Animal Question in Deconstruction

Book excerpt: Explores the political and poetic understanding of the deconstruction of the 'animal question'How does deconstruction understand relations between humans and other animals? This collection of essays reveals that across Jacques Derrida's work as a whole, as well as that of Helene Cixous and Nicholas Royle, deconstruction has always addressed questions about animality. In this collection, for example, Cixous asks after human intervention between the death of a wild bird and the predation of a domestic cat. Kelly Oliver pursues Derrida's analysis of what or whose gaze is at stake when a King oversees the autopsy of an elephant. Royle examines in what sense the vulnerable impressions made by the tunnelling of a mole might be thought of as the traces of a text. Re-examining how we relate to other animals has far-reaching implications for how we think of ourselves. Across this collection authors bring to attention the politics and the ethics of a less anthropocentric world. Even when this world is grasped