Jeffrey Bussolini

The Phenomenology of Animal Life

This paper presents a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, which is opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates. The method is elaborated through the examples of a knot-tying orangutan in a Paris zoo and chile-eating cats in a New York apartment. We show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust character than is usually supposed. How does animal life enter the sphere of interpretation? The question is double-pronged. It is a matter of understanding what it means that an animal life requires interpretation, and also what a human life means such that it can be not only transformed by the interpretation of animal lives, but also enriched. The majority of approaches that seek to study animal behaviour today either fail to ask this question, or if they do ask it, fail to deploy any of the means that would enable them to answer it. Animal life is thus excised from the play of significance and enclosed in a realm of physical machines paired to inaccessible qualia. However, interpreting the meaning of nonhuman comportment is not only possible, but a much needed task that deepens human experience. In the following pages we show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust character than is usually supposed.

Recent French, Belgian and Italian work in the cognitive science of animals: Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret, Roberto Marchesini and Giorgio Celli

This paper is a review of the work of four scholars who have made substantial new developments in our understanding of animal mind and animal–human interactions. Dominique Lestel indicates that culture is rooted in the animal realm and draws upon ethology and ethnography to study animal worlds. Vinciane Despret pays heed to complex animal–human sociality and combines critical psychology and ethology to take account of animal mind. Roberto Marchesini argues that animal influence on humans is widespread and is foundational to culture; he uses anthropology and ethology to expand the field of animal–human interactions. Giorgio Celli holds that ethology permeates the spaces of everyday life and that animals such as cats demonstrate complex problem-solving and social behavior.

THE ENIGMA OF THE RAVEN

Abstract Bernd Heinrich and Maine ravens are exemplars of Desprets concepts of politeness, “faire connaissance” and recruitment. He was dissuaded by his mentor from studying them due to their intelligence and their recalcitrance against reductive methods. Gaining their confidence would take years. Once he did so they allowed him to see an astonishing range of behaviors and they accepted him as a socius. This was research that took into account the interests of the ravens themselves to answer complicated questions about their behavior. Ravens also practice this intermingling of interests and action with wolves.

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.

Thinking like a rat

Abstract In submitting rats to tests such as running a maze, behaviorist researchers failed to take into account the interest and point of view of the rats. As a result, the research missed important questions and relations at hand. The critiques about experimenter effect and intuitive perception of researchers’ questions by research subjects can be more fully extended to animals as research subjects and interactants in research who perceive and interpret situations, set-ups, and questions. Taking meaning and biosemiotics into account helps give a better model of animal subjectivity as exercised in the interpretation of situations and the pursuit of interest.

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.

The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini

Abstract Central to the work of Roberto Marchesini is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behavior. Drawing on veterinary, biological, and philosophical training, he critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines at the same time as acknowledging the importance of biological knowledge and approaches for understanding animals. Further, he offers his own version of a zooanthropological and posthumanist method for the future of ethology as an interdisciplinary social science founded on shared existence, interaction, and understanding. His reframing of questions around biological and cultural continuity in turn refigures received notions of identity, animality, and the origin of culture itself.

Women and the Animal Rights Movement

Emily Gaarder’s Women and the Animal Rights Movement is a timely, insightful, and illuminating book that will add valuably to the growing development of animal sociology as well as to wider activist and public interest in animals and animal rights. The framing question and through-line of the book accounts for the reason that women, since the earliest foundations of the modern animal rights movement, have constituted the backbone and driving force for such activism. Gaarder’s presentation of evidence from nineteenth century anti-vivisection movements and modern animal rights activism alike shows a strong and sustained numerical preponderance of women in the movement. The book primarily draws on participant observation and interviews, but the author also draws on historical methods to give a longer-term picture of the movement. The book is based around interviews and discussions with 27 informants of various ages, races, sexual orientations, and degrees of movement experience. The only informant identified specifically is the well-known vegan feminist activist and author Carol J. Adams (who is an outspoken public intellectual in the area); the other 26 informants are presented anonymously, but information about their ages, ethnicities, and sexualities is provided. Though a small sample, the range of life and movement experiences represented by the informants yields a number of interesting and important findings. Particularly valuable are: the way the book lays to rest the tired old canard that vegetarianism is an index of class privilege (this is empirically denied both within the United States and internationally, where meat consumption is more tied to higher class status); the careful accounts from several perspectives about organizing and action dynamics within the animal rights movement; and the coverage of contentious debates within the movement about whether sexually-explicit or holocaust imagery should be used toward the ends of animal liberation (as it has been by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Gaarder describes the prominent role of women in early antivivisection and humane movements as leaders and rank and file activists. She illustrates a particular Victorian context that gave rise to these movements and extensive participation by women (indeed, Queen Victoria herself took an interest, in the form of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and added her support in 1840, making it the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). But Gaarder’s is not a top-down account focusing on the decisive actions of the Queen. She is more interested in the ongoing development of these movements and why, from the 1820s until today, women make up the numerically greatest share of animal rights groups. Gaarder indicates that the Victorian context harbored two strong ideological factors that likely contributed to women’s participation en masse: the sense that women were by nature more inclined to care for the disenfranchised (and thus had a moral duty to do so), and a more radical linkage of the oppression of women and animals. These elements of the debate, present since the early 1800s, remain issues of discussion and contention in the modern movement in the United States. The book shows the influence of figures such as Francis Power Cobbe in England, who argued that the mistreatment of animals in vivisection and of women in family and medical life were linked. Henry Burgh, Caroline E. White, and Mary F. Lovell played key roles in importing antivivisection campaigns from England to the United States and in establishing early organizations such as the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The notion that women are more disposed to care and empathy, either because of biological predisposition or socialization, is a theme that recurs throughout the interviews and considerations of the book. Some Victorian and early nineteenth century commentators, both activists and critics who dismissed the movement alike, made an explicit biological linkage that associated women with animals, and thus saw it as appropriate that women 532 Reviews