Wielogłos nr 1 (35) 2018

2018

Publication date: 12.06.2018

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

Editorial team

Scientific Issue Editor Jakub Koryl

Editor-in-Chief Tomasz Kunz

Secretary Paweł Bukowiec

Issue content

Intelektualna i akademicka tożsamość animal studies. Wprowadzenie

Jakub Koryl

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 1 - 13

Intellectual and Academic Identity of Animal Studies: An Introduction

This article aims at a preliminary reflection upon the question of what animal studies are, in terms of their somewhat unprecedented subject matter and nomadic academic status. Consequently, it provides neither a history of animal studies nor a survey of recent trends or academic or political achievements. The article asks four questions about the intellectual assumptions and foundations of animal studies, namely, about the domains, lines, instruments and purposes of thought of this discipline. All this leads to a phenomenological description of a thinking which is finally capable of discovering and considering the animality of non-human animals on its own terms, instead of regarding it only as an aspect of humanity, its counterpart or antithesis. The article argues that right up until Husserl and Heidegger, different variants of Western metaphysics and the fixed confines of fields of academic studies constantly prevented thinking from grasping the essentially diversified animalities. Therefore also animal studies would have been nothing but an unfeasible project. Nowadays, regardless of their socio-

-political implications and journalistic appeal, animal studies, being first and foremost a matter of thinking, remain an extremely challenging task.

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Próba pasienia kotów, czyli intelektualny krajobraz animal studies

Magdalena Dąbrowska

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 15 - 31

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.001.8815

Mapping animal studies I present three main approaches: studies of human-animal relationships, critical animal studies and research inspired by posthumanism. They analyze animals from various perspectives, using different theories and research methodologies. Despite major differences they are based on the assumption that animals should be treated as subjects. Moreover, academic research is supposed to influence the social practices and attitudes towards animals. The relationships between animal studies and activism and between academic research and activism are also analyzed.

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Teriantropie. Animal studies i (od)stawanie się człowiekiem

Barbara Kaszowska-Wandor

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 33 - 61

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.002.8816

Therianthropy: Animal Studies and (Un)becoming a Human

The subject of the paper is animal studies: a new field of research that is rapidly growing in popularity within the humanities. The author attempts to identify the fundamental assumptions that tacitly dominate the field. One such premise discussed in the article is the thesis that Judeo-Christian tradition underlies the oppressive model of human-animal relations. To support her arguments, the author provides an analysis of animal topics and ideas of animal nature held by humans that are found in ancient literature, first of all in the Bible and the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Further in the paper, these readings are confronted with a different neo-Spinosian paradigm of thinking about the human-animal relation that emerged in the second half of the

20th century. The leading motif of the analysis is the literary and philosophical concept of therianthropy (metamorphosis of a human into an animal), which is common to all the narrations discussed. The author highlights the continuity of the tradition of the monistic and pantheistic ways of thinking about nature. She interprets the highly syncretic paradigm of animal studies, which is now dominant, as a new form of such thinking. The article is also an attempt to formulate a different rationale for the studies that is founded on the delimiting theoretical proposition of Michael Lundblad and the critical revision of post-Deleuzian rhetoric.

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Podmiotowość zwierząt w sztuce

Dorota Łagodzka

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 63 - 82

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.003.8817

This article aims to give a theoretical overview of the problem of animal subjectivity in visual arts. The author presents the ways of understanding the concept of the animal subject in philosophy, animal psychology, ethology and law, pointing out its special character in the field of art. The text includes a succinct description of changes in the depiction of animals in the course of art history, explaining the connections between the subjectification and objectification of animals in art versus the real human-animal relations. The second half of the 20th century is recognized as the time when ani-

mal subjectivity in art changed the most dramatically, as artists began using real

animals as participants in their art and their dead body parts as materials. Looking into both the art with animal imagery and the one that uses real animals, the author notices connections between symbolism and instrumentalization which take animals away from becoming subjects. Using the zoocentric research perspective of Éric Baratay, Łagodzka analyzes animal subjectification and objectification in the process of art perception.

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Wymieranie gatunków. Reprezentacja i logika synekdochy

Jarosław Woźniak

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 83 - 104

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.004.8818

Extinction of Species: The Representation and Logics of Synecdoche

The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of extinction of species and its cultural representations. This will be done with reference to – among other contexts – Ursula K. Heise’s concepts of proxy logics or synecdoche (Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago 2016).

The emotional and affective impact of images of violence against animals and the visualization and narrativization of the process of their dying is extremely strong. This issue has been widely described in scientific literature. Typically, an individual death represented in cultural texts evokes emphatic reactions and provokes the reader’s or viewer’s ethical reflection. Extinction proves to be much more difficult to capture:

it is a superindividual process which exceeds imagination. Therefore, in cultural texts which depict this issue, a specific narrative model is often applied. As Heise noted,

it is based on the logics of proxy or synecdoche (a part represents a whole), which functions on at least two levels, whose hierarchy can be reversed/questioned: 1) a particular species substitutes the ecosystem or biodiversity (i.e. all the species); 2) an individual life substitutes a species. The author of this article analyzes the discourse on extinction, as it functions in cultural texts, as a phenomenon which is marked by referential emptiness and signifies a failure of imagination. It is argued that despite the development of scientific and factual knowledge about the phenomenon itself no narrations or representations which apply the logics of synecdoche are capable of capturing the phenomenon of extinction of species.

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Znaczenie perspektywizmu dla animal studies

Katarzyna Kleczkowska

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 105 - 125

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.005.8819

The aim of the article is to draw the attention of researchers from the field of animal studies to the anthropological concept of perspectivism described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on the example of indigenous peoples of South America. According to perspectivism, the way in which people perceive other elements of nature (mainly animals and spirits) differs from how these beings perceive themselves. While for a human being, an animal is an animal, for other species of animals, a human is a predator or prey, while the representatives of their own species are seen by them as people. In the first part of the text I present the most important assumptions of perspectivism, while in the second part I show how it can be used in animal studies. I pay special attention to the terms man and animal, showing that both are cultural concepts independent of their biological meaning.

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Od animal studies do animality studies

Michael Lundblad

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 127 - 139

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.006.8820

This article develops the concept of animality studies as distinguished from animal studies. The former focuses on the cultural study of animals and animality, while the latter explores representations of animality and related discourses with an emphasis on advocacy for nonhuman animals’ welfare. This kind of methodological approach opens up a new space for critical work and leads to new insights in fields such as history of sexuality, the question of interactions between species, and the construction of the homosexual in social and medical discourses at the end of nineteenth century.

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Przeciwko zasadzie podobieństwa. O książce Joanny Bednarek Życie, które mówi. Nowoczesna wspólnota i zwierzęta

Katarzyna Trzeciak

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 141 - 150

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.007.8821

The article is a review of Joanna Bednarek’s book Życie, które mówi. Nowoczesna wspólnota i zwierzęta [A Life that Speaks. The Modern Community and Animals]. In her book, Bednarek aims at redefining the question of animals (especially non-human beings) and their presence in the community of all animate beings. She goes against the utilitarian and abolitionist movements claiming that animals should have equal rights to human beings because of their similarity, either in their sensibility or in their non-questionable biological lives. Bednarek proposes a critical return to Spinosian ontology (through the lens of Deleuzian interpretation and biosemiotics), and argues for a community of beings based on their ability to speak (precisely, their ability to create signs). Linking some points from agential realism and new materialism with the Rancièrian concept of a community, Bednarek shows how we can go beyond the sameness principle and build our solidarity with non-human beings on their relation, not only with us, but with all the nonliving environment.

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Popatrz, to do ciebie. O książce Érica Barataya Zwierzęta w okopach. Zapomniane historie

Anna Marchewka

Wielogłos, Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości, 2018, pp. 151 - 157

https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.18.008.8822

This review presents Beasts of the Trenches. Forgotten Lives, the second book by Éric Baratay translated into Polish, which is in a way an extension of the first one, The Animal Point of View. Baratay’s innovative work takes an effort to write a history of animals entangled in mankind affairs from a non-human perspective. The French historian emphasizes that the lack of knowledge about animals’ history and suffering is significant and demands to be filled in. Thanks to Baratay’s works, the overlooked and ignored martyrdom and the role of animals in the First World War finally have a chance of being noticed and expressed.

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Słowa kluczowe: animal studies, animality, posthumanism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, animal studies, human–animal studies, critical animal studies, posthumanism, animal studies, animality studies, therianthropy, A Thousand Plateaus, pantheism, visual arts, animals in art, animal studies, anthrozoology, subject, animal subjectivity, species, extinction, representation, animal studies, synecdoche, perspectivism, animal studies, anthropology, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, animal, human, animal studies, animality studies, queer studies, homosexuality, sexuality, animal studies, animal, speech, community, posthumanism, animal studies, animal point of view, martyrdom of animals, the First World War

Issue 1 (35) 2018: Otwarcia: zwierzęta i ich zwierzęcości

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