Download or read book The Animal that Therefore I Am written by Jacques Derrida and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction--dating from Descartes--between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.
Download or read book Plato s Animals written by Jeremy Bell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A unique and intriguing point of entry into the dialogues and a variety of concerns from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics, politics, and aesthetics.” —Eric Sanday, University of Kentucky Plato’s Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato’s dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato’s work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato’s understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. “Plato’s Animals is a strong volume of beautifully written paeans to postmodern themes found in premodern thought.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews “Shows readers of Plato that he remains significant to issues currently pursued in Continental thought and especially in relation to Derrida and Heidegger.” —Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver “Will provide fertile ground for future work in this area.” —Jill Gordon, author of Plato’s Erotic World
Download or read book In the Eye of the Animal written by Patricia Cox Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Christian theology posited a strict division between animals and humans. Nevertheless, animal figures abound in early Christian literature and art—from Augustine's renowned "wonder at the agility of the mosquito on the wing," to vivid exegeses of the six days of creation detailed in Genesis—and when they appear, the distinctions between human and animal are often dissolved. How, asks Patricia Cox Miller, does one account for the stunning zoological imagination found in a wide variety of genres of ancient Christian texts? In the Eye of the Animal complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how textual and artistic images and interpretive procedures actually celebrated a continuum of human and animal life. Synthesizing early Christian studies, contemporary philosophy, animal studies, ethology, and modern poetry, Miller identifies two contradictory strands in early Christian thinking about animals. The dominant thread viewed the body and soul of the human being as dominical, or the crowning achievement of creation; animals, with their defective souls, related to humans only as reminders of the brutish physical form. However, the second strand relied upon the idea of a continuum of animal life, which enabled comparisons between animals and humans. This second tendency, explains Miller, arises particularly in early Christian literature in which ascetic identity, the body, and ethics intersect. She explores the tension between these modes by tracing the image of the animal in early Christian literature, from the ethical animal behavior on display in Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron and the anonymous Physiologus, to the role of animals in articulating erotic desire, and from the idyllic intimacy of monks and animals in literature of desert ascetism to early Christian art that envisions paradise through human-animal symbiosis.
Download or read book Seeing Animals after Derrida written by Sarah Bezan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume charts a new course in animal studies that re-examines Jacques Derrida's enduring thought on the visualization of the animal in his seminal Cerisy Conference from 1997, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Building new proximities with the animal in and through - and at times in spite of - the visual apparatus, Seeing Animals after Derrida investigates how the recent turn in animal studies toward new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology prompts a renewed engagement with Derrida's animal philosophy. In taking up the matter of Derrida's treatment of animality for the current epoch, the contributors to this book each present a case for new philosophical approaches and aesthetic paradigms that challenge the ocularcentrism of Western culture.
Download or read book Zoographies written by Matthew Calarco and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zoographies challenges the anthropocentrism of the Continental philosophical tradition and advances the position that, while some distinctions are valid, humans and animals are best viewed as part of an ontological whole. Matthew Calarco draws on ethological and evolutionary evidence and the work of Heidegger, who called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life. He also turns to Levinas, who raised questions about the nature and scope of ethics; Agamben, who held the "anthropological machine" responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century; and Derrida, who initiated a nonanthropocentric ethics. Calarco concludes with a call for the abolition of classical versions of the human-animal distinction and asks that we devise new ways of thinking about and living with animals.
Download or read book When Species Meet written by Donna J. Haraway and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending more than 38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal–human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending-socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal–human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism.
Download or read book Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents written by Gary Steiner and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2005-11-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.
Download or read book The Animal Part written by Mark Payne and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.
Download or read book The Animal Inside written by Geoffrey Dierckxsens and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.
Download or read book French Thinking about Animals written by Louisa Mackenzie and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading scholars from Belgium, Canada, France, and the United States, French Thinking about Animals makes available for the first time to an Anglophone readership a rich variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the animal question in France. While the work of French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari has been available in English for many years, French Thinking about Animals opens up a much broader cross-cultural dialogue within animal studies. These original essays, many of which have been translated especially for this volume, draw on anthropology, ethology, geography, history, legal studies, phenomenology, and philosophy to interrogate human-animal relationships. They explore the many ways in which animals signify in French history, society, and intellectual history, illustrating the exciting new perspectives being developed about the animal question in the French-speaking world today. Built on the strength and diversity of these contributions, French Thinking about Animals demonstrates the interdisciplinary and internationalism that are needed if we hope to transform the interactions of humans and nonhuman animals in contemporary society.
Download or read book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw written by Michael Murray and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those who believe in God often puzzle over how God could permit evil and suffering in the world. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw focuses specifically on non-human animal suffering, and whether or not it raises problems for belief in the existence of a perfectly good creator.
Download or read book Dorsality written by David Wills and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision. With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lvinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.” Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences. David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.
Download or read book Thinking Through Animals written by Matthew Calarco and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and indistinction—to differentiate three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains.
Download or read book Theory and Practice written by Jacques Derrida and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, nine lectures from Jacques Derrida that challenge the influential Marxist distinction between thinking and acting. Theory and Practice is a series of nine lectures that Jacques Derrida delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in 1976 and 1977. The topic of “theory and practice” was associated above all with Marxist discourse and particularly the influential interpretation of Marx by Louis Althusser. Derrida’s many questions to Althusser and other thinkers aim at unsettling the distinction between thinking and acting. Derrida’s investigations set out from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” in particular the eleventh thesis, which has often been taken as a mantra for the “end of philosophy,” to be brought about by Marxist practice. Derrida argues, however, that Althusser has no such end in view and that his discourse remains resolutely philosophical, even as it promotes the theory/practice pair as primary values. This seminar also draws fascinating connections between Marxist thought and Heidegger and features Derrida’s signature reconsideration of the dichotomy between doing and thinking. This text, available for the first time in English, shows that Derrida was doing important work on Marx long before Specters of Marx. As with the other volumes in this series, it gives readers an unparalleled glimpse into Derrida’s thinking at its best—spontaneous, unpredictable, and groundbreaking.
Download or read book Divinanimality written by Stephen D. Moore and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A turn to the animal is underway in the humanities, most obviously in such fields as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. One important catalyst for this development has been the remarkable body of animal theory issuing from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. What might the resulting interdisciplinary field, commonly termed animality studies, mean for theology, biblical studies, and other cognate disciplines? Is it possible to move from animal theory to creaturely theology? This volume is the first full-length attempt to grapple centrally with.
Download or read book The Beast and the Sovereign Volume I written by Jacques Derrida and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
Download or read book The Accommodated Animal written by Laurie Shannon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.
