Zoontologies Book

Wolfe has put together an eclectic anthology on what the subtitle calls (after Derrida) "the question of the animal." Wolfe's excellent introduction and his long examination of Wittgenstein's famous dictum'"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him"'range much further than simply an analysis of language games and are worth the price of the book in themselves. I look forward to reading Animal Rites immensely. I thought Steve Baker's "Sloughing the Human" about animals and art deserved to be longer and Alphonso Lingis's "Animal Body, Inhuman Face," which I'd read in Animal Others, once more provded fascinating, weird, and very suggestive. I can't say I really "got" Judith Roof's essay on Freud's psychoanalysis of the single-celled organism, and my predisposition not to take psychoanalysis seriously as a science probably colored my response to Derrida's deconstruction of Lacan's Cartesianism in "And Say the Animal Responded?" (Wolfe explains Derrida much better than I think Derrida does!) Ursula Heise's chapter on virtual reality, dinosaurs, and Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" was thought-provoking and Charlie LeDuff's investigation inside a racially divided slaughterhouse in North Carolina once more reminded me of how politicized and gendered the killing and consumption of animals is. Indeed, this piece (which comes at the end of the book) highlights that when it comes to animals, it (philosophy, theory, food) can never be only about theory. A well-constructed and provocative volume.