Turner, Lynn, ed. 2013. The Animal Question in Deconstruction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748683123 [Edited Book]

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Abstract or Description

How does deconstruction understand relations between humans and other animals? Turner's book reveals that across Jacques Derrida’s work as a whole, as well as that of Hélène Cixous and Nicholas Royle, deconstruction has always addressed questions about animality. In this collection, for example, Cixous asks after human intervention between the death of a wild bird and the predation of a domestic cat. Kelly Oliver pursues Derrida’s analysis of what or whose gaze is at stake when a King oversees the autopsy of an elephant. Royle examines in what sense the vulnerable impressions made by the tunnelling of a mole might be thought of as the traces of a text. Re-examining how we relate to other animals has far-reaching implications for how we think of ourselves. Throughout this collection authors bring to attention the politics and the poetics of a less anthropocentric world. Even when this world is grasped through very writerly fields such as philosophy, literature and autobiography, The Animal Question in Deconstruction demonstrates that we are always marked by traces of other animals.

"The most refreshing aspect of Lynn Turner’s edited collection on deconstruction and ‘the animal question’ is that it reminds us of what I would call the central but often overlooked or downplayed problem in the current posthumanist and postanthropocentric intellectual climate, namely the conundrum of anthropomorphism …" - Stefan Herbrechter, Culture Machine

Item Type:	Edited Book
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Research Office > REF2014 Visual Cultures
Date:	August 2013
Item ID:	6977
Date Deposited:	14 Jan 2013 10:40
Last Modified:	05 Jan 2020 11:54
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/6977

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