Review of Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites, 2003 (original) (raw)
Related papers
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009
Jodey Castricano frames her fascinating edited anthology, Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, as an intervention into cultural studies, or more precisely, a challenge to cultural studies scholars. "Simply put," she reflects, "the aim of this collection is to include the non-human animal question as part of the ethical purview of cultural studies" (7). Specifically, the text attempts to demonstrate the relevance of the question to a field that has conventionally critiqued the human subject, centrally interrogating the ways in which the traditionally unmarked category is, in fact, particularly constructed through power-laden gendered, racialized, sexualized and classed discourses. The text illuminates the limits of cultural studies which, despite its scholarly and political impact, nonetheless reproduces a politics of exclusion in regard to non-human animals. Such disavowal helps reproduce an essential border against which "the human" of the humanist tradition can be sustained. As Cary Wolfe notes (2003),
Animals in Posthumanist Thought: An Introduction
Second Language Learning and Teaching
This book brings together well-researched essays by established scholars as well as forward-thinking aspiring researchers to study how literary and non-literary texts highlight 'animal presence' and explore non-anthropocentric relationships between human and animals. To be precise, it offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric Literary and Cultural texts. The contributors take positions that put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by considering the animal presence in texts seriously. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied interdisciplinary and theoretically-informed perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts beyond geographical and period boundaries, and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "Animal turn" for the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers some fresh perspectives of Posthumanist theory, so that we can revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book will constitute a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed; and they explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics. This book does more than simply decentering the 'human' by bringing animals onto the center of critical discourse and challenging the anthropocentric hierarchical relationship, which are the basis of Posthumanist readings. It also highlights the theoretical intersections between Animal Theory and other relevant cultural theories, that is the latest advancement in this field. The volume is divided into four main sections
Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism
“Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” argues that posthumanist theory, and the interrelated field of animal studies, have been patterned by a lacuna, namely that of race. More precisely, I argue that posthumanism’s disengagement with theorizations of race and colonialism has not only undercut our understanding of the significance of posthumanism for embattled subjectivities but also undermined the stated aims of posthumanist theory itself. With the recent emergence of feminist and queer posthumanist theory attentive to race, the future direction of posthumanism and animal studies promises an exciting break with habits of racialized erasure in posthumanist thought.
Interrogating the “Animal”: An Investigation into the Ethics of Man-Animal Divide
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Humanity defines itself through an animal other, the animal in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of accommodation and hospitality which posthuman philosophy provides in conceptualizing the position of alterity of the “animal”. Building on the writing of Jacque Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I will argue how Posthumanism can radicalize the way in which the anthropocentric worldview looks at the animal as other, questioning the positioning and relevance of speciesism and species boundary. Also, the issue of the agency has been interrogated in this research article. I have also argued for a new mode of conceptualizing the “other” / the “animal” which abolishes the hierarchical view of anthropocentric conception of nonhuman but instead views the other from the lens of companionship, borrowing from the ideas of “companionship” and “Chuthulucene” of Donna J. Haraway. The paper is an attempt to expand ...
Critical anthropomorphism and animal ethics
Anthropomorphism has long been considered a cardinal error when describing animals. Ethicists have 16 feared the consequences of misrepresenting animals in their reasoning. Recent research within human-animal studies, 17 however, has sophisticated the notion of anthropomorphism. It is suggested that avoiding anthropomorphism merely 18 creates other morphisms, such as mechanomorphism. Instead of avoiding anthropomorphism, it is argued that it is a 19 communicative strategy that should be used critically. Instances of anthropomorphism in animal ethics are analyzed 20 in this paper. Some analogies made between people and non-human animals in present theories of animal ethics are 21 clear instances of psychological anthropomorphism. Other analogies are implicit cases of cultural 22 anthropomorphism. It is argued that animal ethics need to take the wider discourse of critical anthropomorphism into 23 account in order to sophisticate the understanding and use of anthropomorphic projections. Anthropomorphism is an 24 efficient tool of communication, and it may be made an adequate one as well. 25 26 27 28
Not Coming to Terms: Nonhuman Animals and the Edge of Theory
In the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. Examining Aristotle's and Heidegger's approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of "the animals" keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language.
From Post-Human to Post-Animal: Posthumanism and the 'Animal Turn'
Lo sguardo – rivista di filosofia, 2017
The so-called 'animal turn' of the past couple of decades brought about a new focus on animals and animality that traverses the whole spectrum of the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Certainly part of a wider cultural phenomenon – the crisis of humanism in late twentieth century –, it has in turn influenced and transformed posthumanist thought itself, not only enabling it to probe the boundaries of the 'human', but also partially reorienting it towards questions of immanence, embodiment, affects, and providing a more marked ethical and political impulse. On the other hand, the encounter with posthumanism brought to the new discipline of Animal Studies the awareness of the limits of the traditional, still very humanist approaches to animal ethics, and of the necessity of an overcoming of the humanist paradigm, of a new theoretical and methodological approach.