Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory

Cary Wolfe

Feb 2003 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Žižek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, Wolfe explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously "the question of the animal."

About the author

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and founding director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University. He is the author of five books, most recently, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame.