From Post-Human to Post-Animal: Posthumanism and the 'Animal Turn'

Second Language Learning and Teaching

This book brings together well-researched essays by established scholars as well as forward-thinking aspiring researchers to study how literary and non-literary texts highlight 'animal presence' and explore non-anthropocentric relationships between human and animals. To be precise, it offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric Literary and Cultural texts. The contributors take positions that put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by considering the animal presence in texts seriously. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied interdisciplinary and theoretically-informed perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts beyond geographical and period boundaries, and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "Animal turn" for the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers some fresh perspectives of Posthumanist theory, so that we can revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book will constitute a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed; and they explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics. This book does more than simply decentering the 'human' by bringing animals onto the center of critical discourse and challenging the anthropocentric hierarchical relationship, which are the basis of Posthumanist readings. It also highlights the theoretical intersections between Animal Theory and other relevant cultural theories, that is the latest advancement in this field. The volume is divided into four main sections

Springer, 2017

This book presents a new way to understand human–animal interactions. Offering a profound discussion of topics such as human identity, our relationship with animals and the environment, and our culture, the author channels the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The research presents a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences. It challenges the separation and oppression of animals with a post-humanism steeped in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. Readers discover a vision of the human as a species informed by an intertwining with animals. The human being is not constructed by an onto-poetic process, but rather by close relations with otherness. The human system is increasingly unstable and, therefore, more hybrid. The argument it presents interests scholars, thinkers, and researchers. It also appeals to anyone who wants to delve into the deep animal–human bond and its philosophical, cultural, political instances. The author is a veterinarian, ethologist, and philosopher. He uses cognitive science, zooanthropology, and philosophy to engage in a series of empirical, theoretical, and practice-based engagements with animal life. In the process, he argues that animals are key to human identity and culture at all levels.

Once marginal, knowledge that many other species share characteristics hitherto thought restricted to humans, including language, tool-use and consciousness, is now commonplace across many scientific fields, from ethology to biosemiotics to neurophysiology. 1 Such new scientific understandings of nonhuman life have been one important inspiration for posthuman theorists aiming to replace ontologies of division with those of connection and relative difference. Animal sexual selection, for example, is much more than an instrumental process. As theorized by Elizabeth Grosz, animal courtship and sex provide not merely the means for reproduction and genetic survival, but are playful, exuberant, creative articulations of the active, forward-moving force of life. 2 Similarly, Brian Massumi outlines how the play of young animals shows their 'capacity to mobilize the possible.' 3 The wolf cub nipping the ear of another wolf cub enacts a ludic gesture, saying 'this is play.' But for the cub to learn how to be an adult wolf, the play bite must also stand in for a real, violent bite. The distinction between violent-bite and play-bite is not simply that one is training for adult wolf-hood and one is childish play. Rather, both ways of biting operate in a zone of indiscernibility without the specific differences of either being erased. The paradox of play is its 'as if-ness.' For Massumi, when animals play, 'they are preparatorily enacting human capacities.' 4 In this vitalist mode, posthumanism places the human in a continuum with other animals, connected through both lines of descent and contemporary ecological relations. Animals become worthy subjects of academic attention in the humanities, while humans become creaturely beings.

In this lecture, Roberto Marchesini will discuss topics such as human identity, our relationship with other animals and the environment, by channeling the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The lecture will open a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences and it will also challenge the separation and oppression of animals with a post-humanism steeped in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. A new vision of the human will be offered as a species informed by an intertwining with other animals. The human being is in fact not constructed by an onto-poetic process, but rather by close relations with otherness. The human system is increasingly unstable and, therefore, more hybrid.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

Humanity defines itself through an animal other, the animal in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of accommodation and hospitality which posthuman philosophy provides in conceptualizing the position of alterity of the “animal”. Building on the writing of Jacque Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I will argue how Posthumanism can radicalize the way in which the anthropocentric worldview looks at the animal as other, questioning the positioning and relevance of speciesism and species boundary. Also, the issue of the agency has been interrogated in this research article. I have also argued for a new mode of conceptualizing the “other” / the “animal” which abolishes the hierarchical view of anthropocentric conception of nonhuman but instead views the other from the lens of companionship, borrowing from the ideas of “companionship” and “Chuthulucene” of Donna J. Haraway. The paper is an attempt to expand ...

Humanimalia, 2016

The field of post-anthropocentrism in current animal philosophy and related disciplines is structured by heterogeneous concepts of anthropocentrism on the one hand and different usages of the prefix ‘post’ on the other. This paper expounds different perspectives on anthropocentrism, while additionally focusing on the possibilities of its overcoming: on how anthropocentrism is problematized rather than on what is problematized. Two different positions are used as examples: humanist post-anthropocentrism, as advocated by Gary Steiner, and post-humanism, as advocated by Cary Wolfe in reference to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In conclusion, the notion of ‘excess’ is analysed to illustrate the structural differences regarding a crucial term for both positions.

“Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” argues that posthumanist theory, and the interrelated field of animal studies, have been patterned by a lacuna, namely that of race. More precisely, I argue that posthumanism’s disengagement with theorizations of race and colonialism has not only undercut our understanding of the significance of posthumanism for embattled subjectivities but also undermined the stated aims of posthumanist theory itself. With the recent emergence of feminist and queer posthumanist theory attentive to race, the future direction of posthumanism and animal studies promises an exciting break with habits of racialized erasure in posthumanist thought.

Environmental Education Research

This paper contributes to the debate about the absence of nonhuman animals (The term 'nonhuman animal' is used to emphasise the interconnection with the human being, viewed as a human animal. Using this terminology does not avoid a homogenising, stereotyping and simplifying of a multiplicity of animal (and human) beings. Nonetheless, we think that such a 'simplification' of concepts is inescapable in academic discussions concerning humans and nonhuman animals.) in environmental and sustainable education (ESE) and the challenge of the anthropocentric characterisation of European education.

2014

Animals´ omnipresence in human society makes them both close to and yet remarkably distant from humans. Human and animal lives have always been entangled, but the way we see and practice the relationships between humans and animals – as close, intertwined, or clearly separate – varies from time to time and between cultures, societies, and even situations. By putting these complex relationships in focus, this anthology investigates the ways in which human society deals with its co-existence with animals. The volume was produced within the frame of the interdisciplinary “Animal Turn”-research group which during eight months in 2013–2014 was hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund university, Sweden. Along with invited scholars and artists, members of this group contribute with different perspectives on the complexities and critical issues evoked when the human-animal relationship is in focus. The anthology covers a wide range of topics: From discussions on new disciplinary paths and theoretical perspectives, empirical case-studies, and artistic work, towards more explicitly critical approaches to issues of animal welfare. Phenomena such as vegansexuality, anthropomorphism, wildlife crimes, and the death of honey-bees are being discussed. How we gain knowledge of other species and creatures is one important issue in focus. What does, for example, the notion of wonderment play in this production of knowledge? How were species classified in pre-Christian Europe? How is the relationship between domesticated and farmed animals and humans practiced and understood? How is it portrayed in literature, or in contemporary social media? Many animals are key actors in these discussions, such as dogs, cows, bees, horses, pigeons, the brown bear, just to mention a few, as well as some creatures more difficult to classify as either humans or animals. All of these play a part in the questions that is at the core of the investigations carried out in this volume: How to produce knowledge that creates possibilities for an ethically and environmentally sustainable future.