Fans pick 100 books like The Animal That Therefore I Am

By Jacques Derrida, Marie-Louise Mallet (editor), David Wills (translator)

Here are 100 books that The Animal That Therefore I Am fans have personally recommended if you like The Animal That Therefore I Am. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Disgrace

Dermot Ross Author Of Hemingway's Goblet

From my list on featuring a damaged protagonist.

Why am I passionate about this?

Right from an early age, I have always been interested in the fallibility of the human condition, being particularly conscious of my own faults. People who are too good to be true are of little interest, except that I want to know their faults or their secrets. I have found myself drawn to complex characters, those who have good and bad characteristics, and some of the novels and movies that I have enjoyed most feature such characters. In my career as a lawyer, I have met all kinds of people who have made bad decisions or suffered misfortune, and it has always been a pleasure trying to help them. 

Dermot's book list on featuring a damaged protagonist

Dermot Ross Why did Dermot love this book?

As the author no doubt intended, right from the first page, I took a dislike to the protagonist (he makes his weekly visit to a prostitute). It emerges that David is, in fact, a sexual obsessive, and it is not long before he is forced to leave his university professorship after aggressively pursuing and bedding one of his students. 

I was surprised, therefore, when the story took off in a different direction and ended up as a graphic and sad portrayal of the predicament of white families in South Africa recently coming to terms with black rule. The portrait that emerges is a bleak one that includes violence, dislocation, theft, and (I thought this a nice circular touch back to the MeToo opening chapters) the rape of David's daughter by a young black man. I found the book disturbing as well as compelling.

By J. M. Coetzee,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Disgrace as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.

"Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." -The New Yorker

At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an…


Book cover of A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

Cary Wolfe Author Of What Is Posthumanism?

From my list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us.

Why am I passionate about this?

Before there was an interdisciplinary academic field called “Animal Studies,” I was involved in these issues as an animal rights activist. Back then, the question of the animal was not taken seriously in academia as a free-standing problem (like gender or sexuality or race). It was important to me to build that—not just to take seriously the lives of animals, but also to show how the animal issue opens onto a much broader set of fundamental questions about the human and its place in relation to ecology, technology, and the non-human world. That’s why the book series I founded is devoted not to Animal Studies, but to Posthumanism.

Cary's book list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us

Cary Wolfe Why did Cary love this book?

Reading this book completely changed how I think about the world around me.

Actually, I should say “worlds,” because Uexküll explores, both lyrically and scientifically, how the umwelt (often translated as “lifeworld”) of each animal is unique, likening each one to a separate “soap bubble,” each with its own particular character, but nonetheless all connected, as if in a giant symphony.

I admire those rare books of historical importance that manage to remain contemporary, and this book has lost none of its relevance since its original publication in 1934. A touchstone for major contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Peter Sloterdijk, Uexküll’s famous foray is widely viewed as one of the founding texts of contemporary theoretical biology, biosemiotics, and posthumanist thought.

By Jakob von Uexkull, Joseph D. O'Neil (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject? With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexkull embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexkull "a high point of modern antihumanism."
A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, A Foray into the…


Book cover of Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name

Cary Wolfe Author Of What Is Posthumanism?

From my list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us.

Why am I passionate about this?

Before there was an interdisciplinary academic field called “Animal Studies,” I was involved in these issues as an animal rights activist. Back then, the question of the animal was not taken seriously in academia as a free-standing problem (like gender or sexuality or race). It was important to me to build that—not just to take seriously the lives of animals, but also to show how the animal issue opens onto a much broader set of fundamental questions about the human and its place in relation to ecology, technology, and the non-human world. That’s why the book series I founded is devoted not to Animal Studies, but to Posthumanism.

Cary's book list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us

Cary Wolfe Why did Cary love this book?

I love how Hearne—a poet, student of philosophy, essayist, and master trainer of dogs and horses—weaves together her hands-on experience working with animals and reflections on the (often uninformed) philosophical commonplaces about them: insights that could only come from someone with her unique skill set.

As the title implies, Hearne is keenly interested in the relationship between language, the mental and emotional worlds of humans and animals, and the challenges of doing justice to how those worlds do (and do not) overlap. (One essay is called “How To Say `Fetch!’”)

No one writes more insightfully—and sometimes iconoclastically—about complex concepts such as animal dignity, honor, and humor, and no one captures more beautifully how animals are unique individuals, each with its own personality.

By Vicki Hearne,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Adam's Task as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A groundbreaking meditation on our human-animal relationships and the moral code that binds it.

Adam's Task, Vicki Hearne's innovative masterpiece on animal training, brings our perennial discussion of the human-animal bond to a whole new metaphysical level. Based on studies of literary criticism, philosophy, and extensive hands-on experience in training, Hearne asserts, in boldly anthropomorphic terms, that animals (at least those that interact more with humans) are far more intelligent than we assume. In fact, they are capable of developing an understanding of "the good," a moral code that influences their motives and actions.

Drawing on an eclectic range of…


Book cover of The Case for Animal Rights

Cary Wolfe Author Of What Is Posthumanism?

From my list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us.

Why am I passionate about this?

Before there was an interdisciplinary academic field called “Animal Studies,” I was involved in these issues as an animal rights activist. Back then, the question of the animal was not taken seriously in academia as a free-standing problem (like gender or sexuality or race). It was important to me to build that—not just to take seriously the lives of animals, but also to show how the animal issue opens onto a much broader set of fundamental questions about the human and its place in relation to ecology, technology, and the non-human world. That’s why the book series I founded is devoted not to Animal Studies, but to Posthumanism.

Cary's book list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us

Cary Wolfe Why did Cary love this book?

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is usually taken to be the founding philosophical text for the animal rights movement, but I think Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights presents the more compelling, more multi-dimensional argument.

Where Singer grounds moral standing in the fundamental interest in avoiding suffering, Regan foregrounds the “inherent value” of being the “experiencing subject of a life,” for whom avoiding suffering is only part of the question.

There’s plenty of disagreement about whether the rights framework is the best way to think about our moral duties to animals (cf. Derrida above). And Regan’s position is available in less rigorous and scholarly form in some of his other books. But for the full walk-through of the best argument for animal rights, this is the text.

By Tom Regan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Case for Animal Rights as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

More than twenty years after its original publication, The Case for Animal Rights is an acknowledged classic of moral philosophy, and its author is recognized as the intellectual leader of the animal rights movement. In a new and fully considered preface, Regan responds to his critics and defends the book's revolutionary position.


Book cover of Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction: An Archetypal Reading of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler

Lisa Marchiano Author Of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents

From my list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners. 

Lisa's book list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health

Lisa Marchiano Why did Lisa love this book?

I love Alderman’s writing. This book is dense. It isn’t long but it does take a bit of work to get through it, but it’s worth it.

He does the heavy lifting I’ve always wanted someone to do, looking carefully at the writings of Derrida and pointing out where these ideas bend back unhelpfully on themselves. He brings a Jungian lens to this exploration, battling back the nihilistic implications of deconstruction and finding again the helpful bedrock of meaning. 

By Bret Alderman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction, Bret Alderman puts forth a compelling thesis: Deconstruction tells a mythic story. Through an attentive examination of multiple texts and literary works, he elucidates this story in psychological and philosophical terms.

Deconstruction, the method of philosophical and literary analysis originated by Jacques Derrida, arises from what Carl Jung called "a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas." In the case of deconstruction, such ideas bear a striking resemblance to a figure that Jungian and Post-Jungian writers refer to as the puer aeternus or eternal…


Book cover of The Location of Culture

Iris Idelson-Shein Author Of Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe

From my list on translation and culture.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been studying Jewish translation for over a decade now. I’m fascinated with the way translation enables dialogue between different languages and cultures without eliminating the differences that make such dialogue worthwhile. Most of my work has been dedicated to translation between Christians and Jews, but I’m also interested in the ways in which translation functioned (and continues to function) within Jewish culture as a means of conversation between different communities, classes, genders, and generations. 

Iris' book list on translation and culture

Iris Idelson-Shein Why did Iris love this book?

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For Bhabha, translation transcends mere linguistic or even cultural exchange to become a tool for grappling with cultural transformation and difference more generally. It is a way of thinking about resistance and religion, innovation and imitation, politics and power. This book was love at first sight for me, and although I…

By Homi K. Bhabha,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Location of Culture as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.


Book cover of Derrida: A Biography

Adrián Gordaliza Vega Author Of The End of Everything: A society in transition

From my list on biographies for the contemporary reader.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a graduate in Philosophy with a Masters degree in Contemporary Culture so this theme is enormously interesting for me. My passion has been shifting from literature to contemporary society and culture in general. I love to find the connexions between the current state of affairs and the past. I honestly think that if we look at the lives and times of the great thinkers we can get hints about the state of contemporary society. Understanding what makes us behave and think the way we do it is my main motivation. 

Adrián's book list on biographies for the contemporary reader

Adrián Gordaliza Vega Why did Adrián love this book?

I'll be honest, when I received Benoit Peeters' book on Derrida I was a little worried.

A 600-page tome about one of the most notoriously difficult philosophers. Fortunately, Peeters does not write in a Derridean manner and makes the life journey of the most influential thinker of postmodernism accessible and even entertaining.

Peeters covers Derrida's formative years in Algeria, his academic career, and his development of deconstruction—a philosophical approach that challenged traditional notions of language, meaning, and text interpretation. 

By Benoit Peeters, Andrew Brown (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Derrida as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world - a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the Ecole Normale Superieure, the cluster of structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers…


Book cover of The Truth about the Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World

Eric Maisel Author Of Choose Your Life Purposes

From my list on the truth about the truth.

Why am I passionate about this?

The sixty books I’ve written wander in and out of existential thought, as that breakthrough thinking, where man was told to take personal responsibility for his life and stop looking up or elsewhere for purpose and meaning, has informed everything I do and write about. Over the years, I’ve been a family therapist, a creativity coach, an existential wellness coach, and an advocate for critical psychology and critical psychiatry, points of view that dispute the current pseudo-medical “mental disorder” paradigm. 

Eric's book list on the truth about the truth

Eric Maisel Why did Eric love this book?

Apart from the existential fiction that I love (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, etc.), this is one of my favorite books of all time. The editor, Walter Truett Anderson, gathered together the best collection ever of essays on the topics of postmodernism, deconstruction (and reconstruction), the wobbly nature of truth in the twentieth century (and now, the twenty-first century), and how we might go about reconstructing the truth now that we have so beautifully and mercilessly deconstructed it.

Authors included are Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Bell Hooks, and a ton of other great thinkers on the subject of our postmodern malaise and the difficulties of belief … in anything. If you don’t know this book, you will really, really want to get to know it.

By Walt Anderson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Truth about the Truth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Includes essays and excerpts from the works of prominent modern thinkers such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, and Isaiah Berlin among others.


Book cover of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader

Richard Wolin Author Of Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology

From my list on intellectuals and fascism.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a graduate student during the late 1970s, my mentor, Martin Jay, generously introduced me to two members of the Frankfurt School: Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal. These memorable personal encounters inspired me to write a dissertation on Walter Benjamin, who was closely allied with the Frankfurt School. The completed dissertation, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, became the first book on Benjamin in English and is still in print. The Frankfurt School thinkers published a series of pioneering socio-psychological treatises on political authoritarianism: The Authoritarian Personality, Prophets of Deceit, and One-Dimensional Man. These studies continue to provide an indispensable conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary reemergence of fascist political forms.

Richard's book list on intellectuals and fascism

Richard Wolin Why did Richard love this book?

The ever-contentious debate about Heidegger’s filiations with Nazism was re-enlivened with the appearance of the so-called “Black Notebooks” in 2014.

However, unless one closely heeds the existential verbiage of Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism, one risks tilting at windmills; hence, succumbing to a plethora of misconceptions and misunderstandings.

This invaluable collection of original texts – which, in addition to Heidegger political speeches of 1933-34, contains the indispensable Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God Can Save Us!” – has taken on an entirely new meaning and importance in light of the “Black Notebooks’” publication. 

By Richard Wolin (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Heidegger Controversy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart…


Book cover of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction

Nicholas Hudson Author Of A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson

From my list on why the Enlightenment is the beginning of the modern world.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a teacher and writer, I am a passionate believer in the ideals of the Enlightenment. In my understanding of these ideals, they include a belief in reason and honest inquiry in the service of humanity. More and more we need these ideals against bigotry, self-delusion, greed, and cruelty. The books recommended here are among those that helped to inspire me with continued faith in the progress of the human species and our responsibility to help each other and the world we live in.

Nicholas' book list on why the Enlightenment is the beginning of the modern world

Nicholas Hudson Why did Nicholas love this book?

I have long considered Jean-Jacques Rousseau the most influential of all major figures in the Enlightenment.

As I tell my students, if they are wearing jeans, then they are showing the abiding impact of Rousseau’s celebration of “nature” over civilization. I could recommend any of Rousseau’s books on the origins of society, the “social contract,” or his Confessions, the first modern autobiography. Instead, I will recommend my favorite study of Rousseau.

The great French historian Jean Starobinski illuminates the paradoxes of Rousseau’s personality and writings, his habits of self-deception and obfuscation in conflict with his celebration of total honesty or transparency. This book, though written in the late 1950s, greatly influenced later French authors on Rousseau such as Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction.

By Jean Starobinski, Arthur Goldhammer (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jean Starobinski, one of Europe's foremost literary critics, examines the life that led Rousseau, who so passionately sought open, transparent communication with others, to accept and even foster obstacles that permitted him to withdraw into himself. First published in France in 1958, Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains Starobinski's most important achievement and, arguably, the most comprehensive book ever written on Rousseau. The text has been extensively revised for this edition and is published here along with seven essays on Rousseau that appeared between 1962 and 1970.


Book cover of Disgrace
Book cover of A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning
Book cover of Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name

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