How to Make a Human

Author: Steel, Karl

Source: Exemplaria, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2008 , pp. 3-27(25)

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Abstract:

Derrida's late investigations into the question of the animal chart a path past the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, Levinas, and animal rights philosophy; they also identify the essential role the subjugation of animals plays in human self-conception. This self-conception, an inheritance from the Christian Middle Ages, suffuses the Middle English encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, whose popularity and ideological conservatism suits it for illustrating the discourse's characteristic features. Sidrak and Bokkus claims a set of properties for humans and denies them to animals, all of which it construes as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffle human claims to uniqueness. The resemblances are not merely a threat to the human, for by invoking, and then denying, animal likeness to humans, Sidrak and Bokkus models the subjugation of animals. Because the human was an effect of such acts of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself; the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain.

Keywords: ANIMALS; POSTHUMANISM; SIDRAK AND BOKKUS; MEDIEVAL; HUMANISM; DERRIDA

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/175330708X268352

Publication date: 2008-03-01

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