These words, words that Hillis Miller cites but otherwise passes over (Miller 2015, 7–8), might make you shiver, just a little – shiver because they chance upon a book not written until a year later, that book by Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington. It involves, as you know, two texts: one is the strange, poetic, confessional text by Derrida which appears at the bottom of each page; the other, far more conventional, the one by Bennington is, as they together say, ‘an argued exposition’ of ‘the general system of . . . J.D’.s thought’ written ‘according to the pedagogical norms to which he [G.B.] holds’ – this text appears on the upper half of each page (Bennington and Derrida 1991, 4; 1993, 1). This, then, is a book in which we find ‘Derrida here below’ [ici-bas]’ (Ibid. 291; 316) and ‘G [G. Bennington] up there [la-dessus]’ (Ibid. 39; 37). Hence, perhaps, the slight shiver or double-take when reading ‘Up at Bennington . . . teaching . . . “Deconstruction”’. ‘I wonder’, writes Derrida, from below, ‘if those reading me from up there [la-haut] see my tears’ (Ibid. 40; 38). He is right to wonder; pedagogical norms do not allow for tears. There is no crying in the classroom; not even when deconstruction is the subject. Up there it is cold, damn cold.

My dictionary tells me that ‘response’ comes either from Old French or Latin, meaning ‘something offered in return’. In this form– ‘response’ – the English adapts the past participle of the Latin of the verb ‘to respond’. This I find appears as a noun in late Middle English, derived from the Old French, respondre, to answer, and from the Latin respondere, signifying ‘to pledge’ (spondere) ‘again’ (re-). The noun precedes the verb, which arrives relatively late in the sixteenth century. A response therefore names an act that is in its gesture performative. For in responding, I offer something in return. In return for what? In this case, I offer words, in the form of an extended answer, to the implied – and equally extended – call that is the article by J. Hillis Miller, ‘How to Read the Derridas: Indexing moi et moi, Der und Der, me and me, this one and that one’. Miller calls. I take up the call and respond. In responding, in offering something – an answer – in return – to a call – I make a commitment. The response is always a pledge. I pledge myself to answer, without knowing if the answer I give will be adequate, the right answer – if there is such a thing – or if Miller will have heard and responded in turn to the answer that you have before you and which you are reading (whatever that word, reading, means). This is though, no simple call and response. It is not only – if it is even this – a process analogous to the call and response in music: a succession of two distinct phrases, that basic musical element, in which one voice answers another, offering a counterpoint, as in the example of the exposition of a Fugue. Miller’s is not, to continue my musical analogy, the originating statement, after which a second voice is introduced,

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.