NORMAL MONSTERS AND MONSTROUS MONSTROSITIES: a response to cary wolfe

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Notes

Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) 121.

Christopher Peterson, “The Posthumanism to Come,” Angelaki 16.2 (2011) 138.

Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 275.

Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms” in The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 68, 73.

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham UP, 2008); idem, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009); idem, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011).

In Rogues, for instance, Derrida rejects the notion that either a political or ethical “turn” can be identified in his work beginning in the 1980s. See Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 39.

Cary Wolfe, “Response to Christopher Peterson, ‘The Posthumanism to Come,’” Angelaki 16.2 (2011) 191.

For an analysis of the privileging of novelty in academic scholarship, see Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll, “Revolution, Rupture, Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 38.1 (2012): 39–57. They argue that novelty has ironically become an orthodoxy that encourages hyperbolic assertions of scholarly innovation.