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)

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)

This article analyses the fourth volume of _Love, Death and Robots_ (2025) to explore how animality can be explored through posthuman aesthetics. Animals have always been historical beings, and their histories are inextricably tied to human activities. By not privileging humans over non-human animals, we can aim for a networked environment with companion species devoid of any binaries. By engaging with Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of becoming animals, Mitchell and Krause’s concepts of animal (...) consciousness and Skonieczny’s concept of the animal turn, this paper focuses on the connections between different aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different animals. This article thus demonstrates that posthuman aesthetics represented through the animals in Love, Death and Robots challenges traditional humanist aesthetics and evokes an alliance of different realms and ecologies. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of Kant’s conception of the animality (or _Tierheit_) of human beings. Though human animality is treated in a wide range of Kant’s writings, it has received relatively little attention from scholars, perhaps because Kant wrote no text principally devoted to the subject. With the aim of establishing its systematic unity, I track the status and role of animality across three distinct but interrelated domains of Kant’s theory of human nature—his account of (...) class='Hi'>animality as one of three basically good original human predispositions in _Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason_, his account of animality as the target of discipline in the pedagogy lectures, and his account of animality as simultaneously a driver of and hindrance to the progress of history in ‘Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim’. I argue that these accounts, taken together and in light of the teleological vision of human development that connects them, manifest a distinctively Kantian vision of the human as an actively rational, but at the same time ineliminably animal, being. Far from denying that humans are animals or seeking to repress human animality wholesale, Kant in fact offers a nuanced and robust, though still problematic, defence of the necessity, innocence, and originality of the human’s animal side. (shrink)

This essay examines animality through an analysis of Les Chants de Maldoror, an obscure but influential nineteenth-century text by the Comte de Lautréamont. Drawing upon the work of Gaston Bachelard as well as the apophatic tradition in Christian mysticism, Les Chants de Maldoror can be read as a text that complicates the boundary between animality and spirituality, producing an “apophatic animality” that ultimately impacts the poetics of the text itself.

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 57 - 76 The aim of this article is to address the question of the anthropological difference by focusing on the intersubjective relation between the human and the animal in the context of a phenomenological analysis of violence. Following some Levinasian and Derridian insights, my goal is to analyze the structural differences between interspecific and intraspecific violence by asking how the generic phenomenon of violence is modalized across various levels: from human to human, (...) from human to animal, from animal to human, from animal to animal. I will address questions of incarnated vulnerability and altered states of affectivity, and I will relate the various forms of violence emerging in the context of the anthropological difference to the question of territoriality, arguing that violence is structurally modified in relation to particular articulations of our worldly spatiality. (shrink)

In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida’s last seminar, Derrida criticizes Lacan for making no room for animality in the Other, in the unconscious transindividual normativity of language. In this paper, I take into account the history of Derrida’s interactions with Lacan’s psychoanalysis to argue that Derrida’s early agreement with Lacan’s conception of subjectivity as split by the signifier gives place in his late thought to a deconstruction of Lacan’s fall into humanist metaphysics, which makes a sharp moral distinction (...) between the animal and the human in order to subordinate animals to the domination of mankind. (shrink)

“What is the nature of the beings that we are?” is perhaps the most difficult question. The difficulty lies in our being a natural animal in a normative environment. In harmony with John McDowell’s conception of a naturalism of second nature, this paper claims that we should not rest satisfied with the predominant scientific picture in which the seeming rift between our animality and our rationality is to be resolved by detailed studies of empirically knowable facts about our animal (...) modes of existence. Instead, appreciating the sui generis character of a distinctive mode of human engagement with the world is a necessary clearing of the ground and an essential first step toward addressing meticulously the above difficult question on human nature. The paper suggests that the human sciences in general and education studies in particular should start off not with disclosed first-natural facts but with a sensitivity to second-natural backgrounds that set the stage for the first-natural facts. (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)

Although there is widespread agreement that the property status of nonhuman animals is indefensible, the debate about how to remedy their situation is ongoing. This paper explores three possibilities for approaching the issue of legal status: (1) extending the existing concept of personhood beyond the human to other animals; (2) developing an alternative legal subjectivity for nonhuman animals that is neither property nor personhood; (3) redefining personhood in animal terms while retaining the rights-bearing significance of personhood and decentering the human (...) from animal subjectivity in law. I offer a critique of the first two strategies and defend the third on both conceptual and political grounds, as most responsive to the requirements of a genuinely liberatory politics. I call this the "centering animality" approach and apply it to the legal context through my proposal of animal personhood. (shrink)

The question of animality haunts the nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Animals appear not only as an allegoric representation but as a reference which troubles the border between humanity and animality. The aim of this paper is to consider how the Darwinian turn has modified the status of animality in modern narratives (the animal seen as an external object before the romantic turn, animal as an internal object). The question of animality as a part of human (...) experience will be analysed on the basis of literary texts (Flaubert and Gombrowicz). (shrink)

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)

In his Perjury and Pardon seminar Jacques Derrida outlines a positive conception of materiality. He does so while criticising Paul de Man’s textual conception of it. For Derrida, this is too linguistic, too formalist, and thus incapable of accounting for a bodily quality of matter. But Derrida also criticises a secure referentiality from before spoken language as is entailed by a pre-critical recourse to ordinary language. Between these two options, he seeks for a third definition of materiality, whose main characteristic (...) is auto-deixis. In turn, this characteristic is formulated by Derrida as coincident with auto-hetero-affection, which, according to him, is the attribute that defines finite animality. The introductory part of the paper shows how this late definition is enrooted in Derrida’s early development of a grammatological project, which implied a critical consideration of the confluence of cybernetics, semiotics, and life sciences. The central part of the paper demonstrates how Derrida’s definition stems from a close reading of De Man’s texts. The last part analyses the meaning of this definition and develops its epistemological consequences. (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)

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)

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)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will give an international (...) audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

A partir de las nociones de ficción, de animalidad y de mundo, el presente artículo pretende establecer ciertas ideas directrices para pensar los vínculos que las producciones culturales mantienen con la categoría de lo animal. El análisis de esta categoría se vincula igualmente a la problemática del sacrificio. Taking the concepts of fiction, animality, and world this article intends to lay down some leading ideas for analyzing the link between cultural productions and the animal category. This is also related (...) to the concept of sacrifice. (shrink)

The first part of the title (Edenic Animality) establishes a direct link to the Old Testament Creation narrative, the heart of the Book of Genesis, which Kant interpreted to develop a conjecture about the beginning of history. What is the meaning of conjecture and what is its relationship with the genesis of history? What does the first human being mean to Kant and what is its relationship with the impulses and instincts experienced in the Garden of Eden? Further still, (...) what link is established between instincts, emotions (Rührungen), sentiments (Gefühle) and human moral action? This short text will seek to answer these questions by demonstrating how the anthropological interpretation of the Holy Scriptures offers a psycho-corporeal genealogy of moral behaviour. In describing the progressive emancipation from Edenic instinct, Kant considers emotional states (loss, love, fear, hope) as essential steps toward the formation of a moral conscience. (shrink)

Addressing the western understanding of the status and nature of animals and the relation of animals to the question of life, this book provides a discourse on animality through an interdisciplinary investigation into various areas of humanities. The nature of animals is explored by drawing on materials from literature, art, religion, philosophy, and political science, focusing on discussions of animality about the classical culture of ancient Greece, metaphysics and its application to debates on life, Martin Heidegger's philosophical theories, (...) and biopolitics. Although the distinctive difference between human beings from animals has long been emphasized, the author argues that they are inseparable from one another to achieve understanding. The interrogation of animality, therefore, provides a new perspective on the nature of human beings in this postmodern era. Academics in western literature, literary theory, literary criticism, and comparative literature will find this work an insightful addition to debates in their respective fields, while it will also help senior university students pursuing their studies. (shrink)

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)

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.

This paper situates abortion in the context of women’s duties to themselves. I argue that Kant’s fundamental moral requirement to respect oneself as a rational being, combined with Kant’s view of our animal nature, form the basis for a view of pregnancy and abortion that focuses on women’s agency and moral character without diminishing the importance of their bodies and emotions. The Kantian view of abortion that emerges takes abortion to be morally problematic, but sometimes permissible, and sometimes even required. (...) I first sketch Kant’s account to duties to oneself, highlighting duties to oneself as an animal and moral being. Next, I discuss pregnancy and the challenges it poses to women’s self-preservation, development, and efficacy as rational human agents. I then give my main argument: that abortion is morally problematic because it is antagonistic to an important subset of morally useful emotions that we have self-regarding duties to protect and cultivate. I argue that self-regarding moral considerations ground a rebuttable deliberative presumption against maxims of abortion for inclination-based ends. Finally, I consider three objections to this account of abortion : that it rests on implausible assumptions about the effects of abortion on women’s morally useful sentiments; that it portrays the virtuous agent’s reasoning about abortion as objectionably self-regarding; and that it fails adequately to recognize the moral significance of the fetus as a potential rational being. (shrink)

This article explores Adorno’s reflections on animality as a central motif in his critique of Enlightenment. Far from being a mere figure of otherness, animality appears in Adorno’s work as a repressed dimension of spirit that continuously resurfaces, exposing the limits of human self-understanding. Through a critical reconstruction of Adorno’s dialectic of spirit and nature, the article shows how the repression of animal resemblance shapes philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Particular attention is given to art and music as privileged (...) spaces in which the memory of nature and the likeness to animals are preserved, offering a fragile image of reconciliation and a utopian anticipation of non-dominating life. (shrink)

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)

This article develops a Hegelian account of self-consciousness by grounding it in being animal. It draws on contemporary naturalist and rationalist philosophy to support a transformative picture of the relationship between self-consciousness and animal purposes, setting work by Danielle Macbeth, Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson, and Matthew Boyle into dialogue with two passages from Hegel’s Aesthetics. Because we are conscious of them as such, the article argues, our ends are never simply given to us and must be determined, which means working (...) them out collectively. But this makes dependency a structural feature of human life, as attaining the right relation to our ends means finding ourselves through the eyes of others instantiating our lifeform. Grounding these Hegelian insights in a naturalistic understanding of organic norms, we see that we should not oppose the self-transparency afforded by rationality to the opacity of animal drives. The article concludes that the mark of rationality is not the capacity to transcend or control animal instinct but that we can be problems to ourselves. Spiritual life is just natural life: natural life finding itself problematic. (shrink)

From orphaned, nameless circus elephants (bonding with orphaned, nameless immigrants) to stray ‘Greekies’ up for adoption by ‘foreigners’, and from stylised, neo-noir Odysseys to raw, makeshift documentary aesthetics, this chapter traces Menelaos Karamaghiolis’s unwavering dedication to an affective cinema that records elusive instances of human-nonhuman bonding, also as a way to talk about the shared precariousness of disenfranchised lives in urban or industrial jungles. Karamaghiolis’s recent documentaries about animals thoughtfully interweave spectral canines, Roma agency, local volunteer work, and privileged, ‘imported’ (...) activism. Throughout his career, Karamaghiolis’s gaze and voice(-overs) keep finding poetry in the most unexpected, and hopeless, of places. The analysis of the director’s filmography is here accompanied by interviews with the man himself, and with J.A.C.E.’s (2011) cinematographer Giorgos Frentzos. (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)