Theodore Ziolkowski
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195336917
- eISBN:
- 9780199868353
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336917.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter investigates how the tale of Europa and the bull—in poetry, drama, and art, but also in cartoons, advertising, and currency—was initially seized upon by artists around the turn of the ...
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This chapter investigates how the tale of Europa and the bull—in poetry, drama, and art, but also in cartoons, advertising, and currency—was initially seized upon by artists around the turn of the century and by Expressionist poets as a parable of sexual awakening and of the essential animality of sex. In the 1920s it emerged as a vehicle for social commentary and political satire; later exile artists used the myth to suggest the descent into social depravity and political chaos in Europe. Long a popular subject for works of artistic kitsch, it triumphed as a widespread symbol of European unity after World War II.Less
This chapter investigates how the tale of Europa and the bull—in poetry, drama, and art, but also in cartoons, advertising, and currency—was initially seized upon by artists around the turn of the century and by Expressionist poets as a parable of sexual awakening and of the essential animality of sex. In the 1920s it emerged as a vehicle for social commentary and political satire; later exile artists used the myth to suggest the descent into social depravity and political chaos in Europe. Long a popular subject for works of artistic kitsch, it triumphed as a widespread symbol of European unity after World War II.
Michael Lundblad (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474400022
- eISBN:
- 9781474434584
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400022.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality ...
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Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume explores the future of what the introduction identifies as “animalities” in exciting new ways, highlighting the work of both internationally renowned figures and emerging scholars who go “beyond the human” in literary and cultural studies.Less
Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume explores the future of what the introduction identifies as “animalities” in exciting new ways, highlighting the work of both internationally renowned figures and emerging scholars who go “beyond the human” in literary and cultural studies.
Christopher Peterson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245208
- eISBN:
- 9780823252602
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245208.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a ...
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In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.Less
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.
Emmanuel Falque
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823270408
- eISBN:
- 9780823270446
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270408.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
This book links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology's “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the ...
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This book links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology's “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the eucharist, the text develops a new concept of the body and of love: By avoiding the common mistake of “angelism”—consciousness without body—it considers the depths to which our humanity reflects animality, or body without consciousness. It shows the continued relevance of the question “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52), especially to philosophy. We need to question the meaning of “this is my body” in “a way that responds to the needs of our time” (Vatican II). Because of the ways that “Hoc est corpus meum” has shaped our culture and our modernity, this is a problem both for religious belief and for culture.Less
This book links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology's “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the eucharist, the text develops a new concept of the body and of love: By avoiding the common mistake of “angelism”—consciousness without body—it considers the depths to which our humanity reflects animality, or body without consciousness. It shows the continued relevance of the question “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52), especially to philosophy. We need to question the meaning of “this is my body” in “a way that responds to the needs of our time” (Vatican II). Because of the ways that “Hoc est corpus meum” has shaped our culture and our modernity, this is a problem both for religious belief and for culture.
Peggy McCracken
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226458922
- eISBN:
- 9780226459080
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226459080.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes ...
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In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. The book discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty, lineage and gender among them, are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.Less
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. The book discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty, lineage and gender among them, are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
Louise Westling
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255658
- eISBN:
- 9780823261208
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255658.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This book is an interdisciplinary work in environmental humanities that puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary biology, animal studies, and literature, arguing for ...
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This book is an interdisciplinary work in environmental humanities that puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary biology, animal studies, and literature, arguing for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. It departs from most philosophic and critical animal studies which retain the traditional view of human exceptionalism. Differing from other studies of Merleau-Ponty’s work, this book emphasizes his lifelong attention to science, showing how his examination of evolutionary biology, embryology, and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal behavior, cognition, and communication. Each chapter explores literary questioning of human-animal relations from The Epic of Gilgamesh and Euripides’s Bacchae to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Chapter 1 introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and dynamic intersubjectivity and chiasm in the context of the phenomenology introduced by Husserl and his proté;gé; Heidegger, with special emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with science. Chapter 2 examines his exploration of animal studies and human animality, in which he insists that there is no evolutionary rupture between our species and other animals but instead a “strange kinship.” The final chapter explores Merleau-Ponty’s theory of language as embodied and gestural, placing it in the context of animal communication, especially among apes. It closes by examining his view that literature and the other arts are a distinctively human manifestation of the sedimentation of experience produced by all life forms on the planet. Here he anticipated the findings of biosemiotics.Less
This book is an interdisciplinary work in environmental humanities that puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary biology, animal studies, and literature, arguing for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. It departs from most philosophic and critical animal studies which retain the traditional view of human exceptionalism. Differing from other studies of Merleau-Ponty’s work, this book emphasizes his lifelong attention to science, showing how his examination of evolutionary biology, embryology, and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal behavior, cognition, and communication. Each chapter explores literary questioning of human-animal relations from The Epic of Gilgamesh and Euripides’s Bacchae to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Chapter 1 introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and dynamic intersubjectivity and chiasm in the context of the phenomenology introduced by Husserl and his proté;gé; Heidegger, with special emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with science. Chapter 2 examines his exploration of animal studies and human animality, in which he insists that there is no evolutionary rupture between our species and other animals but instead a “strange kinship.” The final chapter explores Merleau-Ponty’s theory of language as embodied and gestural, placing it in the context of animal communication, especially among apes. It closes by examining his view that literature and the other arts are a distinctively human manifestation of the sedimentation of experience produced by all life forms on the planet. Here he anticipated the findings of biosemiotics.
Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474422888
- eISBN:
- 9781474444767
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This volume offers a succinct and clear account of the evolution of the work of noted French scholar Raymond Bellour (b. 1939) as expressed in his most important publications in the areas of cinema ...
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This volume offers a succinct and clear account of the evolution of the work of noted French scholar Raymond Bellour (b. 1939) as expressed in his most important publications in the areas of cinema studies and art theory, published over the last four decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. A film scholar and theorist, his interests ranged across film, literature, art and philosophy The book’s first four chapters (Part 1 of the volume) provide a synthetic account of Bellour’s thought on cinema and its relations to the development of moving-image installation art. Chapter one covers his perspectives on film analysis; chapter two continues with his views on the advent of digital media, including video; chapter three follows with his ideas about new forms of spectatorship, the body and classical cinema; chapter four concludes with his contribution to the debates about the end of cinema and the evolving dispositifs (situations or set-ups and their consequent viewing conventions) that have produced contemporary moving-image installation art. A recent interview with Raymond Bellour forms Part 2 of the book’s three sections. Divided into six chapters, it covers the following topics: his formative influences; film analysis and the symbolic; Thierry Kuntzel and the rise of video art; arrested images and “the between-images”; spectators, dispositifs, and the cinematic body; hypnosis, emotions and animality. Part 3 concludes the volume with a short biographical sketch and a select annotated bibliography of Bellour’s most important publications.Less
This volume offers a succinct and clear account of the evolution of the work of noted French scholar Raymond Bellour (b. 1939) as expressed in his most important publications in the areas of cinema studies and art theory, published over the last four decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. A film scholar and theorist, his interests ranged across film, literature, art and philosophy The book’s first four chapters (Part 1 of the volume) provide a synthetic account of Bellour’s thought on cinema and its relations to the development of moving-image installation art. Chapter one covers his perspectives on film analysis; chapter two continues with his views on the advent of digital media, including video; chapter three follows with his ideas about new forms of spectatorship, the body and classical cinema; chapter four concludes with his contribution to the debates about the end of cinema and the evolving dispositifs (situations or set-ups and their consequent viewing conventions) that have produced contemporary moving-image installation art. A recent interview with Raymond Bellour forms Part 2 of the book’s three sections. Divided into six chapters, it covers the following topics: his formative influences; film analysis and the symbolic; Thierry Kuntzel and the rise of video art; arrested images and “the between-images”; spectators, dispositifs, and the cinematic body; hypnosis, emotions and animality. Part 3 concludes the volume with a short biographical sketch and a select annotated bibliography of Bellour’s most important publications.
Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780983533955
- eISBN:
- 9781781384930
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533955.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book presents thirty-seven chapters which present the text of papers selected from approximately 200 papers given at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the ...
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This book presents thirty-seven chapters which present the text of papers selected from approximately 200 papers given at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Glasgow. The theme of contradiction in Woolf's writing, including her use of the word “but,” is widely explored in relation to auto/biography, art, philosophy, cognitive science, sexuality, animality, class, mathematics, translation, annotation, poetry, and war.Less
This book presents thirty-seven chapters which present the text of papers selected from approximately 200 papers given at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Glasgow. The theme of contradiction in Woolf's writing, including her use of the word “but,” is widely explored in relation to auto/biography, art, philosophy, cognitive science, sexuality, animality, class, mathematics, translation, annotation, poetry, and war.
Andreas Höfele
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199567645
- eISBN:
- 9780191731075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567645.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The introduction specifies the proximity of theatre and bear-baiting in the cultural topography of Shakespeare’s London. The two entertainments were not just physically close but joined in active ...
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The introduction specifies the proximity of theatre and bear-baiting in the cultural topography of Shakespeare’s London. The two entertainments were not just physically close but joined in active collusion, generating a perceptive overlap which included the scaffold of public execution as a third partner. This overlap provided a highly productive matrix for synopsis (‘seeing together’) of human actors and their animal counterparts in both their likeness and unlikeness. Evidence for the physical presence of animals on Shakespeare’s stage is scanty at best – even the bear in Winter’s Tale could well have been a human actor – but their imaginative presence is all the more powerful and far from innocent. The stage may have been tainted by the messy company of stake and scaffold, but its very closeness to the rending, tearing and killing also made it a unique platform for evoking sympathy for the suffering fellow creature.Less
The introduction specifies the proximity of theatre and bear-baiting in the cultural topography of Shakespeare’s London. The two entertainments were not just physically close but joined in active collusion, generating a perceptive overlap which included the scaffold of public execution as a third partner. This overlap provided a highly productive matrix for synopsis (‘seeing together’) of human actors and their animal counterparts in both their likeness and unlikeness. Evidence for the physical presence of animals on Shakespeare’s stage is scanty at best – even the bear in Winter’s Tale could well have been a human actor – but their imaginative presence is all the more powerful and far from innocent. The stage may have been tainted by the messy company of stake and scaffold, but its very closeness to the rending, tearing and killing also made it a unique platform for evoking sympathy for the suffering fellow creature.
Mark I. Wallace
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281329
- eISBN:
- 9780823284955
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281329.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Chapter 1 begins with the song of the wood thrush and then focuses on divine animals in the Bible. It examines the Gospels’ “pigeon God” in which the Spirit-bird alights on Jesus at the time of his ...
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Chapter 1 begins with the song of the wood thrush and then focuses on divine animals in the Bible. It examines the Gospels’ “pigeon God” in which the Spirit-bird alights on Jesus at the time of his baptism, signaling the unity of all things: divine life and birdlife, divinity and animality, spirit and flesh. And it argues that the Bible’s seeming prohibitions against animal deities is vitiated by Moses’ and Jesus’ ophidian shamanism that privileges snake-totemism as a source of salvation in Numbers and John, respectively. It examines intimations of “Christian animism”—the belief that all things, including so-called inanimate objects, are alive with sacred presence—in George E. “Tink” Taylor, Lynn White Jr., and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a second-century CE avian spirit possession narrative. It concludes that insofar as the Spirit is ornithomorphic, it behooves us to care for the natural world as the site of God’s daily presence.Less
Chapter 1 begins with the song of the wood thrush and then focuses on divine animals in the Bible. It examines the Gospels’ “pigeon God” in which the Spirit-bird alights on Jesus at the time of his baptism, signaling the unity of all things: divine life and birdlife, divinity and animality, spirit and flesh. And it argues that the Bible’s seeming prohibitions against animal deities is vitiated by Moses’ and Jesus’ ophidian shamanism that privileges snake-totemism as a source of salvation in Numbers and John, respectively. It examines intimations of “Christian animism”—the belief that all things, including so-called inanimate objects, are alive with sacred presence—in George E. “Tink” Taylor, Lynn White Jr., and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a second-century CE avian spirit possession narrative. It concludes that insofar as the Spirit is ornithomorphic, it behooves us to care for the natural world as the site of God’s daily presence.
Mark I. Wallace
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281329
- eISBN:
- 9780823284955
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281329.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Chapter 2 begins with a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) tour of Pennsylvania to witness the devastation wrought by extreme energy extraction. In Martin Heidegger, this type of technology is an ...
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Chapter 2 begins with a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) tour of Pennsylvania to witness the devastation wrought by extreme energy extraction. In Martin Heidegger, this type of technology is an exploitative “setting-upon” nature, rather than “bringing-forth” nature’s latent possibilities in a manner that is site-appropriate and organic. Healthy interactions with nature are resonant with the “incantatory gesture” characteristic of Christian animism: summoning the presence of the numinous within the everyday. Glossing Mary Douglas, this chapter shows that Jesus, the good shaman, is a model of “bringing-forth” when he mixes saliva and dirt together to heal the blind man in John 9. According to René Girard, however, nature is not a site of healing but of dangerous boundary-violations. The chapter concludes with a vignette about the pileated woodpecker, sometimes called the “Lord God!” bird by awestruck onlookers. Like the aerial Spirit at Jesus’ baptism, catching sight of this avian deity reconciles the two orders of being—divinity and animality—Girard seeks to drive apart.Less
Chapter 2 begins with a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) tour of Pennsylvania to witness the devastation wrought by extreme energy extraction. In Martin Heidegger, this type of technology is an exploitative “setting-upon” nature, rather than “bringing-forth” nature’s latent possibilities in a manner that is site-appropriate and organic. Healthy interactions with nature are resonant with the “incantatory gesture” characteristic of Christian animism: summoning the presence of the numinous within the everyday. Glossing Mary Douglas, this chapter shows that Jesus, the good shaman, is a model of “bringing-forth” when he mixes saliva and dirt together to heal the blind man in John 9. According to René Girard, however, nature is not a site of healing but of dangerous boundary-violations. The chapter concludes with a vignette about the pileated woodpecker, sometimes called the “Lord God!” bird by awestruck onlookers. Like the aerial Spirit at Jesus’ baptism, catching sight of this avian deity reconciles the two orders of being—divinity and animality—Girard seeks to drive apart.
Ter Ellingson
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520222687
- eISBN:
- 9780520925922
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520222687.003.0009
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter goes back to 1732 for a pre-Rousseau example of a work by a leading scientist that can be usefully juxtaposed with later works, including some which highlight the possibility of opposing ...
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This chapter goes back to 1732 for a pre-Rousseau example of a work by a leading scientist that can be usefully juxtaposed with later works, including some which highlight the possibility of opposing interpretations of the same peoples, and so, by extension, the constructedness of scientists' interpretations. Ethnographic and scientific representations increasingly found evidences of animality and atavism in “savages” and lower classes alike. But the negativistic turn of European discourse on the savage also marked a significant break with eighteenth-century progressivism. Now the interpretations of other peoples began to change as well, and the change reached as far as the boundaries of Europe itself.Less
This chapter goes back to 1732 for a pre-Rousseau example of a work by a leading scientist that can be usefully juxtaposed with later works, including some which highlight the possibility of opposing interpretations of the same peoples, and so, by extension, the constructedness of scientists' interpretations. Ethnographic and scientific representations increasingly found evidences of animality and atavism in “savages” and lower classes alike. But the negativistic turn of European discourse on the savage also marked a significant break with eighteenth-century progressivism. Now the interpretations of other peoples began to change as well, and the change reached as far as the boundaries of Europe itself.
Elissa Marder
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823240555
- eISBN:
- 9780823240593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240555.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter suggests that the case history Wolf Man not only provides Freud's most sustained articulation of the concept of the primal scene in psychoanalysis, but also that the case itself ...
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This chapter suggests that the case history Wolf Man not only provides Freud's most sustained articulation of the concept of the primal scene in psychoanalysis, but also that the case itself constitutes something of a primal scene for psychoanalysis. Freud's text resembles a dream rebus that amalgamates his entire metapsychological apparatus into a fabulous narrative whose function is to account for the radical unthinkability of the primal scene of birth. Freud's quasi-photographic reconstruction of the “real event” that ostensibly gives rise to the primal scene becomes the site at which several critical differences (real event vs. fiction, man vs. woman, human vs. animal) are viewed, constructed, and repressed. In Wolf Man, Freud attempts to grapple with the fact that the specificity of human subjectivity is grounded in a relation to sexuality which renders us simultaneously too close and too far from the realm of animals.Less
This chapter suggests that the case history Wolf Man not only provides Freud's most sustained articulation of the concept of the primal scene in psychoanalysis, but also that the case itself constitutes something of a primal scene for psychoanalysis. Freud's text resembles a dream rebus that amalgamates his entire metapsychological apparatus into a fabulous narrative whose function is to account for the radical unthinkability of the primal scene of birth. Freud's quasi-photographic reconstruction of the “real event” that ostensibly gives rise to the primal scene becomes the site at which several critical differences (real event vs. fiction, man vs. woman, human vs. animal) are viewed, constructed, and repressed. In Wolf Man, Freud attempts to grapple with the fact that the specificity of human subjectivity is grounded in a relation to sexuality which renders us simultaneously too close and too far from the realm of animals.
Juan Manuel Garrido
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823239351
- eISBN:
- 9780823239399
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239351.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This chapter analyzes the relation between life and being in Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics. Life or “animality” are inaccessible to knowledge and understanding. There is no common ...
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This chapter analyzes the relation between life and being in Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics. Life or “animality” are inaccessible to knowledge and understanding. There is no common world and common experience between the human and other living beings. There is no “being-with” with living beings. Heidegger deeply criticizes the traditional way of grasping the difference between animality and humanity. For him, the animal is no longer considered a potential aspect of the human (as a pre-linguistic sensitivity, for instance). He also criticizes the biologism and the possible knowledge of life through empathy. Life (animality) is inaccessible (life is the most difficult thing to think, as Heidegger says in Letter on Humanism). In the wake of this work, Derrida sees in animality the figure of an absolute otherness. Following these works of Heidegger and Derrida, it is possible to begin conceptualizing “life” beyond its traditional concept, therefore beyond being. “Life” (animality) thus becomes then an object with which to engage the deconstruction of ontology.Less
This chapter analyzes the relation between life and being in Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics. Life or “animality” are inaccessible to knowledge and understanding. There is no common world and common experience between the human and other living beings. There is no “being-with” with living beings. Heidegger deeply criticizes the traditional way of grasping the difference between animality and humanity. For him, the animal is no longer considered a potential aspect of the human (as a pre-linguistic sensitivity, for instance). He also criticizes the biologism and the possible knowledge of life through empathy. Life (animality) is inaccessible (life is the most difficult thing to think, as Heidegger says in Letter on Humanism). In the wake of this work, Derrida sees in animality the figure of an absolute otherness. Following these works of Heidegger and Derrida, it is possible to begin conceptualizing “life” beyond its traditional concept, therefore beyond being. “Life” (animality) thus becomes then an object with which to engage the deconstruction of ontology.
Karen Bray and Stephen D. Moore (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823285679
- eISBN:
- 9780823288854
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823285679.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what the blooming field of critical inquiry known as affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, or liturgies. ...
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Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what the blooming field of critical inquiry known as affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, or liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly. At once transpersonal and prepersonal, affect transcends and subtends the human. As such, it has affinity with divinity, but a divinity that is indissociable from materiality. Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical narratives, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the Egyptian mosque movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry, all in dialogue with such fields as postcolonial and decolonial theories, critical animality studies, secular theology, feminist science studies, new materialism, and indigenous futurism. Not only does the volume map affect theory and add breadth and depth to the study of affect and religion, but it demonstrates the political and social import of such study. Those desiring an introduction to affect theory, together with those eager to delve into its wide-ranging applications within religious studies, will find this volume to be essential reading.Less
Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what the blooming field of critical inquiry known as affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, or liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly. At once transpersonal and prepersonal, affect transcends and subtends the human. As such, it has affinity with divinity, but a divinity that is indissociable from materiality. Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical narratives, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the Egyptian mosque movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry, all in dialogue with such fields as postcolonial and decolonial theories, critical animality studies, secular theology, feminist science studies, new materialism, and indigenous futurism. Not only does the volume map affect theory and add breadth and depth to the study of affect and religion, but it demonstrates the political and social import of such study. Those desiring an introduction to affect theory, together with those eager to delve into its wide-ranging applications within religious studies, will find this volume to be essential reading.
Matthew Brower
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654789
- eISBN:
- 9781452946191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654789.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Photography
This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the book and relates them to later developments in animal representation. By tracing the effects of photography on cultural conceptions of animals, ...
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This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the book and relates them to later developments in animal representation. By tracing the effects of photography on cultural conceptions of animals, the book demonstrates photography’s centrality to contemporary discourses of animality. It also troubles the separation of the human and the animal that photographic technologies have helped to enable and the need to now look at the history and rethink the implications of this imposed and somewhat artificial separation.Less
This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the book and relates them to later developments in animal representation. By tracing the effects of photography on cultural conceptions of animals, the book demonstrates photography’s centrality to contemporary discourses of animality. It also troubles the separation of the human and the animal that photographic technologies have helped to enable and the need to now look at the history and rethink the implications of this imposed and somewhat artificial separation.
Michael Lundblad
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474400022
- eISBN:
- 9781474434584
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400022.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, ...
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The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.Less
The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.
Michael Lundblad
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474400022
- eISBN:
- 9781474434584
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400022.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end ...
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Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end of life. Animality is invoked in the texts as a model for constructing supposedly the right way to approach a diagnosis of cancer, suggesting what kind of death could be seen as a good one, if that might ever be possible. Williams’s two memoirs are linked by the ways they use birds and the discourse of what should be considered “natural” to explain when or how to resist not only death, but also patriarchal gender norms, imperialist U.S. aggression in the “War on Terror”, atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site, and the destruction of environments from Utah to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lundblad’s emphasis is on how constructions of birds can naturalize problematic human discourses, but the chapter also points toward the ways that these essentialized constructions are limiting for nonhuman animals as well.Less
Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end of life. Animality is invoked in the texts as a model for constructing supposedly the right way to approach a diagnosis of cancer, suggesting what kind of death could be seen as a good one, if that might ever be possible. Williams’s two memoirs are linked by the ways they use birds and the discourse of what should be considered “natural” to explain when or how to resist not only death, but also patriarchal gender norms, imperialist U.S. aggression in the “War on Terror”, atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site, and the destruction of environments from Utah to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lundblad’s emphasis is on how constructions of birds can naturalize problematic human discourses, but the chapter also points toward the ways that these essentialized constructions are limiting for nonhuman animals as well.
Vanessa Lemm
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823230273
- eISBN:
- 9780823235469
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823230273.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides a systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a ...
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This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides a systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole. The book argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. The book provides an original contribution to on-going debates on the essence of humanism and its future. At the center of this new interpretation stands Nietzsche's thesis that animal life and its potential for truth, history, and morality depends on a continuous antagonism between forgetfulness (animality) and memory (humanity). This relationship accounts for the emergence of humanity out of animality as a function of the antagonism between civilization and culture. By taking the antagonism of culture and civilization to be fundamental for Nietzsche's conception of humanity and its becoming, this book gives a new entry point into the political significance of Nietzsche's thought. The opposition between civilization and culture allows for the possibility that politics is more than a set of civilizational techniques that seek to manipulate, dominate, and exclude the animality of the human animal. By seeing the deep-seated connections of politics with culture, Nietzsche orients politics beyond the domination over life and, instead, offers the animality of the human being a positive, creative role in the organization of life. This book presents Nietzsche as the thinker of an emancipatory and affirmative biopolitics.Less
This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides a systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole. The book argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. The book provides an original contribution to on-going debates on the essence of humanism and its future. At the center of this new interpretation stands Nietzsche's thesis that animal life and its potential for truth, history, and morality depends on a continuous antagonism between forgetfulness (animality) and memory (humanity). This relationship accounts for the emergence of humanity out of animality as a function of the antagonism between civilization and culture. By taking the antagonism of culture and civilization to be fundamental for Nietzsche's conception of humanity and its becoming, this book gives a new entry point into the political significance of Nietzsche's thought. The opposition between civilization and culture allows for the possibility that politics is more than a set of civilizational techniques that seek to manipulate, dominate, and exclude the animality of the human animal. By seeing the deep-seated connections of politics with culture, Nietzsche orients politics beyond the domination over life and, instead, offers the animality of the human being a positive, creative role in the organization of life. This book presents Nietzsche as the thinker of an emancipatory and affirmative biopolitics.
Michèle Mendelssohn
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623853
- eISBN:
- 9780748651634
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623853.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In the early 1880s, Henry James made the transatlantic aesthete his own despite the figure's increasing association with Oscar Wilde. Though James privately dissociated himself from Wilde's artistic, ...
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In the early 1880s, Henry James made the transatlantic aesthete his own despite the figure's increasing association with Oscar Wilde. Though James privately dissociated himself from Wilde's artistic, sexual and identity politics, vestigial markers remain apparent in James's fiction. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Wilde situated his art theory in reaction to that of James and James McNeill Whistler, defining an oppositional aesthetic through a process of imaginative review-as-revision that aimed to mitigate Realism's vivisectionist tendencies. This chapter marks the demise of Aestheticism and the beginning of James's decadent turn. First, it analyses the language of puerility and animality that pervades James's and Wilde's interaction. It then charts the manner in which, post-1895, both authors recuperate this idiom to describe an innocent and erotic child of power that radically undermines Aestheticism's moral stance. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and De Profundis replicate and interrogate the unmitigated state of moral crisis that resulted from Wilde's trial. In this final crisis, both narratives radically reassess Aestheticism's central tenets, particularly its uncoupling of the aesthetic and the moral.Less
In the early 1880s, Henry James made the transatlantic aesthete his own despite the figure's increasing association with Oscar Wilde. Though James privately dissociated himself from Wilde's artistic, sexual and identity politics, vestigial markers remain apparent in James's fiction. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Wilde situated his art theory in reaction to that of James and James McNeill Whistler, defining an oppositional aesthetic through a process of imaginative review-as-revision that aimed to mitigate Realism's vivisectionist tendencies. This chapter marks the demise of Aestheticism and the beginning of James's decadent turn. First, it analyses the language of puerility and animality that pervades James's and Wilde's interaction. It then charts the manner in which, post-1895, both authors recuperate this idiom to describe an innocent and erotic child of power that radically undermines Aestheticism's moral stance. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and De Profundis replicate and interrogate the unmitigated state of moral crisis that resulted from Wilde's trial. In this final crisis, both narratives radically reassess Aestheticism's central tenets, particularly its uncoupling of the aesthetic and the moral.
