ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

What is the function of the animal in a post-human world? From Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto to Steve Baker’s discussion of contemporary animal art in The Post-Modern Animal, to the philosophical ponderings on man and animal by Derrida and Agamben, the question of the animal has been foregrounded as a theoretical question for our times. In the aftermath of what has been seen as a crisis in humanism and the insufficiency, if not impossibility of the human as promoted by the humanist enterprise, the arts and humanities have made a turn to the animal as a means of both exposing and shoring up human deficiencies—especially the deficiencies of our language and our ways of knowing. The term, “the animal,” Derrida reminds us, is itself a construct of a humanist world that posed this impossible, singular identity to oppose and define the identity of the human. Humanism, as Agamben also reminds us, judged itself and its progress in terms of a mastery over the animal and the distance the human traveled from an animal state. Are these claims justified and sufficient? This panel will consider both the status of the animal for humanism and the animals (or Derrida’s “animot”) that might replace the construct of the animal in a post-human world.

Friday, March 24

Moneera Al-Ghadeer, UW Madison
“She Mourns Like Desert Animals”
Kari Weil, California College of the Arts
“Living Like a Dog: Animal Being in Coetzee”
Matthew Moss, Princeton University
“Kojève and Bataille on Post-Human Experience and the Return to Animality”
J.D. Mininger, University of Minnesota
“Animality and the Demonic: Re-inserting a Kierkegaardian Intertext into Agamben’s Reading of Heidegger”

Saturday, March 25

Jonathon Greenberg, Montclair State University
“Twentieth Century Primates”
Ellen Travis, Independent Scholar
“Architects and Bees”
Cecilia Novero, Penn State University
“Carnival of Animals”
Jane Desmond, University of Iowa
“Art By Animals: Contesting Humanism in the Global Art Market”