Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Host: Callie Smith
Guest: Ron Broglio
Date: October 20, 2025

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features a lively discussion with Ron Broglio about his book Animal Revolution, which explores the agency and resistance of animals in human-dominated worlds. The conversation delves into how animals push back—sometimes humorously, sometimes with real consequence—against human impositions. Broglio and Smith discuss the book's unique style, its visual collaborations, its philosophical underpinnings, and its call for radical new ways of imagining human-animal relations.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Broglio’s Academic Journey and Genesis of "Animal Revolution"

• Origin: Broglio started in British Romanticism, studying eras obsessed with animals, landscape, and agency. Moving from analyzing historical representations of animals to contemporary encounters, he asked: When do animals have agency outside our scripts? (02:32)
• Commodification & Anxiety: From huge cattle portraits to the origins of vaccination (cowpox and human anxieties about injecting versus eating animals).
• Collecting Incidents: By 2005, he began noting real-life moments where animals “push back” against humans, wondering: “Maybe they’re in revolt… it’s their revolution, not ours.” (04:40)
• Humor & Style: The interplay between seriousness and humor became part of the book's tone: “How serious is he about this revolution? How humorous is it? … It was a problem of style as well.” (05:27)
• Crossover Writing: Moving from academic prose to a broader, story-driven style was a central challenge.

2. The Book’s Structure, Style, and Illustrations

• Manifesto & Mock Letters: The book opens with a faux-polite letter from animals—a tongue-in-cheek device to invert expectations. (05:47)
• Collaboration with Illustrator Marina Zirko:
  • Broglio gave Marina the full manuscript; her playful, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous artwork clicked with the book’s tone. She developed quirky images as “visual commentary on the text.” (07:02–09:22)
  • Notable illustrations include a macaque with human hands (giving the finger) referencing the selfie-taking monkey (09:22), Dionysian fauns, and images of bears with awkward human feet.
  • Some illustrations have been made into gallery prints due to their popularity.

3. Moving Beyond "Animal Farm": Animal Agency vs. Human Allegory

• Against Anthropocentrism: Orwell’s Animal Farm uses animals as allegories for human struggles, ignoring animal agency. Broglio states:

  “He immediately moves to the human and leaves the animal’s plight... so he again is whipping the animal because it never has its own agency.” (13:04)

• Animal ‘Worlding’: Humans and animals share Earth but possess distinct worlds; the book catalogs moments of human-animal friction. (14:00)

4. Revolution as Embrace and Affect

• Nietzsche’s Embrace: Instead of only depicting revolution as violent, Broglio considers moments of empathy—like Nietzsche embracing a beaten horse—as potent acts of solidarity and “radical generosity.” (15:08)
• Cultural Distancing: Technologies and habits (utensils, cars) buffer humans from their animality and messiness of life, while animals “hack” these distances (e.g., jellyfish jamming ship engines). (16:55)

5. Objects and Interobjectivity: George Washington’s Teeth

• Haunted Prosthetics: George Washington’s dentures, made from animal, enslaved human, and mineral parts, become a metaphor for the spectral presence of nonhuman and marginalized agencies in forming national identity:

  “All these things that are in his mouth … become specters. They go unrecognized and unmourned. … They provide a different kind of agency that can speak back to us.” (18:30–20:36)

6. Personal Reflection and Animal Myth

• Bringing in the Self: Broglio’s mentor challenged him to make the book personal. He reflects on his own body hair, mourning, and his kinship with goats and Sasquatch as “crafting new myths of animal affinity.” (21:15–25:00)
• Sasquatch as Comrade: The mythic figure bridges human and animal worlds—“Even if Sasquatch does not exist, it’s the idea that we want to find a link that can speak to what it’s like to be animal.” (24:20)

7. Animal Revolution in Everyday Life

• Sanctuary & Resistance Stories: The first chapter weaves together tales like cows escaping into a church parking lot, Vatican dove releases intercepted by wild birds, and other vignettes blending the absurd, poetic, and real. (26:52–28:14)
• Short, “Potato Chip” Chapters: Influenced by Giorgio Agamben and Alphonso Lingis, the book’s structure makes it accessible—each episode stands alone but resonates within the whole. (28:14–32:01)

8. Radical Hospitality & Derrida

• Hospitality’s Challenge: Drawing on Derrida’s life, Broglio explores welcoming the animal Other (and human vulnerability) as a radical ethical act, symbolized by stories like the bull in a china shop (33:35–37:09).
• Daily Practice: Broglio describes “architectures of hospitality”—bat houses, bee stumps, etc.—and scholars’ real-life accommodations of animals as acts of cohabitation. (37:29–39:17)

9. Imagining the Impossible

• Half-Earth Proposal & Shamanism: Citing E.O. Wilson’s “half-Earth proposal,” Broglio advocates new, bold frameworks for coexistence—“less zoos, more shaman.” (39:32–42:22)
• Role of the Arts and Humanities:
  • The “futurist future” is not yet claimed by capital or mastery; humanities scholars/artists can seed radical new visions, ethics of vulnerability, and break through cultural fortresses.
  • “Rather than closing things down and creating barriers… things become more porous, we say yes to the world. It’s that radical yes that becomes so important.” (43:02–45:21)

10. Closing Reflections & Future Projects

• Creative Courage: Broglio praises his mentor’s advice, “save nothing for the return,” encouraging creative risks and imagination. (45:38–46:20)
• Desert Humanities & Ecstatic Knowing: Current work involves community outreach through desert animal pamphlets and a new book on knowledge gained by risking and transforming the self, not just intellect:

  “Those personally transformative experiences are a different way of knowing, almost an ecstatic knowing.” (46:27–47:54)

• Embodied Animal Revolution: The bodily dimension—geese in airplane engines, sacrificial animals—underscores how much of animal resistance is corporeal and often costly for the animals themselves. (47:54–48:18)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Revolution’s Seriousness:
  “Maybe they’re in revolt against us. They’re just not telling us because it’s their revolution, not ours, right?” – Ron Broglio (04:39)

• On Moving Beyond Allegory:
  “He immediately moves to the human and leaves the animal’s plight... so he again is whipping the animal because it never has its own agency.” – Ron Broglio (13:04)

• On Embracing Animality:
  “It’s that I’m an animal, I know pain. You’re an animal, you have known pain. We’re in this together. Solidarity, right?” – Ron Broglio (15:51)

• On Objects Speaking Back:
  “…They go unrecognized and unmourned… They provide a different kind of agency that can speak back to us.” – Ron Broglio (20:32)

• On Personal Vulnerability:
  “You only are writing that book once, so go all in.” – (Advice from Matt Bell, cited by Broglio, 21:15)

• On Humor & the Sasquatch:
  “The role of humor is that it plays with boundaries between what’s acceptable and what’s not… good humor is always political in some way.” – Ron Broglio (24:20)

• On Radical Hospitality:
  “Much like zoos create barriers, rather than creating barriers, things become more porous, we say yes to the world. It’s that radical yes that becomes so important.” – Ron Broglio (43:48)

• On Creative Risk:
  “Save nothing for the return.” – Matt Bell (Advice, cited at 45:41)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Background and Book Genesis: 02:25–05:47
• Illustrations and Visual Collaboration: 07:02–12:30
• Moving Beyond Animal Farm: 12:30–14:33
• Nietzsche & Solidarity: 14:33–17:37
• Objects & Spectral Agency: 17:37–20:36
• Personal Narrative and Myth: 20:36–25:52
• Opening Vignettes & Chapter Structure: 26:52–32:01
• Hospitality & Derrida: 33:35–37:09
• Real-life Hospitality Practices: 37:09–39:17
• Half-Earth & Shaman Proposal: 39:17–42:22
• Role of Humanities, Arts, and Vulnerability: 42:22–45:21
• Creative Advice, Current/Future Projects: 45:21–48:18

Tone and Experience

The episode features philosophical depth, playful storytelling, and a generous, inviting tone. Broglio exemplifies the radical hospitality he advocates, both intellectually and personally, urging listeners to consider animals as fellow agents on a shared earth—and to imagine beyond the boundaries of tradition, discipline, and habitual thought.

Summary Takeaway

Ron Broglio’s “Animal Revolution” is a call to recognize the subtle, not always visible, but persistent forms of resistance and agency that animals exert in our world. Through humor, personal narrative, poetic imagery, and theory, Broglio invites us to join in radical hospitality—to open ourselves, vulnerably and imaginatively, to a future in which our stories, myths, and lives are in deeper conversation with our fellow animals.