Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-232) and index
Old orders for new: ecology, animal rights and the poverty of humanism -- In the shadow of Wttgenstein's Lion: language, ethics, and the question of the animal -- Subject to sacrifice: ideology, psychoanalysis, and the discourse of species in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of The Lambs (with Jonathan Elmer) -- Aficionados and friend killers: rearticulating race and gender via species in Hemingway -- Faux posthumanism: the discourse of species and the neocolonial project in Michael Crichton's Congo -- Conclusion: postmodern ethics, thequestion of the animal, and the imperatives of posthumanist theory
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, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously 'the question of the animal'