The Vulnerability of Animal Life in Derrida’s Philosophy

Abstract

Derrida has been preoccupied by the animal from the beginning to the end of his life. It can be found from the first to the last texts, but its presence is always subjected to new formulations and explications, as if the question of the animal in Derrida’s thinking could never be exhausted: indeed, nothing and nobody can seemingly exhaust it… Our reading takes this inexhaustibility as its starting point in order to examine one of the last concepts reworked by Derrida towards the end of his life, to which his readers have hitherto paid scant attention: the concept of vulnerability. This article probes into the possibility for this concept to allow us to reread in depth Derrida’s relevant texts as a unified body of works, albeit without claiming to exhaust their meaning(s).