punctum books
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions
- Jonathan Gil Harris (author)
Chapter of: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects(pp. 289–295)
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| Title | Animal, Vegetable, Mineral |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Twenty Questions |
| Contributor | Jonathan Gil Harris (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0006.1.14 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/animal-vegetable-mineral-ethics-and-objects/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ |
| Copyright | Harris, Jonathan Gil |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2012-05-07 |
| Long abstract | Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. If this volume’s theme sounds like a premodern version of the parlor game “Twenty Questions,” it is perhaps only appropriate that my response should also take the form of twenty questions. The parlor game’s questions seek to arrive through processes of elimination and guesswork at a positive individual entity; but I hope my questions will do the opposite—that is, resist the allure of any singular or final answer. So here goes.1. What do we mean by the “nonhuman” in medieval and early modern culture?2. Are we dealing (as the “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” parlor game does) with taxonomies of the natural world that presume, as did Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae of 1735, the exteriority of the nonhuman to the human?3. Is the nonhuman itself subdivided according to this principle of absolute exteriority, which would make of animal, vegetable, and mineral entirely discrete entities? 4. Or did medieval and early modern writers see the nonhuman as always already in the human—and, by logical extension, the mineral in the vegetable, the vegetable in the animal, and so on? |
| Page range | pp. 289–295 |
| Print length | 7 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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