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extend access to Modern Philology
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BOOK REVIEW
E136
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Book Review E137
2. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Maller and trans. David Wills
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
3. Marianne DeKoven, ‘‘Why Animals Now?’’ PMLA 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 361–69.
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E138 MODERN PHILOLOGY
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Book Review E139
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E140 MODERN PHILOLOGY
good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insist on the embod-
ied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been
used to signify a leap out of the marked body’’ (677).4
Luhmann and the insights of systems theory make plausible but not
always compelling frameworks for every chapter. The strength of What Is
Posthumanism?—its ranginess, its thoroughness in examining the system
(what Wolfe thinks of as a detotalized totality)—is also in some parts a defi-
cit, and the book, although evidently learned, can be repetitive. This collec-
tion is not one to sit down and read from start to finish, but it is a book in
which to sample—especially its passionate posthumanist grapplings with
animals, which constitute an intellectual core of the study—and Wolfe’s
ambitions for enacting and widening the purview of systems theory is admi-
rable and ambitious. In the end, one does in fact come away with a useful
series of propositions about posthumanism. Perhaps the most simple uni-
tes everything Wolfe is interested in: ‘‘‘we’ are not ‘we.’ . . . Rather, ‘we’ are
always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very being—not just in
the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerabil-
ity . . . but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and
technicity of a language’’ (89). The human is always heterogeneous to the
human.
Hillary Chute
University of Chicago
4. Donna Haraway, ‘‘The Persistence of Vision,’’ in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment
and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1997), 283–95.
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