Cary Wolfe, "Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities" ...

Animal studies is a growing field that explores the relationship between humans and animals in literature, art, and culture. It encompasses various works such as William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, and Ernest Hemingway's Go Down, as well as works by Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe, William Wegman, Bill Viola, Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Randolph, and Patricia Piccinini. The concept of the animal has been central in earlier periods, with scholars suggesting that the idea of the animal was inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers like Descartes and Kant. Beyond literature, art, and culture, the Western philosophical canon and its thinking of the animal/human difference are being reconfigured and reinterpreted. There is also a crossover between philosophy and the legal sphere in animal rights law, animal television, and popular texts like Michael Polllan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The emergence of animal studies has been marked by a growing number of conferences, symposiums, publication venues, and special journal issues devoted to the topic in North America and abroad. This interdisciplinarity is inseparable from its very genesis, making it more justifiable for animal studies than it was for feminist scholarship or queer theory in its early days. Animal studies would not exist without the work done in field ecology and cognitive ethology over the past twenty to thirty years.

Scattered work on the animal was carried out in various fields in the humanities and social sciences as far back as the 1980s, with the landmark publication of Donna Haraway's Primate Visions opeing the 1990s with a remarkable interdisciplinary synthesis that defined a new, resolutely cultural studies era in what would come to be called animal studies. However, what appears different about the emergence of animal studies in our moment is the gradual opening up of a theoretical and critical space of its own.

The series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press has published important titles by Leonard Lawlor, Gary Francione, Stanley Cavell and cocontributors, and Matthew Calarco, among others. The number of special journal issues over the past few years has also increased, with the new online journal Humanimalia, the robust H-Animal corner of the H-Net humanities online forum, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and Society and Animals published by the Animals and Society Institute.

New work on animals, such as Nigel Rothfels's, moves away from an earlier form of history that focused on human ideas and attitudes towards animals. Instead, it traces the ways in which humans construct and are constructed by animals in the past. This raises the question of how the internal disciplinarity of history, literary studies, and philosophy is unsettled when animals are taken seriously, not just as another topic but as one with unique demands. Scholars in animal studies are challenged by the discourses and conceptual schemata that have shaped our understanding of and relations to animals, as well as the specificity of nonhuman animals and their nongeneric nature. This irreducibility of the question of the animal is linked to the problem of animals' ethical standing as direct or indirect subjects of justice.

Animal studies, a field of study that focuses on the human connection to animals, has been gaining attention in recent years. This field has been influenced by fields like cognitive ethology, which has explored the relationship between animals and humans. Animal studies studies both a material entity (nonhuman beings) and a discourse of species difference, which is not limited to their application to nonhumans alone. It is a socially and ethically responsive cultural studies working to stay ahead of new social movements, such as "animal rights," which is an academic expression of a larger democratic impulse towards greater inclusiveness of every gender, race, sexual orientation, or species. However, the rapid adoption of the cultural studies template for animal studies poses a challenge to the disciplinarity of the humanities and cultural studies. Animal studies can only be addressed adequately if they confront questions on two levels: content, thematics, and the object of knowledge, and the theoretical and methodological approach. This approach allows for the incorporation of humanism and liberalism, extending the sphere of consideration to previously marginalized groups.

Animal studies, a subfield of cultural studies, has faced challenges in its pursuit of a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior and the world around us. The field has been criticized for its disciplinary incoherence and vagueness, which has led to the preservation of a historically, ideologically, and intellectually specific form of subjectivity while masking it as pluralism. This incoherence serves to maintain a certain historically, ideologically, and intellectually specific form of subjectivity while masking it as pluralism, including the extension of pluralism to nonhuman animals.

Animal studies challenges the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings, which are sustained and reproduced in current disciplinary protocols of cultural studies and literary studies. This has led to the reproduction of an ideologically familiar mode of subjectivity based on liberal humanism.

An interdisciplinary field of inquiry, animal studies should not be viewed as simply the latest flavor of the month. While the distinction between "subjectivity" and "agency" is useful in understanding how animals and our interactions with them have historically shaped our world, it does not provide insight into the ethical differences that occur in our interactions with inanimate and sentient agents. The literary and philosophical end of animal studies has been interested in these differences, but this perspective differs from the Gramscian notion of critical consciousness that underpins many diverse approaches in cultural studies.

The text explores the relationship between the human and the animal in animal studies, arguing that critical consciousness exposes the intersubjectivity of meaning and exposes the structures that organize how we know and how knowledge is transmitted and accepted. It also highlights the cultural studies model, where animals are now recognized as agents in the enterprise. This picture of critical consciousness closes off the human from the animal, reinforcing the human/animal divide in a less visible but more fundamental way.

Derrida's essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am" is arguably the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies. He questions the nature of the "auto-" of the human as the "autobiographical animal" and the concept of the human that "man" "recounts to himself" to enable his recognition of the nonhuman other in a gesture of "benevolence" characteristic of liberal humanism.

Derrida's work on the animal enables us to address the problem of ethnocentrism raised earlier in Diamond's observation about what we have made of our relations to animals, without leaving us impaled on the other horn of the dilemma—either Gramscian critical consciousness or the broader issue of the human-animal divide. By examining the nature of the "auto-" of humanist subjectivity, we can better understand the embodied finitude that we share with nonhuman animals and the implications of our understanding of the human-animal relationship.

Derrida's argument in animal studies argues that human beings are not the "auto-" of humanism, but rather radically other and already in- or ahuman in their very being. This means that what we call "we" covers over a more radical not being able that makes our conceptual life possible. Animal studies should be more invested in fundamentally rethinking the question of what knowledge is, how it is limited by the overdeterminations and partialities of our "species-being." This second type of finitude is shared by humans and nonhumans when they begin to interact and communicate.

Animal studies intersects with the larger problematic of posthumanism, returning us to the thickness and finitude of human embodiment and to human evolution as itself a specific form of animality. By paying serious attention to the diversity of animal forms and ways of being in the world, we are forced to conclude that the human/animal distinction is nonsensical. On the strength of that weakness, we are returned to a new sense of the materiality and particularity not just of the animal and its multitude of forms but also of that animal called the human.

In the second half of the rubric animal studies, it is important to emphasize that one can engage in a humanist or a posthumanist practice of a discipline. Just because a historian or literary critic devotes attention to the topic or theme of nonhuman animals doesn't mean that a familiar form of humanism isn't being maintained through internal disciplinary practices that rely on a specific schema of the knowing subject and the kind of knowledge they can have.