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Posthumanism And Animal Rights: Rethinking 'The Human', Rethinking The 'Self', Benjamin Bolton

Animal Studies Journal

This piece seeks to extend Jacques Derrida’s and Cary Wolfe’s explorations of posthumanism and the production of ‘the human’ as divided and removed from its embedding within the world. It does so in order to shift the focus of animal welfare ethics away from specific practices and behaviours towards a fundamental reconceptualisation of animal/human relationships. Cary Wolfe’s work questions the fundamental tenets of the construction of the human through ocular domination. This vision-as-mastery permits the capacity for truth and control to be extended from the human self to all other beings. Vision, however, is a fundamentally flawed sense. In the …