Leonard Lawlor

Derrida wrote extensively on "the question of the animal." In particular, he challenged Heidegger's, Husserl's, and other philosophers' work on the subject, questioning their phenomenological criteria for distinguishing humans from animals. Examining a range of Derrida's writings, including his most recent _L'animal que donc je suis_, as well as _Aporias_, _Of Spirit_, _Rams_, and _Rogues_, Leonard Lawlor reconstructs a portrait of Derrida's views on animality and their intimate connection to his thinking on ethics, names and singularity, sovereignty, and the notion of a common world. Derrida believed that humans and animals cannot be substantially separated, yet neither do they form a continuous species. Instead, in his "staggered analogy," Derrida asserts that all living beings are weak and therefore capable of suffering. This controversial claim both refuted the notion that humans and animals possess autonomy and contradicted the assumption that they possess the trait of machinery. However, it does offer the foundation for an argument-which Lawlor brilliantly and passionately defines in his book-in which humans are able to will this weakness into a kind of unconditional hospitality. Humans are not strong enough to keep themselves separate from animals. In other words, we are too weak to keep animals from entering into our sphere. Lawlor's argument is a bold approach to remedying "the problem of the worst," or the complete extermination of life, which is fast becoming a reality

This article is the third part of a trilogy investigating the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. All three essays are inspired by Foucault’s diagnosis of our epoch in terms of biopower. They therefore aim at the creation of a new concept of life. In ‘Un Ecart Infime (Part III)’, I lay out Foucault’s analysis, from the first chapter of The Order of Things, of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas. By stressing what Foucault says about the ‘sagittal lines’ exiting the painting, one can show that that there are three major phases in Foucault’s analysis: locating the blind spot; multiplying the invisibility; and the diffraction of the multiplicity into singularities. More generally, we can see that Foucault’s analysis of the painting concerns the informal space in auto-affection; in other words, it concerns the ‘blind spot’ in the mirror relation, in the ‘psyché’. The blind spot in the ‘soul’ - and the ambiguity in the French word psyché between mirror and soul - is why we can say that Foucault’s analysis concerns life: being blind, life must be conceived as informal and unmappable. I show in the conclusion that the inability of mapping and of seeing this space in fact allows for the increase of power

This essay attempts to reflect on Bergson’s contribution to the reversal of Platonism. Heidegger, of course, had set the standard for reversing Platonism. Thus the question posed in this essay, following Heidegger, is: does Bergson manage not only to reverse Platonism but also to twist free of it. The answer presented here is that Bergson does twist free, which explains Deleuze’s persistent appropriations of Bergsonian thought. Memory in Bergson turns out to be not a memory of an idea, or even of the good, which is one, but a memory of multiplicity. Therefore Bergson’s memory is really, from a Platonistic standpoint, forgetfulness or, even, a counter-memory.