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Articles & Book Chapters by Beatrice Marovich

Relegere, 2018

This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through... more This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through which to examine and contemplate the passion and fervor for interspecies friendship in the digital era. I argue that the digital medium of the animal video (more specifically, animal videos that document and record interspecies friendships) can be read as an alternate spacetime: one alleged to be outside of predation. But I also argue that, when we look closer at both the biblical context of this passage as well as visions of interspecies kinship that derive from, or resonate with, the biblical text, the dystopian underside of this almost utopian image can be rendered with more clarity. Perhaps, however, this biblical image—with its messianic undertones—can also help us to set in sharper relief the non-predational, creaturely, potentialities that might still emerge from these digital peaceable kingdoms.

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2017

This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or ove... more This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or overcome, death. I argue against the claim that religion provides a superior method for quelling our mortal dread (thus leaving secular people with no option but to return to religious regimes of meaning, when coping with death). Instead I argue that both religion and the secular have failed to take our mortality seriously, often collapsing misogyny and mortal dread together in a double rejection of both our dying bodies and death itself. In other words; they both do violence to death, and this violence often has gendered dimensions. I examine feminist attempts to "transfigure mortality" that work both with and against religious and secular thought and I ultimately query whether these transfigurations might be deemed "postsecular."

Editors' Introduction (Beatrice Marovich and Alex Dubilet) to Journal of Cultural and Religious T... more Editors' Introduction (Beatrice Marovich and Alex Dubilet) to Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 16.2 (2017): "Negotiating Terrain: Gender and the Postsecular"

Glossator: Practice & Theory of the Commentary, 2013

Dialog, Dec 2015

This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture... more This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture that maintains traces of (and so remains bound in some way to) its genealogy in the theological. The theological relic, then, is something that fails to be either robustly religious or properly secular. It is, instead, a product of the relations between these social spaces. The article illustrates this concept by examining a cultural history of the whale, highlighting this creature's complex bonds with the theological. The whale, in other words, is figured as a theological relic: a creature of the secular that remains shrouded enough by traces of the theological that these vestiges of divinity are implicated in the whale's powerful late-twentieth-century cultural reconfiguration.

In Rilke's poetry, God often appears closer to the animals than he does to the humans. Rather tha... more In Rilke's poetry, God often appears closer to the animals than he does to the humans. Rather than infusing the animal with the potency of divine power, this seems instead to have the effect of making God vulnerable. This essay explores the nature and shape of Rilke's vulnerable, almost animalistic, God and also brings this figure into conversation with work on sovereignty and animality in Derrida and Agamben. A chapter from the volume Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology.

Anglican theological review, Jan 1, 2010

Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this a... more Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this article expounds upon the subject formation contained within it: the self. This self, developed through a variant of creation myth, is inflected with both political and theological agendas. The complex democratic negotiation of these poles places Whitman’s poem in the realm of political theology. The first half of the essay traces the theological inflections in the poem: the impact, in other words, of the name of God on the formation, development, or thriving of the self. It also sketches the contours of Whitman’s political context and lays bare some of his political agendas. The latter half of the essay speculates on some potential consequences of the development of this self and raises the question: How deeply is it already embedded in American democratic subjectivity?

Other Essays by Beatrice Marovich

This is speculative fiction. The scene is a postapocalyptic (or, perhaps better said, counterapoc... more This is speculative fiction. The scene is a postapocalyptic (or, perhaps better said, counterapocalyptic) future earthscape. The border between the biological and the digital is now so permeable, and manipulable, that the planet becomes overpopulated with hybrid species–creatures who’ve “recreated” themselves by fusing with animal parts and machine bodies. The “pure humans” who remain make what they call an “evolutionary move”. They abandon The Open and sequester themselves in a planet of their own making: Terra Pura.

An essay on the beckoning cat, and other talismans, for the Object Lessons series at The Atlantic.

Papers by Beatrice Marovich

Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

<p>This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theolo... more <p>This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theological figure of creaturely life. Analyzing confessions of creaturely kinship from both theologians and evolutionary science, the chapter argues against a reading of creaturely kinship that sees this bond as merely a form of commonality, or sameness. Working with contemporary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Karen Barad, as well as the early modern philosopher Anne Conway, the essay argues for a reading of creaturely kinship as a diffractive relational bond—one that highlights the differences and plurality in creaturely life and sees, in creatureliness, a "connective distinction" or a difference that also binds.</p>

Society & Animals, Jun 1, 2017

Brianne Donaldson's Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Libe... more Brianne Donaldson's Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation is certainly, as the title suggests, a book about abstractions. As thought forms that are by definition above and beyond the physical, it is difficult for metaphysics to be anything else. But the book, itself, is anything but abstract. It is instead a philosophically serious and deeply compassionate text about life as it plays out in mortal and creaturely bodies. Creaturely Cosmologies is an invitation to think metaphysics into animal liberation, but it's also an invitation to act on behalf of creatures. It argues, ultimately, that action and contemplation feed into one another. Although I am often more inclined to believe that the chicken (political commitments and actions) tends to precede the egg (metaphysics), Donaldson's book left me questioning this. She argues that better metaphysics are also good for animals, and she makes a strong case. Donaldson's book begins with an apologetic for metaphysics, as she is aware that this habit of thought has often been critiqued by those interested in animals and animal studies for its problematic associations with "oppressive universals, patriarchy, rationalism, idealism, human senses, languagecentrism, consciousness, disembodied abstraction, and transcendence" (p. xxi). Metaphysics, as the story often goes, is on the side of a rationally conceived and disembodied human subject. But Donaldson argues that this is a reduction of metaphysics-one that forecloses on metaphysical options often written out of western philosophical perspectives striving for disembodied universality. Donaldson is making a plea for metaphysics because she believes that better metaphysics than the ones that have dominated in the west can show us how the world yet might be, for creatures. The conceptual tissues of metaphysics, she suggests, can show us patterns of entangled relationships between creatures that we might not otherwise contemplate. The metaphysical systems that Donaldson lifts up as exemplary are the 20th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead's process-relational

Worldviews, May 30, 2018

When I left my home in Brooklyn and moved out to Grand Forks, North Dakota for my first faculty p... more When I left my home in Brooklyn and moved out to Grand Forks, North Dakota for my first faculty position two years ago, it was difficult to remember that I was moving to a city. Brooklyn, the most populous of New York's boroughs, now has more than 2.6 million (human) residents. The entire state of North Dakota has less than 750,000 people. Grand Forks has less than 60,000. It felt, to me, like a dusty, windswept, isolated prairie. And then, one afternoon, at the entrance to my apartment building, I was taken aback to find a prairie dog up on his haunches and huffing at me from on top of a new mound. I'd only seen prairie dogs on film, or at the zoo. I confess that I was charmed, and comforted, to learn that I was sharing space with this little creature. It dissipated a bit of that dusty, windswept, feeling of desolate isolation. It was only a matter of days, however, before the mound had been sealed off by apartment building maintenance staff. Fresh new mounds would, of course, quickly reappear at other locations around the building within a matter of days. But this was my introduction to the battle for terrain that plays out between prairie dogs and people across the urban and rural flatlands of the American plains. Prairie dogs are populous here but are often reviled for their housekeeping (and house building) habits. Their numbers are dwindling due to changes in land use, hunting, poisoning, and the sylvatic plague. I started to sense a bit of that crush, and intensity, that comes along with encroaching development and urbanization. I also started to pay closer attention to where I was-I started to care, just bit more, about where I suddenly found myself. Gavin Van Horn and David Aftandilian's new edited volume, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press, 2015), is full of stories like this. That is to say, it's a book of stories-from a number of different contributors-about animal encounters in urban spaces. The city under discussion (Chicago) is nothing like Grand Forks, of course. But the book itself is an invitation to look toward animal life as a way of shifting perspective on the urban environments in which most of us now find ourselves living. Van Horn is the director of Cultures of Conservation for the Center for Humans and Nature. Aftandilian is an academic who's brought animal studies into the study of religion. The aim of their volume is to counteract what Robert Michael Pyle has called the "extinction of experience" (5) in an increasingly urbanized world-the extinction, that is, of informal contact with the non

Punctum Books, Sep 3, 2012

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Sep 3, 2017

Columbia University Press eBooks, Jan 30, 2023

Agamben and the Existentialists, Aug 29, 2021

Edinburgh University Press

Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on t... more Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreadin...

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, 2017

Utilizing the autonomous system of ordinary differential equations derived in [1] to define the e... more Utilizing the autonomous system of ordinary differential equations derived in [1] to define the evolution, we further investigate a class of cosmological models within an Einstein-aether gravitational framework by introducing a non-trivial coupling between the shear of the aether field to the scalar field on the future asymptotic solution. We subsequently conduct qualitative and numerical stability analysis on the new set of equilibrium points and paramountly determine that the expansionary power-law inflationary attractor becomes anisotropic rather than isotropic in the presence of such a coupling. It is further shown that the stability of this solution is dependent on the value of the shear coupling parameter a 3. We also discover a family of asymptotically stable periodic orbits which exist for a particular range of parameter values within the Bianchi I invariant set and vanish in the absence of coupling between the aether field and the scalar field.

Relegere, 2018

This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through... more This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through which to examine and contemplate the passion and fervor for interspecies friendship in the digital era. I argue that the digital medium of the animal video (more specifically, animal videos that document and record interspecies friendships) can be read as an alternate spacetime: one alleged to be outside of predation. But I also argue that, when we look closer at both the biblical context of this passage as well as visions of interspecies kinship that derive from, or resonate with, the biblical text, the dystopian underside of this almost utopian image can be rendered with more clarity. Perhaps, however, this biblical image—with its messianic undertones—can also help us to set in sharper relief the non-predational, creaturely, potentialities that might still emerge from these digital peaceable kingdoms.

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2017

This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or ove... more This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or overcome, death. I argue against the claim that religion provides a superior method for quelling our mortal dread (thus leaving secular people with no option but to return to religious regimes of meaning, when coping with death). Instead I argue that both religion and the secular have failed to take our mortality seriously, often collapsing misogyny and mortal dread together in a double rejection of both our dying bodies and death itself. In other words; they both do violence to death, and this violence often has gendered dimensions. I examine feminist attempts to "transfigure mortality" that work both with and against religious and secular thought and I ultimately query whether these transfigurations might be deemed "postsecular."

Editors' Introduction (Beatrice Marovich and Alex Dubilet) to Journal of Cultural and Religious T... more Editors' Introduction (Beatrice Marovich and Alex Dubilet) to Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 16.2 (2017): "Negotiating Terrain: Gender and the Postsecular"

Glossator: Practice & Theory of the Commentary, 2013

Dialog, Dec 2015

This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture... more This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture that maintains traces of (and so remains bound in some way to) its genealogy in the theological. The theological relic, then, is something that fails to be either robustly religious or properly secular. It is, instead, a product of the relations between these social spaces. The article illustrates this concept by examining a cultural history of the whale, highlighting this creature's complex bonds with the theological. The whale, in other words, is figured as a theological relic: a creature of the secular that remains shrouded enough by traces of the theological that these vestiges of divinity are implicated in the whale's powerful late-twentieth-century cultural reconfiguration.

In Rilke's poetry, God often appears closer to the animals than he does to the humans. Rather tha... more In Rilke's poetry, God often appears closer to the animals than he does to the humans. Rather than infusing the animal with the potency of divine power, this seems instead to have the effect of making God vulnerable. This essay explores the nature and shape of Rilke's vulnerable, almost animalistic, God and also brings this figure into conversation with work on sovereignty and animality in Derrida and Agamben. A chapter from the volume Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology.

Anglican theological review, Jan 1, 2010

Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this a... more Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this article expounds upon the subject formation contained within it: the self. This self, developed through a variant of creation myth, is inflected with both political and theological agendas. The complex democratic negotiation of these poles places Whitman’s poem in the realm of political theology. The first half of the essay traces the theological inflections in the poem: the impact, in other words, of the name of God on the formation, development, or thriving of the self. It also sketches the contours of Whitman’s political context and lays bare some of his political agendas. The latter half of the essay speculates on some potential consequences of the development of this self and raises the question: How deeply is it already embedded in American democratic subjectivity?

This is speculative fiction. The scene is a postapocalyptic (or, perhaps better said, counterapoc... more This is speculative fiction. The scene is a postapocalyptic (or, perhaps better said, counterapocalyptic) future earthscape. The border between the biological and the digital is now so permeable, and manipulable, that the planet becomes overpopulated with hybrid species–creatures who’ve “recreated” themselves by fusing with animal parts and machine bodies. The “pure humans” who remain make what they call an “evolutionary move”. They abandon The Open and sequester themselves in a planet of their own making: Terra Pura.

An essay on the beckoning cat, and other talismans, for the Object Lessons series at The Atlantic.

Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

<p>This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theolo... more <p>This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theological figure of creaturely life. Analyzing confessions of creaturely kinship from both theologians and evolutionary science, the chapter argues against a reading of creaturely kinship that sees this bond as merely a form of commonality, or sameness. Working with contemporary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Karen Barad, as well as the early modern philosopher Anne Conway, the essay argues for a reading of creaturely kinship as a diffractive relational bond—one that highlights the differences and plurality in creaturely life and sees, in creatureliness, a "connective distinction" or a difference that also binds.</p>

Society & Animals, Jun 1, 2017

Brianne Donaldson's Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Libe... more Brianne Donaldson's Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation is certainly, as the title suggests, a book about abstractions. As thought forms that are by definition above and beyond the physical, it is difficult for metaphysics to be anything else. But the book, itself, is anything but abstract. It is instead a philosophically serious and deeply compassionate text about life as it plays out in mortal and creaturely bodies. Creaturely Cosmologies is an invitation to think metaphysics into animal liberation, but it's also an invitation to act on behalf of creatures. It argues, ultimately, that action and contemplation feed into one another. Although I am often more inclined to believe that the chicken (political commitments and actions) tends to precede the egg (metaphysics), Donaldson's book left me questioning this. She argues that better metaphysics are also good for animals, and she makes a strong case. Donaldson's book begins with an apologetic for metaphysics, as she is aware that this habit of thought has often been critiqued by those interested in animals and animal studies for its problematic associations with "oppressive universals, patriarchy, rationalism, idealism, human senses, languagecentrism, consciousness, disembodied abstraction, and transcendence" (p. xxi). Metaphysics, as the story often goes, is on the side of a rationally conceived and disembodied human subject. But Donaldson argues that this is a reduction of metaphysics-one that forecloses on metaphysical options often written out of western philosophical perspectives striving for disembodied universality. Donaldson is making a plea for metaphysics because she believes that better metaphysics than the ones that have dominated in the west can show us how the world yet might be, for creatures. The conceptual tissues of metaphysics, she suggests, can show us patterns of entangled relationships between creatures that we might not otherwise contemplate. The metaphysical systems that Donaldson lifts up as exemplary are the 20th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead's process-relational

Worldviews, May 30, 2018

When I left my home in Brooklyn and moved out to Grand Forks, North Dakota for my first faculty p... more When I left my home in Brooklyn and moved out to Grand Forks, North Dakota for my first faculty position two years ago, it was difficult to remember that I was moving to a city. Brooklyn, the most populous of New York's boroughs, now has more than 2.6 million (human) residents. The entire state of North Dakota has less than 750,000 people. Grand Forks has less than 60,000. It felt, to me, like a dusty, windswept, isolated prairie. And then, one afternoon, at the entrance to my apartment building, I was taken aback to find a prairie dog up on his haunches and huffing at me from on top of a new mound. I'd only seen prairie dogs on film, or at the zoo. I confess that I was charmed, and comforted, to learn that I was sharing space with this little creature. It dissipated a bit of that dusty, windswept, feeling of desolate isolation. It was only a matter of days, however, before the mound had been sealed off by apartment building maintenance staff. Fresh new mounds would, of course, quickly reappear at other locations around the building within a matter of days. But this was my introduction to the battle for terrain that plays out between prairie dogs and people across the urban and rural flatlands of the American plains. Prairie dogs are populous here but are often reviled for their housekeeping (and house building) habits. Their numbers are dwindling due to changes in land use, hunting, poisoning, and the sylvatic plague. I started to sense a bit of that crush, and intensity, that comes along with encroaching development and urbanization. I also started to pay closer attention to where I was-I started to care, just bit more, about where I suddenly found myself. Gavin Van Horn and David Aftandilian's new edited volume, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press, 2015), is full of stories like this. That is to say, it's a book of stories-from a number of different contributors-about animal encounters in urban spaces. The city under discussion (Chicago) is nothing like Grand Forks, of course. But the book itself is an invitation to look toward animal life as a way of shifting perspective on the urban environments in which most of us now find ourselves living. Van Horn is the director of Cultures of Conservation for the Center for Humans and Nature. Aftandilian is an academic who's brought animal studies into the study of religion. The aim of their volume is to counteract what Robert Michael Pyle has called the "extinction of experience" (5) in an increasingly urbanized world-the extinction, that is, of informal contact with the non

Punctum Books, Sep 3, 2012

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Sep 3, 2017

Columbia University Press eBooks, Jan 30, 2023

Agamben and the Existentialists, Aug 29, 2021

Edinburgh University Press

Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on t... more Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreadin...

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, 2017

Utilizing the autonomous system of ordinary differential equations derived in [1] to define the e... more Utilizing the autonomous system of ordinary differential equations derived in [1] to define the evolution, we further investigate a class of cosmological models within an Einstein-aether gravitational framework by introducing a non-trivial coupling between the shear of the aether field to the scalar field on the future asymptotic solution. We subsequently conduct qualitative and numerical stability analysis on the new set of equilibrium points and paramountly determine that the expansionary power-law inflationary attractor becomes anisotropic rather than isotropic in the presence of such a coupling. It is further shown that the stability of this solution is dependent on the value of the shear coupling parameter a 3. We also discover a family of asymptotically stable periodic orbits which exist for a particular range of parameter values within the Bianchi I invariant set and vanish in the absence of coupling between the aether field and the scalar field.

Humanimalia - a journal of human/animal interface studies, Feb 5, 2018

Into what, precisely, do we plum-met when we fall into love? What, exactly, is produced when we m... more Into what, precisely, do we plum-met when we fall into love? What, exactly, is produced when we makeit? When we are hungry for love, what stomach is nourished by that strange food? Colloquialisms are littered with a lan-guage that objectifies love, that turns it into a thing—not just something we can feel, but something we can touch, some-thing that hits us, changes us, throws us, consumes us, drives us. Popular parlance makes the love relation into something almost tangible, concrete, autonomous: love is some thing we fall into, love is a master key, love is a war, love is a bite of heaven, love is a virus. Such language begins to suggest that the "love object" is not, exactly, the person for whom you pine. Instead, it begins to look as though the "love object" is the relation, itself. Love takes on thing-like contours, becomes its own sort of creature. It does its own little cosmic dance.

Humanimalia, 2015

Late in his book Crocodile, Dan Wylie briefly references the fact that Sigmund Freud's theory of ... more Late in his book Crocodile, Dan Wylie briefly references the fact that Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny-Das Unheimliche, that paradoxical force in the psyche that both attracts us to, and repels us from, an object-was at least partially inspired by a crocodile tale, "The Inexplicable," by L.G. Moberley. This connection between crocodiles and the uncanny seems rather coincidental-tucked away, as it is, in the final chapter of this dense little book. But if, for Freud, the uncanny was a reminder of our own repressed impulses, it appears to me that the crocodile becomes a reminder, for Wylie, of other repressions. Chiefly, perhaps, the crocodiles of Crocodile seem to stand as reminders of a repressed (particularly pre-modern) fear of and attendant reverence for this ancient creature. To be sure, this book-like others in the Reaktion Books animal series-is something of a survey. Wylie covers a lot of territory and focuses not only on cultural history, but on natural history and species differentiation among crocodilians. He confesses, from

Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 2017

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2019

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2014