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theses

This dissertation charts the manifold ways in which contemporary ethics has divided humans from other forms of life. It offers an alternative to anthropocentricity through an ethics of virality. Utilizing the image, architecture, and dissemination of the virus as a model, it explores a vibrant ontological borderlands human-oriented ethics has abandoned. Where humanist ethics seeks purity, individuality, and normativity, viral ethics opts for infection, entanglement, and weakness. Though the discipline of animal studies has critiqued dominant discourses of taxonomy, consciousness, and ability, those studies often fail to move beyond our closest animal brethren. This work, instead, foregrounds the virus as a being which both straddles the scientific divide between life and non-life and revels in radical difference, espousing a form of ethics that embraces dissimilarity over resemblance. Thus, when life becomes a stand-in for human and vice versa, anything that falls outside the parameters of human has no ethical recourse to justice. To explode the dynamic of humanist ethics is to reorient being and politics towards a more expansive notion of life. To accomplish this, the first chapter defines viral ethics in its relations to assemblages of affect, debt, and capacity. The second chapter addresses embodiment and the various ways that interiority and exteriority are mobilized to reaffirm normative notions of being. The third chapter looks to the overlaps between organic and digital territories, interrogating the biopolitical architecture of viral objects. Lastly, the final chapter traces the division between human and animal and the division between life and death as mutually constitutive undertakings.

ETD_8175

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Stephen McNulty

doi:10.7282/T3SN0CXF

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.