UC Santa Barbara

The centrality of Martin Heidegger to contemporary discussions of the animal is notable for the lack of debate: despite the explosion of commentary on Heidegger’s thinking of the animal, most scholarship adheres closely to the criticisms first made by Derrida. On this reading, Heidegger anthropocentrically construes the animal according to a lack relative to the human and founds the human/animal distinction—in continuity with the metaphysical tradition—by privileging the human capacity for language, itself construed as a sovereign power. In this paper, an alternative reading of Heidegger’s thinking of the animal is proposed on the basis of a close textual analysis of Heidegger’s changing understanding of the animal throughout the 1920s, as well as the broader methodological context of his most extended treatment of the animal, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Against the current critical consensus, Heidegger is not offering a theory of the animal—let alone a metaphysical and anthropocentric one—but is raising the animal as a question in order to provoke a philosophical transformation in his audience. Although this transformative function is, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger’s primary reason for considering the animal, he also develops an explicitly anti-theoretical understanding of the animal. For Heidegger, animal life is a fundamentally mysterious realm by which we are always already attuned, and he calls for us to let the animal be what it is, rather than to approach it in terms of instrumental use or scientific inquiry.