Matthew Calarco

I won't say it wasn't a struggle. High points, perhaps THE high point, includes FINALLY reading 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (which, okay, I didn't read in *this* book exactly, since I didn't want to read an excerpt): I note my sense that queer theory has caught up to this essay only in the last few years, and also that Cixous saves Bataille's 'Notion of Expenditure' by untethering it from the agon or any other telos. I don't want to complain (too much? at all?) about their selections, their editings, but *how* could they leave out Cixous's "At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences. I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you've never seen me before: at every instant." Sheesh.

What else would I change? First, I'd make it more like a Norton Anthology. There are no notes but the notes provided by the authors themselves--all of whom, barring, say, the plainspeaking Habermas or Rorty--assume we'll get all their jokes. So: more notes, *especially* for our impossible writers. Who can complain about the impenetrability of modern theory after the failure of reading Hegel (Lacan, at least, pretends to have a personality)? And how can we get the BwO of Anti-Oedipus unless the notes contextualize it with the other BwO of Thousand Plateaus? Second, I might arrange it by topic instead of by school. After all, it's not the -isms that destroy traditional metaphysics: it's the new ways of asking questions, all of which open holes in multiple places beneath all previous sites of confidence, above all, the site of the Singular Rule.

I've noticed the demand for anteriority in so many of these thinkers: so many want to find the thing before. Thankfully, a few of our thinkers--Derrida, chiefly--do the anterior thing less to get before than to come at us *from behind.* I'm sure someone else has done the sexual reading of this tendency.… (more)

Been a few months since I finished it, but I remember enough to highly recommend it for anyone doing work in animal theory. Unlike Acampora's Corporeal Compassion, Calarco really gets Agamben; unlike Leonard Lawlor's This is Not Sufficient, Calarco is not so deep into the questions that he's impossible to follow without the appropriate preparation (hint for Lawlor: Derrida's "There Is No One Narcissism (Autobiophotographies)" is essential reading); unlike Haraway's When Species Meet, Calarco is very, very efficient; unlike the various critical animal theory anthologies--Killing Animals, Zoontologies, Representing Animals, Philosophy & Animal Life--it's consistently of high quality; and unlike various special journal issues--I'm looking at you, PhaenEx Phenomenology and Animals issue--Calarco is more than willing to meet the reader halfway.

I've read no one who explains and engages better with Agamben's work on animals, and absolutely no one who does so in light of Agamben's whole philosophical career. That chapter alone is worth the book, but if you want a good treatment of Derrida, Levinas, and Heidegger--who have been treated time and time again, but in disparate places and intermixed with, say, American Cultural Studies (see: Cary Wolfe)--this is THE place to go.… (more)