Animality

En el cruce entre los estudios animales, los estudios decoloniales, los feminismos y la teoría crip, este artículo argumenta que la "modernidad-colonialidad" ha distribuido a las formas de vida en escalas jerárquicas en base a la dicotomía entre lo humano y lo no-humano, dictaminando qué cuerpos importan y cuáles no, con arreglo a diferentes marcadores de poder: raza, capacidad, género, especie (y otros). Asimismo, se sostiene que la cuestión animal puede operar como una instancia transversal para desmontar los dispositivos racistas, heterocisexistas, capacitistas y especistas que han ubicado en el centro al varón cisgénero, blanco, heterosexual y capacitado, mientras han situado en los márgenes a los demás animales, a las personas racializadas, a los cuerpos queer o con discapacidad. Asimismo, se afirma que un enfoque oblicuo de los veganismos puede ser una oportunidad para pensar redes de cuidado, marcadas por la promesa de configurar otros modos de lo común.

La tesi presenta inizialmente il pensiero di Jacques Derrida sull'animalità. Il tema affrontato è la sovranità dell'uomo sul resto dei viventi, in particolare nei riguardi della discriminazione dell'animalità. Nei capitoli a seguire si attua un'emancipazione dell'animalità e non dall'animalità come la corrente umanista voleva. Attraverso l'ontogenesi del concetto di "umanità" viene decostruito il costrutto che sorregge la soglia che divide l'uomo dagli animali, laddove essi partecipano all'animalità in maniere differenti. L'emergenza di questa composizione dei temi trattati si erge ad azione esemplare con cui Derrida, prima di morire, ha lasciato delle tracce da seguire durante il ricevimento del premio Adorno.

Le roman intitulé Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq est fondé sur un monde semi-fantastique dans lequel on raconte ce qu’une jeune fille fait pour s’intégrer à la société dans les conditions extrêmes de l’époque. La protagoniste subit deux métamorphoses fondamentales ; d’abord, il est question de sa transformation du corps humain en forme de truie, ensuite, de la transformation psychologique à cause de ce qu’elle a vécu. Comme le titre, le contenu du roman est également basé sur une structure de multiples significations. Le fait que l’héroïne narre les événements comme narrateur-personnage (je) au lecteur, procure que le lecteur comprend bien la transformation de l’héroïne et les résultats de cette transformation. La narratrice transporte à une autre dimension le regard de la société sur la femme par la métaphore de truie. Elle traite cette problématique via les transformations d’une jeune fille dans un univers créé par des éléments fantastiques. Ce travail vise à révéler la structure du roman au niveau de la narration.

One of the most distinguishing features of J. M. Coetzee's novels is their pervasive and intensive critique of Cartesian rationalism, specifically, its valorisation of the abstract mind at the expense of the physical ('animal’) body. As Coetzee recognises in his fictional and non-fictional works, such
glorification of the thinking mind and its equally abstract capacities inevitably leads to a mechanical philosophy that culminates in the devaluation and exploitation not only of nonhuman animals but also of those human beings who are denied any serious consideration because of their perceived animality. Therefore, Coetzee's narratives resist this mechanical philosophy of Cartesian metaphysics by celebrating and destigmatising the embodiedness of both animals and humans, an embodiedness attested by the corporeal body's capacity for pain and pleasure, a capacity that in turn challenges the autonomy of the Cartesian cogito. As according to the rationalist discourse nonhuman animals are marked by their corporeality, nonrationality and nonduality, and as relinquishing the Cartesian duality and rationality is considered a step towards becoming animal-like, Coetzee's novels advance this particular mode of becoming-animal as the most effective way of resisting this discourse.

In Theory of Religion, translated by Robert Hurley, Bataille’s argument starts creating an ontological distinction between the world of being which belongs to the animal, and world of being of humankind. Using the simile of like water in water, gives the sense that the animals they are not conscious of each other and they don’t have capacity to recognize the difference between their world and their separate environment.  . I think this concept of not distinction comes from their unconscious of the purposes they live for, because they dont reflect and think on what they are going to do, and why they are doing this, for any reason or end. Necessity of survival and evading the death are not in their mind, so their actions are not accompanied by conscious intention This comes to notion that concept of mortality or time, it acts according to the dictation given by natural process

Resumen En el contexto de los colectivos sociales modernos, colocar a los animales en el ámbito de la naturaleza y a los humanos en el de la cultura parece moneda corriente. Sin embargo, otros colectivos claman por la incorporación de los no-humanos al devenir social diluyendo a su paso toda forma posible de naturaleza y es precisamente en un escenario así, en el que nos situaremos. Particularmente nos concentraremos en aspectos de la zoología de los indígenas qom (o tobas) del Gran Chaco argentino; un grupo de las llamadas 'tierras bajas' que antiguamente se dedicaba a la caza, la pesca y la recolección como forma de subsistencia. Sustentándonos en trabajo etnográfico, nos centraremos en analizar un libro sobre animales que, producido en conjunto con los indígenas, suscitó innumerables equívocos e interrogantes. Así, el objetivo de esta contribución es analizar dos casos particulares-el de la personalidad de los animales y el de su orden taxonómico-y las reflexiones reversas acerca de éstos mismos. El fin último es mostrar que "otra zoología", habitante de otro mundo, desea dialogar con la académica multiplicando su espacio epistémico, su posibilidad teórica. Abstract In the context of modern social collectives, placing animals in the field of nature and humans in that of culture seems to be common currency. However, other groups cry out for the incorporation of non-humans into the social becoming, diluting in their path every possible form of nature and it is precisely in such scenario, in which we will situate ourselves. Particularly we will concentrate on aspects of the zoology of the indigenous qom (or tobas) of the Argentine Gran Chaco; a group of so-called "lowlands" that formerly engaged in hunting, fishing and gathering as a form of subsistence. Based on ethnographic work, we will focus on analyzing a book about animals that, produced in conjunction with the natives, raised innumerable equivocations and questions. Thus, the objective of this contribution is to analyze two particular cases-that of the personality of the animals and that of their taxonomic order-and the reverse reflections on them. The ultimate goal is to show that "another zoology", inhabitant of another world, wishes to dialogue with the academic multiplying its epistemic space, its theoretical possibility.

Charles Darwin won worldwide fame for claiming that people and primates evolved from a shared ancestor. Since his times, humans are perceived as a biological species and natural scientists often compare their behaviours to animal instincts. In all this, the flip side of Darwin’s discovery has often been neglected, namely that animals in their behaviour and emotions frequently resemble humans. Yet despite the fact that for Darwin himself an anthropomorphic perspective on animals was a matter of course, many Darwinians today use a mechanistic model. This article analyses these two opposing tendencies using selected works of two biologists, namely Richard Dawkins and Frans de Waal. Differences between the two ways of looking at animals are investigated and contrasted using the subject of morality and its evolutionary origins. It will be shown that de Waal’s empirical orientation is significantly closer to Darwinian tradition than Dawkins’s theoretical approach.

La questione legata all’etica animale è stata, negli ultimi anni, oggetto di discussioni e dibattiti, nonché strettamente correlata alla sostenibilità ambientale e al surriscaldamento globale: da un lato, infatti, risulta evidente la posizione dei cosiddetti ‘attivisti del clima’ che delineano l’importanza di abbassare il riscaldamento in casa e di non mangiare carne per limitare le emissioni di CO2, dall’altro quella degli animalisti che si scagliano contro barbare pratiche generalmente utilizzate negli allevamenti intensivi . Queste argomentazioni, anche se relativamente moderne, potrebbero tuttavia riconnettersi all’idea di Lucrezio di una comune natura tra tutti gli esseri animati, costituente un presupposto necessario per l’affermazione di una tutela etico-giuridica di tutti gli animali non umani. Leggendo il suo “De rerum natura” ci si accorge immediatamente di quanto egli sia vicino alle emozioni degli animali, ai loro sentimenti e alla capacità di interagire con i loro simili e con l’uomo ed emerge, al contempo, la denuncia contro i maltrattamenti e i sacrifici rituali.
La crudeltà umana nei confronti degli animali è spesso denunciata nella sua opera, in questa sede indagata. Leggendo il De rerum natura, infatti, diviene visibile immediatamente la sua posizione nei confronti di tutti gli esseri animati: egli considera l’uomo al pari degli animali e configura il rapporto uomo-animale come uno scambio utile e reciproco. Ne emerge, dunque, una concezione totalmente orizzontale, non più piramidale e gerarchizzata, quest’ultima generalmente appartenente ad una visione antropocentrica o alla dottrina stoicista. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è evidenziare il forte senso etico presente in Lucrezio che con il suo “poema della natura” delinea i principi fondamentali che regolano il mondo, inquadrando l’uomo nello stesso meccanismo cosmico-fisico e biologico in cui sono posti tutti gli altri esseri animali.

The ontology of animality, starting from Derrida's writings, determines the reconsideration of the human being and his ontological condition within an environment (Umwelt) in which the anthropocentric point of view has hitherto been predominant. The post-human represents the urgency for ethics willing to reflect on a world inhabited both by hybridizing life forms breaking the boundaries, and a common and immanent substratum yearning for its own limit: the animality partaken by all of us. The boundaries will be deconstructed starting from the ontology, through the epistemology, in order to define post-human ethics.

This article discusses the concept of carnophallogocentrism and its place in Derrida's philosophy of animality. I read Derrida's embryonic account of carnophallogocentrism in light of his treatment of the primal parricide of Freud's Totem and Taboo and suggest that opening this interpretive channel allows us to grasp how carnophallogocentrism can contribute to the history of 'anthropo-centric subjectivity' that Derrida diagnoses in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In conversation with recent commentators, I begin by characterizing carnophallogocentrism as the idea that a symbolic yet constitutive schema of ingestion underlies the relation between 'man' and 'animal'. I then turn to Freud's image of the primal parricide and to Derrida's treatment of it in several texts. Given the strong structural parallels between carnophallogocentrism and the primal parricide—which figures human civilization as the historical product of a founding event of patriarchal violence and sacrificial ingestion—attending to Derrida's treatment of the primal parricide helps us fill out his view of carnophallogocentrism, and so better appreciate the breadth of his approach to the historical relation between humans and other animals.

A presente tradução da oitava elegia das "Elegias de Duíno" de Rainer Maria Rilke foi composta em julho do ano de 2015. Renunciando ao desafio de reproduzir a extraordinária concisão poética de sua composição, esta tradução busca, prioritariamente, fazer jus ao sentido expresso em seus versos. Não se trata da primeira tradução da obra de Rilke para o português. No entanto, as versões pregressas para o português desta elegia apresentam, a meu ver, falhas em não poucos versos, que comprometem a adequada apreensão do sentido de conjunto, resultante da admirável coesão de seus versos densamente concatenados.

The purpose of this study is to foreground one specific aspect of the continuation of the influence of British Romanticism, its aesthetic, and, subsequently, to delineate its modern form in Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Beast Feast. To do so means to provide a description of the major features of the Romantic aesthetic, based on its theoretical framework, both philosophical and literary, and to perform close readings of Beast Feast from within this framework, analysing and outlining similarities and differences between Beast Feast and its Romantic forebears.
This comparative approach does not aim to prove that similarities between Beast Feast and the aesthetic of Romanticism render the former to be equal to the latter. Doing so would simply be a superimposition of Romanticism on a contemporary poetics. Instead, this study will show that the Romantic aesthetic functions as a unifying concept, and that Beast Feast re-evaluates this aesthetic, rather than, for instance, subscribing to new cultural dominants, such as what McSweeney termed the ‘Necropastoral’, or what Vermeulen and van den Akker describe as ‘metamodernism’, and that this re-evaluation renders Beast Feast – for those who deem classification an absolute necessity – Neo-Romantic more than anything else.

El presente artículo intenta rastrear las consecuencias de la muerte del Hombre para pensar, desde allí, la denominada “cuestión de los animales” a partir de las perspectivas posnietzscheanas abiertas por Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler y Jacques Derrida. En tal sentido argumentamos que “el animal” es un tropo estratégico para desmantelar el dispositivo de lo humano que ubica a determinados cuerpos en posiciones de precari(e)dad, redundando en vidas que pueden ser excluidas y sacrificadas para garantizar el sostenimiento de la comunidad política. De allí que sea fundamental patentizar el carácter ficticio e histórico del Hombre, para así operar una deconstrucción crítica de sus normas reguladoras, abriendo el espacio a diversos modos de resistencias posibles. La animalidad emerge entonces como un lugar de dislocación frente a los dispositivos de poder que se vuelcan sobre las formas de vida y las clasifican-jerarquizan dentro de ciertas taxonomías.

The present Master’s dissertation offers a bibliographic review of two of the most relevant contemporary theoretical positions on anthropocentrism and animal studies. It lays out an analysis of the criticism of anthropocentrism by two representative philosophers of the field: Óscar Horta, who approaches the subject from the perspective of analytic philosophy, and Leonardo Caffo, who studies it from the point of view of continental philosophy. The comparative study of their theories is followed by the proposal for a combined analytic-continental strategy intended to enable a new way of thinking the rejection of anthropocentrism and the criticism of theories that justify and perpetuate the discrimination and exploitation of non-human animals.

In her chapter entiteled "Kafka as Animal, Animal as Kafka. Deleuze and Derrida on Literary Animality", Michaela Fišerová focuses on Gilles Deleuze's approach to literature by emphasizing, on the one hand, the interconnection between politics and literature, on the other hand, the topic of animality, which belongs to the central interests of Deleuze's philosophy. Fišerová focuses mostly on the comparison of Deleuze's and Derrida's reading of Franz Kafka's "animal stories", by proceeding in three interconnected steps. Firstly, she evaluates the possible disadvantages of a scholarly exegetic reading and advantages of a philosophically inspiring reading. Secondly, in order to designate the different inspirations in their readings of Kafka's work, she compares the differences between Deleuze's and Derrida's philosophies and the possible limits of their readings. Thirdly, based on the previous comparison, she formulates a double ontological ethics of post-structuralism depending of double consideration of the problem of animality in Kafka's work: while Derrida deconstructs the problematic „becoming-animal“ of a human who already "is" an animal, Deleuze's concept of „becoming-animal“ indicates a connection between the line of animality and the Kafka's literary machine. In this respect, Fišerová wonders why do Derrida and Deleuze read Kafka's work with such a philosophical interest? She answers this question by pointing out the specificity of poststructuralist readings of literature, which enables to formulate an implicit philosophical problem. Finally, her reflection illustrates the Deleuze's idea that a book's sense remains only in its contact with exteriority.

A partire dalla formulazione dello sguardo di Lacan, siamo condotti alla scoperta di quello felino e dei complessi, privatissimi risvolti che provoca il rispecchiarsi in esso. In altre parole, chiedersi chi sia il gatto passa ineludibilmente per il domandarsi chi siamo noi che lo guardiamo (o che ci specchiamo).

Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é analisar o conto " Eva está dentro de su gato " (1947), do escritor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, enfatizando a presença dos animais na narrativa e os possíveis efeitos de sentido causados por uma leitura aberta a diferentes interpretações. Para tanto, partiremos da análise simbólica dos insetos e do gato, duas espécies distantes dentro da cadeia evolutiva, que desencadeiam na narrativa a formação de uma situação insólita. Posteriormente, mostraremos possibilidades de interpretação do conto sob as perspectivas da metamorfose, da reencarnação, da experiência onírica/lancinante e do devir-animal.

Abstract: This article, starting from Konrad Lorenz’s thesis that links human being and dog inside the common destiny og domestication, dwells on the figure of the dog in Kafka. The dog appears to be an ambiguous figure, on the border between animal and humanity, characterized by shame dependence and submission, but that in its silence and in its strength og instincts, is able to pratice desertion and resistance’s from towards huaman domestication.

L’animalità filosofica è il tentativo di rappresentare e comprendere la diversità a partire dallo sguardo. In tale prospettiva si cercherà di comprendere che la rappresentazione che abbiamo di noi stessi emerge dalla nostra relazione con l’alterità. La narrazione entro cui si muoveranno le premesse di tale comprensione traccerà un percorso partendo dallo sguardo degli animali non umani fino a lo sguardo del mondo su di noi. Il mondo ci guarda e noi siamo chiamati a rispondere della nostra responsabilità di fronte a tale sguardo. I contorni dell’umano vengono ridisegnati a partire da un pensiero sulla diversità, e tale filosofia deve prendere le mosse da un cambio di prospettiva assoluto che rimetta in discussione i principi della nostra relazione con il non umano. Si proverà dunque a ridestare uno sguardo su di noi che indichi un riposizionamento etico in base all’essere guardati. A partire da alcune intuizioni di autori come Derrida, Lacan e Buber, si costruirà una narrazione che metterà in luce la possibilità di essere guardati dal mondo e di riposizionare l’essere umano in base alla sua relazione che intrattiene con la vita.

At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eightysome
parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories
that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the
forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond
to the psychic lives of these parrots—psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging
from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior. These interspecies communications
include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases. While
biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications,
sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to
ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language,
informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about
metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to
ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening
up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it
is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely
configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary.

Un estudio histórico que sigue la reflexión de Nietzsche sobre el fenómeno del sueño a través de todas sus obras, mostrando las transformaciones generales de su pensamiento y, en especial, las inflexiones y cesuras que en tal desarrollo se hacen visibles de la mano del tratamiento del fenómeno onírico y demás procesos psicológicos.-

At a distance of more ten years from publication (2000 French/2005 English translation), with this essay I will re-read, comment and discuss, in different way and in form of anthological sketch, the Derridean volume ‘On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy’, focusing in particular on its ‘tangents and its metonymies’, its manifold entanglements with the  metaphysics of touch and bodily connections. Making use of the geometrical figure of the tangent, Derrida affirms that "[if] philosophy has touched the limit [my emphasis-J. D. ]. of the ontology of subjectivity, this is because philosophy has been led to this limit”. To touch is to touch a limit, a limit without depth or surface. How have we regarded touching in the past? The body?
My thesis, here, is that if Derridean reflection remains mostly anchored to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, it is inspired nevertheless by a different deconstructive gesture/s similar to different geometric tangents (the deconstructive practice is similar to the tracing of many tangents). Discussing in particular Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Derrida’essay ‘Deconstruction  of Christianity’ and devoting an entire section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels, Derrida gives us numerous and special considerations on deconstruction and the deconstruction of touch in Christianity, admitting as well the enormity of this task. A reflection on the Kas Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” will follow in an exemplary way.
Following a discussion of touch and the body in both animal and human spheres, in the closing section of the essay, I will comment on the Patrick Llored’s essay A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida, recently published in A Companion to Derrida (2014). This study addresses highly topical questions such as: ‘What does it teach us about touch, but also about the body and the life of the animal? To what extent is it capable of renewing our knowledge [connaissance] of non-human life and of generating an animal ethics reconceived from top to bottom? If touching is coextensive with the living body, that implies not only that we place the haptical question at the centre of reflection on the animal, but also that we take into account the consequence that is most disruptive for us today (A Companion, p. 512). And conclude along with Patrick Llored that the question of touch promises to transform everything we have understood until now about animality.

This essay argues that modern perceptions of the agency of fat people have been inflected by older ways of thinking about fat and fattening. This claim rests on two basic points. Firstly, the potentially encumbering materiality of fat has long been cited as preventing movement in ways that frustrate agency. Secondly, fat has implications for agency by virtue of the power relationships implied in the act of fattening, which has been repeatedly framed in the West with reference to animal consumption. Discourses of fat and fattening are thus saturated with allegations of failed agency, whether by citing the confining materiality of fat itself or by associating the fattened person with abject animality. After exploring these claims with reference to select examples from classical antiquity, the essay presents surveys how similar ideas mobilized weight-loss discourses from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, by which time most of our current anti-fat thinking had been firmly entrenched.

Solo ante la evidencia de una inesperada noticia, la confirmación de la cuarentena, cobramos dimensión del significado de la indeterminación del tiempo. En el momento en que esta se presenta acuden, arremolinadas, imágenes de nuestra propia (si existiera) vida cotidiana.
Escenas laborales, familiares, la ciudad y los afectos, se nos ofrecen en un rápido repaso de aquello que, pensamos, no volverá. O si lo hará, será de otro modo. ¿Podrán las filosofías críticas —y sus imágenes conceptuales— ser nuestras compañeras en una época que se abre y
algunos aventuran como un quiebre de lo hasta aquí concebido y experimentado? El tiempo en suspenso tal vez nos lo pueda responder.

Homo sapiens has always been an animal species which somewhat ‘exceeds’ its own nature.
Therefore,  transhumanism  is  not  that  different  from  humanism.  In  fact,  the  latter  is  but
another form of humanism, while posthumanism is a condition completely beyond humanity.
More specifically, posthumanism means a form of life which is beyond ‘subjectivity’. Such a
subjectless life places itself beyond ethics and politics too. Therefore, posthumanism implies a
non-humanistic humanity, that is, a form of humanity that finally is animal.

Ecophenomenology has rekindled two of the oldest and most profound insights into nature. The first, following the famous aphorism of Heraclitus, is that “nature loves to hide.” Pierre Hadot has shown in The Veil of Isis how a series of interpretations (and, in his view, misinterpretations) of this aphorism has been decisive for Western philosophy’s approach to nature. Yet phenomenology has rediscovered nature’s self-concealment precisely through an attention to our everyday encounters with its autonomous resistance. We might think here of Heidegger’s descriptions, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” of the “essentially undisclosable” withdrawal of the earth, which grants to natural things their “independent and self-contained” character. Or again, we might point to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions, in Phenomenology of Perception, of the “non-human” that lies hidden in things and gives them a “hostile and foreign” otherness that our everyday perceptions cover over. Simon James draws on such descriptions to respond to the charge that phenomenology is incapable of describing nature on its own terms, real nature, since phenomenology necessarily takes its departure from nature as experienced. One of phenomenology’s “great virtues,” according to James, is its potential, in contrast with environmental realism, to show “what it means to perceive, in an immediate and visceral way, the independent reality of the natural world.” In other words, nature announces its autonomy precisely through its self-concealment, and phenomenology is in a privileged position to disclose this very resistance to disclosure.
The second ancient insight into nature rejuvenated by phenomenology would seem to be in tension with the first. This second insight is that nature is fundamentally musical, or even that it is music. If this idea seems less germane to us today, this is perhaps because we are so quick to equate music with patterned waves of air pressure, rather than appreciating what it could connote more broadly. Yet the link between nature and music is equally long and convoluted, and just as subject to reinterpretation in the light of changing conceptions of its terms. From the Pythagoreans—who, Aristotle reports, held “the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number” (Metaphysics I.5)—to Boethius and Kepler, the most influential versions of this thesis have been variants of Musica universalis, the positing of harmonious proportions in the movements of celestial bodies. Since these proportions paralleled musical intervals, celestial movements were considered “music” in their own right, even if they did not produce audible sounds. As the seventh-century encyclopedist St. Isidore of Seville summarized it, “Without Music, there could be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.” This characterization of the cosmos as musical goes beyond mere metaphor, since worldly, audible music is understood to be a derivative imitation of the cosmic harmony. For those unwilling to go this far, more modest proposals have also appeared, to the effect that the structures of music share certain parallels with the structures of nature—not only in terms of harmony, but also, for example, insofar as they are fundamentally relational and change over time. This view that music and nature are structurally isomorphic finds new champions today, as when Jeremy Leach and John Fitch, scholars of algorithmic composition, posit a common event structure of music and nature based on the fractal distributions of their temporal changes.
Just as phenomenology has rediscovered, on its own terms, a sense of the withdrawal of nature, so it has also given new meaning to the notion of Musica universalis, now inspired by ecological relationships, the “melodies” of organic behaviors in “counterpoint” with their environments, rather than the harmonies of celestial motions. Phenomenologists first uncovered the link between life and music through the contribution of Gestalt theorists such as Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, for whom melody serves as a privileged example of a temporal gestalt. Inspired by Köhler’s descriptions of chimpanzee behavior as “melodic,” for example, Merleau-Ponty relies on the figure of melody to describe the unity and form of organic life in The Structure of Behavior, often referring to the organism’s dialectical relation with its environment as a “melodic development” or a “kinetic melody.” Nowadays, the description of organic behavior as melodic is more frequently associated with the writings of Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, whose work was also influential on phenomenology and is currently attracting new interest from scholars of animal studies and posthumanism. For Uexküll, nature is fundamentally composed of meanings that emerge in the exchange between organisms and their Umwelten, their environments, and this process can be literally described as a kind of music-making in which contrapuntal meanings replace sonic harmonies. Uexküll’s version of Musica Universalis is therefore the intricately composed score of meanings constituting the interlocking environments of all living things—amounting, in Giorgio Agamben’s estimation, to a “radical dehumanization of the image of nature.”

a tension exists between these two ancient ideas about nature—first, that nature loves to hide, as manifest in its resistance to and withdrawal from reflection; and, second, that nature is a kind of all-encompassing symphony of ecological niches, perpetually singing itself into existence through the meaning-making activity of organic life. If both of these claims concern one and the same nature, and if both have a genuine foundation in experience as phenomenologically described, then what is their relation? More precisely, how can the music of nature, if this is more than a mere metaphor, be the event both of nature’s disclosure and of its withdrawal?

La forma-de-vida es una reunión de lo que se halla dividido por la lógica del poder, de la maquina gubernamental: la zoé y la bios. Es decir, Agamben describe la separación entre vida general (zoé) de una vida políticamente organizada (bios) como la prestación originaria y la característica fundamental del poder político. Agamben parece confesar su incapacitad de poner la política y la forma-de-vida en relación. Él llega al concepto de «abierto» empezando desde una ontología nihilista y la operación de negatividad. Políticamente, el abierto es aquella forma-de-vida que reúne bios y zoé y que presupone el acto de un sujeto o agente poietico que traiga este movimiento hasta el colapso de la política a través una estética de la destrucción o de la inactividad, capaz de destruir cada matriz (bio)política. Esta tensión nos proporciona una conclusión muy clara: buscar activamente el punto de coincidencia entre bios y zoé, en tal manera de acercarse al origen de los dos términos, el principio primero de donde llegan las dos formas. Lo que intento hacer en este trabajo es de irme al punto de encuentro originario a partir de un surplus de cualidades que, mostrando sus contingencias a la forma típica que caracteriza lo humano, se pueden poner de lado para borrar y olvidar el umbral –a partir de lo cual Agamben empieza a pensar la forma-de-vida– entre lo humano y lo animal construyendo una forma-de-vida (“pura”) que sea al mismo tiempo animal y política. Esta forma es la vida del cínico, que representa la vida verdadera. El intento es ir más allá del pensamiento del negativo que, a mi modo de ver, empuja el discurso allá donde la política del viviente puede solo ser aquella, débil, de la destitución de la política misma –y que transforma el concepto de sujeto incluyéndolo en la destitución. Algunos autores como Lacan o Deleuze y Guattari, a través el psicoanálisis, reinterpretan el enigma humano –que es constituido por el lenguaje y por esto es lo que constituye el ser humano– como el punto de partida para devenir-cuerpo al destituir la antinomia mente-cuerpo, trascendencia-inmanencia, etc. Después de esto veremos como el animal (humano) deviniendo cuerpo puede quedarse en los márgenes de la política hasta ser comprendido en su interior de forma positiva. La vida del cínico, la forma-de-vida que surge de la verdad de la existencia, no renuncia a la política, sino que se hace cargo como modelo, como paradigma político (bios) que, sin animalizar el humano ni edipizar el animal, se identifica con la zoé en una vida radicalmente otra. El bios alethés que es al mismo tiempo la soberanía absoluta de la zoé, cuya dicotomía se disuelve en la vida verdadera que goza de sí y que, a partir de esta creación de forma-de-vida radicalmente otra, encuentra el acontecimiento de la felicidad.

I was first introduced to Aph and Syl Ko when they reached out to me in early 2013, just in the infancy of our blogging careers. It was an exciting time for digital activism, as feminist online publishing seemed to bridge the gap between the forgotten tomes of vegan feminist theory collecting dust in libraries and the vibrant, fast-paced conversations happening across social media. In July of that year, I launched Vegan Feminist Network (VFN) in heavy collaboration with Aph. It is a blog intended to bring voice to critical ideas about intersectionality and social justice within the nonhuman animal rights movement, ideas that had been stifled in prevailing theoretical dialogues and activist conversations. Aph and Syl contributed a number of essays to VFN, all of which were immensely popular. Their perspective was so fresh and thought provoking, it seemed real change was possible. Cracks were beginning to emerge in the white patriarchal hegemony that had reified American nonhuman animal rights efforts, and this included my own positionality. I was personally changed as an activist and a thinker in an immeasurable way through my early working relationship with them, and I know many other activists and scholars can report having experienced the same Ko effect.

This paper presents some preliminary considerations about dogs and their
relationship to human animals. First, the dog figure is examined in two famous paintings,
in order to explore its symbolic power beyond the myth of “man’s best friend”,
whose characteristics -unconditional love, voluntary submission and servility- are used
to set up the asymmetry and heighten the humanity image. Secondly, the actual relationships
between dogs and humans are studied based on an idea of ??love irreducible
to the problem of empathy between “equals” –a problem that would seem to imply the
need to access, at least imaginatively, to the “inner self “ of animals that live with us.

Ghosts symbolically represent the social recognition of a subject's personhood as well as the legitimacy of that individual's experience with inequality since many haunting narratives center grievance. Marginalized groups may be so oppressed that they do not warrant acknowledgement, thus protecting the distinctiveness of privileged groups. Nonhuman Animals, for instance, are much less likely to be recognized as ghosts, especially farmed species. To explore the relationship between oppression and the cultural visibility of other animals, this article revisits cultural source theory with a qualitative content analysis of 20 ghost anthologies. Results support human bias in haunting narratives.

Animals are omnipresent in Deleuze‘s work, and throughout Deleuze and Guattari‘s common body of work: the tick‘s world, the assemblage (agencement) of the wasp and orchid, the spider‘s prehension of the fly, the cat who knows better than the human how to die, the multiplicity of the wolf, the affects of Little Hans‘ horse, spiny lobsters‘ nomadism and bird-artists. Insects, mammals, crustaceans and birds are such an integral part of Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian thought that these thinkers even created a concept in these animals‘ honor: the becoming-animal. It is well known that this exploration of animality invites a de-anthropomorphization of the relationships between humans and animals in favor of an undomesticated type of relationship. Deleuze makes some very sarcastic remarks about domesticated animals, such as the dog whose barking warns her master of the approaching stranger or the "rubbing" of the cat who over-demonstrates his familiarity. Both Deleuze and Guattari seem to prefer wild animals. However, as we will see, it is not that simple.

In this paper, I propose an analysis of the quite original Wittgenstein naturalism. Wittgenstein included human language into the wider category of animal language. Wittgenstein's naturalism clearly shows itself in his ethological description of human language – a description based on the frequent and illuminating comparison between non-human animal and human animal behaviors. According to Wittgenstein, each language is relative to a species-specific " form of life. " Therefore, the differences between animal (human and non-human) languages are differences in the kind of actions that each " form of life " can realize through its own language. Consequently, between human and animal language there is not a difference in kind; rather, the difference between them is a difference between the relative " forms of life. " Inside such a naturalistic frame, Wittgenstein never forgets that human language is part of animal languages.