Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Wildlife Services is a subbranch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that primarily operates in the Western half of the United States, receiving 100 million dollars of federal funding annually. One of the “services” that the agency provides is the slaughter of 100,000 native carnivores per year (primarily coyotes, wolves, bears, and mountain lions). This killing is accomplished with traps, poison, and, most dramatically, by gunning animals down from planes and helicopters; it takes place on public lands that are set apart, among other purposes, as habitat for just such creatures. The main purpose of the program is to prevent …

Fredric Jameson poignantly notes that for those of us formed by the cultures of the West, it is easier to imagine the destruction of the biosphere and the extinction of the majority of earth’s species than the end of global capitalism. Our collective moral imagination has atrophied within the enclosure of a political-economic system whose momentum seems unstoppable, yet whose operation is geared toward the short-term monetary benefit of a tiny minority. We can readily imagine mass extinctions and ecological deterioration because this is the direction that we are already going; we have trouble imagining the end of late capitalism …

Jacques Derrida despairs of finding animals among philosophers. “Thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis” (2008, 7; cf. 40). The poetic imagination, in contrast to the philosopher’s, has from time to time had the courage to stand in the gaze of the animal and to write as one who is seen. Guided by Derrida’s intuition about poetic discourse, this essay takes its beginning in an ancient piece of erotic poetry in which animal metaphor features prominently—Solomon’s Song of Songs. This book’s place in the canon was a puzzle and …

The Gospel of John begins with a Logos, a Word sounding out the earliest origins of creation and measuring up even to God. After asserting that everything in existence resonates with echoes of the Logos, having come into being through it, John narrows his view and writes that this Logos is life (zōē), and that this life is the light of human beings (anthrōpōn). Human life (zōē) radiates as light from the Logos of God. But John’s text is not all light and life. John quickly modulates into a minor key and writes of a darkness that refuses the light. …

In The Animal that Therefore I Am, Derrida queries what (or who) feeds at the limit between the human and the animal. What is it that is nourished by this distinction? Who stands to benefit from maintaining a single line, a clean cut between the human and the animal. By the end of the text he has come to the conclusion that the thinking subject (the je suis that both ‘follows’ the animal and recognizes itself by means of the encounter with the animal) must be something neither dead nor alive; the ‘je suis’ is neither animal nor some thing …

The controversy between Gregory of Nyssa and Eunomius of Cyzicus over the origin and nature of human language might profitably be mapped across the tension between the two creation narratives in the opening chapters of Genesis. Eunomius, emphasizing the hexaemeron, finds the world a place of order divinely structured; Gregory reveling in Paradise, theologizes in a more mytho-poetic mode. Eunomius places great weight on the text’s assertion that God verbally calls the light “day” and the dark “night”—a clear indicator for him of the divine origin of language.1 In contrast, Gregory calls upon the moment in the Paradise narrative where …

The collected essays comprising Creaturely Theology are announced as a bold entry of properly theological voices into a new ‘wave’ of conversation about animals—one concerned with how (as opposed to whether) animals matter and how they are presented, absented, and represented in language. While expressing gratitude to earlier scholars like Andrew Linzey, editors Celia Deane Drummond and David Clough lament that theologians have been comparatively slow (relative to colleagues in other disciplines) to take up ‘the question of the animal,’ even though articulations of the relationships between humans other animals—or, more abstractly, humanity and animality— frequently use the divine as …