Poetics of the chimera: Thomas Cailley's The animal kingdom (Le règne animal), in light of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Man/Animal in The animal that therefore I am (L'animal que donc je suis’)

Abstract

The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal) (2023), a French film by Thomas Cailley, has been hailed as an original and striking work: the first major anti-speciesist film. Both in the fable it unfolds and in the choices made in the way it is filmed, the work echoes contemporary concerns about the relationship between humans and nature and the non-human living beings that inhabit it. The fiction – an epidemic of mutations transforms some humans into animals – gives rise to the creation, then the embodiment by the actors, of astonishing chimeras representing this transformation. I will consider the film's message and the creation of these chimeras as the fabulous culmination of the deconstruction of the Man/Animal opposition inaugurated by Jacques Derrida in his posthumous work, The Animal That Therefore I Am (L'animal que donc je suis) (2006). He attacks a philosophical tradition that, since Descartes, has based the nature of man, his essence and his dignity on the distinction between him and animals, which are incapable of pain, emotion, thought, reason and language. Kant, Levinas, Lacan and Heidegger are all challenged in this regard.