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Bio-Power and the Badly Behaved Donkey in Bavli Shabbat Chapter Five

Mon, December 17, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 3 Ballroom

Abstract

Foucault was not much interested in animals. Like many other theorists of power, Foucault considered animals to exist outside the scope of power. He did not see the relevance of animals to his most famous ideas about power, such as bio-power (the exercise of power over bodies), the microphysics of power (the study of power in particular and dynamic relationships), or to the role of discourse in normalizing power. Bertrand Russell, by contrast, viewed relationships between human beings and animals as the quintessential exercise of power. Russell’s illustration is a pig with a rope around his middle being hoisted squealing into a ship. For Russell, dealings with animals are singularly instructive because there are no “disguises and pretences.” Drawing on Foucault and Animals, edited by Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, my paper seeks a middle ground between Foucault and Russell as I read selections from Babylonian Talmud Tractate Shabbat Chapter Five, which treats the prohibition on an animal bearing a burden on the Sabbath. Is a saddle a “burden” and therefore prohibited? Is a collar, or a bell? The paper examines some of the “disguises and pretenses” adopted within talmudic law – particularly in the anonymous redactional stratum – in order to naturalize the devices used day-to-day to discipline animals. Those devices emerge from the legal discussion as almost a part of the animal’s body, a necessary accoutrement like a pair of glasses or suspenders. The paper will then focus on a talmudic narrative about a badly behaved donkey (Shabbat 51b-52a) that exposes the strategies of bio-power that the rest of the rabbinic legal discourse puts into place. The paper argues that the talmudic story exposes the constructed character of animal unruliness, and that it represents disciplinary devices as less necessary and neutral than does the legal discourse. Bringing critical animal studies into conversation with Talmud scholarship, the paper will close with reflections on the role of talmudic narrative in denaturalizing norms and on the dialectical interplay between the disguise and exposure of regimes of animal discipline.

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