In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing.

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.

Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice. ... Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative. ... Biology as a way of knowing the world is kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function. Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts "discovered" about organic beings.

From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion

Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously.