Beastly Modernisms: The Question of Animal Speech and Psychology in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

This essay analyses the ways in which James Joyce and Virginia Woolf addressed from a very early stage key issues related to contemporary posthumanist theories such as the question of animal speech and psychology. Both Joyce’s description of human-animal encounters in Ulysses and Woolf’s depiction of a sentient animal subject in Flush: A Biography at first present, and then subvert, the idea of the use of language as evidence of a human surpassing of the animal. By challenging preconceived notions of species distinctions, these authors ultimately decenter the human to focus instead on the centrality of animal subjectivity and sensory experience. While the question of a sharp divide between human and nonhuman animals along the axis of speech can be traceable to the anthropocentric tradition of western humanism and not least to such a possible source as Cervantes (whose novella “The Dialogue of the Dogs” is listed as part of both Joyce’s Trieste library and the library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf), the idea of expanding the typically modernist focus on inner life by also including other forms of subjectivity may have derived from the coeval, burgeoning fields of zoology, ethology and comparative psychology. Drawing from these sources and popular areas of knowledge which formed part of the cultural climate of the time, both Joyce and Woolf explore cross-species intersubjectivity in ways that shift the terms of representation away from anthropocentric views in order to affirm, blur and deny the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

Common Image

Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie develop the notion of the common image - understood as a multisensory perception across species; and common ethics - a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, the authors ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.

Foucault and fugitive study

Michel Foucault was one of the 20th century’s great practitioners of study. Time in the archives and library, teaching, reading, thinking, and writing were all integrated aspects of his tireless labor to find lines of escape out of the confines of Western humanism and totalizing approaches to power and history. Drawing on Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France and the work of James Bernauer, this article discusses Foucault’s mode of study as a practice of freedom. It then mobilizes Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics and neoliberal reason to address new enclosures of academic labor that push against study within the university. The article argues that Foucault was not able to anticipate how the biopolitical horizon would become ever-more dependent on extraction, including from the value generated by academic labor. It then draws on ideas of fugitivity and undercommons to supplement Foucault’s study as a mode of resistance.

Insān Ilahī as The Main Concept of Mulla Sadra’s Transcendental Human Existences

This writing is library research on Mulla Sadra’s thought concerning the concept of insān ilahī as the main concept of transcendental existence discourse in response to western humanism paradigm because it consider vanishing the immaterial domain in human self. This writing is aimed to explain about perfection, happiness, and freedom as the value and main purpose of human existence in Islamic Philosophy civilization based on Mulla Sadra master piece al-Hikmah al-Mutāliyah fī al- Asfār al-Aqliyyah al-Arba’ah. By using descriptive-philosopical method we come to conclusion that the concept of insān ilahī in Mulla Sadra viewpoint were discussed and observed through transcendental discourse. Soul in Mulla Sadra view is immaterial substance which always went through the process of perfection in human existence. Besides knowing that there is immaterial substance in human existence, the concept of Mulla Sadra insān ilahī has also fix many falsity of western philosopher in describing the value and main purpose of man based on material awareness. The result is, individual viewing perfection and potential actualization in him depends on the things which based on logic to view the object of perception based upon his physical existence in reality. The dependence of existence toward material things describes the perfection which gained by individual partially. The result of this writing is to offer a new point of view in understanding the unlimited value and purpose of human existence toward particular paradigms through the concept of Mulla Sadra insān ilahī as the main concept of transcendental existence in Islamic Philosophical Civilization.Keyword: Existence, West, Islam

“South Africa Is the Land of Pet Animals”; or, The Racializing Assemblages of Colonial Pet-Keeping

This essay analyzes two late Victorian texts by white women colonists in South Africa—F. Clinton Parry’s children’s book African Pets (1880) and Annie Martin’s memoir Home Life on an Ostrich Farm (1890)—to nuance understandings of animality as racialization. By reading representations of colonial pet-keeping, the essay shows how the racializing tendencies of Western humanism—especially within slavery and colonialism—manifest within gendered animal-human relationships and help construct both Blackness and whiteness. It focuses on pet-keeping in the colonies to explore understandings of animal-human relationships within the Victorian empire and thus revises Achille Mbembe’s taxonomy of colonial animality. Moving beyond comparison and the tendency to group multiple kinds of dehumanizing practices within slavery and colonialism under the term animalization, the essay suggests that the assemblage is a more productive way to read the many layers of dehumanization taking place within colonial contexts. By analyzing constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and the animal together, it argues that within the animalization and dehumanization projected from the white colonist, we can move beyond reading only for anti-Blackness and locate significant moments of Black fugitivity, wherein Blackness escapes the racializing logics of Western humanism.

Environmentalism is a Humanism

Ecocritics have long been at odds against humanism. What is needed is an “ecological” or “inclusive” humanism, which includes humans and nonhumans, rather than regarding humans as the crown of creation. Several contemporary French intellectuals affirm that one cannot be an ecologist without being a humanist. Claude Lévi-Strauss disparages traditional Western humanism, which denies dignity not only to nonhumans, but to non-Western humans. Pierre Rabhi calls for a “universal” and “true” humanism that respects the earth. Edgar Morin writes that “spaceship Earth” has no pilot: humans must be “ecologized” in order to save the planet. Michel Maffesoli’s “ecosophy” is a plea for Dionysian “progressivism” to replace Promethean “progressism.” His humanism—etymologically linked to “humus” and “humility”—entails a deep respect for the earth. Finally, the American Thomas Berry rejects traditional Christian humanism in favor of an ecological humanism that embraces an “interdependent biological community of the human with the natural world.”

Invenciones de Caliban: cultura, humanismo y posoccidentalismo en Roberto Fernández Retamar

The goal of this research is to analyze the different critical dimensions of the writing of Roberto Fernández Retamar. We are guided by the hypothesis that in the anti-colonial texts of the Cuban poet, one intuits a heterogeneous and non-essentialist reading of the Latin-American culture, which is embedded with the elaboration of a metaphoric concept of Caliban, able to disorganize the cultural dichotomies of the colonial modernity. In the first part, we verified how the particularity of “Caliban” consists in his capacity of resisting any cultural derivation and unilateral writing, being related with what Jacques Derrida defines as différence. Secondly, we reflect on the humanism developed by Fernández Retamar with the well-known trope: the anticolonial humanism conceived from a relationship of aggressiveness between the “own” and the “other”. Finally, we analyzed the impact of the notion “posoccidentalismo” suggested by the Cuban in his criticism of the Latin-American post colonialism. We agree with Caliban; a symbol is not an authority of the absolute. On the contrary, it is a tool that wants to undo scriptural and epistemic modes offered by the western culture, and that takes form, within the work of Fernández Retamar, in an anticolonial and post western humanism, which is still budding.

Sense of Things

Chapter 2 is a reading of Nalo Hopkinson’s 1999 Locus Award–winning near-future novel Brown Girl in the Ring. Becoming Human avers that gendered antiblack metaphysics continues to subtend scales of world among humans, animals, and objects in Martin Heidegger’s still highly influential thought, despite being imagined as a corrective to previous scales, such as the scalae nauturae or the Great Chain of Being examined in chapter 1. It explores what other sense of world becomes available in spaces of abjection and the unthought. This chapter also argues that the absent presence of the black female figure functions as an interposition that subtends and therefore paradoxically holds the potential to topple the logic of this schema and investigates how, as a consequence of this system’s imperialist worldmaking and monopolization of sense, the matter of the black female body is vertiginously affected. An inquiry into onto-epistemology, this chapter explores the reciprocal production of aesthesis and empiricism, both the seemingly scientific and the perceptual knowledge that signifies otherwise under conditions of imperial Western humanism.

Humanism Against Religion

Focusing on the broad epistemological and political effects of humanism in the modern West beginning in the European humanist movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this chapter will trance the emergence of a rudimentary discourse of “humanism against religion” that is rooted in the historical emergence of the modern state as a deconstructive movement against the theo-political order of Medieval Christian Europe. The chapter argues that the emergence of both a human-centric discourse of knowledge and the modern “secular” state out of medieval Christian Europe provide the most significant cultural and political conditions for the rise of western humanism and its wide-ranging critical perspectives of religion. Following this account of the discourse of humanism in the west, the chapter surveys a small sample of modern perspectives and authors that have offered direct humanist critiques of religion toward the service of explicit humanist philosophies or worldviews.

Towards the New Paradigm of Existence, Human to Posthuman: Reflections on Subash Chandran’s A Preface to Man.

The term “Posthumanism” is a contemporary theoretical term put forward by researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in philosophy, science and technology and literary studies, for these groups, Posthumanism designates a series of breaks with foundational assumptions of modern Western culture. It claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centred in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological. The postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan coined the term and offered a seminal definition in an article entitled "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?". As its name suggests, a defining characteristic of Posthumanism is its rejection of the values held on top by the traditional Western Humanism. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “From Protagoras’ assertion that it is “the measure of all things”, to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the privileging of the human instils a set of “mental, discursive and spiritual values” (13). This notion comes to form the basis for political policies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Man is understood as an “intrinsically moral” being, functioning as a kind of vessel for perfect rationality and reason. Armed with these tools, man is capable of a limitless expansion toward his own perfection, and entitled to claim, as his own, whatever objects or others he encounters along the way. This privileging of man as the centre of everything is what Posthumanism aims to attack. Hassan says that posthuman does not mean the literal end of man but the end of an image of man shaped by Descartes, Thomas More and Erasmus. Braidotti in her book The Posthuman outlines that with the rise of ideologies like Fascism and Communism, Humanism started its ascending in the 1960s and 70s. Both these former ideologies represent a significant break from European Humanism: Fascism promoted a “ruthless” departure from the Enlightenment reverence for human reason, while Communism advocated a “communitarian notion of humanist solidarity” (17).