Sunday, August 1, 2010

A Post of Links

I linked to this is my Dark Animal Studies post, but Levi has a very interesting post up engaging Morton's work. I've recently been reading Morton's earlier work on the Romantic inception of vegetarianism, and the sort of ambiguity of Romantic vegetarianism. All very interesting, expect more on that at some point.

In very exciting news, the first volume of Speculations is here. Paul has the details.


This post by HJM on reading Bloch's The Principle of Hope is great. Bloch is a really great and interesting thinker who has mostly been ignored recently. His engagement with Thomas Müntzer, for example, helps present a revolutionary conception of time at least as profound (if not more so) than Negri's work on this subject. HJM, keep us updated on how The Principle of Hope goes.

I recently made a post about how prisons lacked air conditions, and it seems that Mother Jones has a short article recently on this very problem. I can understand that people may not agree with my abolitionist stance when it comes to prisons, but that prisoners need to be treated substantially better should be the sort of thing we can all get behind. Sadly, that doesn't seem the case.


EJ has a post on Haraway's When Species Meet. I would agree that many of the classic texts on animal rights seems to be tried in absentia. Not just with Haraway, but with any number of people on the poststructuralist and continental side of things. Even as strong a reader as Derrida never cites any particular text to say that animal rights is trapped in Cartesianism. Of course, it might be, and I don't defend in toto Singer, Regan, Adams, etc. However, it is absurd to me that people tend to condemn with so little engagement. It makes one feels that there is more bias going on then philosophical work. To return to Haraway, it is also striking to compare her most recent two texts on animals with her earlier work. Issues and questions about animals continue throughout her work, but they don't obviously mesh. For example, take her discussion of hunting from Primate Visions and compare it to the discussion of hunting wild boar in When Species Meet.

Ian Bogost recently has made an argument for what he calls tiny ontology. I'm generally in agreement with his feelings that we need minimal ontological commitments for our work, that ontology should be tiny, should be able to turn into a slogan. I'm not sure if Ian's and my slogans would be the same (though they might be), but I agree with the slogan of tiny ontology.

I recently found that Nick Cave (Nick Cave!!!) will be writing the screenplay for the new Crow. In honor of that, here is a video whose title could be the title of this blog. I am speaking, of course, of "Abattoir Blues."