[DOWNLOAD] "That "Incredible Unanimal/Mankind": Jacques Derrida, E.E. Cummings and a Grasshopper *." by Journal of Literary Studies # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: That "Incredible Unanimal/Mankind": Jacques Derrida, E.E. Cummings and a Grasshopper *.
- Author : Journal of Literary Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 255 KB
Description
Summary Jacques Derrida does not take account of recent discoveries about communication within the animal kingdom. This philosopher shifts the entire debate on whether animals respond, or not, into a complex deconstructive zone. He ignores the fact that animals communicate--including Koko the gorilla and the ants--and this goes together with a couple of uncomfortable complications in his work when it comes to a zoological identity. These complications involve deconstruction on the whole, and in particular Derrida's long recent essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)"; this article focuses on this essay. One important complication which the article discusses briefly and in some detail is that Derrida unnecessarily undermines the potential of language to describe animals. Deconstruction remains"scriptive" when it should be "descriptive"; that is, when it should un-write to the greatest possible degree in order to write (comprehensively and reciprocally into the actuality of) an animal. The article shows, for instance, that Derrida's manner of describing an echidna disappoints. It obscures the descriptive labours of language such as stripping and organising itself outwardly, in the direction of this remarkable creature. That is, it fails to write in such a manner that the actuality of the creature influences and resonates within the writing. And a describing zoological identity has flourished prior to deconstruction, in the most (inter)active and open-ended sense in modernist poetry, for example in E.E. Cummings's grasshopper poem. This article reads this poem, focusing on the full and active describing qualities within it. For instance, it shows how the iconistic centre and a framing of the significant shortcomings of language combine to set the grasshopper free (to let it go, or abandon it in the positive sense) through language; a cross-stitching occurs in which language is also free, finally, to render an adequate and dynamic description of an actual animal. With these arguments and this comparison in hand, the article comes to a provisional conclusion that perhaps deconstruction, despite its important illuminations, ultimately does not render a satisfactory zoological semiosis, while the past has already provided us with clarifying and exciting salient points of this ongoing and imperative manner of making signs.