Reading Activity for Donna Haraway’s “Ecce Homo” (The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape).

 

Directions:

 

1. Number off into groups of three or four students each.

 

2. Each group is responsible for the quote associated with their number. Group number 1 is responsible for quote number 1.

 

3. In your group, locate your quote in the article and then discuss your quote until you think you understand it. In order to gain a solid understanding of your quote, you need to relate it to what comes before and after the quote in the article.

 

4. Make sure that you identify someone in your group to report back to the class.

 

Quotes:

 

1. Feminist humanity must, somehow, both resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility (p.86).

 

 

2. I suggest that the only route to non-generic humanity, for whom specificity–but emphatically not originality– is the key to connections, is through radical nominalism (p.88).

 

 

3. From the start we are in the midst of multiple translations and stagings of a figure of suffering humanity that was not contained within the cultures of the origin of the stories (p.89).

 

 

4. This figure of the Incarnation can never be other than a trickster, a check on the arrogances of a reason that would uncover all disguises and force correct vision of a recalcitrant nature in her most secret places (p. 90).

 

 

5. Difference (understood as the divisive marks of authenticity) was reduced to anatomy; but even more to the point, the doctor’s demand articulated the racist/sexist logic that made the very flesh of the black person in the New World indecipherable, doubtful, out of place, confounding–ungrammatical (p.92).

 

 

6. For me, one answer to that question lies in Sojourner Truth’s power to figure a collective humanity without constructing the cosmic closure of the unmarked category (p.92).

 

 

7. The essential Truth would not settle down; that was her specificity (p. 92).

 

 

8. …many feminists resist this formulation of the project and question its emergence at just the moment when raced/sexed/colonized speakers begin “for the first time,” to claim, that is, with an originary authority, to represent themselves in… other kinds of self-constituting practices (p.96).