Brett Buchanan

ON ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

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

THE METAMORPHOSES OF VINCIANE DESPRET

Abstract This essay provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the writings of Vinciane Despret. Over the last twenty years Despret has contributed a significant number of books and articles in the fields of philosophical ethology and animal studies, and throughout them all Desprets methodological approach resists easy explanation. There is no single, uni- versal method applicable to all animals, in every situation; instead, Despret responds with an open curiosity to the plurality of animal worlds and the storied versions about them. She studies and works with animals just as much as with scientists, farmers, and conserva- tionists. Taking joy in the diversity of animal behaviour, she creates conditions that allow animals to be interesting, and finds humour, warmth, and care in the stories that they tell. Through the practices of human–animal relations Despret contends that humans are transformed, in their thought just as much as in their practices, as much as animals are transformed. This essay suggests that a lasting contribution of Desprets thought are the stories she tells, the questions she asks (and allows animals to ask), the reciprocal agency of all participants involved, and the striving for an animated common world wherein both humans and animals coexist in meaningful and transformative relations.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHICAL ETHOLOGY

Abstract A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs and fields – to know what animal bodies can do – they share in the rethinking of interspecies forms of life, as domains of both empirical knowledge and zoo-political performance, and thereby take important steps towards a new philosophical ethology.

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: ROBERTO MARCHESINI

Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as Il dio Pan (1988),Il concetto di soglia (1996), Post-human (2002), Intelligenze plurime (2008), Epifania animale (2014), and Etologia filosofica (2016) he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, his critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesinis cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the presence and input of other animals.

Entering theriomorphic worlds

Abstract This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Charles Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Precarious Communities: Towards a Phenomenology of Extinction

“Precarious Communities: Towards a Phenomenology of Extinction” begins by criticizing modern ontological models of community as imprecise and dangerous, as they deny animals and other living beings ethical and communal value. The essay criticizes the idea that community is to be based solely around commonality, such as a shared language or physicality. The essay argues that such a model of community is not to be followed because it promotes a widespread “mode of exclusion” of all life that is not human. Instead, the essay proposes an ontological model of “hybrid communities” that is founded on the interdependence of earth’s species. It is argued that human societies have depended on a close relationship with animals and plants since their inception, just as have all other forms of life. The essay posits that animals exist in a phenomenal world that they impart significance to, just as humans do. In turn, the essay proposes the ethical and political value of life is found in the subject’s ability to form relationships and interact with others and its environment, rather than in a “metaphysical superiority.”