The Ambiguity of Political Dichotomies: Derrida's Hobbes

Abstract

The discourses of Western thought on animals operate through a strict human -animal dichotomy. According to Derrida, critical of such sharp distinctions, the strict boundaries drawn between these two categories ignore the singularity of the animal and bring about violence against animals at the level of discourse. In this respect, Derrida, who strategically tracks down the situations in which the boundary between these two categories is blurred, catches the possibility of the sort of ambiguity he seeks in the 'sov-ereign' image of Hobbes' political theory. Hobbes, who portrays man as having the nature of an animal in the state of nature, describes the state of nature as a state of fear of death. However, according to Hobbes, to overcome his animal nature, humans have a unique faculty called reason and utilising this faculty, he transfers his rights to a sovereign by a social contract. In doing so, man creates an artificial prosthesis called the state and excludes animals from his contract. Hobbes also excludes God from the contract to distance himself from the theologically oriented political theories of the Middle Ages. For Derrida, the relation of Hobbes' humanist manoeuvre to theology is controversial. Hence, Derrida focuses on the characteristic, namely the non-responsiveness that the animal and God, which are excluded from the contract, share with the sovereign. They intersect in being non-responsive in that the animal does not have logos, God cannot speak without a mediator, and the sovereign has the privilege of not responding to the law. This paper, focusing on Derrida's analysis of Hobbes, investigates how the commonality of the three categories works in the background of the logic of sovereignty of Hobbes's political theory and shows how the ambiguity revealed by this investigation spreads to the constitutive dichotomies of politics.