The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)

Incredible book for animal rights by a great French philosopher

quite relevant to read this in light of the events of 9/11, and thereafter passed Derrida's time (he died in 2004) to the debacle of 2008 and Euro Union 2010 meltdowns.We have a reigning sense of opacity within the globe questions which never get answered, there is more hidden than known. So is this the agenda of the beast or the sovereign or both....?.You need to decipher where the beast begins and the sovereign ends, and vice versa, how the beast persists,how the beast is given freedom and adopts its own legal systems and symbolic orders; with duplicitous and hidden agendas as the Brexit confusion reveals. Will the beast be allowed to commence to marshal its cadres forward into greater unknowns.There is never a direct congruence for Derrida with politics,or a materialism, these last Lectures are as close as he ever got to the material world, the discourse of what is real. His thought always needs to mortgage itself into the future, to borrow from the future, never the here, the "differance"is a postponement of truth and now and second to approach the density of thought and significations from a working subjectivity.Derrida was the master craftsman of the Lecture form, the forms of transmissions, where it adopts an aesthetic, that's what one finds herein. So there is a pragmatic dimension to his writing, always giving multiple meaning to words, or testing the limits of words by substitutions and parallelisms of words, double-meanings or and enriching within some welter of abstraction some gap, some phantasm place. He did this with Marx "Spectres of Marx", hauntology but greatly expanded into our current practice of ideology,where existence is kind of cinema. The spaces we now inhabit with Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and the internet.Derrida is the grand Master Signified indulging in dialogues himself, testing inherent meanings of thought outside or in contradiction/competition with his own with: Lacan, Deleuze, Agamben and his forever "Go-To" Heidegger. There is a passage in "Being and Time" on animality, on the limits the "loss of world"and one can't help seeing always a direct bridge to the German philosopher in Derrida's thought. It all persists despite his Heidegger's Nazi associations,(certainly all the "beasts" were unleashed in that experience in grand orgies of brutalities, from financial meltdowns of the great sovereigns the great assemblages of multiple War Machines,the Camps to the Hiroshima Bomb...Heidegger also persists continues to be part of the dialogue as Sloterdijk and Vattimo engage, or have throughout their writing lives.When 9/11 occurred the terms "exceptional" state or "Rogue" states, those falling outside the congruence of Atlantic capitalism were quite in fashion, and those adopting extra-legal premise pathways for continuing to deal with world terror.If you read this work within this broader context I think it takes on a much greater substance, more of a holistic essence along what Spinoza thought, but here Derrida with his suggestions of vampires, werewolves, the Wolf as a focus, and how it was made into fables, where meanings occur and where meanings are hidden and distorted is the last great message.

I am already on page 179 and being reminded that the first sentence of a French work:Translated intoEnglish, you remember,this gave:"I am not verystrong on stupidity."German and English have different words for stupidity than the usual form of French used to excuse oneself for a mental blunder. The big problem is:that properly human animalitysupposedly free, responsible,and not reactive or reactional,capable of telling the differencebetween good and evil, capable ofdoing evil for evil's sake, etc. (p. 179).Among the obscure points near the end of the book, two meanings are discussed for the Greek word autopsia. (p. 294). I would prefer the rare meaning to be interpreted as:Among those who dwell with the gods are spearchuckers in the war on the dead.Americans tend to join the money mudslide just to provide themselves with ways to pay for their own home entertainment. As a fan of popular music, character is fate for me when it is like bad poetry:Having grown used toBob Dylan's you stewis like jumping into Derrida questions like:The threshold: to ask oneself,"What is the threshold?"is to ask oneself "How to begin?""How to begin?" we are askingourselves very close to theprovisional end of our first meridian,our first circle or return of the line.How to begin again? (p. 312).Back on page 296, "curiosity" is proposed for "a certain analogical passage between the modern and postrevolutionary zoological garden and psychiatric institutions, insane asylums." History would like progress to produce "an ecosystem that was not without a certain improvement in the living conditions of both animals and the mentally ill." (p. 297). Then treatment is linked with "the two other words we have brought back to themselves, autopsy and curiosity." (p. 299).

This book really started off great. The cover is beautiful and of high quality. The paper is very nice and the book has good sized margins for taking notes. I was really enjoying reading it until the spine broke at page 186. I was pretty gentle with it; so somewhat disappointed by that. Otherwise an excellent book. I still recommend it.

Derrida's last seminars contain a wealth of thoughtful and remarkable effort and work on his part to use his technique of deconstructionism to ask questions that philosophy has too long avoided, especially regarding the nature or what it is to be really "human" and "non-human"; these seminars will be especially invaluable to all those involved in any way with animal welfare or animal rights and any philosopher willing to question the long-held "assumptions" which have dominated western philosophical tradition for so long.

I got the kindle but I wish I had the book. I prefer books. Old fashioned.