“The ‘rogue’, be it to do with elephant, tiger, lion, or hippopotamus, is the individual who does not even respect the law of the animal community, of the pack, the horde, of its kind. By its savage or indocile behavior, it stays or goes away from the society to which it belongs.”
—Jacques Derrida, from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I translated by Geoffrey Bennington. The book launches a new series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, of Derrida’s unpublished lectures. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida deconstructs the traditional determinations of the human through an examination of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty in western literature.
Jacques Derrida (1930—2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine.