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The Beast and the Sovereign #1
La bestia e il sovrano. Volume I
When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
438 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
43 people are currently reading
478 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
652 books1,798 followersJacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 31, 2018
Per vieną kartą jos galutinai perskaityti neįmanoma, per tiršta, per intensyvi. Todėl kelis metus, gal 5 net, buvo likusi su neperskaitytom paskutinėm keturiom paskaitom, tai va dabar jau tvarkingai užbaigiau ir imsiuosi lopyti plyšius antrame tome. Ir čia nieko tokio, nes nelabai ji turi nuoseklių linijų, kurias reiktų sekti visą knygą, nes kitaip jų nesuprastum. Visos intrigos užmezgamos per pirmas tris-keturias paskaitas, bet paskui tik ir darosi įdomu, kai jos pradeda pintis ir viena kitą paneiginėti. Bestija ir suverenas (viena be kitos neįmanomos priešybės) kuo toliau tuo labiau susilieja ir tuo pačiu atsiskiria. Jeigu iš pradžių jų imamasi kaip atskirų būtybių/ būvių/ būsenų/ galių, tai I tomo gale jie yra kiekvienos gyvos ląstelės, kiekvieno veiksmo ir kiekvieno kalbos akto vidinės skirtybės. Kas man žavingiausia šitose Derrida paskaitose - kad absoliučiai visos filosofijos disciplinos su savo kone visomis atšakėlėmis patenka į šitą raizgalynę, ir neatskiriamai suauga viena su kita (dar, aišku, su visais kultūriniais, literatūriniais, religiniais ir etnologiniais argumentais). Senukas Derrida išdidžiai nusispjauna į visas metodikas ir demonstruoja laisvos minties sugebėjimą jungti, skirti, išvesti, suvesti, apversti arba išversti į išvirkščią pusę bet kokią informaciją, jeigu tik to reikia sustingusioms "tiesoms" pajudinti. Demonstruoja filosofinę meistrystę, kitaip sakant.
May 9, 2013
I loved this book! The topics were incredibly dense, but the text was taken from Derrida's lectures. This format allowed it more accessibility. The man is a genius.
January 8, 2021
I mean Derrida does say some important things but also not enjoyable to read one little bit. Glad my week with him is over. Bye *
May 29, 2013
Derrida can be a trying read. And I'm sure he would appreciate the metynomy of that last sentence. Reading this volume in conjunction with my "Early Modern Political Philosophy" course was highly rewarding. His writing [as always] can be frustrating at times, but there are flashes of genius and even moments of [surprising] clarity. Persevere! I found that it was worth the effort.
June 17, 2018
‘The snake, not only because of original sin, all the virtues and vices that are attributed to the snake…’ (Derrida, 317)
‘The snake here is "someone." And so "someone" is somebody, not as much qui as quelqu'un in French, but you don't say "someone" about a stone), "Someone was before me at my water-trough,/ And I, like a second comer, waiting."’ (Derrida, 319)
‘I remember something Levinas often says, namely that morality, ethics, begins with an "After you:' Arte r you. T he first sign of respect for the other is "after you." This doesn't just mean something like "go ahead" at the elevator, etc., It means " I come after you,"’ (Derrida, 319)
IT IS A GOLDEN SNAKE = PHAROAHS’ COLORS
‘The scene described by Lawrence is immediately the scene of a fight to the death. “The voice of my education said to me / He must be killed,"’ (Derrida, 321)
‘"If you were a man ...," initially it's a hypothesis; " If you were a man,.:' evidently in the sense of a human being, but also of courage, of the virile man who, in a duel must annihilate his victim. "And voices in me said, If you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off."’ (Derrida, 321)
‘this is a classic scene, a classic biblical scene, a classic Middle Eastern scene; it happens near a source of water, the scene of hospitality takes place near a source of water, in an oasis or near a well, and the question of hospitality is posed as to water, as to the disposition of the water source.’ (Derrida, 322)
‘So you have here the human race, the signatory of the poem, the one who says '' I" and who hears voices saying to him; " If you were a man…," the humanity of man, [and] there is the beast, the snake… but the beast resembles a god.’ (Derrida, 324)
‘And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, [There's the head . . . This snake has a head.]’ (Derrida, 324)
‘The snake, the beast, becomes the sovereign after having been, if not assassinated, at least the target of an attempt on his life, an act of hatred on the part of the man. The beast becomes the sovereign, the kin g. "Uncrowned," but waiting for the crown, on the way to being crowned.’ (Derrida, 325)
‘when Freud explains the origin of the moral superego via the murder of the father, when the sons agree on equality between them after the murder of the father. Freud—and this is one of the contradictions in what he says—specifies that it is when the sons or the brothers feel remorse after me murder of the father that morality is born […] But the contradiction is that in order for there to be remorse, the moral law would already have to be in place.’ (Derrida, 328)
‘Why the albatross? The snake is a reptile, the low, an animal of the earth, of humus (humility, humus), and that is why he keeps emphasizing he earth.’ (Derrida, 328)
‘I was thinking that if we had the time, we'd pause over this "like." Why is the snake not a king but "like a king," resembling what a king is in human politics? But not only is he only analogous to a king, he is "like a king,” he is not a king, but he is like a king who is not a king, for two reasons (you remember the three lines): because he is in exile, he's a king not exercising power, a king without power, a king dethroned in a sense—and the scene of exile, obviously, is consonant with the scene of hospitality (they go together, exile and hospitality, those asking for hospitality are exiles), it is the scene of the home, of what is at home without being at home, unheimlich (we'll come back to that next week), unheimlich, all this is unheimlich, the most familiar and the most strange, the most disturbing, the most terrible also (unheimlich is a word with which, often in fact, I'll come back to this too next week, Heidegger translates the Greek word deinon in Sophocles, i.e. the terrible, the terrifying, he says that man is what is most unhcimlich, most disoriented and disorienting, at-home-not-at-home), this whole scene is unhcimlich, and obviously Unnheimlichkeit, the fact of being at home away from home is a scene of both exile and hospitality: the exiled, those asking for asylum and hospitality are not at home, they are seeking a home, and here is the man who takes them in or not, at his water-hole that is a water source, a resource for the guests or guest-exiles or those seeking asylum—so he is like a king, but he is not a reigning king, for he is in exile and he has no crown, he is
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld.
Now due to be crowned again.’ (Derrida, 329)
‘Provisionally in exile, the snake signals toward a kingdom to be restored, from his exile i.e. a scene that banished him. What is striking in this poem, which is clearly an ironic or perverse translation of the Garden of Eden, is that what is banished, exiled, is the snake, not Adam and Eve but the snake. The victim in all this, Adam's victim ("Adam") means the earth), the victim is the snake. We need to reread the Bible because, at bottom, the one to be sorriest for in this whole story is the snake! (Laughter.) That's not usually how it gets read! And there is no woman here, no woman, just a man and a snake.’ (Derrida, 329)
‘The snake here is "someone." And so "someone" is somebody, not as much qui as quelqu'un in French, but you don't say "someone" about a stone), "Someone was before me at my water-trough,/ And I, like a second comer, waiting."’ (Derrida, 319)
‘I remember something Levinas often says, namely that morality, ethics, begins with an "After you:' Arte r you. T he first sign of respect for the other is "after you." This doesn't just mean something like "go ahead" at the elevator, etc., It means " I come after you,"’ (Derrida, 319)
IT IS A GOLDEN SNAKE = PHAROAHS’ COLORS
‘The scene described by Lawrence is immediately the scene of a fight to the death. “The voice of my education said to me / He must be killed,"’ (Derrida, 321)
‘"If you were a man ...," initially it's a hypothesis; " If you were a man,.:' evidently in the sense of a human being, but also of courage, of the virile man who, in a duel must annihilate his victim. "And voices in me said, If you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off."’ (Derrida, 321)
‘this is a classic scene, a classic biblical scene, a classic Middle Eastern scene; it happens near a source of water, the scene of hospitality takes place near a source of water, in an oasis or near a well, and the question of hospitality is posed as to water, as to the disposition of the water source.’ (Derrida, 322)
‘So you have here the human race, the signatory of the poem, the one who says '' I" and who hears voices saying to him; " If you were a man…," the humanity of man, [and] there is the beast, the snake… but the beast resembles a god.’ (Derrida, 324)
‘And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, [There's the head . . . This snake has a head.]’ (Derrida, 324)
‘The snake, the beast, becomes the sovereign after having been, if not assassinated, at least the target of an attempt on his life, an act of hatred on the part of the man. The beast becomes the sovereign, the kin g. "Uncrowned," but waiting for the crown, on the way to being crowned.’ (Derrida, 325)
‘when Freud explains the origin of the moral superego via the murder of the father, when the sons agree on equality between them after the murder of the father. Freud—and this is one of the contradictions in what he says—specifies that it is when the sons or the brothers feel remorse after me murder of the father that morality is born […] But the contradiction is that in order for there to be remorse, the moral law would already have to be in place.’ (Derrida, 328)
‘Why the albatross? The snake is a reptile, the low, an animal of the earth, of humus (humility, humus), and that is why he keeps emphasizing he earth.’ (Derrida, 328)
‘I was thinking that if we had the time, we'd pause over this "like." Why is the snake not a king but "like a king," resembling what a king is in human politics? But not only is he only analogous to a king, he is "like a king,” he is not a king, but he is like a king who is not a king, for two reasons (you remember the three lines): because he is in exile, he's a king not exercising power, a king without power, a king dethroned in a sense—and the scene of exile, obviously, is consonant with the scene of hospitality (they go together, exile and hospitality, those asking for hospitality are exiles), it is the scene of the home, of what is at home without being at home, unheimlich (we'll come back to that next week), unheimlich, all this is unheimlich, the most familiar and the most strange, the most disturbing, the most terrible also (unheimlich is a word with which, often in fact, I'll come back to this too next week, Heidegger translates the Greek word deinon in Sophocles, i.e. the terrible, the terrifying, he says that man is what is most unhcimlich, most disoriented and disorienting, at-home-not-at-home), this whole scene is unhcimlich, and obviously Unnheimlichkeit, the fact of being at home away from home is a scene of both exile and hospitality: the exiled, those asking for asylum and hospitality are not at home, they are seeking a home, and here is the man who takes them in or not, at his water-hole that is a water source, a resource for the guests or guest-exiles or those seeking asylum—so he is like a king, but he is not a reigning king, for he is in exile and he has no crown, he is
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld.
Now due to be crowned again.’ (Derrida, 329)
‘Provisionally in exile, the snake signals toward a kingdom to be restored, from his exile i.e. a scene that banished him. What is striking in this poem, which is clearly an ironic or perverse translation of the Garden of Eden, is that what is banished, exiled, is the snake, not Adam and Eve but the snake. The victim in all this, Adam's victim ("Adam") means the earth), the victim is the snake. We need to reread the Bible because, at bottom, the one to be sorriest for in this whole story is the snake! (Laughter.) That's not usually how it gets read! And there is no woman here, no woman, just a man and a snake.’ (Derrida, 329)
September 9, 2025
Derrida zeroes in on the twin figures of la bête et le souverain, the animal as "below" the law, the king as "above" it (both as exceptions to sovereignty, though in the latter case also presumably issuing it), noting first and foremost that sexual difference figures at the core of this distinction, as brought to the fore by the gendered nature of the French language. He culls the history of philosophy in order to extract a bestiary, beginning with a certain lycology, glossing the treatment of wolves in such figures as Rousseau, Hobbes, Freud, Deleuze (and Guattari), and the fox in Machiavelli. There's a frustrating attempted refutation of Lacan as maintaining a Cartesian distinction between the human and the animal, and where Derrida is usually perceptive, here he falls short: he clearly sees one side of the problem, which is the anthropocentrism of maintaining a rigorous distinction between human and animal, but fails in being attentive to the opposite, yet just as anthropocentric, alternative problem, which is merely projecting the human onto the animal instead of maintaining (or respecting) it in its difference. Lacan, for me, clearly seems to be engaging in a critique of the latter, but Derrida simply reads this as an example of the former. What follows is nearly as frustrating, if not moreso, in Derrida seeming to side with Deleuze and Guattari in their childish exhortations against something they call "psychoanalysis," though by the end Derrida turns against them too (of course, for positing a distinction between human and animal). We get an examination of the French term bêtise, stupidity or foolishness, for its etymological proximity to the bestial, which is followed by a discussion on the figure of the marionette, both for its relation to the Cartesian automaton and for its relation to sexual difference. Agamben is targeted for some rather rough (though fair enough) treatment, though Derrida's critique is rather well-tread at this point (Agamben is eager to declare a novel discovery, yet simultaneously to claim that the dynamic has been the case all along). Some theological considerations are examined, as well as some rather concrete treatments of the confinement of both animals and those considered mentally ill in the zoo and the institution (following on from the connection - in the general societal imaginary - between animality and "stupidity"), which simultaneously brings us back to the question of sovereignty in rather stark terms. Also, given the fact that this lecture was given between 2001 and 2002, it also involves reflections on 9/11, with Derrida noting the reproducibility of images of 9/11 given recording technologies having a large impact on the formation of narratives around the event, alongside some commentary on Chomsky's Rogue States. The usual haunts are all here (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Husserl, Levinas, Aristotle, Benveniste, La Fontaine, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Valéry, Celan), alongside some less common considerations (Lawrence, Ronell).
November 25, 2025
No és el fet que l’escriptura de Derrida sigui particular el fet que la fa difícil de suportar, perquè de fet tota bona escriptura es fa particular, es particularitza, esdevé, com deien Deleuze i Guattari amb Proust o Kafka, un llenguatge menor, una llengua a l’interior de la llengua. Diria que és una altra cosa, és la seva deixadesa, com una medusa, en deixar-se arrossegar per les paraules, per l’associació d’idees i l’analogia, a dur a terme digressions de fins a 80 pàgines sobre temes que només toquen la pregunta principal de manera tangencial. I això, enerva. Si una vol saber sobre el poder, farà bé en apropar-se a Foucault: en Derrida hi trobem, més aviat, curtes ràfegues de pàgines dotades d’interès, amb enunciats filosòfics clars i relativament novedosos, acompanyats de desenes de pàgines que s’apropen a la verborrea i que, certament, formen part d’una manera de filosofar que em disgusta. En qualsevol cas, aquest seminari en concret parlava, de manera prou interessant, prou reveladora, de la relació entre la humanitat i el llop, del llop com la figura que amenaça la humanitat des de fora, que la humanitat exclou de la llei, sigui perquè és un animal, una bèstia i, per tant, no pot comprendre la llei, sigui perquè és el sobirà, el sobirà com a llop, en tant que per sobre de la llei, creador de llei, instaurador de la seva pròpia voluntat. I els homes-llops de Rousseau, i la licantropia, on s’ubica l’animalitat, el barbarisme, l’estupidesa, com a motiu fundacional d’una societat.
April 11, 2024
Every seminar begins with some fabulous "As we shall shortly show" :
"The reason of the strongest is always the best"
"Just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his beloved"
"The beast and the sovereign bleed, even marionettes bleed"
Allez savoir (Go figure),
because : Lupus est homo homini,non homo,quom qualis sit non novit" (!!)
YEAH I LOVED IT
"The reason of the strongest is always the best"
"Just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his beloved"
"The beast and the sovereign bleed, even marionettes bleed"
Allez savoir (Go figure),
because : Lupus est homo homini,non homo,quom qualis sit non novit" (!!)
YEAH I LOVED IT
Read
July 12, 2020Whoa. It would be unfair to rate something so scholarly and complicated. I did not enjoy it but I guess it is not about enjoyment in this case. So I'll just give all the credits on my supervisor because I'd never had thought to read this on my own.
October 16, 2012
It's Derrida, so be warned. After The Animal..., this is an interesting continuation of his auto-zoo-bio-graphic pursuit. He focuses on the philological and philosophical histories of "the beast" (and all its French cognates) as well as the image of "the sovereign" - with a nod to logocentrism - and a creepy/cool meditation on marionettes. It's been very useful to me, but as always, the more times I read something of Derrida's, the better I understand.
January 21, 2025
"In the Beginning was the Fable"
-Your Majesty, Mr. Wolf, Sir.
-Your Majesty, Mr. Wolf, Sir.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews