Ruth Parkin-Gounelas
- Regarding Animals
, Regarding Humans
Update: 2015-03-11
Description
How should humans define themselves in relation to other animals? This familiar question has recently attracted new attention in several disciplines, with some radical results.
Jacques Derrida recreates a scene in which he stands naked before the gaze of a cat, experiencing both its ‘intolerable proximity’ and the ‘absolute alterity’ of its point of view. Animals, he argues, have been turned into a ‘theorem’, seen but not seeing. To be confronted by their gaze is to face up to ‘the abyssal limits of the human’.
The talk will explore ways in which disciplines from ethology and cognitive neuroscience to biopolitics and the philosophy of mind are unsettling definitions of human subjectivity which, since the Enlightenment, have excluded other animals. The effect of this work has been the increasing erosion of the distinctions humans have awarded themselves (speech, reason, having a relation to death, etc.).
Examples from literature (EmilyDickinson, Kafka, J.M. Coetzee) will be included to illustrate the tensions and dislocations produced by the encroachment of other animals, with their uncanny proximity and alterity, upon the human domain.
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas is Emeritus Professor, English Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and gave this talk for the Clare Hall Colloquium on 10 March 2015
Jacques Derrida recreates a scene in which he stands naked before the gaze of a cat, experiencing both its ‘intolerable proximity’ and the ‘absolute alterity’ of its point of view. Animals, he argues, have been turned into a ‘theorem’, seen but not seeing. To be confronted by their gaze is to face up to ‘the abyssal limits of the human’.
The talk will explore ways in which disciplines from ethology and cognitive neuroscience to biopolitics and the philosophy of mind are unsettling definitions of human subjectivity which, since the Enlightenment, have excluded other animals. The effect of this work has been the increasing erosion of the distinctions humans have awarded themselves (speech, reason, having a relation to death, etc.).
Examples from literature (EmilyDickinson, Kafka, J.M. Coetzee) will be included to illustrate the tensions and dislocations produced by the encroachment of other animals, with their uncanny proximity and alterity, upon the human domain.
Ruth Parkin-Gounelas is Emeritus Professor, English Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and gave this talk for the Clare Hall Colloquium on 10 March 2015
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