Cary Wolfe: SLSA Keynote 1

Before the Law (Chicago, forthcoming).
different commitments of animal studies. Ethics, not really politics. Biopolitics, theory generally, but not that interested in the status of nonhuman creatures.
Donna Haraway's critique of Foucault. Animality as basically a problem for the human in relation to itself.
What resources does biopolitical thought provide for animal studies?
New knowledges and so on have left our educational and legal institutions in the dust: less because of our coolness than pressure from outside.
Humanities have not been so good at thinking about nonhuman beings. Nor responsive to their changing plights and needs.
Race, gender, sexuality, species: those doing the expanding are secure in the floor plan of subjectivity that we all thought was the problem in the first place.
Humanities will have to become the posthumanities.
Rich bourgeois democracies: not to take the we for granted.
June 2008, Spanish parliament rights to great apes. On basis of human rights.
massive amounts of factory farming
we need something other than the blunt instrument of human versus animal to make sense of it
great apes have a lot more in common with humans than with many other animals
how can we line up the differences of ontology and law?