A Post of Links

Out of town, so this will be quick.

The new issue of Foucault Studies is out, and boy is it worthwhile.

Chloë Taylor has an article out on late Foucault and the issues of self vis-a-vis eating animals. Most of you know I've done a lot of work on this area. Here is a link to the essay (.pdf).

Stephen Thierman has an article that is also in an area I've done a lot of work on, using Foucault's notion of apparatuses to think through the slaughterhouse. Here is a link to the essay (.pdf).

Also, friend of the blog Elliot A. Jarbe has a review of Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending. I liked Cohen's book more than Elliot did, but worth reading both. Link (.pdf).


JCAS is having a special issue on Animals and Prisons. Here is the cfp. I have a great deal of interest in this topic, but I don't think I will have time to write something up for it.

There are more posts on the DeLanda reading group, I'm linking to Levi because he has a shout out to me in that post. Agriculture is certainly an interesting topic in general. There is often a push to make my work more directly about agricultural, but while highly bound up with what I do, there is a certain level of discreteness between what I am talking about and what Levi is talking about. Nevertheless, I certainly indict the monoculturalism that occurs alongside Chicago's packing industry (and the work of Vandava Shiva is pretty important here). Also, I suggest Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origins of Capitalism, and Wallerstein's book on agriculture and the world-market.

Well, I drove down to Boca Raton to see my fiance and help her move. So, here is Murder by Death with I'm Comin' Home.

Too much to read

I've been gone without internet access for the last three and a half days. My blog reader (which is just devoted to AR blogs and academic blogs) has over 200 new posts for me to read. No way I will read them all. So, if something important happened, let me know. As always, self-promotion encouraged. Also, let me thank everyone who has commented about programs friendly to CAS, I will get to responding to those threads later today.

Gone for the weekend, but I still need your help

A couple of nights ago I made a post about programs friendly to doing animal studies, particularly 'critical animal studies' (whatever that means). I am trying to compose a list that I can maintain for people. Any information you want to give me would be great.

I'm looking mostly for two things. (1) A place that doesn't seem hostile to doing your MA thesis or PhD thesis on animals. (2) I am particularly looking for places where there is faculty (maybe even other students) working on questions of animals. That is to say, a place where you can do your work without feeling entirely alone.

So, please leave comments or send me an email. And I will be back around early next week.

On the Akan conception of moral personhood

Relating to my last post on Esposito and the concept of the person: In a fit of beautiful synergy, Peter is up with two posts linking to discussions on the African Akan notion of moral personhood. See here, and here.

I don't really know enough to make much more of a comment, but this certainly ties in well with what I was discussing earlier.

Esposito on the concept of the person

So, as I said in a recent post, part of the dissertation deals with the concept of the person. Well, it seems that much of the argument I was planning to make was done, in more detail, by Roberto Esposito in his Terza persona: Politica della vita e filosofia dell'impersonale Torino: Einaudi, 2007. (Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal, which I believe is forthcoming at some point by Polity). I mean one of the chapter titles is even The Dispositif of the Person, which is a phrase I use as well. It is a smart book, even if it makes a lot of research I did repetitive at this point. Esposito engages in a similar and longer genealogy of the concept of the person. Though his focus is mainly on both the Roman legal conception, and the early Christian trinity conception. I didn't get long to look at the book (I got to figure out cheap ways of buying foreign language books, particularly Italian ones), but let me talk roughly about the book, and highlight some of the disagreements.

The book is, in many ways, very Agamben-esque. In both the good and bad senses of that term. Everything is empty metaphysical machines separating and rearranging bodies into killable and protected in zones of indetermination. And of course the teleology of all of this is the Nazis. The solution is, of course, to render the machine inoperative by exiting from the metaphysics associated with the machine. A lot of sillyness is pushed against supporters of human rights and bio-ethicists (I'm sorry, I find it hard to believe that what this world needs is less attention paid to practical ethics, or that was really drove the logics of the Third Reich was bio-ethics and human rights). It is very learned and nuanced, with fascinating arguments and insights.

The concept of the person is one of the most important ethical and legal concepts of the present day. As Esposito notes, it is something that is considered of critical importance both by secularists and Catholic ethicists and legal scholars. I invite any of you take a dip into current discussions of bio-ethics, medical ethics, animal ethics, etc. and of course one of the major themes is trying to figure out exactly what counts as a person. Meanwhile, the question of the person is still very much a central concern in our legal debates, not only in discussions around abortion and other bio-ethical concerns, but also recently in things like the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling. As a matter of fact, that ruling prompted me to make a quick overview of the history of the concept of the person. Which I suggest reading. Esposito engages in a similar and longer genealogy of the concept of the person. Though his focus is mainly on both the Roman legal conception, and the early Christian trinity conception.
What Esposito draws out of those two traditions are two different ways that the person, rather than being an obvious unity and essence, is actually split both internally and externally. Internally, the split is revealed in the trinity, in which we see that the person does not lie in the body, but rather in the soul or an external essence. The economy of the trinity introduces the idea that the person is somehow an escape or an other of the animal body (both our own animal body, and obviously other animals' bodies). If the trinity provides a certain economy of an internal split (we are both persons and not persons), the Roman legal system provides a more external split. In the Roman system persona was given only to those who were full legal citizens. Obviously slaves were not persons, but also were not women or children. Moreover, stripping someone of their personhood was a penality for certain crimes. So, there was no automatic overlap between the person and the human, and there existed all of the obvious problems with not being a person (slavery, the possibility of being put to death, etc).
Then, in a move totally reminiscent of Agamben, we jump from the Roman legal system and the patristics to Nazism, human rights, and contemporary bioethics. This is, by the way, one of the differences I have with Esposito is that his genealogy seems to downplay the relationship of the person with property. Thus, while slaves, women, and children were not persons under Roman law, corporations or any entity that held property was a person. This is why the development of the concept of person in early modern philosophy under thinkers like Locke and Antoine Destutt de Tracy is absolutely crucial to understanding something like neoliberalism today. As I have said before, personhood seems to be the property to have property. I guess this also a good place to mention that Esposito repeats the common philological mistake (for example, Aquinas makes this same mistake) of saying that the Latin persona comes from the Greek prósopon, when it really comes from the Etruscan phersu. I don't think it is that bad of a mistake because the Latin translation of the Greek prosopon is persona, and therefore there is no doubt that the Greek influenced the Latin/Roman notion of persona. I think it is a mistake to see etymologies through a strictly generative lens than through a certain dialogical lens. Okay, back to the Nazis, human rights, and bioethicists (and if I was Esposito, I could make the joke, "Sorry, I repeat myself").
For anyone who has read Esposito, particularly his preceding book Bios, these arguments are fairly predictable. Nazis are the ones who achieved the complete biologization of personhood, while still maintaining the ability to create a split within the notion of the human from the notion of personhood. Human rights, with their emphasis on the personal expression and personal growth and protection are absolute failures. And they are failures because the notion of human rights repeats the same mistake as the Nazis (no, seriously, stop laughing). Bio-ethicists are also Nazis (especially Peter Singer) because they deal with complex questions of what gets to count as a person. Because they are involved with figuring out things like cloning, abortion, animal rights, ending life support, etc, they are Nazis. Well, to be rather more fair to Esposito, he mostly focuses on Singer's support for certain kinds of infanticide, which is without a doubt one of his most controversial claims. I'm not sure I agree with Singer, but I still find it hard to believe that any serious consideration of his argument would make it seem as a slippery slope to the Lager. I mean, I share very much Esposito's critique of personhood, and I am doubtful of that personhood is a system that can truly bring about liberation (animal or otherwise), but all of that said, I just don't think many of those people working in ethics and promoting human rights are secretly (so secret they don't even know it themselves) allied with the greatest forms of evil. And moreover, I am left doubtful that Esposito push against personhood is useful for us addressing issues of limited medical resources, abortion, end of life counseling and concerns, cloning and stem cell research, the birth of children with painful and fatal medical conditions. When I read Agamben, or Esposito in this case, it almost seems to me that even dealing with concrete ethical issues makes you a Nazi.
So, Esposito's solution or response to personhood is not depersonalization (which he sees as also a bad thing, and indeed a major part of personhood is that is always carries the risk of depersonalization), but rather the impersonal. He traces the impersonal out in basically the work of four thinkers: Simone Weil, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze (with and without Guattari). The impersonal, also the third person, or perhaps clearest for me is a life, life as situated on a plane of immanence. This is also the other shocking moment of convergence, where the solution to the problem of personhood is to be found in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal. Though I would say that Esposito's move here is a rather conservative. Whereas I am interested in pushing D&G's notion into a even more anti-anthropocentric register than it currently is in, Esposito seems to read it as an almost fully anthropocentric register. Thus, becoming-animal means stopping the separation of the human from its animal basis (which for Esposito means its thing-ness basis), and instead discovering the human as human. To put it another way, becoming-animal here is to end the division between bios and zoe, but only for humans. So, in a real way, to never end that distinction. I don't see much hope in Esposito's reading of moving us towards some sort of ethical and political relationship with other animals. Which shouldn't surprise anyone who has read Esposito before. You cannot fully deconstruct personhood without also deconstructing humanness, which is why D&G didn't speak of a becoming-human (well, they did quickly in their book on Kafka), but instead speak of a becoming-animal.
I found Terza Persona like I found the other books by Esposito I have read: well written, absolutely smart, insightful, and problematic. The problems tend to always be the same problems, as well. His downplaying or ignoring the issues of capital, and his complete and uncritical anthropocentrism. Still, I highly recommend the book.

Graduate Programs Friendly to Critical Animal Studies

So, I recently got an email inquiring into graduate programs (particularly at the PhD level) that are friendly to critical animal studies. I gave some of the programs that I knew people were doing interesting work, but I realized it might be nice to put together a list. So, a lot of you are students or professors or former students that might have some idea of graduate programs for people looking into the question of the animal. Please suggest programs you have some familiarity with in comments or email me (also, email me if you know some program is particularly hostile that one might otherwise suspect as being friendly).

I think this could become a good resource for people out there.

Update: I have tried to restart this project over here. Please go there to find more up to date information, and also other links as I build it from there.

Some thoughts on Polemics

Levi has linked to an old review of DeLanda by Shaviro, and both of them agree that DeLanda's hostility toward Marx and Marxism seems rather odd. And I agree with that, but it opens up a moment to talk about polemics.

I think that polemics can be very important. In particular, I think that thinkers, in order to try and think something new, has to clear the way for those thoughts. They have to manage to create some fresh air for themselves, and that breathing room usually comes from taking on one of the master's, one of the great thinkers that help define an intellectual milieu. For DeLanda, that is obviously Marx. For Levi, it is Derrida. For Deleuze, it was Hegel. I could go on (for me, it's Heidegger). Now, these thinkers are obviously to an extent conceptual personae, that is, they refer less to exactly just these thinkers texts, but to an entire relationship, an entire assemblage that goes by the proper name Marx, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, etc. All of us think in a field saturated by proper names, even those that refer the most specifically to actual people still refer to an entire assemblage, to an entire conceptual machinery. Their texts, their lectures, their actual students and virtual students, their enemies and teachers, all of these things go into the making of a thinker. The more famous the thinker, the bigger (more powerful, more vital) the assemblage. Sometimes we have to push hard against one of these assemblages, to think or speak something that exists in tension with a localized part of the assemblage. So, I we talk against Heidegger, Derrida, Hegel, Marx, etc. The polemic is necessary for breathing and thinking. That doesn't always mean the polemic is true, at least true against the texts and ideas of a certain thinker whose proper name also names a certain assemblage. I don't agree with DeLanda about Marx, and I don't agree with Levi about Derrida. But I also have little doubt that if they didn't feel the way they did about these conceptual personae, then their work would be very different. And maybe it should be, those are always fine criticisms (fine as in useful or productive). But there is a reason I don't spend a lot of time trying to convince someone they have misread such and such a thinker, unless I think that misreading has come at a cost of thinking something interesting or useful (ultimately this was what Matt was on about in his disagreement with Levi during the so-called Derrida wars. It wasn't primarily about Derrida, but instead about issues of humanism and anthropocentrism).
In the case of DeLanda and Marx, it makes a lot of sense to me even though I find Marx incredibly useful for my work. First, it is clear that many Marxists are far more interested in centralization than DeLanda feels is healthy and useful (think here of Zizek for just a major current example). And I also can't help but share impatience at many Marxists hatred of markets.
While there is no singular entity called The Market, much less The Free Market, markets exist. And markets are powerful tools for decentralized organization. Many on the left oppose cap and trade because it creates a market, and many on the left opposed health care exchanges because it again functioned as a market. I'm not sure how much Marx is to blame for the anti-markets bias, but for DeLanda (following Braudel), markets are powerful and useful tools, and at their heart are opposed to centralization and totalization.