Tobias Menely | University of California, Davis (original) (raw)

My book, _The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice_, was published by the University of Chicago Press.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo19804560.html

Some of the perplexities of animal rights as a historical phenomenon, I argue, are resolved if we understand rights as neither, simply, intrinsic to nature nor contingent on state recognition but as a communicative transaction, a claim—etymologically, a cry or clamor—that begins before the law and yet is only realized in the law. To test this premise, I track the development of ethicopolitical community with animals from the anti-Cartesian origins of ethical sensibility in the Restoration to Britain’s first animal protection legislation, Martin’s Act of 1822.

Placing Enlightenment sensibility in dialogue with classical and early-modern antecedents as well as contemporary animal studies,_ The Animal Claim_ uncovers a responsivity to the animal voice that inheres at the core of political community, a rhetoric of animal rights that is conceptually inseparable from the rhetoric of human rights. To understand the conditions of our experience of obligation toward other creatures—who are, like us, passionate, expressive, and mortal—and to understand how that obligation is formalized, whether in literary advocacy or instituted law, is to learn something about the history of modern community, the condition of being in-common with others in a biopolitical age.

For several years, I have been working on a second book, “The Climatological Unconscious.” “‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper’s _Task_ and the Time of Climate Change,” appeared in _PMLA_ 127:3 (May 2012), and was awarded the William Riley Parker Prize.

less