Demenageries
Demenageries, Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida is a collection of essays on animality following Jacques Derridas work. The Western philosophical tradition separated animals from men by excluding the former from everything that was considered proper to man: laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, thinking. The animal has traditionally been considered the absolute Other of humans. This radical otherness has served as the rationale for the domination, exploitation and slaughter of animals. What Derrida called la pense de lanimal (which means both thinking concerning the animal and animal thinking) may help us understand differently such apparently human features as language, thought and writing. It may also help us think anew about such highly philosophical concerns as differences, otherness, the end(s) of history and the world at large. Thanks to the ethical and epistemological crisis of Western humanism, animality has become an almost fashionable topic. However, Demenageries is the first collection to take Derridas thinking on animal thinking as a starting point, a way of reflecting not only on animals but starting from them, in order to address a variety of issues from a vast range of theoretical perspectives: philosophy, literature, cultural theory, anthropology, ethics, politics, religion, feminism, postcolonialism and, of course, posthumanism.
