Anat Pick 
Creaturely Poetics 
Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film

Simone Weil once wrote that ‘the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence, ‘ establishing a relationship between vulnerability, beauty, and existence transcending the separation of species. Her conception of a radical ethics and aesthetics could be characterized as a new poetics of species, forcing a rethinking of the body’s significance, both human and animal. Exploring the ‘logic of flesh’ and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought. Pick proposes a ‘creaturely’ approach based on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals and a postsecular perspective on human-animal relations. She turns to literature, film, and other cultural texts, challenging the familiar inventory of the human: consciousness, language, morality, and dignity. Reintroducing Weil’s elaboration of such themes as witnessing, commemoration, and collective memory, Pick identifies the animal within all humans, emphasizing the corporeal and its issues of power and freedom. In her poetics of the creaturely, powerlessness is the point at which aesthetic and ethical thinking must begin.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Creaturely Bodies
Part 1 The Inhumanity of Literature
1. Humanity Unraveled, Humanity Regained: The Holocaust and the Discourse of Species
2. Neanderthal Poetics in William Golding’s The Inheritors
3. The Indignities of Species in Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales
Part 2 The Inhumanity of Film
4. Cine-Zoos
5. Scientific Surrealism in the Films of Georges Franju and Frederick Wiseman
6. Werner Herzog’s Creaturely Poetics
Conclusion: Animal Saintliness
Notes
Works Cited
Index

About the author

Anat Pick is senior lecturer in film and program leader for film and video: theory and practice at the University of East London. She has published on Henry James and Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, posthumanist theory, and independent film.