Matthew Calarco

Giorgio Agamben has come to be recognized in recent years as one of the most provocative and imaginative thinkers in contemporary philosophy and political theory. The essays gathered together in this volume shed light on his extensive body of writings and assess the significance of his work for debates across a wide range of fields, including philosophy, political theory, Jewish studies, and animal studies. The authors discuss material extending across the entire range of Agamben's writings, including such early works as _Language and Death_ and more recent and widely acknowledged works such as _Homo Sacer_. Readers will find useful discussions of key concepts and theories in Agamben's work, such as sovereignty and bare life, along with more critical analyses of the political stakes and consequences of his theoretical and political interventions.

This chapter considers genuine alternatives to a hyperautomobile way of life. Such “altermobilities,” I argue, are not mere replacements for cars and car use but constitute very different ways of being-in and moving-through the world, ways that are attentive to our human and more-than-human kin. Thus, altermobilities are aimed at enacting ways of moving and being that are truly common and shared (what I will call, following the work of Giorgio Agamben, profane) rather than exclusive and hierarchical (or sacred, in Agamben’s sense of the word). Through an analysis of the ideal of autonomobility (developed by mobility theorists Noel Cass and Katharina Manderscheid), along with recent developments in the fields of road ecology, the environmental humanities, and disability studies, I sketch the elements of a genuinely non-anthropocentric approach to thinking about and practicing mobility.

Roadkill is a recurrent but often unthought feature of modern life. It is ubiquitous on urban, suburban, and rural roadways; it is a common theme on popular television shows and in horror movies; there are even cookbooks that extol the virtues and pleasures of eating roadkilled animals. Yet, consideration of the broader significance of the myriad ontological, social, ethical, and political issues related to roadkill has largely gone missing from mainstream scholarship and activism. This neglect persists even in fields such as mobility studies and animal studies that would otherwise seem to have a vested interest in the topic. Chapter 1 examines two systems of power that lie at the heart of the contemporary problem of roadkill: hyperautomobility and anthropocentrism. It is argued that examining these two systems in tandem is essential for overcoming the general neglect of roadkill in contemporary discourse and activism and for generating genuine alternatives to dominant systems of mobility.

This chapter considers the ontological status of roadkill, which is to say, its basic nature and significance. It is suggested that traditional substance ontologies, as well as more contemporary relational ontologies and ethical frameworks, are inadequate for disclosing the nature of roadkill. In order to address this limit, Calvin Warren’s analysis of ontological terror is employed to analyze the lives and deaths of beings who are understood to fall outside the orbit of the human. The chapter concludes with the idea that thinking and attending to roadkill as inhabiting such an outside requires relating to it as an event.

This chapter focuses on Barry Lopez’s essay “Apologia” in order to consider more carefully the issue of subjective formation and re-formation. In this essay, Lopez describes a cross-country road trip in which he encounters and removes a large number of roadkilled animals. Lopez describes this practice of roadkill removal as a “technique of awareness,” a technique which I argue allows not just for fuller appreciation of the beauty and singularity of animals, but also serves as a means whereby a change in hyperautomobile subjectivity might occur. As a means of articulating this latter idea more fully, Lopez’s ideas about apologizing and making amends are brought into conversation with related notions concerning events, truth, and ritual in Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas.

This chapter scrutinizes the “pragmatic attitude” that treats animals as mere obstacles to the smooth flow of circuits of mobility. At the heart of this attitude, it is argued, is a logic of sacrifice that structurally excludes animals and others deemed non- and sub-human from the circle of social and normative consideration. Critical responses and alternatives to this logic are canvassed under three different rubrics: liberal humanism, zoo-pessimism, and inhumanism. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how contemporary roadkill artists endeavor to challenge the logic of sacrifice and how their work aligns with key elements of the inhumanist perspective.

A transformative vision for human-animal relations on personal, social, and environmental levels. The Three Ethologies offers a fresh, affirmative vision for rebuilding human-animal relations. Venturing beyond the usual scholarly and activist emphasis on restricting harm, Matthew Calarco develops a new philosophy for understanding animal behavior—a practice known as ethology—through three distinct but interrelated lenses: mental ethology, which rebuilds individual subjectivity; social ethology, which rethinks our communal relations; and environmental ethology, which reconfigures our relationship to the land we co-inhabit with our animal kin. Drawing on developments in philosophy, (eco)feminist theory, critical geography, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, Calarco casts an inspiring vision of how ethological living can help us to reimagine our ideas about goodness, truth, and beauty.

En las páginas finales de “El futuro de la profesión o la universidad sin condición”, Derrida sugiere que el futuro de las humanidades tendrá que incluir un análisis de la historia de los conceptos que instituyen varias de las disciplinas que componen las humanidades. Dichos análisis históricos, señala, no habrían de ser neutrales. Por el contrario, estarían guiados por un intento de abrir estas disciplinas a modos de alteridad que no han sido pensados cuando se han constituido sus fundamentos. Que este tipo de consideración crítica también ha de ser extendido hasta incluir las problemáticas fundamentales de las humanidades en cuanto tales y en su conjunto (y no sólo de las disciplinas individuales que caen bajo esta rúbrica) es algo que Derrida no elude. De hecho, esta exigencia crítica es el primer tema que él señala cuando intenta delinear un proyecto positivo y cuasi-programático para las humanidades. Sugiere que las humanidades, si han de mantener el espíritu ético a partir del cual se constituyeron, tendrán que girar sus lentes críticos sobre sus propios conceptos fundamentales, esto es, sobre el concepto de “lo humano”.

The Continental Ethics Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on ethics and moral philosophy from the major figures in Continental thought. The carefully selected readings are divided into five sections: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. All of the authors and their writings are introduced and placed in philosophical context by the editors. The Continental Ethics Reader is an ideal point of entry to the most pressing issues and most important thinkers of the Continental tradition, and provides a thorough and much needed introduction to the field.

Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin tracks the transformation of the novel’s protagonist, Isserley, as she undergoes a crisis in her self-identity and drifts slowly but in a determined manner toward another way of life. Isserley works in the voddissin industry, which captures and transforms “vodsels” into consumable meat. As the novel unfolds, Isserley eventually comes to reject the meat industry and the subjugation of vodsels on which it is based. Here I suggest that Isserly’s subjective transformation is based not on a superficial recognition of logical identity between herself and vodsels, but on a deeper ethic of belonging, which enables her to affirm her shared “animal” condition with vodsels and other earthly beings.