Michelle Hamadache talks to David Brooks

In 2016 David Brooks launched Derrida’s Breakfast, a collection of essays on Derrida, philosophy, literature, poetry and always the animal. The launch took place on a chill May afternoon in the mountain township of Blackheath and these are a selection of David’s responses to the questions asked that afternoon, but also via email conversations leading up to and continuing after that launch.

Brooks is one of those rare individuals who acts upon his convictions, a man who makes a mockery of notions of ‘implied authors’ because to suggest a disruption between the man and his writing is a grave injustice, a reduction of both man and writing. Until Derrida’s Breakfast, I had always concerned myself with ethics, with the problems of the human capacity for violence against humans. David’s erudition, his capacity for thinking searchingly and unflinchingly, and his writing and poetry that make the world visceral in a way that very few writers can manage, caused me to re-evaluate my focus on the human. Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ suggests that the ethics we work with today, the ethics that followed the Second World War but that surely we have inherited, arrive at the problem of evil too late. Brooks refuses to arrive at the problem of evil too late. He insists that before the violence of human against human, there is the violence of human against animal. Is it too much to suggest that the ground for the human to treat humans humanely is an end to cruelty, an end to violence against and exploitation of the animal?