Critical Animal Studies Syllabus
organized with Machines Seeking ConnectionsWeek One: Foundations of Critical Animal Studies
Primary: The Animal That Therefore I Am, Chapter 2 by Jacques Derrida
Secondary: ‘Thinking through Animals: Reflections on the Ethical and Political Stakes of the Question of the Animal in Derrida’ by Matthew Calarco
‘The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze’ by James Martell
We’re starting here because this 1997 lecture by Derrida is one of the most cited texts in the philosophical vein of Animal Studies. In effect, Derrida is trying to deconstruct the conception of ‘the Animal’ as it exists in the Western philosophical tradition; his aim is to demonstrate that the various ways in which philosophers have rigidly divided humans from animals is untenable.
How does this text hold up? To some extent, his thinking has become so ingrained in the humanities that it seems almost intuitive. Does animal studies need to keep referring back to Derrida to get accreditation? However, in Western popular thought, scientific practice, and law, the human/animal divide remains intact. Derrida intentionally refrains from prescribing any sort of political program, yet he is concerned with the ethics that might proceed from this new understanding of animals. Still, it’s worth asking if Derrida’s thinking on animals is actionable and, if so, how. Moreover, we could go on to ask to what extent Derrida is even talking about actual animals. James Martell, for example, argues that Derrida’s animals appear throughout his text as autobiographical elements: in short, animals serve to reflect him back to himself. This yields an unsettled, entangled sense of self, but again - to what degree is it actually about animals?
The primary text for this week is Chapter 2, which is plenty of reading on its own. However, if you’re interested, I’ll also include a secondary text by Matthew Calarco, which provides a good gloss on Derrida. Then, if you’re on a roll, or if you’ve already read Derrida and want to dig a little deeper, I’ll include Martell’s article, which expounds on Derrida’s relationship to Deleuze.
Week Two: Response-ability
Primary: When Species Meet, Chapter 3, by Donna Haraway
Secondary: Experimenting with Humans and Animals (Podcast)
Organs of War, Chapter 4 of Becoming Human by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Haraway is another essential contributor to the field, her work emblematic of Animal Studies as the transdisciplinary space that brings into the fold biology, ecology, literature, and politics. ‘When Species Meet’ is an exploration of the idea of ‘companion species’, digging into the interactions between “human beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies.” There are a few terms and references that will be helpful in reading Haraway. While it does not read densely, she references some grand concepts. The letter combination ‘sf’ is used in order to signify a couple different ideas, often overlapping: string figure (i.e. cat’s cradle), science fiction/fact, speculative fabulation (everyday storytelling for imagining radical new worlds). ‘Cosmopolitics’ is a concept of Isabelle Stengers, basically referring to the idea that making decisions and settling upon facts is an entangled and messy action that involves all of the possibly affected parties. It is a critique of the scientific method that opens us up to the contributions of literature and subjectivity, which we feel applied in Haraway’s love of storytelling.
Haraway sees us and our companions as being caught up in a process of meaning-making, each influencing each other. This book does not take a particularly radical political stance; though she cites Marx, her examples are rooted in capitalist systems of domination, and show that our ethical possibilities are complex and imperfect. What do we think about ideology and entanglement? How do we respond and give the space for our fellow creatures to respond, in a world that we are all response-able for? What do you think about the role of analogy and storytelling?
As a secondary we have a chapter from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s book Becoming Human. Using the work of Wangechi Mutu, Jackson discusses medical experimentation (particularly gynecological exams) on enslaved women. As she says in the abstract, “gendered and sexual imperial discourses on ‘the black female body’ provided the conditions of possibility for the historical emergence of the generic construction of ‘the animal’—a term elastic enough to include humans and nonhumans. The transcultural adoption of our current hegemonic and specifically biocentric conception of ‘the human,’ in its distinction from ‘the animal’ as defined in the onto-teleological terms of natural science and philosophy, articulated black female abjection, in particular, as a prerequisite of human qualification in the newly conceived globalizing terms that occasioned ‘Discovery.’”
Week Three: Religious Underpinnings and Self-Made Philosophy
Primary: Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Ibn Tufayl
Secondary: Some background information
Composed in Arabic between 1169 and 1182 (trans. Into English in 17th C.,) Hayy ibn Yaqzan is part fable, part philosophical text. It tells the story of a child who is reared on an island, without any humans around. (Spoilers!~) At first he is raised by gazelles, and is happy living among the animals. Then his gazelle mother dies. In something between a traumatic break and the advent of science, he performs an autopsy on her. From this point on Hayy is a Man. He eats meat, performs experiments, and wears clothes. Eventually he develops an awareness of God.
Fundamentally the text tries to show that the beliefs of Islam are innate truths that do not need to be taught. The author, Ibn Tufayl, was also a doctor, so the importance of vivisection was perhaps a bit propagandistic. Above all, the story illustrates (and reifies) the stages that supposedly distinguish rational from irrational animals, humans from all other critters. However, Hayy doesn’t just settle in the world of people, but seeks a transhumanist enlightenment - a life of pure mind.
How can we think about Hayy’s actions against Haraway’s discussion of animal testing? Does he share suffering nonmimetically? How are tools/ technological developments like vivisection and language treated in this text? How are broader issues of experimentation, play, and sociality regarded? On top of that, I’m interested in the text’s handling of sacrifice (of the human, of animality), and human/animal as figure/ground. What are some ways that Hayy’s story muddies the human/animal distinction?
Week Four: VERMIN WEEK
Primary: The Parasite by Michel Serres
Secondary: Creeping Things by Karl Steel
Some Articles about Eric Adams and rats (paywall buster)
It’s easy to discuss our noble kin–the mammalian domestic-mirrors, the ones we have allowed in, the ones who ask us to question the extension of rights and privileges. More difficult is the discussion of the rats. Those creatures we are surrounded by, with whom most have no dynamic but terror and the desire to invisibilize. Our primary text this week is French philosopher Michel Serres’ The Parasite. Quoting from the Translator’s Introduction:
“The parasite is a microbe, an insidious infection that takes without giving and weakens without killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food. The parasite is noise as well, the static in a system or the interference in a channel. These seemingly dissimilar activities are, according to Michel Serres, not merely coincidentally expressed by the same word (in French). Rather, they are intrinsically related and, in fact, they have the same basic function in a systemJWhether it produces a fever or just hot air, the parasite is a thermal exciter. And as such, it is both the atom of a relation and the production of a change in this relation. Through a careful and cogent analysis of these various threads, Michel Serres produces an elegant theory of human relations and institutions, all of which have the same common factor: the parasite.”
In Creeping Things, Karl Steel walks us through the theories of elements and form-taking that were prevalent at the time of Ibn Tufayl, passing through Heidegger’s theories of “ground”, St. Augustine’s revisions and negotiations of vital life, and Pasteur’s combative and pietous stance against spontaneous generation in 19th century France. We are eventually reunited with the new materialism of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, in some ways showing that dimensions of quantum physics and developmental biology have a stake in these philosophical trends. He raises the problematized boundaries between life and death, the organic and non-organic.
How do we understand our relationships with our vermin? Let’s attend to this categorical distinction in a way that doesn’t further ostracize, nor reflexively idealize, pests. On one hand, vermin pose challenges to conventional Abrahamic metaphysics. On the other,
they bring up ethical challenges surrounding cohabitation, class/race intersections, public health, and biopolitics more generally.
P.S. Included here are some articles about Eric Adams and his anti-rat crusade. Read if you have time! We can discuss the rhetorics surrounding NYC rats.
P.P.S. Here are some more articles. This one is a review of a film that recently screened in NYC that tries to link rodents and redlining. Here’s one of the more interesting citations in the movie, as quoted in the article: “In 1951, scientist David E. Davis disputed Richter’s experiments. He argued that killing procedures were tedious, repetitive, and actually increased the rat population. He believed that the rat problem resided in the environment. His experiments led to city blocks being brought up to par on housing codes. It took a scientist and his ecological approach to vermin management to clean up the slums, which was only a collateral effect of the effort to eliminate rat infestation. John B. Calhoun extended Davis’s studies further by setting up a laboratory in a barn house in Gaithersburg, Maryland. In this modified laboratory, Calhoun used rats to study the effects of crowding on social pathology. His findings were revealing: overcrowding led to what he referred to as a “behavioral sink,” a display of pathological behavior, for example, rats became cannibalistic.” I was interested to see that some version of this study was still going on. Here’s a brief PETA announcement that calls out the racism and superfluidity of the experiment.
Then, here are a couple of articles looking at the spread of the plague via rats and how this sparked reactionary racism. If anyone has better literature on this please LMK.
P.P.P.S
Week Five: Inanimal Torture
Primary: Animal Excendence and Inanimal Torture by Joseph Pugliese
We return now to the question of ethics. In all of our prior frameworks, we have been circling this question, composing and observing the entangled differences ceaselessly at play in any conversation of representation, interspecies relationality, and communication. Now, in a chapter from Joseph Pugliese’s ‘Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence’ we will approach questions of justice, the Open, and ecology, through the interspecies relationships formed between prisoners and stray cats, iguanas, and pigeons at Guantanamo Bay. Pugliese refers in the chapter to Emmanuel Levinas’s “excendence” as an escape from unrelenting subjection (or the exceeding of a limit). In prisoner writings, legal reports, and analyses of the violent misery of the torture site, we are shown the ways in which the interactions between the prisoners and the creatures “produce discontinuous states of being for the detainees, between the violence of the cage and the life-enhancing space of the Open.” The open-air cage becomes a site of rupture, an escape, “transcendence within immanence.” Small exchanges become much larger subversions. “Experienced as a moment of excendence, the buzz of the fly brings into Bashmilah’s cell ‘the noise of the infinite in the small.’”