Following up on a discussion I was having about the new books forthcoming on speculative realism, I have a question for everyone. Yeah, yeah, you don't come to my blog for homework, I get it. But this is quick. Make a list of thinkers (no longer than 10) that you associate with speculative realism. Now, make a list of thinkers (no longer than 10) that you associate with new materialism. These lists cannot overlap (you can't put the same thinker in both list, you have the choice, no matter how arbitrary that choice that is). Feel free to post answers in comments (it is open, and anonymous comments are welcome), feel free to email me, or post it to my facebook.
EDIT: You can just make the lists, don't worry about providing justifications. You can, if you want. But I am much more interested in your first impression lists.
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?
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Becoming-vegan as ethical transformation.
Adam Kotsko recently had a post over at his place, "Why am I not a vegetarian?". This will not be a direct response to all his concerns, excuses, and explanations. I will mostly be talking about vegetarianism and veganism here in its ethical dimensions. There are, of course, environmental reasons, labor reasons, etc. that one might want to be a vegetarian or a vegan. However, I do want to highlight a couple of his points:
I want to say that his rejection of personal responses to systemic issues is a legitimate critique. Though, of course I am not sure I want to go so far as Adam does in his rejection of the ability of personal decisions to change the conditions for other animals. But, in general, the factory farm is exactly the sort of thing that individual consumer choices will most likely not have dramatic effects. Indeed, it would be important, particularly in relation to abolitionist discourses, to consider the limitations of voluntarism and vanguardism. So, if the idea of vegetarianism and veganism as boycott is not functionally sound, why promote it? And I think this is where I also, even more strongly, agree with Adam, when he states that "becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person." Veganism and vegetarianism in this sense is a kind of askesis, a practice of self-production. This pretty clearly drawing upon the work of the later Foucault, and I am by far not the only one to make this argument (you might want to look at Tanke's "The Care of the Self and Environmental Politics," Taylor's "Foucault and the Ethics of Eating," my "Towards a Dark Animal Studies," and Dean's "You Are How You Eat?"). One of the things I find interesting in Foucault's argument is that the cartesian understanding of how a self changes is challenged. Under the usual, what we will call cartesian, view, first you understand the world correctly, and from that correct understanding, you will do what you should do. Right knowledge precedes right action. Under this view of the world, the biggest hurdle to societal arrangements and policy decisions is that people don't know what is true. In other words, the biggest reason we haven't confronted global warming is global warming deniers. Not, you know, that even if we somehow all agreed that global warming was happening and bad, we might still have right action. In Foucault's turn to classical philosophy, we get a different understanding against the cartesian view. In his view, we have to have certain practices that then produce the ability to access certain truths or understandings of the world. Action precedes knowledge, or at least understanding. So, if we want to mitigate the unthinkable suffering of the factory farm, if we want to divert the environmental global suicide pact that is being driven by the expropriation of animal labor and lives, then I think vegetarianism and veganism is going to be key. It will be key not just as an end reality (the end result of challenging the systemic violence to animals will probably be vegetarianism and veganism), but also as a way of producing the sorts of subjectivities that bring about systemic change in the first place. In other words, we need vegetarianism and veganism not because of a consumer boycott, but because we need a different kind of persons.
This gets to a different part of Adam's post:
Now, none of this is given as a good transformation. Along with her story of M.K. Gandhi, Leela Gandhi also replays another story happening at the same time, the story of the first animal welfare law passed in the West, and the animal welfare support of James and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi shows how both the Mills and the animal welfare laws come deeply from places of colonialism, and the policing of of the underclasses (I address some of this in a little more detail in this old blog post). Even with those risks, I still feel we need changes. I do think we need new kinds of persons, we need new relations to other animals, we need new communities. And all of this means that the issues of veganism and vegetarianism are sorts of attempts at Humeian political problems, that is to say, they are attempts at extending partial sympathies.
Another reason: a distrust of ethical consumer choices. Yes, factory farming is an abomination. If there were laws proposing to outlaw it, I would support those laws, regardless of their effect on the cost or availability of meat. In the meantime, I purchase organic meat when possible. Yet I just don’t have it in me to make a big deal out of it or insist on it, just like I don’t have it in me to move heaven and earth to make sure my garbage is recycled. I make my token gesture, but systemic problems have systemic solutions. I’m part of the society in which I live, and no amount of ritualistic keeping my hands clean is going to change anything. [...] For me, it seems like becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person, and I don’t want to make that particular change. Maybe something will happen to make that change plausible and even urgent at a gut level, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I want to say that his rejection of personal responses to systemic issues is a legitimate critique. Though, of course I am not sure I want to go so far as Adam does in his rejection of the ability of personal decisions to change the conditions for other animals. But, in general, the factory farm is exactly the sort of thing that individual consumer choices will most likely not have dramatic effects. Indeed, it would be important, particularly in relation to abolitionist discourses, to consider the limitations of voluntarism and vanguardism. So, if the idea of vegetarianism and veganism as boycott is not functionally sound, why promote it? And I think this is where I also, even more strongly, agree with Adam, when he states that "becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person." Veganism and vegetarianism in this sense is a kind of askesis, a practice of self-production. This pretty clearly drawing upon the work of the later Foucault, and I am by far not the only one to make this argument (you might want to look at Tanke's "The Care of the Self and Environmental Politics," Taylor's "Foucault and the Ethics of Eating," my "Towards a Dark Animal Studies," and Dean's "You Are How You Eat?"). One of the things I find interesting in Foucault's argument is that the cartesian understanding of how a self changes is challenged. Under the usual, what we will call cartesian, view, first you understand the world correctly, and from that correct understanding, you will do what you should do. Right knowledge precedes right action. Under this view of the world, the biggest hurdle to societal arrangements and policy decisions is that people don't know what is true. In other words, the biggest reason we haven't confronted global warming is global warming deniers. Not, you know, that even if we somehow all agreed that global warming was happening and bad, we might still have right action. In Foucault's turn to classical philosophy, we get a different understanding against the cartesian view. In his view, we have to have certain practices that then produce the ability to access certain truths or understandings of the world. Action precedes knowledge, or at least understanding. So, if we want to mitigate the unthinkable suffering of the factory farm, if we want to divert the environmental global suicide pact that is being driven by the expropriation of animal labor and lives, then I think vegetarianism and veganism is going to be key. It will be key not just as an end reality (the end result of challenging the systemic violence to animals will probably be vegetarianism and veganism), but also as a way of producing the sorts of subjectivities that bring about systemic change in the first place. In other words, we need vegetarianism and veganism not because of a consumer boycott, but because we need a different kind of persons.
This gets to a different part of Adam's post:
I also don’t want to be a pain in the ass for hosts. I don’t want to constrain the choice of meal someone can prepare me in their home or the choice of restaurant. This is one key principle from Pauline Christianity on which I will not budge: always be a good guest, always accept what’s put before you. I don’t want them to experience my dietary preference as a moral judgment on them — which will likely happen at least sometimes, whether I intend it that way or not. It’s not as though they or I can do anything about the system of food production, so why create bad feelings?While not a direct answer, it reminds me of Leela Gandhi's excellent book, Affective Communities. In her chapter "Meat"she recounts the story of Mahatma Gandhi's vegetarianism. When he left for England to study law, he made a promise to his mother to be vegetarian. He had not particularly been a vegetarian before that promise, and felt it was a superstition. He was often made fun of in England among his peers, but he kept his promise. In so doing he found himself in different communities than he would have otherwise. He became radicalized on issues of socialism and anti-colonialism. Along with being a different kind of person, there is always the chance that our vegetarianism and veganism will put us in different communities, perhaps produce different kinds of communities (I take it as a sort of given that host/guest relations are constitutive of community).
Now, none of this is given as a good transformation. Along with her story of M.K. Gandhi, Leela Gandhi also replays another story happening at the same time, the story of the first animal welfare law passed in the West, and the animal welfare support of James and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi shows how both the Mills and the animal welfare laws come deeply from places of colonialism, and the policing of of the underclasses (I address some of this in a little more detail in this old blog post). Even with those risks, I still feel we need changes. I do think we need new kinds of persons, we need new relations to other animals, we need new communities. And all of this means that the issues of veganism and vegetarianism are sorts of attempts at Humeian political problems, that is to say, they are attempts at extending partial sympathies.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Top Humanists of the last century, plus a contest.
Over at Adrian's place, he has created a not super scientific but still super interesting list of the most cited 'humanists' who wrote and lived in the last century. The number one hit will surprise exactly no one. Go check it out. He has also announced a contest (which I am currently winning) of finding names who are not on his original list. Read the post and comments to learn more about both.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
CFP: Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue on Tranimalities
CALL FOR PAPERS
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.2
Tranimalities
Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, eds.
It has long been argued that Humanism has reached its breaking point and no longer possesses critical purchase (if ever it did); it would seem that it has not advanced our understanding of what it means to be “human,” especially if the humans we are theorizing do not fit neatly into well-known binary categories sanctioned by Humanism. Further, Humanism delineates a normative standard of legibility by which all others are read, measured, controlled, disciplined, and assigned to fixed and hierarchical social statuses. This administration of norms is the justificatory linchpin of (often violent) practices of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.
Since so many among us have been excluded from the elite status of being considered fully human in the restricted and universal sense that Humanism has articulated, researchers across a multitude of disciplines continue to unpack the underlying frameworks that provide for the standardizing force privileging the anthro-ontological Humanist human over all others. And this is one area in which transgender/trans theory, too, can make a significant intervention.
However, Tranimalities does not strive to provide yet another critique of Humanism simply by adding trans insights into the mix, or as yet another vector in intersectional critique. The abundance of theoretical interventions against Humanism’s investment in regulating and controlling sex/gender/sexuality has already made considerable headway on this front. Instead, Tranimalities wishes to focus on trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by nonanthropocentric and posthumanist perspectives. In this way, Tranimalities aims to entangle and enmesh trans and the nonhuman in a generative tension leading to alternate ways of envisioning futures of embodiment, aesthetics, bio-politics, climates, and ethics.
As such, at the enfoldment of transgender/trans theory, critical animal studies, and posthuman theory lies a rich field of research that has to date been largely unconsidered. Tranimalities thus seeks to attend to the trans-dimensions of recent critical moves beyond the human. With works like Queering the Non/Human (Nora Giffney and Myra Hird, eds., 2008), Animal Others (special issue of Hypatia, 2012; Lori Gruen and Kari Weil, eds.), the Queer Inhumanisms (special issue of GLQ, forthcoming, Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, eds.), and Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Affect, Animals, and Trans* Studies; forthcoming, Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Wagner, eds.) providing some of the groundwork, TSQ’s special issue Tranimalities aims to contribute a specifically trans intervention into the discussion of the anti-, non-, in-, and posthuman.
We invite submissions of scholarly essays that address these and related issues.
Potential topics might include:
Transgendered posthumous life– what becomes of trans not only in the death of Man but also in the death of life?
“Transbiologicial body”: How are nonhumans contingent forms of trans bodies? Or, how does the trans body disrupt “the human”?
The animalization of trans populations as intersected with race, sexuality, nation, ability, and class
Transgendered anthropocene
Trans-species forms of hormonal and surgical lives
Becoming (with) trans-species
Transecologies and transenvironmentalisms: Does trans reinvigorate commitments to critiquing environmental racisms and classisms?
Posthuman trans embodiment and/or materiality – How does a special focus on matter and materiality transform trans understandings of bodies?
Is there a particular trans concept of affect?
Globalization and colonization, and the problematic of transing human/animal life?
The transanimal dimensions of political injustice and exploitation
What becomes of gender and, in turn, transgender in the absence of a human perspective?
Tranimalities and socialities
Trananimalities and engagement with disability studies
Multispecies ethnographies of transspeciation
What can transgender theory offer to scholarship about other Others and, in particular, nonhuman animals?
How does the position of transgender as other than in-, non- or posthuman give theorists a unique perspective from which to reconsider earthly life?
Trans-fat, transdermal, transfection, transfusion, and transposons, the undoing/redoing of “the human”
Bestiality/zoophilia/ “furries” as tranimal erotic formations?
Could the move to transgenre and away from transgender provide a productive opening to theorize posthuman or posthumous transgender
Transgenics/transplantations—How does the social aesthetic of transness shape and reshape biopolitical life?
Species differences as sexual differences?
Please note that this list is not intended to be exhaustive.
To be considered for publication, please submit full articles by June 1, 2014 to tsqjournal@gmail.com. The expected range for scholarly articles is 5000 to 7000 words. Peer review will be conducted on all accepted submissions. Please prepare submissions for anonymous peer review by including your name, a brief bio, postal address, email address, and any institutional affiliation on a separate cover sheet. Please do not make references to yourself in the text, footnotes, or citations. We expect to give authors a response by August 15, 2014. Final revisions will be due by October 15, 2014.
Any questions should be addressed by e-mail sent to both guest editors: Eva Hayward evahayward@gmail.com, and Jami Weinstein jami.weinstein@liu.se, and cc’d to tsqjournal@gmail.com.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is published by Duke University Press; Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker are general co-editors. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal, or to propose future issues, visit TSQ’s editorial page at https://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.2
Tranimalities
Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, eds.
It has long been argued that Humanism has reached its breaking point and no longer possesses critical purchase (if ever it did); it would seem that it has not advanced our understanding of what it means to be “human,” especially if the humans we are theorizing do not fit neatly into well-known binary categories sanctioned by Humanism. Further, Humanism delineates a normative standard of legibility by which all others are read, measured, controlled, disciplined, and assigned to fixed and hierarchical social statuses. This administration of norms is the justificatory linchpin of (often violent) practices of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.
Since so many among us have been excluded from the elite status of being considered fully human in the restricted and universal sense that Humanism has articulated, researchers across a multitude of disciplines continue to unpack the underlying frameworks that provide for the standardizing force privileging the anthro-ontological Humanist human over all others. And this is one area in which transgender/trans theory, too, can make a significant intervention.
However, Tranimalities does not strive to provide yet another critique of Humanism simply by adding trans insights into the mix, or as yet another vector in intersectional critique. The abundance of theoretical interventions against Humanism’s investment in regulating and controlling sex/gender/sexuality has already made considerable headway on this front. Instead, Tranimalities wishes to focus on trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by nonanthropocentric and posthumanist perspectives. In this way, Tranimalities aims to entangle and enmesh trans and the nonhuman in a generative tension leading to alternate ways of envisioning futures of embodiment, aesthetics, bio-politics, climates, and ethics.
As such, at the enfoldment of transgender/trans theory, critical animal studies, and posthuman theory lies a rich field of research that has to date been largely unconsidered. Tranimalities thus seeks to attend to the trans-dimensions of recent critical moves beyond the human. With works like Queering the Non/Human (Nora Giffney and Myra Hird, eds., 2008), Animal Others (special issue of Hypatia, 2012; Lori Gruen and Kari Weil, eds.), the Queer Inhumanisms (special issue of GLQ, forthcoming, Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, eds.), and Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Affect, Animals, and Trans* Studies; forthcoming, Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Wagner, eds.) providing some of the groundwork, TSQ’s special issue Tranimalities aims to contribute a specifically trans intervention into the discussion of the anti-, non-, in-, and posthuman.
We invite submissions of scholarly essays that address these and related issues.
Potential topics might include:
Transgendered posthumous life– what becomes of trans not only in the death of Man but also in the death of life?
“Transbiologicial body”: How are nonhumans contingent forms of trans bodies? Or, how does the trans body disrupt “the human”?
The animalization of trans populations as intersected with race, sexuality, nation, ability, and class
Transgendered anthropocene
Trans-species forms of hormonal and surgical lives
Becoming (with) trans-species
Transecologies and transenvironmentalisms: Does trans reinvigorate commitments to critiquing environmental racisms and classisms?
Posthuman trans embodiment and/or materiality – How does a special focus on matter and materiality transform trans understandings of bodies?
Is there a particular trans concept of affect?
Globalization and colonization, and the problematic of transing human/animal life?
The transanimal dimensions of political injustice and exploitation
What becomes of gender and, in turn, transgender in the absence of a human perspective?
Tranimalities and socialities
Trananimalities and engagement with disability studies
Multispecies ethnographies of transspeciation
What can transgender theory offer to scholarship about other Others and, in particular, nonhuman animals?
How does the position of transgender as other than in-, non- or posthuman give theorists a unique perspective from which to reconsider earthly life?
Trans-fat, transdermal, transfection, transfusion, and transposons, the undoing/redoing of “the human”
Bestiality/zoophilia/ “furries” as tranimal erotic formations?
Could the move to transgenre and away from transgender provide a productive opening to theorize posthuman or posthumous transgender
Transgenics/transplantations—How does the social aesthetic of transness shape and reshape biopolitical life?
Species differences as sexual differences?
Please note that this list is not intended to be exhaustive.
To be considered for publication, please submit full articles by June 1, 2014 to tsqjournal@gmail.com. The expected range for scholarly articles is 5000 to 7000 words. Peer review will be conducted on all accepted submissions. Please prepare submissions for anonymous peer review by including your name, a brief bio, postal address, email address, and any institutional affiliation on a separate cover sheet. Please do not make references to yourself in the text, footnotes, or citations. We expect to give authors a response by August 15, 2014. Final revisions will be due by October 15, 2014.
Any questions should be addressed by e-mail sent to both guest editors: Eva Hayward evahayward@gmail.com, and Jami Weinstein jami.weinstein@liu.se, and cc’d to tsqjournal@gmail.com.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is published by Duke University Press; Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker are general co-editors. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies, and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal, or to propose future issues, visit TSQ’s editorial page at https://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Books forthcoming on Speculative Realism
While we are frequently reminded that speculative realism doesn't, on some level, exist, it certainly hasn't stopped there being a out pouring of speculative realism books. And several of these look very exciting.
There is Tristan Garcia's recently translated and massive tome, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things.
Furthermore there are three books coming out very closely together, that all attempt to engage systematically with speculative realism, while also advancing their own argument.
Coming out in late July from Edinburgh University Press, there is Tom Sparrow's The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism.
There is Peter Gratton's Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, due out in September from Bloomsbury Academic. You can read the actually pretty funny intro to his book here.
And lastly, but probably not least, there is Steven Shaviro's The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, which is due out in October from the University of Minnesota Press.
And the thing is, regardless on your position of speculative realism, all the books listed are probably going to be worth your time. None of the books, based on the bits and parts I have read or have talked about with the author, are some sort of fawning engagement with speculative realism. At the same time, all of them treat the this strand of thinking as serious, interesting, and, well, actually existing.
There is Tristan Garcia's recently translated and massive tome, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things.
Furthermore there are three books coming out very closely together, that all attempt to engage systematically with speculative realism, while also advancing their own argument.
Coming out in late July from Edinburgh University Press, there is Tom Sparrow's The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism.
There is Peter Gratton's Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, due out in September from Bloomsbury Academic. You can read the actually pretty funny intro to his book here.
And lastly, but probably not least, there is Steven Shaviro's The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, which is due out in October from the University of Minnesota Press.
And the thing is, regardless on your position of speculative realism, all the books listed are probably going to be worth your time. None of the books, based on the bits and parts I have read or have talked about with the author, are some sort of fawning engagement with speculative realism. At the same time, all of them treat the this strand of thinking as serious, interesting, and, well, actually existing.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Agamben and Animals and Anthropogenesis, Again
Well, yesterday was an Agamben day. Stuart Elden posted a visual image of the current entire 'order' of the Homo Sacer series. Then, a facebook friend posted this EGS video from 2011 of Agamben on "Animal, Man, and Language."
So, then I found this interview with Agamben from 2013 conducted by Leland de la Durantaye. (Sidenote, I found this interview while trying to find a transcript to the lecture above. Both because I don't really like watching long lectures on youtube, but also because I was having trouble hearing large parts of the lecture. During some of the Q&A, I had my volume up so loud, I was worried my neighbors would complain about my blaring my philosophy).
Now, anyone who has been following my work for a while knows that I something of a hate/love relationship when it comes to Agamben, especially in his relationship to other animals (there are plenty of blog posts on Agamben, but if you are really interested, I suggest reading my articles "Beyond Biopolitics" and "Species Trouble"). But this blog post is trying to update the debate with work from Agamben after the more commonly cited sources of Homo Sacer and The Open.
In the video above, Agamben makes a claim for the event of anthropogenesis (which he glosses in The Sacrament of Language as "the becoming human of man"(p. 68)). Anthropogenesis occurs, for Agamben, when "man" enters into language. In this case, man entering language matters for two different reasons: First, it means she does not have language naturally, but most be constantly acquiring language. This is opposed to the language (or communication) of nonhuman animals, which is already plentiful and natural (yes, this pretty much Bataille's claim about language, humans, and other animals in The Theory of Religion). So, Agamben claims in the interview: "Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They, too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost." In this move, Agamben enters into a series of thinkers who construct a human exceptionalism that operates on the otherside of the coin of the usual justifications for human exceptionalism. Normally, human exceptionalism is argued for by contending that humans are distinctly more important and impressive than other animals. We are smarter, we build things, we have morals, etc. However, there also exists an understanding of human uniqueness that argues we are special because we are less than animals, usually because there exists a gap between nature and ourselves that animals do not have to deal with. We see this, as I already mentioned, in Bataille, but also in Lacan, Schelling, even Deleuze, along with several others. Such moves sometime take on obvious description of the religious. In such moves, it is humanity's fallen nature, as opposed to the animal's non-fallen nature, which results in the gap from nature. Agamben from the interview: "that animals were never expelled from Eden. [...] If Elsa and Kafka were right, then through animals we remain close to paradise. Given that we live in the same world, however, this means that not even we have been expelled from paradise, only that for some reason we imagine that we have been. This is why we are so hard for other animals to understand." If animals still exist in Eden, and exist fully in communication and nature, they are therefore pre-political and pre-ethical beings. This is why in the talk above, Agamben is interested in distinguishing anthropogenesis from one of cognition (humans are like other animals, and then we somehow achieve a certain level of intelligence, and then we become somehow the human that is not the animal), but rather existing as principally one of language. We are the beings that can speak, and it is our speaking that is the on-going event that makes us human (first there was the word...). Why is it important that it is an issue of language, and not cognition, for Agamben? As he explains earlier in Sacrament of Language, "With a tenacious prejudice perhaps connected to their profession, scientists have always considered anthropogenesis to be a problem of an exclusively cognitive order, as if the becoming human of man were solely a question of intelligence and brain size and not also one of ethos, as if intelligence and language did not also and above all pose problems of an ethical and political order, as if Homo sapiens was not also, and of course precisely for that reason, a Homo iustus" (p. 68). Furthermore, "something like a human language was in fact only able to be produced in the moment in which the living being, who found itself co-originarily exposed to the possibility of both truth and lie, committed itself to respond with its life for its words, to testify in the first person for them. [...] [T]he oath express the demand, decisive in every sense for the speaking animal, to put its nature at stake in language and to bind together in an ethical and political connection words, things, and actions. Only by this means was it possible for something like a history, distinct from nature and, nevertheless, inseparably intertwined with it, to be produced" (p. 69). This is the second reason that man entering language matters for Agamben, for her entering of language is also the way in which she is able to exist politically, ethically, and have history instead of mere nature. "[A]nthropogenesis, is not in fact an event that can be considered completed once and for all; it is always under way, because Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being" (p. 11). So, that which originally existed as a negative to other animals (language interrupts communication, we are confused and think we are fallen) becomes instead the very grounds upon which a certain power and potentiality exist (politics! ethics! history!). As an aside, this is why Derrida's critique of Deleuze, where Deleuze maintains that animals are not capable of stupidity and Derrida objects, is so important. Stupidity, like being confused if you are still in Eden, is a type of power. But I want to point this discussion in a different way.
Agamben's insistence on anthropogenesis is a bit of a strange one. In particular, in both Sacrament and in the above video, he wants to insist on his conception of anthropogenesis against any scientific understanding of the human. At one point during the Q&A, he goes out of his way to say he is not engaging in a scientific understanding, but rather a "thought experiment." And earlier, during his talk, he has an aside that it is clear that the scientists have an agenda (as if philosophers didn't?). I point this out, because this discourse of a human exceptionalism (found here in Agamben, but found much worse in other thinkers) is a type of creationist thinking. I have tried to argue this before, but let me try again. Evolution, as we know, is the name we give to the forces that help select for traits that allow one to reproduce, and reach the age of reproduction, in certain environments (I know that is a little b-flat of an explanation). Evolution doesn't really care who you are. As such, it tends to repeat adaptive traits across multiple species. To believe that humans are inherently unique and exceptional against requires a certain, shall we say, faith. That there exists a group of beings with a certain cluster of traits, and that this group has fuzzy boundaries, and that almost individual trait can be found in another type of being, that makes sense to me. But that there exists an indivisible line between animals and humans (so that the phrase human animal sounds odd), well, that requires a certain transcendental intervention into what it means to be a human. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise the the creationist advocacy organization, The Discovery Institute, has a Program in Human Exceptionalism, and whose Senior Fellow, Wesley Smith, spends most of his time attacking vegans and animals rights advocates. To think the human as an exception from other animals, is to think the human as an exception from evolution, in other words, to think as a creationist.
Now, Agamben always makes this weird. Because at the same time he thinks the human exception, he also thinks it opposite. Twice in the interview, Agamben affirms that he is an animal. He further argues: "If the anthropological process I sought therein to analyze is founded upon an articulated division between “human” and “animal,” then their reconciliation is a philosophical task, consisting in deactivating both notions. Giorgio Colli once gave a definition of contact that seems to me prescient in this regard. Two things are in contact only when they are united by a representational void. The point at which the human and the animal are in contact is interrupted by what I have called the anthropological process." This exists in tension with his moves about the never ending nature of anthropogenesis, doesn't it? And perhaps the tension between myself and Agamben is over how to deactive these notions of man and animal, I'm not sure.
So, then I found this interview with Agamben from 2013 conducted by Leland de la Durantaye. (Sidenote, I found this interview while trying to find a transcript to the lecture above. Both because I don't really like watching long lectures on youtube, but also because I was having trouble hearing large parts of the lecture. During some of the Q&A, I had my volume up so loud, I was worried my neighbors would complain about my blaring my philosophy).
Now, anyone who has been following my work for a while knows that I something of a hate/love relationship when it comes to Agamben, especially in his relationship to other animals (there are plenty of blog posts on Agamben, but if you are really interested, I suggest reading my articles "Beyond Biopolitics" and "Species Trouble"). But this blog post is trying to update the debate with work from Agamben after the more commonly cited sources of Homo Sacer and The Open.
In the video above, Agamben makes a claim for the event of anthropogenesis (which he glosses in The Sacrament of Language as "the becoming human of man"(p. 68)). Anthropogenesis occurs, for Agamben, when "man" enters into language. In this case, man entering language matters for two different reasons: First, it means she does not have language naturally, but most be constantly acquiring language. This is opposed to the language (or communication) of nonhuman animals, which is already plentiful and natural (yes, this pretty much Bataille's claim about language, humans, and other animals in The Theory of Religion). So, Agamben claims in the interview: "Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They, too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost." In this move, Agamben enters into a series of thinkers who construct a human exceptionalism that operates on the otherside of the coin of the usual justifications for human exceptionalism. Normally, human exceptionalism is argued for by contending that humans are distinctly more important and impressive than other animals. We are smarter, we build things, we have morals, etc. However, there also exists an understanding of human uniqueness that argues we are special because we are less than animals, usually because there exists a gap between nature and ourselves that animals do not have to deal with. We see this, as I already mentioned, in Bataille, but also in Lacan, Schelling, even Deleuze, along with several others. Such moves sometime take on obvious description of the religious. In such moves, it is humanity's fallen nature, as opposed to the animal's non-fallen nature, which results in the gap from nature. Agamben from the interview: "that animals were never expelled from Eden. [...] If Elsa and Kafka were right, then through animals we remain close to paradise. Given that we live in the same world, however, this means that not even we have been expelled from paradise, only that for some reason we imagine that we have been. This is why we are so hard for other animals to understand." If animals still exist in Eden, and exist fully in communication and nature, they are therefore pre-political and pre-ethical beings. This is why in the talk above, Agamben is interested in distinguishing anthropogenesis from one of cognition (humans are like other animals, and then we somehow achieve a certain level of intelligence, and then we become somehow the human that is not the animal), but rather existing as principally one of language. We are the beings that can speak, and it is our speaking that is the on-going event that makes us human (first there was the word...). Why is it important that it is an issue of language, and not cognition, for Agamben? As he explains earlier in Sacrament of Language, "With a tenacious prejudice perhaps connected to their profession, scientists have always considered anthropogenesis to be a problem of an exclusively cognitive order, as if the becoming human of man were solely a question of intelligence and brain size and not also one of ethos, as if intelligence and language did not also and above all pose problems of an ethical and political order, as if Homo sapiens was not also, and of course precisely for that reason, a Homo iustus" (p. 68). Furthermore, "something like a human language was in fact only able to be produced in the moment in which the living being, who found itself co-originarily exposed to the possibility of both truth and lie, committed itself to respond with its life for its words, to testify in the first person for them. [...] [T]he oath express the demand, decisive in every sense for the speaking animal, to put its nature at stake in language and to bind together in an ethical and political connection words, things, and actions. Only by this means was it possible for something like a history, distinct from nature and, nevertheless, inseparably intertwined with it, to be produced" (p. 69). This is the second reason that man entering language matters for Agamben, for her entering of language is also the way in which she is able to exist politically, ethically, and have history instead of mere nature. "[A]nthropogenesis, is not in fact an event that can be considered completed once and for all; it is always under way, because Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being" (p. 11). So, that which originally existed as a negative to other animals (language interrupts communication, we are confused and think we are fallen) becomes instead the very grounds upon which a certain power and potentiality exist (politics! ethics! history!). As an aside, this is why Derrida's critique of Deleuze, where Deleuze maintains that animals are not capable of stupidity and Derrida objects, is so important. Stupidity, like being confused if you are still in Eden, is a type of power. But I want to point this discussion in a different way.
Agamben's insistence on anthropogenesis is a bit of a strange one. In particular, in both Sacrament and in the above video, he wants to insist on his conception of anthropogenesis against any scientific understanding of the human. At one point during the Q&A, he goes out of his way to say he is not engaging in a scientific understanding, but rather a "thought experiment." And earlier, during his talk, he has an aside that it is clear that the scientists have an agenda (as if philosophers didn't?). I point this out, because this discourse of a human exceptionalism (found here in Agamben, but found much worse in other thinkers) is a type of creationist thinking. I have tried to argue this before, but let me try again. Evolution, as we know, is the name we give to the forces that help select for traits that allow one to reproduce, and reach the age of reproduction, in certain environments (I know that is a little b-flat of an explanation). Evolution doesn't really care who you are. As such, it tends to repeat adaptive traits across multiple species. To believe that humans are inherently unique and exceptional against requires a certain, shall we say, faith. That there exists a group of beings with a certain cluster of traits, and that this group has fuzzy boundaries, and that almost individual trait can be found in another type of being, that makes sense to me. But that there exists an indivisible line between animals and humans (so that the phrase human animal sounds odd), well, that requires a certain transcendental intervention into what it means to be a human. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise the the creationist advocacy organization, The Discovery Institute, has a Program in Human Exceptionalism, and whose Senior Fellow, Wesley Smith, spends most of his time attacking vegans and animals rights advocates. To think the human as an exception from other animals, is to think the human as an exception from evolution, in other words, to think as a creationist.
Now, Agamben always makes this weird. Because at the same time he thinks the human exception, he also thinks it opposite. Twice in the interview, Agamben affirms that he is an animal. He further argues: "If the anthropological process I sought therein to analyze is founded upon an articulated division between “human” and “animal,” then their reconciliation is a philosophical task, consisting in deactivating both notions. Giorgio Colli once gave a definition of contact that seems to me prescient in this regard. Two things are in contact only when they are united by a representational void. The point at which the human and the animal are in contact is interrupted by what I have called the anthropological process." This exists in tension with his moves about the never ending nature of anthropogenesis, doesn't it? And perhaps the tension between myself and Agamben is over how to deactive these notions of man and animal, I'm not sure.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Non-native Species
Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Non-native Species
Within a growing literature of animal studies and animal ethics, scholars have critically examined factory farms, zoos, companion animals, and laboratory testing. What remains underexplored are the logics of extermination deployed against feral or non-native species. The existing vocabulary utilized to describe non-native species often represents these animals as pests that wreak havoc on the eco-system, promiscuously over-populate, and spread disease. This rhetorical framing justifies a militarized relationship to these species. Furthermore, the debate over non-native species divides common ground between animal activists and environmentalists. If the world is moving very slowly towards less cruelty in the treatment of animals and a modest increase in awareness about the basic dignity that should be afforded to all creatures, there is a vast slippage in the case of feral and non-native species that merits attention.
We are looking for essays that critically explore the affiliation between humans, non-native species, and the environment. These essays will be part of a submission for an edited volume to be published by an academic press. We are excited to invite scholars from a variety of disciplines and epistemic positions, including thinkers from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. 300-500 word abstracts should be emailed to criticalspecies@gmail.com. Interviews and reprints from journals will be considered.
Topics might include:
• Bridging the gap between environmental ethics and animal ethics
• Rhetorical examination of the tropes of nativity, exoticness, and/or invasion
• Media and mediated accounts of invasive species
• Ecofeminist approaches to overpopulation, fertility, and promiscuity
• Queer critiques of reproductive futurism
• New materialist and speculative realist interventions in non-native species
• Colonialism and critical geographies
• Economic imperatives and wild/pristine spaces
• Defining ecosystem harm and the terminology of equilibrium, balance, and harmony
• Questions of cohabitation and competition with endangered species
• Introducing, re-introducing, and restoration ecology
• Invasivores
• The biopolitics of wildlife management and/or hunting
The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 6, 2014. Please address correspondence to Dr. James Stanescu and Dr. Kevin Cummings.
Dr. Kevin Cummings is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre at Mercer University. He publishes in the areas of rhetoric and media theory.
Dr. James Stanescu was the winner of the 2012 international critical animal studies dissertation of the year for The Abattoir of Humanity: Philosophy in the Age of the Factory Farm. He publishes in the areas of continental philosophy and critical animal studies and is the author of the blog Critical Animal.
Within a growing literature of animal studies and animal ethics, scholars have critically examined factory farms, zoos, companion animals, and laboratory testing. What remains underexplored are the logics of extermination deployed against feral or non-native species. The existing vocabulary utilized to describe non-native species often represents these animals as pests that wreak havoc on the eco-system, promiscuously over-populate, and spread disease. This rhetorical framing justifies a militarized relationship to these species. Furthermore, the debate over non-native species divides common ground between animal activists and environmentalists. If the world is moving very slowly towards less cruelty in the treatment of animals and a modest increase in awareness about the basic dignity that should be afforded to all creatures, there is a vast slippage in the case of feral and non-native species that merits attention.
We are looking for essays that critically explore the affiliation between humans, non-native species, and the environment. These essays will be part of a submission for an edited volume to be published by an academic press. We are excited to invite scholars from a variety of disciplines and epistemic positions, including thinkers from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. 300-500 word abstracts should be emailed to criticalspecies@gmail.com. Interviews and reprints from journals will be considered.
Topics might include:
• Bridging the gap between environmental ethics and animal ethics
• Rhetorical examination of the tropes of nativity, exoticness, and/or invasion
• Media and mediated accounts of invasive species
• Ecofeminist approaches to overpopulation, fertility, and promiscuity
• Queer critiques of reproductive futurism
• New materialist and speculative realist interventions in non-native species
• Colonialism and critical geographies
• Economic imperatives and wild/pristine spaces
• Defining ecosystem harm and the terminology of equilibrium, balance, and harmony
• Questions of cohabitation and competition with endangered species
• Introducing, re-introducing, and restoration ecology
• Invasivores
• The biopolitics of wildlife management and/or hunting
The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 6, 2014. Please address correspondence to Dr. James Stanescu and Dr. Kevin Cummings.
Dr. Kevin Cummings is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre at Mercer University. He publishes in the areas of rhetoric and media theory.
Dr. James Stanescu was the winner of the 2012 international critical animal studies dissertation of the year for The Abattoir of Humanity: Philosophy in the Age of the Factory Farm. He publishes in the areas of continental philosophy and critical animal studies and is the author of the blog Critical Animal.
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