ANIMALS, DE ANIMA, OBJET (PETIT) A, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE (original) (raw)

Feral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media

2016

This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopus’s encounter with a digita...

The animal question: the Anthropocene’s hidden foundational debate

História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2021

As globalization accelerated after 1492, often in the service of European imperial expansion, human destruction of the habitat in which animals could express their natural behaviors also increased. Within this context, the question arises: just how much are we like other animals, and if they are like us, how much do we owe them? From the 1500s to the 1800s, travelers, imperialists, the colonized, and intellectuals tried to answer this question and produced three positions: animals as mere exploitable devices; confusion about animals’ status and what we owe them, and concern about the suffering of nonhuman animals, their freedom to express their behaviors, and their very existence.

Unwinding the Anthropological Machine: Animality, Film and Arnaud des Pallières

2012

This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animality and what the work of contemporary French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in particular can bring to debates around the zoomorphic or ‘creaturely’ dimensions of film. Examining two works by des Pallières — the documentary Is Dead (Incomplete Portrait of Gertrude Stein) (1999) and the feature-length film Adieu (2003) — and drawing principally on the work of Jacques Derrida, the article attends to cinematic, historically-framed configurations of a shared vulnerability between the human and the animal. Such instances of commonality are shown here to unravel hierarchical taxonomies of being, in a rethinking of the ethics and politics of responsibility. These nonanthropocentric modes of cinematic inquiry also engage with issues of minerality and technicity, animating correspondences between forms of life and nonlife, philosophically broadening a consideration of relations between the human and the nonhuman.

Through Thick and Thin: The Romance of the Species in the Anthropocene

International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2018

The emerging field of animal studies has a curious relationship with environmentalism. Instead of fitting comfortably in the latter’s capacious tent, animal studies has chafed at environmentalists’ commitment to holistic communitarianism best represented by Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic.” The land ethic approaches the biotic community as a pyramidal ecological system that turns on the relations between producers and consumers and between predators and prey rather than as an egalitarian moral community. Animal rights activists have thus repeatedly clashed with conservationists in an internecine fight poignantly dramatized in T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done (2011). In this paper, I argue that environmental justice cannot be secured solely from the third-person perspective of the deontological argument underlying animal rights or the utilitarian argument often used to justify the land ethic. Instead, we might draw on the pragmatist traditions East and West and view justice as a larger loyalty achieved as much by the moral imagination of the particular from the first- and second-person perspectives as by rational deliberation on the universal. Using a French novel (The Roots of Heaven, 1958), a Chinese novel (The Disappearance of Lao Hai, 2001), and a Chinese film (Monster Hunt, 2015) as my examples, I demonstrate how literature’s thick narratives can engender an ethics of care by bringing particular instances of non-human distress into aesthetic, affective, and moral proximity with us.

Haraway Contra Deleuze & Guattari: The Question of the Animals (2009)

Communication, Politics & Culture, 2009

This article is essentially a brief reflection on time in the context of Donna Haraway’s recent work When Species Meet (2008), and in particular her rejection of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming animal’ in their A Thousand Plateaus—Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). The exception Haraway takes to Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to human-animal relations is considered as indicative of wider fissures in contemporary critical theory that have failed to respond to the global crisis of the sixth earth extinction event. Yet there are also points of confluence in their respective positions that provide the potential for a more coherent politics of ecocritique.

Species at War? The Animal and the Anthropocene

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Environmental politics has become inextricably entwined with planetary deep time. This article calls for a reconceptualization of the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. It rejects the ontological singularity of the human, either as a biological species (Homo) or as a planetary super-agent (Anthropos) and argues for a perspective centred on companionship and shared vulnerability. Animal philosophy serves here to counter a growing tendency to generalize and address the human species at large, in the singular. The cultural force of the animal, it is suggested, stems from a productive tension between the abstract singular (‘the Animal’) and the unique specificity of each particular nonhuman other. In the context of Anthropocene Studies, references to Anthropos follow a similar logic. The planetary future of humans cannot be deduced from any specific geopolitical context or expressed through universalizing categories. It must be understood, against the vertiginous backdrop of g...

Art Beyond the Anthropocene: A Philosophical Analysis of Selected Examples of Post-Anthropocentric Art in the Context of Ecological Change

Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 2021

In this article, the authors discuss selected examples of post-anthropocentric art, which—as they show—is associated with human sensitivity, care, empathy, and the capacity for compassion. Czakon and Michna present artistic creations that serve as examples of art that respond efficiently and quickly to the pressing problems of the contemporary world. This post-anthropocentric art, as they call it, critically reacts to major ecological and social problems of today. For this purpose, in the first and second part of the essay, they briefly characterize the basic differences between traditional, anthropocentric art and contemporary post-anthropocentric art, which has been broadly investigated in, among others, the framework of feminist philosophy and women’s studies. Czakon and Michna focus on such fundamental aesthetics concepts as fine arts and the canon thereof, aesthetic pleasure, and the artist of genius, as well as the categories of beauty and the sublime and the ideal of contempl...

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation

2011

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Chapter 1: Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity and Welfare Problems Karen Davis Chapter 2: Road Kill: Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Dennis Soron Chapter 3: Corporate Power, Ecological Crisis, and Animal Rights Carl Boggs Part II. Animals, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School Chapter 4: Humanism = Speciesism?: Marx on Humans and Animals Ted Benton Chapter 5: Reflections on the Prospects for a Non-Speciesist Marxism Renzo Llorente Chapter 6: Thinking With: Animals in Schopenhauer, Horkheimer, and Adorno Christina Gerhardt Chapter 7: Animal is to Kantianism as Jew Is to Fascism: Adorno's Bestiary Eduardo Mendieta Part III. Speciesism and Ideologies of Domination Chapter 8: Dialectic of Anthropocentrism Aaron Bell Chapter 9: Animal Repression: Speciesism as Pathology Zipporah Weisberg Chapter 10: Neuroscience (a Poem) Susan Benston Chapter 11: Everyday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism...