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Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human-animal relations. Throughout such important books as L'Animalité (1996), Les Origines animales de la culture (2001) and L'Animal singulier (2004), he offers a fierce critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human-animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
List of contents
General Introduction: Philosophical Ethology Preface: A Field Philosopher with a Certain Taste for Fish, and Who Does Not Mistake his Hat for an Ethology Introduction: Dominique Lestel 1. The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel 2. Mirror Effects 3. Hybrid Communities 4. Toward an Ethnography of Animal Worlds 5. Dissolving Nature in Culture: Some Philosophical Stakes of the Question of Animal Cultures 6. The Question of the Animal Subject: Thoughts on the Fourth Wound to Human Narcissism 7. The Friends of My Friends 8. Epistemological Interlude 9. The Carnivore's Ethics 10. The Infinite Debt of the Human Towards the Animal 11. The Animal Outside the Text: An Interview with Dominique Lestel
About the author
Matthew Chrulew is ARC DECRA Research Fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia.
Jeffrey Bussolini is Associate Professor of Sociology-Anthropology at City University of New York, USA.
Brett Buchanan is Director of the School of the Environment, Laurentian University, Canada.
Summary
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the writings of French philosopher Dominique Lestel. This volume features translated excerpts from each of Lestel’s books, an interview with Lestel, and an expository essay by Matthew Chrulew. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
