Animal Question in Deconstruction

Animal Question in Deconstruction
Author: Lynn Turner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-08-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0748683143

Explores the political and poetic understanding of the deconstruction of the 'animal question'How does deconstruction understand relations between humans and other animals? This collection of essays reveals that across Jacques Derrida's work as a whole, as well as that of Helene Cixous and Nicholas Royle, deconstruction has always addressed questions about animality. In this collection, for example, Cixous asks after human intervention between the death of a wild bird and the predation of a domestic cat. Kelly Oliver pursues Derrida's analysis of what or whose gaze is at stake when a King oversees the autopsy of an elephant. Royle examines in what sense the vulnerable impressions made by the tunnelling of a mole might be thought of as the traces of a text. Re-examining how we relate to other animals has far-reaching implications for how we think of ourselves. Across this collection authors bring to attention the politics and the ethics of a less anthropocentric world. Even when this world is grasped

The Animal that Therefore I Am

The Animal that Therefore I Am
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0823227901

The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction--dating from Descartes--between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.

Philosophy and Animal Life

Philosophy and Animal Life
Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2009-12-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231145152

This groundbreaking collection of contributions by leading philosophers offers a new way of thinking about animal rights, our obligation to animals, and the nature of philosophy itself.

Without Offending Humans

Without Offending Humans
Author: Elisabeth de Fontenay
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Animals
ISBN: 9780816676040

A central thinker on the question of the animal in continental thought, Élisabeth de Fontenay moves in this volume from Jacques Derrida's uneasily intimate writing on animals to a passionate frontal engagement with political and ethical theory as it has been applied to animals--along with a stinging critique of the work of Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri as well as with other "utilitarian" philosophers of animal-human relations. Humans and animals are different from one another. To conflate them is to be intellectually sentimental. And yet, from our position of dominance, do we not owe them more than we often acknowledge? In the searching first chapter on Derrida, she sets out "three levels of deconstruction" that are "testimony to the radicalization and shift of that philosopher's argument: a strategy through the animal, exposition to an animal or to this animal, and compassion toward animals." For Fontenay, Derrida's writing is particularly far-reaching when it comes to thinking about animals, and she suggests many other possible philosophical resources including Adorno, Leibniz, and Merleau-Ponty. Fontenay is at her most compelling in describing philosophy's ongoing indifference to animal life--shading into savagery, underpinned by denial--and how attempts to exclude the animal from ethical systems have in fact demeaned humanity. But Fontenay's essays carry more than philosophical significance. Without Offending Humans reveals a careful and emotionally sensitive thinker who explores the unfolding of humans' assessments of their relationship to animals--and the consequences of these assessments for how we define ourselves.

Zoographies

Zoographies
Author: Matthew Calarco
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2008-07-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231511574

Zoographies challenges the anthropocentrism of the Continental philosophical tradition and advances the position that, while some distinctions are valid, humans and animals are best viewed as part of an ontological whole. Matthew Calarco draws on ethological and evolutionary evidence and the work of Heidegger, who called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life. He also turns to Levinas, who raised questions about the nature and scope of ethics; Agamben, who held the "anthropological machine" responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century; and Derrida, who initiated a nonanthropocentric ethics. Calarco concludes with a call for the abolition of classical versions of the human-animal distinction and asks that we devise new ways of thinking about and living with animals.

Deconstruction in a Nutshell

Deconstruction in a Nutshell
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823290689

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with unusual clarity and great eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida’s most influential readers, John D. Caputo, elaborates upon Derrida’s comments and supplies material for further discussion. This edition also includes a substantial new Introduction by Caputo that discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida’s death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, Deconstruction in a Nutshell will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida’s work.

Poetics of Deconstruction

Poetics of Deconstruction
Author: Lynn Turner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350128619

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

Derrida and Other Animals

Derrida and Other Animals
Author: Judith Still
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2015-07-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748680993

Judith Still analyses Derrida's late writings on animals, especially his seminars The Beast and the Sovereign, to explore ethical questions of how humans treat animals and how we treat outsiders, from slaves to terrorists.

Derrida and Textual Animality

Derrida and Textual Animality
Author: Rodolfo Piskorski
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030517322

Derrida and Textual Animality: For a Zoogrammatology of Literature analyses what has come to be known, in the Humanities, as ‘the question of the animal’, in relation to literary texts. Rodolfo Piskorski intervenes in the current debate regarding the non-human and its representation in literature, resisting popular materialist methodological approaches in the field by revisiting and revitalising the post-structuralist thought of Derrida and the ‘linguistic turn’. The book focuses on Derrida’s early work in order to frame deconstructive approaches to literature as necessary for a theory and practice of literary criticism that addresses the question of the animal, arguing that texts are like animals, and animals are like texts. While Derrida’s late writings have been embraced by animal studies scholars due to its overt focus on animality, ethics, and the non-human, Piskorski demonstrates the additional value of these early Derridean texts for the field of literary animal studies by proposing detailed zoogrammatological readings of texts by Freud, Clarice Lispector, Ted Hughes, and Darren Aronofsky, while in dialogue with thinkers such as Butler, Kristeva, Genette, Deleuze and Guattari, and Attridge.

Eco-Deconstruction

Eco-Deconstruction
Author: Philippe Lynes
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823279529

Eco-Deconstruction marks a new approach to the degradation of the natural environment, including habitat loss, species extinction, and climate change. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights to address the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together fifteen prominent scholars, from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, vegetal philosophy, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art and aesthetics, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in a non-totalizable ecological context that addresses our times in both an ontological and a normative register. The book is divided into four sections. “Diagnosing the Present” suggests that our times are marked by a facile, flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions. “Ecologies” mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for an originary environmentality, the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life. “Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities,” examines remains, including such by-products and disintegrations of human culture as nuclear waste, environmental destruction, and species extinctions. “Environmental Ethics” seeks to uncover a demand for justice, including human responsibility for suffering beings, that emerges precisely as a response to original differentiation and the mortality and unmasterable alterity it installs in living beings. As such, the book will resonate with readers not only of philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.