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“The Tame From The Wild”: Handling Political Economies Of Life At The Emergence Of Capital, Michael R. Griffiths

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

At least since Aristotle, representations of animality in fictions of the economy have skirted the bounds of allegorical and mimetic modes or (to employ a distinction consonant with the old terms of the Great Chain of Being) those of analogy and emulation. For Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, animals as living beings must be consigned to the status of “tame” chattel property. They are also relied upon as the bases for economic arguments from the “analogy of animals.” Inscriptions of species difference in such arguments often conceal material origins within genres that appear entirely analogical or allegorical. At times, ironically, scholarly efforts …