The Teeming And The Rare: Displacements Of Sacrifice And The Turn To Insect Life

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iii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION This is a dissertation on how the differences between human beings and animals have been represented through frameworks of sacrifice and sexuality. Through readings of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Jacques Derrida's "Rams," my first chapter explores the inadequacy of "sacrifice" as a violent action that may be problematically legitimating. This concept of sacrifice is placed in tension with a different vision, that of an "ethics of response," which, far from negating sacrifice, sustains it as a figuration of the necessity and destructive potential of the encounter with the other. I next trace a movement away from rapports of domination with animals in a "turn" to insect life. Although insects have been objects of a phobic orientation, I show that a non-phobic insect emerges in nineteenth and early-twentieth century works by Jules Michelet, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean-Henri Fabre, Andr? Gide, and Eug?ne Marais. Viewed as a thing of intricate beauty, the inse

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