Insert Hideous Progeny Joke: My article's here!

You have of course submitted something to the Carnival.

My long-awaited Exemplaria article ("How to Make a Human") is being shipped today, along with the rest of Exemplaria 20.1. Since it's my first article (putting aside a very obscure translation), I'm of course super excited. Let me thank the publisher, Maney, and the Exemplarians, especially Judy Shoaf and Al Shoaf.

And here (pdf) it is. I'm sure most of our readers already know the argument. If not, here's the abstract:

Derrida’s late investigations into the question of the animal chart a path past the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, Levinas, and animal rights philosophy; they also identify the essential role the subjugation of animals plays in human self-conception. This self-conception, an inheritance from the Christian Middle Ages, suffuses the Middle English encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, whose popularity and ideological conservatism suits it for illustrating the discourse’s characteristic features. Sidrak and Bokkus claims a set of properties for humans and denies them to animals, all of which it construes as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffle human claims to uniqueness. The resemblances are not merely a threat to the human, for by invoking, and then denying, animal likeness to humans, Sidrak and Bokkus models the subjugation of animals. Because the human was an effect of such acts of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself; the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain.

For nuance, look either here or at Kzoo this May.