“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject

This interview by Jean-Luck Nancy with Jacques Derrida in 1988, is considered one of the pillars of Derrida’s later concern with what he called “the question of the animals.” In an attempt to answer Nancy’s question of “Who comes after the subject?”, the dialogue between two of the most thorough and critical readers of Martin Heidegger in France in their time, gave rise to several of Derrida’s most original and radical formulations regarding the relation between the human and the animal and laid the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the books and seminars that Derrida devoted to the ethical and political aspects of thought about animality in his last years. Human violence toward nonhuman animals, especially the question of the “noncriminal killing” of them and the eating of their flesh, receive here, for the first time in Derrida’s oeuvre, explicit formulation, which remains, to this day, at the heart of the philosophical discussions of the subject and also at the heart of the interpretive discussions of Derrida’s works. The interview is preceded by an introduction that details the circumstances that led to its being edited and published, and locates it on the historical and philosophical axis of Derrida’s writing.