“Une langue ou une musique inouïe, assez inhumaine...”: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal

Abstract

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse on the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat” [bémol]—a ‘blue note’, if you will. The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless, “whose words, concepts, singing, and accent can finally manage to be foreign enough to everything that, in all human languages, will have harbored so many bêtises concerning the so-called animal.” This chapter pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading of Franz Kafka’s final story, “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josephine’s vocalizations—is it really singing? or perhaps rather squeaking, or whistling?—which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the songs of actual mice. What is at stake in rendering this inhuman music audible, and how can we conceive of this procedure as a zoopoetic enterprise? The voice plays a crucial role in almost all of Kafka’s animal narratives, in part because of the ancient tension between speech (logos), which is considered unique to humans, and voice (phonē), which we share with other living beings. Hence, the status of Josephine’s song, and of mouse song in general, obeys the logic of the anthropological machine. The task of this zoopoetic reading, then, is to show how Kafka’s text unsettles, or indeed renders inoperative, that logic.