BIO
Mina Rosefield is a first year PhD student at The University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. Her research interests include animal resistance, the necropolitics of animal survival, and the transcendence of animal ontologies in the Anthropocene: when the animal is present because it is not, when it falls away and leaves only its signifier. Objects of my study include Beyond Meat, memories of/with animals, animal graves, and the exclusion of animals in the work of Michel Foucault.
TITLE
“The Ontological Inoperation of Meat Technology: Beyond Beef as Inaugurating a New Ontological Imagination”
ABSTRACT
While discussions about the ethical consumption of animal products traditionally align with Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the question of the animal—the real animal, that is—concepts of (new) animal materiality (under capital) become contested when we consider the emerging demand for, and the supply of plant-based meat alternatives. The following paper traces an ontological legacy of animality that is the paradoxical inability to ontologize. Beyond Meat, I argue, is located upon a site of ontological halt—it affirms a proximity to the (real) animal, only to disavow its status as a meat product. In biopolitical times, Beyond Meat gestures toward a new currency: imagined animality. With an ever-growing desire for the fantasy of meat, non-human life takes on an explicit immateriality that puts ontology itself into question. The meaning of animality now encompasses a conflicting, albeit imagined replication of the material conditions of meat—the consequence of which is the generation of an ontological structure caught in the throes of thinking itself into thought, of thinking imagined animality into meat.
To better crystallize this market-driven (mis)conception of animal being, I link Martin Heidegger’s failed discussion of animal transposedness to the ontological parameters of Beyond Meat, suggesting that both objects epitomize what I call a Shabbat in/as being, or, a dense-transfer-point: a neuralgic site through which our most important assumptions of about life—human and non-human—flow and are tested. I argue for the way in which this new technology of meat, this imagined animal, renders ontology inoperative, demanding that we partake in a phenomenological endeavor capable of ethically coping with the instability that is the (imagined) animal’s status as a subject unsubjected.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
Mina Rosefield is a first year PhD student at The University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. Her research interests include animal resistance, the necropolitics of animal survival, and the transcendence of animal ontologies in the Anthropocene: when the animal is present because it is not, when it falls away and leaves only its signifier. Objects of my study include Beyond Meat, memories of/with animals, animal graves, and the exclusion of animals in the work of Michel Foucault.
TITLE
“The Ontological Inoperation of Meat Technology: Beyond Beef as Inaugurating a New Ontological Imagination”
ABSTRACT
While discussions about the ethical consumption of animal products traditionally align with Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the question of the animal—the real animal, that is—concepts of (new) animal materiality (under capital) become contested when we consider the emerging demand for, and the supply of plant-based meat alternatives. The following paper traces an ontological legacy of animality that is the paradoxical inability to ontologize. Beyond Meat, I argue, is located upon a site of ontological halt—it affirms a proximity to the (real) animal, only to disavow its status as a meat product. In biopolitical times, Beyond Meat gestures toward a new currency: imagined animality. With an ever-growing desire for the fantasy of meat, non-human life takes on an explicit immateriality that puts ontology itself into question. The meaning of animality now encompasses a conflicting, albeit imagined replication of the material conditions of meat—the consequence of which is the generation of an ontological structure caught in the throes of thinking itself into thought, of thinking imagined animality into meat.
To better crystallize this market-driven (mis)conception of animal being, I link Martin Heidegger’s failed discussion of animal transposedness to the ontological parameters of Beyond Meat, suggesting that both objects epitomize what I call a Shabbat in/as being, or, a dense-transfer-point: a neuralgic site through which our most important assumptions of about life—human and non-human—flow and are tested. I argue for the way in which this new technology of meat, this imagined animal, renders ontology inoperative, demanding that we partake in a phenomenological endeavor capable of ethically coping with the instability that is the (imagined) animal’s status as a subject unsubjected.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
