Contents: Humanimal and the Planet Earth (Issue 41)
Contents: Humanimal and the Planet Earth (Issue 41)
Posts tagged ‘Planet Earth’
Dec 31
Guest-Editorial – Cowborg Manifesto and the Binaric Closure of Homo Deus: Becoming Animal as War Machine
By Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
Worshipping all animals is a wonderful practice and this is exactly what this special issue of Café Dissensus is exploring – endorsing radical indistinctions between human-animal binaries to coronate the humanimal –universe where human supremacy is decententered as the asymmetrical taxonomy of human hegemony has led to the devastation of life and the virtual end of the planet earth.
Becoming “Before” The Damned: Radical Religious Vision/s for the Animals, Earth, and People to Come
By Brianne Donaldson
What circular ideologies support the socially sanctioned subjugation of an entire group of bodies simply because they are in that group, such that we kill animals because they are animals? If ideology represents the study of ideas, what new ideas are needed to free us from past dogmas, superstitions, and culturally conditioned biases?
Humanimality
By Felice Cimatti
Maybe being a humanimal is just such an impossibility to say what a humanimal life is. Humanimality is beyond each of us. It is not an ethical possibility, nor a political one. At the same time, humanimality implies huge ethical and political consequences.
How to Think Through the Animal?: Towards New Frontiers of Critical Animal Studies: An Interview with Matthew Calarco
By Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Saptaparni Pandit
Matthew Calarco is Professor of Philosophy in California State University, Fullerton and author of numerous path-breaking works in the domain of Critical Animal Studies such as Thinking through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (Stanford University Press, 2015), The Death of the Animal (Columbia University Press, 2009), Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (Columbia University Press, 2008). On behalf of Café Dissensus, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Saptaparni Pandit spoke to Prof. Calarco.
Poems: A Trilogy of Cats
By Bashabi Fraser
We have melted in your soft, black sheen
Entrapped by the hypnotic glance of green intensity
That you cast on your mate and all who are keen
To be enslaved by your paradoxical alertness and stupidity.
Wo und Ob: Heidegger’s Animal Differently
By Richard Iveson
While somewhat esoteric at first glance, the seemingly tiny correction made to Sein und Zeit by Heidegger more than twenty-five years after its original 1927 publication nonetheless has important consequences for a rethinking of animals with Heidegger from within both animal studies and Continental philosophy.
A Parliament for Elephants: Encroachment, Laws, and Animal Rights
By Tirthankar Ghosh and Manas Dutta
Whatever the conservationist methods or policies have been applied so far, these are drawn from the humanist viewpoint of retaining the ‘noble’ responsibility to restore elephant lives without making any ‘compromise’ (or sacrifice!) for modernization or developmentalism necessary for the ‘humans’ time to time. If elephants are to live their share of life without any so-called ‘modern’ hindrances, the tracks should be removed and human should retreat from the elephant-land which they have robbed and occupied as if “being the only survival” on the earth.
Re-worlding Planetary Thought and Species History in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty
By Mursed Alam and Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
On behalf of Café Dissensus, Md Mursed Alam and Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha approached Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty for a dialogue on issues related to the Anthropocene, Species-thinking, Planetary thinking, and Capitalism. Initially, Prof. Chakrabarty decided to have the interview through Skype but as subsequently he fell ill, he permitted us through email to use his interview to "Cultures of Energy" scholars at Rice University and we express our deep gratitude to Prof. Dominic Boyer, Director, CENHS (Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences), Rice University, for providing us the audio link of the interview from where we got the transcript of the interview.
Book Review: Poetizing the History of Non-human Subjugation in the Age of the Anthropocene
By Manas Dutta
The anthology of poems under review, Fox Land and Selected Poems, tries to understand certain capacity or traits such as logos, ratio, Will, spirit, Being, emotion, resistance, subjectivity, etc which it is generally believed, the non-humans lack. The poet critically questions these essentialist human categories and subsequently tries to narrate the ontologies of the non-human or the non-anthropocene through the expression of transformative poetics or parapoetics.
Review Essay – Panexperientialism and Ontological Multiplicity: Notes Toward Creaturely Love and Creaturely Cosmologies
By Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
Both these books are significant contributions in the domain of Critical Animal Studies and Planetary Studies as both launch a substantial critique of speciesism or species exceptionalism. While the first book deflates and deconstructs the anthropological claim about love being an exclusively human attribute, the second book deanthropologize the mission further by decentering the human through an exposition of creaturely cosmologies in which the category of the human is located within other creaturely multiplicities.
