Related Papers
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals
2014 •
Richard Iveson
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals offers radical new possibilities for encountering and thinking with other animals, and thus for the politics of animal liberation. Examining the machinations of power that legitimize the killing of nonhuman animals, Zoogenesis shows too how thoroughly entangled they are with the 'noncriminal' putting to death of human animals. Such legitimation consists in a theatrics of displacement that transforms singular, nonsubstitutable living beings into mute, subjugated bodies that may be slaughtered but never murdered. Nothing less than the economy of genocide, Iveson thereafter explores the possibility of interventions that function in the opposite direction to this 'animalizing' displacement - interventions that potentially make it unthinkable that living beings can be 'legitimately' slaughtered. Along the way, Zoogenesis tracks just such 'animal encounters' across various disciplinary boundaries - stumbling across their traces in a short story by Franz Kafka, in the bathroom of Jacques Derrida, in a politically galvanising slogan, in the deaths of centipedes both actual and fictional, in the newfound plasticity of the gene, and in the sharing of an inhuman knowledge that saves novelist William S. Burroughs from a life of deadly ignorance. Such encounters, argues Iveson, are zoo-genetic, with zoogenesis naming the emergence of a new living being that interrupts habitual instrumentalisation and exploitation. With this creative event, a new conception of the political emerges which, as the necessary supplement of an ethical demand, offers potentially radical new ways of being with other animals. Reviews: "Encounters between human living, and other living entities, and between fictive and imaginary, Aristotelian and Cartesian animals are here staged with respect to competing notions of life and value, of writing and of literature. ...Richard Iveson reads a variety of sources with insight and discrimination, contributing highly effectively to this recently emergent and rapidly expanding new life form: zoogenesis" - Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of Derrida on Time (2007). "one of the most thorough and exhaustive treatments of philosophy's recent encounters with animality ... With both impressive scope and penetrating critique, Zoogenesis allows us to think through a comprehensive rearticulation of 'the human' in a radically subversive manner" - John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Postural Mutations: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015).
EIGHT POINTS TO GO FROM A ZOOTECHNICAL TO ZOOANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Roberto Marchesini
This contribution is aimed to present eight steps that I think necessary to go from the current zootechnical society to a zooanthropological one. Let’s have a quick look: 1) The need to redefine our way to interpret “animality” and the need to emancipate it from the historical condition of counter-term related to human. This view change and contaminate the way we look at the other animals, as let us humans be different from the other species. This thought is a premise of every form of estrangement, submission and use of non-human animals. 2) The need to analyze the concept of “animal subjectivity” to get an interpretative model able to explain subjectivity and any kind of its expressions, limited when invoking a conscience or the so-called “superior functions”, as this kind of attitude inevitably lead to a difference among human being and the other species and to set the exclusion bar higher and higher. 3) The need to admit the animal reference, that is to admin the referential, not performative, contribution of the non-human animals in building human predicates; in other words, the need to give more value to the relationship with the other species going beyond the idea that they are useful products but rather dialogical partners that have always been inspiring hom*o sapiens, actively living through the anthropopoietic processes. Therefore, we need to think of the non-human animals as co-factorial in building the human dimension. 4) The need to place again in the centre of controversy the concept of moral patient and the redefinition of the relations among human being as moral agent and their own selves interests. I will affirm the need to go out from the humanist-type ethic of symmetry, in which whoever owns some rights must have been assigned also some obligations, to move towards a new ethical prospect that I call empathy. 5) The need to move to a vegan culture, starting from the ecological importance of such a change, to underline how much habitat destruction, agricultural pressure and deplorable exploitation of planet resources will become key topics in the next future. In this sense, vegan choice overcomes Neolithic society; in connection with the vegan choice, nutrition will not depend anymore from animal agriculture. 6) The need to overcome mass consumption and the need to dismiss a solipsistic and individual ontological conception seeking the meaning of external world inside the single individual. This attitude, really attractive to the capitalist machine, lead to a kind of “world-phagy”, with the human being is focus and the rest of the world is gravitating around them. 7) The need to overcome the common anthropocentrism; this does not mean to discard anthropocentrism in its entirety, but to avoid a projective vision of animal, to be able to accept diversity, and to recognise an ontological dignity to the other species. 8) The need to acquire more awareness about what it means to respect those animals that have been affected from a strong relationship with human being, such as factory animals, and to understand how it will change our relations with them. The challenge will be trying to foresee how it will evolve our relationship with those synanthropic animals sharing spaces with us and with which we have so often some conflictual relations; and, besides, how to look at wild animals typically refusing to get in contact with human beings. These eight points are meaningful to me to go from a zootechnical society to a zooanthropological one.
hc.amu.edu.pl
Zoosemiotics as a new perspective
Marietta Radomska
Call For Paper: Rethinking Animality: International Conference on Animal Studies
Nicola Zengiaro
The XXI century forces us to think again, in a radical way, about the human-animals relationship. Violence toward animals has rapidly taken place in the public debate: veganism, animal products, animal testing and animals right are now significant themes in the political ground. We are currently part of a deep social transformation that involves every cultural aspect of the Western  world from science to literature: humanities, creative arts, and sciences are all shaken to its foundations. In view of this, the CfP 2018 has the aim to give voice to a philosophical urgency of our time through an academic multidisciplinary encounter. Dealing with the Animality means to redefine the anthropological paradigm of what is a human being beyond the Enlightenment frame. Thus, humankind becomes a permeable category for more- than-humans identities. Moving beyond Arnold Gehlen, Max Scheler, and Helmuth Plessner, we must replace Philosophical Anthropology with Philosophy of Animality. In this perspective, humans are no longer an isolated ontological entity, but the results of a constant co-becoming, through hybridization, with other living beings. Therefore, to investigate "animality" means get rid of the all-embracing anthropocentric prejudice. After the prison of metaphysical humanism, other ways to relate to the other are possible. The first step toward this new web of beings must be a new Philosophy of Animality. Several contemporary philosophies take into the account this frame: Posthumanism, Animals Politics, Environtmal Ethics and Ecology, Ecocritics, Ecofeminism, Multispecies Studies, Biopolitics, Ecofeminism, and so on...
Re-minding the Animals: Developments in the Scientific Study of Nonhuman Animals (a review of Bekoff and Jamieson's Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Animal Behavior, Volume I )
kenneth shapiro
TDR
(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance
2007 •
Una Chaudhuri
Centaurus
Science at the Zoo. An Introduction
2022 •
Oliver Hochadel
Was the zoological garden a place for science in the 19th and 20th centuries? This question cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Rather, this Special Issue suggests, we need to reconstruct how the concrete conditions of the zoo as an institution influenced, enabled, triggered, facilitated, obstructed, or impeded scientific research. The zoo was and is a multifunctional space serving different constituencies, such as scientists of different disciplines, artists, breeders, and the general public. This collection of articles argues that despite or even because of its hybrid character, the zoo generated knowledge about exotic animals in often unexpected ways. This Special Issue conceives of “science at the zoo” as a an “impure,” yet very rich epistemic constellation with its very own dynamic, tensions, and contradictions. The first part of this introduction provides a historical overview of the topic. Synthesizing the existing secondary literature, it addresses the major themes of science at the zoo: the debate among scientists about the pros and cons of research conducted in and outside the cages; the gap between the promise of doing research at the zoo and the actual practices; and the emergence of new fields of knowledge such as zoo veterinary medicine, zoo biology, and conservation science. The introduction's second part draws out the common topics that connect the eight articles of this Special Issue: the multiplicity of spaces interacting with the zoo; the broad range of historical actors, including academics, animal traders, and zoo keepers; the changing roles of the zoo-going public; and the negotiation of authority and epistemic hierarchies in producing knowledge about zoo animals. The large numbers of zoos and the long temporal range these articles cover bring the constant evolution of “science at the zoo”—and hence its intrinsic historical dimension—to the fore.
From Animal to Animality Studies
Michael Lundblad
Society & Animals
Editor's Introduction to Society and Animals
1993 •
kenneth shapiro
Not Coming to Terms: Nonhuman Animals and the Edge of Theory
Juliane Prade-Weiss
