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Insensate Oysters And Our Nonconsensual Existence, Karl Steel
Insensate Oysters And Our Nonconsensual Existence, Karl Steel
Publications and Research
From the classical era through to the French Enlightenment, oysters were considered the hingepoint between plants and animals. Unable to move, possessing only the sense of sense itself, they were the very figure of bare life. Rather than claiming that oysters should be granted "agency," as the new materialist habit would be, I argue that humans should instead "oystermorphize" themselves, to recognize that our agency is not the dominant condition of our being.
The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick
The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick
Publications and Research
From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …