What we confusedly call 'animal': Deconstruction and the zoology of narrative (Jacques Derrida, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, France).

摘要

For French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the question of “what we confusedly call ‘animal’” continues to prove a difficult threshold in our efforts to think beyond the traditional assumptions of humanism. Our often implicit understanding of an absolute distinction between the human species and all other non-human animal species, still largely uninterrogated despite a growing body of knowledge that would nullify any presumption of absolute difference from all other species, engages the most fundamental questions at stake in such efforts, including our beliefs about subjectivity and language, rights, justice, and the limits of responsibility. That our naming of other non-human animal species as “animal” is confused suggests the essentially epistemological nature of this ultimately ontological and ethical problem. In narrative fiction, the epistemological processes of plot resolve confusion into ontological certainty in scenes of recognition, Aristotle's anagnorisis. As Terence Cave has shown, while the recognition of the other in anagnorisis retroactively confers intelligibility on narrative sequence, anagnorisis is also the site where literary art tends most to show its hand in artifice, casting into doubt conclusions regarding what and where the other is relative to the ethical community. After the eighteenth century, the recognition of “what we confusedly call ‘animal’” became particularly fraught as epistemes in literary and other disciplines grew increasingly anthropological, on the one hand, and as living animals began to recede from the realms of daily human experience, on the other. This study examines the question of animality in Derrida's writings and its epistemological implications for nineteenth-century narrative fiction when the other to be recognized is a non-human “animal.” In Edgar Allen Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Herman Melville's Moby Dick or, The Whale (1851), and Gustave Flaubert's “La Légende de Saint Julien L'Hospitalier” (1877), plots structured as pursuits of an inhuman other thematize the narrative and ontological stakes of recognition for humans as well as these others.