The noises of a brain in recovery.

Court to rule if chimp has human rights. From a different case (and a less sympathetic source), Chimp denied legal guardian. In the second source, the author writes, "Animal liberationists and others are ideologically driven to destroy human exceptionalism as the reigning value of organized society." He's writing from an exasperated perspective, but I find the negotiations of the 'human' quite interesting. The people who act for these chimpanzees - since the chimps are certainly not the ones bringing suits in court - are asking for these chimps to be treated as humans. In "making" them human, we either have to revise what we consider to be human, expanding the definition of the word and therefore ruining its current meaning and value in our society, or we have to equate them to us, saying that we are the same as chimpanzees. (This seems to be the tack taken thus far, as the activists repeatedly stress that chimpanzees are our near relatives, and the judge in the Austrian case said he could not make a chimp the same as humans under the protection of a legal guardian.) I don't think the activists will ever succeed, no matter which approach they take, since although language is notoriously flexible in meaning, people are very defensive about the word "human" (giving us as it does our right to "exceptionalism")¹.

This whole business resonates with me in the same way as the negotiations around ethics and morality by queer theorists do. (Well, and half the time queer theorists seem to have one eye on the redefinition of the human, anyway.) When you radically revise what is epistemologically or ontologically allowed, in other words, you deny yourself the bedrock of established assumptions, while still in some ways (since you've been socialized in our society) ascribing to them. How do you then make up new rules for the 'human' or the 'moral'?

Enough mental fiddling. The excuse for the above twaddle is that I am finally on vacation, after a truly awful semester. I have to pick up a job soon enough, but I'm letting myself have a week or so before I do that. It feels as though my mind is coming back from a long illness. I went to the library yesterday, and picked up two books on academic publishing, three books on sports training, and two books on learning the banjo. They have been added to the pile next to my bed, which already had Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, James McPherson's Battle Cry For Freedom, and Hermione Lee's recent biography of Edith Wharton. I want to go to the public library to pick up some romance novels and a book on bike repair (and maybe some Levinas), but NO. I just put a post-it up on the lamp by my desk with "READ WHAT YOU HAVE" printed on it in block letters.

I do still have final grades to tabulate for my students, but I'm feeling rather good about that whole process. I had my portfolio committee meeting yesterday, and my grades generally went up, rather than down. I was also abruptly reminded of why I switched from Signs of Life to Ways of Reading; Ways may be difficult to teach, and at times the students may not like it, but at least their papers are worth reading.

Friends and Family Day is this weekend! Get excited!

1 - I find the term "exceptionalism" as a justification for human existence riotously funny. At some point I may even be able to articulate why.