Animal Rites : American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory

by Wolfe, Cary

• ISBN13: 9780226905136
• ISBN10: 0226905136
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Žižek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, Wolfe explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously "the question of the animal."

Author Biography

Cary Wolfe is a professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author, most recently, of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" and the editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
W. J. T. Mitchell
Acknowledgments	xv
Introduction	1	(20)
PART ONE
Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism	21	(23)
In the Shadow of Wittgenstein's Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal	44	(53)
PART TWO
Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (with Jonathan Elmer)	97	(25)
Aficionados and Friend Killers: Rearticulating Race and Gender via Species in Hemingway	122	(47)
Faux Posthumanism: The Discourse of Species and the Neocolonial Project in Michael Crichton's Cango	169	(21)
Conclusion: Postmodern Ethics, the Question of the Animal, and the Imperatives of Posthumanist Theory	190	(19)
Notes	209	(24)
Index	233