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Starting with an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s most intimate encounter with an animal by way of a similar scene in Balthus’s paintings, this essay examines Derrida’s criticism of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the humananimal relation and proposes a way of conceiving the animal-human encounter beyond the traps of narcissism.

The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze JAMES MARTELL

L’écrivain est un sorcier parce qu’il vit l’animal comme la seule population devant laquelle il est responsable en droit. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux

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f I could add an image to the collection of paintings and drawings that Derrida chose d’aveugle: L’autoportrait L’autoportrait et autres ruines that he curated at the for the exhibit Mémoires d’aveugle: Louvre in 1991, it would have been the painting of Balthus, Le chat au miroir I . Of course, this is a desire or a whim that appears “after the fact” since, as you have probably already guessed, what makes me believe that this image is a perfect self-portrait of Derrida (and especially of his acknowledged blindness) is the famous scene he describes in his 2006 book, L’animal que donc je suis. While in summary this scene may seem simple and just loosely analogous to Balthus’s painting—“Derrida is seen naked in his bathroom or bedroom by a cat”—one of my claims in this essay is that, if we follow the development of the scene as Derrida describes it (and take into consideration

Mosaic 48/3 0027-1276-07/175016$02.00©M 0027-1276-07/175016$02.00©Mosaic osaic

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not only this book, but also all of his work), the painting and the scene are the same. In other words, they contain the same elements and positions, and thus the same possibilities for thought and reflection. As we know, the scene starts with just two elements or subjects: Derrida and a cat. Nevertheless, as the text progresses, two new elements are introduced: a mirror and a woman. Derrida explains how the introduction of these elements modifies the autobiographical scene, and how these new elements affect the scene precisely in its auto-biographical character, that is to say, by modifying the (life of the) self or autos that is being depicted. What is more, this modification, for him, is not just an addition. Rather, it is precisely with the introduction of the woman and the mirror that the autobiography really begins. Through this addition, the author has begun not only to question his own gender (“une autobiographie conséquente ne peut pas ne pas toucher à cette assurance du ‘je suis un homme,’ ‘je suis une femme,’ je suis une femme qui est aussi un homme”), but also, through this “accident,” has come to question his own number, that is to say, his limits with other creatures, and with them, our own limits, the limits of “us,” unmentioned but implied participants, spectators of the scene: “L’autre fatalité d’un accident (mais est-ce qu’un accident?), c’est alors, outre la présence d’une femme, la présence d’une psyché dans la pièce. Nous ne savons plus combien nous sommes, alors, tous et toutes. Et je tiens que l’autobiographie a commencé là. Que m’arrive-t-il chaque fois que je vois un animal dans une pièce où se trouve un miroir?” (L’animal 86, emph. Derrida’s). “We do not know anymore how many we are, then, all of us (males), and all of us (females).”1 In order to understand this indetermination brought by the addition of a mirror and a woman to the scene, let us follow for a moment the different threads that this image, “a woman and a mirror,” carries. These threads intertwine not only L’animal que donc je suis and Balthus’s paintings, but also a long European tradition and way of thinking and perceiving. As Virginie Monnier explains in her description of Le chat au miroir I, The theme of the woman with a mirror is recurrent in European painting since the Middle Ages. Balthus himself treated it as early as 1944 [. . .] and on several occasions [. . .] thus joining the long tradition of painters fascinated by the theme and its many allegorical meanings. One of the very oldest of its representations is probably that of “The Great Prostitute” of Saint John’s Apocalypse, where the mirror appears as the symbol of lust, vanity and falsehood, as opposed to the mirrors of wisdom and knowledge of which the late Middle Ages were also fond. Beginning with the Renaissance, the mirror reflects the beauty of nature and communicates neo-Platonic ideals. But in becoming secular, Jean Clair wrote, the theme “was to assume an uncanny gravity,” the painter seeing in it “the exaltation of a glorious

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flesh, melancholy in its awareness of being vulnerable” and thus “the very image of his art, the fleeting reflection of the immutable, pure world of beauty.” The nineteenth century would see mirrors as laden with a broader, more diffuse symbolism, comprising narcissism and inconstancy, as well as prudence, illusion and so on. (qtd. in Clair 432)

Derrida’s description of this scene in L’animal involves most of these themes, from the religious shame of nakedness, through the “lust, vanity and falsehood” (“la peur autant que le désir, le désir apeuré” [86]), the knowledge of self (“Qui suis-je alors? Qui est-ce que je suis? À qui le demander sinon à l’autre? Et peut-être au chat luimême?” [20]), up to the melancholy, the vulnerability, and especially the narcissism, presented in his scene by the sense that the cat’s mortal presence, and the fact that it has a name, signify directly Derrida’s own death: “Rien ne pourra jamais lever en moi la certitude qu’il s’agit là d’une existence rebelle à tout concept. Et d’une existence mortelle, car dès lors qu’il a un nom, son nom lui survit déjà. Il signe sa disparition possible. La mienne aussi” (26). While these traditional questions and themes appear both in Derrida’s scene and in Balthus’s painting, what makes both images the same or, in other words, what allows both of them to create the same space of reflection and thought, is the way the mirror or psyché is positioned and thus the kind of reflections it produces. The mirror in Derrida’s scene appears in some way before appearing, since when the concrete mirror is finally introduced, Derrida wonders if it had not been there always within the cat, which might have always been his first mirror (“Mais ce chat ne peut-il aussi être, au fond de ses yeux, mon premier miroir?” [ L’animal 77]). By the time a third creature appears in his description (be it a woman or the animal itself, he says), we see the mirror starting to move or perhaps becoming aspheric and reflecting it all: “Nous ne savons plus combien nous sommes, alors, tous et toutes.” In the case of Balthus’s painting, the woman is holding the mirror in front of the cat; but she is doing it in the same way she would if she was looking at herself. However, contrary to what Monnier suggests, the mirror is not necessarily reflecting the cat, although we cannot say that it is reflecting the woman either. The mirror appears really in between, in a position that entertains even the possibility that it might be a double mirror (one of those which have a different kind of mirror on each side, one that magnifies and one that minimizes), or perhaps that it is not even a mirror but just a glass allowing both sub jects to see the other one framed. In this way, the reflection here is always double. It reflects and deflects, from the woman to the cat, back and forth, but also toward the third subject or accomplice: us, the viewers, and back, making us all appear as the woman, the cat, the cat-woman, or an undecidable reflection in between.

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There is yet another way in which the painting and the scene exist in a similar manner. Both of them are part of a process. The textual scene develops through the paragraphs and pages of L’animal , and the visual scene in Balthus’s painting in two more incarnations painted a few years after the original (1977-80), Le chat au miroir II (1986-89) and Le chat au miroir III (1989-94). While in these two paintings the composition is basically the same (except for the fact that the woman appears now dressed, as if some shame or reserve had acted retroactively), the position of the mirror has slightly changed. From the second painting to the third it seems as if the mirror has turned more toward the woman, or at least toward a gesture that may signify that she is indeed looking at herself. But the cat is always still there, and with the movement of the mirror it seems as if in these two latter instances the woman’s eyes were directed more toward the animal’s than in the first painting. But what about Derrida’s mirror in the scene in L’animal , throughout the whole book—and, if we agree with him and believe that the question of the animal has occupied him since the beginning, through his work as a whole? As the scene develops, is he looking at the animal, the cat, at himself, or trying to look at both at the same time? And in order to do what exactly? To see himself in the animal, the animal in himself, or perhaps to stop seeing them both and look at something else? In the space of reflection brought by Derrida’s scene and Balthus’s Le chat au miroir paintings, immersed as we are in all the possibilities that the paintings of Balthus and the works of Derrida bring forth, let us follow this question of Derrida’s own sight and reflection on the animal through Le chat au miroir I , and from there through other works by Balthus. One thing we have not yet considered in this painting and its subsequent reproductions is the background. Focusing on Le chat au miroir III , Monnier writes: “The background is very elaborately worked, which reproduction fails to render. It looks like it is sinking into a sort of slow swirl of which the epicenter, a ‘black hole,’ is located somewhere between the girl and the mirror. Thus she appears, with the golden-eye cat, to be the custodian of an unknown world, a beyond, of which the mirror, half-light half-dark, would be the open Sesame” (qtd. in Clair 436). Thus we might ask, in the logic and interplay of reflections between human and animal, self and other, philosopher and object, in these philosophical and pictographic scenes made of mirrors, what role does the background play? And in the philosophical consideration of the distinction—or lack thereof—between animals and humans, or between animality and humanity, “bêtise” and reason, what is the background, the ground or fond , and how does it affect our creation or representation of limits?

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n his seminar La bête et le souverain, Derrida presents what is perhaps his most—if not his only—direct criticism of Deleuze’s notion of the animal, or of his (and Guattari’s) way of conceiving the relation/division animal-human. Two of these critiques are subtle, and we may even say a little sly. They are done in an indirect manner, as if by chance or accident, since they do not address Deleuze’s “fault” directly, but rather see it in a particular circumstance, and/or as a mistake shared with somebody else. The first one is an accusation of an ignorance or a disregard in his (or their) theory of the real or empirical animal, the animal or beast “in themselves.” It is worded thus: “Il faut tout de suite noter que, et pour la psychanalyse et pour Deleuze quand il dispute la psychanalyse à ce sujet , il s’agit toujours seulement de l’homme, du devenir-animal de l’homme, de l’histoire et des histoires de l’homme dans ses devenirs-animaux, autrement dit du devenir anthropomorphiquement animal de l’homme, et non de

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l’animal et de la bête, si on peut dire, eux-mêmes” (Bête 196, emph. mine). As we can see, this criticism tries to be softened by the qualifying clause “quand il dispute la psychanalyse à ce sujet.” This caveat is supposed to allow at least the possibility of giving Deleuze’s work—when it is not questioning psychoanalysis on this subject—the benefit of the doubt. However, we have to ask whether there is any way of really separating any consideration or notion of the animal in Deleuze and Guattari’s work from their critique of psychoanalysis. Or what is more drastic, is it even possible to talk now about the anthropo-ontological conceptual relation animal-human without implying the changes that our conceptions of such a relation suffered through psychoanalytic thought?

In his second critique, Derrida, amalgamating Jacques Lacan and Deleuze (interestingly enough, putting together psychoanalysis in its second incarnation with its harshest critic), accuses them both of sharing the same confidence in the sovereignty of the human self or “moi”: “La commune assurance, néanmoins, de Lacan et Deleuze là où finalement ils misent tout, tous deux, sur une souveraineté du Moi humain responsable, capable de répondre librement, et non seulement de réagir, gardant un rapport de liberté avec l’indétermination du fond” ( Bête 247). Notwithstanding the abysmal differences between Lacan’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s projects, is it fair to consider their work as “investing it all” (misent tout ) in “the sovereignty of the human responsible self, capable of freely responding, and not only of reacting”? Just the role of the Other in Lacan, as well as the sole consideration of Deleuze’s constant critique of any notion of an absolutely delimited subject (“Le nom propre ne désigne pas un sujet, mais quelque chose qui se passe, au moins entre deux termes qui ne sont pas des sujets, mais des agents, des éléments” [Deleuze and Parnet 65]) makes such a criticism invalid, if not ludicrous. But Derrida was in no way a fool or “bête,” even if he might have—as Bernard Stiegler suggests and we will see next—played one here.

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Beyond these two sly and indirect critiques, Derrida’s direct criticism of Deleuze’s understanding of the animal is based on a few lines from Différence et répétition, in which Deleuze says that, “La bêtise n’est pas l’animalité. L’animal est garanti par des formes spécifiques qui l’empêchent d’être ‘bête’” (196). As described further by Deleuze in the same passage (and quoted by Derrida in his seminar), “La bêtise n’est pas le fond ni l’individu, mais bien ce rapport où l’individuation fait monter le fond sans pouvoir lui donner forme (il monte à travers le Je, pénétrant au plus profond dans la possibilité de la pensée, constituant le non-reconnu de toute récognition)” (197-98). Derrida’s criticism of this conception of “bêtise” is twofold. First, he criticizes the idea that animals do not have a relation or rapport with this fond : “‘Les animaux sont en quelque sorte prémunis contre ce fond, par leurs formes explicites.’ D’abord, s’ils sont ainsi prémunis, c’est qu’ils sont bien en rapport, dans quelque rapport, avec ce fond et sous la menace de ce fond” ( Bête 244, emph. Derrida’s). Second, he considers the possibility that humans can also—since they too have “forms of explicit individuation,” like animals—protect themselves against the bottomless fond (“le fond sans fond”), and thus could also avoid “la bêtise pure” (245). Ultimately, for him, what Deleuze does “c’est reconnaître que la bêtise est chose du Moi ou du Je, et c’est ne pas nommer quelque chose comme une forme de vie psychique (qu’on l’appelle fond ou non) qui n’ait pas la figure du Je Moi” (246). But is that really what Deleuze is doing? Has Derrida understood well Deleuze’s development of “bêtise” in Différence et répétition , or has he said something “that is close to what Deleuze says, but that is not exactly what Deleuze says” (163, emph. Stiegler’s)? As Stiegler points out in his critique of Derrida’s understanding of Deleuze’s notion of “bêtise,” “It is here completely impossible to follow Deleuze’s reasoning without referring in detail to the Simondonian philosophy of individuation—which Derrida seems totally to ignore. The ‘explicit’ forms that species form (as ‘taking form’) are the processes of vital individuation of which the ‘concrete’ forms consist in processes of specification” (164-65, emph. Stiegler’s). Derrida complains that Deleuze’s vocabulary and notions here are not enough to give a “critère assuré pour poser aussi nettement que ‘la bêtise n’est pas l’animalité’ et que l’homme seul s’y expose” (Bête 245). However, as Stiegler points out, by ignoring the Simondonian context of Deleuze’s argumentation, Derrida fails to recognize that “formes spécifiques” refers to “species,” not to any kind of “form of specific individuation.”2 At the same time, he fails to acknowledge that Deleuze never said that the animal does not have a relation to the fond or ground, just that its existence as a species prevented it from being “bête,” which does not mean to prevent it from having a relation to the ground, but from being in the special kind of relation where “individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form” (Deleuze qtd.

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in Stiegler 162). Thus, if Derrida’s biggest criticism applies to Deleuze’s lack of development of a “form of psychic life” that does not have the figure of the Je Moi, what kind of psychic figure is Derrida conceiving here, both for the Je Moi and for the nonhuman one? What does he understand by “psychic figure,” and how much of the reflective traits of human consciousness (conscious or not) is he projecting onto the non-human? Let us go slowly. If, according to Deleuze, stupidity or “bêtise” is “neither the ground nor the individual [ le fond ni l’individu ], but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form” (197), what kind of relation is this one? The exact passage from Deleuze that Derrida quotes is the following: Or les animaux sont en quelque sorte prémunis contre ce fond, par leurs formes explicites. Il n’en est pas de même pour le Je et le Moi, minés par les champs d’individuation qui les travaillent, sans défense contre une montée du fond qui leur tend un miroir difforme ou déformant, et où toutes les formes maintenant pensées se dissolvent. La bêtise n’est pas le fond ni l’individu, mais bien ce rapport où l’individuation fait monter le fond sans pouvoir lui donner forme (il monte à travers le Je, pénétrant au plus profond dans la possibilité de la pensée, constituant le non-reconnu de toute récognition). (197-98)

The rising of the ground is not just a psychic or ontological telluric movement; the ground or “fond” is not only what allows the forms in the foreground to appear. The ground or fond can also take the form of a mirror, a “difforme ou déformant” mirror that, in the traps of its narcissistic reflection, in the defenselessness of an I or Moi constituted as a purely reflective instance, dissolves all thought forms in the liquefaction of their reflection. This is the reason why, if we continue reading the same paragraph in Différence et répétition, this special kind of relation to the ground that Deleuze calls stupidity or bêtise, constituted as it is through the trap of a narcissistic relation, appears as the possible origin of melancholia and all its related terrors: Tout devient violence sur ce fond passif. Attaque, sur ce fond digestif. Là s’opère le sabbat de la bêtise et de la méchanceté. Peut-être est-ce l’origine de la mélancolie qui pèse sur les plus belles figures de l’homme: le pressentiment d’une hideur propre au visage humain, d’une montée de la bêtise, d’une déformation dans le mal, d’une réflexion dans la folie. Car du point de vue de la philosophie de la nature, la folie surgit au point où l’individu se réfléchit dans ce fond libre, et par conséquent, par suite, la bêtise dans la bêtise, la cruauté dans la cruauté, et ne peut plus se supporter. (198)

I have implied above that I agree with Stiegler when he writes that Derrida did not understand Deleuze’s development of “bêtise” in Différence et répétition . But

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beyond this misunderstanding (which arises from ignoring Deleuze’s use of Simondonian philosophy and, I believe, from a rash attempt to differentiate his own project of examining the question of the animal and the human from Deleuze and Guattari’s), there is also the possibility that a part of Derrida—consciously, unconsciously, both, or neither—understood this bêtise very well, especially if we consider how “bêtise” and “stupidity” have their condition of possibility through a narcissistic trap. For example, when we look at his criticism of Deleuze’s idea that the animal is “protected” against the fond or background, we see that even in this somewhat blind criticism Derrida understood—and thus agreed with Deleuze—that the relation to the background or fond that constitutes “bêtise” is always connected to a narcissistic anxiety, to an abysmal existential anxiety that he then tries to share with some—if not all—animals: “Et d’ailleurs, qui n’est tenté de percevoir chez, disons, tant d’animaux, un rapport au fond sans fond, un rapport plus fascinant et fasciné, inquiet, angoissé, au moins aussi abyssal que chez l’homme, et, même dans ce qui les en prémunirait ainsi, une proximité toujours pressante, obsédante, menaçante, justement du fond contre lequel — mais comme les humains — les animaux se prémuniraient?” ( Bête 244). What are these fascinating and fascinated, anxious, anguished animals Derrida speaks of, these idiomatic Derridean animals that have such an anxious and obsessive relation to the ground? How many are they? But perhaps the most important question is: can they be separated, completely detached from Derrida himself? Or can we see them only through—and as—his texts? But in order to see what kind of animals they are, and especially to consider them as Derrida wanted Deleuze to consider animals, not through the human, but “in themselves,” don’t we have to go outside of Derrida himself, to look at his own series of “becoming animal” to understand these animals and how he appropriated them? After all, this dream of an infinite appropriation of them is one of his confessions within L’animal : “J’avoue ainsi la vieille obsession d’un bestiaire personnel et quelque peu paradisiaque. Elle s’annonça très tôt: projet fou de constituer tout ce qu’on pense ou écrit en zoosphère, le rêve d’une hospitalité absolue ou d’une appropriation infinie” (60). Let us look at this bestiary. ccording to Derrida, through the process of his own writing, as his scene of writing kept developing and changing throughout his life, more and more animal figures started accumulating. The more auto-biographical his texts became, the more animals appeared: “Mes figures animales s’accumulent, elles gagnent en insistance ou en visibilité, elles s’agitent, grouillent, se mobilisent et se motivent, elles se meuvent et s’émeuvent davantage à mesure que mes textes deviennent plus visiblement autobiographiques” (L’animal 58). These animals appeared throughout Derrida’s work as his

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own autobiography. In other words, these animal figures are the traits themselves that are supposed to make us recognize his texts as autobiographical; they are his signature. And what is more, he adds, in their inscription as traits of his autobiography—of the autobiographical and, thus, of the narcissistic dimension of his theory and philosophical writing—“presque tous ces animaux sont accueillis, de façon de plus en plus délibérée, à l’ouverture de la différence sexuelle. Plus précisément des différences sexuelles” (59, emph. Derrida’s). Thus, we must ask, what kind of animals are these and, if they are the traits, or—we could be tempted to say—the symptoms of Derrida’s auto-biographical philosophy, of his way of philosophizing through his own autobiographical inscription, what kind of relation did he have with them, especially when he received these animal figures in “the opening of sexual differences”? According to him, since the beginning (around 1968) these animals or animalfigures were not simple or strictly just animals, they appeared “en un lieu où le démonique, le malin, voire le malin génie n’est pas sans affinité avec la bête: une bête maligne, donc, perverse, à la fois innocente, rusée et maléfique” ( L’animal 63). Through their position or the space of their incarnation, the Derridean animals were always part of a thinking machine that questioned philosophy from both the inside and the outside, but also that traced the biographical traits of Derrida himself, starting with his own determination of sexual difference. In other words, these animals, as animal figures, were never distinct and separate from Derrida. Just as he, writing his auto-biography through them, was never a completely distinct subject separate from these animal figures. Both Derrida and these animal figures existed only—had their condition of appearance—through their own mutual becoming, that is to say, through a series of becoming-animal of the same kind that Deleuze and Guattari described: a becoming that is not a resemblance3 (Derrida looking like a worm, a cat, a hedgehog); a molecular or viral4 becoming that questions notions of family, profession, conjugality; a becoming that always includes a malefic or demonic choice, and a preferred individual (Derrida the chosen one, 5 the “génie malin,” or “his” cat); a becoming through the machines of war of deconstruction; a becoming that receives and inscribes its animal figures in the opening of sexual difference, recreating a nonhuman sexuality; and, finally, a becoming that deterritorializes and thus hinders any possible re-appropriation of the animals, even one done by Derrida himself: Tout y est: un devenir-animal, qui ne se contente pas de passer par la ressemblance, auquel la ressemblance ferait plutôt obstacle ou arrêt, — un devenir-moléculaire [. . .] qui mine les grandes puissances molaires, famille, profession, conjugalité, — un choix maléfique, puisqu’il y a un “préféré” [. . .] et une sorte de contrat d’alliance, de pacte affreux avec le

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préféré, — l’instauration d’un agencement, machine de guerre ou machine criminelle, qui peut aller jusqu’à l’auto-destruction, — une circulation d’affects impersonnels, un courant alternatif, qui bouleverse les projets signifiants comme les sentiments subjectifs, et constitue une sexualité non humaine, — une irrésistible déterritorialisation, qui annule d’avance les tentatives de reterritorialisation œdipienne, conjugale ou professionnelle. (Deleuze and Guattari 285)

All that is necessary for a becoming-animal is here, and something else. The difference between the Deleuzian and the Derridean animal is simple: it lies in the name. Let us not forget that these animal figures are traits or traces of Derrida’s own autobiography. According to him, each of them is thus not only a mark signifying his life, but also his eventual—and now passed—death. In front of the cat that looks at him while becoming also his own mirror, at the same time as Derrida reflects infinitely on who is reflecting—following, being—whom (qui suit qui?), he remembers that the cat has a name, and that this name is not only a trait that will survive the cat, but especially a trait that will survive him. Henceforth the cat becomes an auto-bio-thanato-graphical trait signifying Derrida’s own death: “Rien ne pourra jamais lever en moi la certitude qu’il s’agit là d’une existence rebelle à tout concept. Et d’une existence mortelle, car dès lors qu’il a un nom, son nom lui survit déjà. Il signe sa disparition possible. La mienne aussi.” However, the fact that the name could signify this death does not mean that it has to signify it. Of the becoming that the cat and Derrida compose, we could say, borrowing Deleuze’s words, “le nom propre ne désigne pas un sujet, mais quelque chose qui se passe, au moins entre deux termes qui ne sont pas des sujets, mais des agents, des éléments” (Deleuze and Parnet 65). In other words, if the animal or animal figures are auto-biographical, this does not mean that their life, the “bio” of their traces, must be limited to the “autos” of the self with whom they become. The “life” of every becoming of a writer, or what constitutes her or his style, must not necessarily be enclosed in itself. Through its different becomings all writing, even auto-biographical writing, must have its end outside of itself. The life of writing becomes death as soon as it is personal: “C’est à la fois que le charme donne à la vie une puissance non personnelle, supérieure aux individus, et que le style donne à l’écriture une fin extérieure, qui déborde l’écrit. Et c’est la même chose: l’écriture n’a pas sa fin en soi-même, précisément parce que la vie n’est pas quelque chose de personnel. L’écriture a pour seule fin la vie, à travers les combinaisons qu’elle tire” (12, emph. mine).

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started this essay by expressing the desire that I could include, if the exhibition Mémoires d’aveugle were ever to happen again, Balthus’s Le chat au miroir I (but also II and III ) within the paintings that Derrida selected. It is interesting to note, given not only the late insistence that Derrida presented on the question of the animal, but also his statements in L’animal regarding how his autobiography has been constituted by the figures of animals, how within this collection that presents, in a way, his own self-portrait, there are very few images that include animals. What is more, the only instance in which the text of Mémoires d’aveugle actually focuses on one of these animals is very brief, when one of the narrative voices (this text is written, as other texts of Derrida, in a sort of dialogue) describes the conversion of Saint Paul and some of the paintings that portray it. In Derrida’s description and narration, this conversion engages the question of election, of the “preferred one,” but with regards to the animal present (Saint Paul’s horse), the relation human-animal is determined solely by the human and by what this one can perceive. Here is the passage:

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— Each time a divine punishment is cast down upon sight in order to signify the mystery of election, the blind become witnesses to the faith. An inner conversion at first seems to transfigure light itself. Conversion of the inside, conversion on the inside: in order to enlighten the spiritual sky on the inside, the divine light creates darkness in the earthly sky on the outside. This veil between two lights is the experience of bedazzlement, the very bedazzlement that, for example, knocks Paul to the ground on the road to Damascus. A conversion of the light literally bowls him over. Oftentimes his horse is also thrown violently to the ground, bowled over or knocked to the ground in the same fall, its eyes sometimes turned like its master’s toward the blinding source of the light or the divine word. In Caravaggio’s painting (Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo), only the horse remains standing. Lying outstretched on the ground, eyes closed, arms open and reaching up toward the sky, Paul is turned toward the light that bowled him over. The brightness seems to fall upon him as if it were reflected by the animal itself. ( Memoirs 112)

When the animal is not looking also toward the same light that is blinding the human—becoming blind with him too, we might infer—it is, like in Caravaggio’s version, just standing there, serving as a mirror—like Derrida’s cat—for Saint Paul to receive the reflected light from above, the light of his conversion. The animal here does not see anything or, if it sees something, it does not matter to Saint Paul who cannot see the animal seeing him. The only thing the converted one sees now is the light; that this light comes to him reflected through the animal or not does not matter to him. Here, if there is any possibility of a becoming, or of an auto-biographical trait with the figure of the animal, it is immediately reabsorbed, re-appropriated

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through the confession, as the confession itself. And what is more crucial here, if we are trying to follow the traces of the animal-figures that signify Derrida’s autobiography within his own work, is that, according to the text, this confession would have to represent the model of all self-portraits, of anybody—Derrida included— who, making an autobiographical trait or trace, says “mine”: One can bet that Paul’s confession, the self-portrait of this mad light, will have come to represent the model of the self-portrait, the one that concerns us here in its very ruin. . . — You mean yours? — Anyone’s—anyone among us, in our culture, who says “mine.” [. . .] In Christian culture there is no self-portrait without confession. The author of the self-portrait does not show himself; he does not teach anything to God, who knows everything in advance (as Augustine never ceases to recall). The self-portraitist thus does not lead one to knowledge , he admits a fault and asks for forgiveness. He “makes” truth, to use Augustine’s words, he makes [ fait ] the light of this narrative, throws light on it, in order to make the love of God grow within him, “for love of your love.” (117, emph. Derrida’s)

As we know, there are different ways of throwing light, of making the light of a narrative. It is true that, within the Christian tradition, when a human and an animal are together and a light appears, this might be the light of God choosing one of them in order for him or her to confess, and thus to make others confess to this same faith. But even within our Christian and/or monotheistic traditions, this is not the only possibility. A human and an animal may witness the light of day as a different shinning or unveiling: as an apocalypse. As a matter of fact, in our tradition, when the figure of the animal appears within or next to any kind of light, we must always be careful. This figure—Derrida says—is always double. It might incarnate absolute innocence, the inability to do harm, or all the opposite, pure or radical evil: “La question du mal, et du mal radical, paraît inséparable de la double figure traditionnelle animale, soit qu’elle incarne l’innocence, l’incapacité d’une volonté maligne, soit au contraire celle du démonique, du satanique, de l’apocalyptique” (L’animal 111). Is there the possibility then of a self-portrait confessing such a conversion, such a light, of a confession admitting fault, and perhaps even also asking for forgiveness, but without regretting the narcissistic exhibition that confessing implies? To conclude, let us look briefly at another confession, a plastic confession of the animal called Balthus, since, according to Derrida, the “peintre” is “une autre sorte d’animal et de chien dont le langage est privé de mots” (L’animal 156-57). Let me present what would be my last wishful addition to the series of self-portraits of Derrida’s Mémoires d’aveugle: Balthus’s La chambre (1952-54). Through the analogies that we have

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already seen between Derrida’s scene in L’animal (and his other works) and the other paintings of Balthus, my claim is that this painting presents us with some of the nonrecognized possibilities within Derrida’s reflection on the animal, especially with regards to the relation between the animal, gods, and demons. To put it simply: La chambre is the non-recognized and perhaps non-recognizable image of Derrida’s narcissistic attempt to recognize the animal looking at him. The cat inhabits La chambre like Le chat au miroir, although this time it is not looking at the woman. The woman is not looking at the cat either. As a matter of fact, she is not looking anywhere, her eyes are as dark as the background; what is more, in the shadows they are part of the background. What the cat is looking at is a short figure who is opening up the curtains in order for us, as viewers—and perhaps also for the cat—to look at the naked, exposed body of the woman. This short figure is as ambiguous as its movement. We do not know if it is a child or a dwarf, a “natural monster” or an unnatural one. We do not know either if the reason it is exposing the body is for somebody outside to see it, or for the cat, him or herself. Here is Pierre Klossowski’s description of the painting: The light of day is cast upon the victim, offered and thrown back on a chaise longue: is this an orgasm following a rape? Or else nothing happened at all. The painting seems to be situated on the verge where “nothing happened” and “the irrevocable” are poised. The determined gesture of the figure pulling back the curtain is like an endless reiteration of the flagrante delicto of which the cat (belonging to the same species as the skirted dwarf) observes with some amazement, what consequences will the latter draw from what he is showing, other than a magnificent painting? (qtd. in Clair 328)

A crime, a rape, or perhaps nothing happened here. What kind of confession is this? And if it is a confession, to whom could it be ascribed? To Balthus, who painted it, to his brother Klossowski, who may have inspired it through his novel Roberte ce soir , or to the Franco-Germanic tradition that influenced both brothers? Or if we follow Derrida in his analysis of Saint Paul’s confession, could this one be also the confession of whoever, looking at it, says “mine”? That is to say, of whoever recognizes something— of one’s own self—in the image? And if we get to recognize ourselves in such a painting, in an image that includes such an undetermined violence, would this mean that we are recognizing in this way our own humanity or our own in- or a-humanity? Would this mean that we would be recognizing and confessing thus our own bêtise, especially taking into consideration that, as we have seen, “la bêtise n’est pas le fond ni l’individu, mais bien ce rapport où l’individuation fait monter le fond sans pouvoir lui donner forme (il monte à travers le Je, penetrant au plus profond dans la possibilité de

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la pensée, constituant le non-reconnu de tout recognition)” (Deleuze 197-98)? The background is broken by the light of day coming through. Nevertheless we still cannot recognize well what happened. It is not that we cannot give form to what we see. We cannot give form to what we think. This is not because the elements in the painting are unclear. They have been unveiled, and all of them are clear signs of what happened: “In the painting, her face and her hands are reddened. Not by flowing blood, but by the blush that surfaces beneath the skin, from the warmth given by pleasure.” However, “according to Balthus, his intention was not to express eroticism. / It is the spectator who, behaving like a voyeur, reads the various iconographic elements of the picture in that sense” (Monnier qtd. in Clair 328). In other words, through the narcissistic reflection that constitutes our “I” ( Je ), the special kind of relation to the background appears, reaching the deepest possibilities of thought, constituting the non-recognized of all recognition.

NOTES 1/ Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are mine. 2/ Stiegler explains further the relation between forms and individuation, according to the Simondonian logic developed by Deleuze, not only with regard to animals and humans, but also to plants and minerals: Derrida does not understand the meaning of the words fond, rapport and individuation as they are used in Différence and Répétition. That animals are “forewarned against this ground” does not mean for Deleuze that they are not in relation to this ground: it means that their relation to this ground passes through specific organizations, where the word “specific” means that which characterizes an animal species, as specific relations typical and determinate for this or that animal species, constituting as such “explicit forms,” that is, recognizable forms (including by the animals themselves as imago—which makes it possible for the locust to adopt its “gregarious” form, as Lacan says in “The Mirror Stage” [Lacan 77]) and describable forms, through which the preindividual fund from which they come individuates itself diversely and specifically—that is, at the level of the living group that constitutes a species—and without the isolated animal individual itself be ing affected by an indetermination. (164) 3/ The breaking away from any mimetic logic in the consideration of the relation human-animal is expressed by Derrida in L’animal . This is another instance in which we might wonder if he could have related more his own reflections on the “anhumain,” or the “divinanimalité,” with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming, especially in relation to sorcery and in opposition to the animals of the State and of myths: Cet au-dèla des partenaires, donc du duel spéculaire ou imaginaire, ne doit-il pas, pour rompre avec l’image et avec le semblable, se situer au moins dans un lieu d’altérité assez radicale pour qu’on doive y rompre avec toute identification d’une image de soi, avec tout vivant semblable, et donc avec toute fraternité ou toute proximité humaine, avec toute humanité? Ce lieu de l’Autre ne doit-il pas être an-humain? S’il en était bien ainsi, l’anhumain, la figure, au moins, de quelque divinanimalité, en un mot, et fût-elle pressentie au travers de l’homme, serait le référent quasi transcendantal, le fondement exclu, forclos, dénié, dompté, sacrifié de ce qu’il fonde, à savoir l’ordre symbolique, l’ordre humain, la loi, la justice. (181) 4/ “Tous les virus mort-vivants qui reviennent, indécis entre v ie et mort, entre animal et végétal, de partout obséder l’écriture” (L’animal 61).

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5/ “We the chosen of unhappiness” (“Circumfession” 125); “And I am interested by, interested in the selection or election of me, let us say Jacob, only by curiosity, not of me, for me or by me, but, as ought to go without saying, by the very thing, the other, then, which would have chosen, blessed or cursed me, chosen at birth” (276-77). WORKS CITED Clair, Jean, ed. Balthus. New York: Rizzoli, 2001. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF, 1976. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Champs essais, 1996. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille plateaux . Paris: Minuit, 1980. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Circumfession.” Jacques Derrida. By Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. vii-315. Print. _____ . L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006. Print. _____ . Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print. _____ . Séminaire. La bête et le souverain. Volume I (2001-2002). Paris: Galilée, 2008. Print. Stiegler, Bernard. “Doing and Saying Stupid Things in the Twentieth Century: Bêtise and Animality in Deleuze and Derrida.” Trans. Daniel Ross. Angelaki 18.1 (2013): 159-74. EBSCO Host. 29 Sep. 2014.

JAMES MARTELL is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at Lyon College. He is the co-editor of Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature. His two current projects are a book on Derrida and Beckett, and one on the relations between the plastic arts and twentiethcentury French philosophy.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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