Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously 'the question of the animal'.