Durantaye's Agamben and animal rights

Leland de la Durantaye's new book, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction finally arrived on my doorstep yesterday. My first feeling upon getting the book is, "Damn! This book is huge." In a purely physical sense, coming in at 389 pages before notes, coming in at 463 with notes, bibliography, and index.

After flipping through this book for a while, my second reaction is, "Damn! This book is huge." And this time I meant it in philosophical sense. This book is likely to be the book by which all other analysis of Agamben is likely to judged for some time coming.
Damn.

One of the things this book contains is an highly revised version of Durantaye's review of The Open, the original version can be seen here(.pdf). In the revised edition, Durantaye advances the following argument: "In this light [That being how The Open functions in the economy of Agamben's writing, very similar to my own arguments on the matter], to read Agamben in the context of debates about animal rights is, though illuminating for those debates, somewhat misleading as a frame through which to understand The Open. For Agamben, the point is not to locate a continuity or an interruption in the line of evolution, not to align himself with those advocates of continuity like Aristotle or those who see a fundamental break between man and animal like Descartes and Heidegger, and not to bring about a more just treatment of animals, but instead to glimpse a new and different paradigm for human life" (p. 333).

Now, I agree that Agamben still has strong levels of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism in his philosophy. It is also true that the concept of the anthropological machine has been 'illuminating' for anyone advancing a critique of humanism. However, this is where my agreement with Durantaye must diverge. His argument above seems to indicate that while Agamben can be illuminating for us, but that when we utilize Agamben's work in ways that are anti-human exceptionalist, we are being misleading. I think Durantaye is missing the point on this one. The 'illuminating' doesn't have to be a one way street on this one. Indeed, most of us would contend that the critiques of humanism advanced by the poststructuralist tradition is only able to reach its radical and liberatory potential if are able to remove the vestiges of anthropocentrism contained within that tradition. What we are not advancing is a new and improved humanism, and if you are not concerned about bringing about a more just treatment of animals, that is all you have. It may be misleading to say that Agamben cares about animals, but our utilizations of Agamben are not to imply that, it is rather meant to advance a reading of Agamben that manages to radicalize his own critique.

As a sort of footnote, I find Durantaye's use of the term "animal rights" in this case to be rather unnuanced. He specifically footnotes the work of Matthew Calarco as someone who has sought to read Agamben through this "animal rights" lens, but clearly anyone who has read Calarco is aware of the amount of time and attention spent distancing his work from the concept of rights.

Suggest blogs!

Anyone want to suggest blogs I haven't linked to that I might be interested in? Even a minor look around my current blog should probably clue you in about the sort of blogs I might want to follow.
Fire away in the comments.

Decolonial humanism

The theoretical and philosophical contributions of decolonial thinkers is absolutely essential. Those of us, like me, whose training is in poststructuralist philosophy, we ignore the contributions of decolonial philosophy to the determent of our understanding.

One of the things that has always interested me in the work of decolonial philosophy is the strong and profound critique of humanism. Patiently and brilliantly, we given over to exam how the human, invented as a european male, has been used to dominate and exploit the rest of the world. So far, so fascinating. But in almost every case the decolonial move is to then demand a new humanism (and what type of humanism tends to get various adjective applied, like substantive humanism, real humanism, universal humanism, humanism of the other, etc). You can see this in theorists as similar and diverse as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Edward Said, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres; just to name a few. They seem to agree (implicitly with most, explicitly with Maldonado-Torress) with Levinas that "[h]umanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human."

I don't have much else to point out. I find this problematic. Does anyone know any decolonial thinkers that don't make this move of reclaiming humanism? Does anyone believe there is something essential in their varied humanisms I am missing?

Book lust

Over at cross-x I keep a thread posting about various just very recently released or unreleased books I am excited about. I've decided that once a week I will perform the same function here. I won't post about the books I've already posted there, you can check it out if you are interested. Except to post one book I am *particularly* interested in.

The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I
(description from the Univ. Of Chicago Press website)

When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.



The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.



Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
(due out in November)

Cultural respect and vegetarianism

One of the more common complaints used against normative appeals of vegetarianism is that vegetarianism ignores diverse cultural practices. So, even if you get everyone to agree that factory farming is evil and indefensible, many will still argue that vegetarianism does not respect the cultural differences of people who have different relationships to slaughtering and consuming animal flesh than one based on the factory farm.
Sure, I think we can all agree there are many different relationships to killing animals and devouring their flesh (indeed, one of the central questions of my dissertation work is how we transferred from a sacrificial economy to a machanic economy in regards to our killing of animals), and that these practices are not equal.

What interests me about this argument is that someone's culture immediately trumps an animal's interest to not be slaughtered. But perhaps even more distrubing than that is this idea replicates the very basis of anthropocentrism, that indeed animals don't have a culture themselves that are endangered through practices that seek to slaughter them. One of the interesting developments of cognitive ethnology is to increasingly show the complex social interactions that most mammals (at the very least) enjoy. In other words, to show that animals have a culture. And if we are to take seriously the problems of coloniality and cultural imperialism, it seems we must be serious about recognizing culture that has been commonly marginalized. This includes the cultural formations of non-human animals, as such. In this view, normative and political arguments for a becoming-vegetarian are therefore arguments that seek not to create some sort of occidental universalization, but rather is a practice of resistance against forms of domination and cultural imperialism. Those that seek to ignore the cultures of animals continue the anthropocentrism and humanism of coloniality.

A discussion

I'm having a discussion with Adam Kotsko about abortion specifically, but more generally if sometimes including groups can be as devastating as excluding groups. So far, I find it interesting, and you might too. Yes, you.

Check it out

Negri and vitalism

So, most people read Negri as being a vitalist even though he explicitly and frequently rejects vitalism. Now, I assume this because of the vitalism that is in Deleuze. But this is one of those issues where people end up reading everyone into the poststructuralist goo. Someone says something similar to someone else, and suddenly they are saying the same thing.

Regardless, that Negri is not a vitalist, that he rejects the bergsonism in Deleuze, is a key and critical difference. Not just between Negri and Deleuze, but oddly also between Negri and Agamben. Negri does believe in an ontology of becoming, which clearly places him alongside Deleuze. And their shared interest in Spinoza and a Marxism that focuses on the production of subjectivity means this shouldn't surprise you. What changes however is that for Deleuze this ontology of becoming is rooted in a vitalism, with the force of life that comes from outside and exceeds everything. This life is certainly not contained within just the human, necessary. Though certainly life, as Deleuze (with and without Guattari) understands it includes things like metal, and various other things that would not traditionally be considered life. For Negri, the ontology of production has nothing to do with the nature of life, but rather with the particular nature of humanity. To be human, for Negri, is rooted with our unique capacity for production, for living labor power. This is not vitalism, as people keep calling it, but humanism. And a not surprising humanism from a man whose early philosophical projects were undertaken in examining many of the great enlightenment era humanists (Descartes, Machiavelli, and a certain conception of Spinoza). And that this is a thinker who desires a new enlightenment, a biopolitical enlightenment. Now, I have no doubt that Negri would disagree with my characterization of this as humanism. Most likely because the production of subjectivity that is uniquely human for Negri can overcome itself (with all the Nietzschean and Foucauldian overtones this is suppose to evoke).

This humanism is also stands as stark contrast to Agamben. Negri believes it is when vitalistic concerns are introduced, when we come to care about zoe instead of just bios, that we see introduced the concerns of the thantopolitical. This comes to heart of Negri's criticisms of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer becoming a political figure. He is terrified that we will rally around naked life as something to be protected, which for him continues to justify being able to see humans as being separable from their bios.

I guess I don't need to say I find this humanism even more problematic than I find Deleuze's generalized vitalism. In particular, I doubt I need to tell you that what Negri misses in this obsession with bios is the problem that I refer to, following the movie Blade Runner, as more human than the human. It may be true that we can produce something different from the human, but if we are bound up with humanism then all seek to make is to perfect the human. And that drive, of course, is what drives regimes to make people into naked life. Not by having the concept of naked life, but by having a concept that can we need to perfect the human.

Which is sad, because I really Negri.