Writing — Ron Broglio

Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies

The book begins with figures often overlooked in literary studies but responsible for shaping the nation and its agricultural productivity—including Burke, Malthus, Sir John Sinclair, and the Duke of Bedford. Beasts of Burden then weaves into this narrative of national progress a number of known and lesser known labor class literary authors and advocates for the rural poor who give voice to those for whom “improved agriculture” means a loss of livelihood including Robert Bloomfield, Thomas Batchlor, Robert Burns, James Hogg, and William Cobbett. The role of animal life unfolds over the course book and is addressed prominently in the final chapters on Thomas Bewick, George Stubbs, and Edwin Landseer.

Beasts of Bruden

At stake is the ability to think about the Other, those agents and beings radically different from ourselves. How are we to understand that which differs from our capacity to comprehend? The conjecture of this book is that such thinking is possible within particular parameters. Foremost, it is a thinking that arises from the event, action, and encounters with the animal others. This is a corporeal thinking that risks itself, mind and body, in the acts of encounters that differ with each animal. Additionally, thinking the Other in this case is possible only if we consider thinking as an activity in the wake of philosophy as a series of experiments and paths toward producing tentative, sometimes fragile, and hybrid meaning. In particular, and as I’ll take up in later chapters, pidgin language—as a makeshift and cobbled-together language of words and gestures between two different groups—has been particularly helpful for me as a figure for thinking alongside animals.

Surface Encounters: thinking with animals and art

"Derrida explores the many resonances of Celan’s line 'The world is gone, I must carry you,' in the mode of carrying a child to term or bearing a dead body: that is to say, a form of responsibility to spectrality itself, to the 'not yet here' or the 'already gone,' the trace of which is materialized, as it were, in the bodies of these dead birds. In the absence of 'world,' and in the radically ethical act of being responsible in the absence of any such foundation art, versus philosophy, has a special role to play in constructing the 'as if' of a world of 'stabilizing apparatuses.'” --Cary Wolfe in You Must Carry Me Now

You Must Carry Me Now

Technologies of the Picturesque

Take these essays’ experiments, productions, and queries as ways of thinking a “wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare.” Uexküll believed such experiments would lead to “worlds strange to us but know to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves.” The essays here expand what it means to be human in multiple ecologies.

Being Human: between animals and technology