Animots

The latest volume of Yale French Studies addresses French-inspired theoretical and philosophical concerns centered on animals and animality. Contributors from France, the United Kingdom, and North America discuss animal-related topics in the French philosophical and literary tradition, offering a wide range of perspectives on animals, ethics, and the future of animal studies. Essays question the reducibility of animal lives to rights discourse on the one hand and scientific empiricisms on the other, and examine whether and how the advent of the posthuman will affect the standing and the future of the nonhuman animal.

Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities". The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.

This bracing volume collects work on Italian writers and filmmakers that engage with nonhuman animal subjectivity. These contributions address 3 major strands of philosophical thought: perceived borders between man and animals, historical and fictional crises, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world.

Drawing on a range of perspectives -philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies-the essays collected here explore unconventional ways of knowing animals, offering new insights into apparently familiar relationships between humans and other living beings.

In Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Peter Mahon goes beyond recent theoretical approaches to 'the posthuman' to argue for a concrete posthumanism, which arises as humans, animals and technology become entangled, in science, society and culture. Concrete posthumanism is rooted in cutting-edge advances in techno-science, and this book offers readers an exciting, fresh and innovative exploration of this undulating, and often unstable, terrain. With wide-ranging coverage, of cybernetics, information theory, medicine, genetics, machine learning, politics, science fiction, philosophy and futurology, Mahon examines how posthumanism played-and continues to play-a crucial role in shaping how we understand our world. This analysis of posthumanism centers on human interactions with tools and technology, the centrality of science, as well as an understanding of techno-science as a pharmakon-an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both poison and cure. Mahon argues that posthumanism must be approached with an interdisciplinary attitude: a concrete posthumanism is only graspable through knowledge derived from science and the humanities. He concludes by sketching a 'post-humanities' to help us meet the challenges of posthumanism, challenges to which we all must rise. Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed provides a concise, detailed and coherent exploration of posthumanism, introducing key approaches, concepts and themes. It is ideal for readers of all stripes who are interested in a concrete posthumanism and require more than just a simple introduction.

The phenomenal development of writing and literary creation among the francophone communities of eastern Canada has gone largely unnoticed and unprobed outside the fragmented land of Acadia. Writing Acadia attempts for the first time to observe from a distance the invention of literature in oral Acadia, and to interpret, assess and order the manifold manifestations of the transition from epic story-telling to writing as a means of nation-building. Having begun to write, modern Acadia has truly (re)written herself into existence, an existence now threatened by postmodern unwriting of literature. Destined not only for specialists but also and especially for readers with a general interest in literature, including students of all levels, Writing Acadia presents generous samples of Acadian poetry, drama and prose, with accompanying English translations.

Demenageries, Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida is a collection of essays on animality following Jacques Derrida’s work. The Western philosophical tradition separated animals from men by excluding the former from everything that was considered “proper to man”: laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, thinking. The “animal” has traditionally been considered the absolute Other of humans. This radical otherness has served as the rationale for the domination, exploitation and slaughter of animals. What Derrida called “la pensée de l’animal” (which means both thinking concerning the animal and “animal thinking”) may help us understand differently such apparently human features as language, thought and writing. It may also help us think anew about such highly philosophical concerns as differences, otherness, the end(s) of history and the world at large. Thanks to the ethical and epistemological crisis of Western humanism, “animality” has become an almost fashionable topic. However, Demenageries is the first collection to take Derrida’s thinking on animal thinking as a starting point, a way of reflecting not only on animals but starting from them, in order to address a variety of issues from a vast range of theoretical perspectives: philosophy, literature, cultural theory, anthropology, ethics, politics, religion, feminism, postcolonialism and, of course, posthumanism.

Engaging with the work of Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, this book reconceptualises the language divide between humans and animals within the context of animal ethics.