_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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Levinas ahead of his time--and himself--on politics, postcolonialism and globalization, animals and the environment, and science and technology.

List of key concepts -- Introduction -- THE KEY CONCEPTS -- Bibliography -- Index.

En las páginas finales de “El futuro de la profesión o la universidad sin condición”, Derrida sugiere que el futuro de las humanidades tendrá que incluir un análisis de la historia de los conceptos que instituyen varias de las disciplinas que componen las humanidades. Dichos análisis históricos, señala, no habrían de ser neutrales. Por el contrario, estarían guiados por un intento de abrir estas disciplinas a modos de alteridad que no han sido pensados cuando se han constituido sus fundamentos. Que (...) este tipo de consideración crítica también ha de ser extendido hasta incluir las problemáticas fundamentales de las humanidades en cuanto tales y en su conjunto (y no sólo de las disciplinas individuales que caen bajo esta rúbrica) es algo que Derrida no elude. De hecho, esta exigencia crítica es el primer tema que él señala cuando intenta delinear un proyecto positivo y cuasi-programático para las humanidades. Sugiere que las humanidades, si han de mantener el espíritu ético a partir del cual se constituyeron, tendrán que girar sus lentes críticos sobre sus propios conceptos fundamentales, esto es, sobre el concepto de “lo humano”. (shrink)

Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought.

This essay examines Jacques Derrida’s contribution to recent debates in animal philosophy in order to explore the critical promise of his work for contemporary discourses on animal ethics and vegetarianism. The essay is divided into two sections, both of which have as their focus Derrida’s interview with Jean-Luc Nancy entitled “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject.” My task in the initial section is to assess the claim made by Derrida in this interview that Levinas’s work is dogmatically anthropocentric, (...) and to determine whether Levinas’s conception of ethics leaves a place for animals. In the second half of the essay I turn to an analysis of Derrida’s discussion of vegetarianism and its critical relation to the humanism and anthropocentrism that he is calling into question. The main argument that I seek to advance here is that deconstruction should not be strictly identified with vegetarianism (as certain of Derrida’s readers have suggested), but rather that what is needed is a thorough deconstruction of existing discourses on vegetarianism, a project that remains largely to be developed. (shrink)

A transformative vision for human-animal relations on personal, social, and environmental levels. The Three Ethologies offers a fresh, affirmative vision for rebuilding human-animal relations. Venturing beyond the usual scholarly and activist emphasis on restricting harm, Matthew Calarco develops a new philosophy for understanding animal behavior—a practice known as ethology—through three distinct but interrelated lenses: mental ethology, which rebuilds individual subjectivity; social ethology, which rethinks our communal relations; and environmental ethology, which reconfigures our relationship to the land we co-inhabit with our (...) animal kin. Drawing on developments in philosophy, (eco)feminist theory, critical geography, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, Calarco casts an inspiring vision of how ethological living can help us to reimagine our ideas about goodness, truth, and beauty. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben has come to be recognized in recent years as one of the most provocative and imaginative thinkers in contemporary philosophy and political theory. The essays gathered together in this volume shed light on his extensive body of writings and assess the significance of his work for debates across a wide range of fields, including philosophy, political theory, Jewish studies, and animal studies. The authors discuss material extending across the entire range of Agamben's writings, including such early works as (...) _Language and Death_ and more recent and widely acknowledged works such as _Homo Sacer_. Readers will find useful discussions of key concepts and theories in Agamben's work, such as sovereignty and bare life, along with more critical analyses of the political stakes and consequences of his theoretical and political interventions. (shrink)

In recent years Derrida has devoted a considerable number of writings to addressing “the question of the animal,” and, more often than not, this question arises in a reading of one of Heidegger's texts. In order to appreciate more fully the stakes of Derrida's posing of this question in relation to Heidegger, in this essay I offer some prefatory remarks to the question of the animal in Derrida's reading of Heidegger. The essay opens with a careful analysis of Derrida's early (...) essay “The Ends of Man,” in which Heidegger's “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ is read in terms of the motif of man's “proper.” Taking my point of departure from this Derridean reading of Heidegger's humanism, I return to Heidegger's “Letter” in order to uncover the manner in which Heidegger distinguishes man's “proper” from what is “improper,” namely, animality. This reading reveals that, while Heidegger offers a convincing account of the limits of metaphysical humanism, this critical account nevertheless ends up uncritically reinforcing the anthropocentrism of this same tradition. My closing suggestion is that Derrida's rethinking of animality should be understood as an extended meditation on the various consequences and effects of this dogmatic anthropocentrism in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian thought. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to examine the status and promise of Emmanuel Levinas’s humanism for a posthuman and more-than-human age. I suggest that, even though Levinas’s approach partially r...

Plato's pigs -- Aristotle's wonderful animals -- Cynicism's dogs -- Jainism's birds -- Plutarch's grunter -- Descartes' beast-machine -- Kant's elephants -- Bentham's suffering animal -- Nietzsche's overhuman animal -- Derrida's cat -- Adams's absent referent -- Plumwood's crocodile -- Haraway's companion species.

This chapter scrutinizes the “pragmatic attitude” that treats animals as mere obstacles to the smooth flow of circuits of mobility. At the heart of this attitude, it is argued, is a logic of sacrifice that structurally excludes animals and others deemed non- and sub-human from the circle of social and normative consideration. Critical responses and alternatives to this logic are canvassed under three different rubrics: liberal humanism, zoo-pessimism, and inhumanism. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how contemporary roadkill artists (...) endeavor to challenge the logic of sacrifice and how their work aligns with key elements of the inhumanist perspective. (shrink)

This chapter considers genuine alternatives to a hyperautomobile way of life. Such “altermobilities,” I argue, are not mere replacements for cars and car use but constitute very different ways of being-in and moving-through the world, ways that are attentive to our human and more-than-human kin. Thus, altermobilities are aimed at enacting ways of moving and being that are truly common and shared (what I will call, following the work of Giorgio Agamben, profane) rather than exclusive and hierarchical (or sacred, in (...) Agamben’s sense of the word). Through an analysis of the ideal of autonomobility (developed by mobility theorists Noel Cass and Katharina Manderscheid), along with recent developments in the fields of road ecology, the environmental humanities, and disability studies, I sketch the elements of a genuinely non-anthropocentric approach to thinking about and practicing mobility. (shrink)

Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin tracks the transformation of the novel’s protagonist, Isserley, as she undergoes a crisis in her self-identity and drifts slowly but in a determined manner toward another way of life. Isserley works in the voddissin industry, which captures and transforms “vodsels” into consumable meat. As the novel unfolds, Isserley eventually comes to reject the meat industry and the subjugation of vodsels on which it is based. Here I suggest that Isserly’s subjective transformation is based not (...) on a superficial recognition of logical identity between herself and vodsels, but on a deeper ethic of belonging, which enables her to affirm her shared “animal” condition with vodsels and other earthly beings. (shrink)

What is the significance of and logic behind Jacques Derrida's recent "political" writings? While Derrida's work refuses to obey any singular movement or register, he does, nonetheless, make recurrent attempts to negotiate between a politics of identity and difference. A similar undertaking can be found in the radical democratic writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. An encounter between these thinkers is here carried out in order to elucidate key themes in Derrida's The Other Heading. The reading aims at developing (...) and contextualising Derrida's relation to radical democratic thought so that his political strategies can be made more explicit. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Roadkill is a recurrent but often unthought feature of modern life. It is ubiquitous on urban, suburban, and rural roadways; it is a common theme on popular television shows and in horror movies; there are even cookbooks that extol the virtues and pleasures of eating roadkilled animals. Yet, consideration of the broader significance of the myriad ontological, social, ethical, and political issues related to roadkill has largely gone missing from mainstream scholarship and activism. This neglect persists even in fields such (...) as mobility studies and animal studies that would otherwise seem to have a vested interest in the topic. Chapter 1 examines two systems of power that lie at the heart of the contemporary problem of roadkill: hyperautomobility and anthropocentrism. It is argued that examining these two systems in tandem is essential for overcoming the general neglect of roadkill in contemporary discourse and activism and for generating genuine alternatives to dominant systems of mobility. (shrink)

This paper explores two different methods of reading ‘Derrida’s own conscience’ – that is, of raising the question of ethics and obligation in deconstruction. The two readings under discussion here are staged by Jean-Luc Nancy in his seminal essay ‘The Free Voice of Man’. In the first half of the paper, I engage in a reading of Nancy’s essay in which I seek not only to highlight Nancy’s double formulation of the place of ethics in deconstruction, but also to re-mark (...) the transition in Derrida’s writings from the priority of the question to an emphasis on a call that precedes the question. In order to further explore this displacement of the priority of the question, the second half of the essay takes up an analysis of Derrida’s employment of the motif of ‘ Viens ’ (‘Come’) in his essay ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. I suggest that ‘ Viens ’ should be read as Derrida’s formulation of: (1) another response, beyond questioning, to a call that precedes any question; (2) another thought of conscience and obligation; and (3) a thought of the trace of alterity at the very heart of conscience that signals the impossibility of any form of good conscience. Key Words: apocalypse • call • conscience • ethics • question • Viens. (shrink)

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Roadkill is a recurrent but often unthought feature of modern life. Yet, consideration of the broader significance of the myriad social, ethical, and political issues related to roadkill has largely gone missing from mainstream scholarship and activism. This neglect persists even in fields such as mobility studies and animal studies that would otherwise seem to have a vested interest in the topic. This book aims to bring roadkill to the foreground of current discussions among scholars and activists in these fields (...) in order to demonstrate that roadkill is a uniquely important site from which to understand and contest the machinations of the dominant social order. It argues that a careful examination of roadkill can help both to uncover the hidden violence of contemporary human-centered systems of mobility and to develop alternative modes of mobility for a renewed social life in common with our more-than-human kin. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Barry Lopez’s essay “Apologia” in order to consider more carefully the issue of subjective formation and re-formation. In this essay, Lopez describes a cross-country road trip in which he encounters and removes a large number of roadkilled animals. Lopez describes this practice of roadkill removal as a “technique of awareness,” a technique which I argue allows not just for fuller appreciation of the beauty and singularity of animals, but also serves as a means whereby a change (...) in hyperautomobile subjectivity might occur. As a means of articulating this latter idea more fully, Lopez’s ideas about apologizing and making amends are brought into conversation with related notions concerning events, truth, and ritual in Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

The Continental Ethics Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on ethics and moral philosophy from the major figures in Continental thought. The carefully selected readings are divided into five sections: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. All of the authors and their writings are introduced and placed in philosophical context by the editors. The Continental Ethics Reader is an ideal point of entry to the most pressing issues and most important thinkers of the (...) Continental tradition, and provides a thorough and much needed introduction to the field. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ontological status of roadkill, which is to say, its basic nature and significance. It is suggested that traditional substance ontologies, as well as more contemporary relational ontologies and ethical frameworks, are inadequate for disclosing the nature of roadkill. In order to address this limit, Calvin Warren’s analysis of ontological terror is employed to analyze the lives and deaths of beings who are understood to fall outside the orbit of the human. The chapter concludes with the idea (...) that thinking and attending to roadkill as inhabiting such an outside requires relating to it as an event. (shrink)