Featured image: Chili pepper cat on red background by Chung Lee
When: Wednesday September 28th, 2011 (4:15-5:30pm)
Speaker: Jeffrey Bussolini (Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work, College of Staten Island)
According to a branch of comparative psychology, mammals other than humans never eat spicy chile peppers due to the ‘constrained risk’ and ‘benign masochism’ demonstrated only by humans. This talk bears on research at the Center for Feline Studies’ Feline Interaction Laboratory (a site for the non-invasive study of the feline life-world, feline-feline interactions, and feline-human interactions) in which cats have been regularly observed selecting and seeking out spicy chiles to eat. This activity also discloses an important instance of tool use, as the cats learned to open a refrigerator and a freezer to access chiles.
Jeffrey Bussolini is Associate Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at the College of Staten Island. His current work deals with the strange and sometimes chilling parallels between nuclear physics and the worldview of the Marquis de Sade, using the tools of feminist and philosophical analysis to look at physics as a discourse and a body of knowledge in which corporeality is treated as sheerly material and physical. Select publications include, The Culture of National Security Science: Los Alamos and Wen Ho Lee (Duke, 2011), “Los Alamos as Laboratory for Domestic Security Measures” (Geopolitics, 2011), and “Ongoing Founding Events in the Work of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben” (Telos, 2011).
Jeffrey Bussolini: College of Staten Island profile
