[Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp

Proximity: A Levinasian Approach to Justice for Animals

The increased use of terms associated with rights appears to have led, at the most, to only moderate changes with regard to the actual level of protection and the underlying ethical-legal status of animals. Whereas the rights discourse may have been a logical first step, there appears to be underlying issues that cannot be adequately addressed through this discourse

The fables of pity: Rousseau, Mandeville and the animal-fable

Copyright @ 2012 Edinburgh University PressPrompted by Derrida’s work on the animal-fable in eighteenth-century debates about political power, this article examines the role played by the fiction of the animal in thinking of pity as either a natural virtue (in Rousseau’s Second Discourse) or as a natural passion (in Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees). The war of fables between Rousseau and Mandeville – and their hostile reception by Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith – reinforce that the animal-fable illustrates not so much the proper of man as the possibilities and limitations of a moral philosophy that is unable to address the political realities of the state

The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben

This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agamben’s work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the ‘name of God’ and the nature of the ‘mystical’, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanity’s ‘religious’ quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (ontotheological) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the ‘name of God’ as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agamben’s work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of ‘absolute’ immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism (or perhaps panentheism) yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings

Two-dimensional transport and transfer of a single atomic qubit in optical tweezers

Quantum computers have the capability of out-performing their classical counterparts for certain computational problems1. Several scalable quantum-computing architectures have been proposed. An attractive architecture is a large set of physically independent qubits arranged in three spatial regions where (1) the initialized qubits are stored in a register, (2) two qubits are brought together to realize a gate and (3) the readout of the qubits is carried out2, 3. For a neutral-atom-based architecture, a natural way to connect these regions is to use optical tweezers to move qubits within the system. In this letter we demonstrate the coherent transport of a qubit, encoded on an atom trapped in a submicrometre tweezer, over a distance typical of the separation between atoms in an array of optical traps4, 5, 6. Furthermore, we transfer a qubit between two tweezers, and show that this manipulation also preserves the coherence of the qubit

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Alliance Politics for Animal Liberation: A Response to Paola Cavalieri

Paola Cavalieri’s article provides an incisive account of the current state of affairs in pro-animal discourse and activism. Taking her bearings from a radical pro-animal commitment to interspecies egalitarianism, Cavalieri expertly describes the shift that has taken place over the past decade from a focus on an ethics of personal purity to a politics of structural change. She correctly underscores the point that an individualistic ethic that prioritizes changes in personal consumption is ultimately unable to effect the kinds of widespread institutional change necessary to address and ameliorate the currently intolerable situation faced by billions of domesticated and wild animals. The shortcomings of this sort of individualistic animal ethics have opened the door to a variety of sophisticated and refined versions of pro-animal politics aimed at structural transformation, ranging from extensions of classical liberalism to modified forms of anarchism. Cavalieri’s critical analysis of the promises and pitfalls of the liberal approach to pro-animal politics – which boldly raises the question of the political standing of animals only to surrender (in many cases) the ideal of species egalitarianism that motivates the radical position – is persuasively presented. Likewise, she helpfully pinpoints important advances and limitations among the more explicitly radical political strategies of key critical animal studies theorists and activists, who share her radical and unyielding commitment to animal equality but have thus far not articulated a convincing account of how their ideals might be realized at the political level

Ungovernable potentialities - DOI: 10.9732/P.0034-7191.2014v108p93

Giorgio Agamben’s essay What Is An Apparatus? presents in condensed form several of themost important strands of his research over the past decade. My aim in this paper is to survey some of these themes in order to underscore both the critical promise and limitations of Agamben’s work on apparatuses. In particular, I will argue that the expanded ontology and conception of apparatuses that he develops in this essay is an essential theoretical advance, and that the one of the chief tasks for thought today is to maintain that expanded ontology and notion of apparatusesas we seek to understand and contest contemporary developments in biopolitical and control societies as they affect both human and nonhuman life

Meanings of Meat in Videogames

Meat is ubiquitous in videogames and, when consumed by avatars or their agents, will frequently confer some aid or benefit. In many games it serves as the most nourishing form of sustenance for those who are hungry, but it can also operate as the most effective restorative for those who are injured, as a potent source of temporary power-ups and enhancements, or as a valuable resource to be spent on permanent improvements and upgrades. In short, in so far as it functions as an indispensable, life-giving food stuff, meat comes to represent vitality. As a common condition of humans and animals, however, meat can also take on a rather different significance, as is illustrated by the game Super Meat Boy, and the ambiguous claim that its protagonist is a “boy made of meat”