Volume 16, Issue 1, Spring 2019
Reading Derrida¡¯s The Beast and the Sovereign
John Llewelyn
Pages 141-159
https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil20192683
Singularisability, Plurality, and Community
The chief aim of this essay is to draw attention to how in Derrida¡¯s last seminars the hyphenation ¡°life-death¡± serves as a key to understanding the force of the hyphenation in the expression ¡°animal-human¡± and how the work of sharing which it stands for there differs from the exclusively separative work for which we might employ the oblique stroke or slash, as in ¡°animal/human¡± and ¡°life/death.¡± If we wonder whether and how the hyphen and the oblique stroke share each other¡¯s company, it might occur to us that a name for this relation of sharing could be John Duns Scotus¡¯s distinctio formalis understood in the light of his haecceitas respelled as ecce-itas by Gerald Manley Hopkins.