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Moving Targets

Stephen J. Simpson and David Raubenheimer

in The Nature of Nutrition: A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity

This chapter studies intake and growth targets. For clarity, earlier chapters have treated intake and growth targets as static points integrated across a particular period in the life of an animal. ... More

This chapter studies intake and growth targets. For clarity, earlier chapters have treated intake and growth targets as static points integrated across a particular period in the life of an animal. In reality they are, of course, not static but rather trajectories that move in time. In the short term, the requirements of the animal change as environmental circumstances impose differing demands for nutrients and energy. At a somewhat longer timescale, targets move as the animal passes through the various stages of its life, from early growth and development to maturity, reproduction, and senescence. On an even longer timescale, nutritional traits are subject to natural selection and move as species evolve to exploit new or changing nutritional environments and to adopt differing life-history strategies. Presaging such evolutionary change in gene frequencies within populations are epigenetic effects, whereby the nutritional experiences of parents influence the behavior and metabolism of their offspring without requiring changes in gene frequencies.Less

Culture and Civilization

Vanessa Lemm

in Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being

This chapter examines the openness of human life to the horizon of becoming through an analysis of the competition between culture and civilization. Nietzsche's puts forth a ... More

This chapter examines the openness of human life to the horizon of becoming through an analysis of the competition between culture and civilization. Nietzsche's puts forth a criticism of civilization that does not imply a “return to nature” but is oriented toward a cultivation of animality. He conceives the process of civilization as a process of moral and rational improvement of the human being which does not cultivate animal life but extirpates and oppresses it. On the other hand, Nietzsche believes that the challenge of culture in civilization is to bring forth forms of life and thought which are not forms of power over animal life.Less

The Novelist, the Lecturer, and the Limits of Persuasion: J. M. Coetzee and Elizabeth Costello on the Lives of Animals and Men

Michael Bell

in Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to ... More

J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the author who most exemplifies at the turn of the century the nature of literary authority; a power and a predicament he has repeatedly thematised while refusing to translate the authority of his writing into its supposed political or ideological equivalents. This chapter is devoted mainly to a close reading of The Lives of Animals in its original form and context as one of the 1998 Tanner lectures at Princeton. Costello herself is far from being a simple mouthpiece for the author and her account of the novelist's sympathy is vulnerable as well as eloquent. Although it is often discussed, and not inappropriately, for its thematic contribution to public debate on the human relation to animals, the mutual embedding of formal lecture and fictional narrative gives the work a philosophical focus on the incommunicability of all radical conviction that falls outside conventional norms.Less

‘Is this the right image of our nation?’ Disgrace and the Seriousness of the Novel

Patrick Hayes

in J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett

This chapter explores the way Coetzee engages with another dimension of the form of the novel—the way in which it can be used to represent the deepest concerns of a nation state. With close reference ... More

This chapter explores the way Coetzee engages with another dimension of the form of the novel—the way in which it can be used to represent the deepest concerns of a nation state. With close reference to the aims of the new constitution, it shows that post‐apartheid South Africa places a complex demand on its future by its insistence that both interpretations of the ideal of equal recognition—both the difference‐based demand for social justice, and the concept of abstract human equality—must have a formative influence on its politics. Coetzee responds with great subtlety to the questions posed by the new nation state: this chapter argues for the political importance of the way Disgrace disrupts the surface seriousness of novelistic representation, not least through its extensive portrayal of animal life.Less

Natural Norms

Philippa Foot

in Natural Goodness

Foot defends her proposal to meet Hume's practicality requirement with a cognitivist ethical theory. The central feature of Foot's theory is that she places the evaluation of human action in the ... More

Foot defends her proposal to meet Hume's practicality requirement with a cognitivist ethical theory. The central feature of Foot's theory is that she places the evaluation of human action in the wider contexts not only of the evaluation of other features of human life, but also of evaluative judgements of the characteristics and operations of other living things. She focuses on the description of natural goodness in plant and animal life, and argues that such judgements of goodness and badness are normative and indeed evaluative. Thus, Foot shows that these norms can be explained in terms of facts about natural things, i.e. without recourse to speech acts or the expression of psychological states. Natural goodness, Foot argues, is attributable only to living things themselves and their parts, characteristics, and operations; it is an intrinsic or autonomous goodness that depends directly on the relation of an individual to the life form of its species.Less

Conclusion: Biopolitics and the Question of Animal Life

Vanessa Lemm

in Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on Friedrich Nietzsche's animal philosophy and biopolitics. It provides insights into how biopolitics can be ... More

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on Friedrich Nietzsche's animal philosophy and biopolitics. It provides insights into how biopolitics can be approached through Nietzsche's treatment of the question of animal life. It concludes that Nietzsche provides a way to understand the relationship between animality and humanity, which can be given a new and productive interpretation by seeing it as developing an affirmative sense of biopolitics.Less

The Fictions and Futures of Farm Animals: Semi-Living to “Animalacra” Pig Tales

Susan McHugh

in Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines

This chapter examines how industrial meat narratives reflect widespread anxieties about the production of genetically modified farm animals. Narratives about meat animals, such as George Orwell’s ... More

This chapter examines how industrial meat narratives reflect widespread anxieties about the production of genetically modified farm animals. Narratives about meat animals, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), suggest that shared human–animal lives is a point of access to the public. Pigs gain cultural significance as avatars of animal agency in barnyards by serving as links between locally sustained agriculture and globalize biotech communities. These narratives symbolize the process of symbiogenesis and heterogenesis, even though their transgenic theme portrays threats to species.Less

Man and Animal

Emanuele Coccia

in Sensible Life

This chapter explains how the sensible defines the forms, the realities, and the limits of animal life. It suggests that sensible life is not exclusively a human trait, that sensation has always been ... More

This chapter explains how the sensible defines the forms, the realities, and the limits of animal life. It suggests that sensible life is not exclusively a human trait, that sensation has always been considered to be the faculty through which “living things, in addition to possessing life, become animals.” Through the senses, we live in manner indifferent to our specific difference as humans, as rational animals. Sensations give form and reality to that which, in our life, is not specifically human. Sensible life allows animal life in all its forms to relate to images—that is, all forms of the sensible world, whether they be visual, smelling, or auditory. This chapter also discusses the science of the sensible and compares it to an anthropology of the sensible.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

Late novels

John Thieme

in R. K. Narayan

The Painter of Signs (1976) is R. K. Narayan's last major novel. The fiction that he produced in his seventies and eighties is variable in quality, but generally demonstrates a falling-off in his ... More

The Painter of Signs (1976) is R. K. Narayan's last major novel. The fiction that he produced in his seventies and eighties is variable in quality, but generally demonstrates a falling-off in his talents. Nevertheless, it develops interesting variations on several of the defining themes of his novels, particularly the passage into the fourth stage of the varnasramadharma, the discursive constitution of space, oral mythologies and Hindu reverence for animal life and the natural world. The last of these concerns is central to both the theme and the point of view of the novel that he has referred to as his favourite, A Tiger for Malgudi (1983). In one sense, A Tiger for Malgudi returns to issues explored in The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961). It is useful to consider some of the tropological associations with which tigers have been invested in India. At least one strand of the narrative of Narayan's next novel, Talkative Man (1986), suggests a parallel with A Tiger for Malgudi. Another late Narayan novel is The World of Nagaraj (1990).Less

Introduction: The Sistine Gap

Jessica Riskin

in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life

This book is about a long tradition of attempts to sound the Sistine gap. It discusses the efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to measure living ... More

This book is about a long tradition of attempts to sound the Sistine gap. It discusses the efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to measure living beings against inanimate mechanisms. A historical approach to artificial life is also presented. The chapter then contributes to the current conventions regarding the nature of animal life, sentience, and human cognition. Moreover, the book is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores the efforts to connect intellect with matter, souls with mechanisms, magic with engineering. Part 2 emphasizes the importance of interactions within living beings, among the distributed parts of the complex systems that comprise them. Part 3 concentrates on the exchanges between creatures and the outside world, and on attempts to understand life in terms of these exchanges. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is given.Less

Some Questions about Animals

Paul F. Snowdon

in Persons, Animals, Ourselves

This chapter discusses some general questions about animal existence and persistence, arguing that animals, even advanced ones, do not require psychological properties to remain in existence. An ... More

This chapter discusses some general questions about animal existence and persistence, arguing that animals, even advanced ones, do not require psychological properties to remain in existence. An animal also cannot be separated from its body should that body remain alive and intact. These claims imply that if we are animals the same applies to us. It is also argued that life is not a necessary condition for animal existence. This rejection of the Termination Thesis does not, though, seem to have significant implications for the debate about animalism. It is at least plausible to say that an animal cannot itself cease to be an animal, and, moreover, has to remain the type of animal it is, although the support for these claims is not conclusive. Finally, it is argued that animal persistence is not explicable in terms simply of bulk, but is in some sense functional.Less

‘Going to the Dogs’: ‘Humanity’ in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, The Lives of Animals and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

in Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa

In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first ... More

In 1986, J. M. Coetzee declared that South Africa's transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 presented an opportunity to restore humanity in society, yet in his first post-apartheid novel, Disgrace (1999), he paints a remarkably bleak scenario of South Africa. In particular, it portrays the relations between communities in a negative light, which Derek Attridge argues is a hindrance to, rather than a support of, the enormous task of reconciliation and rebuilding of South Africa. The African National Congress objected to the novel's supposed racism, but ignored the extent to which it explores the systemic aspect of the rape epidemic in South Africa. This chapter compares Disgrace with another Coetzee novel, The Lives of Animals (2001), and shows how the former tackles social violence and the extent to which ‘humanity’ and ‘humanitarianism’ are intertwined with the culture of patriarchy. It also examines how the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission containing the testimony of victim-survivors highlight the similarity between the perverse uses of non-human animals in place of humans.Less

Following the Actors: G. H. Lewes’s and George Eliot’s Studies in Life

Philipp Erchinger

in Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

Opening with a look at the character of Benjulia from Wilkie Collins’s novel Heart and Science, this chapter turns to G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies. As it argues, Collins’s Benjulia is unhappily ... More

Opening with a look at the character of Benjulia from Wilkie Collins’s novel Heart and Science, this chapter turns to G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies. As it argues, Collins’s Benjulia is unhappily tied to a position-based notion of knowledge that separates him from whatever he seeks to grasp. By contrast, Lewes’s studies exemplify an enquiry that goes along with its subject-matters, rather than trying to capture and contain them in an ideal place apart from the observer. Thus, Lewes’s essays invite their readers to learn with, rather than from, them. Instead of merely transmitting knowledge about marine life, these works take their readers through an experimental field that is still in the process of being explored. The section goes on to argue that George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss outlines a non-propositional reason that cannot be abstracted from the particular situations and actions in and through which it is expressed. The chapter therefore puts the case that Eliot’s novels and Lewes’s studies investigated different problems through similar methods. This explains why Eliot described her novels as “experiments in life”, a claim that the chapter clarifies by placing it in the context of Emile Zola’s theory of the experimental novel.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

Stories of Seeds and Soil

Gabrielle Tayac and Tanya Thrasher

in The Land Has Memory: Indigenous Knowledge, Native Landscapes, and the National Museum of the American Indian

This chapter looks at the influence of the animal and plant life on the surrounding landscape of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). This is illustrated by the 27,000 trees, shrubs, ... More

This chapter looks at the influence of the animal and plant life on the surrounding landscape of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). This is illustrated by the 27,000 trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants; 40 massive boulders; and 4 Cardinal Direction Marker stones that were placed throughout the NMAI's landscape. All were carefully selected, blessed with prayer and song, transported over thousands of miles, and thoughtfully re-oriented on the museum's four-acre site. The museum's diverse plantings aims to recall the indigenous environment and culture of the landscape prior to European contact.Less

Necessity Testing

Caroline E. Foster

in Global Regulatory Standards in Environmental and Health Disputes: Regulatory Coherence, Due Regard, and Due Diligence

Part III comprises two chapters, Chapter Five and Chapter Six. These chapters together investigate the decisions of WTO panels and the Appellate Body in environmental and health cases. The chapters ... More

Part III comprises two chapters, Chapter Five and Chapter Six. These chapters together investigate the decisions of WTO panels and the Appellate Body in environmental and health cases. The chapters examine the major contribution made through WTO dispute settlement to the emerging global regulatory standard of regulatory coherence. Specifically, Chapter Five analyses the elaboration of the ‘necessity’ formula in the GATT and the GATS general exceptions’ subparagraphs, as well as under the TBT and SPS Agreements. The WTO adjudicatory process appears to have been protecting the traditional procedural justification of international law’s relative authority claim by enabling respect for domestic decision-making through democratic processes. Members’ entitlement to choose their level of protection against a risk is still at present fully recognised and there is vital scope for recognition of the importance to WTO Members of long-term non-economic interests requiring a multifaceted policy response.Less