Wolf and Werewolf (loup-garou)

The wolf is the saturating figure of BS-I — it opens the seminar (pas de loup, "stealthy as a wolf," S1 p. 1) and closes it (Jean-Clet Martin's Marcwulf at S13 pp. 340–343). Every session crosses the wolf in some register: as silent intruder, as object of "let's not forget the wolves" refrain, as proverbial source of homo homini lupus (Plautus Asinaria), as werewolf-outlaw (Rousseau's Confessions), as object of the Wolf Man's terror (Freud), as fable-protagonist (La Fontaine), as the horla of medieval dynastic war, as Lupus Vulgaris the elephantine illness, as the Sire / Majesty whose "reason of the strongest is always the best." Derrida coins genelycology for the seminar's wolf-genealogical method (lyko + genealogy), and genelycopolitics / lyconomy for its political extension: "the law is always determined from the place of some wolf." The wolf is structurally the figure of the outlaw: the one who stands outside-or-above the law and so shares the topological position of the sovereign. The werewolf (loup-garou) is rendered in English as "outlaw" in the Penguin Cohen translation of Rousseau — Derrida's S3 footnote pp. 64.

Key Points

  • The wolf is named in absentia. When one says à pas de loup ("stealthy as a wolf"), the wolf is not there — only its name. The wolf is most powerful as figure precisely because absent: it is referred to, projected, fabulized, fantasmatized, but the "real wolf" is what does not arrive. Sovereignty has the same structure: it is figured most as the absent one whose name terrorizes. BS-I S1 pp. 4–7.
  • The pas is both "step" and "negation." Pas de loup contains the silent intrusion of the French adverb of negation (pas) into the noun pas (step). An adverb haunts a noun. "Where things are looming à pas de loup, the wolf is not there yet, no real wolf, no so-called natural wolf, no literal wolf." S1 p. 5.
  • The werewolf (loup-garou) is the political figure of the "without faith or law." Rousseau's Confessions names himself loup-garou in three distinct senses: asocial reader (book 1); just accuser of warring religious "wolves" (book 9); unjustly accused antichrist (book 12). All three converge on the topology: sans foi ni loi, outside religious and civil law alike. The Cohen English translation gives loup-garou as "outlaw" — making the structural identity with the sovereign (who is also "outlaw" in the sense of above-the-law) visible. BS-I S3 pp. 63–64; S4 pp. 98–101.
  • The wolf is the figure of what exceeds knowledge / making-known. Plautus's Asinaria l. 495 — "Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit" — places the wolf-saying in a credit/lending scene where a merchant refuses credit to someone he does not know. Reading: "When one does not know him, man is not a man but a wolf for man." But the grammar also admits: "Wolf is a man for man, which is not a man, when one does not know him." The wolf is unidentifiable man, the one whose identity exceeds faire savoir. BS-I S2 pp. 58–62.
  • The Plautine origin corrects the Hobbesian misattribution. The standard chain treats homo homini lupus as Hobbes's doctrine. Plautus (c. 200 BC) is centuries earlier; Montaigne, Rabelais, Bacon all inherit from Plautus before Hobbes. Hobbes did not invent the saying. Agamben's Homo Sacer "Ban and the Wolf" pages perpetuate the misattribution and forget the Plautine and Rousseauian sources. BS-I S2 pp. 60–62; S3 pp. 92–96.
  • The werewolf bears the same topology as the sovereign. Both stand "outside-or-above the law" — the sovereign as Law-giver above law, the werewolf as outlaw beneath/beyond law. Both can be predicated as "without faith or law." The sovereign has the right of pardon, of life or death; the werewolf has the power of trespass. Their structural identity is what generates the seminar's analogical-copular pairing. BS-I S4 pp. 98–101; S8 pp. 206–207.
  • Wolf-figures vary by culture, history, language; the wolf-figure is not universal. "Real wolves" are the same on both sides of the Pyrenees, but the figures of the wolf belong to specific cultures, nations, languages, myths. The seminar catalogues: Wotan's wolves; Fenrir (Norse); Akela / Mowgli (Kipling); Romulus-Remus's she-wolf; Manabozho's wolf-twin (Algonquin); Atatürk "gray wolf"; the wolf-tyrant of Plato's Republic 8; the Wolf Man (Freud); "Peter and the Wolf"; "Little Red Riding Hood." Wolves qua figures vary; wolves qua animals don't. BS-I S1 pp. 9–11.
  • Marcwulf and Lupus Vulgaris (closing wolf at S13). Jean-Clet Martin's Ossuaires (1995) recounts the wolf that unseats Carolingian Louis IV and inaugurates the Capetian succession: an enormous "Wolf" both animal and symptom, who astride forests and towns spreads his disease — "Lupus Vulgaris," the elephantine illness later just called "wolf." The wolf-king-illness triple is a translating function — a "popular chimera," not three identifiable beings. The seminar closes with this translatio-wolf, completing the genelycology. BS-I S13 pp. 340–343.

Details

Pas de loup — the seminar's grammar of absence

The seminar opens with "stealthy as a wolf [peut-être à pas de loup]." The French proverb à pas de loup — proceeding with the wolf's silent step — has a double structure. Pas is both the noun step (silent footstep of the wolf) and the adverb of negation (ne pas, "not"). To proceed à pas de loup is to advance silently AND to advance with no wolf — the wolf names what arrives most powerfully by being not-yet-here.

This is the grammatical figure that runs the seminar. Sovereignty operates the same way: it is most powerful when figured (named, feared, projected, fabulized) AS absent. The "real sovereign" is what doesn't arrive — what arrives is the fable of the sovereign. (Connect to fable-political for the political-fable's role here.)

Genelycology / genelycopolitics / lyconomy

Derrida's neologisms for the seminar's method. Lyko- (wolf) + -logy / -politics / -nomy. Genelycology is a fabular-genealogical reading of wolf-figures across philosophical, literary, juridical, and mythological texts. Genelycopolitics is its political extension. Lyconomy is the structural consequence: "the law is always determined from the place of some wolf" (S2). These neologisms perform what they name — fabular, hybrid, refusing the dichotomies (animal/political, beast/man) they thematize.

Rousseau as werewolf (Session 3)

Rousseau is the seminar's main werewolf-text. Confessions book 1: "I lived like a real werewolf [loup-garou]" — Rousseau describes his retreat from sociality into book-reading as a becoming-werewolf. Book 9: in the polemics surrounding the Encyclopédie, all the warring parties are "wolves fiercely trying to tear each other to pieces"; Rousseau positions himself as the non-wolf arbiter (the just accuser). Book 12: after Émile, Rousseau is himself accused of being a wolf — antichrist, lycanthrope, cruel, "without faith or law" — pursued across the countryside "like a werewolf."

The Pléiade footnote at Confessions p. 591 cites the 1762 Académie française Dictionnaire: "Lycanthropy: mental illness in which the patient imagines he has turned into a wolf. But here it would rather be the mental state of a man who is full of hatred, cruel, enraged like a wolf." Rousseau's three werewolf-passages bracket the seminar's reading: the werewolf is cruel (the proper of man, per Lacan's reading), criminal (transgressor of civil law), and miscreant (transgressor of religious law). All three converge on the sans foi ni loi topology that the sovereign also occupies.

The Plautine origin — Asinaria l. 495

Derrida recovers the actual origin of homo homini lupus in Plautus's comedy Asinaria (c. 200 BC), spoken by a merchant in a credit-and-lending scene. Setting: the merchant has been asked to deliver money to a person he does not know; he refuses, saying:

"Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit." (Roughly: "Man is a wolf to man — not a man — when one does not know him.")

The line's grammar is undecidable: "wolf is man" or "man is wolf"; "for man" or "to man"; with or without the "not a man" parenthetical. Derrida reads: the wolf is here the figure of what exceeds knowledge — what one cannot identify, faire savoir (make-known), trust. The wolf is "homo who is non homo" — the man-stranger as wolf. (Connect to fable-political for the faire savoir analysis.)

The standard attribution chain reads homo homini lupus as Hobbesian doctrine, but Hobbes inherited it. The genelycological filiation runs Plautus → Erasmus (proverbs) → Montaigne (Essais) → Bacon → Hobbes — and through Lacan in our century. Agamben's Homo Sacer perpetuates the Hobbes-attribution and is criticized by Derrida for this forgetting (along with forgetting Rousseau's loup-garou).

The wolf-tradition of Hobbes-Spinoza-Schmitt

Hobbes's De Cive uses homo homini lupus and homo homini deus together — man is both wolf and god to man. Hobbes's "state of nature" is the wolf-state; the social contract is what exits it. Spinoza glosses similarly in Tractatus Politicus. Schmitt's "concept of the political" — friend/enemy — is the structural inheritor: the enemy IS the one whom one treats as wolf, hostis not inimicus, foreign-other rather than personal-other. (Connect to sovereignty for the Schmittian-decisionist context.)

Machiavelli's wolf and fox (Session 3, pp. 79–91)

Machiavelli's The Prince ch. 18: the prince must combat by both law (proper to man) and force (proper to beasts); the half-man / half-beast Chiron (the centaur) teaches this dual mode. But Machiavelli prefers the fox-lion composite over Chiron, and within that the fox dominates — because cunning (knowing-how-not-to-make-known) is a second-degree power that even lions and wolves lack. The fox can pretend not to be a fox — the lie, the cunning of cunning.

Derrida draws the consequence: the fox's supremacy in Machiavelli is structurally the inversion of force into knowledge. The wolf-and-lion register of brute force is dominated by the fox-register of dissimulation. This is already the Nietzschean priest's move (will-to-power as deceit), and it anchors the seminar's reading of contemporary politics as fabular: the contemporary sovereign rules through faire savoir (image, narrative, archive), not through wolf-force directly. (Connect to fable-political for the contemporary fabular-sovereign.)

Marcwulf and Lupus Vulgaris — the closing wolf (Session 13)

Derrida closes BS-I (after the Aristotle reading) with a passage from Jean-Clet Martin's Ossuaires: Anatomie du Moyen Âge roman (1995). The text recounts the late-Carolingian war between Louis IV and the early Capetians: "between Reims, Laon, and Soissons" prowls "a wolf without equal" — Marcwulf, "wolf of the marches." This wolf is "both animal and symptom"; it unseats Louis IV, who dies of "elephantiasis" — a disease the text calls "Lupus Vulgaris", by the 13th century just called "wolf."

The wolf here is a translation-function: animal → illness → outlaw (horla) → dynastic-war-figure → Capetian successor. The "name 'wolf' unfolds a diagram or a ramified volume" of incommensurable meanings. Derrida flags: "the horla, the outlaw that, like the sovereign, makes the law from a place external to the law" (S13 p. 342). The seminar's closing figure is the wolf as translatio itself — the figure across which sovereignty translates between two dynasties, between two illnesses, between animal and political and medical registers. This anchors arg #42 in the seminar; see derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i.

What the Concept Does

  • Names the absent-figure structure of political imagination. What is most powerful in political discourse is what is named but not present — the wolf, the enemy, the threat. The seminar's pas de loup analysis generalizes from wolf-figure to sovereignty itself.
  • Provides the operative analogy across the seminar. Beast and sovereign share outside-or-above the law topology; the wolf is the canonical figure of this shared topology; therefore the wolf is the analogy-vehicle for the seminar's deconstruction of sovereignty.
  • Recovers a forgotten genealogy (Plautus → Rousseau → contemporary discourse) against the standard Hobbesian attribution of homo homini lupus, with critical consequences for any Homo Sacer-style reading.
  • Connects ethology, mythology, juridical history, philology, and political philosophy in a single fabular-genealogical archive that the standard disciplinary divisions had kept separate.

What It Rejects

  • The folkloric-dismissive reading that treats the werewolf as superstition rather than operative political topology.
  • The universalist reading that takes "the wolf" as one transhistorical figure. Wolves qua figures belong to specific cultures, languages, myths.
  • The Hobbes-as-originator attribution of homo homini lupus (and its consequences in Agamben's Homo Sacer).
  • The cognitivist reduction of the wolf to its empirical-ethological signified. The wolf is irreducibly figure, fable, fantasy — and that is precisely its political force.

Connections

  • is the figure of sovereignty — both share the topology of being outside-or-above the law
  • is the central figure of derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — saturates all 13 sessions
  • is the saying of plautus's Asinaria — homo homini lupus originates here, not in Hobbes
  • is engaged by jean-jacques-rousseau — the Confessions werewolf passages
  • is engaged by jean-de-la-fontaine — "Le loup et l'agneau" as exemplary structure of sovereign right
  • is engaged by thomas-hobbes — De Cive on homo homini lupus / deus; the wolf-state and the social contract
  • is engaged by carl-schmitt — friend/enemy and the wolf as hostis
  • is engaged by niccolo-machiavelli — the fox-lion composite that dominates over Chiron
  • is engaged by Freud — the Wolf Man's dream of seven wolves in a walnut-tree
  • is forgotten by giorgio-agamben — Homo Sacer's "Ban and the Wolf" omits Plautus and Rousseau, criticized at BS-I S3 pp. 92–96
  • contains the pas de loup wordplay (step / negation; absent-figure logic)
  • contains the loup-garou (werewolf) as canonical outlaw-figure
  • closes via Jean-Clet Martin's Marcwulf and Lupus Vulgaris (S13)
  • is anchored in derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — full extraction at .extraction-derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i.md

Open Questions

  • The cross-cultural question: are there non-European political traditions where the wolf-figure functions analogously? The seminar's archive is European-Mediterranean; Derrida flags at S13 p. 339 that "we have had a French seminar."
  • The wolf as gendered figure: BS-I begins with the feminine beast (la bête) and the masculine sovereign (le souverain); but the wolf-figures Derrida tracks are mostly masculine. The wolf-she-wolf distinction (Romulus-Remus's lupa, Rousseau's "wolves of both sexes") is named but not developed. Open for BS-II.
  • The contemporary post-9/11 wolf: BS-I S1 pp. 19–20 cites Chomsky's Rogue States on the bestiary-lexicon of contemporary American policy ("beast of Baghdad" etc.). The line from this seminar (2001–2002) through Voyous (2003) traces the wolf-figure into contemporary global politics. Open as a contemporary-political reading thread.

Sources

  • derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — sessions 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13 are the primary wolf-sessions; the wolf saturates the entire seminar. Pass 2 extraction note .extraction-derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i.md records the per-session locations.