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Introduction: Bestiarium Judaicum

Jay Geller

in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews

This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, ... More

This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, identified, and denigrated by non-Jews—and maps the historical and theoretical contexts for both these puzzling deployments and the efforts at making sense of them. It situates the socio-political Jewish Question in Germanophone lands, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society. It points out how the need to render purported Jewish difference visible drew upon natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human—as mediated by the Bestiarium Judaicum. It provides an overview of contemporary theoretical and historical engagements with the Question of the Animal and with the representation of human (animals) as (nonhuman) animals. It then turns to how the scholarly literature has inadequately examined the associations of Jews and Animals, the Jew-Animal, and instead proposes to turn critical attention to the Jew-as-Animal—how Jewish-identified writers appropriated and reworked these Jew-Animals and gave voice to the Jewish animot. It briefly discusses several of the strategies that are elaborated in subsequent chapters.Less

Golden Codger and Siren: Yeats and Edith Shackleton Heald

Joseph M. Hassett

in W.B. Yeats and the Muses

Yeats extended his last, yearning grasp for the Muse toward Edith Shackleton Heald, whose Siren's evocation of the twin impulses of Eros and Thanatos propelled him to pursue sexual desire for the ... More

Yeats extended his last, yearning grasp for the Muse toward Edith Shackleton Heald, whose Siren's evocation of the twin impulses of Eros and Thanatos propelled him to pursue sexual desire for the sake of desire, even as he learned to relinquish longing for life or death. The stasis of Yeats's relationship with the Muse is apparent in ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’, where eroticism leaves the ‘golden codgers’ depleted rather than energized. Chapter 9 traces these remarkable developments to their culmination in Yeats's recognition that ‘lust and rage’ were unreliable sources of inspiration. Their sterility is apparent in ‘The Circus Animals' Desertion,’ which describes the poet's vain search for a theme. Yeats's next poem, ‘Politics’ the one he intended to complete his last volume, eschews the Furies and — as he enjoined himself in ‘Those Images’ — calls the Muses home. The poet focuses on ‘That girl standing there,’ and his longing — that of a true Muse poet — ‘that I were young again/And held her in my arms.’ The wheel had come full circle with Yeats's decision to end his body of work with quite a different song from ‘Words,’ where his Muse's unattainability was essential to generating his poetry. The poet of ‘Politics’ is a devotee of a Muse who, speaking in ‘The Three Bushes,’ insists on being captured because ‘None can rely upon/A love that lacks its proper food.’Less

Introduction: Moral Entanglements in Experimental Animal Science

Lesley A. Sharp

in Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science

The moral entanglements of human-animal relations have complex histories, as evidenced in anthropology’s longstanding interest in the relevance of interspecies encounters in shaping social worlds. ... More

The moral entanglements of human-animal relations have complex histories, as evidenced in anthropology’s longstanding interest in the relevance of interspecies encounters in shaping social worlds. This chapter begins with a history of my ethnographic project. I then discuss the long-term anthropological engagement with moral systems and the disciplinary relevance of the term ethos, where quotidian thought and action are central anthropological concerns. Ethos offers a potent approach to the study of science, where regulatory ethical frameworks overshadow the everyday and ordinary. I clarify the book’s terminology, with an important distinction between ethics (codified bioethical principles) and the unscripted, personal moral responses that animals inspire in the humans who work with them. Different animals inspire different moral responses; mammalian species are especially affectively potent, and certain kinds of animals (rats, dogs, monkeys) enable me to track different sorts of moral responses among lab personnel. As a result, certain kinds of animals will figure as a means to foreground particular themes and sentiments. I situate this work within the context of animal studies and science and technology studies, and I track the history of animal welfare and activism, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. The chapter concludes with an overview of my study. I also explain the relevance of the book’s three overarching sections, “Intimacy,” “Sacrifice,” and “Exceptionalism.”Less

Animals, art, abjection

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn

in Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s essay, ‘Animals, Art and Abjection’, teases out the implications of Kristeva’s contention in Powers of Horrorthat the abject engenders a fragile state within which ... More

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s essay, ‘Animals, Art and Abjection’, teases out the implications of Kristeva’s contention in Powers of Horrorthat the abject engenders a fragile state within which the human strays on the territory of the animal. For Kristeva, some cultures have branded animals as abject and as ‘representatives of sex and murder’. In such cultures, the animal is figured in negative terms and notions of animalism, of the human as an animal species, are suppressed. Animals therefore figure as impure and are made to form the constitutive outside to the human. Creed and Hoorn, however, argue that contemporary art practices that explore animals and animality do so as a means to challenge the notion that animals form humankind’s abject other. In this context, the artworks do not function to purify the abject but rather embrace what has hitherto been labelled as abject as a means to renegotiate its status from within an anthropocentric society.Less

Ctesias (a)

Eran Almagor

in Plutarch and the Persica

The most important writer of the group of authors who are said to have composed Persica works is Ctesias of Cnidus (fl. 400-390 BCE). Of all the authors treated in this book, Ctesias the physician is ... More

The most important writer of the group of authors who are said to have composed Persica works is Ctesias of Cnidus (fl. 400-390 BCE). Of all the authors treated in this book, Ctesias the physician is the only one about whose life and work we have relatively secure information, albeit it all appears to ultimately come from his own descriptions, and despite the fact that certain issues are still unclear. The chapter addresses passages in which Ctesias' name is explicitly stated as a source by Plutarch. It begins with an analysis of the passages in Plutarch's work, and combines the observations with what is known of Ctesias from other sources, to infer Plutarch's work method and the purpose of using Ctesias in the Artaxerxes and of mentioning him as a source.Less

The Problem of Nature’s Spurious Infinite within the Register of Animal Life

Wes Furlotte

in The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System

Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of ... More

Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of Hegelian nature. Concentrating on Hegel’s writings on animal life, the chapter reveals that the organism’s self-referential structure is consistently given over to various forms of external determination that analogically reflect the externality permeating the categories of space and time. This collapse into exteriority proves dangerous to the interiority constituting organic life. By extension, such collapse is dangerous to the animal organism’s status as one of the primary upsurges of freedom within the matrices of material nature. The upshot of Hegel’s account of organic life is revealingly significant: nature’s exteriority and indeterminacy function as crucial preconditions for the emergence of freedom within nature and yet they also serve to perpetually threaten the very reality of that same freedom. This paradoxical tension constitutes a fundamental problem which the remainder of the monograph seeks to systematically explore, both in terms of Hegel’s anthropology and political philosophy.Less

The Environment and Natural Resources

Dinah Shelton

in Commitment and Compliance: The Role of Non-binding Norms in the International Legal System

This chapter presents case studies that demonstrate the importance of soft norms in moulding behaviour of states and non-state actors. The case studies cover the UN General Assembly ban on driftnet ... More

This chapter presents case studies that demonstrate the importance of soft norms in moulding behaviour of states and non-state actors. The case studies cover the UN General Assembly ban on driftnet fishing, the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides, the Antarctic Treaty, and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.Less

Animal Farms, Animal Activism: The Emergence of Factory Farms and Its Opposition

F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk

in Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare

This chapter discuses animal activism. Animal activism has been around since the nineteenth century when the actions of powerful interest groups enforced the first modern animal welfare laws. Sir ... More

This chapter discuses animal activism. Animal activism has been around since the nineteenth century when the actions of powerful interest groups enforced the first modern animal welfare laws. Sir William Putney, Richard Martin, and William Wilberforce introduced animal anti-cruelty laws. At this time also the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals (RSPCA) was formed to enforce these laws in Britain. In the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was the first animal advocacy group which strengthened existing animal protection laws. The American Humane Association (AHA) was founded to protect the well-being of both children and animals. But, some officers of the AHA who were disappointed with its failure to confront the livestock industry, formed the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) which became a leader in changing farm animal welfare.Less

Compassion, Commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J. M. Coetzee’s Recent Fiction

Allison Carruth

in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within ... More

This chapter examines the ethics of animal domestication and commodification in the novels of South African writer J. M. Coetzee, with particular reference to the human treatment of animals within the larger discourse of citizenship and rights. It offers a reading of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals to show how human compassion, which is necessary to act on behalf of other animals, might come at the expense of human affinities with other human beings. The chapter also considers an essential component of postcolonial ecocriticism: the human consumption of the other-than-human world and, by extension, human complicity in perpetuating those systems.Less

Introduction: The Legend of Mary Ellen Wilson

in The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of child protection in the U.S. during the Gilded Age. It describes the case of Mary Ellen Wilson, a child ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of child protection in the U.S. during the Gilded Age. It describes the case of Mary Ellen Wilson, a child abuse victim who was rescued by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) from her foster parents. This volume argues that the nexus of animal and child protection was neither sad nor strange, but was instead tightly bound to the crosshatched threads of sentimentalism and liberalism.Less

But What About the Animals?

Cheshire Calhoun

in Reason, Value, and Respect: Kantian Themes from the Philosophy of Thomas E. Hill, Jr.

Kant famously claimed that we have no direct duties to animals and that animals are things that (within limits) we may dispose of at will. Kantian moral philosophers have sometimes called this a ... More

Kant famously claimed that we have no direct duties to animals and that animals are things that (within limits) we may dispose of at will. Kantian moral philosophers have sometimes called this a repugnant moral doctrine. This chapter begins by distinguishing three ethical concerns one might have with respect to animals: taking into account animals’ interests, adopting a non-instrumentalist valuing attitude toward animals, and avoiding ingratitude, mockery, unfairness and the like. Utilitarianism is well designed to address only the first of the three ethical concerns. Drawing on Kant’s comments about the analogies between animals and humans, this chapter argues that there are good Kantian reasons for valuing animals, for not discounting their interests, and for not regarding them purely instrumentally. The chapter also argues that even if one is not obligated to respond to animals gratefully, fairly, respectfully, and the like, there is nevertheless a moral defect in not doing so.Less

User Layer

Benjamin H. Bratton

in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

This chapter discusses the sixth and top layer in The Stack, the User layer. It describes how Users initiate chains of interaction up and down layers, from Interface to Earth and back again. It sees ... More

This chapter discusses the sixth and top layer in The Stack, the User layer. It describes how Users initiate chains of interaction up and down layers, from Interface to Earth and back again. It sees the “user” as a contemporary mediated image of the self, one that is often reduced to narrow and utilitarian frames, but also open to a diverse variety of possible human and non-human agencies. The user position can both over-individuate that agent’s sense of self and also radically multiply it. For example, data generated by Users and producing traces and shadows of their worldly transactions, initially creates a high-resolution portrait of a single user (for example as seen in the Quantified Self movement) but as overlapping external data streams are introduced, the coherency the user’s subjectivity is dissolved by the overdetermination by external relations and forces. Any durable politics of the User must understand this dynamic of platform sovereignty.Less

Staging Humanimality: Patricia Piccinini and a Genealogy of Species Intermingling

Sara E. S. Orning

in Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human

Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what ... More

Orning raises questions about the provocative work of Patricia Piccinini, a contemporary sculptor and artist. Piccinini’s work often stages encounters between what look like human figures and what look like hybrid creatures with both human and nonhuman characteristics. Orning’s focus in these “humanimal” encounters is on the potential they hold for questioning easy distinctions between “the human” and “the animal”, while also drawing attention to the fact that human beings today can already be seen as hybrid, whether we have tissues or organs implanted from nonhuman beings or we recognize that human bodies are made up of cells and micro-organisms that are not necessarily human. Orning connects the uneasiness associated with unsettling what it means to be human to a longer genealogy of putting “monstrous” or “freakish” bodies on display, whether in the form of humans with animal-like features, or animals with human features, particularly in nineteenth-century circus sideshows. But the “species intermingling” that is staged by Piccinini, according to Orning, holds more potential for ethical engagement with “others” of various kinds or species than earlier settings such as freak shows.Less

Darwin’s Flinch

Tiffany Watt Smith

in On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock

Chapter One takes as its starting point Charles Darwin’s self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens, when he recoiled from a puff adder lunging from behind its glass tank (The Expression of the ... More

Chapter One takes as its starting point Charles Darwin’s self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens, when he recoiled from a puff adder lunging from behind its glass tank (The Expression of the Emotions, 1872). Opening out into a larger discussion of the use of theatrical techniques of acting and spectating in his emotional experiments, this chapter argues that Darwin’s self-experiment replicated the ‘double perspective’ associated with the audiences of sensation theatre in the 1870s. The chapter concludes by arguing that the theatricality characterizing Darwin’s experiments also eloquently expressed wider late Victorian anxieties about the emotional body. Theatre and its vicissitudes become a primary metaphor for a newly unsettled relationship between outward physiology and inward feeling that increasingly concerned the scientific study of the emotions for the rest of the century and beyond.Less

Schismogenesis

Anthony Chaney

in Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness

This chapter describes how a surge of protest over the Vietnam War brought back the classic debate over the nature of revolution. Should change be directed at the interior, at perception and culture, ... More

This chapter describes how a surge of protest over the Vietnam War brought back the classic debate over the nature of revolution. Should change be directed at the interior, at perception and culture, or should it be directed at the exterior, at existing institutions? This debate was framed by 1966's most celebrated play, Marat/Sade. England’s leading culturalist, R. D. Laing, founder of Kingsley Hall in Swinging London, planned an event for the following year: the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. He invited Bateson, an old mentor, to speak. Bateson’s letter of acceptance included a scientific critique of radicalism. In the States, the experience of San Francisco Digger founder Emmett Grogan, demonstrated culturalist and structuralist strains within an emerging counterculture. In March of 1967, as the Summer of Love approached, Grogan and the Diggers disrupted a Michigan executive meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society. The event demonstrated fragmentation within a movement suddenly too large and amorphous for its purported leadership. Before leaving for London, Bateson reads Philip Wylie's The Magic Animal in light of his recent friendship with Konrad Lorenz.Less

Putting the Blues in British Blues Rock

Roberta Freund Schwartz

in Transatlantic Roots Music: Folk, Blues, and National Identities

This chapter examines the fusion of blues and rock in the 1960s heyday of what has variously been termed “blues rock,” “British blues,” or “R&B.” Describing the ways in which bands such as the ... More

This chapter examines the fusion of blues and rock in the 1960s heyday of what has variously been termed “blues rock,” “British blues,” or “R&B.” Describing the ways in which bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Animals adopted style and lyrics from the recorded music of Chicago blues performances such as Broonzy and others, it demonstrates the revolutionary impact of the fusions that were the result of the British exposure to American blues.Less

Lectures on Ethics: Wittgenstein and Kafka

Yi-Ping Ong

in Wittgenstein and Modernism

Establishing the affinities between Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics” and Kafka’s fictional lecture on ethics, “A Report for an Academy,” Ong examines the ethical dimensions of the their ... More

Establishing the affinities between Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics” and Kafka’s fictional lecture on ethics, “A Report for an Academy,” Ong examines the ethical dimensions of the their exploration of the limits of language; the mystery of ordinary life; and the relation between the corporeal and the spiritual. “My whole tendency and…the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language,” declares Wittgenstein in “A Lecture on Ethics.” The possibility or impossibility of lecturing, teaching, documenting, and establishing something are all related to the form of Wittgenstein’s text and to the question it raises: what is at stake in our desire to speak meaningfully about ethics? “A Report for an Academy” is also concerned with the attempt to instruct an audience in a language that cannot express what one most wants to say. Why, and how, is this experience bound up with the ethical dimensions of existence? To lecture on ethics, both Wittgenstein and Kafka suggest, is to risk unintelligibility and to desire a kind of understanding from others that is thwarted or denied.Less