Animals in Posthumanist Thought: An Introduction

Journal of Animal Ethics, 2021

Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad, 2017

The End of the Animal--Literary and Cultural Animalities

Since the field of Animal Studies has opened up, the human and social sciences, in North American and in Europe, have developed an almost exclusive interest in the human side of this subject, examining human uses, practices and most particularly human representations of animals, in part because of a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s.1 After having used these approaches myself many times, I feel they are now insufficient because they have created and maintained a blind spot at their center: that of animals as feeling, acting, responding beings, who have their own initiatives and reactions. Scholars have had much to say about humans, and very little to say about animals, who remain absent or are transformed into simple pretexts, pure objects on which human representations, knowledge, practices are exercised without consequence. In this sense, the history of animals that has developed over the last thirty years is in reality a human history of animals where these latter have very little place as real beings. Looking at Real Animals We must move away from this approach rooted in a Western cultural worldview that has impoverished the dialectical theme of humans and animals, reducing it to a field with one magnetic pole (humans) and a single directional pull (humans towards animals) thus forgetting or dismissing much of its reality and complexity. We must look more closely at the influence of animals in their relationships with humans, at their role as actual actors, in light of ethology's growing insistence-at least for certain species and an increasing number of them-on the behaviors of each animal as actor, individual, and even person; on the cognitive capacities of animal individuals; and on the sociability and cultures of animal groups-and thus revealing the inadequacies of purely human approaches. Similarly, historical documents show, when this information is not rejected as anecdotal, that humans have seen or foreseen and assessed animal interests and have reacted, acted, and imagined as a result. We must leave the human side, moving to the animal side,2 in order to better understand human/animal relationships but also in order to better know these living actor-beings who deserve to be studied in and of themselves. This means that the definition of history must be broadened, abandoning the too restricted definition of "a science of humans in time,"3 in which many historians have become entrenched. This definition is not inviolable; it has been historically constructed, from Fustel de Coulanges to Bloch, with two events being of particular importance: first, the formation of the human sciences as a means to studying the human independently of the natural sciences that had a certain monopoly on knowledge; and second, the broadening of the human sciences during the 1900s to 1930s to include the study of all aspects of the human and not just those related to the political. It is now time to redefine history as the "science of all living beings in time" and to become interested in these living beings' evolutions, at the very least in those evolutions that have been recorded in diverse historical documents and that could be the object of study for a historian versed in the field. At the same time, we must go beyond the cultural approach-note that I did not say abandon this approach-that tends to reduce the human and social sciences to an exercise in deconstruction and close examination of social discourses, and thus arrive at representations that are considered to be the only observable reality. This work is necessary; but the success of cultural approaches has transformed an essential preliminary step into an ultimate finality. We must once again be searching for realities using the concept of "situated knowledges"4 to validate a building of knowledge that is not ignorant of, nor taken in by, its context of elaboration. We need to apply this to the diverse human actors who have used, become close to, and observed animals, and who have become witnesses to animals in varying degrees using observation and representation. We need to take into account the conditions under which these discourses were produced so that when we bring together, test and critique information that is partial-in the sense of being incomplete and biased-we arrive at some sense of that reality. We must also abandon the culturally constructed Western notion of animals as passive beings and see them instead as feeling, responding, adapting, and suffering. In other words, we need to start with the hypothesis that animals are not only actors that influence humans, but that they are also individuals with their own specific set of characteristics, they are even people with their own behaviors, in short, they are subjects. These ideas are no longer taboo5 and should be tested in the field while leaving room for some flexibility in how the definitions are used. We must refrain from starting with (too-well) defined concepts, whose reality we hope to prove, because then we simply configure these concepts according to the form we know best, that is, the human form, or more precisely the European human form at a given time, and once again we fall into the trap of ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism. We must realize that our concepts are always situated: in time, as historians show us; in space, as ethnologists point out6; and amongst living beings as ethologists are beginning to demonstrate.7 Western culture has defined the subject as thinking, self-conscious, and as having recourse to conscious choices and strategies, all the while forgetting that this definition-that it takes as the definition-is in fact a situated, inferred version of the human. Moreover, this underlying portrait includes a set of philosophical implications that place humanity at the top as absolute reference, just as the Western world placed itself at the top in the past. When one clings to this definition while observing animals, one uses a discourse of domination as a tool of investigation, arriving at the already-drawn conclusion that there are no subjects among animals. It is when more supple definitions are adopted that one can envisage the concept of animals as subjects or come to a conclusion even if not all the parameters are met. We must remember that we have just barely begun to search for these parameters in the animal world; if we find that these parameters lack some consistency, it may be that we need to consider a greater plurality of meanings. Experimenting with key concepts does not mean falling into the trap of anthropomorphism, just as attributing flexibility and suppleness to concepts under investigation does not mean sliding into vague impressionism. What such an approach entails is a form of critical anthropomorphism that watches with curiosity, asks difficult questions, tries out critical concepts, observes without prejudice, and avoids an already conclusive anthropomorphism that foists humanity on animality and thus denies their specificities. It also entails being as open as possible to the potential capabilities of animals, many of whom we still do not know very well. Finally, this approach means seeing the diverse expressions of different faculties in order to adopt wider definitions of them. This is already being done for physical abilities (we know that many species do not see the world as we do but we do not deduce from this that they can not see), but we remain reticent when it comes to doing the same for mental abilities because these are what allow us to value ourselves over animals. This is not a question of mixing up all living beings, but rather it is a question of appreciating the diversity of all and the richness of each one. This means abandoning the shallow, puerile, distorted dualism that opposes humans to animals and in which philosophies and religions have trapped us for the last 2500 years. First, this dualism is shallow because it opposes a concrete species, the human, to a concept, the animal, that does not exist in the fields nor in the streets and that is nothing more than a category masking the reality of a multiplicity of species that are each very different. Second, this dualism is puerile because it poses the question of a difference

In the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. Examining Aristotle's and Heidegger's approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of "the animals" keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language.

“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.

The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies

The rise of mechanistic philosophy in the early modern period triggered difficult questions concerning the traditionally elevated status attributed to human beings in nature as God's creation.

Humanimalia, 2022

Review of: Chiara Mengozzi (ed.): Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human–Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, Routledge, London, 2021, 283 pages.

To believe that mankind, specifically humans exist in vacuum is an erroneous take on the world and the way that it normally functions. In reality, humans can never achieve the perfect image of an autonomous separate being, rather they embody one of the threads that are strictly interwoven within the larger fabric of planetary life. The amalgamation of human, environment, and nonhuman animals encompass the philosophy of existence eliminating that each of these forces is absolute. This paper, through the theory of Ecocriticism, illuminates how nonhuman subjects and human individuals interact with one another through the lens of its sister discipline in humanities: Animal Studies, explaining how the portrait of the animal shapes human realities in the more than human world by undoing the nature-culture binary. Through the analysis of separate scientific data, books, and articles the central interests of this study firmly rest upon the pillar of three main beliefs discussed: (1) the issue of Otherness and Anthropocentric Mastery, (2) Ecofeminism as Speciesism, and (3) Art as form of resistance: the history of representation and the misrepresentation of the nonhuman animal in visual media. The confluence behind these areas offer up an array of novel perspectives, insights, and answers on how the human world and the natural world of nonhuman animals are two sides of the same coin with similar histories, sufferings, and an unwavering thirst for life.