Ryan S. Gustafsson

This article is a review of Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers, a timely and crucial contribution to critical animal studies scholarship. CIFERAE is a remarkable and careful analysis of epistemological anthropocentrism+in particular, what Tyler calls a "first-and-foremost anthropocentrism"--and the ways in which animals "figure" in the history of Western thought. Moreover, the text prompts a critique of "the human" and the formation of the "we." As such, Tyler’s philosophical investigation or bestiary pertains not only to theories of knowledge, but it holds significant ethical and political implications.

This article articulates a critical phenomenological account of the being of the Korean transracial adoptee, through an analysis of three fundamental interrelated experiences. First, I argue that adoptee being is marked by epistemological ambiguity, or the impossibility of knowing and the ambiguous value of any knowledge gained. Second, the arbitrary sense of one’s place and identity contribute to a sense of substitutability among adoptees. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema, I then argue that for the Korean adoptee, racial difference is inscribed in the body schema as absence. The article ends with a discussion of the complexities of racial embodiment that underpin adoptees’ identifications and experiences of belonging and place, and which result in what I term ‘hyper(in)visibility’.