Monkey trouble : the limits of posthumanism / Christopher Peterson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Peterson, Christopher, 1950 February 18-2012, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophical anthropology.

Human beings.

Humanism.

Human-animal relationships.

Nature and civilization.

Physical Description:

pages cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2018.

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 Cuaron 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. Book jacket.

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823277797

0823277798

9780823277803

0823277801

OCLC:

1008770263