Animal Rites
American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory
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Animal Rites
American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory
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."
252 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2002
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Philosophy: Ethics, General Philosophy
Table of Contents
Foreword, W.J.T. Mitchell
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
1. Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism
2. In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal
Part Two
3. Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (with Jonathan Elmer)
4. Aficionados and Friend Killers: Rearticulating Race and Gender via Species in Hemingway
5. Faux Posthumanism: The Discourse of Species and the Neocolonial Project in Michael Crichton’s Congo
Conclusion: Postmodern Ethics, the Question of the Animal, and the Imperatives of Posthumanist Theory
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
1. Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism
2. In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal
Part Two
3. Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (with Jonathan Elmer)
4. Aficionados and Friend Killers: Rearticulating Race and Gender via Species in Hemingway
5. Faux Posthumanism: The Discourse of Species and the Neocolonial Project in Michael Crichton’s Congo
Conclusion: Postmodern Ethics, the Question of the Animal, and the Imperatives of Posthumanist Theory
Notes
Index