Abstract
This chapter considers the ontological status of roadkill, which is to say, its basic nature and significance. It is suggested that traditional substance ontologies, as well as more contemporary relational ontologies and ethical frameworks, are inadequate for disclosing the nature of roadkill. In order to address this limit, Calvin Warren’s analysis of ontological terror is employed to analyze the lives and deaths of beings who are understood to fall outside the orbit of the human. The chapter concludes with the idea that thinking and attending to roadkill as inhabiting such an outside requires relating to it as an event.
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Notes
- 1.
See Desmond (2016, 143–144) for a general overview of roadkill from this more definitional perspective.
- 2.
On this point, see also Lulka (2008).
- 3.
When pressed on the question of whether an animal might have a face, Levinas suggests that a “more specific analysis is needed” to answer the question (Levinas 1988, 172).
- 4.
It is important to note that Blanchot’s reflections on the corpse make sense only within the context of a world that is (to use Levinasian terminology) “right side up”—which is to say, a world that accords human bodies some semblance of meaning and value and in which corpses do not pile up unattended on the side of the road. As should be clear, there are situations in which such worlds break down and in which human corpses do pile up, unattended and unmourned. How might consideration of the fate of human bodies in such broken worlds help to illuminate the status of roadkill in worlds that we might otherwise consider to be right side up? This is a question to which I return in the following section in examining Calvin Warren’s work.
- 5.
Roadkill removal services are not uncommon in larger cities, but their primary charge is to ensure the smooth and safe flow of automobile traffic—and not to ensure a fitting or respectful burial for dead animals.
- 6.
Warren typically refers to “blacks” in the lower case; I follow his practice here when referring to his work.
- 7.
I should underscore here at the outset of my discussion that marking this adjacency of blacks and animals (which Warren himself also underscores) is by no means intended to denote a simple identity of these groups, either in terms of ontological status or ethico-political standing. The connections here are considerably more fraught and complex, as I hope the following analysis demonstrates.
- 8.
- 9.
The concept of event has a wide circulation in contemporary theory and philosophy. It plays a significant role in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, to name a few of the more prominent figures. In proposing that roadkill be conceived of as an event, this body of work will certainly be relevant to my concerns, but I depart from the standard uses of this term in ways that will be apparent in the pages that follow.
- 10.
I use the term solicit here in the etymological sense emphasized in Derrida’s work, in which to solicit means to make something “shake as a whole, to make [it] tremble in [its] entirety” (Derrida 1982, 21).
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Calarco, M. (2023). What Is Roadkill?. In: Reflections on Roadkill between Mobility Studies and Animal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30578-8_2
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