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The subjugation of difference by identity carries with it additional subjugation: binaries, where one side is favoured over the other (e.g., male/female). The line of a binary is effected by a disavowal: what characterizes the negative side is essential to the positive side (e.g., emotion over reason is ascribed to females — yet males constantly affirm their superiority through aggressivity).
To illustrate, Derrida shows that what we take as characteristic of writing, which is seen as inferior to the full presence of speech (i.e., the presence of the speaker in distinction from the absence of the writer), is essential to speech. Its deferral, iterability, and différance (i.e., differential deferral)—where each term refers to another term, deriving its sense from how it differs from them and, thus, its presence is always deferred—are indicative of speech never having had full presence.[1]
However, Derrida’s move, as Lawlor traces out,[2] is not only an attempt at a Nietzschean revaluation of the binary, but, also, to show that the more originary sense of a binary is the ‘negative’ side: writing[3] is more originary than the split between writing/speech.
This revaluation cuts through attempts to maintain the alleged purity of a binary: as example of the latter, non-human animals are sacrificed in countless ways to show their inferiority to humans. They’re ‘shown’ as closed to beings as such, open only to stimuli. The ‘evidence,’ then, justifies how we treat them.
For example, Heidegger marshals evidence without questioning the conditions under which such evidence can become evidence for the matter.[4] With that said, any behaviour of non-human animals validates Heidegger’s interpretation because his interpretation underlies all behaviour (and ‘behaviour’ for him is always animalistic). He takes all non-human animals as ontologically the same: i.e., what Derrida calls, l’animot.[5]
Binaries reveal something about our thinking: conceptually, ontologically, and ethically. Reflect on what ours say about us (where the first term is prioritized over the second):
male/female; white/racialized; cis-/transgender; form/content; form/matter; essence/accident; active/passive; strength/passivity; culture/nature; light/dark; white/black; dry/damp; life/death; straight/bent; human/animal; animal/plant; plant/the inanimate; organic/inorganic.[6]
In popular narratives and stories, light triumphs over dark. This is at play in how we think about conflicts, wars, and struggles, and peace, love, community, and inclusion. In fantasy narratives, for example, there are orcs — unlike us in key respects. This fantasy reveals our orientation towards enemies: our enemies embody the darkness that we, as light, must eradicate. We make our enemies orcs. (We throw out to the other what more originarily characterises ourselves: i.e., dehumanizing violence.) We thereby miss both how we and they are, exacerbating and extending indefinitely the need for conflict.
Stories codify our world, reinforce views, and enable us to see certain outlines while other possibilities can fall from our grasp.
Being responsive means responding to the stories we tell, the binaries that have been set up for us, and the implicit assumptions forming the backdrop of our behaviour. We need to call these into question when they occlude honest and sensitive ways of being and ways of responding to other beings.
[1] Derrida, Of Grammatology.
[2] Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), in particular p. 28–30.
[3] Or arche-writing. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 56, 69, 71, 86, 97–8, 159, 166–7.
[4] Heidegger, FCM, p. 241–6, 250–2.
[5] In French, Derrida’s coined word l’animot sounds exactly like the word for the plural of animal (animaux) yet while singularizing it (le; l’): we hear, jarringly, the singularization in the plural. In addition, while animot sounds like animaux, l’animot is spelled differently, so as to combine the words for animal (animal) and word (mot). Derrida’s point is at least threefold. First, it draws our attention to the discrepancy between those in the Western tradition (e.g., Heidegger) who’ve consistently spoken of ‘animals’ (as one large category that lacks something in relation to humans) but who mean ‘the animal’ (and, thus, try to capture diverse kinds of beings from emu to whale under one concept). Second, it implies the suppressed violence and thus pain (mal, in French) done through the concept of ‘the animal’ as loss of singularity (l’animal, the singular animal, is subsumed within the pluralization as l’animaux, and we thus cover over the suffix –mal). Third, it shows that ‘the animal’ is constructed as a word, a category that we who call ourselves humans have created. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 23–4, 31, 34, 37, 40–1, 47–8.
[6] Binary-based thinking is more complex. For example, in the nature/culture binary, while culture is taken as superior to nature, it’s nonetheless the case that some cultures are taken as natural. These cultures can be regarded as superior precisely because they’re natural. This is also why heterosexuality or cisnormativity are insisted on above others. – The binaries operate as a mesh, a net, with interlocking dependencies, interlocking valuations. At times, this net has been called the patriarchy.