"Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Context": A talk with Cary Wolfe
Cary Wolfe is the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. This talk is organized by the Environment, Culture, and Sustainability Quadrant, part of a joint program of the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Minnesota Press, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Each of the four Quadrant Publication and Research Groups reflects an area of current or emerging excellence at the University of Minnesota, in which innovative, interdisciplinary work has begun to appear.
This presentation explores the questions of law, justice, and animals (both human and non-human) by recontextualizing current legal doctrine in the framework of biopolitics and biophilosophy. Moving from the rights philosophy of Peter Singer and others, to critiques of the rights framework by Cora Diamond and Jacques Derrida, and finally to the biopolitical philosophy of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Roberto Esposito, we will attempt to understand and rethink the political status of two events involving non-human animals that lie at opposite extremes: the recent decision by the Spanish Parliament to grant basic rights to Great Apes, and the treatment of animals in factory farming.
Questions and Answers: Including comments about the Holocaust, subjectivity and synthetic meat!