Editors' Preface: Ecce animot: Postanimality from Cave to Screen

In "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (1999), Jacques Derrida coined the portmanteau word animot as a challenge and an alternative to l'animal, the collective singular noun habitually used to group all animal species together into a single homogeneous category opposable to Man. In contrast to this general singular, the phonetically plural animot signifies, "a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living," which cannot be separated from the human by a single indivisible line. Encountering the diversified mass of the animot, the human is confronted with multiple forms of life, highly differentiated among themselves, separated from each other and from human animals by complex, layered borders that are at once "intimate" and "abyssal." An outspoken critic of continualism in biology, Derrida declares his intention to "complicate," "thicken," "delinearize," "fold," and "divide" such boundaries, thus opening up for exploration an intermediary, hybrid realm between nature and culture. Here, Clark and Freccero explore Ecce animot in postanimality.