• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.50
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• pp.299-325
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• 2018

Humans have made a third person over a long history and differentiated them from each other. Discrimination of 'us' and 'them' has led Derrida to make works to look upon the human nature towards animal strangers. This study tries to examine upon the expansion of animal strangers by focusing on 'The Animal That Therefore I am.' Furthermore, the research asserts to pay more attention to animal strangers by looking at his works of how modern people think about animals in the current society. Derrida expresses his 'humiliation' that he felt when he faced his cat after a shower. This emotion brings up the topic that was neglected in the conventional wisdom and casts doubts on this. This emotion of humuliation is only felt by humans, and he explains this is one way of feeling like a 'human.' The researcher therefore focuses on the 'experiences of humans' and looks at the ambivalence of humans in culture and the irony in natural animals. This perspective criticizes Speciesism, which considers people other than oneself able to be suffered. This view also tried to escape anthro-pocentrism and looked at the animals on their own. This study examines current animal strangers with theories of Donna Haraway and Jane Goodal, and analyzes Derrida's artworks with Susan Sontag's philosophy. This aims to lead to a conclusion of how to reach an optimal relationship between human and animal. By focusing on Derrida, who has not been highlighted yet in this country, hopes to create effective communication between human and animal by explaining his artworks through new philosophy of animals.

• Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association
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• no.48
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• pp.5-50
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• 2012

In these days, we come across a growing interest in animals from various perspectives. Considering that the posthumanistic point of view forms the major stream of postmodern humanities, ethics and philosophies, this paper tries to study the liminality between human beings and animal as appear in postmodern plays. The cases of a middle-aged architect falling in love with a goat (The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee); An abandoned (human-)dog that encounters his old mistress under the moonlight (A leaseholder by Yoon Young-sun); Coexistence of men, dog, plants in a Country life (White Cherry by Bae Sam-sik); A Mutual sympathy between a swarm of bees and a woman dying of cancer(Bee by Bae Sam-sik) were discussed referring such concepts as 'Otherness' of Derrida, 'Becoming'of Deleuze, 'a bare life' of Agamben and ecological co-existence. In The Goat, the moment of Martin who happened to meet a goat's eyes in a suburbs can be paralleled with that of Derrida who one day found himself caught up with the gaze of a cat in the bathroom while he was naked. They shared the common experience in that they went through the ontological and mysterious abyss that rendered them to raise the question of "Who am I ?" In A leaseholder, a young woman returns to her hometown exhausted by the calculating human society and meet her old time (human-dog). This story reminds us of Agamben's werewolf, Levinas's dog Bobby and Derrida's Zootobiography. He, an abandoned pet, both excluded and included from human society, now appearing as a mysterious human-dog, welcomes, embraces, and comprehends his old mistress and exposes his individual remorses and passions as an animal-subject. In White Cherry, the author describes the coexistence of all the life-beings such as an old dog, a golden bell tree, the deceased daughter and even a fossil remains in a country life. Bee is a story of a beekeeping village where bees were leaving and disappearing. A swam of bees fly down on a woman who was dying of cancer. With physical and spiritual empathy the dying woman helps the swarm of bee to conduct a new birth and a new life.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.7-34
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• 2014

This essay explores how Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller encourage human's sympathetic relationship with the nonhuman animal-Other, paying attention to her posthumanist voices against anthropocentric mistreatment of animals which is inseparable from white Americans' environmental and racio-ethnic subjugation of nature and Natives in the colonialist history of the United States. As a way of dissolving the problematic anthropocentrism and embracing the animal-Other as a fellow creature, Silko employs and transforms Native American oral tradition in her own idiosyncratic posthumanist storytelling. In order to highlight the ethico-political examination of the animal issue in her storytelling, this essay refers to contemporary posthumanist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who are all in their own ways critically engaged with Western metaphysical anthropocentrism. Arguably, in a similar vein with the posthumanist critics, Silko disrupts the mischievous hierarchical opposition of humans/animals that have directly or obliquely warranted violence against the animal-Other. In order to demonstrate Silko's ethico-politicality concerning the animal issue, this essay inquires her critical perception of humans' misunderstanding (or misbehavior) toward animals in terms of the suffering and death of animals. Besides, Silko's posthumanist storytelling of the animal's gaze (as Derrida notes as an event of revealing human aporia and vulnerability) and "in-between" (as a reification of crossing the boundary of humans/animals) is discussed with the exemplification of Tayo's encounter with a mountain lion and a bear-man Shush. The posthumanist approach to thinking about the animal-Other in Ceremony and Storyteller would shed light on the ethico-political significances of Silko's storytelling in our time in peril of losing the tie between humans and nonhuman animals.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.79-101
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• 2010

In "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Derrida notices that he is being watched by his cat. He becomes ashamed of being naked in front of his cat. The sense of shame is a response to being reduced to the level of an animal. He is ashamed of being as naked as an animal. His next move is, therefore, to cover his nakedness from the gaze of his cat. By contrast, he realizes, the animal is not self-conscious of being naked and so does not shield its nudity. In a truer sense, then, the cat is not naked. Humans do not see animals for what they really are but what they project on them. Whereas the gap between man and animal is clearly identified by Derrida's philosophical discourse, the possibility of going beyond the gap can be suggested by fantasy stories in children's literature. Children's literature in Britain arose in the eighteenth century with the revival of traditional fairy tales and growth of literary fairy tales. Romanticism in the early nineteenth century contributed to opening up a new horizon for the concept of the child, in which the child is no longer defined as the object to be tamed and childhood imagination is glorified as a powerful means to reach the higher state, the spiritual origin prior to separation of Man from the 'thing-in-itself.' In The Wind in the Willows, animals talk and behave like humans. The anthropomorphic figuration of animals can be understood as a result of the one-sided projection of anthropocentric perspectives on animals rather than an interaction between humans and animals. Significant contradictions also emerge in this story, however, as traits particular to animals are vividly delineated even as the main didactic theme of good triumphing over evil reflects an anthropocentric projection on animals. An attempt to capture the true characteristics of animals and locate them in the text constitutes a remarkable achievement in The Wind in the Willows. This can be evaluated as an important step toward a more ecopocentric perspective on animals which appears in later children's fantasies like Charlotte's Web.