Weekly Roundup – November 15th, 2009

Announcement

• The Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities Event has extended our deadline for accepting submissions for the event until November 22nd. Thanks to everyone who has gotten us something, for the rest of you, get cracking!

Conference CFPS

• PIC is hosting its 20th annual conference, April 16-17 on Life: Politics, Resistance, & Beyond. Papers exploring these questions through a non-anthropocentric viewpoint are particularly welcome.

Newspapers and Articles

• Sarah Palin goes after vegetarians in her new book, Going Rogue.
• First Things carries an article arguing for a necessary connection between being Pro-Life and pro-animal.
• The Onion explores becoming-animal.

Blogs

• Animal Blawg floats the idea that US v Stevens, the US Supreme Court case about depicting animal cruelty for commercial gain, might be used against animal rights groups if the Court affirms the law.
• Over at Posthumanities Rodolfo posts a paper arguing that we can find the traces of early modern humanism in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Teaching Animal Studies

This year, for the first time as far as I know, the university at which I teach offered an undergraduate course in animal studies in the Department of Law. (I understand that a second course is being planned by the Department of History.) Fortunately for me, I get to teach the course, the syllabus can be found here. Presently, the course is offered as “first year seminar,” which means that enrollment is capped at thirty-five (hardly a “seminar”!) and is limited to first year students. All first year students in B.A. programs are required to take a first year seminar. As we approach the end of the first semester of a two semester course, I’ve begun to wonder what should be the single take-home message the students receive in a class such as this, especially given that they will most likely not be in a position to discuss animals in any of their other classes as they work their way through a degree. Like most first year students, mine are not prepared to engage in any form of serious thought or reflection–on the whole, they seem more interested in my dietary habits than the material as such. Perhaps that will change as we move into the next semester where we will spend our time looking at “issues” rather than at “theory.” If you were (or are) teaching an undergraduate animal studies course, what do you want your students to get out of it?

Weekly Roundup – November 8th, 2009

Remember:

This Friday is the deadline for the Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities cross-blog event.

 

Conferences and Fellowships

• The Animal and Society Institute has announced the information needed to apply for their 2010 summer Fellowships.
• Conference: “Real” Animals and the Humanities, Texas, February 17-19, 2010. Featuring Marc Bekoff, Carol Adams, and Paul Waldau. More information here and here.

Blogs and Newspapers

• The Book Forum blog has a great post bringing together a lot of information of agriculture and food.
• Jonathan Safran Foer continues to dominate and produce animal related discussions. He has an article, Jonathan Swift-style, in the Wall Street Journal which ‘advocates’ eating dogs. He also has interviews in both the LA Times and Salon.com.
• The New York Times carried an article on whether dogs were smarter than we originally assumed (answer: Yes. That seems to always be the answer is such stories).

Weekly Roundup – November 01, 2009

Another short one, not only because we are busy, but also because there doesn’t seem to be that much going on. If we are missing stuff, let us know!

• Discussions of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals covered all sorts of blogs this week. Mary Martin posted a review of the book, with both strong pros and cons, from a vegan perspective. Natalie Portman also reviewed the book, and credited it with her deciding to become vegan, and become an animal rights activist. And lastly, Salon.com carried a rather predictable and incoherent response to Portman’s review.
• In self-promotional news, the Columbia UP blog carried a positive review of our event with Matt.
• Happy World Vegan Day!

Animal Attacks

I have nothing particularly insightful to add to this, but I’m always amazed at the institutional response to animal attacks: the animal(s) involved in the attack must be hunted down and exterminated. Take the following story reported in my local daily: a woman hiking in the woods was apparently attacked by two coyotes, she died as a result, one of the coyotes was shot, but escaped, and the other escaped unharmed. The institutional response is as follows:

Parks staff are searching for the second coyote, which will be killed if it is found, said Germaine LeMoine, a spokesman for the Cape Breton field unit for Parks Canada.

“The trail has been closed and it is secure,” LeMoine said. “We’re very concerned about public safety. That’s foremost on our minds. We are keeping it closed until that second animal has been located and disposed of.”

Many questions come to mind: how will the escaped coyote be identified as the one who participated in the “attack? Further, why is there no inquiry into the probable case that the woman (or another human elsewhere on the trail) acted in some way so as to bring the coyotes to attack? (Coyotes, like wolves and bears, which are most frequently involved in “animal attacks” in Canada tend to shy away from contact with human under the well-known principle: “they are more scared of you than you are of them.”) Subsequent investigation into many “animal attacks” result in showing that the humans were complicit in the “attack” if not outright responsible for it. For instance, in the case of bear “attacks” acting in ways that the bear finds threatening (e.g., trying to scare it away) rather than acting in ways that the bear will not find threatening (e.g., slowly and calmly backing up while facing the bear until you are out of its sight.) What is the principle that leads to retribution of this sort? Has the coyote been deemed to be criminally responsible for murder? If so, why not give the coyote a trial? Why summary execution? How will the response not lead to an open season on coyotes in general? Of course, even in the case where you provoke the attack, intentionally or not, you have the right to defend your life even if that means ending the life of the attacker, this principle cannot be extended into the indefinite future.

Weekly Roundup – October 25, 2009

It remains quiet around because the three of us are still rather busy, but we did have the time to find some interesting links for this week:

• A series on animal studies in the Chronicle of Higher Education, along with a number of rather hostile comments: “Animals Reconsidered,” “Creature Consciousness,” “Moral in Tooth and Claw,” and “A Theory of Critters” (although not as hostile as the now infamous Carlin Romano piece on Heidegger)
• A couple good pieces at change.org’s Animal Rights blog: on greenhouse gases and livestock, on hog farming in Illinois, and American rodeos versus Spanish bullfighting
• Animalblawg on deer hunting and the first amendment
• And, Gary Francione on his abolitionist approach

Weekly Roundup – October 18, 2009

Our apologies for so few links this week–we’ve all been really busy:

• Justin E.H. Smith at 3 Quarks Daily on “Ecce Cannis: Towards a Philosophical History of Dogs“
• The law school vegan debacle continues, this time with a new poll surveying reasons for becoming vegan and Gary Francione weighs in on the meaning of being vegan
• A review of Daniel C. Beaver’s (the name is wonderful) Hunting and Politics of Violence Before the English Civil War
• An excerpt from Jonathan Safran Foer’s forthcoming Eating Animals
• Agribusiness blocks a Michael Pollan lecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (and a short piece by Pollan in the New Times Magazine, “Rules to Eat By”)
• And J Rodolfo at Posthumanities on origami chickens in McDonald’s advertising

Weekly Roundup – October 11, 2009

New Books

• Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I is now in stock.
• Jonathan Safran Foer’s has taken a interesting detour in his fiction, to produce this nonfiction work Eating Animals. Set to come out this November.

Blogs and Newspapers

• US v. Stevens, the Supreme Court case dealing with selling videos of animal cruelty, had oral arguments this last week. This blog post rounds up some of the major newspaper coverage of the case, this blog post has links to the oral arguments and an amicus brief by animal law professors, and Scu covers some of the larger legal issues in this post, and covers some of the interesting turns in oral arguments in this post.
• This New York Times article traces the path of a recent e. coli outbreak. In so doing, it also provides an in-depth look at the current productions of ground beef and hamburgers.
• More, a video analysis of Ardi from Science, and the original issue of Science on Ardi.
• Katie Hance on clarifying the relation between animal rights, vegetarianism, and veganism at Animalblawg.

Weekly Roundup – October 4, 2009

New Books and Articles

• Leslie Irving, Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters (Temple UP, 2009).
• Edwin Schatz, ed, Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (U. Chicago P., 2009), with what looks to be an interesting chapter by Timothy Pachirat entitled “The Political in Political Ethnography: Dispatches from the Killing Floor.”
• Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human (Columbia UP, 2009).
• Sale on social sciences and humanities books, including the “Posthumanities” series, through the University of Minnesota Press’s website.

Blogs and Newspapers

• More law school vegan controversy, this time set off by the claim that vegans hold ‘morally abhorrent’ views: original (commenting on this poll) with responses here and here.
• Frans De Waal comments on the implications of the discovery of ‘Ardi.‘ While not exactly about animals, it certainly explore the inhuman or prehuman within the human.
• Also, there is a new listserv dedicated to the intersection of Critical Race Theories and Food Studies.

The Passion of the Animal: Derrida

In reading the comments of the previous installments of this series, it seems like those participating are able to  digest the arguments of the philosophers under consideration and the critiques Matt makes of them (is it ok if I refer to you as “Matt” instead of “Calarco”? The surname address sounds stilted at this point). For that reason, and because life is busy, I am going to eschew a full summary of the Derrida chapter.

Derrida is an excellent capstone to the previous readings. Derrida breaks with Heidegger’s metaphysics and Dasein as the sole possessor of language; he radicalizes Levinas’s ethics in nearly exactly the way I would wish. Matt is kind to footnote Derrida’s many engagements with philosophers on the issue of animals for those wishing to pursue this thread, and in each of those cases Derrida takes the opportunity to unseat a clean split between “human” and “animal.” By juxtaposing Derrida and Agamben one can see the cloaked gravitational center pulling Agamben off course. Matt speaks of a “performative anthropocentrism” in the Derrida that aptly describes the constraints on both. In Derrida’s case, there is a will to respect the animal that is hindered by the philosophical inheritance. In Agamben’s, solidarity with other animals seems like the only logical outcome—what else would move biopolitics out of the realm of idealism?—and yet is avoided, symptomatically, to preserve the whir of the anti-anthropological machine.

There are a few points in Matt’s critique of Derrida that I find myself returning to in my head, and it is on these that I want to focus. First, he calls Derrida out on saying that there are divisions between humans and animals: “not…that there is no limit between ‘animals’ and ‘man’: it is because I maintain that there is more than one limit, that there are many limits” (146). This statement seems, to me, in keeping with a conservative streak underlying much of Derrida’s self-positioning in relation to matters of law. Derrida is no revolutionary: when he revolutionizes philosophy by deconstruction, it is out of an apprehension of the unrecognized excesses of a belief in self-presence (Heidegger being the greatest example, but also the tremendous cruelties carried out in the name of Cartesianism or positivism and kinds of Marxism). So it does not surprise me that Derrida is willing to say “many limits” rather than “no limits.” The question would be whether these Derridean limits would function as gates for oppression, as past generic limits have. The argument I imagine coming from Derrida is that these are transient limits and that they are necessarily instantiated within the ethical moment. Matt’s point is well taken: if Derrida wants a new taxonomic hierarchy, give him the boot. But if he is parasitizing the language of taxonomy to describe singularity, there is no conflict with his typical position (in his written texts rather than interviews) on animals and ethics.

The second major point of discussion is the relation between vegetarianism and deconstruction, specifically in Derrida’s writings. As we know, Derrida gives full ethical otherhood to nonhuman animals. There is a great section of his interview with Roudinesco where he goes on the offensive (as much as Derrida “the power of powerlessness” ever does) in confronting her with the realities underlying her desire to eat meat. It seems intuitive that not eating animals would be a fundamental consequence of this respect for animals. However, Derrida remains agnostic about vegetarianism because it can be deconstructed. This is especially true today, when animal (by)products have been spectralized into seemingly unrelated goods. Are we going to consume nothing? How do we draw a line in the sand without committing the cardinal sin of deconstruction?

Matt concurs with Derrida that deconstruction and a deconstructive respect for animals does not entail vegetarianism (Scu linked to Matt’s article on the subject a couple posts ago; I haven’t gotten a chance to read it, so forgive me if you answer my questions there). For my part I endorse their line of argument. However, this does not mean vegetarianism is incompatible with deconstruction. It means that the pledge of respectful consumption must be renewed continually, as any ethical relation must be continually open to the future and constituted in its arriving. It is somewhat baffling to me that Derrida would not himself sign on to vegetarianism, given the great and senseless suffering inflicted by the meat industry, with the minor human caveat that his vegetarianism remains impure.

Here is where I think vegetarianism can make a strong claim to the practice of deconstruction. Let us imagine Derrida as a young man. He realizes one day that philosophy, the whole thing, is founded on a couple great untruths or self-deceptions. Rather than saying, “philosophy is a load of bull,” he devotes his life to working from within that tradition to mar it indelibly. He was able to deconstruct philosophy by virtue of, and only because of, a position within philosophy. Today, we find ourselves realizing that the cultural infrastructure of the meat industry called Western Civilization (“carnophallogocentrism”) is a set of self-deceptions. From where do we dismantle it? Vegetarianism is not a position outside of the world, but it is a position within it that allows for different horizons to appear. The work of deconstructing vegetarianism would multiply those horizons, disbanding some and enriching others—but it is only from within such a vegetarianism (becoming-veg!n as Scu calls it) that such futures can arrive. I’m not sure there is much more of interest to be spun out from the culture of meat sacrifice after deconstruction. Veg!sm, on the other hand, puts humans at stake in the ever more fine-grained construction/discovery of living beings.