ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 16 number 2 june 2011

he diverse aims of contemporary scholarship that calls itself animal studies or

posthumanism renders inoperable any universally accepted definition of these fields. Generally
speaking, however, scholars who work in these
areas direct our attention to the permeable
boundary that separates human from animal, or
more forcefully, urge us to avow the human
animality that we have historically denied. Such
arguments are certainly not altogether novel
coming more than 150 years after the publication
of Darwins On the Origin of Species. That 39
percent of Americans currently reject the theory
of evolution, however, suggests that blindness to
human animality shows little abatement, thus
underscoring the necessity of both scholarly and
activist work that seeks to challenge the humanist
ideologies that fuel such disavowals.1 Of course,
posthumanist scholarship goes well beyond
reaffirming Darwinian monogenesis. More
urgently, it embraces a conception of the
human that refuses to define itself in violent
opposition to the nonhuman. Such work thus
emphasizes the vulnerability that humans share
with animals: our exposure to others that makes
all living beings available to both hospitality and
violence.
While these goals are certainly worthy, I aim
to put pressure on precisely what it means to
affirm or avow animality. Can a posthumanist
ethics or politics proceed by means of simply
reversing humanisms disavowal of the animal?
Can animality be fully avowed? Similar to past
posts (poststructuralism, postmodernism, postfeminism, postracism, postmarxism, and so on),
the language of posthumanism promises a
temporal shift or turn, if not a complete rupture,
vis-a`-vis the legacy of humanism. Yet what
exactly does it mean to leave humanism behind?

christopher peterson
THE POSTHUMANISM
TO COME
To what extent do the ghosts of posts past
haunt this latest claim of temporal succession?
Indeed, each of the aforementioned -isms has not
surprisingly managed to survive beyond premature announcements of its death. That past
posts continue to manifest the seemingly
ineradicable traces of the -isms from which they
claim to have broken free should caution us
against acquiescing to a rhetoric of decisive
ruptures and epistemological break[s] that
are inevitably reinscribed in an old cloth that
must continually, interminably be undone.2
This warning, issued from Derrida in the early
1970s, has generally been either forgotten or
ignored by much recent posthumanist scholarship. Instead, such scholarship operates

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/020127^15 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.591592

127

posthumanism to come
according to a logic of dialectical reversal that
claims too much for its capacity to move beyond
humanism. To be sure, not all scholarship
focused on the topic of human/animal relations
identifies with the term posthumanism. Donna
Haraway, whom many would consider one of
posthumanisms founders, asserts in When
Species Meet that she is not a posthumanist.
She continues: I am who I become with
companion species, who and which make a mess
out of the categories in the making of kin and
kind.3 The almost biblical tautology invoked by
the phrase I am who I become implies an
agnostic approach to the question of who we are
becoming in our unceasing transformability.
By contrast, the assertion that humanism can be
decisively left behind ironically subscribes to a
basic humanist assumption with regard to volition and agency, as if the end of humanism
might be subject to human control, as if we bear
the capacity to erase the traces of humanism from
either the present or an imagined future after
which posthumanism will have secured an
inviolable institutional presence. As Derrida
observes in The Animal that Therefore I Am,
every ostensibly erased trace can leave a trace of
its erasure: It is inherent to a trace that it is
always being erased and always capable of being
erased, even though its full and final effacement
remains beyond human control.4 While Derridas
argument is concerned primarily with our human
incapacity to erase the marks of prior linguistic
usages, the force of iterability undermines all
claims to historical rupture, thus rendering
untenable any effort to institutionalize posthumanism such that it could legitimately claim to
have fully divorced itself from humanism. As
Peggy Kamuf observes, there is no institution
of any sort, and first of all no institution
of meaningful signs . . . without iterability.
Iterability is what we mean by institution and
the reason we can mean anything at all.5
Whereas institutionalization is often taken to
imply stabilization, Kamuf shows that whatever
we seek to institute must itself be repeatedly
performed and re-instituted such that the
apparently stabilized forms [it] may assume in
the present remain open to the transformations
of a future (8, 4). Focusing on the institution of

literature within the modern research university,

Kamuf argues that the separation and division
of literature from its others bears the very mark
of division as a kind of surplus that belongs
on neither side of the division it marks (8). Just
as the institutional status [of literature] would
never be fully assured or self-evident because,
under the name of literature, it is this divisionality, posthumanism cannot stabilize itself
without claiming a doubtful capacity to efface
the mark of separation by which it disassociates
itself from humanism.
The following reflections aim to identify
several related themes that regularly appear in
posthumanist scholarship but which have not
been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric
of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of
dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/
animal difference, and above all the critical
ascendancy of the term posthumanism itself.
To what extent does this watchwords well-worn
prefix obscure an urgent and worthwhile ethicopolitical project under the historical weight of
its own slogan? As we learn from the biblical
book of Genesis, the human comes to know itself
precisely thorough the power of naming. Indeed,
the Adamic act of naming authorizes humans to
assert their mastery over a heterogeneous group
of beings who are nonetheless given the general
name of animal. This pretention to selfknowledge, together with the homogenizing
force it wields over all that is nonhuman,
resurfaces at a later historical moment of
arguably equal import: Carl Linnaeuss modern
taxonomic system that both narrowed the gap
between humans and animals by locating the
former in the same genus as apes, and simultaneously repeated the gesture of human exceptionalism by designating the human nosce te
ipsum, know thyself (which Linnaeus later
shortened to Homo sapiens). As Giorgio
Agamben observes, the solipsistic logic of this
appellation implies that man has no specific
identity other than the ability to recognize
himself . . . Man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human.6 In other
words, the human is human only insofar as it calls
itself human. If one of the aims of posthumanism
is to trouble such narcissistic self-reflection,

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peterson
to render the face of the human unknowable
and unrecognizable, then to what extent does the
human that re-names itself posthuman do so
in order to lay claim once again to a dubious
self-knowledge?
The rhetoric of posthumanism, moreover,
implies a progressive narrative that ironically
mirrors the Enlightenment principles of perfectibility that it would oppose. Against this
regrettable alliance, I argue that the advent of
the posthuman always remains to come. I draw
this principle of posthumanisms necessarily
deferred completion from Derridas notion of
the democracy to come, which Derrida insists
does not mean a future democracy that will one
day be present.7 Just as democracy must
always remain insufficient a principle that is
especially crucial to remember in those moments
when it seems to present itself as having fully
arrived the posthuman must infinitely postdate
its arrival in any present. The moniker of
posthumanism, by contrast, presumes that
the end of humanism has either already arrived
or that its arrival is only a matter of time. On the
contrary, the non-arrival of the posthuman is a
matter of time in an entirely different sense.
Indeed, it is a matter of what Martin Hagglund
characterizes (following Derrida) as the undecidable coming of time, the indeterminable
and incalculable future that cannot repose in
any present, but must remain both infinitely
perfectible and infinitely corruptible.8

a weaker disavowal
For many posthumanist scholars, the promise
of reducing violence directed both toward nonhuman animals and toward dehumanized social
and political others depends on severing our
allegiance to humanism. In Stalking the Subject,
for instance, Carrie Rohman identifies the
mechanisms of disavowal within modernist
racist and imperialist ideologies that displaced
animality onto marginalized groups, whether
they be Jews, blacks, women, or the poor.9
In response, Rohman champions texts that
radically invert the traditional speciesist hierarchy by privileging . . . the animal and
marginaliz[ing] the conventional human

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(100). In addition to redressing the dehumanization of social and political others, recuperating
the animal serves a crucial institutional function; that is, it promises to curb the exhaustion
of the humanities, which has resulted from
a rehashing of specific theories that take on a
dogmatic and predictable quality (161). Yet
Rohmans animal-centered approach is itself
quite predictable in its reliance on a logic of
inversion whereby the animal assumes its position
alongside previously valorized identity categories
such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and
ethnicity. On Rohmans account, moreover,
posthumanism owes its institutional advent
more to the perennial search for a new critical
paradigm than to the political or ethical exigencies that ought to form the principal justification
for humanisms displacement. Her approach thus
reduces the animal to a fetish designed to cover
over a sense of human lack and insufficiency, an
allegorical mascot to reinvigorate a humanities
that is perceived to be depleted.
It might seem odd to diagnose this aim to
reinvigorate the humanities as fetishistic. After
all, the fetish in Freudian terms is predicated on a
logic of disavowal, whereas the force of Rohmans
argument, as with much posthumanist scholarship, is animated by an effort to avow animality.10
Yet it is precisely in opposing the operations
of avowal and disavowal that the call to affirm
animality risks replicating the violence it aims to
avoid. That marginalizing the human reinscribes
the human/animal opposition is altogether unsurprising given its emphasis on reversal rather than
on displacement. The latter requires what Kamuf
characterizes (referring to deconstructive strategies more generally) as a double gesture
of inscribing and erasing that effaces the
historical epoch of metaphysics . . . in a manner
that does not render it illegible.11 If the
metaphysics of presence is conditioned by
multiple disavowals (of writing, differance,
absence, finitude, spectrality, animality, and so
on), we cannot simply convert this disavowal to
an avowal, for that would presuppose a rigorous
distinction between avowing/disavowing; rather,
deconstruction must both register and repudiate
philosophys archive according to a movement
whereby we do not simply renounce our

posthumanism to come
membership in the very metaphysical tradition to
which we do not fully belong but in which we
inevitably participate. To characterize such
participation without belonging, Kamuf proffers
a phrase whose awkwardness she readily (dare
we say) avows: the disavowal of disavowal (9).
To reduce confusion and to signal the weaker
power of the belated disavowal, we might write
it as the (dis)avowal of disavowal. This weaker
(dis)avowal, this avowal that avows its own
fragility, aims to mitigate the movement of
negation whose traces cannot be fully eradicated
from the most apparently unqualified
affirmation.
This inherent corruptibility of any avowal is
a necessary corollary of Freuds observation
that every disavowal is subject to failure.
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud notes
that when the ego . . . seeks to disavow a portion
of the real external world . . . its success is never
complete and unqualified. The outcome always
results in two contrary attitudes, of which the
defeated weaker one, no less than the other, leads
to psychical complications.12 The mechanisms
of registration and repudiation thus operate
according to an agency whose power lies beyond
the scope of human volition. The success of any
disavowal is never assured. If we accept Freuds
view, then is it not also true that the success of
every avowal is likewise never finally certain?
This would mean that we can no more affirm
animality wholly than we can deny it, that the
traces of both the affirmation and the refusal
haunt one another from within. To argue
otherwise is to presume that the divided subject
might somehow be made whole, that the contrary
attitudes produced by means of disavowal might
be finally reconciled in favor of an unequivocal
affirmation of animality.
I want to suggest that this incapacity to reverse
the disavowal of animality stems largely from
what Freud describes as the narcissism of minor
differences, by which he observes that it is
precisely the minor differences in people who are
otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of
strangeness and hostility between them.13 Freud
initially situated this form of narcissism in the
context of sexual difference in order to explain
male hostility toward women. Later he expanded

his theory to consider racial, ethnic, and

nationalist tensions that arise between communities with adjoining territories, and related to
each other in other ways as well, who are engaged
in constant feuds and ridiculing one another.14
Given that humans and chimpanzees share 96
percent of the same DNA, one could certainly
further extend Freuds theory to explore human
aggressivity and violence toward nonhuman
animals.15 That is to say, it is precisely the
similitude between humans and apes that humans
so often seek to deny. It might be objected that
the differences between humans and some nonhuman animals are simply too great to afford any
useful analysis in terms of the narcissism of
minor differences. Yet the human obsession
with documenting the numerous deficiencies
that supposedly plague the lives of animals
cannot fail to register even if it ultimately
disavows the chiasmus between human and
animal. After all, humans do not typically devote
their energy to denying stones the capacity for
language, reason, and sentience precisely because
the dissimilarity of such inanimate objects from
humans seems incontrovertible. The assertion
of animal lack, in other words, presupposes an
acknowledgement of transspecies similarity, no
matter how minimal, that is nonetheless denied.16
If the absolute separation of human from
animal seeks to assert human superiority, it also
has the consequence of exacerbating the animals
menacing alterity. In this regard, the human
tendency toward anthropomorphism emerges as
a compromise formation that works to diminish
this threat, even as it guards against any complete
collapse of the human/animal distinction. After
all, the anthropomorphic animal is by definition
not fully animal but also not quite human.
Anthropomorphism thus functions as a fetish that
produces the animal as both the same and
different. Despite its cultural ubiquity, anthropomorphism has historically been scorned by the
scientific community in particular as nave and
counterproductive to the aims of an ostensibly
neutral and objective endeavor. As Lorraine
Daston and Gregg Mitman observe, anthropomorphism is often seen as a mark of childishness
and feeblemindedness that is incompatible
with modern science.17 However, the taboo

130

peterson
on anthropomorphism appears to prescribe a
relation to animal alterity that would fully
eradicate human narcissism. It presumes that
the animal is absolutely other, as Levinas
might put it, and therefore not simply another
(inferior) version of the human. Certainly the
erasure of animal alterity ought to be resisted.
Yet is there any relation to animal alterity that is
not complicit, as least minimally, in seeking to
reduce this otherness to the human, even if such
appropriation ultimately fails? Such complicity
is thoroughly disavowed when Jonathan Burt
declares that, for animal studies to move
forward . . . we need to bring the animal center
stage as the main focus of study, sidestepping the
issue of the humananimal boundary, and set this
study within the overarching context of human
animal relations not the overarching context
of theorizing about humans.18 Is the only
alternative to a nave anthropomorphism an
equally specious anthropomorphobia that insists
on the animals absolute difference? How exactly
can we whoever or whatever we are sidestep
the human/animal boundary?
Humans have historically secured this boundary by ascribing to themselves a number of
capacities that nonhumans supposedly lack,
among these: sentience, reason, language, tool
use, mourning, deception, imagination, and
knowledge of mortality. One might seek to
demonstrate that animals do indeed possess
such capabilities, a task that would seem to
satisfy Burts proposal to cease theorizing
about humans. Indeed, ethologists have already
done much to cast doubt on many long-standing
humanist presumptions with regard to what
animals can or cannot do.19 The merits of
demonstrating that language is not exclusively
human, or that animals are aware of their
impending death, are not to be dismissed. Yet
to extend such capacities to nonhuman animals is
still to theorize about animals from a human
perspective, which means that we can never fully
avoid theorizing about humans. Moreover, the
extension of these capacities to the nonhuman
presumes that the given faculties given in
both senses as known and bestowed upon
are unproblematically human. It presupposes,
in other words, that we know and identify such

131

capabilities as originally ours in order to

give them to animals. Consider, for instance,
the claim that animals are ignorant of their
mortality. As Heidegger famously declared, only
man dies. The animal perishes.20 To the extent
that the animal is poor in world, occupying
a liminal position between the animate and
the inanimate, the sentient and the insentient,
the animal possesses no knowledge of death as
death. Heidegger thus echoed Rousseaus assertion that an animal will never know what it is to
die because death lies beyond its imaginative
capacities.21 For Rousseau, the animal is riveted
to an eternal present and therefore cannot
anticipate any future. One could challenge such
unsupported generalizations about animal being
by providing evidence that animals possess both
a temporal sense and an awareness of death
irreducible to an instinctual revolt of the
organism but not a revolt of the soul that the
fictional Thomas OHearne ascribes to animals
in Coetzees The Lives of Animals (63). To
engage such arguments on their own terms,
however, is already to grant humans a knowledge
of finitude against its presumptive absence among
animals. It might seem counterintuitive or
downright absurd to claim that humans lack
knowledge of their own mortality. Yet is this not
precisely what Freud observed when he asserted
that at bottom no one believes in his own
death . . . Every one of us is convinced of his own
immortality?22 Echoing Freud, Zygmunt
Bauman calls attention to the remarkable
achievement by which we live as if we were
not going to die.23 Insofar as animality and
finitude are deeply imbricated, we deny our
animality, in part, in order to imagine ourselves
as immortal. As Giorgio Agamben suggests,
the human has historically been conceived as
the articulation and conjunction of a body and
a soul . . . of a natural (or animal) element and a
supernatural or social or divine element.24 This
belief in humanitys partial divinity is not easily
relinquished. To avow our animality would be to
pronounce without reservation our vulnerability
and exposure to mortality, to affirm unconditionally the unavoidable certainty of human finitude
to which we nevertheless always remain partially
blind.

posthumanism to come
In speaking of something like a conditional
avowal, I might appear to contradict Derridas
notion of an unconditional hospitality. Yet this
latter formulation is misconstrued when read as
calling for a wholly nonviolent relation to alterity.
While Derrida does indeed argue that an
originary yes conditions any relation to the
other, he also insists that this affirmation lets
itself be haunted by an intrinsic threat that can
transform any yes into a no.25 In this
regard, carnivorism, no less than vegetarianism,
would be conditioned by such an originary
exposure and openness to alterity. I must say
yes to the animal even if I choose to eat it.
As Derrida observes:
an unconditional hospitality is, to be sure,
practically impossible to live . . . But without
at least the thought of this pure and unconditional hospitality, of hospitality itself,
we would have no concept of hospitality
in general and would not even be able to
determine any rules for conditional hospitality. (PTT 129)

We must therefore re-inscribe the unconditional

into certain conditions (130). This is why
Derrida describes the yes as inherently
double: an originary yes that opens any relation
to alterity, even a violent one, and a subsequent
yes that he compares to the signature that follows
ones name on an identification card, and which
takes on the sense of a yes, of an ethical
engagement to the other (UG 94). As Hagglund
puts it, the unconditional yes . . . marks the
opening of an unpredictable future that one will
have to negotiate, without an affirmative or
negative response being given in advance (97).
Hagglund thus foregrounds Derridas insistence
that ethical decisions derive from a determination
of what constitutes the lesser violence rather
than from a choice between violence and
nonviolence. Derrida employs the phrase lesser
violence only briefly in an essay on Levinas that
challenges his aspirations to ethical purity.26 For
Derrida, no relation to alterity is devoid of
violence. Despite Levinass notion that ethics
requires a relation to an absolute other, an
other who escapes the economy of the same,
Derrida demonstrates that the absolute other

amounts to an other who bears no relationship

to alterity, which means that the absolute other is
nothing other, as it were, than the same.
Derrida thus displaces the opposition between
violence and nonviolence by showing that ethical
decisions are made in view of choosing the lesser
violence, even though what ultimately constitutes the lesser violence is never entirely knowable
and thus always available to revision and
reevaluation.27
In other words, despite our best intentions,
we cannot know either now or in the future
whether what we perceive as the lesser violence
will have turned out to be the lesser or the
worse violence. Indeed, the phrase will have
turned out misleadingly imagines a future
moment that would resolve such a question
once and for all; the future present, no less
than the present present, is not immune to the
temporality that opens every decision to an
infinite number of future judgments that may
alter our interpretation of whether a given act has
resulted in greater or lesser violence.
To claim that humans can avow the animal
without reservation is thus to endow human
consciousness with a self-mastery and agency
that denies the power of our non-power, our notbeing-able that Derrida locates at the heart of
human being. Beyond its affirmation of animal
suffering, Benthams rejection of speech and
reason as the reigning criterion that decides our
ethical actions toward animals interests Derrida
precisely because it stresses a non-activity,
indeed, a weak power: Can they suffer?
amounts to asking can they not be able?
(AIA 28).28 The intransitive form of suffer in
Derridas citation of Bentham does not describe
a willful agency; rather, suffering happens.
Drawing upon this Derridean insight, Leonard
Lawlor asserts that humans and animals are
composed of one force . . . that does not have the
ability or the force to keep the others out.29 This
weak force thus does not so much grant
animals permission to board the ark in order to
repopulate a postdiluvian humanism as it avows
that we are not able to exclude them. The title of
Lawlors book, This is Not Sufficient, succinctly
captures this sense of human deficiency with
regard to our responsibility toward nonhuman

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peterson
animals. This book that announces itself as
insufficient, as unable to render a prescriptive
account of how humans ought to act toward
animals, does so not by displaying an air of false
humility but by responsibly affirming that no
affirmation can be responsible enough. In lieu
of a prescription that would cure our human
disavowal of animality, Lawlor offers what he
describes as a recipe that says yes to animal
others (and to the animals that we are) even as
this hospitality cannot fully distinguish itself
from the violence of negation.
Despite deriving this weak force from
Derridas notion of not-being-able, Lawlor insists
on an ethics of unconditional, unlimited hospitality that risks replicating the logic of the
strong force he claims to eschew. Indeed, he
urges us to make the passive active. Let the
others in their singularity in . . . Then, up the ante
on this weak force, make it unconditional, which
amounts to letting every single other in (109;
my emphasis). Yet how can a weak force enforce
its unconditionality, when the unconditional
is defined as precisely the unenforceable, the
imprescriptible? How can we make something
unconditional when the unconditional cannot be
made to say either yes or no to whatever
arrives? My point, however, is not simply that the
unconditional cannot be enforced, but that it
does not exist in any absolute purity. Derridas
observation that pure unconditionality is impossible to live means that our weak power, our
lesser disavowal, not only cannot keep animal
others out but equally cannot keep animals in,
that is, affirm a hospitality of unlimited scope.
All forms of belonging no matter how open and
hospitable they are toward others inevitably
produce beasts (both human and nonhuman)
whose exclusion functions at cross purposes
with our apparent desire for inclusivity and
nonviolence.
To grasp fully this fundamental logic of
exclusion, we must come to terms with what
Derrida describes in Rogues as the autoimmunitary character of democracy, according to which
the fulfillment of democracys promise is always
deferred. Although democracy is built on the
seeming ideals of freedom and equality, these
principles actually conflict with one another.

133

Whereas freedom is unconditional and immeasurable, equality is conditional and measurable.

Democracy claims to be all inclusive, but it
always produces rogues, a term which bears
certain bestial connotations. Democracy thus
attacks itself from within by claiming to remain
open to the incalculable freedom of the people
on the one hand, but insisting that everyone
must be equally free on the other. Despite its
supposedly limitless hospitality, democracy must
therefore place conditions on freedom, which
means that it disavows its foundational logic of
exclusion. Yet not only is democratic freedom
conditioned by the principle of equality, but
democracy necessarily circumscribes its applicability to those demos it determines as belonging
to a definable, and therefore limited, population.
Even if a democracy decides to extend the right
to vote to immigrants, for example, it nonetheless
continues to exclude a whole world of singularities who call out in suffering for a legitimately infinite extension of what are called
human rights.30 To extend voting rights to
immigrants is still not to include everyone.
A more inclusive democracy is still not and
cannot be all inclusive insofar as it cannot
eradicate the border that secures the included
against the excluded. Rogues are thus not an
accidental occurrence that befalls an otherwise
all-inclusive democracy, but rather are a measure
of its internal conflict between freedom and
equality. Democracy authorizes the production
of animal others (of different or the same species,
of different or the same skin colors, of different
or the same social classes, and so on). Far from
naming a political ideal, democracy remains the
only system that welcomes in itself, in its very
concept, the expression of autoimmunity called
the right to self-critique and perfectibility (86).
As Hagglund observes, however, perfectibility
is identical to corruptibility and undercuts the
regulative Idea of final perfection (169; original
emphasis). The impossibility of achieving a
perfect democracy is thus not to be lamented
precisely because its absence allows for change
and transformation.
Insofar as posthumanism is invested in the
democratic mission of expanding equality, it
betrays its own autoimmunity. One of the most

posthumanism to come
common anxieties plaguing contemporary political and philosophical projects that take the value
of nonhuman animals seriously is the irresolvable
question of where to draw the line. That is,
which animals are deserving of rights and ethical
treatment and which are not. Whereas the Great
Ape Project, for instance, seeks to extend to apes
the right to life, individual liberty, and the
prohibition on torture precisely because apes are
our closest nonhuman relatives, others argue that
the line should correspond with the capacity
for sentience.31 One can go further and claim
a doubtful ethical purity that says yes to all
others, that admits no lines or exclusions. This is
dubious because it subscribes to an unlimited,
and thus unsupportable, hospitality that disavows
its own violent practices. If, as I noted above,
a carnivore must say yes to the animal others
that he or she nonetheless eats, it is also true that
a vegetarian who says yes to some animals
(by not eating them), might also say no to
other animals. (One thinks of Elizabeth Costellos
admission in The Lives of Animals that she wears
leather boots despite her unwavering vegetarianism.) Yet the violence of appropriation is not
reducible to such seeming failures to live up to
an absolute prohibition on the consumption of
nonhuman animals. When Derrida remarks that
vegetarians, too, partake, of animals, even of
men, he in no way means to dismiss vegetarian
practices.32 His point rather is that carnivorism is
irreducible to the physical consumption of
animals. Violence takes many forms, from the
most extreme acts of killing and mutilation to less
theatrical modes of excluding both human and
nonhuman animals, especially those seemingly
innocuous practices of social cohesion and
belonging whose violence should concern us
especially because it is so seldom acknowledged.
That our relations to alterity always betray a
minimal violence is neither to acquiesce to the
suffering of others nor to stubbornly maintain the
human/animal opposition, an error for which
Matthew Calarco, seemingly with the aim of
outflanking deconstruction, takes Derrida to task.
Troubled by Derridas assertion that the aim of
deconstruction lies not in effacing the limit
[between human and animal], but in multiplying
its figures, in complicating, thickening,

delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line

precisely by making it increase and multiply,
Calarco describes this recognition of irreducible
difference as dogmatic and puzzling (AIA
29).33 Yet Derrida is simply rehearsing the
basic deconstructive point that a line is never
singular, that what we call the line can always
be divided within itself. When he refers to this
line as an abyssal rupture, moreover, this does
not suggest so much a horizontal expansion of the
distance between human and animal as it does
a bottomless accretion of lines, folding in on
and infinitely divisible within themselves. Once
the line has been divided within itself, moreover, this line is no longer a line, and thus the
domains on either side that the line sought to
demarcate are no longer pure. Indeed, Derrida
remarks that these relations [between humans
and animals] are at once intertwined and abyssal,
and they can never be totally objectified. They do
not leave room for any simple exteriority of one
term with respect to the other (AIA 31;
my emphasis). Hence, there never was one line
between human and animal, a point that Calarco
obscures when he asserts that Derrida advocates
a simple (or even a highly refined) binary
distinction between human and animal, thus
rather slyly (and falsely) attributing to Derrida
a desire to maintain their oppositional relation
(143; my emphasis).
This line of thought (or thought of the line)
leads to the conclusion that humans could
simply let the humananimal distinction go
(149; original emphasis).34 Calarco presents this
solution as a way out of the false opposition
that Derrida supposedly constructs between
conventional, binaristic thinking on the one
hand, and biological continuism on the other
(149). It remains entirely unclear, however, how
letting the humananimal distinction go could
not lead to either biological continuism or to
something rather similar to (if not wholly
synonymous with) the multiplication of differences advocated by deconstruction. When
Derrida draws our attention to the divisibility of
any line, he clearly intends to let the human
animal distinction go, understood as the
singular line that humanism has historically
drawn between human and animal. Despite his

134

peterson
claims to the contrary, Calarco, like Derrida, also
does not appear to advocate the effacement of all
differences. He remarks that
even if one agrees with Derrida that the task
for thought is to attend to differences that
have been overlooked and hidden by philosophical discourse, this does not mean that every
difference and distinction that guides common
sense and philosophy should be maintained
and refined. (149; original emphasis)

What about Derridas affirmation of animal

suffering? His refusal to deny animals the
capacity for language and mourning? His rejection of the Cartesian reduction of the animal to
the status of reactive automaton? As Calarcos
own extensive (and uncommonly precise) exegesis
of Derrida demonstrates, the latter makes it
abundantly clear that these conventional markers
of difference are dubious at best. Calarco thus
seems to arrive at a set of conclusions with regard
to human/animal differences that are difficult to
distinguish from those of Derrida. Where he does
depart most clearly from Derrida, however, can
be detected precisely in the rhetoric of letting
go, which betrays a profoundly humanist
conceit with regard to volition and agency, as if
the answer to our conflicted and discordant
relation to nonhuman beings was right there
in front of us all along, simply waiting to be
discovered, as if humans bear the power to
simply will these differences away.
Notwithstanding Calarcos insistence on erasing distinctions, one cannot thus avoid detecting
a certain analytical hair splitting that is symptomatic of contemporary political anxieties with
regard to drawing lines. The point I am
making is not that we should or should not
draw lines, but that lines get drawn nonetheless,
consciously or unconsciously, even and especially
when we deliberately seek to efface them, such
that we can never be entirely certain that our
efforts will not themselves outline a new
boundary that is equally in need of erasure.
Indeed, Derrida diagnoses the belief in the
capacity to efface ones traces as a philosophical
dogmatism, one that manifests in Lacans dubious
assertion that an animal cannot cover up its
tracks, which would be tantamount to making

135

itself the subject of the signifier (cited in

Derrida, AIA 135). Not content with demonstrating that nonhuman animals do indeed possess the
ability to cover their tracks, Derrida asks
by what right could one concede that power
to the human, to the subject of the
signifier? . . . Is it necessary to recall that
every erased trace . . . can leave a trace of its
erasure whose symptom . . . will always be
capable of ensuring its return? And is it
necessary, above all, to remind a psychoanalyst of that? (13536)

Derrida thus echoes Freuds claim that the

success of any disavowal is never guaranteed; its
traces can always return. In terms of human/
animal difference, we can never rest easy knowing
that the eradication of any line (that is always
already infinitely divisible within itself, that is not
actually a line) will not be redrawn. Indeed,
how can we know absolutely that the eradication
is not finally a reinscription, one that leads to
unforeseen violence and exclusions? Therein lies
the autoimmunitary force of posthumanism, the
irresolvable and insurmountable tension between
hospitality and inhospitality, inclusion and exclusion, inscription and erasure. Posthumanism can
and ought to work toward weakening these forces
of negation, but it cannot for that matter ever
claim to have vanquished them once and for all,
nor can it assure itself that an act perceived as
diminishing violence does not in fact consent to
its escalation or transposition, its operation in
unintended and unforeseeable ways.

the betise of (post)humanism

Of posthumanisms many advocates, Cary Wolfe
ranks among the most well known and scholarly
active, editing the Posthumanities series at the
University of Minnesota Press, and producing a
wealth of scholarship that demonstrates no small
debt to Derrida. Given this steady engagement
with deconstructive thought, it is all the more
surprising that Wolfe defines posthumanism in
Animal Rites (2003) precisely by employing the
vocabulary of rupture that Derrida eschews:
Most of us remain humanists to the core, even
as we claim for our work an epistemological break

posthumanism to come
with humanism itself.35 The reference to most
of us is clearly not meant in this context to
include the author himself; rather, the language
here serves as an injunction to other scholars
in the humanities to make the break with
humanism that Wolfe has supposedly already
made. That Wolfe views his work as operating on
the far side of humanism is confirmed when he
observes that his perspective on animal subjectivity might lead some to consign him to the
lunatic fringe (1). What better way to mark
ones split from tradition than by portraying
it hyperbolically as a perceived break from
reason?
In What is Posthumanism? (2010), however,
Wolfe adopts a more measured tone with regard
to the question of historical departure, conceding
that the point is not to reject humanism tout
court indeed, there are many values and
aspirations to admire in humanism but rather
to show how those aspirations are undercut by the
philosophical and ethical frameworks used to
conceptualize them.36 For Wolfe, posthumanism
comes both before and after humanism, before
to the extent that it avows the humans
indissoluble relation to its own embodiment and
animality, both of which come into view as
the evolutionary condition of possibility for
the emergence of the human as such, and after
insofar as it names a historical moment in which
the decentering of the human by its imbrication
in technical, medical, informatic, and economic
networks is increasingly impossible to ignore
(WIP 121, xv). This temporal disjunction accords
posthumanism a paradoxical temporality vis-a`-vis
humanism, thus appearing to disrupt the narrative of historical rupture to which Wolfe
subscribed in his earlier work. Yet despite
appearing to reject the temporal division between
humanism and posthumanism, this distinction
gets reinscribed in the context of his painstaking
efforts to distinguish between what he characterizes as humanist versus posthumanist
approaches to posthumanism. In other words, it
is no longer a matter of separating oneself from
a humanist past as it is from a humanist present,
or rather, from those whose current scholarly
and political endeavors betray anachronistic
humanist assumptions.

In his critique of the Great Ape Project, for

instance, Wolfe rightly observes that such a wellintended and long overdue project nonetheless
problematically endows apes with rights only
because they possess capacities that we possess,
but in diminished form (AR 191, 192). The
Great Ape Project thus urges us to protect apes
from harm only because they are inferior
versions of ourselves (AR 192). Wolfe traces
a similar humanist logic in Martha Nussbaums
capabilities model, which evaluates our ethical
practices toward animals in terms of how they
either facilitate or inhibit their flourishing,
a flourishing that is based on a more or less
empirical assessment of the capabilities, needs,
characteristics, behaviors, and so on of the
particular being in question (WIP 66). He
describes such work as humanist posthumanism insofar as it outwardly expresses a posthumanist aim of taking the lives of nonhuman
animals seriously yet internally clings to outmoded concepts and methodologies. If the
designation of humanist posthumanism were
not unwieldy enough, Wolfe proceeds to categorize a select group of theorists and philosophers
into four general classifications: (1) Humanist
Humanism; (2) Humanist Posthumanism;
(3) Posthumanist Humanism; and (4)
Posthumanist Posthumanism (WIP 125).37
Employing a Cartesian Coordinate Graph no
less, Wolfe plots the names of these thinkers
relative to humanism and posthumanism. In each
case, the first term in the pair (plotted along the
X axis) corresponds to a given theorys internal
disciplinarity (or methodology) while the second
(plotted along the Y axis) refers to its external
relations to its larger environment, the extent to
which it explicitly assumes responsibility for
rethinking our relation to nonhuman animals
(WIP 123; original emphasis). Not surprisingly
are the theorists that Wolfe champions (Derrida,
Haraway, Latour, Luhmann, Maturana, and
Varela) placed in the category of Posthumanist
Posthumanism, so that we are given to surmise
that such practitioners (including, by implication,
Wolfe) could claim the title of Posthumanist
Posthumanist. This rhetorical accumulation
of posts thus begins to mirror the teleological narrative that Wolfe identifies with

136

peterson
transhumanism, a discourse that he explicitly
rejects insofar as it hinges on fantasies of
disembodiment and autonomy derived from
Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility
(WIP xv). Although he assures us that he does
not aim to pursue a kind of more-posthumanistthan-thou sweepstakes, it nevertheless remains
difficult not to see in this accretion of posts a
form of one-upmanship that imagines posthumanism precisely within a narrative of increasing
perfection (WIP 62).
Most striking about the categorical couplings
that Wolfe constructs are how they presume a
certain internal purity, such that, for example,
each term in the pair, humanist posthumanism, is presumed to be entirely identical to
itself. An avowedly posthumanist project is
deemed to fail only when its otherwise pure
set of external relations are undermined by a
faulty internal disciplinarity. Yet how can one
assume that each member of this coupling is not
already divided within itself? As Wolfe would
have it, humanist posthumanism describes
a project whose explicit avowal of animality is
nevertheless disavowed on an internal, methodological level. This logic presumes, as I noted
before, a doubtful capacity to distinguish with
any absolute certainty an avowal from a disavowal. Humanist posthumanism, which is no
more awkwardly rendered as a disavowed
avowal, could never be entirely separable from
posthumanist posthumanism, or an avowed
avowal, an affirmation of animality that supposedly operates according to a methodology whose
internal purity is equal only to that of its outward
intentions. That there could be no end to the
formulations made possible by the operations of
division means that no matter how one might
want to distinguish humanism from posthumanism, the mark of division, to paraphrase Kamuf,
remains as a surplus that haunts the very domains
that it divides but to which it does not precisely
belong.
Posthumanisms impossible institutionalization is further disavowed by the rhetorical shift
from posthumanism to the posthumanities,
a move clearly designed to facilitate a concrete
institutionalization in the form of a series
published by a university press.38 Describing the

137

aims of this series, Wolfe asserts that the

posthumanities foresees what the humanities
will look like thirty years from now that is, when
the humanities will have become the posthumanities.39 According to this formulation, the
Posthumanities series foreshadows a future institutionalization that will take the form of a
discipline rechristened and fully reimagined as
the posthumanities. One can thereby trace
a certain trajectory, mapped out in advance, that
begins with the posthuman as trope, continues
through its canonization as the guiding concept of
an interdisciplinary field of study, and achieves its
formal concretization as a division of research and
teaching within a university to come. If all goes
well, this narrative seems to suggest, the posthumanities will not simply take its place alongside
previous minority studies, modes of inquiry
such as race, class, gender, and sexuality whose
legitimization has hinged on a similar logic of
incremental institutionalization. On the contrary,
Wolfes vision would force these areas of study
to reckon with a much larger overhaul of the
humanities as such. And yet, by what measure
would we be able to judge the success of this
institutional transformation? What messianic
signs will herald its final arrival?
Although Wolfe concedes the possibility that
posthumanisms final institutional arrival may be
subject to a deferral of thirty years, this arrival
is no less presentist for all that it is delayed.
Such scholarship is certainly forward looking, but
what it ought to look toward is not an imaginary
future in which its aims will have been instituted
once and for all, but rather a future that will still
take seriously the question of animal alterity,
a question that Wolfe and many others are
currently posing with great insight and urgency,
yet whose continued power and relevance
requires that it be repeatedly and unceasingly
re-posed. The posthumanities will always
remain to come. To claim, on the contrary, that
the posthumanities has either already arrived or
will finally arrive on some future day is to
presume, as I indicated above, that the disavowal
of animality which conditions the emergence of
the human subject can be finally overcome; it
presumes, that is, a certain Aufhebung of the
human, a raising up of the human to a higher

posthumanism to come
level of meaning, even if it gains its significance
by affirming our affinity with the so-called lower
animals.
One could certainly explain away this messianic narrative as nothing more than a marketing
device. Yet this rhetoric goes a long way toward
legitimizing posthumanism as a field of study that
bears the capacity to efface any and all traces
of its previous, humanist past. Wolfes effort to
expose the residual humanism that informs
certain philosophical and political interventions
is both necessary and often on target. Yet these
interrogations always take the form of a judgment
in which others are found bearing the traces of an
atavistic humanism that one would have hoped to
have fully eradicated in oneself. In a long
and detailed analysis of the French term betise
(from bete, beast), Derrida suggests that the
accusation of folly, bad judgment, or stupidity
that one levels against others
can always be mine, and not that of someone
else . . . can always betray my fault, my failing,
evil, or illness, the defect from which
I suffer . . . I, myself, as philosopher,
theorist or not, always run the risk of having
to attribute to myself the betise Im talking
about or that, dogmatically, betement, I think
I recognize in others.40

This contagion or mimeticism of betise

makes it impossible to disentangle oneself fully
from the offense that endures ones judgment,
which means that the division that one might
want to institute between humanism and posthumanism can never be assured, that the betise
of humanism of which posthumanism does not
want to find itself guilty, can always leave its
traces, notwithstanding our all-too-human efforts
to erase them (158). This posthumanism can
always prove to be just as bete (beastly, violent,
stupid, lacking in judgment), or even more bete
than the betise it claims to correct. That the
traces of humanism remain is thus not fully
attributable to a lack of philosophical or political
insight on the part of scholars such as Nussbaum,
a reflection of the incapacity, as it were, of the
capabilities model to move fully beyond
humanism. If this project is deemed unsuccessful,
its failure is not reducible to methodological

error, to its inability to conjugate its external

relations with its internal disciplinarity. Prior
to any purported methodological success or
failure, no posthumanist project worthy of this
name (and my point is precisely that no scholarship or politics will ever be worthy enough to
claim this title), could ever attain its final selfcompletion. There is, nor never will be, a politics
and ethics that could legitimately call itself
posthuman, only a politics and ethics that will
have been more or (one hopes) less humanist,
more or less violent in its treatment of both
human and nonhuman others. What calls itself
posthuman is thus not yet posthuman precisely
because it claims to be posthuman, because it
claims for itself either a present or a future whose
unforeseeable iterations may prove either more
or less peaceful, either more or less perfect, but
never totally without violence, never without the
possibility of corruption.
Rather than attempt to articulate a positive
definition of posthumanism that claims to know
what posthumanism is, we might follow Derrida
in his Letter to a Japanese Friend, where he
reflects on the inadequacy of the term deconstruction, despite its having become the mot
clef in the critical reception of his work. After
carefully detailing what deconstruction is not,
Derrida asserts that deconstruction takes place,
it is an event that does not await the deliberation,
consciousness, or organization of a subject, or
even of modernity . . . What deconstruction is
not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course!41 To some extent,
Wolfes suggestion that posthumanism is both
before and after humanism echoes Derridas
notion that deconstruction does not wait for its
conscious deployment by a human subject. The
posthuman is also the antehuman, the animality
that precedes the historical elevation of the
human above all other life forms. Yet whereas
Derrida expresses both dissatisfaction with the
term deconstruction and surprise with regard
to the privileged space it has come to occupy
in the reception of his work muting a number of
equally (un)satisfactory terms such as writing,
trace, supplement, specter, and so on Wolfes
ever-more-labyrinthine refinements of posthumanism appear altogether content with the

138

peterson
critical dominance that the term bears in
contemporary discussions on human/animal
difference. How might the human otherwise
come to unknow itself, permanently and
without the comforts of naming and identity,
as neither human nor posthuman, as altogether different
and unidentifiable from what
we imagine we are or continue
to become?

notes
1 Jon D. Miller et al., Public Acceptance of
Evolution, Science 313 (11 Aug. 2006): 765^ 66. The
rejection of evolution frequently hinges on a disavowal of human animality. Consider the recent
emergence of Intelligent Design in the United
States as an alternative both to Darwinian evolution and to Creationism. Intelligent Design allows
for modifications to occur polygenetically, but it
safeguards the borders of the human by continuing
to deny natural selection.
2 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass
(London: Continuum, 2004) 22.
3 When Species Meet
Minnesota P, 2008) 19.

(Minneapolis:

of

4 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore

I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham
UP, 2008) 136. Henceforth cited in the text
as AIA.
5 Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or the
University in Deconstruction (Chicago: U of Chicago
P,1997) 27.
6 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal,
trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004)
25, 26.
7 Giovanna Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of
Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 120.
Henceforth cited in the text as PTT.
8 Martin Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and
theTime of Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008) 171.
9 Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism
and the Animal (New York: Columbia UP, 2009) 29.
10 Sigmund Freud, Fetishism in The Standard
Edition, trans. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth,1975).

139

11 Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford:

Stanford UP, 2005) 14.
12 Sigmund Freud,An Outline of Psychoanalysis
in The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth,1973) 61.
13 Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity in
The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth,1973) 199.
14 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its
Discontents in Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12: Civilization,
Society, and Religion, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Penguin,1991) 305.
15 Stefan Lovgren, Chimps, Humans 96 Percent
the Same, Gene Study Finds, National
Geographic, available 5http://news.nationalgeo
graphic.com/news/2005/08/0831050831chimpgenes.
html4 (accessed 8 Feb. 2010).
16 The preoccupation with animal lack is thus not
unlike the trauma produced by the male fetishists
perception of female castration. The fetishist disavows both male/female sameness (their similarity
to one another beyond genital dissimilarity) and
male/female difference: the latter insofar as the
fetish functions to replace the missing maternal
phallus.
17 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds.,
Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on
Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia UP,
2005) 3.
18 Jonathan Burt, Review of Zoontologies: The
Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe, and Cary
Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse
of the Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Society and
Animals 13.2 (2005) 168.
19 For provocative discussions of various
animal capacities, see the Reflections by
Marjorie Garber, Wendy Doniger, Peter Singer,
and Barbara Smuts included in J.M. Coetzee,
The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1999) 73^106; see also Paola Cavalieri and
Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project:
Equality beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martins,
1993).
20 Martin Heidegger, The Thing in Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper,1971) 178.
21 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second
Discourses, trans. Roger Masters and Judith

posthumanism to come
Masters (New
1964) 116.

York:

Bedford/St.

Martins,

22 Sigmund Freud,Our Attitude toward Death,

The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth,1957) 289.
23 Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and
Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992) 17;
original emphasis.
24 Agamben, The Open 16.
25 Jacques Derrida,Ulysses Gramophone:TwoWords
for Joyce, trans. Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock,
in Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between
the Blinds (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 576.
Henceforth cited in the text as UG. For more on
the role of the yes in deconstructive thought,
see my Derridas Ouija Board, Qui Parle 17.2
(2009): 85^101.
26 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
(New York: Routledge, 2001) 400 n. 21.
27 Samir Haddad suggests that Derrida ceased
referring to the lesser violence after Violence
and Metaphysics because the phrase implies
a normative decision-making procedure that
deconstruction requires us to forfeit. If we can
never know with any absolute certainty
whether a given act constitutes the lesser or
the greater violence, then it makes no sense to
employ these terms. This perpetual ignorance,
however, does not require the suspension of all
normative judgments. In The Force of Law,
for instance, Derrida argues that the ordeal of
the undecidable . . . must be gone through by any
decision worthy of the name. See The Force
of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority
in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice,
eds. Drucilla Cornell and Michel Rosenfeld
(New York: Routledge, 1992) 24. To claim
that we cannot make a decision with a view
toward a lesser violence (even if it turns out
that our decision has resulted in worse violence)
is a bit like proposing that, since the signified
of any signifier remains undecidable, then we
ought not to ascribe any meaning to written or
spoken language, no matter how provisional.
In other words, Haddad seems to confuse
the Derridean notion of undecidability with
an unnecessarily paralyzing indecisiveness. See
Samir Haddad, A Genealogy of Violence, from
Light to the Autoimmune, Diacritics 38.1^2
(2008): 121^ 42.

28 See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the

Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford:
Clarendon,1876) 311.
29 Leonard Lawlor, This is Not Sufficient: An Essay
on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida
(New York: Columbia UP, 2007) 109.
30 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 53, 36.
31 Gary Francione, for instance, draws the line
at sentience because . . . sentient beings have
interests and the possession of interests is the
necessary and sufficient condition for membership
in the human community. See Gary Francione,
Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?
(Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000) 175. See also
James Rachels, Drawing Lines in Animal Rights:
Current Debates and New Directions, eds. Cass R.
Sunstein and Martha Craven Nussbaum (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005) 162^74.
32 See Jacques Derrida, Eating Well, or the
Calculation of the Subject in Points . . . Interviews,
1974^1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy
Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 282.
Derrida does not explicitly link the lesser
violence to eating well. Yet both phrases
emerge in the context of discussions on ethics
and violence. Derrida observes that the latter
phrase implies a respect for the other at the
very moment when . . . one must begin to identify
with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally (283). Eating well thus
invokes the same play of difference and sameness
at work in the lesser violence, which in turn
negotiates an irresolvable conflict between
the desire to appropriate alterity and the others
resistance to such assimilation.
33 Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of
the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York:
Columbia UP, 2008) 144.
34 In another passage, Calarco argues more
forcefully that the human^animal distinction
should be abolished or, at the very least, be treated with considerable caution and suspicion (143).
With regard to the latter point, who could seriously contend that Derrida has not treated the
human^animal distinction with substantial vigilance and wariness? Calarcos own analysis admits
as much when he observes that, from the very
earliest to the latest texts, Derrida is keenly

140

peterson
aware of and intent on problematizing the anthropocentric underpinnings and orientation of philosophy and associated discourses (104).
35 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture,
the Discourse of the Species, and Posthumanist Theory
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 1. Henceforth
cited in the text as AR.
36 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) xvi.
Henceforth cited in the text as WIP.
37 The complete list of theorists is as
follows: (1) Humanist Humanism (Habermas,
Rawls, Ferry, Heidegger); (2) Humanist
Posthumanism (Nussbaum, Singer, Regan);
(3) Posthumanist Humanism (Rorty, Zizek,
Foucault); (4) Posthumanist Posthumanism
(Derrida, Haraway, Latour, Luhmann, Maturana,
and Varela).
38 Despite the misgivings that I outline below
with regard to the institutionalization of the posthumanities, in no way do these remarks reflect my
assessment of the many admirable authors and
books published within the Posthumanities
series, some of which directly challenge the language of posthumanism. As I have noted above,
Haraways insistence in When Species Meet that
she is not a posthumanist seeks to unknow the
human in a manner similar to what I propose in
the final section of this essay. Perhaps as a concession to the series in which her book appears,
however, Haraway describes the term posthumanities as a useful notion for tracking scholarly
conversations (308).
39 Cary Wolfe,Posthumanities (2006), available
5http://www.carywolfe.com/postabout.html4
(accessed 2 Dec. 2010).
40 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 1,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2009) 158,157.
41 Jacques Derrida, Letter to a Japanese Friend,
trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in
A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP,1991) 275.

Christopher Peterson
School of Humanities and Languages,
Bankstown Campus Building 7
University of Western Sydney
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith, NSW 2751
Australia
E-mail: c.peterson@uws.edu.au

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