What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode ofphilosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: What Is Posthumanism?
Part One: Theories, Disciplines, Ethics
1. Meaning and Event, or, Systems Theory and "The Reconstruction of Deconstruction"
2. Language and Subjectivity: Cognitive Science, Deconstruction, and The Animal
3. Flesh and Finitude: Bioethics and the Philosophy of The Living
4. "Animal Studies," Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities
5. Learning from Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject
Part Two: Media, Culture, Practices
6. From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies: The Animal Question in Contemporary Art
7. When You Can't Believe Your Eyes (Or Voice): Dancer in The Dark
8. Lose the Building: Form and System in Contemporary Architecture
9. Emerson's Romanticism, Cavell's Skepticism, Luhmann's Modernity
10. The Idea of Observation at Key West: Systems Theory, Poetry, and Form Beyond Formalism
11. The Digital, the Analog, and the Spectral: Echographies from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Notes
Publication History
Index
About the Author :
Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. He is the author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" (Minnesota, 1998) and Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, and the editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003).
