Responsabilità verso l’animale. Annotazioni a partire da Jacques Derrida

Abstract

On a background of the environmental issue, the article explores the philosophical position of Jacques Derrida concerning the problem of human responsibility towards the animal. The main theoretical stances on the animal are therefore examined in Derrida’s work, from Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference up to the posthumous text The animal that therefore I am. The question of the animal emerges as man’s otherness that, nevertheless, deeply solicits the human being. Here the concept of responsibility tends to align with the scheme of responsibility-towards-the-other as Autrui: the animal is an unattainable ground from which, however, we ourselves derive. On the other hand, there is the assumption, especially in the autobiographical Derridean texts, to consider a different type of responsibility, starting from the point that when we write, or think, it is the deep animality that acts on us, within a never resolved differential dynamic between activity and passivity. Consequently, it is the construction of ethics itself that must be totally rethought. In this case, responsibility assumes a relational feature, as constitutive reversibility and openness between man and animal. In conclusion, it is shown and stressed how these two models of responsibility towards the animal co-exist in Derrida, and that it could be useful to make them work together, in order to shape a different ethical thought of “complex responsibility” towards the animal: a thought that should not be crypto-anthropocentric, but not naively immanent either.