LEARNING FROM NONHUMAN ANIMALS: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF POSTHUMANITIES

Throughout the debated discourse of humanism, humans were considered as the only species endowed with reason and moral values. The result was an andro/anthropocentric humanism that divided everything into hierarchies and confined everything within boundaries. European model of higher education has undoubtedly been an enforcement of humanist ideas and ideologies which established certain humans as exceptional and superior to other ‘non-privileged’ humans and nonhuman animals. In this era of posthumanism all the imposed and imbibed boundaries between the human and nonhuman are being questioned, challenged and eliminated to create an open network of cross-species encounters. In this context this article through the theories of Posthuman philosophy and Critical Animal Studies proposes a shift towards posthuman ethics of inclusion and understanding in the field of classical humanities in India. This can be achieved by employing postontological methods to create and understand nonhuman representations. Theories and studies by posthuman scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Graham Harman form the basis of this paper. This article is an acknowledgement as well as an advocation of the shift happening across disciplines from humanities to posthumanities, which however is yet to make a movement in education in India.

Download Full-text

Bestiarium Judaicum

10.5422/fordham/9780823275595.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jay Geller

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

Sigmund Freud ◽

Animal Studies ◽

Social Contexts ◽

Visual Images ◽

Heinrich Heine ◽

Critical Animal Studies ◽

Close Textual Analysis ◽

Nonhuman Animals ◽

Human Animal

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.

Download Full-text

Understanding animal (ab)use: Green criminological contributions, missed opportunities and a way forward

Theoretical Criminology ◽

10.1177/1362480618787173 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 402-425 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Nik Taylor ◽

Amy Fitzgerald

Keyword(s):

Animal Studies ◽

Global Climate ◽

Meat Production ◽

Green Criminology ◽

Special Issue ◽

Critical Animal Studies ◽

Missed Opportunities ◽

Methodological Choices ◽

Production And Consumption ◽

Nonhuman Animals

While the last two decades have witnessed considerable growth in green criminology, the positioning of nonhuman animals within the field remains unclear and contested. This article provides an analysis of green criminological work—published since the 1998 special issue of Theoretical Criminology—that addresses harms and crime perpetrated against nonhuman animals. We assess trends in the quantity of the work over time and how the treatment of nonhuman animals has unfolded through an analysis of green criminology articles, chapters in edited volumes and monographs. We find that while the amount of consideration given to nonhuman animals by green criminologists has increased dramatically over the years, much of this work has focused on crimes and harms against wild animals (e.g. “wildlife poaching”, “trafficking”), comparatively less attention has been paid to so-called “domesticated animals” or to larger questions of species justice. Based on these findings, we consider how concepts in critical animal studies, ecofeminism and feminist intersectional theories may be utilized in green criminological debates regarding animal (ab)use. With the goal of stimulating further work in this vein, we outline three areas where green criminology has much to offer: (1) researching and exposing meat production and consumption as a form of animal abuse and as a major contributor to global climate change; (2) bridging the divide between environmentalism, animal advocacy and their associated areas of academic study; and (3) refining and reflecting on methodological choices, all with the aim of developing a nonspeciesist green criminology.

Download Full-text

Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice, Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.548 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 124 (2) ◽

pp. 548-555 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Kimberly W. Benston

Keyword(s):

Animal Models ◽

Biomedical Research ◽

Animal Studies ◽

Human Subjects ◽

Nonhuman Animal ◽

Species Boundaries ◽

Critical Animal Studies ◽

Wide Range ◽

Nonhuman Animals ◽

Field Of Inquiry

Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because … they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and … are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss.—Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”Heir to the divided aristotelian vision of nonhuman creatures as, alternately, mute foils (Politics 9; BK. 1, Sec. 2) and behavioral mirrors (Parts 138–39, bk. 2, sec. 4) of “man,” the properly “political” animal, animal studies has displayed uncertainty about how and where to draw species boundaries. Among the provinces of this field of inquiry, none is more defined by this tension than laboratory biomedical research, where physiological correspondences underwrite animal models of human maladies, while presupposed ontological distinctions justify the consignment of nonhuman animals to treatment considered improper for human subjects. Conventionally, those distinctions have centered on a cluster of intellectual capabilities—reasoning, speaking, intending, remembering—the dearth or deficiency of which abrogates the nonhuman's right to dissent and legitimates the human claim of priority. “Animal studies” in this sense, designating a wide range of investigative operations employing nonhuman animal bodies, posits material resemblance and metaphysical incompatibility between researcher and the object of research.

Download Full-text