ENGL 491C

Senior Honours Seminar - Theory (3 credits)

Instructor: Lorraine Weir
Section: 003
Term: 1

The Animal That Therefore I Am: “Man” / “Animal” / Other in Derrida et al.

Taking Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) as our core text in this seminar, we will explore a foundational binary of Western philosophy — “Man” and “Animal” — through some of its contemporary iterations and transformations.  The overture to our discussion will be Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and an extract from Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. Then we will proceed to Derrida and some of his interlocutors, including Heidegger and Lacan.  The coda of our seminar will consist of a selection of theoretical texts concerned  with alterity whether in terms of the racialized and/or gendered Subject.  Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, and Temple Grandin will assist us with this part of our inquiry, bringing us from Derrida to ethology and Postcolonial theory.

Texts:

• Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
• Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am
• Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings
• Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (selec.)
• Donna Haraway, When Species Meet
• Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation
• Coursepack (Nietzsche, Spivak et al.)