Matthew Calarco draws on ethological and evolutionary evidence and the work of Heidegger, who called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life.

The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and indistinction—to differentiate (...) three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains. (shrink)

Levinas ahead of his time--and himself--on politics, postcolonialism and globalization, animals and the environment, and science and technology.

This volume provides the first in-depth collection of essays aimed at critically examining the work of political philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

In recent years Derrida has devoted a considerable number of writings to addressing “the question of the animal,” and, more often than not, this question arises in a reading of one of Heidegger's texts. In order to appreciate more fully the stakes of Derrida's posing of this question in relation to Heidegger, in this essay I offer some prefatory remarks to the question of the animal in Derrida's reading of Heidegger. The essay opens with a careful analysis of Derrida's early (...) essay “The Ends of Man,” in which Heidegger's “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ is read in terms of the motif of man's “proper.” Taking my point of departure from this Derridean reading of Heidegger's humanism, I return to Heidegger's “Letter” in order to uncover the manner in which Heidegger distinguishes man's “proper” from what is “improper,” namely, animality. This reading reveals that, while Heidegger offers a convincing account of the limits of metaphysical humanism, this critical account nevertheless ends up uncritically reinforcing the anthropocentrism of this same tradition. My closing suggestion is that Derrida's rethinking of animality should be understood as an extended meditation on the various consequences and effects of this dogmatic anthropocentrism in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian thought. (shrink)

This essay examines Jacques Derrida’s contribution to recent debates in animal philosophy in order to explore the critical promise of his work for contemporary discourses on animal ethics and vegetarianism. The essay is divided into two sections, both of which have as their focus Derrida’s interview with Jean-Luc Nancy entitled “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject.” My task in the initial section is to assess the claim made by Derrida in this interview that Levinas’s work is dogmatically anthropocentric, (...) and to determine whether Levinas’s conception of ethics leaves a place for animals. In the second half of the essay I turn to an analysis of Derrida’s discussion of vegetarianism and its critical relation to the humanism and anthropocentrism that he is calling into question. The main argument that I seek to advance here is that deconstruction should not be strictly identified with vegetarianism (as certain of Derrida’s readers have suggested), but rather that what is needed is a thorough deconstruction of existing discourses on vegetarianism, a project that remains largely to be developed. (shrink)

Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought.

The aim of this essay is to examine the status and promise of Emmanuel Levinas’s humanism for a posthuman and more-than-human age. I suggest that, even though Levinas’s approach partially r...

What is the significance of and logic behind Jacques Derrida's recent "political" writings? While Derrida's work refuses to obey any singular movement or register, he does, nonetheless, make recurrent attempts to negotiate between a politics of identity and difference. A similar undertaking can be found in the radical democratic writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. An encounter between these thinkers is here carried out in order to elucidate key themes in Derrida's The Other Heading. The reading aims at developing (...) and contextualising Derrida's relation to radical democratic thought so that his political strategies can be made more explicit. (shrink)

List of key concepts -- Introduction -- THE KEY CONCEPTS -- Bibliography -- Index.

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the (...) issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity. (shrink)

Roadkill is a recurrent but often unthought feature of modern life. Yet, consideration of the broader significance of the myriad social, ethical, and political issues related to roadkill has largely gone missing from mainstream scholarship and activism. This neglect persists even in fields such as mobility studies and animal studies that would otherwise seem to have a vested interest in the topic. This book aims to bring roadkill to the foreground of current discussions among scholars and activists in these fields (...) in order to demonstrate that roadkill is a uniquely important site from which to understand and contest the machinations of the dominant social order. It argues that a careful examination of roadkill can help both to uncover the hidden violence of contemporary human-centered systems of mobility and to develop alternative modes of mobility for a renewed social life in common with our more-than-human kin. (shrink)

Plato's pigs -- Aristotle's wonderful animals -- Cynicism's dogs -- Jainism's birds -- Plutarch's grunter -- Descartes' beast-machine -- Kant's elephants -- Bentham's suffering animal -- Nietzsche's overhuman animal -- Derrida's cat -- Adams's absent referent -- Plumwood's crocodile -- Haraway's companion species.

The Continental Ethics Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on ethics and moral philosophy from the major figures in Continental thought. The carefully selected readings are divided into five sections: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. All of the authors and their writings are introduced and placed in philosophical context by the editors. The Continental Ethics Reader is an ideal point of entry to the most pressing issues and most important thinkers of the (...) Continental tradition, and provides a thorough and much needed introduction to the field. (shrink)

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin tracks the transformation of the novel’s protagonist, Isserley, as she undergoes a crisis in her self-identity and drifts slowly but in a determined manner toward another way of life. Isserley works in the voddissin industry, which captures and transforms “vodsels” into consumable meat. As the novel unfolds, Isserley eventually comes to reject the meat industry and the subjugation of vodsels on which it is based. Here I suggest that Isserly’s subjective transformation is based not (...) on a superficial recognition of logical identity between herself and vodsels, but on a deeper ethic of belonging, which enables her to affirm her shared “animal” condition with vodsels and other earthly beings. (shrink)

This paper explores two different methods of reading ‘Derrida’s own conscience’ – that is, of raising the question of ethics and obligation in deconstruction. The two readings under discussion here are staged by Jean-Luc Nancy in his seminal essay ‘The Free Voice of Man’. In the first half of the paper, I engage in a reading of Nancy’s essay in which I seek not only to highlight Nancy’s double formulation of the place of ethics in deconstruction, but also to re-mark (...) the transition in Derrida’s writings from the priority of the question to an emphasis on a call that precedes the question. In order to further explore this displacement of the priority of the question, the second half of the essay takes up an analysis of Derrida’s employment of the motif of ‘ Viens ’ (‘Come’) in his essay ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. I suggest that ‘ Viens ’ should be read as Derrida’s formulation of: (1) another response, beyond questioning, to a call that precedes any question; (2) another thought of conscience and obligation; and (3) a thought of the trace of alterity at the very heart of conscience that signals the impossibility of any form of good conscience. Key Words: apocalypse • call • conscience • ethics • question • Viens. (shrink)