Matthew Chrulew

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.

Pastoral counter-conducts: Religious resistance in Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity

The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of “pastoral power” characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and totalizing, is its modern descendant. At different moments, Foucault rather infamously opposed to the pastorate and governmentality such ethico-political spiritualities as the Iranian Revolution and ancient Greek ascesis, but he also took care to identify numerous forms of resistance specific and internal to Christianity itself. His lecture of 1 March 1978 outlined five examples of “insurrections of conduct”: “eschatology, Scripture, mysticism, the community, and ascesis.” I will detail Foucault’s analysis of pastoral counter-conducts, and explore how he sets up the nature and stakes of this tension within Christianity and its secular kin.

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 PHILOSOPHICAL ETHOLOGY OF DOMINIQUE LESTEL

Abstract Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and understanding. This profusion of new evidence and edifying approaches demands that we rethink our ideas both of animality and of the nature and origins of culture.

An art of both caring and locking up: Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopo litical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of sovereign power over the objectified beast. The stakes of Derrida’s ar gument are as significant as its history is burdened. It returns to elements of the longstanding polemic between Foucault and Derrida over madness and history, complicated here by Derrida’s reproach of Agamben’s own, more recent cruel admiration of Foucault. It engages with the question of historical thresholds, regarding both the development of biopower and the history of the menagerie. If we read the Eleventh Session on zoological gardens together with the Twelfth on biopolitical thresholds, their implications for contemporary thinking about human-animal relations become clearer. I will suggest, contra Derrida, that the modern history of zoological gardens does indeed cross important thresholds of biopolitical novelty. While he is no doubt right to insist on the persistence of a human sovereignty that reigns over beasts, his argumentation obscures the emergence, specificity and significance of biopolitical care. Being able to understand and critique contemporary relations of power between humans and animals requires genealogical attention to the particularity of this dispositif. Derrida’s lectures on the beast and the sovereign are erudite and provocative, if incessantly recursive. As he explains in the summary provided for the Ecole’s yearbook, his aim was:

THE ANIMAL OUTSIDE THE TEXT

Abstract This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Dominique Lestels thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; realist-Cartesian and bi-constructivist ethology; biosemiotics; philo- sophical anthropology; animal studies; the other-than-human; veganism; and technology. It touches on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Shepard, and Donna Haraway.

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.

Francis’s Planetary Practice

W hen the conclave met in March 2013 to anoint a new pope, with innumerable cameras and eyes trained on the famous Sistine Chapel chimney awaiting the emergence of white smoke, an adventurous seagull decided to alight there, holding its brown-flecked wings back and neck erect like a vigilant herald. By intruding on this teletechnological spectacle of religion—it soon had its own Twitter account, swapping quips with that of the chimney—this gull seemed to offer itself as an avian omen for the re(or not-too-dis-)enchanted. In the preface to his book on animals and the Bible, Eden’s Other Residents, Michael Gilmour recounts his only half-joking excitement at this “delightful coincidence,” expressed in his own tweet at the time: “Hoping it’s a sign the next Pontiff will be a voice for non-human animals too!”1 It did not take long for this hope to be doubled by the announcement of the accession of Argentine Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio—with the regnal name of Francis. Francis! This saintly name still sings, eight centuries after the ascetic life of the nature-loving mendicant friar transfigured the Church from within. He is known for preaching to flowers and interceding for birds, liberating lambs and pacifying a wolf, for his love for the poor and outcast in imitation of Christ. His counterposition within Christianity’s hostility to nature is so time-honored that even historian Lynn White Jr., author of the much-debated 1967 Science essay critical of the religious roots of the ecological crisis, endorsed him as the patron saint of ecology—a suggestion sanctioned by Pope John Paul II in 1979.2 He is also a patron of animals and, it must be said, of merchants and San Francisco, that hotbed of speculation in silicon and brick, as well as of stowaways. Francis himself has often stowed away on the supposedly most modern and secular of vessels, below deck or often in plain sight. He has been the favorite of a