So far, we can say that the argument is quite simple although it has wide-ranging implications. It is based on an analysis of experience, but it is also based in the experience of what Derrida has called “auto-affection.” We find the idea of auto-affection (or self-affection) in ancient Greek philosophy, for example in Aristotle’s definition of God as “thought thinking itself.” Auto-affection occurs when I affect myself, when the affecting is the same as the affected. As we said above, Derrida will frequently write about autobiography as a form of auto-affection or self-relation. In the very late The Animal that Therefore I am, Derrida tells us what he is trying to do with auto-affection: “if the auto-position, the automonstrative autotely of the ‘I,’ even in the human, implies the ‘I’ to be an other that must welcome within itself some irreducible hetero-affection (as I [that is, Derrida] have tried to demonstrate elsewhere [my emphasis]), then this autonomy of the ‘I’ can be neither pure nor rigorous; it would not be able to form the basis for a simple and linear differentiation of the human from the animal” (The Animal that Therefore I am, p. 95). Always, Derrida tries to show that auto-affection is hetero-affection; the experience of the same (I am thinking about myself) is the experience of the other (insofar as I think about myself I am thinking of someone or something else at the same time). But, in order to understand more fully the basic argumentation, let us look at three of these “other places” where Derrida has “attempted” to show that an irreducible hetero-affection infects auto-affection.