Szymon Wróbel - Intellectual motivation to undertake the subject animality

At the opening of our conference I would like to expound the reasons why we have decided to make the effort to spend three days discussing animality in culture, science and daily life. My diagnosis today differs somehow from the one worked out with Professor Jerzy Axer over a year ago in the invitation to the conference. We are now fully aware of the variety of questions to be raised in the forthcoming presentations and what awaits us on each day of the conference. 

 I will therefore try to outline the cognitive interests, intellectual motivations, ethical reasons and practical effects that substantiate our meeting:

 First of all, the main axis of our conference is the recognition of yet another turn in the humanities. After linguistic turn (30s to 70s) and pictorial turn (70s to 90s), what comes up next in the humanities and social sciences is what we only tentatively begin to refer to as the animal turn. I presume our main effort here is to determine what precisely is animal turn and what might be its further developments. Specifically, can we provide this turn with a meaning? Are we the lucky ones who can name and diagnose their times and consciously participate in the events to follow?

I am long conscious of a need to come up with a new philosophy of nature in which nature is not an externality subjugated and tamed by man, but an equal partner in a debate, so to speak, endowed with the gift of speech. If we are privileged to hear it, we are also capable of providing it with the ways to be heard aloud? Our section on THE HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIP will presumably follow this direction, that is, explore the conditions of co-existence of humans and animals, animals and angels, and angels and monsters alike. Perhaps the main question that will organize our work in this respect is whether discourse ethics should now include entities that initially seemed mute and were excluded from the discussion.

Equally so, I am convinced we need to establish a new ethic. And by saying so I don’t mean we only need to expand the concept of a moral subject to include animals, nor that we need to establish legal basis for protecting animal rights. Even if the former and the later are of practical importance and of political interest I think that what really awaits us here is the revision of the project of ethics as such and the task of answering the question of non-anthropocentric ethics. Jürgen Habermas once called on us to replace the paradigm of subject centered reason with the paradigm of communication centered reason. In this sense, we would like to consider the possibility of establishing a new ethic of life that would strive not so much to protect life, which would probably result in a new biopolitical regime, as it would strive to think over the principles of co-existence and establish what is really common to all of the living. We hope to see THE ANIMAL ETHICS follow this direction.

Since in the vast majority we are the representatives of the humanities, not natural science, we would like to consider the presence of animals in literature and philosophy, from Flaubert after Gombrowicz and from Thomas Aquinas to the Jean-Paul Sartre, to paraphrase the title of Miroslaw Loba’s presentation featured in our conference. The presence of animals in literature and philosophy is permanent, indelible and inescapable. There are animals of Nietzsche - a donkey, a camel, a lion. There are animals of Kafka – a mole, a worm, a mouse, and a butterfly. Perhaps every writer and every philosopher brings to existence their own animals. Kafka-Gnostic discovered by Harold Bloom joins Kafka-Taoist discovered by Elias Canetti. Kafka-mole is thus complemented with the figure of Kafka-butterfly. However, how should we understand the presence of animals in literature? Are they just metaphors of human characters, or do they reveal something more profound, a direction of human desires, or in particular, a fantasy of transgressing humanity? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote ecstatically: "We think and write for animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else. The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other"” . But what does it exactly mean to "become animal so that the animal also becomes something else"? What does the difference mean, to paraphrase this time the title of Paweł Miech’s presentation: being a rat and identifying with a rat? I believe the above questions shall accompany us when discussing the section on visual arts ANIMALS IN ART AND CULTURE.

Andrew Linzey in his 1994 book Animal Theology instigated a large debate with one anxious question : what in fact is theology if it is developed only thanks to a moral neglect of a group of creatures constituting vast majority in the world of living organisms? Indeed. The question however, is whether the modern animal rights movement needs theology at all? And if so: what sort of theology is in demand? What is the place of animals in the hierarchy of God's creation? The question is not limited to: whether the animals or the animal rights movement needs theology, but what theology needs animals? We hope to see ANIMALS, RELIGION AND THEOLOGY section address these difficult and important issues and outline possible answers.

At the end of our conference we shall challenge probably the most important and most difficult question: animal policy. The presence or rather the absence of animals in politics, political and economic abuse of animals, and their widespread fetishization are rather obvious part of our biopolitical reality. However, Nicole Shukin pervasively notices in her Animal Capital  that while theorists of biopower (Foucault and Agamben) have interrogated the increasingly total subsumption of the social and biological life of the anthropos to market logics, little attention has been given to what Shukin calls “animal capital”. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida remarks, the power to reduce humans to the bare life of their species body arguably presupposes the prior power to suspend other species in a state of exception within which they can be noncriminally put to death . For this reason, it is not enough to theorize biopower in relation to human life alone and that the reproductive lives and labors of other species also become a matter of biopolitical calculation. Peter Sloterdijk writes that today life may depend only on itself. However, we have to ask: what is the life, which depends only on itself? Is there a form of the biophilia? What is a critical project related to this life? Is it just a satirical act as suggested by Sloterdijk? We hope ANIMALS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY section will provide the basis for a closing discussion.

We raise no claims to completeness nor we intend to fully explore the issues at hand, we only claim that animality as such has been overlooked far too long and can no longer escape our thinking.

Due to a large number of interesting proposals, we decided to extend the conference to three days. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for sending the abstracts and apologize for not being able to include them all. 

In particular, I wish we were able to include into our discussion many interesting papers of the students. Still, we hope the authors will engage in a discussion and share with us their insights. You are also invited to submit your texts for publication in a post-conference volume.

I am most thankful to our foreign guests. The fact that so many of you were willing to make the effort and in some cases flew across the ocean to join the conference is uplifting and proves that both human motivation to share the ideas at meetings as this one is still alive and an open exchange of ideas still in demand. 

Many thanks to our distinguished guests professors Mary Trachsel, Kathleen Perry Long, Clair Linzey, Ewa Mazierska, Kenneth Shapiro, Krzysztof Ziarek and as well as our distinguished guests from Poland Monika Bakke, Ewa Domanska, Jan Hartman, Mirosław Loba, Tadeusz Sławek. 

Many thanks to my colleagues from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies for their presence and support in preparation of the conference. Let me also thank my students for their help with the organization of the conference and the extraordinary inspiration they were the source of. Special thanks go to Paweł Miech who prepared the conference web page. I am particularly grateful to professor Jerzy Axer whose charismatic personality, spontaneous creativity and inexhaustible energy accompanied me ever since hatching the idea of our meeting.

Szymon Wróbel