Oscar, Derrida’s Cat, and Other Knowing Animals (original) (raw)

Knowing Animals

In recent decades the humanities and social sciences have undergone an ‘animal turn’, an efflorescence of interdisciplinary scholarship which is fresh and challenging because its practitioners consider humans as animals amongst other animals, while refusing to do so from an exclusively or necessarily biological point of view. Knowing Animals showcases original explorations of the ‘animal turn’ by new and eminent scholars in philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. The essays collected here describe a lively bestiary of cultural organisms, whose flesh is (at least partly) conceptual and textual: paper tigers, beast fables, anthropomorphs, humanimals, l’animot. In so doing, they investigate the benefits of knowing animals differently: more closely, less definitively, more carefully, less certainly. Contributors include: Laurence Simmons, Alphonso Lingis, Barbara Creed, Tanja Schwalm, Philip Armstrong, Annie Potts, Allan Smith, Ricardo De Vos, Catharina Landström, Brian Boyd, Helen Tiffin, Ian Wedde.

Exploring Animal Encounters: Philosophical, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives

2018

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity. Dominik Ohrem & Matthew Calarco (editors) Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

“Animals, before Me, with Whom I Live, by Whom I Am Addressed: Writing after Derrida”

The opening chapter in DIVINANIMALITY: ANIMAL THEORY, CREATURELY THEOLOGY, ed. Stephen D. Moore, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 17-35, that is an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of animality in THE ANIMAL, THAT THEREFORE, I AM and THE BEAST AND THE SOVEREIGN and what it means for the tradition of ethics that has waged war on animality, assumed sovereignty, distorted vision, and how Derrida points in new directions of relationship and spirituality, as well as complements Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of inter-animality and inter-corporeality.