Posthumanities: August 2009

Aug 31, 2009

The Cat Who Reads the Map: Posthumanism and Animality in "Harry Potter"

posted by Rodolfo Piskorski

To premiere the blog, I thought it would be fitting that I should post the full text of my latest research - which was my undergraduate end-of-course thesis, focusing on a posthumanist reading of animality and humanity in the Harry Potter novels. This is an embedded version of my text on Scribd.

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Rodolfo Piskorski

My current research focuses on the role of animality for the construction of meaning in literary/cultural texts, as in the works of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, who was the focus of my dissertation. I'm attempting to outline a theory for a possible zoogrammatology, which would account for how animals make meaning, language, and humanity possible. I am a close reader of Derrida and I believe his early texts about language, linguistics, and différance speak as much about animals as the later ones more openly concerned with animality. My favorite book is, without a doubt, Of Grammatology.

La grammè, my other blog.

Please write me if you want to make contact.

Academia.edu profile.

About

The 'post' of 'posthumanism' indicates a particular philosophical orientation toward the question of the human itself, one that would insist that we have never been only or wholly human, if by “human” we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy. Rather, the “human” is enmeshed in the larger problem - at once biological, ecological, and ontological — of what Derrida calls “the living.” Posthumanism does not entail a "beyond the human", but rather a "beyond humanism". And a better yet translation would show that the word 'post' is there to reveal not a temporal discontinuity, but a crisis. Posthumanist thinking tries to think of "the human" as a place of tensions, deeply steeped in a deeper discussion of humanity, animality, and the living.

adapted from Posthumanities
by Cary Wolfe