Peter and Devin continue my post on Levinas. No surprise, I have broad agreement with them. I would like to add, if you are interested a way of reading Levinas for animal others, you need to read Matt Calarco's Zoographies (if, for some reason, you haven't already).
Levi has a post extending my analysis of human exceptionalism, and circling squares riffs on it over at his blog.
There are two awesome looking events in the DC area on critical animal studies at the beginning of Dec. I cannot begin to tell you how jealous I am of anyone going.
My blog is just never going to be the place for finding up to the minute news and analysis on the Occupation. Not because I don't think it is important, it might be the most important news story in America these days, but because other people are doing it better and faster. Anyway, here is a good round-up by Stuart Elden on the UC police brutality. A nice place to go if you are out of touch.
Over at Knowledge Ecology, Adam Robbert has uploaded Donna Haraway's speech on animals and killing well that she gave at the AAR this weekend. I need to listen to it again (I was distracted this morning while listening to it) to give a better response. However, I continue to believe she is somehow articulating a position to vegan ecofeminists of innocence, which I think is clearly not at all what is at stake. Also, I continue to be confused if her position on killing well thinks through animal/critter sociality (outside of human-animal sociality) in any sort of semiotically and materially thick way. Worth a listen, though. Donna Haraway remains a remarkably bright and insightful thinker, and one whom comes across in a spirit of generosity so seldom seen in the academy these days.
MLA has an insightful and disturbing post on the justifications and views of distance learning, including linking it to his shitty early jobs at McDonalds.
Over at Environmental Critique is an interesting post on urban animal raising. If I get the chance tomorrow, I will make a post on the tendency of urban centers to exile animal slaughtering. Also, APS has a post up there, definitely worth checking out. The title, "A Necessary Fear of Chaos," should be more than enough to entice you to click.
I recently discovered the blog Animal Wise, which is about research into animal intelligence and capabilities (I believe from a link on Andrew Sullivan's blog).
It seems that modern humans once mated with other species. I've been meaning to do a post up about this and Ladelle McWhorter's smart essay, "Enemy of the Species", from the edited volume Queer Ecologies. It might still happen.
Peter Singer argues we should ban cigarettes.
Lastly, but not least, here are a few conferences that if I can make the time and funding work out, I would like to submit to, and hopefully present at: the 2012 Radical Philosophy Association Conference, 5th International Deleuze Studies conference, and the Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies.
Florence+ The Machine has a new album. Instead, here is her old song.
The agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. - Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
