This paper interrogates animality through a dialogue between Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Stella do Patrocínio, a Black thinker whose speech emerged in the context of social exclusion and confinement during the military dictatorship in Brazil. With Do Patrocínio and Derrida, it reveals the imaginary character of the human-animal opposition on which Lacan’s anthropology depends. Through Do Patrocínio and Lacan, it challenges Derrida’s understanding of dissemination through an examination of how social positionality constrains différance. The paper argues that although language can and often does subvert oppositions, it remains bound to the ways in which designation entails social positioning. It therefore proposes an understanding of the animal as position, showing how the signifier’s incapacity to fully capture the real becomes visible in Do Patrocínio’s movement through the animal positions her discourse inhabits and displaces.
Iracema Dulley is an anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and creative writer. Her anthropological work explores how subjects are formed through the entanglements of language, power, and the body. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, she examines the sociocultural, political, historical, and discursive aspects of subject constitution, with a particular focus on Angola and Brazil. She is the author of the monographs On the Emic Gesture, Os nomes dos outros, and Deus é feiticeiro, and her work has appeared in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Social Analysis, Comparative Studies in Society and History, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Africa. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon.
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