This essay presents a reading of Nietzsche's untimely consideration On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life that reevaluates the importance of animality and animal forgetfulness in Nietzsche's conception of history. It argues that the novelty of Nietzsche's essay On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life is contained in the insight that animal is prior and primordial to human memory; that life is historical through and through because it is forgetful through and through. Furthermore, it contends (...) that the perspective of animal forgetfulness reveals that memory is an artistic force, and, as a consequence, historiography must be understood as an artwork rather than a science, concerned with interpretation rather than the factual representation of the past. Dieser Artikel vertritt die These, dass die Originalität von Vom Nutzen und Nachthiel der Historie für das Leben darin besteht, das tierische, Vergessen als die Bedingung und Möglichkeit des menschlichen Erinnerns festgestellt zu haben. Dies beduetet, dass das menschliche Leben nicht deswegen als geschichtlich zu begriefen ist, weil der Mensch sich erinnert, sondern weil er wie das Tier vergisst. Es wird dafür argumentiert, das es diese Einsicht in den Vorang des tierischen Vergessens ist, welche Nietzsche dazu geführt hat einerseits das menschliche Erinnerungvermögen als eine Künstlerische Kraft neu zu definieren und andererseits die Geschichtsschreibung als ein Kunstwerk, dass sich mit Interpretation und nich mit der faktischen Widerspiegelung der Vergangenheit befasst, neu ze bestimmen. (shrink)

This essay contributes to contemporary discussions concerning so‐called animal politics by drawing from the history of the notion of political animal. Two different historical meanings of the notion are identified: (1) normative political animality that is intrinsically linked with rationality, language, and justice; (2) biological political animality that focuses on collaboration for the sake of a common aim. The former is applicable only to human beings, while the latter can also be used in relation to other animals. After (...) briefly discussing the Aristotelian background of the notion, the essay argues that in medieval Aristotelian tradition, the normative meaning prevailed and the biological one was set aside. However, it is precisely the biological notion that appears useful today. The essay suggests several ways in which it might benefit contemporary theoretical discussions concerning animals, thus laying ground for further developments in animal politics. (shrink)

Axel Honneth and Hans Joas claim that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is problematically ‘solipsistic’ insofar as it fails to appreciate the ways in which human persons or selves are brought into being and given their characteristic powers of reflection and action by social processes. Here I review the main argument of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie with this criticism in mind, giving special attention to Plessner’s accounts of organic being, personhood, language, sociality, (...) and historicity in that text. I argue that Honneth and Joas’s criticisms understate the extent to which Plessner takes sociality to be a constitutive condition of human forms of life within the structure he calls ‘ex-centric positionality’. This reading of Plessner also provides resources for answering a more common criticism of his philosophical anthropology – namely, that it is problematically ‘essentialist’, paying insufficient heed t.. (shrink)

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity (...) through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women's theorising as a crucial component of the methodological metissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence. (shrink)

El ensayo ofrece una lectura de la tragedia Woyzeck, del dramaturgo alemán del siglo XIX Georg Büchner. Se intenta mostrar que la obra de ficción constituye una suerte de antípoda respecto de su fuente de inspiración: el informe psiquiátrico que precipitó la condena del sujeto histórico que da título al drama. En esta perspectiva, se propone como clave de lectura el complejo de variaciones que aporta la obra en torno al tópico o la figura de la animalidad como fuerza neutra, (...) impensable e incontrolable que no solo arrastra al protagonista hacia la desgracia, sino que además opera como principio dinámico de toda la galería de personajes. The essay offers a reading of the Woyzeck tragedy, by the XIX century German playwright Georg Büchner. It intends to portray that the fictional work constitutes a sort of antipodes in relation to its source of inspiration: the psychiatric report that precipitated the sentence of the historical subject, which gives the title to the drama. On this point of view, a reading codeis proposed from the set of variations that the play contributes to the subject or the figure of animality. As a neutral, inconceivable, and uncontrollable force, which not only pulls the protagonist towards tragedy, but also functions as a dynamic principle of the complete rangeof characters. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the problematic frontier that separates the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of animality. The main difficulty is to differentiate phenomenologically not only between embodiment and animality, but also between specifically human embodied experience and what is accessible to us through empathy in relation to the corporeality of the animal. I will tackle these questions by considering relevant textual material from the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. On (...) the one hand, I will show that although embodiment and animality are convergent on the level of the naturalistic attitude in Husserl’s Ideas II, they are divergent as soon as we place ourselves in the personalistic attitude, where the body enters into a different conjunction—namely, with the idea of person and of the spiritual world. On the other hand, Heidegger claims that, in spite of the abysmal bodily kinship with the animal, there is an essential difference between the human body and the animal organism, thus opposing the tendencies to humanize the animal and to animalize the human. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThroughout his writings, Heidegger's view of animals is ostensibly anthropocentric, defining them as deficient in relation to human beings. His most extensive analysis of animality, found in the 1929–1930 lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, seems to be a clear example of this anthropocentrism, defining the animal as poor in world in opposition to the human being's world-forming character. Nevertheless, Heidegger is explicitly ambivalent regarding the anthropocentric implications of this conception of animality. This paper examines Heidegger's (...) articulation of the notion of world-poverty as a distinct form of negativity, its implications for the question concerning Heidegger's anthropocentrism, as well as his ambivalence with regard to this question. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the Husserlian phenomenology of animality, by focusing on several texts of the 1920s in which the animal is determined as an abnormal variation of the human being. My aim is to address the question of the abnormality of the animal by reintegrating it in its original context, which is Husserl’s theory of normality. I will sketch the general framework of this theory, its articulations and strata, in order to eventually raise some paradoxical issues, (...) specifically in relation to how the question of animality is interpreted through the couple normality/abnormality. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of texts - from philosophical ethology to classical texts, and from continental philosophy to literature - Cimatti creates a dialogue with Flaubert, Derrida, Temple Grandin, Heidegger as well as Malaparte and Landolfi explores what human animality looks like, with a particular focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze.

My main goal in this article is methodological: I want to spell out how a Kantian perspective could accommodate current empirical work on cognition, and in particular on emotion. Having chosen John McDowell as a guide, I try to characterize his view of moral experience and underline its Kantian traits. I start by identifying the conception of freedom as exemplified in the rational wolf thought experiment in Two Forms of Naturalism as the main Kantian trait. I then go through the (...) characterization of two other crucial aspects of our moral experience – reasons and value. I suggest that McDowell’s approach to moral experience, although not itself strictly Kantian in all of its details, is an instance of a transformative view of rationality, as defended by Matthew Boyle and that such transformative view is the key to accommodate empirical research on cognition within a Kantian perspective. (shrink)

In his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach famously cites the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot as emblematic of modern realism. With their minute description of the boardinghouse, where much of the novel’s action takes place, these pages emphasize physical setting, Auerbach argues, in a way new to Western literature. Yet Balzac’s descriptions are driven by something more than an ambition to represent “contemporary life” in scrupulous detail. In Auerbach’s view, the characteristic (...) element of Balzac’s realism is an obsession with the reciprocal action of characters and milieu, a scientific or philosophical principle according to which the quality... (shrink)

Going beyond the creolisation theories of Brathwaite and Glissant, I attempt to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation, and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as ‘physiological things’ contextualised in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation, I seek, importantly, to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects. Brathwaite's proposition that ‘the most significant (and lasting) inter-cultural creolisation took place’ within the ‘intimate’ space of ‘sexual relations’ is key to my (...) argument. In the light of this, I consider how Creole cultural knowledge about affect—as the primary motivational system inclusive of fear, anger, outrage and so on — might be identified, and what constitutes such Creole knowledge within which affect might be embedded. How might Glissant's relationality and Creole literary texts add to this knowledge? I focus primarily on three texts: Clarke's The Polished Hoe, Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘l Love My Master’. Each text on which I draw is selected for its intersectional representation of gender relations, ‘knowledge about sexual difference’ and its representation of Creole subjectivities within the context problematised here as the ‘demonic ground’. Moreover, as auto-theorising texts, they represent both narrative and meta-narrative of a creolising of affects in and against the economy of the slave plantation. Each represents also a stage or aspect of the development of subjectivities and an affective community that inform this intervention concerned with theorising against consolidated, universalising and Eurocentric conceptualisations of affect. In the process, I attempt to offer a differentiated cartography and literary archaeology of affect. (shrink)

By setting up a dialogue with contemporary animal research the essay attempts, on the one hand, to expose the limits of Martin Heidegger’s concept of animality in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and, on the other hand, to propose some new ways of thinking the being of those animals that most distinctly show themselves as being other than Heidegger’s claims. I suggest, with reference to Heidegger’s thesis of the animal as “poor in world,” that the being of the cognitively (...) most complex animals is better understood in terms of otherworldly worlds within the world of human world forming. With this concept I aim to develop and continue, rather than criticize, Heidegger’s way of thinking the being of animals and deepen the productive relationship between science and philosophy that Heidegger proposed in this work. (shrink)

Constructions of the animal and animality are often pivotal to religious discourses. Such constructions create the possibility of identifying and valuing what is "human" as opposed to the "animal" and also of distinguishing human beliefs and behaviors that can be characterized as being animal from those that are "truly human." Some discourses also employ the concept of savagery as a bridge between the human and the animal, where the form of humanity but not its ideal beliefs and practices can (...) be displayed. This paper explores the work of the influential scientist, philosopher, and theologian A. N. Whitehead in this context. His ideas of what constitutes "the animal," the "primitive" and the "civilized" are laid out explicitly in his now little-used history of religions text, Religion in the Making. This paper explores these ideas in this history and then considers how the same ideas permeate his currently more popular philosophical and theological writing Process and Reality. Drawing on some work in post-colonial theory, the paper offers a critique of this understanding of animality, savagery, and civilization and suggests that using Whitehead to underpin modern theological work requires considerable caution. (shrink)

Kant's views of human animality are consistent with his belief in human freedom.

Tolstoy's remarkably economical novella The Kreutzer Sonata manages to create one of the most intense, vivid, and thought-provoking portraits of jealousy in the canon, and is as disturbing to read today as it no doubt was in 1889. The rather unhinged protagonist, Pozdnyshev, explains to his traveling companion and narrator: “Of all the passions, it is sexual, carnal love that is the strongest, the most malignant and the most unyielding” (48). This article identifies not only the “bestial” element of human (...) sexuality in Tolstoy's story but also the array of animals which the author offers to ventriloquize a certain complex (and times confused) polemic about gender relations. In other words, this analysis offers an interpretation of The Kreutzer Sonata as bestiary; one which offers a moral taxonomy of creaturely life and creaturely love. From the green-eyed monster of jealousy itself, through the Venus fly-trap and porcine couple, right up to the wild murderous beast, Pozdnyshev's confession is read via this zoological trope in order to emphasize, and question, that mobile border which separates the human from the inhuman, the civilized from the uncivilized. And it does so in order to highlight the incoherencies of the anthropocentric discursive regulation of this very same borderline. Animality and animosity are thus presented as the twin avatars of Tolstoy's intense and challenging vision. (shrink)

Heidegger thinks that humans enjoy openness to being, an openness that distinguishes them from all other entities, animals included. To safeguard openness to being, Heidegger denies that humans are animals. This position attracts the criticism of Derrida, who denies the difference between humans and animals and with it the human openness to being. In this paper, I argue that human difference and human animality are not mutually exclusive. Heidegger has the conceptual resources in his thought and in the history (...) of philosophy to affirm human animality while safeguarding the human difference. A cause transforms the meaning of a condition. The case of the human hand, an animal appendage that serves our openness to being, illustrates splendidly this transformation. The human hand not only grasps things in its environment but also points things out, makes things, acts, and welcomes others in the world. Humans are animals transformed by openness to being. (shrink)

This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animality and what the work of contemporary French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in particular can bring to debates around the zoomorphic or ‘creaturely’ dimensions of film. Examining two works by des Pallières — the documentary Is Dead and the feature-length film Adieu — and drawing principally on the work of Jacques Derrida, the article attends to cinematic, historically-framed configurations of a shared vulnerability between the human and the (...) animal. Such instances of commonality are shown here to unravel hierarchical taxonomies of being, in a rethinking of the ethics and politics of responsibility. These nonanthropocentric modes of cinematic inquiry also engage with issues of minerality and technicity, animating correspondences between forms of life and nonlife, philosophically broadening a consideration of relations between the human and the nonhuman. (shrink)

Aping apes: Edgar Allan Poe's "The murders in the Rue Morgue" and Richard Wright's Native son -- Slavery's bestiary: Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales -- Autoimmunity and ante-racism: Philip Roth's The human stain -- Ashamed of shame: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics and (...) class='Hi'>animality, link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope. This paper is an attempt at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzsche and Agamben, and with using it to come to a better understanding of the latter’s political ontology. It presents a reading of Kafka’s “The Burrow” in an attempt to show how Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine challenges the Nietzschean program of the affirmation of life as will to power. (shrink)

Both Kant and Levinas contrast morality with a vision of the lives of animals, governed by self-interested instincts. Despite this shared Hobbesian-Darwinian account of the struggle for existence, there are significant differences: Kant positions reason as the path to transcending instinct and inclination, through respect for the moral law, but as a survivor of the Shoah, Levinas claims that reason is continuous with self-interested motivations, and the ethical should instead be understood as a form of anarchy that traumatizes the self-possessed, (...) autonomous subject. Central to both accounts is a commitment to ethics as the transcendence of animality, and we should question whether that shared association between animality and self-interested violence is warranted. (shrink)