Sobriquet 47.18

The following post was originally published on 10/18/08.

Although I assumed that I would be too sleepy to read much more than a few pages of a novel yesterday evening, I decided to at least make an effort to do something more -- and ended up reading Kari Weil's "Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics" in addition to a bit of The Rights of Desire. Weil's essay, like quite a few others, views David Lurie's relationship with animals as central to an understanding of Disgrace. Although there is a good deal more to the paper, I find Weil's use of autistic-animal relations as a key to opening a discussion of pre-verbal empathy between humans and non-humans to be one of the more fascinating things I have read lately. If anything, this short article proves that, as heavily discussed a novel as Disgrace happens to be, there is plenty of room for further critical debate.

As for today, I still have another four pages of criticism to read before bed, so I am going to sign off for the evening/early morning.

For tomorrow: Read another essay.

Work Cited

Weil, Kari. "Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics." Configurations 14 (2006): 87-96.