Death took Jacques Derrida before he could finish writing the book entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am. Instead we have is the script of a very long lecture he gave at the Cerisy conference. It is about the relationship between humans and animals. More specifically, it is about how humans use animals, and how animals show up in philosophy.

In it, he analyzes the experience of being caught naked in the gaze of an animal, contrasting it with the nudity of Adam as he calls out the names of all the beasts. The concept of naming interlocks with the concept of 'having dominion', which lays the foundation of the received ethics regarding the treatment of animals. A great deal of the lecture is devoted to Jeremy Bentham and the question "Can they [animals] suffer?" This leads back to Genesis and Abel's sacrifice of an animal, and Abraham's sacrifice of a ram in place of his son.

The point of this web of allusions is to demonstrate how the animal in thought is most usually the animal in general, any animal, an arbitrary animal that, because it cannot speak, is denied an identity. I don't believe he succeeds completely, in part because he sets out to show us too much, with too little time. The last section on the animal in Heidegger is especially truncated; he barely seems to say anything at all. There is no climax. I wish, like he wished, that he would have had more time.