Edward Said and the Late Animal

Edward Said and the Late Animal reconsiders On Late Style, Edward Said's posthumously published final book, as a model of politically engaged comparativism for classical reception and beyond, and poses the question: how can classicists and other literary scholars respond to news and images from Gaza? Radically defamiliarizing texts of Apuleius, Oppian, Ovid, Sophocles, and Seneca and modern iterations in light of works discussed in On Late Style and others chosen for their urgent relevance, this book elevates a menagerie of animals—a donkey, an octopus, a dog, ants, a bull—each one emblematic of Said's groundbreaking and widely influential notion of aesthetic lateness. In the face of genocidal violence, reading here channels and enacts a sense of intransigence (and eccentricity) while unexpectedly placing Said's lateness in dialogue with contemporary schools of thought (queer theory, Afropessimism, critical disability studies) and excavating the anti-humanist unconscious of Said's lateness—a product of his sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and its ramifications for musical theory. An Adornian elaboration of Palestinian unworlding shapes this book's comparativist method, which contests deep-seated associations of Said with humanism. Not simply cultural-historical or literary-aesthetic, Edward Said and the Late Animal is a manifesto for a critical-theoretical approach to ancient literature and its disturbing resonances with a harrowing present.

Mario Telò is Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at UC Berkeley. He is also a member of the Critical Theory interdepartmental program.