Toward a More Robust New Materialist Politics: How the Practice of Criminal Animal Trials Can Inform Contemporary Politics
Keywords:
New materialisms, animal trials, Michel Serres, natural law, environmental politics
Abstract
Prior to the twentieth century, animals were routinely put on trial in human courtrooms. This curious practice has received little academic attention. In this article, I examine the phenomenon of animal trials as an “old” New Materialism. Both part and parcel of the Western legal systems that gave rise to modern law and somehow excessive or extravagant to modern law, the practice of putting animals on trial provides insight into how occidental law and politics has traditionally grappled with the question of the nonhuman, and also the potentialities and shortcomings of recent attempts to include the nonhuman in modern law and politics. The goal of this article is not to resuscitate these archaic practices, but to explore a path not taken by modern law, and so open a route for both deepening our appreciation of the historical possibilities of a New Materialist politics and pushing it further.
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Bennett, Jane (2012). “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43.2: 225–33.
Berman, Paul Schiff (2000). “An Observation and a Strange but True ‘Tale’: What Might the Historical Trials of Animals Tell us about the Transformative Potential of Law in American Culture?” Hastings Law Journal 52.1: 123–78.
Bryant, Levi, Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek, eds. (2011). The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: Re.press.
Cohen, Esther (1986). “Law, Folklore, and Animal Lore.” Past & Present 110.1: 6–37. Cole, Andrew (2013). “The Call of Things.” The Minnesota Review 80: 106–18.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cullinan, Cormac (2011). Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice Second Edition. Hartford, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Dean, Jodi (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Evans, Edward (2009). The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals [1906]. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange Ltd.
Ferguson, Kathy (2014). “Anarchist Printers and Presses: Material Circuits of Politics.”Political Theory 42.4: 391–14.
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Harman, Graham (2009). Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.press.
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Kovel, Joel (2007). The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London: Zed Books.
Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern [1991]. Trans. Catherin Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2004). The Politics of Nature. Trans. Catherin Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno (2017). Facing Gaia. Trans. Cather Porter. Cambridge: Polity.
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as-they-sound.html.
Meillassoux, Quentin (2010). After Finitude. London: Bloomsbury.
Morton, Timothy (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pickering, Andrew (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pietz, William (1997). “The Death of the Deodand.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31: 97–108.
Reyna, Zachary Low (2018). “Aquinas’s Ecological Vision: Natural Law and Friendship in Contemporary Environmental Political Thought.” New Political Science 40.1: 15–32.
Ridler, Victoria (2013). “Dressing the Sow and the Legal Subjectivation of the Non-human Animal.” Law and the Question of the Animal: A Critical Jurisprudence, ed. Edward Mussawir, 102–15. New York: Routledge.
Roy, Eleanor Ainge (2017). “New Zealand Rive Granted Same Legal Rights as Human Being.” The Guardian, 16 March 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/
mar/16/new-zealand-river-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-being.
Serres, Michel (1995). The Natural Contract [1990]. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Stone, Christopher (2010). Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sykes, Katie (2011). “Human Drama, Animal Trials.” Animal Law Review 17.2: 273–312. Timofeeva, Oxana (2018). The History of Animals: A Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury. Timofeeva, Oxana (2013). “Communism with a Nonhuman Face.” e-flux 48 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/48/60030/communism-with-a-nonhuman-face/.
Teubner, Gunther (2006). “Rights of Non-humans?: Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law.” Journal of Law and Society 33.4: 497–521. Whitehead, Alfred North (2015). The Concept of Nature [1920]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whitman, Walt (1985). Leaves of Grass. New York: Norton.
Wolfe, Carey (2012). Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Published
2020-07-25
How to Cite
Reyna, Z. L. (2020). Toward a More Robust New Materialist Politics: How the Practice of Criminal Animal Trials Can Inform Contemporary Politics. Stasis, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-105-127
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Articles
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