The prefix “trans-” surrounds “animal” with a pluralizing effect: tranimals. This portmanteau word describes creatures at once real and imagined who traverse taxonomic categories. This essay considers two of many threads of trananimality: the transgenic and the prosthetic. Artist Jodi Clark imagines the Menagerie à Trois as a space for carnal humanimality, where sexual entanglements commingle with chimeric forms. This menagerie à tranimals extends Clark’s ever-expanding Menagerie à Trois by articulating a framework for contemplating and indexing humanimal (...) networks of engineered organisms while simultaneously attending to the agency-in-captivity experienced by prosthetic and transgenic tranimals. The results of genetic interventions, transgenic tranimals have been engineered to serve a range of roles in biomedical research. Prosthetic tranimals are not always born with their modifications, but are instead engaged by other human and non-human animals by way of mechanical devices and symbiotic systems. These physical bonds destabilize concepts of part and whole: synecdoche becomes an important way of conceptualizing the labour performed by tranimals. Tranimals signal entangled relations, framing potentially infinite configurations of cooperation and adaptation. Visitors to this menagerie are encouraged to rethink the ethical and moral space created by becoming with tranimals. (shrink)

According to cognitive non-naturalism, normative judgments are standard beliefs that purport to be about non-natural properties. An influential plurality of normative theorists, including non-naturalist realists, error theorists and skeptics, share this view. But it is mistaken. For it predicts an epistemic profile for normative judgments that they do not have. In particular, they are not disposed to extinguish in light of accepted evidence that the any non-natural properties are absent, and they are not disposed to come into existence in light (...) of accepted evidence for any non-natural property. So normative judgments might be beliefs, and there might be non-natural properties, but normative judgments are not beliefs about non-natural properties. (shrink)

This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights (...) related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks. (shrink)

In 1864, the first living Mexican axolotls were brought from Mexico to Paris. On arrival, the 34 animals were divided up between the two zoos in Paris, the Ménagerie of the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle and the Jardin d'acclimatation. From there, the animals and their descendants spread around the world as zoo and laboratory specimens, as well as pets. Today, a population of hundreds of thousands of axolotls live in aquariums, zoos, and laboratories around the globe. The fate of the axolotls (...) in the Ménagerie and their subsequent proliferation open a unique window into the culture and practices of keeping unknown animals in Europe in the 19th century, and their relation to experimental zoology. During the early years, the challenges were to keep the axolotls alive and to bring them to reproduction. The surprising transformation of some of these normally aquatic animals into a land-dwelling form prompted further investigations of their living conditions and mode of reproduction. The example of the axolotl offers a detailed look into the practices of handling unknown species, the ways in which this handling became research, and the kinds of knowledge produced in this context. I pay particular attention to the role of the animal keepers and the infrastructures, and the ways in which practical knowledge about the animals' living conditions triggered experimental research. (shrink)

This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of (...) the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerade as education as a social good while the ‘university’ itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms. (shrink)

Modernist literature of the early to mid-twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic is replete with examples of a particular kind of relationship with objects, namely, the touching, collecting, and grasping of small, often highly personal, and ostensibly quotidian objects. From John’s glass collection in Woolf’s “Solid Objects,” Peter Walsh’s stroking of his pocket-knife in Mrs. Dalloway, Miriam’s frenzied absorption with flowers in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, to Laura’s fiddling of her glass menagerie in Tennessee Williams’s eponymous play, (...) fidgeting in modernist literature and drama reveals a particular tendency of not just characters’ possession of things but also their possession by things. This phenomenon, I argue, allows characters to practice care as they withdraw from oppressive narratives of normalcy and (economic and biological) productivity, challenging their exclusionary and othering configurations. My paper looks at fidgeting in The Glass Menagerie as a part of this larger ideological and haptic orientation in modernist literature. The care invested by Laura in her intimate relationship with these “playthings” allows her to intercept not only male narrativizing forces and articulation of herself but also the rhetoric of productivity that circulates both within the play and in the larger economic backdrop of post-depression America. My paper attempts to foreground these objects of care in our readings of the play and modernist texts in general and, in so doing, highlight their importance as lenses of analysis that render visible alternate forms of agency and resistance. Lastly, it attempts to reframe fidgeting as an act of embodied refusal, evoking the radical potential of refusal within feminist and disability studies. (shrink)

Introduction -- Why care about animals? -- Broader philosophical considerations -- Utilitarian arguments : the value of animal experience -- Deontological arguments : do animals have natural rights? -- Aristotelian arguments : animal telos and human aretē -- Contractarian arguments : animals outside the state of nature -- Extensionism and its limits -- The call and the circle : the animal in postmodern thought -- Ecophilosophy : deep ecology and ecofeminism -- Sacrifice and self-overcoming -- The child, the hunter, and (...) the artist. (shrink)

This article elaborates a local history of zoo feeding practices in order to shed light on the construction of knowledge at the zoo, its intersection with laboratory developments in life sciences, and the nature of zoo sciences. It relies on the case studies of two of the oldest zoological gardens in the world-the Jardin des Plantes Ménagerie in Paris (1793) and the London Zoological Gardens (1828)-both of which formed parts of major scientific institutions, thereby facilitating research on the dialogue between (...) zoo knowledge and life sciences. The article argues that zoos developed around an experimental paradigm that consisted of testing on animals the (nutritional) variables of their survival within a highly constrained institutional framework. From the interwar period, the empirical nature of the zoo feeding economy was marked by slow and uneven changes, associated with the development of nutritional sciences as well as internal hygiene, pathology, and veterinary programmes. Despite transfers and networks of people, methods, experiments, concepts, and animals between zoos and life sciences laboratories, the former remained too impure as a research site to act as an extension of the latter. Zoos, however, needed external laboratories to support themselves with the scientific legitimacy that their “biopolitical modernisation” (Chrulew) required. In addressing programmatic changes as well as their impact upon the animals, this paper argues that trial-and-error experiments are constitutive of the zoo, contributing towards the definition of the nature of both zoo management and zoo sciences. (shrink)

Lochlann Jain's debut non-fiction graphic novel, Things That Art, playfully interrogates the order of things. Toying with the relationship between words and images, Jain's whimsical compositions may seem straightforward. Upon closer inspection, however, the drawings reveal profound and startling paradoxes at the heart of how we make sense of the world. Commentaries by architect and theorist Maria McVarish, poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, musician and English Professor Drew Daniel, and the author offer further insight into the drawings in this collection. (...) A captivating look at the fundamental absurdities of everyday communication, Things that Art jolts us toward new forms of collation and collaboration. (shrink)

In 1826, the Pasha of Egypt offered to the King Charles X an unusual present: a living giraffe. While offering remarkable animals was a common practice among monarchs, the choice of a giraffe was somewhat extraordinary since it was the first representative of its kind to set foot in France. The Royal Menagerie of the Paris Muséum national d'histoire naturelle was asked to oversee the transportation of this precious mammal and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, one of its professors, was sent (...) to Marseilles to fetch it on foot all the way back to the capital. The whereabouts of this exotic procession stirred passions throughout the country, generating a fashion craze "à la girafe." The so-called Pasha's giraffe, King's giraffe or French giraffe is also -- and perhaps more importantly -- Geoffroy's giraffe. The giraffe episode is representative of Geoffroy's larger scientific career. Because of its Egyptian flavor, its adventurous aspect, its political and diplomatic undertones, as well as the popular attention and educational opportunities it afforded, that mission was ideally suited for the flamboyant naturalist. So close were the animal's and the French zoologist's fates, that they passed away a couple months apart and both fell into relative oblivion. But even dead and dissected, Geoffroy's giraffe could not easily be dissociated from its companion. The afterlife of its "saintly" relics mirrors the popular and scholarly revival of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, portrayed by some as a forgotten "prophet.". (shrink)

French naturalists at the Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in the early nineteenth century recognized that their individual and collective successes were intimately linked to questions of power over specimens. France’s strength abroad affected the growth of the museum’s collections. At the museum, preserving, naming, classifying, displaying, interpreting, and otherwise deploying specimens went hand in hand with promoting scientific theories, advancing scientific careers, and instructing the public. The control of specimens, both literally and figuratively, was the museum’s ongoing concern. (...) The leopard in this essay’s title, a live specimen confiscated from the streets of Paris in 1793, serves here to represent the tensions created in an existing order of things by the introduction of a potentially disruptive agent. The essay explores the life of the museum and the interrelations among its naturalists, the special challenges created by the establishment of a menagerie, and the histories of particular specimens and ideas. (shrink)

In 1776, the first living giant anteater to reach Europe arrived in Madrid from Buenos Aires. It survived 6 months in the Real Sitio del Buen Retiro before being transferred to the newly founded Real Gabinete de Historia Natural. In 1853, 77 years later, a second anteater was brought to London by two German showmen and exhibited at a shop in Bloomsbury, where it was visited by the novelist Charles Dickens. The animal was subsequently purchased by the Zoological Society of (...) London, which classed it as one of the most important additions to the menagerie since its formation in 1828. Drawing on recent work in animal biography, this article assesses the reception of the two anteaters and considers their cultural and scientific significance. I examine the logistics of the exotic animal trade and trace the transatlantic networks that permitted anteaters-and knowledge about them-to move between continents. I also study the modes of representation, from painting to taxidermy, that enabled the anteaters to reach new audiences. By focusing in detail on the lives of two exceptional anteaters, the article illuminates understandings of the species more broadly and shows how different spaces and places shaped the creation and dissemination of zoological knowledge. I emphasise, in particular, the tensions that emerged between imperial and colonial science and the competing knowledge regimes of the natural history museum, the menagerie, and the field. (shrink)

Priority monism (hereafter, ‘monism’) is the view that there exists one fundamental entity—the world—and that all other objects that exist (a set of objects typically taken to include tables, chairs, and the whole menagerie of everyday items) are merely derivative. Jonathan Schaffer has defended monism in its current guise, across a range of papers. Each paper looks to add something to the monistic picture of the world. In this paper we argue that monism—as Schaffer describes it—is false. To do (...) so we develop an ‘island universe’ argument against Schaffer's monistic theory. (shrink)

As robots increasingly become part of our everyday lives, questions arise with regards to how to approach them and how to understand them in social contexts. The Western history of human–robot relations revolves around competition and control, which restricts our ability to relate to machines in other ways. In this study, we take a relational approach to explore different manners of socializing with robots, especially those that exceed an instrumental approach. The nonhuman subjects of this study are built to explore (...) non-purposeful behavior, in an attempt to break away from the assumptions of utility that underlie the hegemonic human–machine interactions. This breakaway is accompanied by ‘learning to be attuned’ on the side of the human subjects, which is facilitated by continuous relations at the level of everyday life. Our paper highlights this ground for the emergence of meanings and questions that could not be subsumed by frameworks of control and domination. The research-creation project Machine Ménagerie serves as a case study for these ideas, demonstrating a relational approach in which the designer and the machines co-constitute each other through sustained interactions, becoming attuned to one another through the performance of research. Machine Ménagerie attempts to produce affective and playful—if not unruly—nonhuman entities that invite interaction yet have no intention of serving human social or physical needs. We diverge from other social robotics research by creating machines that do not attempt to mimic human social behaviours. (shrink)

When the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris learned in 1836 that it had the chance to buy a live, young orangutan, it was excited by the prospect. Specimens were the focus of the Museum’s activities, and this particular specimen seemed especially promising, not only because the Museum had very few orangutan specimens in its collection, but also because of what was perceived to be the orangutan’s unique place in the natural order of things, namely, at the very boundary between the (...) animal kingdom and humans. Frédéric Cuvier, the superintendent of the Museum’s menagerie, urged that studying the orangutan’s mental faculties would help resolve fundamental questions regarding the similarities and differences between animals and humans. Archival and printed sources allow one to reconstruct the orangutan’s capture, acquisition, and subsequent career at the menagerie in greater detail than has generally been possible for animals of nineteenth-century zoos. Scientists, artists, the public, the press, and even musicians sought to engage with the orangutan, seeing in it not just another ape or monkey but a special creature unto itself at the animal/human boundary. Key to their fascination with the orangutan was the question of proximity—just how close was the orangutan to humans? The orangutan’s story illuminates not only how the animal-human boundary was conceived at the time but also the problematic status of the zoo as a site for scientific research and the roles of scientific and non-scientific actors alike in constructing how the orangutan was understood. (shrink)

The subject of the study is one of the main lines in the work of choreographer John Neumeier - the interpretation of literary works on the ballet stage. This article discusses his productions based on literature such as "The Lady with Camellias" (1978), "Peer Gynt" (1989/2015), "The Seagull" (2002), "Death in Venice" (2003), "Anna Karenina" (2017), "The Glass Menagerie" (2019). Neumeier's ballets reveal a special relationship between literature and choreography. The performances created by him are not just a fact (...) of illustrating the plot of the original source, but an attempt to penetrate into the essence of the author's idea, reflect and emphasize the details found in the text in the language of choreography. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that when analyzing several key performances from the choreographer's creative biography, the prospect of considering the literary line of his ballets as a separate phenomenon opened up. As a result of the study, the following conclusions were made. Firstly, an important feature of Neumeier's ballets, based on literary works, is a clearly structured dramaturgy of all components of the performance: action, music, choreography, set design. Secondly, when working with a literary source, most often the choreographer transfers the action to the modern world, while not going against the author's intention, but on the contrary, enhances the relevance of the themes embedded in the works, declaring the timeless existence of the meanings of the text. Thirdly, the interrelation of literature and choreography in Neumeier's work takes the choreographer's work with the text to an absolutely new level, which allows us to talk about the great possibilities of non-verbal interpretation in the ballet theater as a whole. (shrink)

“A flawless compendium of flaws.” —Alice Roberts, PhD, anatomist, writer, and presenter of The Incredible Human Journey The antidote to fuzzy thinking, with furry animals! Have you read (or stumbled into) one too many irrational online debates? Ali Almossawi certainly had, so he wrote An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments! This handy guide is here to bring the internet age a much-needed dose of old-school logic (really old-school, a la Aristotle). Here are cogent explanations of the straw man fallacy, the (...) slippery slope argument, the ad hominem attack, and other common attempts at reasoning that actually fall short—plus a beautifully drawn menagerie of animals who (adorably) commit every logical faux pas. Rabbit thinks a strange light in the sky must be a UFO because no one can prove otherwise (the appeal to ignorance). And Lion doesn’t believe that gas emissions harm the planet because, if that were true, he wouldn’t like the result (the argument from consequences). Once you learn to recognize these abuses of reason, they start to crop up everywhere from congressional debate to YouTube comments—which makes this geek-chic book a must for anyone in the habit of holding opinions. (shrink)

In nineteenth-century Britain, captive snakes in menageries and zoological gardens were routinely fed with live prey – primarily rabbits, pigeons and guinea pigs. From the late 1860s, this practice began to generate opposition on animal welfare grounds, leading to a protracted debate over its necessity, visibility and morality. Focusing on the c.1870–1914 period, when the snake-feeding controversy reached its zenith, this article charts changing attitudes towards the treatment of reptiles in captivity and asks why an apparently niche practice generated so (...) much interest. By looking at the biological arguments put forward for and against live feeding, the article traces the changing nature of humanitarian activism in the late nineteenth century and shows how the shifting character of the live-feeding debate paralleled wider trends in the animal welfare movement. It also highlights the different types of knowledge and expertise involved in the debate, as naturalists, veterinary surgeons, legal professionals, zookeepers and humanitarians offered conflicting perspectives on questions of reptilian dietary requirements and animal sentience. (shrink)

Do both the zoo and the mental hospital induce psychosis, as humans are treated as animals and animals are treated as humans? How have we looked at animals in the past, and how do we look at them today? How have zoos presented themselves, and their purpose, over time? In response to the emergence of environmental and animal studies, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, theorists, literature scholars, and historians around the world have begun to explore the significance of zoological parks, past and (...) present. Zoo Studies considers the modern zoo from a range of approaches and disciplines, united in a desire to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. The volume begins with an account of the first modern mental hospital, La Salpêtrière, established in 1656, and the first panoptical zoo, the menagerie at Versailles, created in 1662 by the same royal architect; the final chapter presents a choreographic performance that imagines the Toronto Zoo as a place where the human body can be inspired by animal bodies. From beginning to end, through interdisciplinary collaboration, this volume decentres the human subject and offers alternative ways of thinking about zoos and their inhabitants. This collection immerses readers in the lives of animals and their experiences of captivity and asks us to reflect on our own assumptions about both humans and animals. An original and groundbreaking work, Zoo Studies will change the way readers see nonhuman animals and themselves. (shrink)

This essay explores how the human biological self is socially constructed, and rejects various truisms that define our character. Rather than being stand-alone entities, the human biological self forms what biologists call “superorganisms” and what I call “poly-super-organisms.” Thus, along with prokaryotes , viruses, and other entities, we are combined in an inseparable menagerie of species that is spread across multiple bodies. Biologists claim that only males and females are organisms. As described here, however, human sperm and eggs are (...) equally entitled to that rank. Much about human reproduction is also socially constructed. For example, contrary to scientific wisdom, humans have always reproduced both sexually and asexually. Moreover, human life does not begin between conception and birth, and neither event creates new life. In addition, some cancer cells are organisms; they are contagious entities formed by asexual human reproduction. Finally, while science universally describes humans as being living entities, accumulating evidence makes clear that the life concept is failing. In fact, much that originates from human bodies does not fall under current biological or cultural classifications.How we construct the human biological self has consequences for understanding our health, how we reproduce, and what we are. These social constructions greatly influence our views on abortion, stem-cell research, human cloning, and our post-human future. A more accurate construction of the human biological self will help us better navigate these contentious issues. (shrink)

The foundation and administration of European Zoological gardens in the 19th century is analized. It is significant of such new institutions, that they are founded in the large cities, and that most of the founders looked at the great models in Paris and London, which are described first. Further it is shown that the change from princely menageries to public Zoological Gardens is caused both by common interests in people's education and pleasure and by scientific aims which leaded to choose (...) the name Zoological “garden” in analogy to botanical gardens. It seems to be characteristic of such public institutions created by citizens in the 19th century that they are mostly supported by commercial or scientific local societies. This is exemplified by describing the administration of the Zoological gardens of Berlin (1841), Frankfurt (1856) and Hamburg (1863), which initiated also research for acclimatization of wild animals. (shrink)

This paper examines the first reptile house (1849) at the Zoological Gardens in London as a novel site for the production and consumption of knowledge about snakes, stressing the significance of architectural and material limitations on both snakes and humans. Snakes were familiar and ambiguous, present at every level of British society through the reading of Scripture and as recurrent characters in imperial print culture. For all that snakes engendered feelings of disgust as the most distinctive representatives of a lowly (...) class of animals, they exerted an equivalent fascination over diverse publics spanning the social spectrum. Building on work showing a consideration for the multi-sensory nature of visits to menageries, this paper considers animal display beyond the visual. It explores the emotional economy of encountering snakes in person and the bodily phenomena this engendered. Vicarious visits were offered up to readers of periodicals and newspapers and the reptile house was harnessed as a controversial pedagogical resource for teaching moral, as well as scientific, lessons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum:Buddhist Lessons in The Waste LandThomas Michael LeCarnerMany critics have argued that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is a poem that attempts to deal with the physical destruction and human atrocities of the First World War, or that he had somehow expressed the disillusionment of a generation. For Eliot, such a characterization was too reductive. He replied, "Nonsense, I may have expressed for them (...) their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." He did not want to be the poet of a "lost generation" of war survivors, but rather, he wanted, like most poets, to write for all ages. To that end, Eliot sought to transcend time and space by bringing to The Waste Land scores of literary, cultural, and artistic allusions from a variety of sources including the Upanishads, Greek mythology, the Bible, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Ironically, within this menagerie of literary homages, Eliot has created a vast emptiness, a world of pain, suffering, desolation and despair, as if to suggest that even in the presence of all the greatest artistic and cultural achievements of mankind, we must understand that life is transitory and material things ephemeral.The idea that life is fleeting and filled with suffering is at the core of Buddhist thought and one that Eliot surely learned from his graduate studies at Harvard. Several scholars have examined the influence of Eastern philosophy, and in particular Buddhist thought, on Eliot's work, largely in the past forty years.1 My argument departs from this scholarship in two significant ways. First, I will read The Waste Land through the lens of Eliot's graduate studies, and in doing so will show how the poem functions as a didactic, artistic representation of the Buddhist doctrine of samsāra, an idea that views the world as transitory, overcome [End Page 402] with lustful desires, and forever bound to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. From this perspective, we can see how Eliot's understanding of the original Buddhist texts, which informed much of his writing of The Waste Land, allowed him to see through the all-too-common misconceptions about Buddhism during the early part of the twentieth century. Lastly, we will see that Eliot looked at these misconceptions as a psychological projection of Europeans' discontent with their own lives in an uncertain time.Over the past three decades an increasing number of scholars have studied Eliot's graduate work. In 1985, Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck published a study that examines the impact that Eliot's coursework and professors had on during his studies at Harvard.2 Perl and Tuck point out that Eliot devoted nearly one third of his graduate program to the study of Asian philosophy and philology. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali under C. R. Lanman, the preeminent Sanskrit specialist of the age. In his third year, Eliot took a course entitled "Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought in Japan" with Professor Masaharu Anesaki, a course that had a profound impact on him. Eliot was exposed to several schools of Buddhism in his studies including the Kegon, Shingon, and Tendai, which are characterized as "descendants of the Madhyamika School, which was founded in the second century A.D. by Nāgārjuna, the Indian Buddhist philosopher." Nāgārjuna is widely considered the most influential Buddhist philosopher after Siddhartha Gautama himself and is the leading proponent of the Mādhyamika ("Middle Way") philosophy.The central teaching of Nāgārjuna was the doctrine of śūnyatā, or as it is often translated, "emptiness." For Mahāyāha Buddhists, all things are totally empty of any defining essence. Thus, all things are void of any fixed identity or inherent existence and remain in a constant state of impermanence, change, and flux. This is the fundamental premise of Mahāyāha Buddhism. Only through the realization of this emptiness in material things can one achieve Buddhahood. According to one standard text, "the real knowledge of Buddha nature is empty of empirical content, and it is the discovery of that emptiness or void, śūnyatā, of the true Buddha... (shrink)

Solipsism is the strangest creature in philosophy’s menagerie. It seems just that its defense should be so simple and reasonable. As similarity or difference in the length of things presuppose their commensurability in respect of spatial extension, so similarity and difference between conscious subjects presuppose the commensurability of their experience. But comparing what I feel with what I fail to feel seems worse than inconvenient. Like location and duration or color and quantity, these seem strictly incommensurable. Yet just as (...) a fact of the matter about things’ length presupposes their commensurability, so a fact of the matter about others’ experience presupposes intersubjective commensurability. If, then, it is not merely difficult but a priori impossible to compare experiences, there seems but one explanation: the grand and solitary thought that I alone am the unique subject of experience. (shrink)

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopolitical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well (...) as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and BrutalRobert N. MatuozziA Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora ; xxxii & 371 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.What if instead of re-reading Nietzsche's corpus, one imagines what it would be like to view his works on the "Nietzsche Network." Imagine a spectator situated (...) in the middle of a vast amphitheatre preparing to watch these simulacra. Gazing up and around a series of giant, flat-screen video monitors arrayed in layers around the interior wall of an amphitheatre, the spectator views and listens to Nietzsche's multi-media texts as, simultaneously, they seductively flash their provocative narratives in flickering streams of high-resolution sounds, words, and images.The Nietzsche Network is a roaring carnival. It consists of colorful, speculative historical dramatizations and equally enticing philosophical tableaux. Dark ambient musical motifs, laced with interludes of explosive, uncontrollable laughter, are a subliminal presence. Lurid detective stories and somber cultural narratives and slashing polemics implicate cultures and ideologies in festivals of cruelty and soul-murder. Poignant genealogical and aphoristic asides on joy [End Page 443] and work and suffering, weird psychological skits starring well-known ensemble casts are accompanied by hoarse oratory, soaring denunciations, and sober etymological digressions. Intermittently, the spectator is startled by abrupt, sometimes strident proclamations, like confessional bulletins shot from nowhere.Nietzsche's siren-like prose exhibits an extraordinary rhetorical range. This is particularly true of the polychromatic works originally published in the gloaming of his career in the period after 1886. Nietzsche's compelling, fluvial style is accounted for in this volume by the kinetic movements of lizards and the halcyon tones of birds, to his study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics (and to the lost musicality of Greek tragedy in particular), and to his emphatic embrace of a kind of plosive, Dionysian philosophical technics.The content of the Nietzsche Network spans thousands of years of human experience and thought. A prequel features a substantial bestiary of traditional animals and emergent biomorphic forms set in a variety of carefully animated zoological dioramas. Among the modernists, has there been another thinker as strangely original and subversive? Allowing for fundamental differences, only Valéry comes to mind. Like the silent, ruminating cow in his "untimely" essay on history, Nietzsche prevents the past from injecting noise into present and future philosophizing. He will be the exemplary philosopher of the other-than-human as he campaigns to re-inscribe human animality into the zoological text of nature. Through explicit pronouncements and in scattered philosophical sorties involving human animality and his (desperate) utopist vision of human perfectibility, Nietzsche attempted to attain—at least conceptually—what Richard Rorty aptly calls the "historical sublime, a future which has broken all relations with the past."This excellent collection of essays on Nietzsche's bestiary demonstrates the surprising persistence of the animal imaginary in his thought. The various pieces also illuminate the multiple thematic and linguistic transformations Nietzsche develops as he enlists animals in his feral, anti-essentialist dialectic on the obscure continuum between "humans," "animals," and "nature." It turns out that a degraded version of Nietzsche's strangest thought experiment on animalism, the übermensch, is perhaps only a few years away from being produced through emerging boutique bioengineering, a prospect that has some commentators on both the left and the right blinking with apprehension. These essays amply demonstrate that Nietzsche's bestial philosophy of human and animal alterity subverts, among other paradigms, the strange Cartesian notion that animals are mechanical automata while humans are transcendental rationalists. As one commentator in this book broadly puts it, Nietzsche shows that the various schemes concocted to put an illusory distance between humans and animals have ended up being an immensely corrupting "pretense" (p. 224).Precursor bestiaries are indicated in this volume, though the medieval tradition originating in the Physiologus is here mostly displaced by a different [End Page 444] menagerie of cultural affiliations. The fabulist Aesop is present, along with Aristotle and Montaigne, though La Fontaine is not, and Pico Mirandola's famous remarks in his Oration on... (shrink)

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” When Alice questions this license, Humpty Dumpty replies, “The question is … which is to be master — that’s all.” The present article offers a lexicon of words that are used by human beings, however unintentionally or ingenuously, to maintain their mastery or prerogatives over other animals. A motivating (...) assumption of the article is that putting on display the verbal menagerie in animal agriculture, animal experimentation, and the rest of the industries and institutions that use nonhuman animals, could go a long way toward eliminating these enterprises, since they are built as much on equivocation as on exploitation. (shrink)

English Summary The main focus of this article is a church, the picture of which is shown on a gravure by Gugas İnciciyan and called Arslanhane (Menagerie)/Nakkaşhane (House of painters). The church has a central dome, an apsis and a semi dome at the west side and looks like a little model of the Hagia Sophia. It was erected above an other building with a central arch. This resembles descriptions of the Chalke gate and the Chalke church in several (...) written sources. Some chraracteristic marks of İnciciyan's church can also be discovered on some other drawings from various artists (Matrakçi Nasuh 1537; Melchior Lorichs, 1559; Cornelius Loos, 1710). A comparison with them helps us to localise it on the southern side of the former university building of Gaspare Fossati. Written sources inform us that the so called Arslanhane/Nakkaşhane of Inciciyan was not the only the building, which was converted to a menagerie. The church of Johannes in the Diippion and an other building, near the southwest corner of the Hagia Sophia were also used as menagerie during the Ottoman period. Especially the second one can be seen on various drawings. In our opinion Mango's identification of a church drawn by Willey Reveley (1786) with the Chalke, must be reviewed, since it was probably that of Theotokos Varaniotissa, which was renewed in the late Byzantine era. (shrink)

Since DNA has replaced blood as the medium through which we establish kinship, how do we determine with whom we are kin? Who counts among those we care for? The distinction between these categories is constantly in flux. How do we come to decide those we may kiss and those we may kill? Focusing on narratives of kinship as they are defined in contemporary film, literature, and news media, Frances Bartkowski discusses the impact of "stories of origin" on our regard (...) for nonhuman species. She locates the role of "totems and taboos" in forming and re-forming kinship categories-groupings that enable us to tie the personal to the social-and explores the bestiary, among the oldest of literary forms. The bestiary is the realm in which we allegorize the place of humans and other species, a menagerie encompassing animals we know as well as human-animal chimeras and other beings that challenge the "natural" order of the world. Yet advances in reproductive technologies, the mapping of genomes, and the study of primates continually destabilize these categories and recast the dynamic between the natural and the cultural. Bartkowski highlights the arbitrariness of traditional kinship arrangements and asks us to rethink our notions of empathy and ethics. She shows how current dialogues concerning ethics and desire determine contemporary attitudes toward issues of care, and suggests a new framework for negotiating connection and conflict. (shrink)

Donna Haraway, one of the premier feminist science theorists of our generation, is a trained biologist who has used a menagerie of creatures—the cyborg, the vampire, OncoMouse™, and primates—as markers to analyze the intersections among nature, culture, gender, and science. Her writing about these creatures is unique: dense, circling around, doubling back to move forward. This book, a conversation with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, uses a more informal voice to discuss the intellectual, professional, geographical, and personal influences that shaped Haraway's (...) singular vision.A most surprising influence is the Catholicism of her upbringing—she was schooled by nuns and considered becoming a medical missionary. Although she no longer adheres to the tenets of the religion, Haraway attributes her linking of the figurative and the material to an indelible impression of the Eucharist. Place has also been defining: Denver, where she grew up, as a borderland; California, as a blend of agriculture and technology, populated by “Californios” , as the location of the history of consciousness program of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she was appointed to the first position in feminist theory in the United States and where she has trained multitudes of students, both graduates and undergraduates.Haraway's background in the life sciences permeates this conversation. Architecture and its emergence in embryonic development stimulated her initial interest in biology, and the title How Like a Leaf stems from Haraway's attempt to compare her own structure to that of a leaf. Biology, with all of its subdisciplines, is the foundation for her analysis of nature‐culture, using one to inform the other. “We live intimately ‘as’ and ‘in’ a biological world” , but it is a world that is historically contingent on and tied to culture. Her theory is relational, seeking to challenge boundaries, requiring responsibility for their construction, and taking in all views, simultaneously. The multiple perspectives occur horizontally and vertically, from miniatures to aggregates, zooming between them.A large portion of this slim book discusses Haraway's adult personal ties, which, like her writing, also are unique. Goodeve claims that these relationships show how Haraway “lives the theory she writes and teaches” , but Haraway does not explicitly endorse this idea, saying that the relationships were only possible at a particular point in time. Without linking them to the body of work, the assertions run the risk of resembling gossip. The conversation is stilted at times, the flow interrupted when Goodeve quotes material from other writers whom Haraway does not immediately acknowledge as influential. A complete bibliography of Haraway's writings, easily accessible citations for works discussed during the talks, and more careful copyediting would have been helpful. Readers of this book will also find worthwhile dialogue between Haraway and Constance Penley and Andrew Ross .Those who come to this book looking for the canvas on which Haraway has painted an uncommon picture of our world will be enlightened. Those who come looking for clues to unravel the density of the words in her texts may be disappointed. But who would want directions for reading Haraway? Part of the joy is finding something new each time we read an essay “with passion and irony, where passion is as important as irony”. (shrink)