The Question of the Animal

Rate of Slaughter of Chickens, Pigs, and Cows in the United States, 2008


Through the intensification of carnophallogocentrism, animals are increasingly entrapped, enclosed, corralled, and sacrificed both symbolically within a single term and literally within what Barbara Noske (1998) calls “the animal industrial complex.” Derrida notes that the conditions under which animals are subjected today are “conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation” (26). Just as farmed animals have been reduced to the general singular “meat,” so has their suffering been hidden from presence “in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide” (26).
http://picasaweb.google.com/Adam.Weitzenfeld/TheIndustrialMeatComplex#


Free Range Studios (2003) The Meatrix




PETA (20014) "Meet Your Meat"

NOTCOT: Banksy's Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill from Jean Aw on Vimeo.

Banksy (2008) "Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill"




To Love or Kill: Man Vs Animal



The Onion (2010) "Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday"






Koko All Ball






Hero dog saves another after it was hit in the highway.






Dans Le Couloir De La Mort (Death Row)






Maxine's Dash for Freedom






Georges Franju (1949) Le Sange de Betes










Nature's tools! How birds use them - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife


Wild crows inhabiting the city use it to their advantage - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife


Birds With a Memory to Envy


Christian the Lion



Leopard seal teaches photographer how to catch penguins



Monkey kitten


Crow adopts kitten


MUST WATCH: A Lioness Adopts a baby antelope. A short documentary that will open your eyes.


Leopard saves baby baboon


HIPPO SAVES IMPALA


Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry Part A 3/5


Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry Part A 4/5


Shirley and Jenny reunited


Dog Cat Rat


Dog and Elephant, odd couple


snake Hampster


The Orangutan and the Hound


The Tortoise and the Hippo


Mississippi Baby Squirrel Adopted By Mother Cat Learns How to Purr


Polar bears and dogs playing

Existential Animal: The Inhumanity of Man

Philosophy in Film:
Existentialist Film Series

Fridays 2-5pm @ ENV 190

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has counted, if not for himself, then at least in the scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace of meaning.

The paradox is that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil. The evil that troubles him the most is his vulnerability; he seems impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the cosmos... Men cause evil by wanting to heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance

-Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil (1975: 4, 135, 151)

INTRO

[SEP 10] Waking Life (Richard Linklater 2003)

DEATH

[SEP 17] The Seventh Seal (Ingar Bergman 1957)

[SEP 24] Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa 1952)

IDENTITY

[OCT 1] Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman 2008)

[OCT 8] Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze 1999)

MEMORY

[OCT 15] La Jette (Chris Marker 1962, 26min)

[OCT 22] Memento (Christopher Nolan 2000)

POSTHUMAN

[NOV 5] Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshi 1995)

[NOV 12] Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982)

APPLICATION

[NOV 19] Flight from Death (Patrick Shen 2003)

* Also watch some great animal documentaries.