Animal as Text, Text as Animal: On the Matter of Textuality

Abstract

Piskorski situates the common analytical strategy in Literary Animal Studies of foregrounding animal embodiment in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, underscoring such a strategy’s inadvertent admission of the constitutive powers of language in literature’s attempt to grapple with embodiment. Next, he discusses in more detail the co-implicated character of language and materiality and offers a critique of some interventions in Animal Studies and their reliance on a thinking of the body. The discussion then focuses on Derrida by revisiting his early writings on Husserl where he exposes the similarities between language and animality, and concludes by discussing how Derrida’s deconstruction of the linguistic sign and introduction of the trace opens a space for thinking the animal differently.