Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities

Dr Richard Iveson

Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2014 - 2017
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
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Researcher biography

BArts (Hons), University of the Arts London (Camberwell); MA, Middlesex University, UK; PhD, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Richard Iveson's teaching and research interests include animal studies and animal liberation; Continental philosophy (with focus on Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida); posthumanism; cultural studies; biotechnology and cyberculture; post-Marxism; political activism; pedagogy and the university; SF; and the trope of the fantastic.

Research Interests

  • Continental Philosophy
  • Animal Studies
  • Posthumanism
  • Biotechnology
  • Post-Marxism
I welcome applications from prospective PhD students working in any of the above areas.
 

Current Research

Richard's current research is an interdisciplinary project investigating current debates surrounding the notion of the ‘posthuman’ and, more specifically, examining the significance of these debates for challenging traditional oppositions between the living and the inanimate. Despite the recent opening up of contested ethical and political spaces in the wake of the collapsing of traditional boundaries separating human from animal, animal from machine, and machine from human, and despite the huge acceleration of technological innovation and often complementary fascination with the posthuman, the contingent and constructed opposition between the living body and the inanimate object, of (human) subject and (animal, machinic) object, still today structures practically every aspect of existence. By focusing on the collapse of a secure division between living beings and inanimate objects, the aim of this study is thus to analyse the emergence of complex and layered ‘posthuman’ spaces that render perceptible previously unseen historical, ethical, political and sociotechnical relationships.
 

Selected Publications

Books
  •  Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter With Animals (Pavement Books, 2014).
Articles 
  • ‘The Protagorean Presumption and the Posthuman: Ceci n’est pas un calmar.’ Journal of Cultural Research 18:4 (2014) 384-405.
  • ‘Figuring Those Who Have Already Been Dead: Destructive Plasticity and the Form of Absence.’ Reviews in Cultural Theory 5:1 (2014) 46-58.
  • 'Derrida e il desiderio di porre fine a ogni vita: la decostruzione, De Landa e la vivacità degli oggetti.' Animot. L'altra filosofia 1:1 (2014), 94-119.
  • ‘Deeply Ecological Deleuze and Guattari: Humanism’s Becoming-Animal.’ Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies 4:2 (Spring 2013), 20-40.
  • ‘Domestic Scenes and Species Trouble: On Judith Butler and Other Animals.’ Journal of Critical Animal Studies 10:4 (Winter 2012), 20-40.
  • ‘Swarms of Technology, Melodies of Life.’ Body and Society 19:1 (March 2013), 108-122.
  • ‘Animals in Looking-Glass World: Fables of Überhumanism and Posthumanism in Heidegger and Nietzsche.’ Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies 1:2 (Spring 2010), 46-85.
  • ‘A Politics of Disease: The Fantastic Trope and the Dismembering of Reality.’ eSharp 11: Social Engagement, Empowerment and Change (Spring 2008), 1-27.
Book Chapters
  • 'Celluloid: animal waste, animal remains.' In Carl A. Zimring and William L. Rathje (Eds.), Encyclopedia of consumption and waste: the social science of garbage (Sage, 2012), 107-108.
Review Essays
  • ‘Pity on the Offensive: Reading Élisabeth de Fontenay’s Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Forthcoming in Reviews in Cultural Theory (2014).
  • ‘Rewiring the Brain Or, Why Our Children Are Not Human.’ A Review of Bernard Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford University Press, 2010). Parallax 18:4 (2012), 121-125.
  • ‘Animals Living Death: Closing the Book of Derrida.’ A Review of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Parallax 18:2 (2012), 102-106.
  • ‘Negotiating without relation: Of Jews and Animals.’ A Review of Andrew Benjamin’s Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Parallax 17:3 (2011), 104-107.
Invited presentations
  • 'Ontology after Extremophiles,' Queensland School of Continental Philosophy, 6 April 2016.
  • ‘Plato between the Teeth of the Beast: Animals and Democracy in Tomorrow's Europe.’
  • Forum for European Philosophy (FEP): “European Provocations” Series. London School of Economics, 11 February, 2014.
  • ‘On the importance of Heidegger’s anthropogenesis, and of moving beyond it’ Unruly Creatures 2: Creative Revolutions at the Natural History Museum in London, 18 June, 2012, along with Anat Pick, Erica Fudge, Jonathon Burt, André Dias, Catherine Wheatley, Wendy Wheeler, and John Mullarkey.
Conference presentations
  • "In the Belly of the Beast: On the Force-Feeding of Servitude in Plato's Republic," 2016 ICAS Oceania Conference, 30 September-1 October 2016, University of Canberra.
  • ‘“Whether There is Life or Not”: Triangulating Matter with Derrida, Meillassoux, and DeLanda.’ Derrida Today, 28-31 May 2014, Fordham University, Lincoln Center, New York.
  • ‘Cannibals and Apes: Revolution in the Republic.’ London Conference in Critical Thought, 29-30 June, 2012, Birkbeck College, University of London.
  • ‘The Disciplinary Underbelly in the Margins of Control: Foucault in the Slaughterhouse and the Laboratory.’ Radical Foucault: An International Conference,8-9 September 2011, The Centre For Cultural Studies Research, University of East London.
  • ‘Making Sense Beyond Species: Iterability and the Wounds of Rancière.’ The 2nd Derrida Today International Conference, 19-21 July 2010, Goodenough College, Bloomsbury, London. Keynote speakers: Geoffrey Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, Nicholas Royle.
  • ‘Nietzsche’s Posthumous Placeholder: Demanding Animals and the Technics of Posthumanism.’ Zoontotechnics (Animality/Technicity), 12-14 May, 2010, Cardiff University. Plenary Speakers: Bernard Stiegler, David Wills, Joanna Zylinska.
 
A full list of Dr Iveson’s publications, including fulltext links, can be accessed via UQ eSpace.