•  
  •  
 

Document Type

Review Essay

Abstract

[First paragraph]

The question of the category of the "animal" and its relation to that of the "human" is one that has recently surfaced in the work of such theorists as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway and Giorgio Agamben; this recent concern with the speciesism that underlies scientific categorization, and the faulty structure such speciesism lends for philosophical investigations into the qualities of Man, has largely been framed within the context of humanism and the problematic of articulating posthumanist ethics. Reductively, the concerns of the above authors are the ways in which the difference that has been constructed between the human and the animal is deployed in diverse contexts to render the category of the animal beyond ethical consideration -- in other words, how the category of the human is constructed as that which is ethical (or has the capacity for ethics) and how certain humans, in certain historical contexts, are rendered more animal that human and robbed of the necessity to be treated as humans, as ethical beings. The promise of a posthumanist ethics that incorporates the question of the animal and its relation to the human is that of releasing the animal from its position on the outside of ethics, and thereby articulating an ethics that is structured by "life" generally (across species -- although one might rightly question what the limit of this category of "life" will be). Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003), and its companion selection of essays, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003), should be read in the context of this concern of articulating an ethics that does not depend on placing the animal outside of the human in order to found the human, but rather, to place the animal and human squarely within the same sphere of ethical consideration. I agree that this need for a new ethics is impending, and one that could open new possibilities for understanding social relationships beyond traditional species lines is promising, but Wolfe's forays into the question of ethics and the animal fall short of making significant headway into the terrain, and unfortunately -- especially in the case of Animal Rites -- depend on case studies that are highly specific and have isolated audiences. Rather than producing theory that has the potential to revolutionize the place of the animal in philosophical thought, Zoontologies and Animal Rites make tentative stabs at the modernist-humanist speciesism, and these stabs might readily be deflected by defenders of humanism as isolated cases of little import. That being said, Wolfe (and his contributors to Zoontologies) do make some vital observations, and it is worth attending to these and transporting the moveable feast of "the question of the animal" to other sites in order to ascertain its legitimacy, and to discover the potential benefits of a posthumanist ethics.

Download

Share

COinS