Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War

Matthew Leep

Description

In Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War, Matthew Leep develops a cosmopolitan account of war that blends sharp inquiry into interspecies politics with original poetry on animals, loss, and war. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, this book is not only a somber and sobering exploration of the loss of animal lives during the Iraq War—from the initial US invasion to later struggles with ISIS—but also an imaginative tracing of animal experiences in "spectral-poetic moments." By emphasizing elegies, poetic space, and multispecies belonging, Leep envisions the cosmopolitan text as a hybrid form of critical and poetic engagement with animal others. An insightful mix of cosmopolitan poetics, poetry, and analysis of the Iraq War in its multispecies entanglements, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War connects contemporary concerns with political violence, memory, and interspecies politics to imagine a more spectral, posthumanist, and poetic cosmopolitanism. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will engage scholars of international relations, political theory, US foreign policy, animal studies, poetry, and Derrida, as well as those interested in human-animal relations in perilous times.
List of Poems
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Cosmopolitan Elegies

1. Spectral Cosmopolitanism

2. Stray Hearts, Vectors: The Wandering Dogs of Iraq

3. Caged Cosmopolitanism: Menagerie Moments of War

4. Black Sheep: ISIS and the Smoke of Qayyarah

(In)Conclusion(s): Spectral-Poetic Proximities

Notes
Works Cited
About the Author
Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438482453
• Langue: English

Extrait

COSMOPOLITAN BELONGINGNESS AND WAR
COSMOPOLITAN BELONGINGNESS AND WAR
ANIMALS, LOSS, AND SPECTRAL-POETIC MOMENTS
MATTHEW LEEP
Cover image: Thomas Smillie, cyanotype, 1890. Smithsonian Institute Archives.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leep, Matthew, author.
Title: Cosmopolitan belongingness and war : animals, loss, and spectral-poetic moments / Matthew Leep.
Other titles: Animals, loss, and spectral-poetic moments
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024816 | ISBN 9781438482439 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438482453 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Iraq War, 2003–2011—Casualties. | Animal welfare—Moral and ethical aspects—Iraq. | Cosmopolitanism. | Human-animal relationships—Political aspects. | War and society. | Derrida, Jacques.
Classification: LCC DS79.767.C37 L44 2021 | DDC 956.7044/31—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024816
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the lost
Contents
List of Poems
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cosmopolitan Elegies
Chapter 1 Spectral Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 2 Stray Hearts, Vectors: The Wandering Dogs of Iraq
Chapter 3 Caged Cosmopolitanism: Menagerie Moments of War
Chapter 4 Black Sheep: ISIS and the Smoke of Qayyarah
(In)Conclusion(s): Spectral-Poetic Proximities
Notes
Works Cited
About the Author
Index
Poems
Alone Ghosts
Qarqar
Remember That
Wolf-Time
A Promise, a Threat
Clusters
Tangled
Delta
Palm Cloak
Raven’s Coat
Nightpsalm, Rusted
Absential
Birdflowers
Breath
Rememberkey
Notes, Cinders
Hourglass
Burned Compass
Recognition
Find Me
Moonpaths
Illustrations Figure 2.1 Stray Dog in a Cage Figure 2.2 Camp Slayer Vector Control Figure 3.1 Hope and Riley Figure 3.2 A Note for Looters Figure 4.1 Qayyarah Oil Field Fires Figure 4.2 Qayyarah Oil Smoke Figure 4.3 Mine Dog in Qayyarah
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and kind words. Many thanks are owed to Michael Rinella at SUNY Press for his support, confidence, and guidance. I offer my deep appreciation to my parents and sisters for their encouragement. I offer thanks to Walden Pond, Corniche Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea, Lake Superior, and Bahía Honda. Jeremy Pressman deserves a special mention for his assistance on a variety of projects. I am forever thankful for Moszka, a wanderer—my heart. I am grateful for the lifelong friendship of Adrian Butler (LA is infinite). I have been privileged to work with my colleagues and students at WGU. A special thanks to Kate Warrington and DJ Bradley for their kindness and support for my work. In no particular order, thanks also to the following individuals or groups for their inspiration, feedback, kind words, or other forms of support: Donna Lee Van Cott, Bangkok street dogs, Eileen Nizer, Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Shawn Berman, the folks at my synagogue, Congregation Sinai, Rafi Youatt, Cyrus (Ernie) Zirakzadeh, Bryan Benson, Jamie Mayerfeld, Christian Hunold, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Doug Kriner, Susan Howe, Katherine Douglas, Cheryl Hall, Lee Jones, the ibises of Silver Sands and Hammonasset, Barry Sharpe, Bill Kakenmaster, and Garry Clifford. I also thank you, reader, for your engagement. Most of all, thanks to Alise. Your compassion for the world compels me to engage it differently, more deeply. I am forever indebted to you in far too many ways to list here. Amidst these red frogs and dune deer, I follow your heart to an oropendola’s dream.
An earlier version of chapter 2 was originally published by Sage Publications as “Stray Dogs, Post-Humanism and Cosmopolitan Belongingness: Interspecies Hospitality in Times of War,” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 1 (September 2018). The appearance of US Department of Defense visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.
Introduction
Cosmopolitan Elegies
Naming assures a kind of longevity and survival, writes Jacques Derrida. 1 After war, the names of the lost might persist in documents, on monuments, and in memories. 2 The Iraq War, like every war, has resulted in the loss of so many soldiers, civilians, and (often nameless) animals. 3 The nameless lost animals are often neglected or maintained in abstractions, disciplined and distant. The losses, tallied or unrecorded, are untethered from the lived moments of life and death. Who are these animal others? Who are we when we imagine their voices?
Derrida claims that “we owe ourselves to death” ( nous nous devons à la mort ). 4 These losses in Iraq move toward us, withdrawing and escaping, appearing within the nowhere space of the poem—an elegiac space for the animal other. Perhaps we owe ourselves to these losses, to the memory of the lost, to the poetic voice of a specter. Cosmopolitans would do well to consider this voice. This voice—finding “us” within a spectral-poetic moment. Engaging this voice will likely bear little resemblance to most accounts of war. But this engagement opens us to thinking about how to live differently in and with the world. This endeavor also raises critical questions about how to write about, with, and for a multispecies world. Perhaps elegies can generate meaningful reflection on nonhuman moments of loss and our posthumanist responsibilities. In cosmopolitan elegies, we might recall the ends of worlds, our debt to the distant heart of the other, traces of unknown interiorities.
Across borders—a debt, a voice. For traditional cosmopolitans, borders and “other boundaries considered to restrict the scope of justice are irrelevant roadblocks in appreciating our responsibilities to all in the global community.” 5 Cosmopolitanism is about connections with and support for distant others; it is about “the interconnectivity of the world.” 6 From this traditional perspective, justice is about the living and its scope is global and temporally oriented toward the present and future. Cosmopolitan justice attends to the limited horizons of the human. But what of justice for the mostly unknown and nameless animal dead? As Derrida reminds us, “just because the dead no longer exist does not mean that we are done with specters.” 7 No, the specter “asks [us] to respond or to be responsible,” and there is no “demand for justice” without this responsibility to the spectral other. 8 Yet possibilities of memories from and connection to the lost are typically not central to the intellectual project of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, there is little attention to the interiority of life becoming lost to war, and only faint concern for how the lost still might move toward us, within the elegiac space of a poem. What if we subject cosmopolitanism to these spectral-poetic demands of justice?
This book aims to generate shifts in cosmopolitan thought toward an imaginative memory of the distant and often unknown animal others lost to war, toward a poetic memory of and from the other, toward the other’s experience and time of loss. Put another way, this book seeks to articulate a multispecies cosmopolitanism that addresses the following questions: How might we encounter and connect to the loss of distant, mostly unknown animal others of war? How can we approach the interior life of animals lost to war? These queries stimulate cosmopolitanism to become something else, something more “posthumanist” and poetic, something less interested in telling us about justice and belonging and more conversant with animal ghosts. 9 It is a spectral-weaved cosmopolitanism embodying this impossible hope.
Cosmopolitanism—a rich philosophical tradition, a varied set of aspirations for global justice, a sense of debt to distant others across boundaries and borders—is always a kind of possibility. There is a vibrancy, fluidity, and dynamism to it. Cosmopolitanism always seems to resist closure, seems to stretch alive with voices calling from pasts and futures, pressing us about the meaning(s) of distance, connection, loss. This book anchors itself to these poetic voices, the incantational voices of animals from the Iraq War—unveiled, pursuing and interrupting us—from the past and from within ourselves. “The interactions of the living must be interrupted, the veil must be torn toward the other, the other dead in us though other still,” writes Jacques Derrida. 10 Holding on to these voices of the lost within us involves not only expanding the boundaries of thinking about war in its multispecies entanglements but also orienting our attention toward the experience of the other, for the other (though always irreducibly other). The unknowable voice, their impossible presence, lost— here is a space for arrival, for interrupt