The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

By Donna J. Haraway

Book Overview

The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness." In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival" but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971757585
• ISBN13: 9780971757585
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.4" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Excellent, lively read!!!

This is a lovely, engaging short volume. It was just the right mix of theory and very pragmatic discussion to appeal to anyone from the reader who just plain loves dogs ... to those interested in better understanding contemporary scientific discourses. Highly recommended.

A Social Metaphysics of Humans-in-Relation

The previous comment seems to me to miss the plot of Haraway's text. I don't mean to cause offense by saying this, but only to explain why I feel like I should write. The way I read this manifesto, Haraway is working to lay out a social metaphysics that takes relations with radical otherness as integral to and inseparable from any identity. Classical liberalist / modernist theory imagines humans as fundamentally discrete and fungible. This necessarily produces hostility to anything marked as other (e.g., women, dogs, nature, etc.). By drawing off her earlier cyborg theory, Whitehead's process metaphysics, and her own very intimate and concrete relationship with her beloved companion, Haraway is working to construct an intimate and concrete conceptual alternative. This is probably not a text that you would want to wander into without at least some previous (e.g., undergrad) introduction to 3rd wave feminist theory.