegger’s existential analytic when he writes:

If, in its very principle, the rigor of this distinction [i.e., eigentlich sterben and verenden] were compromised, weakened, or parasited on both sides of what it is supposed to dissociate . . . , then . . . the entire project of the analysis of Dasein, in its essential conceptuality, would be, if not discredited, granted another status than the one generally attributed to it. (A 31-2/PF 321)

But beyond this attempt to point out the necessity for a rethinking of the existential analytic, Derrida’s intervention into the thematics of the possible/proper in Heidegger’s discourse on death can also be read as opening onto a quite radical and original critique of anthropocentrism. In contrast to thinkers such as Agamben, Levinas, and Blanchot, Derrida clearly recognizes that something must be said about the anthropocentrism of a discourse that so quickly dismisses any relation between animals and their death(s) and/or language(s). The underlying argument here is that it is not sufficient to argue (against Heidegger) for the impossibility of a proper death for Dasein only to effectively leave in place (with Heidegger) the classically anthropocentric, hierarchical, and analytical distinctions between human Dasein and the animal. Derrida addresses this concern in the concluding lines of the paragraph we have been reading:

Against, or without, Heidegger, one could point to a thousand signs that show that animals also die. Although the innumerable structural differences that separate one “species” from another should make us vigilant about any discourse on animality or bestiality in general, one can say that animals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war (hence to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they have neither a relation to death nor to the “name” of death as such, nor, by the same token, to the other as such, to the purity as such of the alterity of the other as such. But neither does man, that is precisely the point! . . . Who will guarantee that the name, that the ability to name death (like that of naming the other, and it is the same) does not participate as much in the dissimulation of the “as such” of death as in its revelation, and that language is not precisely the origin of the nontruth of death, and of the other? (A 75-6/PF 336)

Derrida closes the paragraph with a question mark, as is typically the case in his work when such immensely complex relations are at stake. What we are left with at the end of his analysis, then, is a rather open-ended conclusion: the lingering forms of anthropocentrism and humanism that underpin Heidegger’s analysis of death should be called into question, and this entails the necessity not only for a more nuanced account of the various relations human beings have to death and dying, but also for careful analyses of how animals (and not “The Animal”) also die.

For some readers, Derrida’s “conclusion” is likely to be frustrating. What one would perhaps wish to see here is a detailed discussion of the consequences—whether they be philosophical, ethical, political, or institutional—that follow from the notion that “animals also die.” Although this kind of demand is understandable, it betrays a common misunderstanding of the scope and capacity of deconstruction that misses its essential modesty and radicality. In complicating our understanding of the differences between those beings called “animal” and those called “human,” Derrida is seeking to do little more than create the conditions of possibility for another way of rethinking the forms of relation that obtain between these singularities. To demand of deconstruction that it do more than this is to deprive it of its radicality, of its ability to incessantly question the categories and decisions that guide “positive” ethical and political projects.

Thus, if there is any discussion to be had concerning the consequences that might follow from the deconstruction and de-sedimentation of the traditional distinctions that have been used to separate human death from animal death, then such a discussion is, precisely, an aporetic project and responsibility that faces all of us. And inasmuch as the question of the animal bears both on the (non)ground of sociality, as well as on various social and political institutions that are governed by a certain anthropocentric concept of animal life and death (medical experimentation on animals, slaughtering them for their flesh, etc.), then this project is perhaps best described as political. It is in this context that we encounter the possibility of rethinking the status of animals at the level of “the political” and “politics,” as well as the possibility of developing a non-anthropocentric notion of being-with that challenges the all-too-human tendencies of contemporary post-humanism.