Special Issue on the EcoGotchic has just been released

Special Issue Gothic Studies 16/1, "The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century", has just been released, and will probably be of great interest to many of you.

The special issue addresses introduces a new field of inquiry, the EcoGothic, which includes, among others, two essays on carnivorism and speciesism in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  The issue is available in preview on the Manchester University Press website and by subscription through many university libraries. A brief description of the issue follows below.

This special issue of Gothic Studies brings together Gothic works--British, Irish and Italian--to consider their engagement with species- and environement-related issues through the theoretical lens of an emerging field of critical inquiry–the EcoGothic. An EcoGothic approach takes a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that species, nonhumans and the environment play in the construction of monstrosity and fear, examining the construction of the Gothic body–unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid–through a more inclusive, antispeciest lens.

Contents

The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century  David Del Principe

Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in Arthur Machen’s

The Hill of Dreams  Anthony Camara

(M)eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker’s Novel  David Del Principe

The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker’s ‘Carpet of Death’ and Ireland’s Horrible Beauty Derek Gladwin

Italian Rural Gothic: The Powers of Were-Goats in Tommaso Landolfi’s La pietra lunare [The Moonstone]  Keala Jewell

Meat, Cannibalism and Humanity in Paul du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, or, What Does a Gorilla Hunter Eat for Breakfast?  John Miller

‘L’orrida magnificenza del luogo.’ Gothic Aesthetics in Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra  Maria Parrino

 An Already Alienated Animality: Frankenstein as a Gothic Narrative of Carnivorism  Jackson Petsche

 Between Darwin and San Francesco: Zoographic Ambivalences in Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee  Nicoletta Pireddu

(Thank you to David Del Principe for both putting this together, and letting me know this existed). 

Intersex, teratology, zoology

I am currently working on other projects, so, just a short post.

Hilary Malatino gave a talk entitled "Intersex 101, or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Intersex But Were Afraid To Ask". It is clearly geared for being accessible to a beginning audience or undergraduate audience, however, it is still really interesting. Particularly, she engages within the history of how we come to understand intersex today. Here is the video:


Now, that is all interesting, and she explains the connection between the history of intersex and teratology, the academic study of monsters (and therefore this is connected to what Jeffery Cohen has called Monster Theory). I want to add something a short bit. Hil brings up the person who coined terms like teratology and ethology, namely Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Now, over at A Monster Observatory, we have a rather old but interesting post that is "an excerpt from a British Review Article on M. Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's General and particular History of Anomalies of Organization in Man and Animals which appeared in The British And Foreign Medical Review (Vol 8, No. 15) July, 1839." What this excerpt makes clear is that teratology is stapled to zoology. I am sure there is more to say, but I have to run.

monstrosity, normalizing, authenticity

So, there is a cool looking conference (I don't have any real travel funds, so I will not submitting an abstract) on monstrosity. Anyway, seems like a good place as any to say something I have been thinking of.

Monstrosity is basically a really good way of thinking all sorts of things that seem opposed to what Foucault called "the normalizing society". Sometimes this is specific to the entire terrain of monsters as opposed to the creation of the category of the abnormals. Sometimes this refers in generic to something monstrous that rebels or resists the normalizing order. Sometimes this refers to all sorts of specific introductions of the monster that we use as metaphors (or whatever) in order to think all sorts of theory: werewolves, vampires (vegetarian and otherwise), ghosts, the weird, the blob, zombies, Frankenstein's Monster, etc. And really, I don't have anything against any of this. I know it is always fashionable to oppose whatever is fashionable in contemporary philosophy/theory, but this is a fashion that I both do work in and lots of people I respect do work in. But I briefly want to talk about something else.

So, I come out of the traditions of goth, glam, and punk when I was in HS. All of them are pretty big fans of monstrosity, excess, the profane, that sort of thing. And while monstrosity, in those circles, might be opposed to normality, but is often used as an indicator of authenticity. Authenticity is another way of thinking specific forms of domination, of thinking specific models of normalizing. Anyway, Adorno wrote an excellent little book, The Jargon of Authenticity, that should be read on this point. I don't have much to say on this point, really (yay, blogging. Throw something out there without fully forming the idea). I certainly don't think that all forms of valorization of monstrosity suffers from the problems of authenticity. But I do think there is a possibility to turn the issues of monstrosity into an existential politics, into something specifically avoids the anonymous, the production of alterity, existing outside economies of the sacred and the profane, bizarre co-mingling, etc. It is not that we need to be opposed to recent academic interest in monsters, but that any new trend requires proper caution in places it can end up.

Negri, Humanism, Monstrosity

Jason Read has a review of Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. (h/t Philosophy in a Time of Error). In it, Read argues:

Finally, Casarino's example of language as this relation between the virtual and actual, an example that is repeated numerous times throughout the discussions with Negri, underscores that as a philosophical problem the common focuses as much on the fundamental aspects of human subjectivity, on a philosophical anthropology, as it does on an ontology.

The turn towards philosophical anthropology, towards an examination of humanity through its fundamental activities and relations, differentiates Negri's work from the work of thinkers of a previous generation such as Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser. For Deleuze, and other "anti-humanist" thinkers, any discussion of human nature, of some commonality, was an effect of power or an ideological ruse. Negri's and Casarino's work has more in common (no pun intended) with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, and Paolo Virno, who have returned to the maligned field of philosophical anthropology, to a consideration of what makes us human, not as a generic essence, but as the interplay between abstract potential and singular differences. This is not to say that these conceptions are the same. In the interviews, and in the essay on the political monster, Negri distinguishes his understanding of humanity from Agamben's understanding of bare, or naked, life. For Agamben, bare life, the reduction of humanity to pure survival, is at the basis of the modern state. Such an understanding of humanity disavows the common, specifically the way in which the common as presupposition constitutes a kind of historicity. As Negri writes,

There is no naked life in ontology, much as there is no social structure without rules, or word without meaning. The universal is concrete. What precedes us in time, in history, always already presents itself as an ontological condition, and, as far as man is concerned, as (consistent, qualified, irreversible) anthropological figure (208).

This is, as I have argued before, absolutely correct. Negri is no vitalist, no matter how many times you read that people say he is a materialist vitalist in the same lineage as Deleuze. For Negri, it is not life that gives us the power to be, but rather the very being of humanity that gives us the unique power to be. This is, and always been, the flavor of humanism that always exists in Negri. Though a biopolitical (in the sense Negri uses that term) humanism, to be sure.

This collection, however, contains a particularly interesting essay that both goes the farthest at contesting the boundaries of the human while at the same time ultimately reterroritoralizing on the figure of the human. This is the essay "The Political Monster." I remember a little over a year ago, back when I first trying to blog, Shaviro had a series of posts up on the question of monstrosity that Hardt and Negri praise as the monstrous flesh of the multitude. Shaviro had argued at the time that such a moves ignores that for Marx, the monstrous was capitalism. At the time I argued that the monstrous was something I wanted to be on the side of. Anyway, in this essay Negri not only extends the analysis about why he is on the side of monsters, but also specifically deals with this change from capitalism as monster to multitude as monster.

monstrosity

Over at Shaviro's blog he has a very interesting post on the notion of the monstrous flesh in the work of Hardt and Negri. You should go read it http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=639

I wanted to post here the comment I made over there:

Interesting post. A few issues I have.

(1) The Task of Philosophy:
I think that whatever problems there are in Empire and Multitude (and sure, there are many), these books are not just works trying to describe a political situation, they are also trying to produce a political ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in What Is Philosophy? “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (p. 108). Empire and Multitude is about calling forth this new people, this multitude. I think we have to judge the exuberance of these two books partially upon a criteria of a “becoming-political of philosophy” (as Alliez puts it in The Signature of the World).

(2) On subsumption:

Few people have done more to advance the knowledge of transitions from formal subsumption to real subsumption than Negri. Indeed, one can see in the works of both Negri and Hardt a thorough look at capitalism’s move to a cognitive and affective capitalism. We can see the increasing disciplinarization and normalization of capitalism. Read Negri’s The Politics of Subversion for merely my favorite work on this issue. Also, a good read (if you haven’t already) is Jason Read’s The Micro-politics of Capital, which synthesizes the work of Negri and other autonomists and french political theory. The switch from formal subsumption to real subsumption and the rise of immaterial labor is clearly at stake in both Empire and Multitude, why then does your post imply that somehow it isn’t acknowledged? Your post implies that they somehow think that the categories of immaterial labor and real subsumption are somehow less oppressive. I don’t think they ever imply that (though maybe, in the general sense, that they imply that Empire is less oppressive than the days of nationalism). What they do argue in those texts (and perhaps more forcefully in other works) is that the stage of real subsumption is a stage of contestability. Similar to Foucault, if capitalism now inhabits every moment of our life, then every moment of life is a possibility to fight capitalism. The antagonism against real subsumption becomes the constitutive reality of the multitude.

(3) Monstrosity:
It is the question of constitutive possibilities that seems to be real break you make with Negri and Hardt. Does capitalism contain creative, constitutive powers itself? Does it have poesies and potentia? The argument of Negri is unambiguous on this point, capitalism does not and cannot. (It is here that Agamben makes his criticism against Negri). If capitalism does not have its own constitutive powers, than it proceeds based upon control and normalization (and those words should be not be heard too far outside of their Deleuzian and Foucauldian registers). Perhaps then we should also hear the word monstrosity in its Foucauldian register. Foucault devoted an extensive amount of time to the idea of monstrosity, particular in his lectures on The Abnormal. In there we find that “the monster is essentially a mixture” (p. 63). But it is not enough for the monster to be a mixture. “There is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law” (ibid). If capitalism is only parasitic, if it only has potestas and not potentia, if it has only constituted and not constitutive power, if it only can own the means of production but cannot produce itself; then it needs normalization and control. Capitalism may break taboos (may indeed depend on it), but only to create a new normal. Monstrous bodies are still bodies that need to be controlled or killed in our society. When Hardt and Negri align the multitude with a monstrous flesh, this is actually a very important moment. First of all, it sets up the antagonism between the multitude and those societies of control (deleuze)/societies of normalization (Foucault). Second of all, it contends that the common of the multitude will not be one of normalization. Communism is not and cannot be soviet socialism, it cannot be another way of normalizing, rather, the common of the multitude must be the monstrous. The singularity of the monstrous body, the creativity and productivity of the multitude against the normalizing control of capitalism.

That post makes me sound like I am in the tank for hardt and negri, which surely isn’t the case. It also didn’t express enough that I liked your post.