Abstracts

THE HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIP SESSION

1.Kenneth Shapiro, The Emerging Field of Human-Animal Studies: Application to Companion Animal Abuse

2.Monika Bakke, Biotech Animal: Tissues, Cells and Genomes as Animals

3.Piotr Laskowski, Wegen dem Pferd. The Fear and the Animal Life

4. Szymon Wróbel Praise for Monstrosities. The Case of Nicolo Machiavelli

5.Magdalena Dabrowska, Cynological Sports: A New Paradigm for Human-animal Relationships?

THE ANIMAL ETHICS SESSION

6.Mary Trachsel, Beyond Words: A Socio-biological History of Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships on the University of Iowa Campus (1847-2012)

7.Kathleen Perry Long, Evil and the Human/ Animal Divide:From Pliny to Paré

8.Jan Hartman, Animals are Good People Too

9.Pawel Zaleski, Ethics and Aesthetics of Vegetarianism

10.Krzysztof Skonieczny, The Ethics of Becoming-Animal in Michel de Montaigne

ANIMALS IN LITERATURE SESSION

11.Krzysztof Ziarek, The Modern Privilege of Life: Rethinking the Human-Animal with Regard to the World

12.Miroslaw Loba, Literature and the Darwinian Turn: From Flaubert to Gombrowicz

13.Joanna Partyka,Wolves and Women: À Propos the Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Book

14.Przemyslaw Kordos, Saurians, Khepri and Graphomanus Spasmaticus: Zoomorphism in Science-Fiction Creations

15. Ewa Domańska Am an Animist Ecological Humanities and Personhood. 

16.Kinga Jeczminska, Attitude towards Animality in Stories about Werewolves and Vampires Analysed from a Medical Perspective

17.Tomasz Garncarek, Shamanic Worlds of Gombrowicz and Castaneda

18.Ewa Mazierska, Animals and Humans in the Films of Béla Tarr

19.Ewa Lukaszyk, Towards Other Modalities of Being: Transgression into the Animal Condition in Post-Humanity, Primitive Humanity And Contemporary Art

20.Joanna Walewska & a group of students from the Art and Posthumanities course, The Beech Marten Project. The Use Of Low Technologies For Human-Animal Communication In The Urban Niche

21.Pawel Moscicki, The Cloth of Man. Contribution to a Study on the Human-Animal Pathos

ANIMALS,RELIGION AND THEOLOGYSESSION

22.Tom Tyler, The Bad Faith of Being Human

23.Clair Linzey, If You Disparage the Creature, You Disparage the Creator

24.Alina Mitek-Dziemba, Animal Theology: The Case for a Post-Secular Sacrality

25.Jacek Dobrowolski, Atheology of Animality As Emancipation Tool of Modern Humanity

26.Rafal Zawisza, Not Being Angel. Manichaeism as an Obstacle to Thinking New Approach to Animality

ANIMALS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY SESSION

27.Tadeusz Sławek, Unanimal Man. On What Remains Primeval in our Formalized Humanity

28.Nina Gladziuk, Protean Manifestations of Social Darwinism in American Political Thought

29.Agnieszka Kowalczyk, Animality and Nature in Marx Thought – Beyond Modern Assumptions

30.Pawel Miech, Being a Rat vs Identifying With a Rat – a Psychoanalytic Inquiry Into Human-Animal Divide

31.Mateusz Janik, People and Other Political Animals – Do We Need Dehumanization of Politics?

 

THE HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIP SESSION

 

1.Kenneth Shapiro, The Emerging Field of Human-Animal Studies: Application to Companion Animal Abuse

 

Abstract: In the past two decades, a multi-disciplinary field, variously called human-animal studies (HAS), anthrozoology, and animal studies, has emerged and is accelerating in growth. In the first part of this paper, I will provide an overview of the field addressing questions such as: What is the definition and scope of the field?What methods can it borrow from traditional human-centred disciplines and what methods can it create peculiar to the field? How can and should the field situate itself within the university? How can (and should) the field effect change current treatment of other animals? In the second part of the paper, I use the case of the abuse of companion animals to examine HAS’s potential applications to the enhancement of our understanding and improvement of human-animal relationships -- for both parties. How do (and should) we define abuse? How can we over-ride socially acceptable “abuse”? What is the relationship between animal abuse and human violence? How can we change abusive behaviour?

 

Author bio: Kenneth Shapiro Executive Director Animals and Society Institute, Inc. (hdqtr Ann Arbor MI) t/f 301-963-4751 403 McCauley Street WashingtonGrove MD 20880 USA www.animalsandsociety.org
www.Facebook.com/animalsandsocietyinstitute

 

2.Monika Bakke, Biotech Animal: Tissues, Cells and Genomes as Animals

 

 

Abstract: Biotechnologies produce, modify and sustain animal life in forms no longer comprehensible within traditional Western conceptual frameworks. Animals have become bioreactors, models for pathology and physiology studies, organs for transplantation, and tissue and cells cultivated in vitro. Animal lives have shifted into the restricted zone of ‘liminal lives’ in biotech labs. In this paper, I take up ontological and ethical issues arising from biotech practices, ambitions and fantasies. I ask if human animals are the only benefactors of animal-related tissue engineering, genetic engineering and synthetic biology. I am interested in exploring those areas of research where both human and nonhuman animals can meet to make a better future. The molecular level of life reveals not so much the differences as the similarities between us and other animals. Genomic research and DNA sequencing technology, which have made available complete genome sequences from many different species, starting with model organisms such as the fruit fly, mouse and rat, and moving towards farm animals, not only contributes to the further instrumentalization of animal lives, but also builds an awareness of their complexity and the need for an ethical response. The appearance of novel animals as the result of gene transfers between distant species calls for a reconsideration of species borders and hierarchies, and for accepting responsibility and showing hospitality to these newcomers into the animal world, to which we also belong.

 

Author bio:Monika Bakke writes on contemporary art and aesthetics, with a particular focus on posthumanist, gender and cross-cultural perspectives. She works in the Philosophy Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. The author of two books: Bio-transfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010, in Polish) and Open Body (2000, in Polish), co-author of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics (2004, in Polish), Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006) and The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011). Since 2001 she has been an editor of the Polish cultural journal Czas Kultury (Time of Culture). dr hab. Monika Bakke Instytut Filozofii ul. Szamarzewskiego 89c Uniwersytet im. A. Mickiewicza 60-569 PoznanPoland.

 

3.Piotr Laskowski, Wegen dem Pferd. The Fear and the Animal Life

 

Abstract: It is, as Deleuze and Guattari observed, “an ordinary sight in those days”, an indispensable part of full modernity, of capitalist mode of production; it is an image that is always within the range of sight. “A horse falls down in the street!”, “a horse is going to die”. From the Auguries... of William Blake, from Hogarth's second stage of cruelty, through laments of Dostoyevski and Conrad, up to the madness of Nietzsche and Little Hans' phobia, and again Pyramid of animals by Kozyra – the image is always there. It becomes “a hieroglyph that condenses all fears, from unnamable to namable”.Taking famous Freudian Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy as a starting point, we shall try to revise it as well as its famous Lacanian (Le Seminaire IV, Kristeva's Powers of Horror) and Deleuzian (Mille Plateaux) reinterpretations. We shall invoke Agamben's concept of “bare life” to reconsider an animal life that is tormented and eventually destroyed, and to present it both as a centre of historical narrative on modernity (with a reference to Darnton's Great Cat Massacre), and the key issue of the philosophical reflection on violence, production, and biopolitics (with concluding remarks on Shukin's Animal Capital).

 

Author bio: Piotr Laskowski (Zaklad Filozofii i Bioetyki, Collegium Medicum UJ) has got his Ph.D. in Egyptology at the University of Warsaw (with the Oxford University reviewer of the thesis). Since 2008 he has hold the position in the Department of Philosophy and Bioethics, Jagiellonian University Medical College. He has published in Polish Szkice z dziejow anarchizmu (Essays in the history of anarchism, Warsaw 2006, 2nd edition in 2007) and Maszyny wojenne. Georges Sorel i strategie radykalnej filozofii politycznej (War Machines. Georges Sorel and the strategies of radical political philosophy, Warsaw 2011). He was also a co-founder of a “free school”, Jacek Kuron High School in Warsaw, its first headteacher (2006-2010), and still a teacher there. His research focus on the history of ideas, political philosophy of 19th and 20th centuries, he has also written a number of articles on the libertarian pedagogy.

 

4. Szymon Wróbel, Praise for Monstrosities. The Case of Niccolò Machiavelli

Abstract: In my presentation I will refer to the passage from The Prince of Niccolò Machiavelli, in which the famous Florentine says that “there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first proper to man, the second to beasts; […] Therefore itis necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man. Thisrole was taught covertly to princes by ancient writers, who wrote that Achilles, and Many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. To have as teacher a half-beast, half -man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting”. I will defend the claim that by writing this, Machiavelli opened up a new and still unused way of thinking about nature-culture relationship. A follower of this way of thinking withdraws from saying that nature is surpassed by culture, or that nature is nothing else but a subject of an on-going human speculation, and rebuts the sole hypothesis that what there is, is nothing but nature. Modern Western culture entrusted its key opposition to the nature-culture relationship. By and large, political philosophy is a story about surpassing the nature in order to establish a state under the rule of law. It is in this state, as distant from nature as it can be, that we wish to imbed natural law. According to Machiavelli, the juxtaposition of nature and culture, the narrative on surpassingby politics the laws of nature, just as well as the narrative on us being stuck in it, are all utterly wrong. The juxtaposition of nature and culture brings about destructive consequences to our cognition and politics. Accepting the ambiguity of the opposition between nature and culture and assuming that the social contract is indeed fictitious, I would like to question Machiavelli about his vision of subjectivity and politics in a world where "natural objects" appear to be socialized, and "cultural subjects" appear to be dissocial. Is politics a never-ending fantasy about the state of nature – ennobling it, condemning it, or supressing it – because its own tool is naturalization? Is a political subject, who, in political discourse, on behalf of institutional facts (anti-nature) explicitly denies the existence of "harsh social facts" (nature) not in fact looking for a new base in the form of a false nature (para-nature)? Hence, does Machiavelli recommend monstrosity by writing stories in praise of monstrosity as it may well seem? Are "natural objects", that are "socialized" and "cultural subjects", which appear to be dissocial indeed best candidates for such a monstrosity?

 Author bio: Szymon Wróbel is Professor of Philosophy at Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies Artes Librales UW and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a psychologist and philosopher interested in the contemporary social theory and philosophy of language and mind. His main spheres of scientific interest are: theory of social power, theory of literature, contemporary linguistics and the reception of psychoanalytic ideas in political theory. Szymon Wróbel has published seven books and many articles in academic journals.

 

5.Magdalena Dabrowska, Cynological Sports: A New Paradigm for Human-animal Relationships?

 

Abstract: Looking for new metaphors and paradigms of human- animal relationships Donna Haraway refers to her experience of agility training with Australian shepherd Cayenne. In her opinion humans and dogs learn to understand each other only by common activities, training and work. The relationship of “being with” is not hierarchical and quite distant from paradigm „man gives the order, dog obeys”. It is much more complex, based on respect for the Other, understanding of differences between dogs and humans. It seems that in analysis of cynological sports (especially agility) Haraway avoids the trap of animalizing the human and humanizing the animal. They stay what they are, but they create a team and communicate being conscious of the otherness of the Other. Building on Haraway's analysis I would like to investigate how people engaged insports like agility or frisbee perceive their relationships with dogs. Is growing popularity of “dog sports” going to create a new paradigm of human- animal relationships?

 

Author bio: Magdalena Dabrowska (PhD) - assistant professor at Institute of Culture Studies, University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Lublin. Studied gender studies at Central European University in Budapest and philosophy at UMCS. In 2009 received PhD in Culture Studies at University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska for dissertation on gender in Polish political discourse. Worked as a researcher for European Commission's project „QUING” (Quality in Gender + Equality Policies, www.quing.eu) at Centre for Policy Studies, CEU. Co-editor of e-book “Masculinity as cultural category. Practices of masculinity”. Author of several articles published in Poland and abroad. Co-organiser of feminist meetings “Wieza Bab L” at art gallery “Biala” in Lublin.Recent research interests: human- animal relationships in gender perspective.

 

THE ANIMAL ETHICS SESSION

6.Mary Trachsel, Beyond Words: A Socio-biological History of Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships on the University of Iowa Campus (1847-2012)

 

Abstract: Only humans use verbal language, so words alone cannot explain how humans and other animals negotiate relationships with each other.Certainly human language plays a role in the negotiating process; laws and policies that regulate human-nonhuman interactions are encoded in written language, and exemplary stories told and written about human-animal relationships create mythologies that guide human expectations of other animals’ presence and participation in our social lives.These verbal texts to some degree dictate how humans keep company with other animals, but the actual conduct of human-animal relationships occurs largely through non-verbal negotiations, through pragmatic, common-sense rhetorics of physical presence and action, motivated by emotions and feelings.I introduce the term “socio-biome” to represent a field of analysis where nonverbal communicative actions and displays conduct social ties between human and nonhuman animals. My own University of Iowa campus is the subject of my sociobiological analysis of human relationships with other animals.I position my campus geographically in “the heart of the heartland,” in the fertile central plains of the continent. I trace the historical development of human-animal relationships on this site from the founding of the University of Iowa in 1847 until the present.I test biologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis by examining human-nonhuman animal negotiations on a biophilia-biophobia spectrum as acts of tolerance, approach, and avoidance.

 

Author bio: Associate Professor Mary Trachsel earned her PhD in English with an emphasis in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. She came to the Iowa Rhetoric Department in 1989. At Iowa she has led advisory groups in the Rhetoric Department’s Professional Development Program and taught General Education Rhetoric and Interpretation of Literature as well as advanced writing courses and graduate courses in feminist pedagogy, feminist ethics, and the history of literacy. She teaches animal studies courses as first-year seminars and honours seminars. Her current research interests focus on human-animal relationships and animal communication, with a special interest in the discourse of ape language research. Her most recent publications include “How to Do Things Without Words: Whisperers as Rustic Authorities on Interspecies Dialogue” (Arguments about Animal Ethics [Greg Goodale and Jason Edward Black, eds.) and “Human Uniqueness in the Age of Ape Language Research” (Society and Animals).

 

7.Kathleen Perry Long, Evil and the Human/ Animal Divide:From Pliny to Paré

 

Abstract:We continue to speculate on what separates the human from the animal: is it language, culture, reason, laughter? One striking difference between humans and animals, at least in ancient and medieval thought, is the human capacity for evil.In his Natural History, Pliny portrays elephants and some other animals as superior to humans, arguing that they do not harm their own kind.Elephants are particularly ethical, refusing to harm other creatures, even at the peril of their own lives.The monstrous human races are described in neutral terms.Caesar, on the other hand, is portrayed as a destructive if admirable monster that has destroyed many millions of human lives.This representation of the animal and the half-human monster as morally admirable or at least neutral is modified by Saint Augustine and subsequent theologians who associate the animal and the monstrous with the divine, the human with imperfect knowledge and character.In this context, it is not surprising that Marie de France portrays her werewolf as morally superior to his human wife.But in the wake of late medieval discussions of the devil, particularly in the context of theories of witchcraft, animals become associated with evil.Most particularly, creatures that blur the line between human and animal are presented as evil; the animal-human hybrids in Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges offer a striking example of this association.

 

Author bio: Kathleen Perry Long - professor of French in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Department of Romance Studies Morrill Hall 303 Cornell University Ithaca, New York.

 

 

8.Jan Hartman, Animals are Good People Too

 

Abstract:The idea of my lecture is to challenge traditional ways of confronting animality with humanity. Either in order to define humane superiority over animals and construct “man” as an “animal and something much more”, or in order to launch the idea of an animal as being less stupid that it has always been supposed to be, comparison between humans and animals is concentrated on suppressing animality (in humans as superiors as well as in animals – as wrongly conceived to be “stupid”) and affirming humanity. This is a dialectic interplay of two related concepts (or one double concept) of “man” and “beast” petrifying a false vision of common fate of people and animals. This kind of false consciousness makes animals and people badly interdependent. I claim that this mental figure should be overcome by applying the very category of “being human” to so (far) called “animals”.

 

Author bio: Jan Hartman, Jagiellonian University Medical School in Krakow, chair of the Department of Philosophy and Bioethics, author of several books on different subjects in philosophy, including political science and bioethics.

 

9.Pawel Zaleski, Ethics and Aesthetics of Vegetarianism

 

Abstract: The discourse on vegetarian attitudes seems to be dominated by ethical issues. Statistics however display that among vegetarians such the attitudes play a minor role. Small percentage of the most radical vegetarians refers to ethical issues. The vast majority of vegetarian behaviours arise from aesthetical attitudes resulting out of concern for a body. According to such an attitude animals are paradoxically presented as a source of harmful, toxic substances threatening life, health, and self-appearance. The attitudes seems to be correlated with more and more mass production of a meat, constructing growing distance between a man and hidden in the meat factories animal. Industrialization of animal farming leads henceforth towards growing exclusion and objectification of the animals as objects of mass consumption – in a consciousness of consumers as potential victims of the industry. A relation between man and animal is mediated by the industry. Moral effect of aesthetical attitudes is ambiguous. On the one side it allows to reduce scale of a tragedy of animals, on the other side it deepens subjective abyss between worlds of people and animals.

 

Author bio: Pawel Stefan Zaleski – Sociologist and social philosopher interested in the analyses of social and political movements, and theories of political society. Author of a book “Neoliberalism and Civil Society”.

 

 

10.Krzysztof Skonieczny, The Ethics of Becoming-Animal in Michel de Montaigne

 

Abstract: It is a recent tendency to read certain pre- and early-modern thinkers as “anticipatory critics” of modernity. The name of Michel de Montaigne and the potential of his thought for opposing the post-Cartesian interpretation of animality as well as the division between the human and the animal often comes up in this context. Yet, most of the critics approach Montaigne from a point of view that treats him like a pre-Rousseauist proto-romantic whose theriophily leads to judging animals more rational and more moral than humans, which in turn entails an escapist misanthropy. While this indeed might be an important part of Montaigne's thinking, recognized (and criticized) from a very early period of the reception of his work, I would like to show that his Essays also allow for a different interpretation, which is more interesting from today's point of view. In my paper I will try to show that 1) Montaigne's appraisal of Nature is far from the romantic-idyllic one that he is often thought to represent; 2) his understanding of the interspecies (or at least animal-human) division is more subtle than it is often thought; 3) his thought thus interpreted includes an ethics of becoming-animal that is based on a radically anti-Platonic (and thus anti-Cartesian) body-mind economy.

 

Author bio: Krzysztof Skonieczny graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in Philosophy and in Psychology - both in the course of the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. He also holds an MA in Psychoanalysis from Paul Valéry University in Montpellier. His work within the International PhD Project, conducted under the supervision of prof. Szymon Wróbel and prof. Jan Miernowski, focuses on the relationship between psychoanalysis and scepticism. His interests include contemporary French thought, pop culture and 20th century American literature, of which he is an occasional translator.

 

ANIMALS IN LITERATURE SESSION

 

11.Krzysztof Ziarek, The Modern Privilege of Life: Rethinking the Human-Animal with Regard to the World

 

Abstract: Derrida and Agamben in their different ways attempt to undo the anthropocentrism intrinsic in the human-animal relation.While Agamben proposes to interrupt the relation and open up a caesura, a space of non-working and non-knowledge between animals and humans, Derrida rethinks animality by questioning the privilege accorded to the human in the hierarchy of life.Yet although both speak to the effects and pervasiveness of biopower and biopolitcs, they appear not to interrogate the continuing privileging of life, and of living beings, in the discussion of human-animal and biopolitcs.This approach seems to confirm what Arendt describes in The Human Condition as the ruling assumption of modernity “that life, and not the world, is the highest good of man.” Taking my cue from Arendt’s critique of life as the highest good and, above all, from Heidegger’s questioning of the priority of the notions of life and humans as living beings, I want to draw out the implications of his critique for the human-animal relation when it is rethought from the perspective of a broader ethos of being and world, neither focused on nor privileging life.

 

Author bio: Krzysztof Ziarek is Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (SUNY ), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern), and The Force of Art (Stanford). He has also published numerous essays on Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited two collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford). He is the author of two books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sad dostateczny. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Language After Heidegger.” His other current work focuses on the “disappearance” of world in the age of globalization and on the post-Heideggerian notion of being human.

 

12.Miroslaw Loba, Literature and the Darwinian Turn: From Flaubert to Gombrowicz

 

Abstract:The question of animality haunts the nineteenth and twentieth century literature. The 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 narrative (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). What animal is/means in a modern literature?

 

Author bio: Miroslaw Loba professor of French and Italian literature at the University of Poznan with a particular interest in psychoanalysis and literary theory, narrative and poststructuralism. He published Le sujet et la théorie littéraire en France après 1968 (2004).

 

13.Joanna Partyka,Wolves and Women: À Propos the Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Book

 

Abstract:Clarissa Pinkola Estés in the book Women Who Run with the Wolves. Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype(1992) explored the relationship she sees between women and wolves. In the very beginning of her book she put the sentence: “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species”. To be wise, creative and powerful a modernwoman has to regain her connection to nature, claims Estés. On the other hand we know that in the European culturewomen have always been perceivedas emotional, weak creatures closer to nature and to “wildlife” thanmen. To be “closer to animals in our culture is to be denigrated”, we read in Lynda Birke’s paper Exploring the boundaries: Feminism, Animals and Science. Following the concept ofthe Wild Woman I will try to cope with some paradoxes hidden in it.

 

Author bio: Joanna Partyka is an anthropologist and historian of literature, associate professor in Cultural Studies at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies “Artes Liberales” (University of Warsaw) and researcher at the Institute for Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences. The main field of her interest is the Mediterranean culture of the 16th and 17th centuries analysed from the comparative point of view. In her research she explores paraliterary texts, such as penitential books, itineraries, encyclopaedias, moral and pedagogical treatises, letters, household books, diaries, etc. She is interested in the history of women, especially their active and passive participation in European culture. She published two books as well asabove 50 articles in Polish, Spanish and English. She also translates from Spanish to Polish. She is a member ofthe International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, International Society for Iberian-Slavonic Studies (CompaRes) and WISPS (Women in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies).

 

 

14.Przemyslaw Kordos, Saurians, Khepri and Graphomanus Spasmaticus: Zoomorphism in Science-Fiction Creations

 

Abstract: As an avid fan of SF writing I would like to point out an interesting technique in picturing the aliens in many SF books and TV series. In order to differentiate the humans and the extraterrestrials, writers give the latter animal traits, equipping them not only fins, tails and tentacles, but trying to mimic animal behaviour. In other words, escaping anthropomorphism they “talk animalish”, borrowing from the animal world elements that would serve as a way of describing what is not human. I would divide what I plan to say in three parts. In the first part I would show some of the most popular animal aliens in the recent SF history. In the second, main part I will concentrate on writings of two of my favourite creators: China Miéville and Stanislaw Lem. Miéville's world, Bas-Lag, abounds in curious animal sentient races, thoroughly described and depicted. Moreover the writer has defined in detail one more race, Ariekei, for the needs of his latest book. Here not their look, but rather the way there are described is drawing my attention. Lem on the other hand is great and humorous theoretician of how they aliens would look like and what are the way we think about them. In his famous Star Journals he gives accounts of many E.T. races and accompanies them with his own drawings. I would finish off by presenting ideas of some writers of escaping the zoomorphism trap (which after all proves to be largely anthropomorphism in disguise) and listing attempts of creating aliens beyond human comprehension.

 

Author bio: Przemyslaw Kordos - neohellenist. He spent his earliest years in a village, but then lost contact with animal kingdom due to urban experience. He is now trying to restablish this link, with help of his two young sons. One of them loves piranhas, sharks and ladybirds, while the other ducks and butterflies.

 

 

15.Ewa DomanskaAm an Animist. Ecological Humanities and Personhood

Abstract: The paper considers a new animism (as defined by Graham Harvey) - a critical approach in contemporary (ecological) humanities that allows us to rethink the idea of personhood, and relations with non-Western cultures. I would claim that new animism might become one of the crucial ways of being human in the future. Studying relations based on kincentric ties with non-human animals, plants and things could help to develop an inclusive and holistic idea of metacommunity. This does not mean a return to a primitive and/or romantic idea of peaceful and harmonic community or a form of New Age paganism. It means, rather, a personal contribution to the development ofa knowledge of living together and a utopian vision of “multispecies participatory democracy.”

 

Author bio: Ewa Domanska is Associate Professor of theory and history of historiography in the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznan, Poland and since 2002 Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. Her teaching and research interests include comparative theory of the human and social sciences, history and theory of historiography, posthumanities and ecological humanities.She is the author of 4 books, recently Existential History. Critical Approach to Narrativism and Emancipatory Humanities (in Polish, 2012); History and the Contemporary Humanities (in Ukrainian, 2012) and editor and co-editor of 13 books including recently published: Re-Figuring Hayden White (with Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner, 2009); French Theory in Poland (with Miroslaw Loba, 2010, in Polish) and Theory of Knowledge of the Past and the Contemporary Humanities and Social Sciences (in Polish, 2010).

 

16.Kinga Jeczminska, Attitude towards Animality in Stories about Werewolves and Vampires Analysed from a Medical Perspective

 

Abstract: The analysis of the development of the idea of werewolves and vampires can help to understand changes of attitude towards animalistic aspects of human nature. Although beliefs in transformation of humans into animals were popular in antiquity, the Middle Ages witnessed a change in attitude towards such a possibility which would threaten the idea of the hierarchy of beings. St Augustine claimed that humans, made in the likeness of God, could not become animals. Since only God can truly change matter, the apparent transformation was attributed to the interference of Devil who simply deceived human senses. Medieval accounts were usually sympathetic towards people transformed into wolves who suffered because of human malevolence and family intrigue. They were banished from human society to live a solitary life. From the medieval times on, people increasingly believed werewolves to be victims of a disease, often characterised by violent, impulsive or sexually aggressive behaviour. Medical and legal authorities stated the presence of mental impairment and possible brain disorder in such wolf-men. Paulus Aegineta also attributed wolf transformation to brain disease, especially epilepsy, humoral pathology, and the use of hallucinogenic substances. In the initial stage of its development, modern clinical and physiological inquiry that replaced ancient and medieval Galenic medicine was unable to explain various diseases. Thus they were often associated with demonic possession, which underlies a more cruel attitude towards werewolves and vampires and consequently their severe persecutions around the 16th century.Many illnesses could explain stories about werewolves and vampires: affective disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, rabies, intoxication with herbs containing hyoscyamine, atropine, scopolamine or serotoninergic hallucinogens, but the most probable is porphyria. The latter can easily account for characteristics of werewolves and vampires presented in literature and folk tales. Contemporary medical explanation of the disease helped to change the attitude towards genetically affected people. It is arguable that the scientific explanation of the observed deformities of the human body made people aware that human beings constitute a continuum with the rest of animals, even if humans are on the more advanced end of this continuum. Contemporary presentations of werewolves and vampires, for instance in Angela Carter’s short stories, reveal a more positive attitude towards both animals and animalistic drives experienced by humans, e. g. sexuality.

 

Author bio: Kinga Jeczminska graduated from the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice in 2007 with an MD in Medicine, and from the University of Warsaw in 2011 with two BAs: one in Philosophy of Being, Cognition and Value and the other in English Philology. She is currently working towards two MAs: in Philosophy of Being, Cognition and Value and in English Philology at the University of Warsaw.

 

17.Tomasz Garncarek, Shamanic Worlds of Gombrowicz and Castaneda

 

Abstract:The contribution of Tomasz Garncarek into the treatise of the animality regards the output of a writer and philosopher Witold Gombrowicz and a controversial anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. Initially, Gombrowicz offers us a history of a reduction in modern philosophy, that leads to the reflection of the impossibility of any rational, objective, absolute philosophical system. Such a deconstruction culminates, in his opinion, in existentialism. Here we are able to turn to the cause of animality directly: since existentialism left us with the freedom to create our own values individually and liberally, it's no excuse for it to continue to defend an anthropocentric hierarchical conception of the world. The vacuum of a universal and logically coherent image of reality, that appears, argues Maria Janion, is fulfilled in Gombrowicz with esoteric interests, an investigation of demonic dimension of being, crowded with animals, as well as supernatural powers. They mixes and influences themselves respectively. Those are the residues of pre-Christian, pagan, romantic culture. This trace leads us to the shamanic supernatural world of Carlos Castaneda. Here animals are sorcerers allies, shamans turn into animals and, most of all, animals are equal cohabitants of a natural environment.

 

Author bio: Tomasz Garncarek (1974) graduated in philosophy from the University of Florence. He works on PhD at the University of Lódz, Poland. Interested in Ancient philosophy, Machiavelli, as well as Wittgenstein. Actually focused on philosophical aspects of Jean Luc Godard movies.

 

ANIMALS IN ART AND CULTURE SESSION

 

18.Ewa Mazierska, Animals and Humans in the Films of Béla Tarr

 

Abstract:In my paper I will discuss the role of animals in the films of the Hungarian director of international renown, Béla Tarr, especially Kárhozat (Damnation, 1988), Sátántangó (Satan Tango, 1994) and A torinói (The Turin Horse, 2011). I will argue that for Tarr the fate of an animal signifies the fate of people, especially a state which Georgio Agamben describes as that of ‘bare life’. Yet, by showing suffering animals and humans as if they were animals, due to being poor, helpless and devoid of speech, Tarr also underscores a difference between an animal and even the most wretched of humans. The use of animals in his films also raises the issue of ‘employing’ animals as actors and using animals for human goals at large.

 

Author bio: Ewa Mazierska is professor at the School of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Central Lancashire. She is a specialist in European film history and has published over ten monographs and edited collections on this topic. Her work has been translated into languages such as French, Italian, Czech, Estonian and Korean. She is a founder and associate editor of the journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema.Her publications include European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist (Berghahn, 2010), Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema (Berghahn, 2008), Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (I.B. Tauris, 2007), with Elzbieta Ostrowska, Women in Polish Cinema (Berghahn, 2006) and with Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: The European Road Movie (Wallflower, 2006), Dreams and Diaries: The Cinema of Nanni Moretti (Wallflower, 2004) and From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003). She is currently working on a study devoted to representation of work in European cinema.

 

19.Ewa Lukaszyk, Towards Other Modalities of Being: Transgression into the Animal Condition in Post-Humanity, Primitive Humanity And Contemporary Art

 

Abstract:The reflection, to be presented at the conference in three distinct “steps of inspiration” (Agamben, ethnology and art), will interrelate apparently distant spheres of problems and cultural phenomena. The starting point will be constituted by Agamben's essay L'Aperto. L'uomo e l'animale (2002), and more precisely, by the idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community”,overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The second move will explore an ethnological inspiration. We will reflect upon the archaic search of transcendence through the animal and in the animal, corresponding to the stage of man before the “invention of monotheism”, which introduced the concept of divinity defined by reduction and abstraction (the monotheistic God has no attributes, no sex, no animal traits that defined and identified the polytheistic divinities). As a working hypothesis, we assume that this concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by exclusion from the universality of biological life.The primitive man, with his totems, masks and trances, transcends the limitation of the human condition towards the animal, putting the animal, in a sense, as an aspiration. The mechanism is still in action, not only in living cultures of a “primitive” kind. We will also bring about some examples from the domain of the contemporary art, which can be interpreted as a tentative to reopen the possibility of “transgression into animality”, overcoming the frontiers of the human condition in the direction of other forms of being. Thus, some artistic procedures may be seen as a way of access (here and now) to the sphere of the primitive experience and at the same time, to the sphere of post-humanity / apocatastatic pre-humanity, located by Agamben in the eschatological time of fulfilment.

 

Author bio: Ewa Lukaszyk, born in 1972, professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw. Main research area: (trans-)cultural criticism. At the present moment, interested in topology (and other mathematical inspirations) as a source of innovative reflection in recent critical theory (Sloterdijk, Žižek, Agamben and others). Prof. Ewa Lukaszyk's Blog

 

20.Joanna Walewska & a group of students from the Art and Posthumanities course, The Beech Marten Project. The Use Of Low Technologies For Human-Animal Communication In The Urban Niche

Abstract:The Beech Marten project is a scientific, artistic and D.I.Y research project which would be realised by a group of students form the Institute of Audiovisual Studies in collaboration with scientists, ecologists and designers working with low technologies. The project is devoted to the problem of synurbization, which refers to the way in which animal populations adapt themselves to the changes in landscape caused by the urban development. The growing populations of birds and mammals are settling and increasing their abundance in cities. Our project is expected to have site specific character and we want to devote it to the inconvenient companion of beech martens, which, especially in the last years, are considered to be troublemakers as they settle in the neighbourhood of people and they destroy utensils stored in the cellars and attics as well as cars. Considering Kraków as an ecological niche we would like to map relations between humans and wild animals. Using social media, mobile media, different low technologies and recycled materials, we would like to create a series of small projects dedicated to describing this realations and making them more durable for both sides of the (alleged) conflict. We would like to collaborate with environmentalists and ecologists to look at this problem by adopting a non- anthropological point of view. The theoretical frame for our project will be provided by concepts of companion species and contact zones coined by Donna Haraway, the action-network theory and politics of nature of Bruno Latour, posthuman philosophy, and some representatives of animal studies. The project is expected to provide an opportunity to explore the notion of interdisciplinarity and should also allow us to raise a problem of the definition of new media. We want to show that new media need not to be digital but can also base on simple materials and technologies which provide people with smart solutions for difficult everyday problems.

 

Author bio: Joanna Walewska (Department of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Informatics Computer Games Design programme, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland) I work at Department of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Informatics Computer Games Design program, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. I'm finishing my PhD at Department of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University and I am enrolled into PhD program at Institute of Audiovisual Studies at Jagiellonain University, where I would like to write a PhD about intersection of arts and biology (special area of interest DNA). I was teaching there a class of “Posthumanism and art”, during which we discussed a lot Beech Marten Project, which was initially my idea but we would like to make it together and we discussed it a lot during classes (it was a group of students from different departments, but mostly form computer games and media studies). The project was not realized this year due to lack of a financial support (which we did not get because people think it is crazy), but on July we have a summer school titled Media Ecology Workshop (media-ecologies.pl), where the idea of project will be develop further. The paper (or more talk) was presented this year at 7th Cyberculture Conference in Prague, organized by interdisciplinary-net.org, where it was rather warmly welcomed but the participants were mostly interested in social media (Facebook etc.), so I would like to have a feedback from the scholars represented animal studies field.

 

21.Pawel Moscicki, The Cloth of Man. Contribution to a Study on the Human-Animal Pathos

Abstract: In his definition of the Pathosformeln, Aby Warburg pointed at a significant displacement that every expression of emotional pathos has to undergo. While studying the famous Boticelli’s paintings Primavera and The Birth of Venus he states that these images are a place of an interesting paradox. In visual terms bodies, faces, gazes are left in an impassible state, while all the passion concerning what happens in the painting is left for the limits of bodies. In these cases it is the wind moving the hair and clothes, which by their ornamental shapes express bodily emotions. Warburg was a fervent reader of Darwin’s works, especially The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which the founder of the theory of evolution was trying to show the similarities and differences in the expression of pathos between species. The main question of my paper would be how animals can represent pathos of human experience in a way, which humanistic, purely anthropocentric forms of expression can no longer account for. In order to present my argument I would like to analyse three examples from literature. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte, Thomas Bernhard’s Distortion and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. In all three cases animal are necessary to express human pathos but the intensity of this expression seems to go far beyond the limits of the traditional human-animal division.

 

Author bio:Pawel Moscicki (b. 1981) is a philosopher, essayist and translator, adjunct at Institute of Literary Research in Warsaw (Polish Academy of Science). His interests include contemporary philosophy, art and critical political discourse. He has translated books by Alain Badiou, Derek Attridge, Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Rancière. He was the editor of the book Maurice Blanchot. Literatura ekstremalna (Maurice Blanchot. Extreme Literature, 2007) and has authored Polityka teatru. Eseje o sztuce angazujacej (The Politics of Theatre. Essays about Compelling Art, 2008) and Godard. Pasaze (Godard. Passages, 2010). He has currently written and defended his dissertation at the School of Social Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), Warsaw, dedicated to the concept of potentiality in the work of Giorgio Agamben. He is also working on a project dedicated to art and utopia in the 20th century.

 

 

ANIMALS,RELIGION AND THEOLOGYSESSION

 

22.Tom Tyler, The Bad Faith of Being Human

Abstract: Sartre’s account of bad faith describes the practice by which individuals endeavour to deceive themselves into believing that the identity on which they have settled fully defines and delineates them.His famous example of the waiter, who throws himself a little too enthusiastically into his routines--he steps forward too quickly, his comportment is almost mechanically perfect, he is overly attentive to customers--illustrates this form of identification which knows, at the same time, that it is a wilful over-identification. In this presentation, I would like to suggest that we can consider as a form of bad faith a persistent self-identification as pre-eminently or even exclusively human, which is to be found in the work of diverse authors, both academic and otherwise, who write on culture, science and indeed everyday life.This form of bad faith is displayed by writers who are both sympathetic and opposed to finding new ways of living ethically with other animals.Like the waiter who is a waiter but also so much more, these authors effectively acknowledge only a narrow, limited part of themselves, and, what is more, implicitly invite their readers to do the same.The language used is what we might call “anthroponormative” in its assumption of, and insistence on, a human writer and reader.There are, however, many other forms of collective self-identification that we might choose to acknowledge.I will elaborate three such articulations of identity, in the realms of science, culture, and everyday life. Firstly, in science, we might emphasise familial collectivities that go beyond the merely human.Each of us is a member not just of the species Homo sapiens, but also of the family of great apes, the class of mammals, the kingdom of animals, and many other taxonomic ranks.Thus, within a scientific, classificatory context, we might more appropriately say “we primates” or “we chordates” or “we eukaryotes.” Secondly, in culture, we might emphasise perceptual collectivities.Each of us has a range of perceptual capacities that we share with some but not all other humans, and also with many other nonhuman creatures.The ability to differentiate and appreciate particular colours, for instance, is by no means species-specific.We might, then, within an aesthetic or cultural context, more appropriately say “we trichromats” or “we who distinguish red from green.” Finally, in everyday life, we might emphasise behavioural collectivities. I will focus here on a particular form of sexual behaviour, shared by some humans, hedgehogs and dolphins, amongst others. Thus, within everyday contexts, we might more appropriately ally ourselves with collectivities composed of all those, human and otherwise, who engage in a particular form of sexual activity. My consideration of these alternative collectivities explicitly seeks to problematize the traditional understanding of humanity and animality as mutually exclusive.The language we use to articulate the time-honoured distinction between human and animal – in science, in culture, and in everyday life – informs both our sense of self, and the obligations we feel toward our fellows, human and otherwise.By drawing attention to the bad faith which informs anthroponormative approaches, my hope is to encourage modes of articulation that lend themselves to more encompassing forms of self-identity, and ultimately to better ways of living with the animals that we are.

 

Author bio: Tom Tyler is senior lecturer in philosophy and culture at OxfordBrookes University, UK. His research concerns the use of animals, andthe persistent expression of anthropocentric assumptions, within philosophy, critical theory, and popular culture. He is the editor ofAnimal Beings (Parallax, 2006), the co-editor of Animal Encounters(Brill, 2009), and the author of CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minnesota University Press, 2012).

 

23.Clair Linzey, If You Disparage the Creature, You Disparage the Creator

Abstract: Loose translation of "Detrahere ergo actiones proprias rebus, est diviniae bonitati derogare," St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Lib. 3, cap. 69 n. 16. The Christian tradition has left us with a mixed legacy regarding animals. At its worst, the tradition has contributed to the denigration of animals as little more than things, machines, soulless beings, tools, all here for our use. The dominant voices including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Descartes have all endorsed a purely instrumentalist view of animals. But there is also a little appreciated positive tradition about animals found in some biblical material, in early apocryphal literature, and the history of the saints. This positive tradition gave birth to the first national Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824. The prophet of this movement (Humphry Primatt) argued that “We may pretend to what religion we please, but cruelty is atheism. We may make our boast of Christianity, but cruelty is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy, but cruelty is the worst of heresies". We shall examine the theological resources for a post-Primatt positive Christian view of animals, including the ideas that all sentients have intrinsic value and that humans beings should be properly seen not as the master species but rather as the servant species in creation. At its best, the Christian tradition requires a transformed approach to animals as fellow creatures. Aquinas, as a loose rendering of his words show, understood the theological imperative, but failed to relate it to non-human animals.

 

Author bio:is Deputy Director of The Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She previously studied at St Andrews and Harvard Divinity School and is currently a Doctoral Candidate at the University of St Andrews working on Leonardo Boff's ecological theology with special consideration for the place of animals..

 

24.Alina Mitek-Dziemba, Animal Theology: The Case for a Post-Secular Sacrality

 

Abstract:Despite the tendency to view animal theology (following Professor Andrew Linzey’s 1995 seminal work) as a revisionist subcurrent of Christian theological thinking or environmental ethics, the paper will seek to make a case for a much broader reference of the notion, placing it in the context of the recent post-secular redefinition of Western philosophy of religion and religious practice that has consisted in the weakening of its ontotheological anchoring. The rise of the pernicious anthropocentricism with which Christian theology is often identified can thus, in the light of the post-secular critique, be not only ascribed to a certain one-sided interpretation of Christian teaching long dominant in the official doctrine, but also to its alliance with a mode of philosophizing concerned with essentializing or naturalizing the distinction between the free human agent and subservient non-human nature, portrayed as devoid of all agency and value. The claim is that the case for revisiting and reshaping Christian theology so that it is construed in a more ecocentric and animal-friendly way could not have been put forward without questioning the implicit philosophical foundation that is common both to theistic ontology and its descendant, disenchanted secular modernity, permeated as they are by the idea of strict hierarchical organization of the forms of living in terms of their capacity for rational and reflective behaviour. The fact that the idea of animal theology is unpalatable to many (if not most) Christian theologians is just a confirmation of the working intuition that it secretly paves the way for “a postsecular alternative taking shape in the space between traditional secular and religious discourses” (J. A. McClure, Partial Faiths. Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, Athens and London, 2007, p. 12). The language of dogmatic theology seems to be ill-equipped to deal with the recent renaissance in environmental / animal ethics as it finds it difficult to map the latter’s unconventional religious attitudes, their emphasizing the intrinsic sacrality of nature and the need for piety and reverence for all life while simultaneously shying away from any form of sovereign transcendence represented and mediated by dogma. Hence the space for the postsecular, a discourse which, in its vigorous anti-anthropocentrism, offers a weak (but philosophically potent) theology of the non-human environment.

Author bio: Alina Mitek-Dziemba, PhD, works at the Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. She is a translator and an author of numerous articles discussing points of intersection of philosophical aesthetics and literature. She has recently published a book Literature and Philosophy in Pursuit of the Art of Living, devoted to the strategies of aesthetic self-creation in late nineteenth-century literature and thinking, with references to contemporary philosophical scene (R. Shusterman). Her current research focuses on ecocriticism, environmental aesthetics, pragmatistically oriented somaesthetics and post-secularism.

25.Jacek Dobrowolski, Atheology of Animality As Emancipation Tool of Modern Humanity

 

Abstract: Diverse concepts of animality has played an important role within the processes of modern secularisation and its anti-theological turn in the modern making of “man”. By turning the conceptual focus towards the animal side in human being, and specifically by describing and explaining “human nature” in terms of its “animal base”, modern philosophical anthropology has been increasingly changing into naturalistic, godless discourse of life, which is purely material, and of mind, which ceased to be a divine trace in humankind and instead became a feature shared with other animals, organic and bodily. This “becoming animal” of man in philosophical anthropology and the modern experience of animality seem correlated and reciprocally impactful. On the one hand “animal” has always been a concept constructed in relation to man and God; all three are elements of a human narrative about the universe and its meaning, all three are ideas that shape the experience. On the other hand it is the experience of animality in a more scientific sense that in recent times started to shape the ideas. The discovery of the “animal in man”, its increasing impact through evolution theory, that placed man in the purely natural, unpurposeful and random process of the biological, eventually led to denial of human supremacy and defined its superiority in terms of quantity rather than quality. To some extent the animalisation of the anthropological undermined and replaced its previous deification: zoology of human body defeated theology of human soul. One of the aspects of this shift has been the debate over “free will”. Since secularisation in its essence intended to emancipate humanity, it is interesting how animalisation can be related to emancipation; how becoming animal can liberate the human, and how diverse images and phantasms of the animal might determine human subjectification. The lecture refers to such thinkers as i.al. Montaigne, Hume, Rousseau, Sade, Nietzsche.

 

Author bio: Jacek Dobrowolski is a Ph. D. at the Philosophy Department of Warsaw University. He was born in Warsaw in 1976. His Ph.D. dissertation that concerned the phenomenon of stupidity, studied from diverse perspectives by employing philosophical strategies proposed by key postmodernist 20th Century thinkers, was published in 2007 under the title: “Philosophy of Folly”. Apart from philosophy J. Dobrowolski is keen on literature and travelling.

 

26.Rafal Zawisza, Not Being Angel. Manichaeism as an Obstacle to Thinking New Approach to Animality

 

Abstract: The influence of theCartesian heritage on reflection concerning animality is well known. My aimis to focus on another important historical moment namely institutionalization of the monastery life in the West with predomination of vita contemplativa upon vita activa. Despite the fact that above-mentioned Christian tradition is far from the coherence, it isn't hard to distinguish its Manichaean component whose characteristic feature is a grudge against matter, body and sexuality. This complex of ideas brought about practically manifested contempt of vital elements of human existence, so that its animal past which is still present and takes part in Zivilisationsprozess as well. Examples of many Western intellectuals like Machiavelli and Spinoza or - in recent times - Arendt and Blumenberg, show that only overcoming or leaving Christian anthropology with its Manichaean origin facilitates a cultivation of worldly wisdom and the art of living. It is based on much more conscious and therefore cunning attitude towards nature and evolutionary vision of culture reigned by the principle of gratitude. This principle leads to the presumption that only through theappreciation of animal'sdimension of human life - instead of monastic desire of becoming an angel - will be possibleto create new perspectives for renegotiation of the interconnections between what is animal and what is human.

 

Author bio: Rafal Zawisza - Graduated from College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities at the University of Warsaw (thesis: “Overcoming Melancholy: Hannah Arendt towards Nihilism”). Main interests: debates about modernity, philosophical anthropology, history of gnosis.

 

ANIMALS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY SESSION

 

27.Tadeusz Sławek, Unanimal Man. On What Remains Primeval in Our Formalized Humanity

 

Abstract: The essay tries to approach the question of whether it is conceivable to bring the human and animal to the common existential denominator, to open the possibility of thinking in terms of the "humanimal". Thus, what presents itself as the major problem is the issue of whether or not it is possible to, borrowing the phrase from an e.e.cummings' poem, "unanimal mankind". Various paths which one may take inspecting this territory open yet another vital interrogation concerning the degree to which the societal dimension of human culture and "formalized humanity" (Herman Melville's phrase) is enracinated in the presocietal, primeval, world the animal is representative of.

 

Author bio: Tadeusz Sławek, professor of comparative literature at the University of Silesia which, between 1996-2002, he was the rector of. Published books on Blake, Thoreau, Derrida, Trakl. With the bass player Bogdan Mizerski gives concerts of "essays on voice and double bass".

 

 

28. Nina Gladziuk, Protean Manifestations of Social Darwinism in American Political Thought

Abstract:In the Gilded Age America social Darwinist ideas reigned supreme. They took multiple anddiverse forms such as Darwinist individualism on the one handand Darwinist collectivism on the other. They led to scientifically based apotheosis of laissez-faire economy and at the same time to expansionist national imperialism. They advocated “survival of the fittest” in the context of an unfettered free market economy and minimal state and at the same time they championed state militarism, intervention in race betterment and “anglosaxonization” of a whole mankind. They represented biologically grounded patriarchalism and at the same time they allowed a discourse of equality of sexes as the conditionof civilizational advancement.

 

Author bio: Nina Gladziuk obtained her Ph.D in political philosophy at the University of Warsaw in 1992 and her post-doc degree (habilitacja) at the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2006 where she works continuously since 1990. She was a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, Warsaw School of Economics and Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski University. Currently she serves as professor at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. She was awarded Katarzyna Kalwinska Fellowship at the New School for Social Research (1986-88), Fulbright Research Senior Grant (1994-95) and Research Grant at the International Center for Jefferson Studies (2002). Her books include: Cóz po Grekach? Archetyp polis w twórczosci Hannah Arendt (Warszawa1992);Omphalos. Plec jako problem filozofii politycznej Greków (Warszawa 1997); Druga Babel. Antynomie siedemnastowiecznej angielskiej mysli politycznej (Warszawa 2005).

 

 

29.Agnieszka Kowalczyk, Animality and Nature in Marx Thought – Beyond Modern Assumptions

Abstract: This paper engages in both theoretical and practical aspects of Marx writings to examine possibility of “radical left posthumanism” (Papadopoulos 2010). Particularly, the aim is to discuss the viability of Marxist notions through the careful reading of the work of Karl Marx in the posthumanist frame of reference (Rossini 2006). Many of the categories in Marx writings, are defined in terms of animal-human dichotomy. In this regard Marx work is imbued with strong modernist overtones. By taking into consideration a non-anthropocentric perspective, possibilities of transgressing “species imperialism” (Wilde 2000: 38) of Marx will be explored. Although we observe increasing number of attempts at “greening” Marx (Benton 1996), using Marx concepts in regard to animals and nature is still perceived as unfounded. It will be claimed that, by reconfiguring human-animal relations, concepts like “trans-species encounter value” (Haraway 2008: 46) can inform our struggle against capitalism. First, essential features of the Nature in the Marxian perspective will be pointed out. Two views on Nature and animality in Marx writings will be contrasted in regard to explore differences between Marx approach to those issues presented in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Capital. Then, drawing upon recent investigations on the moral status of animals especially in Capital (Benton 1993, Benton 1996, Wilde 2000), and its environmental readings (Burkett 1999, Foster 2000), dialectical relation between human and non-human will be shown. The paper’s conclusion addresses pros and cons of Marx view on metabolic rift in relation to conceptualization of animality.

 

Author bio: Agnieszka Kowalczyk is a PhD Student at the Philosophy Institute in Poznan, Poland. She is the editor of Theoretical Practice philosophical review praktykateoretyczna.pl). Her theoretical interests include Philosophy of Science, Critical Animal Studies, Materialist Feminism, Ecofeminism, Marxist Philosophy. Co-translator of the Polish translation of Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri and Rebel cities by David Harvey.

 

 

29.Pawel Miech, Being a Rat vs Identifying With a Rat – a Psychoanalytic Inquiry Into Human-Animal Divide

Abstract: When one reads Freud's case studies closely one is tempted to say that unconscious expresses itself through an identification with animals. Animals are not just a pretext for symptoms but they seem to play crucial role in unconscious of Freud’s patients. A sample of this curious unconscious affinity with animals is provided by Ratman’s case, who, as Freud claims, “found a living likeness of himself in the rat". In my presentation I would like to reflect on general conditions of this curious difference between “being an animal” and “identifying with an animal”, which seems to be disclosed in Ratman’s case. What exactly manifests itself in this curious identification with an animal? What makes the difference between “being an animal” and “identifying with an animal”? Is id an animal, or is id just an effect of id-entification with an animal? The presence of difference itself may appear problematic. Assertion of a difference between “being an animal” and “identifying with an animal” would presuppose that “identifying with” cannot be reduced to being, but rather includes a reflection of being. A subject who identifies with an animal, on that reading, would be one who reflects or mirrors the being of an animal. In this case we are just one step from arguing that identifying with an animal presupposes some distorting medium, some tainted mirror which reflects pure being of a real animal. What would this medium be? Perhaps language. This reading would certainly satisfy Jacques Lacan. Lacan would probably argue that Ratman identifies with an animal through a signifier of an animal, and this act of identification send its tectonic waves through symbolic chain. As Freud put it “rat (…) had acquired a series of symbolic meanings, to which, during the period which followed, fresh ones were continually added". But is Lacan’s reading satisfying? In what other, non-Lacanian, registers can we investigate the distinction between “being an animal” and “identifying with an animal”? Should “identifying with an animal” be conceived as something characteristic of humans, an effect of our ability to reflect on ourselves, something which gives humans exceptional place in nature? Should we assume that we are better than rats because we can recognize ourselves in rats while rats cannot recognize themselves in us? An inquiry into this curious difference gives a pretext to think about the human-animal divide from some unexpected perspectives..

 

Author bio: Pawel Miech holds an MA in Sociology and an MA in Philosophy from the Interdepartmental Individual Studies in the Humanities (MISH) at the University of Silesia in Katowice. His planned PhD dissertation, Death Drive after the Death of Man, is supervised by prof. Szymon Wróbel. The work involves research into the complex interrelations between the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive and different contexts, implications and variations of the idea of the death of man.

 

 

 

31.Mateusz Janik, People and Other Political Animals – Do We Need Dehumanization of Politics?

 

Abstract: I want to discusspolitical and imaginary content of the notion of “animal”. In order to make this content visible I want to draw a direct link between the posthumanist critique and Marx's concept politics mediated in the class struggle. The main argument goes as follows: 1. The political dimension of class struggle is based on the assumption that stakes and forms ofthe political field are determined - in the last instance-by its non-political conditions. For Marx this non-political element was economy in general and social relationships of production in particular. 2. Etienne Balibar who has argued that the main effect of the shift made by Marx (i.e. from politics to “non-politics”)is that the transformation of the material conditions of existence becomes the main stake of politics as such. 3. Transformation of social means requires new perspective that political practice may be conducted in non-political (i.e. experienced as natural) environment according to the logic of this environment. This means that the politics as such is transformed by “non-politics” in the same degree as “non-politics” is transformed by politics.At first, what I want to show is that following this line of argumentation one arrives not only to the problem of “politicization of nature” but also to naturalization of politics. The autonomy of politics always requires critical approach:who's interest is secured by drawing the frontier of the autonomous field of politics in such and such way? Second thesis of my speech is that the main risk that comes with combination of the non-politics and politics is an imaginary projection. This may be the case in reference to the posthumanist perspective which is always at risk of falling under the imaginary logic - The link between human and non-human would be based in such situation on the image and function played by non-human beings and objects within the traditional humanist perspective. The problem of the imaginary representation will bring us to the final point of my speech: a double question that accompanies posthumanist critique as such. First part of the question is: “in what way one is supposed to show that what is non-human is political without totalisation of the anthropocentric idea of politics”? Second part has quasi-transcendental character which sets the conditions for the post-humanist perspective as such: “In what way what is human is always already non-human?”

 

Author bio: Mateusz Janik is philosopher and PhD student (Graduate School for Social Sciences/Polish Academy of Sciences), working in the field of social ontology, ethics, political and social theory. He is an author and translator of various articles devoted to Spinoza, Louis Althusser and contemporary materialism and co-author of Spinoza Beyond Philosophy book. He is member of editorial board of Recykling Idei Journal. He collaborates with Althusser Studies Journal "Decalages".