Matthew Scully

Argues for responsible action in the treatment of animals, challenging popular conceptions about animal feeling and awareness and profiling a safari convention, factory farm, and the works of top writers.

The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

Dominion

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality? Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form. By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.

Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature

Democratic Anarchy

Matthew Scully's Dominion explores the many ways our society has turned away from animals and created a climate of cruelty and exploitation toward them, and the justifications mankind uses to maintain its dominion over animals. Matthew Scully believes that our treatment of animals is a measure of our humanity, and his exposure of the world of factory farming, as well as the eloquence of his writing and the penetration of his arguments, make Dominion the definitive work on the subject of animal rights. A powerful and moving statement of the obligations we owe to animals, deeply humane, grounded in religious and scientific beliefs, Dominion is a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a catalyst for animal rights. Dominion is a life-changing work that is a call to arms for anyone who has anything to do with animals (and that includes eating them).

Matthew Scully

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