Book cover of The Animal That Therefore I Am

Book description

The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cerisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Animal That Therefore I Am as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The philosopher who invented deconstruction sets out—in a philosophical tour de force—to dismantle the grounds on which Western philosophy (and the Abrahamic religions) attempt to maintain the absolute difference in kind between the human and the animal.

Derrida’s point, I want to emphasize, is not that humans and animals are “the same,” but rather that the distinction between “the human” and “the animal” is of no use in trying to understand the wild diversity of life forms on earth and the ways in which they are entwined. At stake here too is our (often disavowed) relationship to our own animality.

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