Introduction: The Beast and the Sovereign and lycological intertexts

In this chapter I shall set off from the posthumous publication of Derrida's 2001–2 seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1, to follow the figure of the wolf, particularly the genealogy of the key phrase ‘lupus est homo homini’ (usually translated as ‘man is a wolf to man’) and its various mongrel offspring. Derrida cites a range of classical and Early Modern authors, circling, perhaps doggedly, around Plato, Plautus, Plutarch, La Fontaine, Hobbes and Rousseau amongst others, explicit intertexts and interlocutors for him. For Derrida, while there exists an extensive political bestiary (including the fox and the lion), it is the wolf who is pre-eminently both sovereign and beast in political discourse. The wolf thus makes us think about a certain characterisation of man, man's self-definition, and how this impacts on possible constructions of community (social existence), of a just or unjust society (the social pact), and ultimately the state (polis). I should note again that I shall echo the he/man language of the sources I am using because it allows the reader to look for the ambiguity or tension between man as human being and man as male, which is often critical to, for example, Rousseau's writing and his reception, and indeed to that of many other philosophers of the time, and even today. Chapter 3 will focus explicitly on sexual difference, women and wolves. Through the different treatments of the wolf, and of wolfish man, I shall briefly track the questions of the representation of the savage, and tyranny and enslavement, in these authors; these will be pursued further in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. This will include worrying at the notorious voracious appetite of the wolf– and the way in which the shift from brute hunger (the need to survive) to perfectible taste (choice and distinction) is depicted as quintessentially human in a number of authors. I shall conclude with man's relation to the animal wolf, and a first pass at the politics of what we eat. The wolf is the undomesticated, free animal par excellence, in spite of (or relative to) the physical similarity between wolves and dogs, domesticated par excellence, trained to obey their master's law.