Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Sax, Boria. "Review of Derrida's THE ANIMAL THAT THEREFORE I AM." H-NET REVIEW (July 2008).

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Theorists constantly remind us that words like 'nature,' 'God,' 'civilization,' or 'consciousness,' except in the most restrictive contexts, have nothing close to the sort of precision that we usually expect from academic work, and it is very easy to dismiss them as incoherent or even meaningless. But, to the immense frustration of many positivists, analytic philosophers, and deconstructionists, no amount of critique or complaint ever seems to make such words disappear. They grow and evolve in ways that seem well beyond the control of those who use them (as even their critics almost always do), as if the words themselves were alive. In The Animal that Therefore I Am, Derrida expresses his intense opposition to the concept of the 'Animal.' . . . Read the rest here: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=207901217255183.

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