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Derrida's Beast
Adriana Cavarero
In his recently published seminar The Beast and the Sovereign Derrida warns us that we "should never be content to say, in spite of temptations, something like: the social, the political, and in them the value or exercise of sovereignty are merely disguised manifestations of animal force, or conflicts of pure force, the truth of which is given to us by zoology, that is to say at bottom bestiality or barbarity or inhuman cruelty."2 This warning applies perfectly to Hobbes and his famous formula, originally derived from Plautus, of homo homini lupus, or the well-known observation which is notoriously crucial to the way in which the English thinker constructs his theory of the state and his concept of sovereignty. More generally, however, over and beyond the specific conception of the sovereign developed by early modernity, it applies to a certain zoological foundation of discourse regarding the political, already present in antiquity, one that reduces "the original community of human beings to an animal community" whose leader would be represented, as in the case of Plato's tyrant, as a kind of wolf. There is no doubt that politics conceived as a discourse on the wolf, or politics as lycology, in Derrida's words, assumes a conspicuous role in this investigation where in "the metaphoric covering-over of the two figures, the beast and the sovereign, one therefore has a presentiment that a profound and essential ontological copula is at work on this couple."3 One can explain this, at least in part, because although Derrida talks about the sheep in his extensive analysis of La Fontaine's fable of "The Wolf and the Lamb," here he ignores Foucault's reflections on the "pastorate":4 another significant case of a community of human beings reduced to animals, namely sheep, albeit one where the wolf would constitute the threat rather than the head. In accordance with its own natural instinct, the wolf would actually eat them, whereas the shepherd would save and protect them. For the rest, Derrida is interested not only in the proverbial voracity of the wolf but also in the cunning of the fox and the tranquil power of the lion, not to mention "the obvious though surprising abundance of animal figures that invade the discourses...