The Cat Who Reads the Map: Posthumanism and Animality in "Harry Potter"
To premiere the blog, I thought it would be fitting that I should post the full text of my latest research - which was my undergraduate end-of-course thesis, focusing on a posthumanist reading of...
View ArticleWhat's in a name? or Post- vs. Trans-
Within the larger field of the (post-)humanities, the terms 'posthumanism' and 'posthuman' have been difficult to determine. A quick Google search on any of these words will list many websites which...
View ArticleAnimality, animals and racial Otherness
Renee, posting in two feminist blogs (Feministe and Womanist Musings), authored a comment on the connections between animal rights groups and the political fight of people of color that has sparked...
View ArticleSeptember 1, 1939
On September 1st, which was last Tuesday, I was watching Katyń by Andrzej Wajda and I realized during it that that Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland, and of the Second World...
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Origami chickens
That's what McDonald's "chicken" sandwiches are made of. At least according to the little box the sandwich comes out of. Now they have the "ingredients" of the sandwich pictured around it, and there...
View ArticleThe Production of Early Modern Humanism in "The Tempest"
The following is a term paper I wrote for a course I had this semester on The Tempest and how it has been read by several theoretical frameworks. In it I analyze the ways in which Prospero (and...
View ArticleTemple Grandin's ableism
As an autistic animal scientist who seemed to problematize even further the connections between the disability critique and posthumanist thinking, Temple Grandin had always been a very interesting and...
View ArticleDisability, the animal, and the question of the "lack"
Long time since I've posted, but I've certainly been busy reading and writing and going to conferences. Right now we are having our annual international seminar on Gender Studies here at UFSC called...
View ArticleKojève's posthumanism
The first time I got in contact with Kojève's thinking was in Agamben's The Open, where he quotes what Kojève has to say about the End of History and what that would imply - the end of dialectics and...
View ArticleA zoogrammatology of literature
Having recently been to a major international conference here in Brazil on the interfaces between animality and literature (the name translates to "Animals, Animality and the Limits of the Human"), I'm...
View ArticleWhat is language, after all? (+ a short review of "The Sensible Life")
Recently I've been attempting to think of language as having no inherent relationship to communication. I believe it could be argued that communication and transmission of information are purely...
View ArticleBare life and animal life
I'm currently reading Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life carefully for the first time and I'm having a hard time separating the many thematic strands that comprise such issues as the...
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Human exceptionalism in "Gattaca"
I say "more" thoughts because I have been thinking about and discussing Gattaca for years now, and it's certainly one of my favorite films. The persecuted underdog story, coupled with Michael Nyman's...
View ArticleNew issue of ICAS journal
The latest issue of the Journal of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies is out. I'm proud to say that I have a small participation on it - a review of Tom Tyler's book CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five...
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Scriptural, electric animality
When writing about zoogrammatology, I often make the point that animality threatens to short-circuit language and literature (to use an expression sometimes employed by Cary Wolfe). I was happy, but...
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Animal silhouettes
Many have talked about the fact that, in Derrida's deconstructive readings, the signifier he obsesses over doesn't need to be really there. To be sure, in many of his analyses he finds a specific word...
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Teeth
For millennia and in different discursive practices, a very common distinguishing mark between humans and animals has been the former's lack of weapons. The story goes that animals are "perfectly...
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Žižek's piece on Greece and the Rise of Nephopolitics
I believe it goes without saying that it is almost impossible for a layperson - even an academic one - to follow all events and opinions surrounding the Greek crisis. But Žižek's piece for the New...
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