Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Don Ihde – Thesis Advisor, Distinguished Professor, Department of Philosophy | Timothy A. D. Hyde – Second Reader, Adjunct Professor, Department of Philosophy
Date
2009-05-01
Keywords
animal perspective | unlearning | honesty | Jacques Derrida
Department
Department of Philosophy
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/71694
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
My aim is to try and discover what it would mean to see from an animal perspective, which is the animal perspective that I once had before my training and the animal perspective buried deep within me waiting to return. Since this animal perspective is weakened by the process of domestication (it is starved), I am very much interested in discovering what it is, what it would be to perceive as an animal, what possibilities does this potentiality have to offer and whether this is the animal that always should have evolved. The animal within can only respond to these questions through a three step translation process that gives it voice: unlearning, relearning and learning. And this process will reveal the details to what it means to be animal—a mode of being honest, involved in non-apophantic logos, and constituted within a cyclical time. The first part of my investigation will be concerned with unlearning, which reveals that I am a corpse rotting under the values of ghosts. These values no longer give me comfortable answers to the question “Who am I?”1 ; and as a result, I am prompted to look for that which I have been taught to put aside—the animal. I need to go back through the history of philosophy to understand the fetters that have been shackled onto the animal within me. Understanding this past helps uncover the lies that must be unlearned so that truth can be revealed. I hear the faint cries of the animal within me as I strain to perceive both this animal and as this animal. The training that has caused this beast within to be restrained needs to be understood for unlearning to take place and the animal to be revealed. Unlearning is the process of stripping one bare; of peeling away the layers of certainty to reveal an undetermined animal…a naked animal. To unlearn what one has been taught to be certain, essential, determinant, the answer. To unlearn this reveals the human animal in its origins…its nakedness. Only by becoming naked will I begin to become animal. And from this point (if one wishes to be true to one’s self, if one wants to become animal) the undetermined animal needs to reconstitute itself with several elements, one of which is honesty. Honesty is one of three fundamentals discussed in this paper that helps ground the mode of animal being. It is a virtue that will be developed more fully in the part “to follow,” 2 as I look to Jacques Derrida to help open a space where the weakened, undetermined animal can develop itself through the powers of honesty and the nonapophantic. The second part of this investigation (the one that follows) will conjure the ghost of Derrida to elucidate this process of unlearning, of stripping one’s self down to nakedness, as well as emphasize the importance of the afore mentioned fundamentals that will help one to become and remain animal. Analyzing the honesty and non-apophantic emphasize the second part of the translation process, which is that of relearning. Derrida will represent a movement from unlearning to relearning. The camel-lion (chameleon) Derrida goes from the beast of burden (carrying Descartes, Heidegger and others) to the beast of prey, which has the courage to be undetermined.3 The beast of prey has the courage to strip off its clothing and be naked. To break free from the shackles and announce its presence…a presence that needs to be nursed back to health. Derrida is this lion that has the courage to destroy his past and assumes the above two characteristics of the animal that need to be relearned; characteristics that the human animal once possessed but must relearn in order to understand itself as animal. These characteristics are necessary if one is to be a lion or an eagle that follows itself, which is to say an animal that follows its undetermined self…instead of being the animal that follows after.4 Derrida’s invocation of the above two fundamentals in the space his “might”5 creates has pointed me to look for that which would allow these constitutive elements to be internalized and practiced. A time, as Derrida suggests, that has been put aside.6 A time that he does not have time to investigate in The Animal That Therefore I am. I began to wonder what time would constitute an animal way of being, a time necessary to remain honest and practice non-apophantic logos. After reading Derrida, I turned to Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of cyclical time to consummate my investigation into the relearning process necessary to become animal. I turned to Nietzsche to expand my narrow perspective on the animal mode of being. Indeed, Derrida’s whole text The Animal That Therefore I am reminded me of Nietzsche. An echoing throughout the abyss. Throughout Nietzsche, there appears to be a call to adopt both the non-apophantic and honesty in order to become animal. Why do I say a call to the non-apophantic and honesty? Because it appears the apophantic and other tools of the “reason-spider”7 can cause us to kill ourselves and our life-world with certainty. With lies that prevent us from being honest. I realized that I was hearing this call through his account of the cyclical. In this third part of my investigation, I plan to reveal the connection between honesty, nonapophantic logos and cyclical time—three fundamentals that constitute animality “as such.”8 A constitution that Zarathustra has whispered in my ear as he lures me from the herd in order to become the animal that follows itself. I will argue that in order to understand the nature of honesty and the nonapophantic in animal being, a notion of cyclical time needs to be relearned and internalized. Cyclical time allows one to remain in this mode of honesty because it allows one to be in this state of return to uncertainty, to the undetermined. It leaves no room for lying. The non-apophantic, insofar as it is not linguistic, would reinforce these two elements by offering a logos that does not require deceit. Only with this structure can we begin to “give birth” 9 to the animal and begin the child’s phase of Nietzsche’s metamorphosis. A phase that allows one to live as the animal one should have been all along. A phase that allows one to realize we are dead without being the animal we are. A phase that enables us to constantly learn anew to maintain a mode of being the “undetermined animal”10 that we are. A learning to follow the undetermined.So I will begin my process of unlearning and attempt to invoke the courage needed for honesty, for animal eyes (the courage to look in my mirror at a corpse) and read what my mirror tells me…
Recommended Citation
Smalley, Annie Lynn, "Meditations in the Mirror: A Return to the Undetermined Animal" (2009). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 899.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/899