ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida’s last text, compiled from a series of lectures delivered in 1997 and published posthumously in translation as The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), points to a persistent metaphorics of the animal in his own work from the beginning to the end. This “visitation of the innumerable critters that now overpopulate my texts” (37) includes hedgehogs, silkworms (which are also crucial in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn), spiders, serpents, wolves, horses, and others besides. Derrida is concerned in Animal with the “unprecedented . . . subjection of the animal” (25; italics in original), and, in terms that strongly resonate with questions posed in Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), Derrida asks us to recognize that our (human) dominion over other animals is suspect:
No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide. . . . the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artifi cial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous. . . . As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals by means of artifi cial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fi re. In the same abattoirs. (25-26)
Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace 185
Derrida here starkly places within the purview of the Nazi genocide our treatment of animals. Coetzee’s vegetarian, dogmatically anti-the-killingof-animals character Elizabeth Costello similarly makes the connection between these deaths and the Nazi genocide:
Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its victims are dead, after all, it does not burn them to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort of our home) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been-pardon the tastelessness of the following-to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with. (65-66)
Both Derrida and Coetzee would agree that we are under the sway of what Donna Haraway aptly terms the “culturally normal fantasy of human exceptionalism” (11). (Haraway disagrees with how Derrida approaches the animal, but that is the subject of another book.) And for both Derrida and Coetzee the Holocaust aptly analogizes the depth of the wrongs we commit against animals.
