Jean de La Fontaine

French poet and fabulist (1621–1695), author of the Fables choisies, mises en vers (12 books, 1668–1694). On the wiki La Fontaine appears through BS-I in the load-bearing role of supplying the seminar's opening epigraph and operative fable: "The reason of the strongest is always the best / As we shall shortly show" — the first lines of "Le loup et l'agneau" (The Wolf and the Lamb, Fables I.10, 1668). The fable is read in extended detail at BS-I Session 8 (pp. 208–214) as the exemplary structure of sovereign right: preemptive punishment, originally accusatory ("if not you, your brother then"), without tribunal ("sans autre forme de procès"). La Fontaine also supplies "Le singe et le dauphin" (The Monkey and the Dolphin, Fables IV.7), read at BS-I S10 in the context of the dolphin-Dauphin wordplay. The Fables are dedicated to Monseigneur le Dauphin (the king's son, heir to the throne); BS-I tracks the totemic-political force of this dedication through the dolphin-Dauphin association (S10 pp. 253–256).

Key Points

  • "Le loup et l'agneau" (Fables I.10) — the seminar's operative fable. "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure / Comme nous l'allons montrer tout à l'heure." Opening lines also figured at BS-I S1 p. 8 as the seminar's own incipit-figure ("we shall shortly show"). The fable structurally exhibits: (a) sovereign right as preemptive vengeance; (b) original accusation prior to the offense; (c) transgenerational culpability ("if not you, your brother then"); (d) dispensing-with-tribunal ("sans autre forme de procès"); (e) the wolf as Sire / Majesty addressed by the lamb. BS-I S8 pp. 208–214.
  • "The reason of the strongest is always the best." Raison — French — is structurally undecidable: (i) "reason given" by the strongest (the verbal-discursive reason he advances); (ii) "the right he has" (la raison qu'il a) — the just-right of his sovereign-claim; (iii) the idiom avoir raison des autres (to prevail over the others). The wolf's "reason" runs all three together; that is the structural force of sovereign right. BS-I S8 p. 209.
  • "If not you, your brother then" — the original-culpability formula. When the lamb argues "I wasn't born yet," the wolf replies with the famous transgenerational accusation. Ursprüngliche Schuldigsein of the lamb (Derrida's term, S8 p. 210): the lamb is guilty at birth, by birth, guilty for being born what he was born. The reading reflects the seminar's Heideggerian background (the Schuldigsein of Sein und Zeit §58).
  • "Le singe et le dauphin" (Fables IV.7) — the Cartesian dolphin. Read at BS-I S10 pp. 253–256. A dolphin saves a monkey from shipwreck, mistakes it for a man (the monkey "resembles man"); when the dolphin's trick question reveals the monkey's ignorance, the dolphin throws him back to drown. The dolphin reasons Cartesianly: this monkey doesn't really respond, only reacts; therefore he is bête, not human; therefore I throw him back. The seventeenth-century dolphin is "a Cartesian dolphin."
  • Dedication to Monseigneur le Dauphin and the totemic force of the dolphin-name. La Fontaine's Fables are dedicated to the king's son (the Dauphin — heir to the throne). The dauphin (dolphin, delphis in Greek, delphinus in Latin) is also the name of the French province; this names the king's son and the marine cetacean simultaneously. Derrida tracks the totemic-political force at S10 p. 253: the heraldic dolphins of the lords of the Viennois are the etymological source of "Dauphin" as title of the king's elder son.
  • The fable as constitutive of political reason (see fable-political). La Fontaine's Fables are the operative archive through which BS-I demonstrates that the fable is internal to political discourse. The dedication to the Dauphin, the moral-pedagogical claim ("as we shall shortly show"), the animal-as-political-figure structure — all of these make La Fontaine the seminar's canonical fable-source.

Role on the Wiki

La Fontaine appears on the wiki primarily through BS-I and supplies two of its structurally most important readings: the wolf-and-lamb fable (S8) and the monkey-and-dolphin fable (S10). The wiki's wolf-and-werewolf page anchors the sovereign-as-wolf reading in "Le loup et l'agneau." The fable-political page anchors the seminar's fable-as-constitutive-of-political-reason thesis in La Fontaine's Fables (especially the dedication to the Dauphin and the opening "we shall shortly show" of Le loup et l'agneau).

La Fontaine-as-fabulist (the broader corpus, the 17th-century French literary context, the reception in subsequent French literature) is not engaged on the wiki beyond BS-I.

Sources

  • derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — Sessions 1 (opening epigraph), 2 (fable as political reason), 8 (extended reading of "Le loup et l'agneau"), 10 ("Le singe et le dauphin" and the dolphin-Dauphin wordplay).

Connections

  • supplies the operative fable of derrida-2001-bete-souverain-i — "Le loup et l'agneau"
  • anchors wolf-and-werewolf — the wolf as Sire / Majesty; the sovereign-wolf reading
  • anchors fable-political — fable as constitutive of political reason; "we shall shortly show" as opening figure
  • anchors sovereignty (arg #14) — preemptive sovereign punishment; "if not you, your brother then"
  • connects to the dolphin-Dauphin wordplay at BS-I S10 (the heraldic-totemic etymology of Dauphin)
  • is engaged through Cixous's "L'amour du loup" (1994) at S8 pp. 210–211, which reads the wolf-lamb genitive as undecidable

Open Questions

  • The full Fables (12 books, 1668–1694) is engaged by BS-I only through "Le loup et l'agneau" and "Le singe et le dauphin." Other fables (especially those with sovereign-and-beast-political structure: "Le lion et le rat," "Le loup et le chien," "La cour du lion," "Les animaux malades de la peste") would extend the reading.
  • La Fontaine's Discours à Madame de la Sablière on animal reasoning is briefly engaged but not extensively. Open.
  • The 17th-century French context (Louis XIV's court, the salon culture, the Académie française) is not on the wiki.
  • The relation between La Fontaine's Fables and the Aesopian-Phaedrian-Mediterranean fable tradition (and its philosophical reception in Plato's Phaedo) is named but not developed.