The aim of this paper is to revisit an ongoing controversy within the so called “Science Wars”; more specifically, I will address a particular topic within the “human nature” debate: the ontological and epistemological status of homosexuality. I claim that, in this particular chapter of the “Science Wars”, we are continually left in an explanatory impasse even when more data are collected, more rigorous experimental techniques are developed, more subtle arguments are offered and more pluralistic narratives are told. My diagnosis (...) of the source of this impasse leads me to the conclusion that here we are dealing with a structural problem that cannot be solved with an elaboration of new models and theories that maintain an on- tology and an epistemology that are no longer suited as an explanans of human nature in general, and homosexuality in particular. Nevertheless, my analysis of the structural features of the biological explanations and the constructivist counter-explanations also leads me to the belief that, although biologists do not fully understand the intricacies of subjects, neither constructivists understand the facticity of evolution and the challenge that it implies. If so, then the subject might be the right target of explanation. And, if so, constructivists might be right about the uniqueness of human homosexuality as a modern, western phenomenon explainable in terms of subjectivities and identities that mold and are molded by desires and institutions. But, if they are, evolution is not expendable because now we are facing a most intriguing question: How is that we humans became subjects? (shrink)

This article responds to the phenomenon of Internet cats becoming pervasive in Web 2.0, while at the same time digitally shared self-portraits, commonly called “selfies,” also circulate with extremely high frequency. The author tracks the efficacy of sharing selfies for trans/two Spirit individuals such as artist Kiley May and in trans-centric hashtag campaigns. It shows that trans-animality in digital life can offer sovereign forms of subjectivity and engages response patterns that locate a trans point of regard. Further, it seeks to (...) explain why so many different kinds of cuteness are shared in the intimate superpublics of online trans* communities. Building on classic texts in philosophical cat studies, such as from Jacques Derrida, the concept of the “inappropriate/d other,” and contemporary cuteness theories, the article argues that cute aesthetics provide a sentimental shield, can counter sexual indifference, and often enact a mode of resilience crucial for surviving in cultures that erase the existence of trans people of color. (shrink)

This article considers a selection of Chris Marker's films in the context of noted differences between Emmanuel Levinas's and Jacques Derrida's positions on the animal as Other, the potential for the animal face. Derrida (2008) himself argues that Levinas ‘did not make the animal anything like a focus of interrogation within his work’ (p. 105). Statements such as this about Levinas's ethics seem to make his position clear. In contrast, Derrida's thinking on the matter of the animal, and in particular (...) human responsibility for them as Other, stands as a thorough and influential body of ethical thought, probing the limited and limiting boundary between human and animal. His autobiographical texts, according to Lynn Turner (2015, p. 135), welcome animal others. Marker's images, I will argue, address an equity between species through what he refers to as the égalité du regard, an equality in the gaze (of the camera). These images speak to a space beyond themselves and it is within this territory, I will argue, that the animal does have a face, that can occur via that of the human. (shrink)

This essay addresses the other side of the robot ethics debate, taking up and investigating the question “Can and should robots have rights?” The examination of this subject proceeds by way of three steps or movements. We begin by looking at and analyzing the form of the question itself. There is an important philosophical difference between the two modal verbs that organize the inquiry—can and should. This difference has considerable history behind it that influences what is asked about and how. (...) Second, capitalizing on this verbal distinction, it is possible to identify four modalities concerning social robots and the question of rights. The second section will identify and critically assess these four modalities as they have been deployed and developed in the current literature. Finally, we will conclude by proposing another alternative, a way of thinking otherwise that effectively challenges the existing rules of the game and provides for other ways of theorizing moral standing that can scale to the unique challenges and opportunities that are confronted in the face of social robots. (shrink)

AbstractMichel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of institutions of confinement such as the psychiatric asylum and the prison. Although the invention of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, can be considered emblematic moments in a history of modernity, and although the modern farm is an institution of confinement comparable to the prison, Foucault never addressed these institutions, the politics of animal agriculture, or power relationships between humans and other (...) animals more generally. The few times that Foucault discussed animality or human–animal relations, animals and animality remained metaphors for humans and human experiences. Despite Foucault's failure to analyze human–nonhuman animal relations, a significant body of Critical Animal Studies literature has mobilized Foucault's work over the last decade. In particular, a number of scholars have taken up Foucault's writings to consider how relations between humans and nonhuman animals in agriculture might be conceptualized as instances of sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power, as well as why we may not think that these are power relations at all. This essay provides an overview of Foucault's accounts of power and of the Foucauldian scholarship that applies these accounts to human–nonhuman animal relations in animal agriculture. (shrink)

This article argues that the standard model of political representation mischaracterises the structure of representation. After surveying the classical types of representation and their application to non-humans, the basic nature of representation is shown to have been unduly centred on interests, responsiveness and unidirectional protocols. It proposes a different structure by drawing inspiration from recent scholarship and developments in political philosophy, as well as the representation of non-human actors. It proposes an ontological grounding of representation in ‘irreducible multiplicity’, and a (...) structural analysis based on the concepts of claim and relation. This abstract form of representation can take into account both human and non-human cases, and works to ground different typologies. The relational structure of representation creates interests and preferences, subjects and actors, power dynamics and seemingly immutable identities. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the thesis put forward by David Gunkel and Mark Coeckelbergh in their essay Facing Animals:A Relational, Other-Oriented Approach to Moral Standing. The authors believe that the question about the status of animals needs to be reconsidered. In their opinion, traditional attempts to justify the practice of ascribing rights to animals have been based on the search for what is common to animals and people. This popular conviction rests on the intuition according to which we tend (...) to treat better those beings that are closer to us and resemble man in one way or the other. The attempts to ascribe a special status to animals are therefore based on the question “What properties does the animal have?”. However, the question is not well formulated because it leads to a number of ontological and epistemological problems. The question should rather be “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?”. Whilst fully subscribing to the suggestion, I cannot agree to the way the question is understood by both authors. I will demonstrate that the question opens up a transcendental dimension of reflections and may provide a clear justification of the need to engage in animal ethics. To do so, I will separate the easy and hard problems of animal ethics and use a different approach from the one suggested by Gunkel and Coeckelbergh to demonstrate how the need to pursue animal ethics may be justified. (shrink)

I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately (...) linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences. (shrink)

In many of his writings and lectures Ortega y Gasset criticized Darwinism on numbers of issues. In this paper I aim to reexamine his critique and to prove that in 1916 the harsh critique was designed to hide the similarity between his ideas and Darwin's idea of Natural Selection. The origins of Ortega's idea on the vocation of man can be traced in his dialogue with Darwin in the year 1916. In the historiography his Philosophy of Life is conceived as (...) a metaphysics that stands beyond biological and any other natural explanation. My contention on the other hand is that Ortega's concept of the vocation of man is an elaboration of Darwin's Natural Selection. I will try to show that in 1916 Ortega conceived the human character and the vocation of man as a product of Natural Selection. Instead of following Ortega's critiques on Darwin and his effort to show that there is no connection between his Philosophy of Life and Darwinism the article proposes to reconsider Ortega's thought as a constant dialogue with Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. The Change in Ortega's conception of Darwin's evolution came rather late in his thought and in the first section we will see how Ortega described technology in a manner that allows the human subject to change the environment in his favor. (shrink)

The international protest surrounding the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent decision to kill a healthy giraffe in the name of population management reveals a deep moral tension between contemporary zoological display practices—which induce zoo-goers to view certain animals as individuals, quasi-persons, or friends—and the traditional objectives of zoos, which ask us only to view animals as specimens. I argue that these zoological display practices give rise to moral obligations on the part of zoos to their visitors, and thus ground indirect duties on (...) behalf of zoos to their animals. I conclude that zoos might take on interspecies friendship as a new zoological objective. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline valuable insights that current theorists working in urban environmental ethics can gain from the analysis of nineteenth century urban contexts. Specifically, I argue that an analysis of urban areas during this time reveals two sets of competing metaphysical commitments that, when accepted, shift both the design of urban environments and our relationship with the natural world in these contexts. While one set of metaphysical commitments could help inform current projects in urban environmental ethics, the second (...) “de-animalized” or “cleansed” commitments that influenced the structure of post-nineteenth century urban areas could potentially harm projects in urban environmental ethics. Thus we need to be particularly careful when choosing a metaphysical base for our current urban environmental ethics, as, depending on your specific project, implicitly accepting certain commitments could inadvertently work against the overall goals of the project. (shrink)

Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and understanding. This profusion of new evidence and edifying approaches demands that (...) we rethink our ideas both of animality and of the nature and origins of culture. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls (...) for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making. (shrink)

This paper investigates forms of metaphysical vertigo that can appear when contrasts between humans and animals are challenged. Distinguishing three forms of vertigo and four ways of differentiating humans and animals, the paper attempts to achieve a perspicuous representation of what could be termed “the difficulty of being humans when we are animals”; or alternatively, “the difficulty of being animals when we are humans”.

Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida’s program with Stengers’s and Latour’s. I read Derrida’s critique of hospitality and Stengers’s and Latour’s ontological politics as necessary complements for conceiving (...) a care-oriented subalternist cosmopolitics, a process of composing common worlds that remains attentive to the limits of representation. (shrink)

In this essay we reflect critically on how animal ethics, and in particular thinking about moral standing, is currently configured. Starting from the work of two influential “analytic” thinkers in this field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, we examine some basic assumptions shared by these positions and demonstrate their conceptual failings—ones that have, despite efforts to the contrary, the general effect of marginalizing and excluding others. Inspired by the so-called “continental” philosophical tradition , we then argue that what is needed (...) is a change in the rules of the game, a change of the question. We alter the normative question from “What properties does the animal have?” to “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?” This leads us to consider the role of language, personal relations, and material-technological contexts. What is needed then in response to the moral standing problem, is not more of the same—yet another, more refined criterion and argumentation concerning moral standing, or a “final” rational argumentation that would be able to settle the animal question once and for all—but a turning or transformation in both our thinking about and our relations to animals, through language, through technology, and through the various place-ordering practices in which we participate. (shrink)

Answers to the question, “What is a farm animal?” often revolve around genetics, physical attributes, and the animals’ functions in agricultural production. The essential and defining characteristics of farm animals transcend these limited models, however, and require an answer that avoids reductionism and encompasses a de-atomizing point of view. Such an answer should promote recognition of animals as beings with extensive mental and social capabilities that outline the extent of each individual animal’s existence and—at the same time—define the animals as (...) parts of wholes that in themselves are more than the sum of their parts and have ethological as well as ethical relevance. To accomplish this, the concepts of both anthropomorphism and sociobiology will be examined, and the article will show how the possibility of understanding animals and their characteristics deeply affects both ethology and philosophy; that is, it has an important influence on our descriptive knowledge of animals, the concept of what animal welfare is and can be, and any normative ethics that follow such knowledge. (shrink)

The turn of the millennium has witnessed an extraordinary paradox—one identified by Jacques Derrida as a simultaneous increase in violence against nonhuman animals and compassion toward them. This article turns to critical legal theory as well as to recent work by continental philosophers on the human/animal distinction in order to make sense of the ways the paradox manifests in law, arguing that so-called animal welfare laws that appear to be politically progressive are, in fact, iterations of the very violence they (...) purport to redress. What legislation designates as “animal” has neither language nor a recognized image, which not only renders this singular object of law voiceless but also denies that object access to any experience of death, and thus, to life. Through a deconstruction of recently enacted Japanese “animal welfare” legislation, this article proposes that the inability of the legislator to think the animal as having a relation to death belies a deeper struggle at the heart of law itself, to constitute its subjects through language. (shrink)

In 2008, the European Community adopted a Proposal to revise the EC Directive on nonhuman animal experiments, with the aim of improving the welfare of the nonhuman animals used in experiments. An Impact Assessment, which gauges the likely economic and scientific effects of future changes, as well as the effects on nonhuman animal welfare, informs the Proposal. By using a discourse analytical approach, this paper examines the Directive, the Impact Assessment and the Proposal to reflect critically upon assumptions about the (...) morality of nonhuman animal experiments. Because nonhuman animal welfare is so prominent in the Proposal, it appears that the EC position advances beyond human self-interest as the sole motivator for such experiments, to ethical questions about the welfare of nonhuman animals . In examining this contention, this paper concludes that, even given concerns about nonhuman animal welfare, nonhuman animal experimentation in the EC is firmly grounded in a morality that focuses on human benefit goals rather than on the wider moral issues associated with the means of achieving such goals. (shrink)

This is a response to an article published inSociety & Animals in 2008 that argued for the existence of a “species identity disorder” in some furries. Species identity disorder is modeled on gender identity disorder, itself a highly controversial diagnosis that has been criticized for pathologizing homosexuality and transgendered people. This response examines the claims of the article and suggests that the typology it constructs is based on unexamined assumptions about what constitutes “human” identity and regulatory fictions of gender identity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

The modernist conception of the autonomous ‘subject’ as centred, sovereign, and coherently rational, acting intentionally, knowledgeably, and volitionally, has been challenged from a variety of sources, including poststructuralism, feminism, and posthumanism. A different kind of attack on the modernist subject has recently been staged by neurobiologists who have started to decentre the subject from within—to ‘naturalise’ (and materialise) the subject. This biological naturalism—the new ‘life sciences’—claims to challenge our conceptions of self, the ethical subject, and what we conceive of as (...) ‘life’. But what conceptions we have of the configurations of the self is fundamental to our understandings and conceptions of ethics. This paper traces a debate between German neurobiologists and (post)humanist philosophers on the ontology of such things as ‘free will’, ‘ethical agency’, and the ‘self' as an example of how the dispute between naturalists and nonnaturalist or postnaturalists is instrumental in sharpening our understanding of the self and of ethical agency. The paper argues that naturalism is bound to fail due to its inability to grasp the intersubjectivist nature of ethical agency, a theme which links up with recent geographical writing on ethics. I suggest, building on a recent contribution of Huib Ernste in this journal, that we should consider Helmuth Plessner’s concept of eccentric positionality and ontology of the possible as a postmetaphysical kind of ethical humanism. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 18, Issue 4, Page 63-79, December 2013.

This paper is a response to Val Plumwoods call for writers to engage in ‘the struggle to think differently’. Specifically, she calls writers to engage in the task of opening up an experience of nature as powerful and as possessing agency. I argue that a critical component of opening up who or what can be understood as possessing agency involves challenging the conception of time as linear, externalised and absolute, particularly in as much as it has guided Western conceptions of (...) process, change and invention. I explore this through anthropologist Carol Greenhouse's claim that social conceptions of time can be read as theories of agency. Thus, in seeking to respond to Plumwood’s call to think differently, the question becomes: what kind of writing would enable a fundamental re-thinking of agency without, however, ignoring the way Western notions of agency have been shaped by linear accounts of time? I look to Jacques Derrida's work as one example. I first locate the possibility of re-writing time and agency in the experiential aspects of his writing, which I argue interrupt both the reader’s sense of agency and linear models of reading. But further, I connect Derrida’s work directly with Plumwood’s by examining how his deconstruction of the Western concept of invention may enable another account of creative change that could reshape what counts as ‘agency’ within the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The article investigates the possibilities of phenomenology to contribute to the study of animal behaviour, and, respectively, asks how and on what grounds phenomenology can benefit from the research done within empirical sciences. The theoretical point of departure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior and the essay "The Metaphysical in Man".

This essay responds to the machine question in the affirmative, arguing that artifacts, like robots, AI, and other autonomous systems, can no longer be legitimately excluded from moral consideration. The demonstration of this thesis proceeds in four parts or movements. The first and second parts approach the subject by investigating the two constitutive components of the ethical relationship—moral agency and patiency. In the process, they each demonstrate failure. This occurs not because the machine is somehow unable to achieve what is (...) considered necessary and sufficient to be a moral agent or patient but because the characterization of agency and patiency already fail to accommodate others. The third and fourth parts respond to this problem by considering two recent alternatives—the all-encompassing ontocentric approach of Luciano Floridi’s information ethics and Emmanuel Levinas’s eccentric ethics of otherness. Both alternatives, despite considerable promise to reconfigure the scope of moral thinking by addressing previously excluded others, like the machine, also fail but for other reasons. Consequently, the essay concludes not by accommodating the alterity of the machine to the requirements of moral philosophy but by questioning the systemic limitations of moral reasoning, requiring not just an extension of rights to machines, but a thorough examination of the way moral standing has been configured in the first place. (shrink)

Business ethics, as it is understood and practised generally, lacks a component of radicality. As part of the contemporary ‘return to ethics’ it displays an undesirable conservatism and blocks off possibilities for systemic alterity. I argue that a normal and ‘apologetic’ business ethics should therefore be supplemented with a radical or utopian business ethics. Put differently, business ethics should not only contribute to more responsible business practices, more morally sensitive business managers and more ethical organisational cultures, but should also facilitate (...) social hope via hermeneutic strategies aimed at changing the way we think about ourselves, our economies and the roles and responsibilities of business as such. (shrink)

Recently, many pro- animal thinkers have expressed critical views on the animal rights movement. In particular, the movement has been criticized for being philosophically uninformed, politically regressive, and practically unpersuasive. This paper investigates these criticisms and seeks to map out the philosophy behind the grassroots animal rights movement, specifically. It concludes that the criticism presented by animal studies scholars is often misplaced due to a lack of understanding of the philosophical notions within the movement, but that the critics are right (...) to argue that the movement needs to place more emphasis on persuasion. (shrink)

Prompted by Derrida's work on the animal-fable in eighteenth-century debates about political power, this article examines the role played by the fiction of the animal in thinking of pity as either a natural virtue (in Rousseau's Second Discourse) or as a natural passion (in Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees). The war of fables between Rousseau and Mandeville – and their hostile reception by Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith – reinforce that the animal-fable illustrates not so much the proper of (...) man as the possibilities and limitations of a moral philosophy that is unable to address the political realities of the state. (shrink)

Abstract In his paper “The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem” ( Nanoethics 2: 305-36, 2008) Thompson argued that technological attempts to reduce or eliminate selected non-human animals’ capabilities (animal disenhancements) in order to solve or mitigate animal welfare problems in animals’ use pose a philosophical conundrum, because there is a contradiction between rational arguments in favor of these technological interventions and intuitions against them. In her response “Animal Disenhancement and the Non-Identity Problem: A Response to (...) Thompson” ( Nanoethics 5:43–48, 2011), Palmer maintained that the philosophical conundrum is even deeper if we introduce the non-identity problem into the discussion. In my brief response, I claim that in order to avoid the pitfalls of speculative ethics, empirical facts related to the technologies involved as well as costs for the non-human animals have to be taken into account. Depending on which changes we are referring to, ethical problems can be seen very differently. Widening the consideration to the socio-economic context in which non-human animals are currently used by humans, I challenge the idea of genuine philosophical conundrums from an antispeciesist and abolitionist perspective. Only in a context of exploitation, in which non-human animals are deprived of basic rights and their existence is totally dependent on human exploitation, the contradictions between improvement of welfare and disenhancement of capabilities make sense. Content Type Journal Article Category Critical Discussion Notes Pages 1-12 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0139-1 Authors Arianna Ferrari, KIT/ITAS (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis), Karlsruhe, Germany Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757. (shrink)

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner and—worker, who enters education and research laboratories under (...) false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the “negative spaces” of education. The techne of undercover work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits; different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions, provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration. (shrink)

Abstract In this essay I show that while Levinas himself was clearly reluctant to extend to nonhuman animals the same kind of moral consideration he gave to humans, his ethics of alterity is one of the best equipped to mount a strong challenge to the traditional view of animals as beings of limited, if any, moral status. I argue that the logic of Levinas's own arguments concerning the otherness of the Other militates against interpreting ethics exclusively in terms of human (...) interests and values, and, furthermore, that Levinas's phenomenology of the face applies to all beings that can suffer and are capable of expressing that suffering to me. Insofar as an animal has a face in Levinas's sense through which it is able to express its suffering to me, then there is no moral justification for refusing to extend to it moral consideration. 1. (shrink)

This article studies a series of provocative references to Spinoza by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. For both contemporary philosophers, the context is discussions of eating, a subject matter that turns out to involve such central issues as subjectivity, nature, ethics, and teleology. Each situates Spinoza in a counter-history of philosophy and suggests that Spinoza constitutes an important resource for contemporary reflections. Through an analysis of the three philosophers' texts about eating, nutrition, and being metabolized, I argue that Spinoza's nonteleological, (...) nonhumanistic conception of nature remains a radical possibility, even in the face of contemporary attempts to think outside the canonical discourses of transcendental subjectivity, technological reason, and teleological ethics. Spinoza's position is, in the end, more uncompromising than that of Derrida or Agamben. (shrink)

The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating (...) animals—and other people—as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll's theories of life -- Biography and historical background -- Nature's conformity with plan -- Umweltforschung -- Biosemiotics -- Concluding remarks -- Marking a path into the environments of animals -- The essential approach to the organism -- Heidegger and the biologists -- Paths to the world -- Disruptive behavior : Heidegger and the captivated animal -- The worldless stone -- The poor animal -- For example, three bees and a lark -- Animal morphology -- A shocking wealth (...) -- A fine line in the rupture of time -- An affected body -- The theme of the animal melody : Merleau-Ponty and the umwelt -- The structure of behavior -- A pure wake, a quiet force -- A leaf of being -- Interanimality -- The-animal-stalks-at-five-oclock : Deleuze's affection for Uexküll -- Problematic organisms -- Uexküll's ethology of affects -- The body without organs, the embryonic egg, and prebiotic soup -- Nature's refrain sung across milieus and territories -- The animal stalks. (shrink)

To me a painted paroquet Hath been – a most familiar bird– Taught me my alphabet to say– To lisp my very earliest word. Edgar Allan Poe, “Romance,” Poetry and Tales 53 Logographical necessity (ana...

Derrida argued at great length early on in his career that texts live on in the absence of their author. The question remains, however, of precisely how this survival takes place. In this paper I argue that the life of Derrida’s own œuvre is sustained through his particular practice of self‐inheritance. I justify this claim by focusing on one moment in the text Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, in which Derrida inherits from himself through self‐citation. In citing himself while at (...) the same time modifying his citation, Derrida sets into motion a deconstruction of his own text that he does not seem to anticipate. It is this movement of deconstruction that enables Derrida’s text to live on. (shrink)

This paper examines transhuman technologies that seek to eradicate disability - primarily prostheses and implants. While most would agree that disability denies individuals the same quality of life as those deemed “abled,” this eradication ultimately relies upon secular humanist notions of the perfect human. Transhuman technologies hold obvious implications for the human body, however they also hold implications for what it means to be an acceptable body; ultimately these technologies aim to create the perfect human by eradicating the disabled Other. (...) This paper uses these notions to question concepts of “hierarchies of life,” at which disabled individuals are most commonly moved towards the bottom, or at the very least considered nonhuman. This article seeks to provide alternative theory to the eradication of disability, which states that these individuals may not have the same mode of existence, but that their mode/s are just as valid as those lived by “abled” individuals through an examination of Braille. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophically informed survey of transhumanism and ‘posthumanism(s)’ on education. It has two primary aims: (1) bringing clarity to the widespread confusion surrounding even the most basic theoretical contents and terminology of transhumanism (TH) and ‘critical posthumanism’ (CPH), the two dominant forms of posthumanism in academic and popular discourse, and (2) descriptively surveying the discourses of TH and CPH on education. The first section contains description of TH’s and CPH’s basic theoretical contents, brief histories of TH and (...) CPH, and a proposal for sorely needed standard terminology. The second section surveys the TH and CPH literature on education, emphasizing the way education typically is technologized by THs and politicized by CPHs. The conclusion considers possibilities for alternative forms of ‘posthumanism.’. (shrink)

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of (...) this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”. (shrink)

This essay contextualizes the Dantean figure of Ulysses, as conceived by Yuri M. Lotman, and draws this key figure of modernity into a network of mutually interconnected discourses: primarily transhumanist visions of the human future in space, which nevertheless arise from the specifically modern epistemic dimension of “restlessness,” and intertwine with post-war astronautics, cyborg visions of human re-engineering, and revolutionary considerations of speculative realism. The key is Lotman’s emphasis on Ulysses as a figure of “energy of thought”; in this regard, (...) the essay shows how the original poetic “decision,” embodied by the Ulysses figure, advocates implicit cruelty in the name of the future (treated as an inevitable fate), and how this decision generates a logical and progressively unfolding series of “inhuman” images of man situated in the universe as an event of saturation of matter with merciless intelligence. (shrink)

At the outset of _Marx for Cats_, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have (...) long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration. (shrink)

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened (...) scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. (shrink)

Imagine a future in which animals had fundamental rights to political participation and voting. What would our towns and cities look like? What kind of infrastructure would we need? And what kind of zoodemocracy would we, animals, co-author? As counterintuitive as it might seem, sometimes what is needed is not a minimal agenda. Animal rights theorists and the animal rights movement more generally have focused for decades on abolishing the farming of animals and on one-issue campaigns such as the abolition (...) of the animal fur trade. These are noble and important pursuits, but what if the driving force to produce meaningful change did not reside in looking at the horrors of factory farming, but rather in envisaging beautiful and joyful futures? What if what we needed was to provide imaginaries full of possibilities, opened to create new relationships and communities; futures that we might long for and might be willing to strive for? In this speculative article, I imagine a realistic and fictional zoodemocracy after the devastating effects of climate change hit Earth and Earth’s inhabitants with full force. The reader should imagine that the scenario portrayed in this article is situated in the 2180s and after many catastrophic events had happened. Location-wise, the article portrays different historical moments in which London, England, transitions from a human-centric polis and democracy to a zoopolis and zoodemocracy. (shrink)