When Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson asked about man's difference from animals' way of eating, Derrida replied:

I have become increasingly interested in the philosophical border between man and animal, which also becomes an examination of the traditional boundary between culture and nature. I have chosen to tackle this issue via the thinkers who seem to have questioned the self-sufficiency of humanism most deeply: Heidegger and Lévinas. Despite their critique of a traditional concept of the subject, they remain humanists by insisting on an absolute distinction between humans and animals. The establishment of man’s privileged position requires the sacrifice and devouring of animals. Not even Lévinas is willing to sacrifice the sacrifice.

But in Heidegger, the interpretative act is surely not about interiorizing or incorporating, right?

No, not in any simple way, given that he dissolved the idea of a subjective interiority. But the difference itself between what is one’s own and what is foreign remains—understanding is still an assimilation. Heidegger is not as voracious a philosopher as Hegel; not everything for him can be assimilated. What Heidegger calls the “ontological difference” between “being” (Sein) and “beings” (Seienden)—which is of course the very essence of his philosophy—indicates such a limit. Being always remains inaccessible. Being is never given as a being, a thing in the world that can be named and captured with the question What? Being transcends beings—it evades linguistic naming.

So you take Heidegger’s ontological difference to be the boundary between what can be eaten and what cannot be eaten?

Yes, exactly. The ontological difference is the boundary between what can be assimilated and what is already presupposed in all assimilation, but which itself is inaccessible. This is the most profound and most difficult to comprehend movement in the Heideggerian concept of being. Being makes beings accessible in the world, yet itself withdraws. This movement is what Heidegger called das Ereignis—the event (or “the coming-about”).

But as far as Heidegger’s qualified humanism is concerned, which transfers the specifically human from man’s interior to his hand, the boundary between human and animal still remains something which is impossible to call into question. It is not a traditional humanism, but a determination of the location—the place (Dasein) where meaning can be received. The location is not explicitly determined as Man, but Heidegger nonetheless provides a description of this place that excludes animals. Only man has hands, says Heidegger, and, through the hand, he has access to a world of meaningful action. The ape, however, possesses only “Greifsorgane” (organs for grasping) and is therefore excluded from the realm of the human. This distinction between hand and organ for grasping is not something Heidegger arrived at by studying apes in the Black Forest, but rather has a purely stipulative character. Here, as always, humanism rests on the sacrifice of the animal, on the implicit swallowing up of the animal.

  ¶ 7:11 AM