I Stink, Therefore I Mink: A Manifesto
I Stink, Therefore I Mink: A Manifesto
Author(s): Marie-Dominique GarnierSubject(s): Fiction, Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Comparative Study of Literature, Other Language Literature, Contemporary Philosophy, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Theory of Literature, Ontology, Rhetoric
Published by: Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti
Keywords: animal turn; Jacques Derrida; Jacques Lacan; queer studies; fur farming; deconstruction; ecology of the mind; hauntology; politography; Alain Minc;
Summary/Abstract: The recent mass culling of mink in Denmark and elsewhere, following the animals’ contamination by a COVID-19 variant, is taken as a re-entry point into Derrida and Lacan’s mink-mediated conversation in The Beast and the Sovereign. Out of the etymological ‘stink’ attached to the mink emerges an animot gifted with (unlimited) ink, with a potential to disturb philosophies of language, to write back or strike back, as it has recently done in the form of alignments of dead yet resurfacing animals. In the wake of Derrida’s verbal disseminations around the vison, and of Lacan’s attribution of a ‘sort of language’ to the animal in The Formations of the Unconscious, this essay follows an animal pack with includes the 17 million mink programmed for (double) extinction by inhumation and cremation. A hauntology follows, adumbrated by Lacan’s interest in the ‘secretion’ of fur, mink oil and (psychoanalytic) sense, and by Derrida’s encounter with the neoliberal, crypto-vison Alain Minc in 1994.
Journal: Word and Text, A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics
- Issue Year: XI/2021
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 83-96
- Page Count: 14
- Language: English
