:This preface offers a playful and insightful introduction to the thought of Vinciane Despret from her colleague and collaborator. Despret's philosophical approach builds from the virtue of politeness, which allows animals – concrete, individual animals – to be interesting. Part appraisal, part speculative narrative, this preface looks at the curious practices of Despret as she works with, and thinks from, animals.

:This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Vinciane Despret's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; stories and storytelling; feminism; philosophical anthropology; animal studies; collaborative research; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in books. It touches on thinkers and artists including Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luc Petton.

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human–animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and to be interesting. In scientific research animals are too often reduced to uninteresting, instinctive machines, whereas other modes of engagement allow us to see the wonderfully surprising, culturally rich, and intelligently inventive lives lived by animals. With genuine curiosity, Despret responds that humans and animals (...) transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. (shrink)

A core historical narrative about anthropological knowledge is that it is created in relations with others, with fieldwork seen as ‘a series of apprenticeships’ whose success is determined by the quality of those relations. An ethnographer connects with the conditions of those studied in ‘circulating exchange’; but on leaving the field a degree of closure is needed to formulate and communicate anthropological knowledge. These obligations and requirements in the creation of knowledge entail attachment and detachment, carrying the seeds of betrayal (...) that can compromise that knowledge. Each epistemological enquiry has its own core ethical imperatives, but as long as knowledge posits a knower, ‘the self of the knower will be at epistemological issue’. In discussing the ethics of knowledge creation I consider the following questions, among others: To what extent is the creation of a particular kind of ethical and epistemic person required for knowledge? How can ethnography produce knowledge about others without betraying them? Can relations of knowledge exchange confer or withhold ‘rights to speak’? Is it possible that unethical relations may destroy or hold up the unfolding of knowledge? And are there circumstances in which it is unethical to disclose knowledge? (shrink)

Who or what gets to be counted as human? This paper is a response to the questions raised by the idea of inhumanism, in particular, two papers in the e-flux Journal, editions #52 and #53, by the philosopher Reza Negaretsani, respectively, The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I and Part II: The Inhuman. In Part I, Negarestani addresses the paradox of orienting ourselves between the cultural tropes of humanism and anti-humanism, of operating via ‘consensus or dissensus’. In Part 2, Negarestani (...) elaborates the commitment to a discursive inhumanism, one which requires rational agency to allow for the emergence of the human, albeit a speculative rationality which has the potential, to undergo a form of assimilation to an artificial, general intelligence, in which we ‘only become rational agents once we acknowledge or develop a certain intervening attitude toward norms that renders them binding’. Negrestani describes an augmented rationality which inhabits ‘the “area of maximum risk”—not risk to humanity per se, but to commitments which have not yet been updated, because they conform to a portrait of human that has not been revised’. The obvious question we are left with is whether the division between the human and the non-human is sustainable, and in asking this question, do we naturalise an ontology which always foregrounds humanism, even if it is filtered through an anti-humanist lens? (shrink)