ABSTRACT
Spurred by a diverse set of commentators including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, twenty-first-century cultural theorists have begun to decouple the subjects and methods taught within the humanities from the anthropocentric perspectives through which they traditionally have been perceived. For these posthumanist scholars, viewing the world through absolute divisions between human subjects and nonhuman objects not only obscures the biotic continuities between animals and humans, but also, and perhaps more crucially, masks the ways that animals express their own agencies as they enter into dynamic networks with other human and nonhuman actors. One central challenge of posthumanism thus revolves around a difficult question: given our status as human beings embedded within a deep tradition of humanism, how can we collect and share information about nonhuman agents from their points of view? Since animals lack an easily identifiable interiority and are, as Martin Heidegger famously argues, “poor in world,” how can we, who are “world forming” creatures, think through animals? 1 Or as Derrida, working within the same tradition, asks in his seminal essay “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” can human beings ever “think through [the] absolute alterity of the neighbor”—a possibility that he confronts but does not resolve when he “see[s himself] seen naked under the gaze of [his] cat”? 2
