Chris Danta

Acrobats and Ascetics

In his 2009 work You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk proposes an anthropology of the acrobat. ‘Whoever looks for humans will find ascetics,’ Sloterdijk declares programmatically at one point, ‘and whoever observes ascetics will discover acrobats.’ This essay shows that the topological shift Sloterdijk traces in You Must Change Your Life from asceticism to acrobatics indicates a shift from a religious to a decidedly creaturely experience of verticality. The acrobat, for Sloterdijk, figures the nonchalance with which humans conquer the downward force of gravity. But in developing this vertical metaphor of the human-as-acrobat, Sloterdijk ignores what the author wants to call the topology of affect – the sense in which humans respond emotionally to their topological orientation. To demonstrate Sloterdijk’s insensitivity to the emotional implications of the vertical orientation of humans, the author re-examines two of the main sources of his acrobat metaphor: the tightrope walker scene in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Franz Kafka’s 1924 short story about an eccentric trapeze artist, ‘First Sorrow’. When we re-examine these texts in light of their treatment of verticality, we notice that they are actually both about the physical, metaphysical and emotional experience of falling.

Introduction - Fabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign

Jacques Derrida’s lectures on La bete et le souverain, given at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and its opposition and overlap with bestiality. Published in two volumes by Editions Galilee, and in English translation by the University of Chicago Press, they touch on familiar themes and concepts from Derrida’s broader work, such as sexual difference, the nature of reason, decision and responsibility, the religious basis of humanism and fraternalism and the community of fellows. Yet most centrally, they revolve around the question of the bete in Western thinking about sovereignty and humanity, making use of the discourse of the beast and of fabulous animals to deconstruct the “onto-theologico-political structure of sovereignty” (B&S I 46).1 Derrida’s seminar swarms with fabled creatures from the Bible and La Fontaine, as well as from Hobbes, Machiavelli and Schmitt. Derrida traces the figure of the wolf in an impressive range of sources. He takes on Deleuze’s studious sarcasm and Agamben’s scholarly tics. He reads the poetry of Celan and Lawrence, the novels of Valery and Defoe, prompting his auditors and readers to confront the philosophical ramifications of the richly fraught pairing of sovereignty and bestiality. In the second year of the course, he brings together two very different texts—Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—around themes of world, solitude and encirclement. Musing obsessively on Celan’s line “There is no world, there are only islands,” he once more zeroes in on Heidegger’s famous claim that animals are poor in world, both having and not having world yet lacking properly human access to beings as such.2 Derrida’s recourse to the fable and to the deconstructive power of the fabulous animal in The Beast & the Sovereign might surprise some of his readers, especially those familiar with his book The Animal That Therefore

DERRIDA AND THE TEST OF SECRECY

Jacques Derrida reads the biblical story of Genesis 22, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, as a test of secrecy. Derrida follows Kierkegaard in presuming that Abraham not only does not but also cannot tell anyone about what God has commanded him to do. For Derrida, moreover, Abraham comes to embody the absolute right to non-response or secrecy constituting the modern institution of literature. In this essay, I criticize Derridas highly Kierkegaardian account of Genesis 22 for underplaying the involvement of Isaac and the ram in the sacrifice. By seeing how Derrida ignores the two victims of the sacrifice, we can see how both Genesis 22 and literature are inadequately described as tests of secrecy.