Wolfe Notes

Cary Wolfe

1. The case of another important liberal European intellectual—Niklas Luhmann—comes to mind here. Though working in an explicitly post-humanist framework (systems theory), Luhmann is also bothered by the Greens for these reasons, as his book Ecological Communication makes clear. For a discussion of the dangers of ethics from Luhmann's point of view, see William Rasch's informative discussion in "Immanent Systems, Transcendental Temptations, and the Limits of Ethics," Cultural Critique 30 (Spring 1995), esp. pp. 213 ff..
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2. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), p. 249, emphasis mine.

3. See, for example, Rorty's characterization of opponents of liberalism as "people who have always hoped to become a New Being, who have hoped to be converted rather than persuaded," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 29. Further references in the text.

4. An example of Ferry's superficial engagement with postmodern theory is evinced in his rather remarkable misreading of Felix Guattari's interest in ecology, where he mistakes what Guattari calls "resingularization" with conservative identity politics. Anyone who has read any of Guattari's work over the last thirty years knows that Guattari has never said that identity is a positivity that can be either accomplished or restored in the sense attributed to Guattari by Ferry. The same should be said, of course, for Ferry's claim that Guattari's contention that "there is no reason to ask immigrants to give up their national affiliation or the cultural traits that cling to their being" is "a 'leftist' version of racism" (114). This rather absurd charge might be plausible were it not for the fact that Guattari's work long ago made it clear that he does not believe in the existence of races, or of their equivalent in terms of cultural identity.

5. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 58.

6. Gregory Bateson, "Form, Substance, and Difference," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 451. Further references are given in the text.

7. See Kenneth Burke's discussion of technology in the postscript to the second edition of Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984), p. 396. Rifkin, as is well-known, is one of the more socially visible critics of the current headlong rush into genetic engineering, especially of animals.

8. Tim Luke, "The Dreams of Deep Ecology," Telos 76 (Summer 1988), p. 51. Further references are in the text.

9. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 10.

10. Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 77-8.

11. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. xii. Further references given in the text.

12. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 277.

13. Peter Singer, "Prologue: Ethics and the New Animal Liberation Movement," in In Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 5. Further references in the text.

14. See Singer's Animal Liberation (New York: Avon), pp. 21-2, and Regan's The Case for Animal Rights, p. 324.

15. Deborah Slicer, "Your Daughter or Your Dog? A Feminist Assessment of the Animal Research Issue," Hypatia 6: 1 (Spring 1991), p. 110.