ABSTRACT
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse on the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat” (bémol). The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless. This chapter pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading of Franz Kafka’s final story, “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josefine’s vocalizations (is it really singing? or perhaps rather squeaking, or whistling?), which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the songs of actual mice. The voice plays a crucial role in almost all of Kafka’s animal narratives, in part because of the ancient tension between speech (logos), which is considered unique to humans, and voice (phonē), which we share with other living beings. Hence, the status of Josefine’s song, and of mouse song in general, obeys the logic of the anthropological machine. The task of this zoopoetic reading, then, is to show how Kafka’s text might unsettle, or even render inoperative, that logic.
