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Jobst Paul proposes an approach to teaching HAS that develops learners' ability to understand and evaluate how representations of animals may function as vehicles for racism, antisemitism, and other dehumanizing ideologies that are based on modes of thinking that provide justifications for animal death, suffering, and exploitation. As Paul notes in "The Philosophical Animal Deconstructed: From Linguistic to Curricular Methodology," the animals that appear in Western philosophical and theological traditions have been disconnected from their referents and have primarily served various human purposes, for example, as figures of thought. Analyzing representations of wolves in the 2019 election campaign by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing German political party, Paul demonstrates how animals have been used to stigmatize and marginalize vulnerable populations such as refugees, and how these stereotypes have, in turn, been instrumental in justifying centuries of violence against nonhuman animals. To help learners understand this vicious circle, Paul introduces a method that can be used in various educational contexts, at different levels, and with learners of all ages. The approach to teaching HAS that he proposes allows learners to reconsider how language and power work through the figure of the animal and to develop the ability to think intersectionally. Particularly in an age of numerous political and environmental crises, there is an urgent need for pedagogical interventions such as the one proposed by Paul.
Volker Woltersdorff's essay 'Sexual Ghosts and the Whole of History: Queer Historiography, Post-Slavery Subjectivities, and Sadomasochism in Isaac Julien's "The Attendant"' discusses the controversial concept of wholeness in historiography with regard to the fascination with past horrors and the desire to do justice to their victims who retain a ghostly presence. The essay retraces how this commitment produces a dilemma, as it can result either in the aspiration to historical wholeness as full memoralization or alternatively in the radical rejection of wholeness as an impossible healing. Employing Elizabeth Freeman's notion of 'erotohistoriography', Woltersdorff introduces affect into the work of historiography in order to find an escape from the dilemmatic impasse between history's wholeness as pacified reconciliation and as ongoing catastrophe along the lines of Walter Benjamin. Sadomasochism is presented as a practice that may correspond most adequately to the paradoxical affect caused by traumatic history that continues to haunt the present. Indeed, re-enactments of historical oppression and violence occur frequently within the BDSM community. However, what distinguishes them from 'living history' re-enactments is their potential to modify affective attachments to history by altering the historical script. The essay elaborates this potential through Isaac Julien's 1993 short film "The Attendant", which, in a kind of queer re-enactment, overwrites the memory of colonial chattel slavery by a sadomasochistic encounter of a black guardian and a white visitor in a museum dedicated to the history of slavery. The film raises the ethical and political question of how to relate affectively to the legacy and ongoing presence of racism. Against this backdrop, the author argues that, through the BDSM scenario and its changes to the historical script, Julien's film represents and promotes a paradoxical way to perform both the memorialization and the forgetting of past horrors and pleasures. Here, historical wholeness acquires a conflicting double meaning of both achieving completeness and restoring integrity. Woltersdorff concludes by interpreting "The Attendant" as urging a utopian perspective, produced by the tension between the impossibility of history's wholeness and the necessary, reparative desire for it. The article concludes by highlighting the paradox that Julien's film shows wholeness 'to be impossible and yet necessary' and 'expresses a necessary desire made impossible'. While the essay explicitly engages with the figure of haunting, one could perhaps speak here also of plasticity insofar as the contradictory conjunction of remembering and forgetting seems to rely on a malleability of affects and on producing an affective economy that sustains the fantasmatic remembrance of a painful past through paradoxical pleasure but breaks with any pleasure derived from real inequality, injustice, or suffering imparted non-consensually.