Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T04:50:27.870Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

James Stanescu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article utilizes the work of Judith Butler in order to chart a queer and feminist animal studies, an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. Butler's commentary on other animals remains dispersed and fragmented throughout books, lectures, and interviews over the course of the last several years. This work is critically synthesized in conjunction with her work on mourning and precarious lives. By developing an anti‐anthropocentric understanding of mourning and precarious lives, this article hopes to create ontological, ethical, and political concepts that resist the violence of the present. In so doing, the article contrasts Butler's understanding of precarious life with Giorgio Agamben's understanding of bare life in order to conceive of precariousness as constitutive of social reality. This intellectual labor lays the groundwork for understanding mourning the lives of other animals as a political act that produces new communities, rather than as an individuating and isolating emotion.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 27 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Animal Others , Summer 2012 , pp. 567 - 582
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1998. Beethoven: The philosophy of music. Trans. Jephcott, EdmundCambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Adorno, Theodor. 2006. History and freedom. Trans. Tiedemann, Rolf. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Trans. Heller‐Roazen, Daniel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities. Trans. Heller‐Roazen, Daniel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The open: Man and animal. Trans. Attell, Kevin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception. Trans. Attell, Kevin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Farneti, Roberto. 2009. Antigone's claim: A conversation with Judith Butler. Theory & Event 12.1 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v012/12.1.antonello.html (accessed February 21, 2011).Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 2004. Critique of violence. Trans. Paul Bullock, Marcus and Jennings, Michael W. In Selected writings, vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone's claim: Kinship between life and death. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2003. Afterword: After loss, what then? In Loss, ed. Eng, David L. and Kazanjian, David. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004a. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004b. Undgoing Gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith, and Spivak, Gayatri. 2007. Who sings the nation‐state?: Language, politics, belonging. New York: Seagull Books.Google Scholar
Cavalieri, Paola. 2011. Cetaceans: From bare life to nonhuman others. Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture 10 (1). http://www.logosjournal.com/cetaceans-bare-life-nonhuman-others.php (accessed March 2, 2011).Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The animal that therefore I am. Trans. Wills, David. New York: Fordham Universty Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The beast and the sovereign. Trans. Bennington, Geoffrey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Durantaye, Leland de la. 2009. Giorgio Agamben: A critical introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal. Trans. Burchell, Graham. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Haver, William. 1996. The body of this death: Historicity and sociality in the time of AIDS. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror. Trans. Roudiez, Leon S.New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 2009. Animal lessons: How they teach us to be human. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Chloë. 2008. The precarious lives of animals: Butler, Coetzee, and animal ethics. Philosophy Today 52 (1): 60–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wadiwel, Dinesh. 2008. Three fragments from a biopolitical history of animals: Questions of body, soul, and the body politic in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 6 (1): 17–39. http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_8/Wadiwel17_31.pdf (accessed March 2, 2011).Google Scholar
Wojnarowicz, David. 1990. Tongues of flame. Normal: Illinois State University Press.Google Scholar