Human Studies (2005) 28: 317–334

C Springer 2005

“Another Insistence of Man”: Prolegomena to the Question of the

Animal in Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger

MATTHEW CALARCO
Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar,
VA 24595, E-mail: mcalarco@sbc.edu

Abstract. In recent years Derrida has devoted a considerable number of writings to address-
ing “the question of the animal,” and, more often than not, this question arises in a reading
of one of Heidegger’s texts. In order to appreciate more fully the stakes of Derrida’s posing
of this question in relation to Heidegger, in this essay I offer some prefatory remarks to the
question of the animal in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger. The essay opens with a careful
analysis of Derrida’s early essay “The Ends of Man,” in which Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Hu-
manism”’ is read in terms of the motif of man’s “proper.” Taking my point of departure from
this Derridean reading of Heidegger’s humanism, I return to Heidegger’s “Letter” in order to
uncover the manner in which Heidegger distinguishes man’s “proper” from what is “improper,”
namely, animality. This reading reveals that, while Heidegger offers a convincing account of
the limits of metaphysical humanism, this critical account nevertheless ends up uncritically re-
inforcing the anthropocentrism of this same tradition. My closing suggestion is that Derrida’s
rethinking of animality should be understood as an extended meditation on the various conse-
quences and effects of this dogmatic anthropocentrism in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian
thought.

1. The Logic of the Proper in Heidegger’s Humanism

In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes of the name of “man,”1 how it is given,

and what must be excluded from this name so that man is not confounded
with his other:

Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from
the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism,
infancy, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared
as a threat of death, and desired as access to life without differance. The
history of man calling himself man is the articulation of all these limits
among themselves. (1974: 244–5)

Without justification, but not without a certain provocation, I want to

isolate here the inscription of one of these limits, viz., the boundary drawn in
the delimitation of man from his animal other. In doing so, I am setting out
to approach “the question of the animal” as it is posed in Derrida’s reading
318 M. CALARCO

of Heidegger. Since this question contains within it a considerable number

of tasks for thought which are each in turn rather intricate and complicated,
my task in the present essay is simply to sketch out the barest preface to this
question.2
I shall begin with a reading of Derrida’s 1968 essay, “The Ends of Man,”3
in which the question of the name and limits of man in Heidegger’s thought
is raised explicitly. Readers of Derrida will no doubt recall the remarkable
opening preface to this essay in which the essential link between the philo-
sophical and the political is discussed, along with Derrida’s specific dating of
the writing of the essay (April-May 1968) and his outspoken political protest
against certain policies surrounding the Vietnam war. The essay’s governing
theme, the (mis)appropriation of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in France, is
also well known and does not need to be rehearsed here. But with the ques-
tion of the animal in mind, I want to reread the handful of pages devoted to
Heidegger’s humanism and the role that the motif of the proper of man plays in
this humanism. Of course, Derrida’s explicit concern in “The Ends of Man” is
not with the distinction between humanity and animality as such; his interest
belongs rather to what remains of humanism and the name of man in Heideg-
ger. So why begin with “The Ends of Man” if my aim is to understand the
place of the question of the animal in Derrida’s work? What I shall attempt
to argue here is that Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s humanism opens the
space for the possibility of disclosing an often overlooked thematic concern-
ing animality in Heidegger’s text – and it is this very conjunction, or rather
disjunction, of humanism and animality that Derrida will later interrogate at
more length in the name of the question of the animal. By carefully locating
the role and status of animality in Heidegger’s re-thinking of humanism, we
will thus be better prepared to understand what is at stake in those later texts
where Derrida explicitly raises the question of the animal.
Before this argument can be developed at more length, we need first to
turn our attention to the letter of the text of “The Ends of Man.” Opening
to the middle of the essay, under the section entitled “Reading Us [Nous
Lisant],” we find ourselves confronted straightaway with the question of
man. Derrida asks: What about the “we,” the humanity of “we” men in
Heidegger’s text? (1982: 123). As Derrida is quick to point out, this is by no
means a simple question since, within Heidegger’s text, it can only be raised
against the backdrop of a prior delimitation of humanism, one in which the
essential complicity of humanism and metaphysics has been disclosed. If the
question of the “we” is to be raised within Heidegger’s text, it cannot be a
matter of accusing Heidegger of simply falling back into the metaphysical
form of humanism that he, better than anyone else, has called into question.
In his “Letter on ‘Humanism,”’ Heidegger argues that humanism in both its
traditional and classical forms is metaphysical insofar as it grounds itself
in a determination of the Being of man without ever raising the question of
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 319

Being, either with respect to man or the beings over and against which man is
defined. Consequently, if there is in fact a new determination of man’s Being
in Heidegger’s text, it will likely be something other than a mere repetition
of one of the traditional metaphysical definitions.
In order to locate the question of man in Heidegger’s text with the rigor
with which he himself pursues it, one must think humanism otherwise, i.e.,
in relation to the thinking of the truth of Being. Derrida is perhaps the first
to pursue the consequences of Heidegger’s humanism on this terrain. His
means of gaining access to Heidegger’s humanism is through an examina-
tion of the various ways in which man and the thinking of Being maintain a
hold on one another (1982: 123–4). As Heidegger no longer allows himself
to define the “we” in terms of standard metaphysical determinations (e.g.,
animal rationale), what constitutes the “we” must be re-thought in terms of
the question of Being. This other thinking of man that finds its place along-
side the question of Being (Derrida will go so far as to call it a thinking
of the proper of man [le propre de l’homme]) occurs, according to Derrida,
by way of “a kind of magnetic attraction [un sorte d’aimantation]” (1982:
124).
With the modesty requisite for a project as large and involved as interro-
gating the relation between man and Being in Heidegger’s text, Derrida limits
himself merely to indicating some of the effects of this magnetization. These
indications are drawn from close readings of two key texts: the opening sec-
tions of Being and Time (1927) and the “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ (1942), two
works separated by several years and many substantive texts. While Derrida
readily acknowledges the complications and multiplications that occur be-
tween these two texts and beyond them, he nonetheless insists that there is no
simple turning from man to Being in Heidegger’s work in the years between
Being and Time and the “Letter.” Already in 1927, the existential analytic
of Dasein in Being and Time attempts to distance itself from the “man,” or
humanist subject, of metaphysics. And the “Letter,” for all of its professed
opposition to humanism in favor of a thought of the truth of Being, is still
governed throughout by another, (supposedly) non-metaphysical thought of
the proper of man. Thus, rather than a break or a turning, Derrida will attempt
to point up a continuity in Heidegger’s text, the constancy of a magnetic attrac-
tion which he suggests needs to be read in terms of the concept of proximity
(proximité) (1982: 124). The proximity in question concerns the proximity of
man, both in nearness to himself and to Being. It is in the play of this proximity
that Derrida will attempt to locate Heidegger’s other thought of man, of “we
men,” – in short, Heidegger’s humanism. Heidegger’s thinking of proximity,
a thought directed against a metaphysical humanism that has forgotten what
is closest to man, constitutes according to Derrida “another insistence of man
[une autre insistance de l’homme]” (1982: 124), another humanism, even as
it resists the name of humanism.
320 M. CALARCO

Concerning the opening sections of Being and Time, Derrida attempts to

flesh out the proximity that marks Dasein out as the exemplary entity for the
starting-point of the existential analytic. For Heidegger, the primary concern
in these opening pages is to work out the formal structure of the question
of Being and to determine the question’s ontical and ontological priority.
Regarding inquiry as such, Heidegger argues that every inquiry is guided in
advance by that which is sought out, which consequently implies that beings
with the ability to inquire always already have some minimal understanding of
Being. This pre-understanding of Being is what characterizes “us,” those who
are inquiring into the meaning of Being. We, the inquirers, will turn out to be
the exemplary beings for the starting-point of the existential analytic based in
part on this pre-understanding of Being and the ability to inquire. But Derrida
suspects that this very minimal determination of who “we” are, as simple
and unassuming as it might appear, nonetheless draws the existential analytic
back within the horizon of metaphysics. To understand this supposition, let
us look more closely at the three structural elements of the question of Being:
every question has that which is asked about, that which is interrogated, and
that which is to be found out through the asking. Concerning the question
of Being, what is asked about is Being, and that which is to be found out by
the asking is the meaning of Being – what, then, is to be interrogated here?
Clearly Being, but Being never exists apart from a being, an entity; hence it
is a matter of interrogating the Being of a particular being. But which being
to interrogate? Heidegger wonders if the starting-point is optional, or might
it be that some particular being has a priority here?
Derrida argues, in a move that appears rather forced upon first glance, that
the answer to this question is governed by the phenomenological principle of
presence. As we already know, Dasein is the exemplary entity chosen for the
starting point of the existential analytic – but is Dasein chosen based on pres-
ence? Derrida’s argument is that it is indeed a certain form of self-presence,
phenomenology’s “principle of principles,” that determines Dasein as the
specific entity to be interrogated. This self-presence takes the form of self-
proximity, the proximity of the questioning being to itself. In support of this
claim, Derrida cites the key passage from Being and Time where Heidegger
makes his argument for Dasein being the exemplary text for the working
out of the question of Being.4 But nowhere in this passage does Heidegger
mention any kind of proximity or presence to self – at least not by name. This
is not lost on Derrida, however, who immediately notes that the remains of
self-presence in the choice of Dasein are at work in a more subtle way. Two
points need to be made here in this regard. First, Heidegger says that the task
of the existential analytic is to make the inquirer, Dasein, “transparent” in its
Being. This reading will unfold in the form of a hermeneutics of unveiling
which, as Derrida notes, resembles (which is not to say reproduces) and
communicates with the classical metaphysical gesture of bringing something
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 321

to light, to consciousness, to knowledge – in short, to self-presence. Secondly,

Heidegger sometimes retains the name of “man” – the being who has always
been characterized by one form or another of self-presence – when speaking
of Dasein.5 According to Derrida, this reliance on the name of man, is the
“paleonymic guiding thread which ties the analytic of Dasein to the totality
of metaphysics’ traditional discourse” (1982: 127). Of course, Heidegger
is not unaware of this risk of falling back into the closure of metaphysics;
he knows he must avoid using the name “man” when speaking of Dasein so
that the existential analytic is not confused with a traditional metaphysics or
anthropology. And yet, despite this cognizance, he is nevertheless forced by
the language of metaphysics and, more importantly, by his own determination
of Dasein’s proper being (viz., the characteristics of being capable of making
inquiries and having a pre-understanding of Being, capacities that Heidegger
argues are open only to those beings called “human”) to make recourse to
the name of man. This is perhaps the point at which we can begin to see that
Heidegger clearly has nothing other than “human beings” in mind when he
speaks of Dasein. It is not that Dasein is simply equivalent to the “man” of
metaphysics; it is rather the case that, for Heidegger, only the being that re-
ceives this determination, the human being, is capable of Dasein. There is, for
example, no animal or plant Dasein. This reliance on the name of man gives
rise to one of Derrida’s more memorable lines of commentary: “We can see
then that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man [On
voit donc que le Dasein, s’il n’est pas l’homme, n’est pourtant pas autre chose
que l’homme]” (1982: 127). To reformulate this passage in a more explicit but
less elegant syntax, we could say that Dasein is not the man of metaphysics –
but that, nevertheless, Dasein cannot be found anywhere else than with human
beings.
If Derrida’s insistence on the motif of presence qua proximity as the or-
ganizing structure of Heidegger’s discourse still seems a bit strained or even
artificial, we need only read through a few more pages of Being and Time in
order to see that Heidegger himself understands proximity to be at stake in
the choice of Dasein as the exemplary entity for the Seinsfrage. In Section 5,
the proximity of Dasein to itself is explained in terms of what is close, indeed
that which is closest. Dasein is close to us, so close that we ourselves are
Dasein. This proximity, however, remains on an ontic level. Ontologically, the
Being of our Dasein remains what is farthest from us. Derrida suggests that
Heidegger’s thinking, both within and beyond Being and Time, occupies the
space between this (ontic) proximity and (ontological) distance in an attempt
to reduce the distance, i.e., in order to re-establish the magnetic attraction that
binds the essence of man to the thinking of Being.
If in formulating and choosing the exemplary entity for the question of
Being in Being and Time Heidegger is unable to avoid relying on the name
of man and his proper, what occurs when the question of Being is actually
322 M. CALARCO

raised against metaphysics and humanism itself, for example in the “Letter
on ‘Humanism”’? Does the thought of the truth of Being brought forth in that
text displace the name of man, or does it instead insist on a restoration of what
is proper to man? Heidegger’s circumscription of the essential co-belonging
of humanism and metaphysics in the “Letter” would seem to promise just
such a displacement. For Heidegger, metaphysics is defined by its inability to
ask the question concerning the truth of Being and the relation between this
truth and man’s essence (Heidegger, 1998: 246). Humanism thereby remains
metaphysical insofar as it “presupposes an interpretation of beings without
asking about the truth of being . . .” (1998: 245). Thus, the posing of the
question of the truth of Being to humanism and metaphysics would seem
to give rise to a different kind of thinking beyond or prior to metaphysical
humanism, one that gives a priority and privilege to Being itself, i.e., to (the)
Being (of beings), rather than Man.
But contrary to this rather customary reading of Heidegger’s “Letter,” Der-
rida argues that the thinking of the truth of Being is still related to man, is
of man. “Man and the name of man are not displaced in the question of Be-
ing such as it is put to metaphysics. Even less do they disappear” (Derrida,
1982: 128). Instead, what we find in the “Letter” according to Derrida is a
“reevaluation or revalorization of the essence and dignity of man” (ibid.).
Let us break this citation into two parts and consider in turn the reevaluation
of man’s essence and then his dignity. Heidegger’s “Letter” contests the ex-
tension of metaphysics and the technical understanding of thought inasmuch
as it threatens the essence of man (Heidegger, 1998: 242–3). This threat is
marked by the “widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language” and
man’s homelessness, in which “not only man but the essence of man stum-
bles aimlessly about” (1998: 258). Only a reinstatement of man’s essence can
counter this threat and homelessness. This occurs when man gains another
relation to language and speaking: “Before he speaks the human being must
first let himself be claimed again by Being . . .“ (1998: 243). In listening to
this claim, man’s essence and home will once more be bestowed upon him.
Even though this is a thinking that gives a priority to Being and not man,
Heidegger readily concedes that it is at the same time concerned with man
and his humanity.

But in the claim upon human beings, in the attempt to make humans ready
for this claim, is there not implied a concern about human beings? Where
else does ‘care’ tend but in the direction of bringing the human back to his
essence? What else does that in turn betoken but that man (homo) become
human (humanus)? Thus humanitas really does remain the concern of such
thinking. For this is humanism: meditating and caring, that human beings
be human and not inhumane, the ‘inhuman,’ that is outside their essence.
But in what does the humanity of the human being consist? It lies in his
essence. (1998: 243–4).
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 323

The restoration of man’s essence, as Derrida goes on to explain, coincides

with a restoration of man’s dignity in the form of a proximity to Being. This
dignity and proximity is found in man’s eksistence, or ecstatic inherence in the
truth of Being. In eksistence, man closes the ontological distance from Being
that characterizes ontic proximity by finding his way “once again into the
nearness of being” (1998: 243). And since Being is not a being, man’s saying
of Being can be accomplished only in metaphoric terms – hence we find “in
Heidegger’s discourse, the dominance of an entire metaphorics of proximity,
of simple and immediate presence, a metaphorics associating the proximity of
Being with the values of neighboring, shelter, house, service, guard, voice, and
listening” (Derrida, 1982: 130). The upshot of this metaphorics of proximity
is another thought of the proximity of man to Being and Being to man, one in
which “Being is essentially6 farther than all beings and is yet nearer to man
than every being . . .,” or as Heidegger also phrases it, “Being is the nearest”
(Heidegger, 1998: 252). Derrida reads this nearness of man and Being in
terms of the proper (le propre), a Latin-based vocabulary that translates and
transfers a series of German terms (eigen, eigentlich, eignen, Ereignis, etc.)
into the French idiom: “The near is the proper; the proper is the nearest [Le
proche, c’est le propre; le propre, c’est le plus proche] (propre, proprius).
Man is the proper of being [L’homme est le propre de l’être], which right near
to him whispers in his ear; Being is the proper of man, such is the truth that
speaks, such is the proposition which gives the there of the truth of Being
and the truth of man” (Derrida, 1982: 133). It is thus in ek-sistence that man
finds his most proper being. Heidegger writes: “Such standing in the clearing
of Being I call the ek-sistence of human beings. This way of Being is proper
only to the human being“ (Heidegger, 1998: 247).
Derrida closes his reading of the “Letter” by citing this passage from
Heidegger and footnoting his own writing on the “near, the proper, and the
erection of the ‘standing upright”’ in “La parole soufflé” and Of Grammatol-
ogy (Derrida, 1982: 133, n. 37). With this passage from Heidegger and these
latter texts from Derrida in mind, we might take this footnote to suggest the
following: for Derrida, what is at issue in Heidegger’s humanism is not simply
a thought of the co-propriety of man and Being in Ereignis, but also the manner
in which the delimitation of what is proper to man functions to exclude man’s
others from this propriety. Certainly, Derrida could not have failed to notice
Heidegger’s repeated insistence that eksistence is a mode of being proper only
to human beings. His thinking of the proper has been concerned with such
exclusions all along: “Proper is the name of the subject close to himself – who
is what he is – and abject the name of the object, the work, that has deviated
from me” (Derrida, 1978: 173).7 And although he does not foreground this
as an explicit theme in “The Ends of Man,” the fact that Heidegger’s limiting
of eksistence to man is carried out in a distinguishing of man from his animal
other is not likely to have escaped Derrida’s attention either, especially if we
324 M. CALARCO

recall this essay’s opening citation from Of Grammatology. We shall return to

this limit between man and animal momentarily.
Now if we concern ourselves with both of these senses of the proper (the
proper of man as a proximity to self and Being, and the proper of man as a
logic of exclusion), we could imagine at least two sorts of responses to Der-
rida’s reading of Heidegger’s humanism. One response might be to question
Derrida’s reductive reading of man’s proximity to self and Being in Ereignis
in terms of the proper. On this point most readers would readily concede that
the reading of Heidegger presented in “The Ends of Man” is to a certain ex-
tent violent and reductive. It is undoubtedly true, as Lacoue-Labarthe among
others points out, that Derrida does not pay enough attention to the play of
impropriety and the uncanny in Heidegger’s discourse on Ereignis and the
question of man (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997). In this vein, one could criticize
Derrida for completely neglecting Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitean ēthos
in the “Letter” which discloses man’s proper dwelling site as anything but
proper. From this perspective, man’s relation to being should be understood
not in terms of proximity or propriety but as radically ex-propriating, unheim-
lich. Yet even if these limitations were acknowledged, on another reading one
could still maintain that Derrida’s analysis is absolutely necessary and has to
be followed through.8 The reasons for this necessity might be understood as
follows. On the one hand, underscoring the dominant and continuous traits
of Heidegger’s discourse (e.g., the proper of man) allows the minor and dis-
ruptive elements (the uncanny, improper, etc.) to stand forth in a new light.
And on the other hand, and more importantly for our present task of raising
the question of the animal, it demonstrates that Heidegger’s thinking of the
truth of Being – no matter how nuanced, ambiguous, or equivocal – remains a
thinking of man and what is proper to man. In short, it is an anthropocentrism
and a humanism, perhaps even a hyper-humanism.9 Important consequences
follow from this hyper-humanistic delimitation of metaphysical humanism.
In the next section, I am going to track but one of them, the one alluded to in
the opening paragraph of this essay: the problematic inscription of the limit
between humanity and animality as it appears in the “Letter on ‘Humanism”’
– for it is precisely this limit that is at issue for Heidegger when he insists that
only man eksists.10

2. The Animal Without Eksistence

As those familiar with the “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ will recall, Heidegger

traces the concept of humanitas back to the age of the Roman Republic in
which homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus. He tells us that homo
humanus is the name given to Romans who embodied the paideia of the Greeks
of the Hellenistic age. Humanitas, the Roman translation of the Greek paideia,
came to mean scholarship and training in good conduct. Subsequent versions
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 325

of humanism (from Renaissance humanism, to eighteenth century German

humanism, to the versions we find in Marx and, more recently, in Sartre) differ
significantly in the respective modes in which they actualize this humanitas.
But Heidegger argues that they all coincide in at least one essential aspect:
the humanitas of man is “determined with regard to an already established
interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of world, that is of
beings as a whole” (1998: 245). As we have seen while reading “The Ends of
Man,” this pre-established interpretation of the Being of beings as a whole is
what typifies all previous humanisms as being metaphysical; and the posing
of the question of the truth of Being to metaphysics and humanism is what
discloses their common ground.
Yet, within this interpretation of beings as a whole, what exactly is the
interpretation of the Being of man that metaphysical humanism presupposes?
Heidegger argues that, beginning with the first humanism in Rome, every
subsequent humanism has supposed the “essence” of man to be obvious: man
is understood always as an animal rationale. Heidegger finds this determina-
tion questionable in several respects. To begin with, animal rationale is not
simply a translation of the Greek definition of man, zōon logon echon (the
animal having discourse or language), but a metaphysical interpretation of it
in which ratio is problematically substituted for logos. But even beyond this
contentious substitution, all subsequent humanisms have failed to inquire into
the ground of ratio. The various definitions of ratio (as reason, a faculty of
principles or categories, etc.) thus presuppose and arise from within a cer-
tain pre-established interpretation of the Being of beings, thereby covering
over the question of the truth of Being itself (the question of the ontological
difference), i.e., the question of how Being is given to man, and their essen-
tial co-belonging. The same goes for the animal of animal rationale, which
is always interpreted in terms of a pre-determined conception of the Being
of “life,” and the zoē and phusis in which what is living comes to presence.
When Heidegger criticizes humanism for being metaphysical, it is these two
limitations that are being addressed.
But beyond this penetrating delimitation of humanism and metaphysics,
there is something else at stake here to which Heidegger will devote a consider-
able amount of effort in the remainder of the “Letter.” It involves a contestation
of the confusion of man’s humanitas with his animalitas in the definition of
man as animal rationale. Heidegger’s point here is that not only is metaphysics
guilty of failing to raise the question of Being regarding ratio and animalitas,
it is at fault for thinking man more on the basis of animalitas than his hu-
manitas. He wonders if this is the most effective means of uncovering what
is essential to man: “ . . . it finally remains to ask whether the essence of the
human being primordially and most decisively lies in the dimension of ani-
malitas at all” (1998: 246). Should man be thought of in terms of life, as one
“living being” among others, among “plants, beasts, and God,” as Heidegger
326 M. CALARCO

phrases it? This is how biologism proceeds, and in so doing, it will of course
be able to state important things about human beings; ultimately, however,
the biologistic approach fails to uncover the essence of man. According to
Heidegger, when man is placed alongside other living beings, we “abandon”
man’s essence to the realm of animalitas. This occurs even if (as is the case
with metaphysical humanism) man is considered different from the animal
on the basis of some essential attribute, e.g., having a spirit or soul, or being
capable of subjectivity or personhood. An analysis of man that starts from the
realm of animalitas and then locates the human being’s essential difference
from the animal by tacking on a soul or mind still falls short of thinking man’s
humanitas (1998: 246–7).
As Derrida recalls for us in “The Ends of Man,” what Heidegger finds
missing in this approach to man is his proper essence and dignity. Man’s
essence lies in his ek-sistence and it is in ek-sisting that man finds his dignity
and propriety. But Heidegger is not just trying to restore man’s essence and
revalorize his dignity; he is doing so within the context of trying to separate
decisively the essence of man from the essence of other “living creatures,”
especially the animal. In this context, Heidegger insists not once or twice but
three times that ek-sistence is not only man’s proper, but his proper alone.
He writes: “Such standing in the clearing of being I call the ek-sistence of
human beings. This way of being is proper only to the human being [Nur dem
Menschen eignet dieses Art zu sein]” (1998: 247). And one sentence later,
Heidegger asserts two more times that only human beings are characterized
by ek-sistence: “Ek-sistence can be said only of the essence of the human be-
ing [vom Wesen des Menschen], that is, only of the human way ‘to be’ [nur von
der menschlichen Weise zu ‘sein’]. For as far as our experience shows, only the
human being is [der Mensch allein ist] admitted to the destiny of ek-sistence
[in das Geshick der Ek-sistenz eingelassen].” Why this insistence of/on man?
Does Heidegger merely wish to drive home the point that metaphysics has
time and again overlooked man’s essence as ek-sistence? Certainly, but that is
perhaps not the only reason. Recalling Derrida’s remarks on the exclusionary
aspect of the logic of the proper, it should not surprise us to find Heidegger
also working to separate decisively man’s proper from that which is improper.
And, for Heidegger, what does not belong properly to man’s essence is ani-
malitas. The metaphysical definition of man as animal rationale has allowed
this essential distinction to become blurred, and this is another reason why
it has come under criticism in the “Letter.” Thus, Heidegger’s restoration of
man’s essence and dignity is, I would suggest, as much a matter of bringing
man back into a thinking relation with Being as it is of driving a wedge (or,
as we shall see, an abyss) between the essence of man and the essence of the
animal based on this relation.
This suggestion receives further support when Heidegger turns to a dis-
cussion of embodiment (1998: 247ff.). Heidegger argues here that the human
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 327

body, in its essence, must be viewed as something other than the body of a
living organism. He insists on this point because it is human bodies (which
in many ways are so similar to other living being’s bodies – especially animal
bodies) that encourage us to understand man’s Being in terms of animalitas.
According to Heidegger, however, the human body and the animal body, de-
spite certain anatomical and physiological similarities, are different in essence:
“The human body is something essentially other than an animal organism [Der
Leib des Menschen ist etwas wesentlich anderes als ein tierischer Organis-
mus]” (1998: 247). That physiology can study the human body as an animal
organism and even give us a number of interesting and useful facts in the
process is, for Heidegger, no guarantee that the essence of the human being
has been properly explained. For this to come about, the human body needs to
be examined in light of its grounding in man’s ek-sistence. Man’s bodily inter-
action with other entities around him is, according to Heidegger, essentially
different from the way non-human embodied beings relate to other entities,
since man moves about in a “world” which grants him access to beings in
their Being. Because what is essential to man is ek-sistence, i.e., because
he stands-out in the clearing of Being, the human body can be understood
properly starting only from this essential ground.
As we know, Heidegger uses the term “ek-sistence” to highlight the ecstatic
element of Dasein’s Being, as well as to avoid the metaphysical baggage that
accompanies the concept of existentia which signifies actuality in contrast to
possibility, essentia. Using the term ek-sistence, Heidegger thus establishes a
certain distance between himself and the various metaphysical interpretations
of existentia offered by medieval philosophers, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, all
of whom fail accurately to characterize man’s Being. At this point in the text,
he leaves it an open question whether or not the Being of beings other than
man are adequately conveyed with the concept of existentia. What Heidegger
is able to determine with apparent certainty is that, unlike human beings, living
creatures (Heidegger’s examples are plants and animals, the stone being his
example of a non-living being) do not ek-sist. It is at this point that we can
begin to see more clearly the exclusionary nature of the logic of the proper as
it functions in Heidegger’s text. If ek-sistence is proper to man alone, then it
follows that no being other than man can have a share in it, especially those
beings we suspect of being the most akin to us. The logic of the proper has to
make clean, decisive cuts where the possibility of contamination creeps in:

. . .living creatures are as they are without standing outside of their being as
such and within the truth of being, preserving in such standing the essential
nature of their being. Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult
to think about are living creatures [Lebe-wesen], because on the one hand
they are in a certain way most closely akin to us [Heidegger will speak a few
lines later on of our ‘abysmal bodily kinship with the beast’], and on the
other they are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an
328 M. CALARCO

abyss [durch einen Abgrund von underem ek-sistenten Wesen geschieden

ist]. (1998: 248)

Ultimately, then, not only are “living creatures” different from “us,” they
are different in their essence, so essentially different that a gulf opens up wide
enough to be labeled an “abyss.” This is not the only time Heidegger will insist
on an abyss between ek-sistent man and creatures that merely live.11 But why
this rhetoric of abysses and essential differences?
On the surface of the text, it is clear that at the very least Heidegger
wants to distance his own project from the determination of the Being of
man made by previous metaphysical humanisms. The definition of man as
animal rationale that humanism takes for granted is not altogether false, but it
remains metaphysical. Heidegger thus opposes this metaphysical humanism
in order to think man on a non-metaphysical basis, in terms of the question
of the truth of Being. This opposition to humanism does not come down then
to merely advocating some form of anti-humanism, but rather is intended to
bring about a more rigorous humanism, what I (following David Krell) have
called a “hyperhumanism”:

. . .the highest determinations of the essence of the human being in hu-

manism still do not realize the proper dignity of the human being. To that
extent the thinking in Being and Time is against humanism. But this op-
position does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane
and advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates
the dignity of the human being. Humanism is opposed because it does not
set the humanitas of the human being high enough. (1998: 251)

Heidegger goes on to argue that man’s humanitas, his unique relation to

the saying and truth of Being, should not be mistaken for a kind of mastery or
tyranny over Being in which man deigns “to release the beingness of beings
into an all too loudly glorified ‘objectivity”’ (1998: 252). Instead, the recovery
of man’s humanitas is meant to recall the essential finitude of the human being,
man’s being-thrown by Being into the truth of Being so that he may guard and
shepherd it.
Now if one reads “The Ends of Man” and other pieces by Derrida where he
takes up Heidegger’s humanism (such as the Geschlecht essays), it is difficult
to understand why Derrida would be at all interested in “criticizing” (if this
is indeed how we should read these texts) Heidegger’s thinking when it is,
in many respects, so close to his own. The stakes of this critique become
clearer, however, if Heidegger’s recovery of humanism is placed alongside the
Derridean questions of the proper and the animal. Beginning from this double
site of questioning, one could in a Derridean vein subscribe almost without
reservation to the questions Heidegger poses to metaphysical humanism; but
when Heidegger offers his own determination of man’s proper, any adherence
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 329

to his path of thought must be circumscribed and subsequently brought into

question. Even the most minimal determination presupposes delimitation,
inscriptions of propriety and impropriety – this is one of the chief lessons of
Derrida’s analyses of the logic of the proper. And even when the determination
is as equivocal and indeterminate as “man’s essence is ek-sistence,” where
propriety and impropriety are intertwined in such a way that neither can be
said to dominate, we nevertheless need to remain vigilant about what kinds
of lines are being drawn. Of course, Heidegger’s non-metaphysical definition
of man appears to be so broad as to pose no concerns about exclusion. Ek-
sistence is not parceled out unequally along any of the traditional lines that
have separated one group of human beings from another (class, race, sexuality,
gender, etc.); it finds its place anterior to such distinctions. But it does institute,
and is itself instituted, along a questionable dividing line separating man from
animal. Reading Heidegger’s text from the perspective of the question of
the animal enables us to uncover this oppositional line as well as to track the
axioms that underlie Heidegger’s rhetoric of abysses and essential differences.
Pursuing this thought further, we find that the dividing line between animal
and human re-appears in Heidegger’s text when he shifts to an analysis of
language. When Heidegger calls into question the metaphysical definition
of man as animal rationale, he is of course doing so with an eye toward the
more primordial Greek understanding of man as zōon logon echon, the animal
having language. By interpreting the logos as ratio, metaphysical humanism
misses the essential role that language plays in being-human. As mentioned
earlier, this is why for Heidegger animal rationale is not simply a translation
of zoon logon echon but a metaphysical interpretation of it, one in which a
groundless experience of ratio is substituted for a more primordial experience
of the word. But a simple return to the Greek definition of man will not suffice
either since in labeling man “the animal possessing language” we run the risk
of understanding language as something that arises out of, or is added on to,
man’s animal existence. To understand man’s proper relation to language, we
must begin from man’s humanitas and not his animal nature since animals,
strictly speaking, do not have language.
Animals lack man’s specific relation to language according to Heidegger
because they lack “world.” World here does not simply mean “nature,” or the
“environment,” but signifies instead the place in which the Being of beings
comes to unconcealment. “World” thus understood presupposes the capacity
for ek-sistence, for standing in the clearing of Being where Being comes into
presence and departs, a possibility (as we have seen) reserved for man alone.
Plants and animals do not ek-sist outside of themselves in the clearing of being,
but simply live within their surrounding environments: “Because plants and
animals are lodged in their respective environments [Umgebung] but are never
placed freely into the clearing of being [die Lichtung des Seins] which alone
is ‘world,’ they lack language” (1998: 248). We should not infer from this
330 M. CALARCO

passage that Heidegger is arguing that plants and animals have no access to
beings beyond themselves. As is clear from his Freiburg lecture course in
the winter semester of 1929–1930, Heidegger does believe that plants and
animals have access to other beings around them; he denies, however, that
plants or animals are able to access these other entities in their Being, or as
such, in the way that human beings with language and world are able to do.
Without language, which simultaneously distances man from his surrounding
environment and brings him into proximity with being, plants and animals
remain lodged in their environments and continue “merely” to live without
access to the being of other beings or their own being.
The metaphysical-animal explanation of man’s essence covers over the
close relation between being and language posited here much as it misses
man’s ek-sistent essence. The essence of language needs to be understood,
according to Heidegger, as the “clearing-concealing advent of being itself”
(1998: 249); or, as he says later in the text, the bringing near of being “oc-
curs essentially as language itself [west als die Sprache selbst]” (1998: 253).
This conception of language finds its contrast in the traditional conception
of language as a unity of body (phoneme or written character), soul (melody
and rhythm), and spirit (meaning). The definition of man as animal rationale
corresponds to this traditional understanding of language insofar as man’s
constitution is read in terms of body, soul, and spirit. Man’s body on this ac-
count is what belongs to the realm of animalitas and his capacity for language
and reason are the specific marks of his humanitas. The definition of man’s
essence as animal rationale thus sets man apart as the single and sole living
creature with the capacity for language. Heidegger insists however that lan-
guage cannot be understood as arising from man’s animal nature; language
is not just something added on to man’s essence in order to distinguish him
from other living creatures:

“. . . the human being is not only a living creature [nicht nur ein Lebewesen]
who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is
the house of being in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling, in that
he belongs to the truth of being, guarding it” (1998: 254).

As this passage illustrates, Heidegger’s contestation of the metaphysical

definition of man as animal rationale is indeed undertaken in order to re-
store the privilege of being as the matter of thought; but this privilege cannot
be separated from a logic of the proper that functions on another level – a
logic that grants man, and man alone, a certain dignity in his ex-propriated
proximity to being. It is from this perspective that we can appreciate the
implications of Derrida’s statement that “man and the name of man are not
displaced in the question of being such as it is put to metaphysics” (1998: 128).
Heidegger’s thought of the truth of being is a displacement of metaphysical
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 331

humanism, but one that occurs in the name of a more exacting and rigorous
humanism.
But – as you no doubt have been wanting to rejoin for quite a while now
– does not such thinking think precisely the humanitas of homo humanus?
Does it not think humanitas in a decisive sense, as no metaphysics has
thought it or can think it? Is this not a ’humanism’ in the extreme sense?
Certainly. It is a humanism that thinks the humanity of the human being
from nearness to being. But at the same time it is a humanism in which not
the human being but the human being’s historical essence is at stake in its
provenance from the truth of being. But then does not the ek-sistence of
the human being also stand or fall in this game of stakes? Indeed it does.
(1998: 261)

In those texts where Derrida explicitly raises the question of the animal
in Heidegger’s discourse, it will almost always be a matter of contesting the
various manifestations and manifold effects of this more subtle and rigor-
ous form of humanism. Consequently, the question of the animal as it posed
by Derrida should not be understood as an attempt to assimilate Heidegger
simply and unthinkingly to the less rigorous forms of metaphysical human-
ism that Heidegger himself has delimited. To place Heidegger facilely within
this closure would be to overlook his difference from that tradition. Where
classical humanisms have been content to determine man’s Being in light of
a presupposed determination of nature and humanity, Heidegger has boldly
raised the question of the ground of these determinations, thereby exposing
humanism’s complicity with metaphysics and offering a new determination of
man’s essence as ek-sistence. With this critique of humanism and conception
of ek-sistence we are given not only the possibility for a clearer understanding
of the collapse of value theory and its attendant nihilism, but also the pos-
sibility for an alternative “ethics,” another thought of responsibility itself, of
responsibility qua responsivity or ex-posure.12
The problem arises, at least from the perspective of the question of the
animal as Derrida raises it, when Heidegger limits ek-sistence to man alone.
And the issue here is not simply that Heidegger offers no analysis or argu-
mentation in support of this claim (although this deficiency does pose certain
difficulties); nor is the problem that this claim about ek-sistence is anything
but certain (is anyone certain, including Heidegger himself, that ek-sistence
cannot be found beyond man? What is the status of his constant denega-
tions and disavowals of animal ek-sistence?). The problem lies instead with
Heidegger’s uncritical reliance on a logic of opposition in differentiating hu-
man beings from animals. Why does Heidegger have to insist that man alone
ek-sists? Could one not just as easily speak of ek-sistence without drawing
single, insuperable lines between man and animal? Of course a less anthro-
pocentric and more nuanced discussion of eksistence might still eventually
give rise to certain distinctions and boundaries between “human beings” and
332 M. CALARCO

“animals” – but would these differences necessarily be essential, simple, op-

positional, binary, and abyssal?
Heidegger ultimately offers nothing in the way of critique concerning
the tradition’s drawing of the oppositional line between human beings and
animals; he is concerned, rather, with the way in which this oppositional line
has been determined and understood. Heidegger thus says the “Same” as the
humanist tradition – he too insists on an oppositional logic separating hu-
man from animal. The difference in Heidegger’s repetition of the Same lies
in his shifting of the opposition between human and animal onto another reg-
ister. The essential difference between man and animal for Heidegger lies
not merely in having language or reason, but in the ground of these capac-
ities: ek-sistence, which is reserved for man alone. Thus, what we find in
Heidegger’s text when read from the perspective of the question of the animal
is an effective challenge to metaphysical humanism (where man is determined
according to a pre-established interpretation of the Being of beings) but, at the
same time, a further sedimentation and reinforcement of the anthropocentrism
of this same humanist tradition (in which the animal’s Being is determined in
strict binary opposition to and against the measure of man’s Being).13
The force of the question of the animal in Derrida is to be found at this
level, where Heidegger’s anthropocentrism uncritically communicates with
the anthropocentrism of the humanist tradition. In contrast to Heidegger’s
insistence on man’s oppositional relation to the animal, Derrida will persist
in thinking the contamination, complication, multiplication, and différance of
the differences between and among man and animal. In place of a thinking of
man’s essence and proper, Derrida will offer us a thought of the effects of these
determinations, a tracking of the reductive consequences of this thinking of
the Animal as such and Man as such. Derrida will ask: in what ways does
Heidegger’s inscription of single, absolute limits between man and animal
create homogeneities and flatten out differences, both between and among
human beings and animals? Is there a way to think the differences between
and among human beings and animals in non-oppositional terms? What are
the possible consequences of a non-oppositional thinking of such differences?
These and other such questions serve as the preface to the task of reading the
question of the animal in Derrida.

Notes

1. Throughout this essay I retain the term “man” as it is a citation of both Derrida’s and
Heidegger’s texts, and also to underscore that what is at issue in this essay is the “man”
of Western metaphysics, a conception of the human that has been typically restricted not
only to those beings deemed fully human but also masculine.
2. This question will be explored at more length in a forthcoming monograph entitled The
Animal After Derrida.
 ANOTHER INSISTENCE OF MAN 333
3. See also Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1981 for a series of essays in response to Derrida’s
text.
4. “If the question about Being is to be explicitly formulated and carried through in such a
manner as to be completely transparent to itself, then any treatment of it in line with the
elucidations we have given requires us to explain how Being is to be looked at, how its
meaning is to be understood and conceptually grasped; it requires us to prepare the way for
choosing the right entity for our example, and to work out the genuine way of access to it.
Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it – all these
ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those
particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves. Thus to work out the question
of Being adequately, we must make an entity – the inquirer [des fragenden] – transparent
in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as
such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about – namely, Being. This entity
which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its
Being [Dieses Seiende, das wir selbst je sind und das unter anderem die Seinsmöglichkeit
des Fragens hat], we shall denote by the term Dasein [fassen wir terminologisch als
Dasein]. If we are to formulate our question explicitly and transparently, we must first give
a proper explication of an entity (Dasein), with regard to its Being” (Heidegger, 1962:
26–7).
5. See Derrida’s citations of Heidegger’s use of the name “man” to describe Dasein (1982:
127).
6. “Essentially” is added in the Gesamtausgabe edition of Wegmarken.
7. Cf. also the lines immediately preceding the citation from Of Grammatology in the opening
paragraph of this chapter where Derrida paradoxically defines man’s proper as “not the
proper of man: it is the very dislocation of the proper in general: the dislocation of the
characteristic, the proper in general. . .” (1974: 244).
8. Lacoue-Labarthe himself concedes such a necessity. See Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997: 60.
9. I borrow the term “hyperhumanism” from David Farrell Krell. See Krell, 1992: 323, n. 23.
10. Lacoue-Labarthe asks Derrida, concerning his reading of Heidegger in “The Ends of Man,”.
“. . .in the name of what must one do this?”; that is to say, how does one decide, what obliges
one to decide, which weaknesses to focus upon “in a text subject to the abyssal ‘logic’ of the
question of being?” (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997: 77). While I certainly do not wish to answer
for Derrida (he offers his own non-answer, his response sans response, in the discussion
following Lacoue-Labarthe’s paper), I would nonetheless respond that one must, or at
least, I feel obliged to focus on those weaknesses in Heidegger’s text that reproduce and
reinforce problematic delimitations. Despite his displacement of the classical humanist
subject, Heidegger still leaves intact, “sheltered in obscurity,” as Derrida might say, the
axioms of another, more profound humanism and anthropocentrism (see section VI of
Derrida’s Of Spirit, 1989). It is this problematic and dogmatic limit that obliges me to
focus on the limits and weaknesses of Heidegger’s humanism from the perspective of the
question of the animal (which is perhaps not the same thing as the name of the animal –
another response sans response).
11. Among other places, see Heidegger, 1995: 264.
12. And we should bear in mind that this conception of responsibility can be read in terms
of a responsibility to beings beyond man, e.g., to “animals” and other entities, to all
Others. Indeed, there is a sense in which Heideggerian responsibility might be under-
stood as infinite in a manner that supplements and goes well beyond Levinas’s con-
ception of infinite responsibility. For Levinas, responsibility is infinite insofar as it can
never be fully assumed or accomplished – good conscience from this perspective is im-
possible. Yet responsibility remains finite within Levinas’s text insofar as it is limited
334 M. CALARCO

to man alone. Heidegger’s conception of responsibility could conceivably be brought

to bear on this limitation in Levinas’ work. For more on such a project see Llewelyn,
1991.
13. It should be noted that it is this specific sense of anthropocentrism – where the animal is
determined oppositionally in relation to man, and measured over and against man’s Being
– which remains in place in Heidegger’s thinking. It is clear that he openly contests other
senses of anthropocentrism, e.g., an anthropocentrism in which human beings occupy a
central and dominating role in relation to the Being of all other entities.

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