Queer Creatures, Strange Kinds
book review
When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species - Rafael Rachel Neis
Reviewer - Max Thornton
extract
Difference, Gilles Deleuze argued in Difference and Repetition, is almost never given its due. In both philosophical and commonsense thinking, we subordinate difference to sameness, elevating a Platonic ideal and ignoring or suppressing the true multiplicity of reality, which is messy and complex and just plain weird. While Deleuze does not make an appearance in Rafael Rachel Neis’s When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, the spirit of his inquiry hovers over the text, not only via his influence on the theoretical realms with which Neis thinks (queer and trans theory, animal studies, posthumanism), but also in their profound commitment to multiplicity and the weirdness it engenders. This is a wildly, fabulously queer text, in content and form, and above all in its refusal of totalities and closures. With deep and rigorous scholarly grounding, Neis opens the rabbinic sandbox, populated by a dizzying array of queer creatures, figures of excess and marginality and multifariousness—what the book’s other guiding spirit Donna Haraway would call “oddkin”—and invites us to come play.