Animal Rites

American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanism

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by Cary Wolfe,

Foreword by W. J. T. Mitchell

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published February 2003, 240 pages, paper

ISBN 0226905144

Now that supposedly distinguishing marks of humanity, from reasoning to tool use, have been found in other species, how can we justify discriminating against nonhuman animals solely on the basis of their species? And how must cultural studies and critical practices change to do justice to "others" who are not human?

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism, ethics, and animals by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lˇvinas, Derrida, Zizek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture--Hemingway's fiction, the film The Silence of the Lambs, Michael Crichton's novel Congo--Wolfe explores what it would mean, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously "the question of the animal."