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). 

Some thoughts on Beautiful Soul Syndrome

I'm working on a paper about vegetarian vampires, and I am engaging with what Tim Morton calls Beautiful Soul Syndrome (following, of course, Hegel). So, some of you have seen some of my arguments here before about how vegans and vegetarians are constantly being accused of suffering from beautiful soul syndrome (not, obviously, in those words), and that for the most part the accusation is bunk. But, I begin to think more about the critique of beautiful soul syndrome, and I realized there is a real threat in the critique as well. Let's detour quickly through Harman on Zizek, and then we will get back to animals.

Recently Harman commented on the absurd comments by Zizek on the Roma. Specifically, Harman wrote that:

However, some (though not Lenin’s Tomb) have suggested that Žižek is simply trying to be a contrarian. I don’t think so at all. I think there’s a fairly sturdy common thread running through all his most controversial political statements (both this one and some of his more controversial statements at the leftmost end of the spectrum), and that is his hatred of “the beautiful soul.” What Žižek despises more than anything else (and this is to his credit) is the assumption of cost-free moral superiority, even when it comes from the Left. He is deeply attracted to those who are willing to pay the price for their views, and that’s why we find him praising Stalin’s forced collectivization and, in the remarks now at hand, apparently praising locals who “fear” the Roma over distant city dwellers making bourgeois multicultural remarks for the Roma against the locals, and so forth.
[...]
I hate the defense of Stalin and shudder at any opening of inquests against the Roma, but what I do always respect about Žižek’s remarks on politics is that they’re never actually clownish at all.

Right, so there is something right on at that. And I agree, that being a beautiful soul is really problematic, especially from a political and ethical standpoint (also consider this a beginning of an answer to this question over at AUFS). However, being critical of being a beautiful soul is often what someone does right before they, you know, say or do something horribly violent and messed up. Zizek's frankly racist remarks about the Roma is a good example. But this also happens all the time in discussions of vegans and vegetarians. When someone critiques vegans and vegetarians of engaging in beautiful soul syndrome, of just desiring to be pure (like Pollan often does), they almost always are saying their willingness to accept the world as a violent place means they can now slaughter and eat the flesh of animals.

In other words, we cannot have a critique of the beautiful soul leading us into a worse world. This sort of political and ethical 'realism' cannot be an excuse for racism and needless violence. Deleuze was often fond of saying that doing philosophy required a sort of stutter or a sort of stammer. A way of making language do something it wasn't really designed to do. I often think that political and ethical action requires a type of shambling, a type of shuffling. A way of walking that both rejects the beautiful soul while at the same time not allowing that to become an excuse for us to not have ethical commitments.

Dark Animal (Studies)

I recently received a rather odd email from someone who came across my blog, and the response to this email is something I feel the need to post here, as well. Mainly because it deals with some misconceptions of vegetarianism and veganism that seem very common. So, here's the response:

***

It seems to me that your email misunderstands what is at stake with trying to create ethical relationships with non-human beings (in particular here, those beings we call animals). There is an indictment against vegetarianism and veganism that it is motivated by a naive escapism and utopianism. In this argument, vegetarianism and veganism are conceived not as ethical responses to violence, but rather as a way of being unable to think through violence. The ethical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalala over and over again. Under this view vegetarianism and veganism is about keeping our hands clean, about purity and innocence and the sacred. This is the mistake that Derrida makes in his interview with Nancy, "Eating Well." In it he argues that vegetarians have yet to sacrifice sacrifice. Well, no duh. Now, I've hung out with plenty of vegetarians and vegans, and in general they are crowd less congratulatory on their innocence as consumed by their own guilt. The blame they lay at the feet of those who still consume animal flesh and products is meet by an almost Newtonian response of equal and opposite blame upon themselves. This is the guilt that Adorno describes as a "guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life". Indeed, the escapist and utopian drive that seeks to ward off this guilt is to be found just as often (if not more so!) among those who deride vegetarianism as utopian. If you look at Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Jose Ortega y Gasset you see again and again a desire to expiate this guilt by sublimating their violence into a sacred ritual. It's like something straight out of Durkheim or Mauss.
Vegetarians and vegans are seldom Hegel's beautiful soul who faces the "silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial elements of evaporated life," but are instead the other side of the dialectal coin, a damaged soul who has seen the face of the gorgon. This is exactly what I have tried to address in my discussion of vegetarian vampires and vampiric vegetarians. The vegetarian vampire is the liminal figure that exists on both sides, both beautiful soul and damaged soul. On the one hand the vegetarian vampire uses vegetarianism as a marker of innocence (this is one way to understand Hitler's propaganda around his non-existent vegetarianism, and also a way to understand the British National Party's Land and People campaign for animal welfare). On the other hand, the vegetarian vampire is a brooding, reflective creature; a guilt-ridden being. We need to escape these economies of innocence and guilt, of purity and pollution, of the sacred and the profane (this is a difference between myself and Agamben, who embraces the profane as a way out). What we need might be less of a critical animal studies, and more of a dark animal studies.
The critique, as Kant explains to us from the very beginning, has a policing and tribunal function. The critique distances and judges. I think that ground has very little to offer us, at least now. So, a dark animal studies repeats Tim Morton's move towards a dark ecology. The point isn't for innocence, the sacred, or distance. At the same time, it isn't for guilt, the profane, or redemption. It is, rather, to exit from these economies entirely. This is the point of ethics -- it is only because innocence and purity cannot exist that ethics can. As I have said elsewhere: Ethics is not about finding innocence, but about living after innocence. Ethics is about thinking and living in our postlapsarian world without alibi. It is from this position that we can begin to think about vegetarianism and veganism, or at least the vegetarianism and veganism of dark animal studies-- a becoming-vegetarian, a becoming-vegan.
As with all becomings what is at stake are alliances, packs, relations. Vegetarianism and veganism are practices of the self (a la late Foucault). As Foucault teaches us; following the return to certain Classical philosophical schools like the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics; we need to reverse the Cartesian moment by which right knowledge produces right action (this is, in some ways, most explicit in Badiou's theory of revolution). Rather, certain practices allow us to access certain truths. These practices and productions of the self are not simply of the self. Rather, they open us to alliances with other beings, beings that may have existed for us before these practices as "sub-ontological" (to borrow a phrase from Nelson Maldonado-Torres). The navigation of these alliances; the force and diplomacy involved; are not automatic or always obvious. There are complex and rigorous philosophical questions involved. This is another reason to think of a dark animal studies, as an invocation of a double sense of opacity against comprehension. We need to both recognize the opacity of other beings, but also the greyness, the opacity from ever knowing fully ahead of time how such relations are going to play out. Becoming-vegetarian, becoming-vegan, are practices of self and other, pacts we make to packs.

A certain fragility of the infinite

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while knows that questions of vulnerability, finitude, and precariousness are returning philosophical questions for my work. (See here and here for a couple of examples). Several other thinkers have used the idea of finitude to think us outside of an anthropocentric ontology, ethics, and politics (see Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Cora Diamond, and Cary Wolfe). Now, in one sense of this thinking vulnerability is just a fact, an almost unfortunate fact, that has to be taken into account. In more positive accounts, Butler's for one, precariousness isn't just a passive fact demanding to be taken into account. Rather, the reality of shared vulnerability produces important facts-- like sociality and plasticity, like the common and contingency. (As a side note here, when Wolfe writes on vulnerability he focuses on Diamond and Derrida, which is certainly interesting. But I wish in that chapter he had spent more time with Luhmann, I think a strong second-order systems account of vulnerability would be wonderful).
So, on the one hand, finitude is simply fragility, and as such needs to be paid attention to in the same way we stamp "Caution: Fragile" on boxes. On the other hand, finitude isn't fragility or simply fragility, it is also a productive power upon which all sorts of adaptive strengths come from (indeed, adaptation and evolution are entirely bound up with the notions of finitude). What happens, though, when we start flipping this around? In a real way, it is hard to say, because life seems to need some measure of death, but there are several literary resources at hand. For example, the vampire here enters the scene as a being defined by certain finitudes (the Hunger, fear of sunlight, etc), but also a belief that one day, the might not die. Many authors seem unsure if the great age of vampires make them powerfully devious, or if their very immortality makes them more predictable, more rigid. I started thinking about this while reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (don't hate). Butcher himself can't seem to make up his mind, attributing both realities to his vampires depending on what he wants done in his text. In another example, we can think of the Highlander tv series. In it Duncan MacLeod is always is always running into other immortals that he has known through his 400 plus years of existence. And almost all of them seem like pure trauma cases from psychoanalysis, constantly repeating the same traits again and again throughout the centuries. Immortals seem to almost never change, and all of them seem completely predictable. I am actually curious what other vampire stories and stories of immortal beings (including gods) have come down on in this idea of if immortality tends to produce a certain asociality and rigidity. A certain fragility of the infinite.

Vampire Animal Studies: The Figure of the Vegetarian Vampire

I recently came across an article in n+1 entitled "Vampire Studies". In the concluding paragraph, the author includes this part of a sentence, "So when Vampire Studies replaces Animal Studies as the latest academic vogue" the author goes on to make some rather vague claims and nothing is really ever given why vampire studies is suddenly juxtaposed with animal studies. But what this really gives me is an excuse to return to the figure of the vegetarian vampire. I talked about this before in one of the more popular posts on this blog, and this is a slightly different and slightly longer version of that post.

***

For those of you lucky enough to not be familiar with the phrase vegetarian vampire, it comes from the novels and movies of Twilight. Recently everywhere I look I see references to vegetarian vampires. T-shirts reading ‘I heart vegetarian vampires,’ and chapters of pop culture philosophy books. Within the world of Twilight, the ‘good’ vampires are a family of the Cullens, who refer to themselves as vegetarians.

When I first heard about a vegetarian vampire I wondered if we were dealing with another comedic adaptation, like the early 90s cartoon Count Duckula. But no, oh no. The vegetarian vampire of Twilight is suppose to be anything but comedic. Edward Cullen, the romantic interest, represents another in the line of both emotive and guilt-ridden vampires. Moreover, these vegetarian vampires of Twilight kill and drink the blood of other animals, they just don't kill and drink the blood of humans. This begs the question: What does vegetarianism mean, if it does not actually mean abstaining from the flesh of other animals?

This question allows us to see a way that vegetarianism, and I would say veganism as well, enters into an economy of the sacred and the profane, the innocent and guilty, the pure and the contaminated. In this case the word vegetarianism has obviously no real meaning, except for one -- to demarcate that the present vampire is 'good'. The concept of vegetarian is wielded in such a style as to make the vampire not a vampire. I mean this in two registers. The first is in the way that vegetarianism is stereotyped as essentially anti-masculine. The vampire that does not drink the blood of humans is a fundamentally 'defanged' vampire. Why, after all, do you think Bill, in the HBO series True Blood, only drinks human blood while having sex, or when he is committing an act of violence? This 'defanged' vampire is the sensitive and brooding vampire. To take another example, in Joss Whedon's Buffy and Angel universe, the vampire Angel also lives only on animal blood. He exclusively drinks animal blood because of a curse that gave him back his soul. If he ever has a true moment of happiness, a repeated euphemism for sex, he will turn back into an evil vampire.

But these tropes of vegetarian vampires are not just used to connect vegetarianism to a lack of virility. Vegetarianism is used in another way, too. The vegetarian is also a trope of a split within vampiric being. Not only is this split connected to the questions of virility mentioned above, but there always remains a yearning for human blood. What is referred to again and again, as The Hunger. As a quotation from the movie of Twilight illustrates: ‘Drinking only animal blood is like a human only eating tofu. It's filling but never quite satisfies.’ Vegetarianism is presented as paralyzed being rather than becoming. The vegetarian vampire is never satisfied with his or her vegetarianism. Rather, this vegetarianism is seen as denial of their true nature, They really are fun filled blood thirsty monsters, but go around saying “woe is me, woe is me” because they don’t kill humans. And the danger, the excitement, of these vampires is that at any moment they may snap. Their vegetarianism maintained only through the greatest will power. Instead of being a creature whose existence symbolizes an impure and con-fused nature, a transgressive nature in thrall of all that is profane —which is what the vampire has classically been used to represent-- this vegetarian vampire seeks after purity and redemption, a Vampyr Sacer. These sacred vampires are fundamentally brooding creatures, racked by guilt and shame. The vampire traditionally has no reflection—they cannot see themselves in mirrors—but all these vegetarian vampires are able to do is reflect upon their lives. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari declared in A Thousand Plateaus that ‘thought is a vampire.’ By which they meant that thought in its most intense manifestations is never a reflection, never a Cartesian moment, but always a creation of something new. Descartes himself, who denied that animals could feel pain or pleasure and carried out horrible vivisections, but at the same time loved his dog and did not eat the flesh of animals was something of a vegetarian vampire as well. These vegetarian vampires reassert reflection as the core of being, and therefore deny the intensity of existence whose impure blood allows multiple becomings. Vegetarianism here seems to indicate nothing other than morality, but a morality of the most incoherent and sickly variety. An anemic morality of a demon who has found religion.

This brings us back, at least briefly, to the philosophy of Antiquity. These practices of the self were referred to as askesis. This term, askesis, became translated by the Christian monks into the idea of asceticism. Indeed, many of the practices you’d find among the stoics and epicureans you’d find transposed with subtle but important differences by the early monastic orders. To give one example […]. Asceticism is therefore rooted deeply in the denial of the self. You deny your human, read animal, nature in order to affirm your higher, divine nature. Therefore, Christian asceticism is a dualism, the same dualism we see in Cartesianism and the figure of the vegetarian vampire. And in all of these dualism we see an extreme bias against the animal. Askesis, on the other hand, is not rooted in denying the self. It doesn’t begin with the idea that we are inherently split, and indeed such a dualism would seem quite alien. Rather, askesis is conceived as a set of practices of self-production, of a form of metamorphosis. Veganism, or better, becoming-vegan, when conceived as a type of askesis is not about self-denial, it isn’t about refusing some primal instinct that is essential to who we are. Which isn’t to say that becoming-vegan isn’t sometimes hard, or that it doesn’t require work. However, it also have a great deal of pride and joy involved. You know, if we lived be several centuries old I don’t think we’d go around being like, [vampire accent] “I am so uptight because I want to suck your blood, but I can’t.” So, becoming-vegan is an askesis, a practice of changing our being.

[...]

Now, most of the vegans/vegetarians I know in the animal emancipation movement do not believe they are innocent. But, and this is important, they too are seeking redemption. We need a way becoming-vegetarian that means both we are never innocent, but it also means that we don't have to be trapped by guilt or rituals of purity. However, those of us in the animal emancipation movement see these rituals of purity everywhere we go. Welfarists vs. Abolitionists. Pacifists vs. Militants. A movement that has trouble moving because of all its fractures. A movement that has trouble moving because the question of tactics is always raised to the level of the pure and the impure. Vegetarianism has become a symbol for putting the vampire back into the play of the sacred and the profane, however we desperately have to revert this process. If the animal emancipation movement is to have a chance at changing both our relationships with other animals, and our relationship with the animal that we are, we are going to have to find ways to escape these protocols of guilt and innocence. We need less vegetarian vampires and more vampiric vegetarians.

***

For long time readers of this blog this will have been mostly repetitive, but I after reading that partial line I couldn't resist.

Vegetarian Vampires

So, I've never seen the movie or read any of the books of Twilight. However, it seems there is a new pop culture philosophy book about Twilight, and from it I learned that the main good guy vampire from Twilight is referred to as a vegetarian vampire. It seems there are even t-shirts that say "I heart vegetarian vampires."

Now, I know nothing about Twilight, so when I first heard about a vegetarian vampire I wondered if we were dealing with another Count Duckula. However, it seems that these vegetarian vampires kill and drink the blood of other animals, they just don't kill and drink the blood of humans. I don't honestly know what to do with this information. First of all, it seems everyone that says the world vegetarian is pretty meaningless these days might have a good point.

The other point is that this shows another way that vegetarianism enters into an economy of the sacred and the profane, the innocent and guilty, the pure and the impure. In this case the vegetarianism has obviously no real meaning, except for one -- to demarcate that the present vampire as 'good'. The concept of vegetarian is wielded in such a way as to make the vampire not a vampire. I mean this in two ways. The first is in the way that vegetarianism is stereotyped as fundamentally anti-masculine. The vampire that drinks animal blood (or the vampire that drinks true blood) is a fundamentally 'defanged' vampire (why, after all, do you think Bill drinks the blood of Sookie in True Blood when they are having sex, or when he is committing acts of violence?). This 'defanged' vampire is the sensitive, dark, brooding, vampire. (To take another example, in Joss Whedon's Angel, he is the only vampire to live on the blood of animals instead of humans, which is connected to a curse which gives him a soul. This curse, however, also prevents Angel from having sex. If he ever has sex, he'll become evil again).

But these tropes of vegetarian vampires are not just used to connect vegetarianism to virility. Vegetarianism is used in another way, too. The vegetarian is also a trope of a split within their vampirism. Not only is this connected to the questions of virility mentioned above, but there always remains a yearning for human blood. A quotation from Twilight (the movie or the book or both, I have no clue): "Drinking only animal blood is like a human only eating tofu. It's filling but never quite satisfies." Vegetarianism in this world is asceticism rather than askesis, a paralyzed being rather than becoming. Rather than being a creature whose nature symbolizes an impure and con-fused nature in thrall of all that is profane, this vegetarian vampire seeks after purity and redemption, a Vampyr Sacer. A fundamentally brooding creature, unable to embrace it's lack of reflection with all that implies (see D&G, ATP p. 416). Vegetarianism here seems to indicate nothing other than morality, but a morality of the most incoherent and sickly variety. A demon who has found religion.

Now, most of the vegans/vegetarians I know in the animal emancipation movements do not believe they are innocent. But, and this is important, they too are seeking redemption. A becoming-vegan means both that we are never innocent, but it also means that we don't have to be trapped by guilt or rituals of purity. Indeed, those of us in the animal emancipation movement see these rituals of purity everywhere we go. Welfarists vs. Abolitionists. Pacifists vs. Militants. A movement that has trouble moving because of all its fractures. A movement that has trouble moving because the question of tactics is always raised to the level of the pure and the impure. We need less vegetarian vampires and more vampiric vegetarians.