Research Catalog

Title

Monkey trouble : the scandal of posthumanism / Christopher Peterson.

Author

Peterson, Christopher, 1972-

Publication

• New York : Fordham University Press, 2018.
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

v, 159 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

"According to scholars of the nonhuman turn, the scandal of theory lies in its failure to decenter the human. The real scandal, however, is that we keep trying. The human has become a conspicuous blind spot for many theorists seeking to extend hospitality to animals, plants, and even insentient things. The displacement of the human is essential and urgent, yet given the humanist presumption that animals lack a number of allegedly unique human capacities, such as language, reason, and awareness of mortality, we ought to remain cautious about laying claim to any power to eradicate anthropocentrism altogether. Such a power risks becoming yet another self-accredited capacity thanks to which the human reaffirms its sovereignty through its supposed erasure. Monkey Trouble argues that the turn toward immanence in contemporary posthumanism promotes a cosmocracy that absolves one from engaging in those discriminatory decisions that condition hospitality as such. Engaging with recent theoretical developments in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as well as ape and parrot language studies, the book offers close readings of literary works by J.M. Coetzee, Charles Chesnutt, and Walt Whitman and films by Alfonso Cuarón and Lars von Trier. Anthropocentrism, Peterson argues, cannot be displaced through a logic of reversal that elevates immanence above transcendence, horizontality over verticality. This decentering must cultivate instead a human/nonhuman relationality that affirms the immanent transcendency spawned by our phantasmatic humanness."--

Subject

• Tierethik
• Tiere
• Philosophische Anthropologie
• Mensch
• Human beings
• Human-animal relationships
• Humanism
• Nature and civilization
• Philosophical anthropology
• Humanism
• Nature and civilization
• Philosophical anthropology

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 143-153) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The scandal of the human : immanent transcendency and the question of animal language -- Sovereign silence : the desire for answering speech -- The gravity of melancholia : a critique of speculative realism -- Listing toward cosmocracy : the limits of hospitality.

ISBN

• 0823277798
• 0823277801
• 9780823277797
• 9780823277803

LCCN

^^2016058789

OCLC

• 1008770263
• SCSB-12142365

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library