Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide

Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide David Baumeister Derrida Today 10.1 (2017): 51–66 This article discusses the concept of carnophallogocentrism and its place in Derrida’s philosophy of animality. I read Derrida’s embryonic account of carnophallogocentrism in light of his treatment of the primal parricide of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and suggest that opening this interpretive channel allows us to grasp how carnophallogocentrism can contribute to the history of ‘anthropo-centric subjectivity’ that Derrida diagnoses in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In conversation with recent commentators, I begin by characterizing carnophallogocentrism as the idea that a symbolic yet constitutive schema of ingestion underlies the relation between ‘man’ and ‘animal’. I then turn to Freud’s image of the primal parricide and to Derrida’s treatment of it in several texts. Given the strong structural parallels between carnophallogocentrism and the primal parricide—which figures human civilization as the historical product of a founding event of patriarchal violence and sacrificial ingestion—attending to Derrida’s treatment of the primal parricide helps us fill out his view of carnophallogocentrism, and so better appreciate the breadth of his approach to the historical relation between humans and other animals. In the first essay of The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida offers three formulations of his now famous thesis concerning the ‘abyssal rupture’ between the creatures who call themselves humans and the creatures humans designate as animals—between ‘what calls itself man and what he calls the animal’ (Derrida 2008, 30). The second formulation of the thesis addresses the historicity of the human-animal divide. ‘The multiple and heterogeneous border of this abyssal rupture has a history’, which is today ‘passing through the most unusual phase’, a phase ‘for which we have no scale’ (Derrida 2008, 31). Derrida does not elaborate on how the present moment constitutes an ‘unusual phase’. It may be that the history of the self-declared separation of humans from animals is today being contested and rewritten, within the environmental and animal movements, for instance. Alternately, it may be that the present environmental crisis and widespread extinction of animal species constitutes a new, unprecedentedly destructive, turn in this history. Whatever it is about the present that makes it the ‘unusual phase’ in this history that

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it is, it is clear that, for Derrida, the present-day human is as much the product as the author of this history. For to mark out this trajectory as a history is to occupy and speak from the human side of the rupture: ‘Indeed, one can speak here of a history, of a historic moment or phase, only from one of the supposed edges of the said rupture, the edge of an anthropo-centric subjectivity that is recounted or allows a history to be recounted about it, autobiographically, the history of its life, and that it therefore calls History’ (Derrida 2008, 31). Given that the history of the abyssal rupture between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ can only be articulated from what remains a human vantage point, any attempt to approach this history critically, with an eye toward the deconstruction of the rupture itself, must be taken with care. A certain circularity is always involved: the history we would deconstruct constitutes us, and in undermining it we undermine the basis we have for approaching it as a history in the first place. This problem is especially acute in the case of those histories that more narrowly describe the emergence of the rupture—the initial event or series of events, at the dawn of human history, where ‘man’ was first separated from ‘animal’. Such original histories or origin stories are central to countless religions and mythological traditions, as well as modern paleoanthropology. In so far as they account for the chronologically necessary starting point of human history, the anthropo-centric subjectivity Derrida speaks of could not exist without them. One history of the emergence of human from animal with special importance for Derrida is the primal parricide described by Freud in Totem and Taboo. For Freud, the primal parricide marked the symbolic yet constitutive—fantastic yet necessary—moment where a group of stillanimal apelike human ancestors banded together then killed and feasted upon their tyrannical father—becoming human in the process. For Freud, the primal parricide was the origin of human civilization, as of religion, guilt and sacrifice, and the androcentric social contract. In ‘Before the

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Law’, Derrida discusses the aporetic historicity of this fantastic event, but he does not discuss how the Freudian image might inflect our approach to the abyssal rupture between human and animal. Though he does not draw the link himself, key features of the primal parricide clearly resonate with a central concept of Derrida’s philosophy of animality: carnophallogocentrism. First introduced a decade before The Animal That Therefore I Am, but touched upon several times thereafter, carnophallogocentrism is the idea that a schema of ingestion, symbolic yet constitutive, underlies the human-animal relation and accompanies all phallo- and logo-centric closure. Derrida’s account of the concept is rich but regrettably incomplete. Specifically, he provides no account of carnophallogocentrism’s contribution to the history of ‘anthropo-centric subjectivity’. This essay sets out to show that attention to Freud’s primal parricide, and to Derrida’s expansive reading of it, can help flesh out Derrida’s view of carnophallogocentrism and its place within the all-too-human history diagnosed in Derrida’s broader philosophy of animality. I proceed in two steps. In section one, I examine Derrida’s stated view of carnophallogocentrism, and propose a reading of the concept in conversation with three recent commentators: Matthew Calarco, David Wood, and Kelly Oliver. In section two, I turn to the Freudian primal parricide, and to Derrida’s reading of it in ‘Before the Law’. Here I explain how Derrida’s treatment of the primal parricide as a symbolic yet constitutive structure within human history offers an interpretive channel for thinking the historical nature of carnophallogocentrism. I conclude by suggesting that, while a better understanding of the carnophallogocentrism concept does not in itself combat the history of anthropo-centric subjectivity diagnosed within Derrida’s broader philosophy of animality, such an understanding does bring the violence embedded within this history more powerfully to thought.

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I. Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism Derrida first mentions carnophallogocentrism in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy published in Cahiers Confrontation in 1989, which later appeared in English translation as ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject’. The interview as a whole concerns the role of the subject (of the ‘who’) in modern philosophy and among Derrida’s contemporaries within ‘the French philosophical scene’ (Derrida 1995, 263). Carnophallogocentrism appears almost in passing, and Derrida explains that he cannot on this occasion develop the concept further: Going much too quickly here, I would still try to link the question of the ‘who’ to the question of ‘sacrifice.’ It would be a matter not only of recalling the concept of the subject as phallogocentric structure, at least according to its dominant schema: one day I hope to demonstrate that this schema implies carnivorous virility. I would want to explain carnophallogocentrism, even if this comes down to a sort of tautology or rather a heterotautology as a priori synthesis, which you could translate as “speculative idealism,” becoming-subject of substance,” “absolute knowledge” passing through the “speculative Good Friday”: it suffices to take seriously the idealizing interiorization of the phallus and the necessity of its passage through the mouth, whether it’s a matter of words or of things, of sentences, of daily bread or wine, of the tongue, the lips, or the breast of the other. (Derrida 1995, 280) Carnophallogocentrism indicates how a schema of ingestion (the carno-) always accompanies the schemas of logocentrism and phallogocentrism. What is ingested can be literal flesh—the ‘breast of the other’—or it can be a more symbolic material—‘of sentences, of daily bread or wine’. To say that each of these modes of ingestion involve carnivorous virility is to link the ‘idealizing interiorization of the phallus’, which Derrida had earlier treated as phallogocentrism, to the (human) subject’s ingestive relation to nature, whose paradigmatic form is the ingestion of ‘animal’ (non-human) flesh. ‘The virile strength of the adult male, the father, husband, or brother’, Derrida continues, ‘belongs to the schema that dominates the concept of subject. The subject does not want just to master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh’ (Derrida 1995, 281). Carnophallogocentrism connects phallocentric Baumeister, ‘Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide’, 4

authority with the ingestion of animal flesh, whether literal or symbolic. On this formulation, the domination of women implies the domination of animality, within a schema of subjectivity that is preferentially both human and male by default. Given this overlap between the schemas of androcentric and anthropocentric domination, the deconstruction of phallogocentrism (as of logocentrism) also implies the deconstruction of carnophallogocentrism. The deferred, futural character of Derrida’s explanation bears emphasizing: ‘Going much too quickly here’, ‘one day I hope to demonstrate’, ‘I would want to explain’. In light of these markers, the few paragraphs within ‘Eating Well’ where Derrida treats carnophallogocentrism cannot be read as a definitive formulation of the concept. Though it seems that at the time of the interview Derrida intended to more fully elaborate his view of the ‘carnivorous virility’ characterizing the scheme of carnophallogocentrism, he never revisited the concept at any length, other than a few echoes in later works. In an interview conducted in October, 1990, Derrida reiterates his interest in carnophallogocentrism: ‘In the past, I have spoken about the West’s phallic “logocentrism.” Now I would like to broaden this with the prefix carno- (flesh): “carnophallogocentrism.” We are all—vegetarians as well—carnivores in the symbolic sense’ (Birnbaum and Olsson 2009, 4). Still in 1990, the affixing of the carno- prefix is a goal for the ‘now’. By 1997 and the lectures that would become The Animal That Therefore I Am, however, Derrida will speak of his introduction of carnophallogocentrism in the past tense. In the first of these lectures, Derrida discusses the scene of animal sacrifice at the root of both Greco-Roman mythology (specifically in the guise of Diana) and the Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian tradition (specifically evidenced in God’s giving dominion over animals to Adam). Derrida explains: ‘It was in order to name that sacrificial scene that I spoke elsewhere, as though of a single phenomenon and a single law, of carnophallogocentrism’ (Derrida 2008, 104).

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Despite their brevity, these later references confirm features of the concept found in the initial formulation. Carnivorous virility can manifest itself ‘in the symbolic sense’. Such symbolism does not make carnivorous virility any less binding upon us: even if symbolic carnivores, we are carnivores—carnivorous virility constitutes us. Hence, Derrida adds in ‘Eating Well’, “Vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation’ (Derrida 1995, 282). It should be added that the schema of carnophallogocentrism is fundamentally sacrificial, and reflects the legacy of animal sacrifice in Western mythology and religion. Carnivorous virility is therefore manifested not only in our eating practices, where one would expect it to be, but is also dispersed throughout the (human) cultural or civilizational field, inflecting morality, religion and politics. Though it has received less attention than other aspects of Derrida’s work on animality, carnophallogocentrism has given rise to several divergent readings in the scholarly literature. Briefly engaging with three such readings will allow me to more clearly articulate my own interpretation. As a first example, Matthew Calarco reads carnophallogocentrism as the marker of a certain ‘network of exclusionary relations’: Derrida argues that the meaning of subjectivity is constituted through a network of exclusionary relations that goes well beyond a generic human-animal distinction. He has coined the term ‘carno-phallogocentrism’ to refer to this network of relations . . . What Derrida is trying to get at with this concept is how the metaphysics of subjectivity works to exclude not just animals from the status of being full subject but other beings as well, in particular women, children, various minority groups, and other Others who are taken to be lacking in one or another of the basic traits of subjectivity. (Calarco 2008, 131) This explanation nicely connects with Derrida’s remarks about the exclusion of ‘animal’ from ‘man’ in The Animal That Therefore I Am. However, an overemphasis on exclusion would distort Derrida’s concept. For the carno- marks not just an exclusion of animals through their being killed or being made available for killing, but a sacrificial inclusion of animals through their

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being ingested, literally or symbolically, as meat. The importance of inclusion is apparent in Derrida’s insistence that, in order to establish the relationship between phallogocentrism and the ‘carnivorous virility’ of carnophallogocentrism, ‘it suffices to take seriously the idealizing interiorization of the phallus and the necessity of its passage through the mouth’ (Derrida 1995, 280). Calarco is correct that the schema of carnophallogocentrism effects the exclusion of a certain connected set of others (animals, women, children, minority groups), in so far as the model of subjectivity constructed by the schema diminishes or eliminates what standing as subjects they have. But our understanding of carnophallogocentrism should not overlook its ingestive dimension—the fact that it entails ‘interiorization’ and a certain ‘partaking’ of animals, and of other human beings. David Wood discusses carnophallogocentrism in two of his essays taking up animal themes in Derrida’s work. In ‘Thinking With Cats’, Wood states: Animals, then, are slaves and sacrificial offerings to our need for ritual symbolic confirmation of our peculiar self-understanding. We may surmise that the (external) animal we eat stands in for the (internal) animal we must overcome. And by eating, of course, we internalize it! On this reading, our carnivorous violence towards other animals would serve as a mark of our civilization, and hence indirectly legitimate all kinds of other violence. If we are to target anything for transformation it would be this culture (or should we say cult) of fault and sacrifice. Derrida’s brilliance lies in tracking it along the finest filaments. (Wood 2004, 139) And, in an earlier piece, Wood had remarked: Carnophallogocentrism is not a dispensation of Being toward which resistance is futile; it is a mutually reinforcing network of powers, schemata of domination, and investments that has to reproduce itself to stay in existence. Vegetarianism is not just about substituting beans for beef: it is—at least potentially—a site of proliferating resistance to that reproduction. If we allow the imminences and pressures (and ghosts and cries of suffering) to which I have been yielding to have their say, we might well end up insisting that ‘deconstruction is vegetarianism.’ (Wood 1999, 33) Taking Wood’s remarks together yields a subtle account of the carnophallogocentrism concept to complement Calarco’s reading. For Wood, the concept refers not only to the exclusion of animal Baumeister, ‘Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide’, 7

others and the propagation of literal and symbolic violence, but also to the continuation of a network of dominance (not simply exclusion) that is distinctive of human civilization. Wood grasps the explanatory breadth of Derrida’s concept, its treatment of the violent, ingestive relation humans have towards other animals as a constitutive element—if not the constitutive element—in the formation of human civilization. Grasping this breadth reveals the urgency of our deconstruction of carnophallogocentrism. In principle, an enormous amount of good (defined as the elimination of domination and violence) would be accomplished through a fundamental transformation of the sacrificial violence or ‘carnivorous virility’ that underlies such a broad swath of our deeply domineering and violent civilization. On Derridian grounds, however, we might contest Wood’s account in that, on his reading, carnophallogocentrism can be overcome by turning to vegetarianism. But if we understand carnophallogocentrism in its more constitutive sense, then overcoming the schema will not be a matter, entirely or even primarily, of changing our eating practices. For it is the broad framework of human civilization that is carnophallogocentric and that must be transformed in order for our eating practices to no longer play into the mechanism of carnophallogocentrism. Calarco underscores this intractability when he says, ‘Derrida is also arguing at the same time that being a carnivore is at the very heart of becoming a full subject in contemporary society. Participating, whether directly or indirectly, in the processes and rituals of killing and eating animal flesh is almost a necessary prerequisite of being a subject’ (Calarco 2008, 132). Though turning to vegetarianism may avail us of direct participation in carnophallogocentrism’s ingestive schema, our indirect participation in its ‘carnivorous virility’ will thereby remain unchanged. Vegetarianism (or, as many would insist, veganism) may be a necessary step in our overcoming of carnophallogocentrism, but it is not a sufficient one.

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A related point should be made about the symbolic dimension of Derrida’s concept. The preceding passages from both Calarco and Wood foreground the literal killing and eating of animals. In light of Derrida’s formulations of the concept in both ‘Eating Well’ and The Animal That Therefore I Am, however, the symbolic ingestion of flesh is arguably just as important. Without this symbolic dimension, the ‘interiorization of the phallus’ Derrida refers to, which encompasses such a range of phalli (‘of words or of things, of sentences, of daily bread or wine, of the tongue, the lips, or the breast of the other’), could not be read as instances of ‘carnivorous virility’. Of course, the literal ingestion of animal flesh remains at issue, and is certainly the paradigmatic form of ‘carnivorous virility’. But symbolic ingestion cannot be excised from Derrida’s account. When its symbolic dimension is placed in the foreground, carnophallogocentrism’s ‘indirect’ hold upon human civilization appears more extensive, and more deeply constitutive, than a literalist reading would allow. Kelly Oliver’s reading of carnophallogocentrism shows how we can both recognize the explanatory breadth of the concept, which includes literal (or real) and symbolic dimensions, and attend to the ethical questions it raises about our eating practices. She remarks: As we learn from Derrida, even if the real and the symbolic are inseparable conceptually (they have their meaning only in relation to each other), on the level of practical ethics and politics, it is imperative to keep them distinct. According to Derrida, this we can do only by acknowledging the ways that one is implicated in the other. In other words, we can separate really eating from symbolically eating only by recognizing how the two are always already mixed. (Oliver 2009, 107) On this reading, Derrida’s concept has a practical aim that corresponds to the reality of our eating practices, and to the fact that ‘carnivorous virility’ is manifested in our ingestion of animal flesh. This aim is fundamentally ethical, and is reflected in Derrida’s question within the 1989 interview, which provides the title for the published version: ‘since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good, how for Baumeister, ‘Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide’, 9

goodness’ sake should one eat well?’ (Derrida 1995, 282). Hence, Oliver urges that we follow Derrida in considering ‘both the how and what, not to mention the why, of ethical eating’ (2009, 108). And yet, an ethical approach to our eating practices does not entail narrowing attention to literal ingestion alone. Though we can (and, for Oliver, must) separate literal and symbolic ingestion on practical or political grounds, this should not blind us to the fact that, no matter what is literally ingested, the schema of ‘carnivorous virility’ will be symbolically in operation— literal and symbolic will be ‘always already mixed’. Each of the three readings touched on above discusses how the structure of sacrificial violence Derrida calls carnophallogocentrism underlies the relation of humans and other animals in the contemporary world, specifically as regards the human killing and eating of other animals. Derrida’s imperative that one must eat indicates the constitutive force of the concept—the idea that we are what we eat, or that our ingestion, in a broad sense, makes us who we are. The ethics of eating, the dilemma of eating well, becomes an issue for us only because sacrificial ingestion is constitutive for us and because, operating symbolically as well as literally, it cannot be circumvented by simply not ingesting flesh. In its application to expansive fields of human activity (eating, language, sexuality, authority), carnophallogocentrism comes very close to what Freud understands to be the primal parricide’s role in instituting civilization as a whole. In the next section, I explore Derrida’s reading of the primal parricide. I suggest that Derrida’s characterization of the primal parricide as something both symbolic and constitutive (or, symbolic yet constitutive) sheds additional light on his inchoate account of carnophallogocentrism. Understanding carnophallogocentrism in light of Derrida’s treatment of the (structurally parallel) primal parricide allows us to more precisely locate carnophallogocentrism as a driver within the history of ‘anthropo-centric subjectivity’.

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II. Derrida on the Primal Parricide Freud’s primal parricide describes not simply the birth of human civilization, but the emergence of the human out of its animal ‘ancestry’. The decisive act of collective murder, and the subsequent act of carno-sacrificial-ingestion (whereby the ‘civilizing’ bond between the primal brothers is instituted and repetitively sustained) sets humanity apart from the animality that proceeds it. And yet, in the brothers’ ingestion of the meat of the primal father, the animal is brought into the human. Such ingestion contaminates the human from the inside. Human purity is shown to be inaugurated and sustained through animal pollution—a Freudian insight that, when paired with the concept of carnophallogocentrism, casts light on the historical development of the human-animal relation. From this vantage, the story of ‘human civilization’ appears as the dispersed and ritualized re-enactment of the primal parricide, where nonhuman animals and other surrogates come to be substituted for the primal father across many registers. Within Totem and Taboo, the thesis of the primal parricide is presented as the convergence of three distinct yet overlapping ideas. First is Scottish minister William Robertson Smith’s notion that a ‘totem meal’ or ritual sacrifice accompanied early totemic systems among primitive peoples. Second is the ‘psycho-analytic translation of the totem’ as a substitute for the father. Third is Darwin’s idea that, in their primitive proto-human state, humans lived in small bands, or ‘hordes’, dominated by a single alpha-male father, who has exiled all of his adult sons (Freud 1950, 141). The thesis then emerges: ‘One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde’ (Freud 1950, 141). Further details are added: Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they

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accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. (Freud 1950, 142) Freud then connects the image of the parricide to the totem meal, and so the mature image, with its mass of far-reaching implications, is born: ‘The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion’ (Freud 1950, 142). The question of how to understand the primal parricide has long dogged Freud’s readers, and is bound up with the question of the status of the psychoanalytic approach to human (and nonhuman) history. Literalist, positivistic readers typically dismiss Freud’s image for its improbability and lack of empirical evidence. The social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, to take an early representative example of this reading, concludes that, ‘Freud tells us a just-so story which only a genius could have ventured to compose, for no evidence was, or could be, advanced in support of it’ (Evans-Pritchard 1965, 111). More sympathetic readers have tended to treat the episode as a symbolic allegory of modern social structures, as does Marcuse in Eros and Civilization: ‘If Freud’s hypothesis is not corroborated by any anthropological evidence, it would have to be discarded altogether except for the fact that it telescopes, in a sequence of catastrophic events, the historical dialectic of domination and thereby elucidates aspects of civilization hitherto unexplained. We use Freud’s anthropological speculation only in this sense: for its symbolic value’ (1955, 60). Here I would like to repeat Marcuse’s suggestion that the force of the primal parricide image lies in its ‘symbolic value’, and so is not diminished by the literalist critique. However, going beyond Marcuse’s formulation, it appears equally important to insist that this ‘symbolic value’ is not thereby merely symbolic. Freud’s image is intended as a speculative explanation of how human civilization has come to be what it is. While not presuming that the event of the primal parricide Baumeister, ‘Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide’, 12

literally took place, Freud insists that the primal parricide describes something fundamental about civilization itself. Following Derrida’s reading of the primal parricide in ‘Before the Law’, the curious explanatory force of Freud’s image can be approached by the thought that while the parricide ‘resembles a fiction’, it is nevertheless ‘necessary’ (Derrida 1992, 199). We might say that the primal parricide image is a fantasy, but an explanatory fantasy, one that speaks directly to relations between humanity, animality, and violence as they obtain in our lives today, regardless of whether the image accurately depicts paleoanthropological reality. It can, on this fantastic but still explanatory register, be brought in line with a deconstructive understanding of our present human-animal fissure, and so lend depth to our understanding of the process of animal inclusion/exclusion within the human. Mirroring the multi-valiant mechanism described by the carnophallogocentrism concept, the historical process whose emergence is summarized by the primal parricide must be said to be both symbolic and constitutive. This thought can be developed further. Freud’s text situates the parricide at the very birth of civilization and the very juncture of humankind’s departure from its animal ancestry. Among the most powerful features of the parricide is that it complicates any simple notion of ‘purity’ at any point along the civilizing line. Both the ‘animal’ and the ‘human’ held over against it are apparitions of the same event—neither remains purely dissociated from the other. Instead, both are co-contaminated, and the human is seen to be constituted, both initially and in its historical development, by its relation to animality. The animal father had already been proto-human and it was, after all, the desire on the part of the brothers to take the animal father’s place (and not to become human) that motivated the parricide in the first place. At the same time, those brothers who enter into the civilizing contract post-mortem, though the first humans, retain a mark of the

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animal in their ritual re-ingestion of the father in the form of the sacrificial eating of non-human animals. Any pure humanity they might have is compromised by the repetition of this ritual sacrifice. This structural link between the primal parricide and carnophallogocentrism—that both are symbolic yet constitutive processes of sex-differentiating, anthropo-delimiting sacrificial ingestion—opens a fresh interpretive channel into Derrida’s philosophy of animality. For, in sustaining this link, Derrida’s treatment of the primal parricide takes on new resonance. This treatment tells us not just about Derrida’s relation to Freud, but about the peculiar historical status of carnophallogocentrism. Ritual sacrifice through ingestion cannot be dismissed as accidental—as something ‘anthropo-centric subjectivity’ can do without. Humans would not be who they are, originally and today, without the schema of ritualized ingestive sacrifice. On this point, the Derridian deconstruction of the human aligns with the Freudian story of the birth and unfolding of civilization. There is some precedent for linking carnophallogocentrism to Totem and Taboo along such historical lines. Patrick ffrench, in After Bataille, remarks that, ‘the Subject is dependent on a sacrificial structure in that its concept is complicit with “carnivorous virility,” thus Derrida’s neologism carno-phallogocentrism’. And, he continues, ‘The association of sacrifice with carnivorous virility appeals more to the Freudian thematics of Totem and Taboo, to the postsacrificial incorporation of the sacrificial body, than to the aspect which fascinates Bataille, the moment of exposure of and to the death of the other’ (ffrench 2007, 152). While ffrench’s linkage of Derrida’s concept and the primal parricide is not carried further than this, his suggestion that the ‘post-sacrificial’ element within Freud’s image is what resonates best with the carnophallogocentrism concept is insightful. For ffrench, it is the historical unfolding that

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occurs in the wake of the primal parricide—a process of proliferate sacrifice in repetition—that synergizes with Derrida’s concept, offering to it a tendril of historical depth. Of course, it remains the case that Derrida himself did not link carnophallogocentrism to the Freudian primal parricide. I think this can be explained, however, as a missed or undrawn connection, rather than as evidence that Derrida held the ideas to be incompatible. In several of his later writings, Derrida broaches Freudian thought in light of the human-animal relation: the treatment of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the lecture ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’ within The Animal That Therefore I Am (Derrida 2008, 119–140); and his discussion of the Freudian Wolf Man in the third session of the first volume of The Beast in the Sovereign (Derrida 2009, 64–65). Derrida’s turning to Freud in these texts concerned with animality is not surprising given how, as Oliver puts it, ‘At almost every level, animals are involved in defining the uniquely human psyche and creating its dynamics through the ‘science’ of psychoanalysis’ (Oliver 2009, 247). Though Derrida’s most sustained reading of the primal parricide, in ‘Before the Law’, does not raise the question of animality explicitly, it is telling that, in one of the lectures given at Cerisy in 1997 that would later be published in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida references the 1982 lecture: ‘I spoke many years ago in this very place, in the context of Freud and Kafka, of being before the law and the grand question of the erection of man, in particular, in the form of the upright stance and its ambiguous privilege, and of erection in another register, that, once more, of nudity’ (Derrida 2008, 55). The human-animal resonances of the primal parricide, implicit in the 1982 lecture, clearly became apparent to Derrida over time. ‘Before the Law’ reveals Derrida’s understanding of the aporetic historicity of the primal parricide. Attending to this understanding further substantiates the sense in which the symbolic yet constitutive nature of carnophallogocentrism can be aligned with the similarly dual character

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of the primal parricide. On Derrida’s reading, the event of the parricide both did and did not happen; it is both symbolic or fantastic and a necessary description of who we are. Derrida introduces Totem and Taboo at the nexus of questions concerning the temporality of institutions, the origins of morality, and the thesis of law as prohibitive. The primal parricide as event of institution is seen to constitute civilization, morality, and the law, but, again, not in a literal or ordinary way. Rather, this event is extra-ordinary and fantastic: ‘Since the father dead is more powerful than he was when alive, since he lives better from his death and, very logically, he would have been dead while he was alive, more dead alive than post mortem, the murder of the father is not an event in the ordinary sense of the word. Nor is the origin of moral law’ (Derrida 1992, 198–199). Note how Derrida frames the primal parricide in the space of an event that need not actually have happened, but which is nonetheless necessary—as something that may be merely symbolic, but that is constitutive even so. The primal parricide is not an event in the sense of a definite moment of origin (the first carno-sacrificial ingestion), but rather in the sense of a moment repeated again and again, supporting and reinforcing the logic as it proceeds, emanating from it and retrospectively justifying it. Its temporality is therefore non-linear and non-eventual, but fundamentally aporetic, and remains all the more necessary for this aporicity. In a gesture that echoes his discussion of the speculative character of psychoanalysis in The Postcard (written just a few years prior to ‘Before the Law’), Derrida is careful to note the fantastic, speculative dimensions of the parricide narrative: However, this pure and purely presumed event nevertheless marks an invisible rent in history. It resembles a fiction, a myth, or a fable, and its relation is so structured that all questions as to Freud's intentions are at once inevitable and pointless (‘Did he believe in it or not? did he maintain that it came down to a real and historical murder?’ and so on). The structure of this event is such that one is compelled neither to believe nor disbelieve it. (Derrida 1992, 199) And then, soon after: Baumeister, ‘Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide’, 16

Whether or not [the event of the primal parricide] is fantastic, whether or not it has arisen from the imagination, even the transcendental imagination, and whether it states or silences the origin of the fantasy, this in no way diminishes the imperious necessity of what it tells, its law. This law is even more frightening and fantastic, unheimlich or uncanny, than if it emanated from pure reason, unless precisely the latter be linked to an unconscious fantastic. (Derrida 1992, 199) The event of the parricide is extra-ordinary. As Derrida says, ‘the murder of the father is not an event in the ordinary sense of the word’ (Derrida 1992, 198–199). Even so, the event has historical significance: ‘However, this pure and purely presumed event nevertheless marks an invisible rent in history’ (Derrida 1992, 199). To translate this into the terms I have used here, the symbolic character of the primal parricide—the fact that it ‘is not an event in the ordinary sense of the word’—does not diminish its constitutive character—the fact that it ‘nevertheless marks an invisible rent in history’. In this way, the primal parricide can be said to model the historicity of carnophallogocentrism. Freud’s image, understood as Derrida suggests in ‘Before the Law’, has an aporetic historical structure, one both fantastic and necessary, symbolic and constitutive. The primal parricide therefore provides a way to think the historical nature of carnophallogocentrism.

Conclusion Carnophallogocentrism and the primal parricide may, therefore, be thought together. Both ideas function on both symbolic and constitutive registers, and the latter supplies a model for thinking the historicity of the former. But what value is there to thinking them together? On my view, the conjunction of Derrida’s concept and Freud’s image yields more than a convenient illustration. If we are able to think the history carnophallogocentrism along the lines of the primal parricide, then the deconstruction of carnophallogocentrism that Derrida’s text calls us toward can take

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place along a historical register—we now have a way of interpreting carnophallogocentrism into our all-too-human history. Attending to Derrida’s treatment of animality elsewhere in his writings and, specifically, to Derrida’s notion of the ‘abyssal rupture’ between the human and its various living others (including animals) allows the value of this conjunction to come further into focus. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, he remarks: The discussion becomes interesting once, instead of asking whether or not there is a limit [between the human and the animal] that produces a discontinuity, one attempts to think what a limit becomes once it is abyssal, once the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line but more than one internally divided line; once, as a result, it can no longer be traced, objectified, or counted as single and indivisible. What are the edges of a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on an abyss? (Derrida 2008, 31). The primal parricide image offers a fruitful way of fathoming this abyssal limit between human and animal. For that image, with the entire discursive legacy attached to it, reveals how, through the constitutive logic of carno-sacrificial-ingestion, human civilization entails an always already eating of other animals, which is at the same moment an always already eating of ourselves. When thus engaged, the image opens onto a deconstruction of the human-animal relation across the historical spread of human civilization. To be sure, approaching human history in terms of ‘carnivorous virility’ and ritualized ingestive sacrifice does not on its own supply any direct means of combatting the violence embedded within this history. The approach accounts for how such violence originated and is sustained, but it cannot in itself make this violence a problem for human beings. Indeed, in so far as innumerable material benefits have historically accrued to humans as a result of carnophallogocentrism, and in so far as ‘anthropo-centric subjectivity’ itself is a product of the rupture between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ at the heart of this process, there are strong incentives for humans not to challenge or problematize this violence, but rather to accept or even endorse it. Baumeister, ‘Derrida on Carnophallogocentrism and the Primal Parricide’, 18

Leaving this violence unchallenged, unproblematized, and unthought is all too easily and commonly done. Put differently, a fundamental predicament for humans at the present moment within the anthropocene (or properly human era) would appear to boil down to just this: on the one hand a recognition that humanity has come to be where it is due to a basically violent relation to non-human nature and animality, and on the other hand a sense that the nest of values, institutions, and practices that comprise the properly human world somehow require this violence in order to continue running as they are. Though it promises no resolution, reading carnophallogocentrism along with the primal parricide brings this tension powerfully to thought.

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