Zoopolitics

We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Derrida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human [le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rational animal, in opposition to the animal that would be neither political nor rational. It must, however, be noted right away that despite what might be called the animalistic tropism of Derridean deconstruction, it does not include a thesis maintaining the continuity between human and animal. If it is unquestionable that deconstruction refrains from making animality play a secondary or peripheral role in reflection on the political, and if it is also true that animality is in no way, with Derrida, the pretext for an inquiry concerning what distinguishes, in actually quite a traditional way, human from animal, then animality can no longer be for him the concept that it has always been, at heart, beckoning toward the establishment and institution of a border between the two, but rather one that comes to blur, to rework and accordingly to complexify the limits between them.