A Nietzschean-Type Perspectivism: Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger’s Thesis on the Animal

Abstract

On the occasion of the publication of Derrida’s unedited seminar Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity (1984–5, 2018), which includes significant pages on Heidegger’s discourse on animality, this article proposes reopening the dossier that the French philosopher had dedicated to that discourse throughout his work. It aims to elaborate an overall interpretation of this dossier in the light of the grammatological account of the living, which, at the moment of sketching his intellectual biography, Derrida himself acknowledges as the shared feature of his work. In particular, the article takes into examination the readings of Heidegger’s thesis that “the animal is poor in world” which Derrida had offered since Of Spirit: Heidegger and The Question (1987). As the examination develops, it is shown that Derrida’s critical reelaboration of Heidegger’s discourse is shaped as a Nietzschean-type perspectivism.