HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language

Description

HumAnimal explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, Kalpana Rahita Seshadri suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power.

Kalpana Rahita Seshadri is associate professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race.

"Kalpana Rahita Seshadri's HumAnimal is remarkably inventive, innovative, and thoughtful. Readers of Derrida and Agamben will find it especially stimulating."-Robert Bernasconi, author of How to Read Sartre "HumAnimal is one of the most insightful books on biopower and 'human nature' that I have ever read. This book has the potential to change not only the terms in current debates over the categories 'human' and 'animal,' but also to change the way that we think about ourselves. This is truly a beautiful and important book."-Kelly Oliver, author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human "Vibrant and lucid."-Feminist Legal Studies