Download or read book Outside the Anthropological Machine written by Chiara Mengozzi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.
Download or read book The Open written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'The Open', contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the 'human' has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether.
Download or read book Zoographies written by Matthew Calarco and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calarco (California State Univ., Fullerton) examines the question of the animal in major Continental thinkers like Heidegger, Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida. He takes to task the belief that Anglo philosophy alone boasts of a strong tradition on this issue. He admits, however, that although these post-Enlightenment thinkers were committed to examining and refiguring philosophical concepts and human existence, most resort to dogmatic anthropocentric concepts, specifically the traditional dualism of human/animal--a type of essentialism. For example, despite being critical of an ontotheological thesis of animals, Heidegger nonetheless writes of an "abyssal" difference between human and animal life. Calarco's basic thesis is that this binary is no longer defendable, forever destroyed by the sciences and humanities. Most promising is Derrida, the only major Continental thinker to date who thoroughly rejects the human/animal distinction and envisions the philosophically enormous task of rethinking politics and ethics outside this tradition. Derrida begins with humankind's pre-philosophical encounter with animals as fellow beings capable of suffering, embodied and "vulnerable" (although this last description is problematic as it is, arguably, a continuation of humans' desire to infantilize animals). This important analysis is long overdue. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by M. A. Betz.
Download or read book Beyond Human written by Charlie Blake and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the implications of our animal origins and posthuman futures for our understanding of our humanity and our relations with other species.
Download or read book Being Human written by Ron Broglio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology and animals often serve as the boundaries by which we define the human. In this issue contributors explore these categories as necessary supplements or as porous membranes which disturb the scaffolding of how the human is constructed. A lingering question throughout is whether we have ever been human or if such a category is a non-localizable ideal or perhaps a misnomer. In this collection of essays, internationally known theorists muddle the categorical boundaries such that animals and technologies become necessary components rather than limits for what it means to be human. They examine a range of subjects, including apophatic animality, critical media objects-to-think-with, biosemiotic insect resonances, the monstrous and horrific which dislodges our cultural animals, and the problem of thinking of animality as stupidity. Novels, films, digital objects, scientific laboratories, philosophical texts, animals on the road and in the fields serve as sites for inquiry. The result of these investigations is the spectral possibility that we are not the humans we make ourselves out to be. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
Download or read book Beyond the Anthropological Difference written by Matthew Calarco and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this Element is to provide a novel framework for gaining a critical grasp on the present situation concerning animals. It offers reflections on resisting the established order as well as suggestions on what forms alternative, pro-animal ways of life might take. The central argument of the book is that the search for an anthropological difference - that is, for a marker of human uniqueness determined by way of a sharp human/animal distinction - should be set aside. In place of this traditional way of differentiating human beings from animals, the author sketches an alternative way of thinking and living in relation to animals based on indistinction, a concept that points toward the unexpected and profound ways in which human beings share in animal life, death, and potentiality. The implications of this approach are then examined in view of practical and theoretical discussions in the environmental humanities and related fields.
Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.
Download or read book Revivals written by William Robert and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents new ways of thinking about the human and the humanities through a rethinking of Antigone. Why revive Antigoneagain? And why now? William Robert responds to these questions through an inventive reading of Sophocless Antigone, reimagining Antigone in unprecedented ways. These new possibilities, of new Antigones, offer fresh ideas on what it means to be human in relation to others. Recast in novel roles, Antigone is brought into contemporary conversations taking place in the humanities concerning animals, biopolitics, ethics, philosophies, religions, and sexualities. Robert also brings her into conversation with Luce Irigaray in ways that illuminate Antigone and Irigaray alike, opening up new avenues for understanding them both and their potential for further contributions to the humanities.
Download or read book Glossolalia and the Problem of Language written by Nicholas Harkness and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, has long been a subject of curiosity as well as vigorous theological debate. A worldwide phenomenon that spans multiple Christian traditions, glossolalia is both celebrated as a supernatural gift and condemned as semiotic alchemy. For some it is mystical speech that exceeds what words can do, and for others it is mere gibberish, empty of meaning. At the heart of these differences is glossolalia’s puzzling relationship to language. ? Glossolalia and the Problem of Language investigates speaking in tongues in South Korea, where it is practiced widely across denominations and congregations. Nicholas Harkness shows how the popularity of glossolalia in Korea lies at the intersection of numerous, often competing social forces, interwoven religious legacies, and spiritual desires that have been amplified by Christianity’s massive institutionalization. As evangelicalism continues to spread worldwide, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language analyzes one of its most enigmatic practices while marking a major advancement in our understanding of the power of language and its limits.
Download or read book Animal Studies written by Matthew R. Calarco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prefaced with a brief introduction to the field of animal studies, the text explores the key influential terms, topics and debates which have had a major impact on the field, and that students are most likely to encounter in their animal studies classes. Animal Studies provides a guide to key concepts in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of animal studies, laid out in A-Z format. While Human–Animal Studies and Critical Animal Studies are the main frameworks that inform the bulk of the writings in animal studies and the key concepts discussed in the volume, other approaches such as anthrozoology and cognitive ethology are also explored. The entries in the volume attend to the differences in ongoing debates among scholars and activists, showing that what is commonly called “animal studies” is far from a unified body of work. A full bibliography of sources is included at the end of the book, along with an extensive index. The book will be a valuable guide to undergraduate and postgraduate students in geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and other related disciplines. Seasoned researchers will find the book helpful, when researching topics outside of their specialization. Outside of academia, it will be of interest to activists, as well as professional organizations.
Download or read book Critical Directions in Comics Studies written by Thomas Giddens and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Paul Fisher Davies, Lisa DeTora, Yasemin J. Erden, Adam Gearey, Thomas Giddens, Peter Goodrich, Maggie Gray, Matthew J. A. Green, Vladislav Maksimov, Timothy D. Peters, Christopher Pizzino, Nicola Streeten, and Lydia Wysocki Recent decades have seen comics studies blossom, but within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root—assumptions around the particular methods used to approach the comics form, the ways we should read comics, how its “system” works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish. These approaches question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. In this edited collection, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine comics by addressing materiality and form as well as the wider economic and political contexts of comics’ creation and reception. Through this lens, influenced by poststructuralist theories, contributors explore and elaborate other possibilities for working with comics as a critical resource, consolidating the emergence of these alternative modes of engagement in a single text. This opens comics studies to a wider array of resources, perspectives, and modes of engagement. Included in this volume are essays on a range of comics and illustrations as well as considerations of such popular comics as Deadpool, Daredevil, and V for Vendetta, and analyses of comics production, medical illustrations, and original comics. Some contributions even unfold in the form of comics panels.
Download or read book Non humans in Social Science written by Karolína Pauknerová and published by Pavel Mervart. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the issue of non-humans and their role and position within contemporary social sciences. Inspired by current trends of bridging the dichotomy of nature and culture, the authors use the “non-human“ as a prism that offers a different perspective of the world, society, culture, and last but not least, being(s). To start paying attention to non-humans has the potential to hybridize social sciences and in turn enrich them as well as to offer social scientists novel perspectives and tools to approach social phenomena. Such an attitude might in turn lead to a reassessment of understanding of the relationship between the world and being, and of the categories of being and subject. Hence the potential of non-humans to stimulate an ontological shift within social sciences. The view of the “human” and “non-human” as oppositional categories is a remnant of essentially modernist thinking. This book represents a response in terms of an attempt to think about humans and non-humans outside of the binary division. The authors thus want to contribute to the hybridization of social sciences and throughout the book they deal with ontological, epistemological and thematical shifts stemming from the hybridization. If the non-human does not exist as a negation, the boundary between the two becomes unclear and overlapping. It is with this hybridization, the blurring of the boundaries, that we are able to come closer to those who inhabit the world: non-humans and humans alike.
Download or read book Wittgenstein s Lion written by Adam Rafinski and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-06-29 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: 1, Bard College (Literatur, ), course: Wittgenstein's Lion, language: English, abstract: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” (Wittgenstein 1958, P. 223) Conducted by this famous quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, this paper concerns the anthropocentrically gap between Men and Animal in two parts: The goal of first part, entitled "Wittgenstein's Lion speaks", is to throw a spotlight on this dark phrase regarding its meaning, possibility and actual consequence for the philosophical relationship between the animal and the human today. I will begin by posing the question of the meaning of this event. By analyzing the use of the metaphor of the lion I will ask for the content of his speech. Then I will ask for the possibility of the lion giving this speech after the death of truth. But before that, I will also raise the question of the ontological difference between animal and man. And finally I will conclude by raising the question in which form his words would appear to us today. The goal of the second part, entitled "Wittgenstein's Lion at play", will be to call into question a theory of language that deals with the notion of game-play as a possibility to overcome the anthropocentric gap under the onto-metaphysical condition that I already extracted in the first part. Although I am very aware that what follows might overstretch some ideas by Wittgenstein a little bit, I have to give my strong suspicion concerning the relationship between Wittgenstein’s “language-game” and his “form of life”, as a ideal starting point to leave our anthropocentric prison of reason, some space. Taking the thoughts of one of the most ambitious logical thinker in the age of posthistoire literally, I will have to give Wittgenstein’s ideas some “form of life” by doing exactly what his theory of language calls for: by playing with it in a close reading.
Download or read book Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture written by Ashley Pearson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book HumAnimal written by Kalpana Seshadri and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power and counterpower in the space of silence
Download or read book The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism written by Camillo Boano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben’s oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ with architecture’s aesthetic-political function.
Download or read book The Problem of Context written by R.M. Dilley and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The apparently simple notion that it is contextualization and invocation of context that give form to our interpretations raises important questions about context definition. Moreover, different disciplines involved in the elucidation and interpretation of meanings construe context indifferent ways. How do these ways differ? And what analytical strategies are adopted in order to suggest that the relevant context is "self-evident"? The notion of context has received less attention than is due such a central, key concept in social anthropology, as well as in other related disciplines. This collection of contributions from a group of leading social anthropologists and anthropological linguists addresses the question of how the idea of context is constructed, invoked, and deployed in the interpretations put forward by social anthropologists. The ethnographic focus embraces peoples from regions such as Bali, Europe, Malawi, and Zaire. Primarily theoretical in its aims, the work also draws on expertise from anthropological linguistics and philosophy in order to set the issue as much in a comparative disciplinary perspective as in a comparative cross-cultural one.
