PANEL 2_4: Engaging with Animal Subjects: Ethical and Ecological Concerns
Abstracts
Of Meat and Miracles: Rethinking the Grounds of Animal Ethics and Politics
Matthew Calarco,California State University, Fullerton
My contribution to this panel will explore the ethical implications of recent developments in animal philosophy, especially among so-called Continental (modern European) philosophers. Philosophers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, and Irigaray have revolutionized our understanding of inter-human ethics, but how does their work impact on questions concerning animal ethics? I will suggest that the general thrust of much of this work—especially that of Derrida, Deleuze, and Irigaray—is toward an ethic of maximal respect and infinite responsibility toward animals and other non-human others. I also hope to show some of the practical and theoretical consequences of this approach to animal philosophy and animal ethics and how it relates to recent developments in post-humanism and environmental thought
Animals Before the Law
Cary Wolfe, Rice University
This paper will explore the question of animals“before”the law in at least two senses: as subject to the law, standing before it or subjugated to it in liberal democratic forms of jurisprudence in the United States; and“before”the law in the sense of an ontological antecedent, as beings whose evolutionary histories, ways of being in the world, attributes,“interests,”and so on point toward the question of an ethical standing that precedes and is quite independent from our historically contingent and ideologically specific juridical paradigms. Examples of this disjunction abound; for example, animals are property, not persons, under the law while corporations and certain ships enjoy the status of persons. Drawing on the work of legal scholars such as Steven M. Wise and Gary Francione and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Cora Diamond, this paper will examine a range on opinions on the sufficiency or insufficiency of ruling legal paradigms for doing justice to what we now know about (at least some) animals“before”the law (including, of course, the paradigm of extending“rights”to animals, as in The Great Ape Project), and it will use Agamben’s work on the“state of exception”and his distinction betweenbiosandzoeto disclose unexpected alliances between non-human animals used in factory farming or biomedical research, political prisoners (such as those at Guantanamo), and death row inmates as they stand“before”the law, in an effort to think the politics of“animal rights”anew.
The New Green Wave: Media Landscapes of Animal-Human Relations
Gregg Mitman , University of Wisconsin- Madison
In the spring of 2005, emperor penguins were on the move. From their home in Antarctica, they had, within a matter of months, appeared on every continent of the globe. This was not some remarkable feat of biological migration. Rather, it was a triumph of technology, storytelling, and the multinational media industry. The film, March of the Penguins, released by Warner Independent Pictures, a subsidiary of the multimedia giant, Warner Brothers Entertainment, made movie history. With gross earnings of $77 million in the United States, it became the second-highest grossing documentary ever to be released in North America—just behind Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
While theaters and cable television have become saturated with documentaries and shows that cater to green as the new cool, blue-chip nature films are a reminder of how disconnected many wildlife films are from the environmental issues facing planet earth. The end of nature, foretold by environmental writer Bill McKibben in 1989, has come. It has come, because the stories of nature are now inextricably bound to the stories of our own lives. Global climate change has finally brought that realization home. Over the last two decades, however, in the hands of global media giants, wildlife films have largely become escapist fantasy. We may relish in the beauty of Winged Migration, Jacques Perrin’s 2001 magisterial and poetic meditation on bird migration across seven continents, or wonder in amazement at the March of the Penguins. But we, as viewers, are never forced to confront how the behaviors of individuals, institutions, corporations, and governments are altering both animal and human lives. It is ironic that humans are largely absent in big-budget wildlife films, and wildlife are absent in the film credits. But the stories of people and wildlife are intertwined: in the production of nature films, and in the survival of all living species on planet earth.
Through an investigation of wildlife films produced over the last decade—from March of the Penguins to the YouTube splash, “Battle at Kruger,” this talk explores the place of nature film in shaping the contours of human-animal relations. If the new green wave of cinema is to be more than a passing consumer fad, a concerted effort is needed to strengthen the connections between filmmaking and community activism already underway. New media technologies have opened up the possibilities for new material, new voices, and new points of view. Outside the powerful networks of film distribution and promotion, new relationships across art, science, and activism are being forged, helping to create media that matters in the lives of people and animals throughout the world.
When Species Meet: Ethical Attachment Sites for Out-of-Place Companions
Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz
Companion species “break bread” together at table; it's in the word itself—cum panis, with bread. Who is on the menu at this table is a question of ethical and ecological urgency. In another context, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern asked if a young contemporary Papua New Guinea woman, who was enmeshed in the complexities of a life-cycle payment marriage agreement from which she was released by the PNG national court, nonetheless “might like to be able to fulfill her obligations.” What those obligations had become was, literally, on the table for all of the unexpected companions. In the same years, Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, who makes life-size (alien?) “protectors” for endangered species, like the Surrogate for the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat, asks what it would take in technoculture to love the failures, to take care of all the progeny of biotechnoscience's proliferating womb-labs? Also in my web of companion species, anthropologist and advocate in Aboriginal land claims Deborah Bird Rose inhabits the rodeos of Australia's Northern Territory to ask how the species in play—horses, cattle, EuroAustralian and Aboriginal cowboys of all available genders, and more—might be engaged in a practice of reconciliation crucial to “taking care of country” and bequeathing to those who come after worlds that bear the marks of generations of care even in the face of frontier practices of conquest and colonization, like rodeos. I will be at table with Strathern, Piccinini, and Rose in this paper, in order to work through ontological, ethical, and ecological knots tying together three gatherings of companion species: 1) the rapidly growing world of 21st-century urban chickens and the women who depend on them in Gabarone, Botswana; 2) park managers (Aboriginal and AngloAustralian, ecologists and tourist experts, etc.), Bininj/Mungguy Aboriginal traditional owners of the land, and Asian water buffalo in an Australia World Heritage site, Kakadu National Park; and 3) the people and other critters of the Navaho Sheep Project who bring the Iberian Churro into many an unexpected world of alliance and conflict where the premise of human exceptionalism gives way to the dangerous but promising open of companion species.
the pennsylvania state university