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The Animal Mirrors:
The Human/Animal Divide
in Derrida and Deleuze
JAMES MARTELL
I
f I could add an image to the
collection of paintings and
drawings that Derrida chose
for the exhibit Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines that he curated at the
Louvre in 1991, it would have been the painting of Balthus, Le chat au miroir I. Of
course, this is a desire or a whim that appears “after the fact” since, as you have prob-
ably already guessed, what makes me believe that this image is a perfect self-portrait of
Derrida (and especially of his acknowledged blindness) is the famous scene he
describes in his 2006 book, L’animal que donc je suis. While in summary this scene may
seem simple and just loosely analogous to Balthus’s painting—“Derrida is seen naked
in his bathroom or bedroom by a cat”—one of my claims in this essay is that, if we fol-
low the development of the scene as Derrida describes it (and take into consideration
Starting with an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s most intimate encounter with an animal by way of a similar scene
in Balthus’s paintings, this essay examines Derrida’s criticism of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the human-
animal relation and proposes a way of conceiving the animal-human encounter beyond the traps of narcissism.
L’écrivain est un sorcier parce qu’il vit l’animal comme
la seule population devant laquelle il est responsable
en droit.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux