Derrida Animal Ethics, is a study of “the animal question" in the works of French Philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and his relevance for the newly emerging and diverse field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS), Religious Studies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities more generally. Drawing on Derrida’s longstanding engagement with human-animal relations, in such texts as The Animal That Therefore I Am, “Violence Against Animals,” and his final seminars The Beast and the Sovereign, this thesis centers on his analyses of sovereignty, singularity, death, and responsibility, treating each of these concepts in a thesis chapter, and examining the potential of each for a rethinking of “animality” in discourses on ethics and human-animal relations.

This thesis examines the writings of Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee in order to explore pressing issues that have emerged in literary, philosophical, and theoretical approaches to animal studies. These include animals as disputed objects in claims to territorial, national, and cultural belonging; and the use of animality to manage cultural difference and mobilize identity-based violence. I investigate the roles that hierarchical discourses of species, and the rhetorics of animality that mobilize them, play in cultural and social inscription, cross-cultural conflict, and cultures of violence in the writing of J.M. Coetzee. My dissertation provides historical, material, and cultural context and specificity to the entanglements of race, gender, and culture with the rhetoric and hermeneutics of species, by demonstrating how colonial, Enlightenment, and traditional humanist thought mobilizes speciesism for the cultural work of violence. Intervening in assumptions about the irreconcilability of animal- and human-endorsing approaches to animal studies, I demonstrate that human and non-human animals alike are mutually implicated in conceptual economies that employ animality as a trope; and in the material logistics that mobilize discourses that surround nonhuman animals to do violence to human and nonhuman animals. Coetzee embeds questions about what nonhuman animals mean, or more precisely are made to mean, firmly within the broader politics of interpreting and recognizing alterity, regardless of species, while asking how animals might have a place—in our worlds, in our thought, and in our interventionist strategies—as more than means to human ends. Coetzee’s fictional and critical engagements with nonhuman animals, I argue, comprise a major reassessment of the codes of, and struggles concerning, human and nonhuman animal correspondence and difference. Highlighting the complex interrelations between the cross-cultural violence that mobilizes the rhetoric of species and its attendant violations of nonhuman animal life, Coetzee challenges speciesist schemata that give nonhuman animals symbolic and material currency by imagining how we might read across species differently, in ways that affirm, rather than master, nonhuman animal life. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-04 16:52:47.618

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl / This dissertation addresses the first and most fundamental question in environmental philosophy: how should we conceive of the human place within nature? The title derives from the moment in Descartes’ second meditation when he considers what he believed himself formerly to be: a rational animal. Inquiring into what animality and rationality are would send him down a slippery slope, and he decides that he does not have the time to waste on such questions. Prioritizing the rational over the empirical, the metaphysical distinctions that follow precipitate a pivotal episode in the rise of modern science and technology: a disembodied intellect is freed to discover and manipulate the laws and forces at work in nature, conceived mechanistically. While generating many positive advances, for instance in anatomy and medicine, that break with Aristotelian ontological suppositions also marks the beginning of centuries of violence toward the animal within, not to mention the animals, or animal-machines, without. In response, many contemporary environmental thinkers swing the metaphysical pendulum in the opposite direction. Troubled by the consequences of an implicit mind-body dualism, they assume some rendition of its early modern antithesis, Spinozist ontological monism. God, or Nature is understood as comprising a single substance, with all other beings conceived as modifications of that substance. Such ontological humbling is supposed to produce an ethical humility, putting the human back in its place as one humbled part of the larger whole. Our concern is that without important qualifications, such ontological humbling merely provides another justification for man’s modern conquest of nature, in accordance with instrumentalizing, human-centered ends. If the human is conceived as merely one more species among others, we boast an equal right to act in accordance with the powers of our own natures. In response, we develop a thesis that builds from insights in the works of Maurice Merleau- Ponty. We argue that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is characterized by an “archeological,” or origin-directed orientation, according to which he eventually theorizes a phenomenological analogue to Spinoza’s ontological monism: his instigating insight is that both the perceiver, or the subject, and the perceived, or the object, derive from a common ontological fabric. Beginning from insights indicative of a contrary, but complimentary orientation present in Merleau-Ponty’s early works, we begin to construct a “developmental” account to balance out his increasingly “archeological” path, introducing qualifications that orient his thought in an ethical direction. The integrative ethical ideal that we propose entails a developmental, rather than regressive “descent” of the animal slope (le versant animal), without undermining or denying ethical capacities and responsibilities that are specifically human. Drawing from the works of Schelling’s middle period to which Merleau-Ponty turns in his late lectures on Nature, we argue that we must acknowledge tendencies toward violence and domination present within nature itself—and, consequently, present within us, as part of nature—such that becoming fully human would demand the overcoming of those tendencies in the service of a higher ethical ideal. Taking a cue from Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, we propose an integrative ideal of self-giving love. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

In this work I investigate the role of emotion in the moral philosophies of Immanuel Kant and T.H. Green. Noting Kant's reputation as a rationalist holding a predominately negative view toward emotions, I studied the works of Kant with this two-fold question in mind: Why did Kant allegedly find emotions as hindrances to moral actions, and what exactly would such a view entail if it were indeed his perspective? Based on Kant's writings regarding duties to others in Doctrine of Virtues, I show that in his discussion on sympathetic actions there appears to be a reliance on emotions in the construction of a moral response to another's fate. I place Kant's theory in juxtaposition with T.H. Green's moral philosophy because Green, a lesser-known British Idealist, is commonly presented as a theorist within the Kantian tradition. However, working exclusively with Green's major work, Prolegomena to Ethics, there are notable differences between Kant and Green. Green does not hold a negative view of emotions as Kant did, and more fundamentally, the distinction between Kant and Green stems from their differing perspectives of human nature. Whereas Kant presented human nature as comprised of two coexisting, and conflicting, natures - the animal nature and the moral nature - Green dissolved this dualism by making reason that which unifies the human being's animal nature and moral nature. Hence, it is my purpose to study Green's moral philosophy against the backdrop of Kant's moral theory, with particular focus on the role of emotions and sympathy in human behavior. In this comparative analysis, I show how Green's theory, although heavily indebted to Kant, works to correct some problematic issues that arise from Kant's denigration of emotions inherent in his dualism. Furthermore, in this discussion that begins as an examination of two views on the relationship between emotions and morality, one is pressed to entertain a deeper question concerning how these thinkers arrived at their views of human nature. This progression is indeed appropriate, at least when considering Kant and Green, because their regard for emotions is directly dependent upon their views of human nature as distinct from animal nature. In the end, it is suggested that Green's theory not only serves to correct Kant's work, but by rectifying Kant's problematic dualistic view of human nature, Green created a philosophy all his own that may more accurately represent the true nature of humankind.

This essay constitutes an attempt to expose, with reference to contemporary animal research, the limits of Martin Heidegger’s concept of the being of animality in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929/30) and to propose some possible ways to think, within the philosophical style of this particular work, the being of those animals that most distinctly transcends Heidegger’s concept. The essay seeks to address the following question: Do the results of contemporary animal research expose ways of being within animality that withdrawal from Heidegger’s concept of the being of animality in general, and if so, how should we think these new ways of animal being? The motivation to ask this question, I argue, are immanent to Heidegger’s thinking in at least three ways: 1) Because of his standpoint that philosophy cannot, in any meaningful way, create an ontological concept of animality without an orientation towards the results of the positive sciences; 2) Because of the unfinished and tentative character of Heidegger’s analysis, a character that is such that it should be seen, according to Heidegger himself, as an essential point of departure for further thinking; 3) Because of Heidegger’s view that the being of the animal are such that it involves the withdrawal of this very being from any originary access, a withdrawal that necessitates an infinite return to the question concerning the being of the animal. The essay wants to be a continuation of lines that are present in Heidegger’s open-ended thought on this theme rather than to be an external critique that approach the text, which is most often the case, as a closed point of view which we are forced to affirm or reject. Motivated by these immanent reasons, I attempt to set up a dialogue between Heidegger’s way of thinking the animal and that scientific evidence that has become available since Heidegger wrote his text in the late 20s’. The paradigmatic change in the scientific view of animals that constitute this time period has philosophical consequences, I argue, and I attempt to flesh them out as follows: Contemporary animal research motivates the ontological conclusion that many species withdrawal from the meaning of Heidegger’s concept of the animal in general, and thereby necessitates a philosophical response to this, namely to create – at least as a first step toward a full-blown philosophical and ontological recognition of the differentiated animality of animals – a new concept of the being of those particular animals who most clearly show themselves, both in the new scientific evidence and to our phenomenological experience, as being different to that Heidegger claim them to be. I suggest, with reference to Heidegger’s thesis of the animal as ”poor in world”, that the being of these animals is better understood as otherworldly worlds within the world of human world forming. The being of these animals are to be seen as otherworldly worlds insofar they are what they seem to be, namely alien subject’s that have some sort of access to being, an access that differs from the openness of human Dasein in some profound and ungraspable sense, but that nonetheless suggests itself in the results of contemporary research. In this way I seek to sketch out a thought that let the otherness of these animals shine forth in a radicalized manner from out of their very nearness to the human way of being. The ontological recognition of these beings, I can thus conclude, enrich our world with their woundrous presence while at the same time exposing, with novel acuteness, the finitude of this world. Uttermost, I propose in an forward-looking reflection, these animals turn us toward the discovery of that world that we share with them, here named as the elemental world, as an crucial question for philosophy today and as a theme for further research.

Heidegger’s 1929lectures published under the title The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:World, Finitude, Solitude inquire about the animality of the animal. Their intentionis to elucidate the aspect in which the peculiarity of life resides and that, eludingevery attempt of getting caught under mechanistic or biological interpretations,Heidegger finds in what he names poverty”. In this context, this paper intendsto investigate the link between this poverty, the one that characterizes the animalin 1929, and the consideration of the peculiarity of man in the same terms since1945. Through this investigation, our goal will be to make explicit the ontologicalbond between humanity, animality and corporealness present in men. / El curso dictado por Heidegger en 1929 y publicado con el título Los conceptos fundamentales de la metafísica. Mundo, finitud y soledad se pregunta por la animalidad del animal. Su intención es elucidar aquel aspecto en que reside lo propio de la vida y que, sustrayéndose a todo intento de captura bajo interpretaciones mecanicistas o biologicistas, Heidegger encuentra en lo que denomina con la expresión pobreza”. En este contexto, el presente artículo se propone indagar en el vínculo entre esta pobreza con la que el animal es caracterizado en 1929 y la consideración de lo peculiar del hombre en los mismos términos a partir de 1945. Mediante dicha indagación nuestro objetivo será explicitar el vínculo ontológico entre humanidad, animalidad y corporalidad presente en el hombre.

Prenant pour point de départ l’omniprésence de l’animal dans l’art actuel, notre recherche s’attache à comprendre comment la question de l’altérité, souvent explicite dans le discours des artistes contemporains qui utilisent le thème de l’animal, se pose à travers ce dernier. En effet depuis le romantisme et suite à une crise propre à la modernité, l’homme, accablé par une mélancolie et la nostalgie de l’Harmonie et de l’Unité perdue, cherche à combler le fossé qui le sépare de « l’absolu ». C’est dans cette tentative de réconciliation que l’animal en tant qu’altérité prend une place importante. Ainsi dès le milieu du XVIIIe siècle l’attention de l’homme européen se tourne vers ces autres qui sont les « sauvages », les enfants et les animaux. Un nouveau type de rapport entre l’homme et l’animal s’instaure alors. Nous étudions ce changement de rapport en commençant avec Goya et sa descente aux enfers qui interroge la vérité de l’homme. Ensuite nous cherchons à comprendre comment se manifeste l’attrait pour l’« exotisme » chez les romantiques, peu à peu remplacé par la question de l’« éthique », pour enfin aboutir à une certaine forme d’ « animalisme ». / By taking into account the omnipresence of the animal in present art as a point of departure, our research seeks to conceive how the question of otherness, often explicitly articulated in the discourse of those contemporary artists who use the animal theme, has been put forward through it. In effect, since the romanticism and its successors have posed a real crisis to the modernity, the man, overwhelmed by melancholy and nostalgia of the past harmony and its lost unity, seeks to bridge the gap that separates her from the “Absolute.” It is in this endeavour of reconciliation that the animal as otherness holds an important position. Since the eighteenth century, the attention of the European man has turned to these forms of “others,” as the “wild,” the children and the animals. Then a new kind of relation has been developed between the Man and the Animal. Here we study this change of relation, inaugurated by Goya, and its descent into hell that queries the truth about Man. Afterwards we seek to understand how the attraction of “exoticism” among the romantics has been manifested, while gradually replaced by the question of “ethics,” that finally lead to a certain form of “animalism.”

This project attempts to bridge conversations between the predominantly Western canon of animal studies and the frequently humanist approach to postcolonial African studies. Drawing on these sometimes incompatible fields, this thesis proposes two premises that emerge from close readings of African cultural texts. First, “Africa” as a discursive construct has long been associated with animals, animality, and the category of the nonhuman, evident in, to give some examples, the current touristic promotion across the globe of African wildlife as an essential part of its continental identity, local and global anxieties over zoonotic transmissions of disease, and the history of race science’s preoccupation with animalizing black and indigenous African bodies. My second premise suggests that in postcolonial and especially African contexts ostensibly “human” concerns are inextricably tied to both the categorical limitations imposed by imperial paradigms of animalization and the precarious existence of nonhuman animals themselves, concern for whom is often occluded in anthropocentric postcolonial discourse. In my dissertation, I examine the role that texts play in directing affective relations of concern locally and globally, reading fictional texts as well as news media, conservation literature, and tourist advertisements. Through these works I examine the complex and often cantankerous politics of cultivating interspecies concern in postcolonial contexts, ranging from the globalized commodification of African wildlife and the dubious international policies that ostensibly protect it, the geography of the North American safari park, the animalization of queer bodies by African state leaders, textual representations of interspecies intimacy, and accounts of the Rwandan genocide. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis responds to the question of how we show concern for animals in postcolonial, globalized, and postconflict worlds. Drawing on the example of multiple texts in African literature, film, and other media, it explores how Africa itself has long been construed in the global imagination as a zone associated with animality. This association appears in texts produced within the West and Africa whose accounts of the continent imagine it to be outside the realm of human ethical concern. Demonstrating how exclusive human ethical concern is for African lives, both human and animal, this thesis argues for an ethics of concern that does not revolve around exclusively the human in postcolonial African studies.

Cette étude cherche à établir un rapport entre les nombreuses références positives à l’animal présentes dans le corpus cynique et une certaine conception de l’activité philosophique mise de l’avant par ces philosophes et, plus particulièrement, incarnée par la figure de Diogène de Sinope. Comme il le sera brièvement montré dans la première partie, l’animal est un concept pratiquement absent de la pensée grecque qui tend à penser l’unité du vivant. Il ne peut faire son apparition que dans un contexte moral afin de fonder les normes de l’agir proprement humain, et dans ce contexte, les références positives à l’animal sont plutôt rares. La position des philosophes cyniques, qui exhortent fréquemment les hommes à s’inspirer des animaux afin d’atteindre la vertu, est donc, à cet égard, excessivement singulière. Comment interpréter ce renversement de perspective où l’homme ne semble plus occuper la position intermédiaire entre les immortels et les bêtes? En examinant les thèses de Thierry Gonthier, d’Ovide Florès-Junior et de Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé sur la question, la deuxième partie de cette étude nous mettra sur la voie de la rhétorique d’exhortation qui, nous le verrons, est constitutive même de la pratique philosophique cynique. Il reste cependant à déterminer à quoi, plus précisément, les philosophes cyniques exhortent leurs concitoyens et, ce qui est pour cette étude le nœud du problème, dans quelle mesure la figure de l’animal est-elle susceptible de nous renseigner. La troisième partie de cette étude portera ainsi sur l’idéal de sagesse cynique et sur la figure emblématique du mouvement, le chien. Nous tâcherons alors de montrer, en prolongeant les lectures qu’en ont faites Jean-Marie Meilland, D. Deleule et Peter Sloterdijk, que la valorisation de l’animal chez les cyniques ne doit pas être comprise comme un vil appel à la régression en l’animalité mais plutôt comme la promotion d’une singulière conception de l’activité philosophique. / This study tries to make a connection between the numerous positives references to animals in the cynic corpus and a certain conception of the philosophical activity as suggested by the Cynics and more precisely embodied by Diogenes of Sinope. As shown in the first section, the concept of the animal is practically absent in the classic Greek philosophy. It can only appear in a moral context which tries to establish the ethics and norms of human acts and in this context, positives reference to animals are rare. The Cynic’s position-- exhorting their fellow citizens to mimic animals as a means to acquiring virtue-- is in this regard exceptionally unusual. How do we interpret this radical change of perspective in which man seems to no longer occupy the intermediate position between gods and animals ? Following the theses of Thierry Gonthier, Olimar Florès-Junior and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, the second section leads us on the path of the rhethoric of exhortation that is, an essential element of the Cynic’s practice. What actions the Cynic’s exhort their fellow citizens to ? And how the figure of the animal is able to exemplifies it? The third section discusses the cynic’s ideal of wisdom and their emblematic figure, the dog. We will finally demonstrate with the help of studies by Jean-Marie Meilland, D. Deleule et Peter Sloterdijk that the valorisation of the animal in the Cynic’s perspective must not be understood as a vile regression to animality but as a legitimate activity in and of itself.

À une époque qui se concentre sur l’avenir de l’humanité, Maupassant s’intéresse aux origines. Pour lui, l’homme est un « animal humain » en qui coexistent le moderne et l’archaïque. C’est à ce regard original que nous invite son œuvre, qui travaille à montrer le primitif dans et non contre le civilisé. En quoi le primitif est-il une figure dérangeante ? En quoi le rapport à la nature et au corps est-il primitif ? Ici, le rapport à la nature, le corps, la sexualité, l’animalité, la bêtise sont traités comme des composantes irréductibles de l’humain. Mais la nature et le corps sont fondamentalement ambivalents. La figure du primitif, par son inscription dans la matière, est donc un miroir troublant tendu à l’homme du XIXe siècle. Ainsi définie, la notion de primitif fonctionne, si l’on peut dire, comme un pavé dans la mare, qui éclabousse la notion de civilisation et ses valeurs. Dénonçant la société comme dénaturée, Maupassant en vient à mettre en question la définition même de la civilisation et à mettre en cause l’opposition traditionnelle entre sauvage et civilisé. L’acception anthropologique de la notion de primitif, et plus particulièrement le principe de « participation », jettent a posteriori un éclairage singulier sur l’œuvre. C’est l’angle d’attaque de la dernière partie. Parce qu’elle échappe au normatif, la figure du primitif met à mal ce qui, dans la société, a valeur de cadre, de loi. Aussi assiste-t-on chez Maupassant au brouillage des différenciations sexuelle, sociale et morale, ainsi qu’au brouillage des frontières entre folie et raison, et entre fantastique et réaliste. De cet ébranlement des repères participe, enfin, une écriture elle-même primitive. / At a time when the future of humanity was all that mattered, Maupassant focused on the origins. For him man is a “human animal” combining elements of both modern and archaic behaviour. This original approach is the one Maupassant wants us to adopt with regard to his work, in which he endeavours to reveal the primitive aspect of man within his civilized refinement and not in opposition to it. In what way is the primitive an element which is disturbing? How does Maupassant portray the relationship between nature and the human body as primitive? He describes nature, the body, sexuality, animality and stupidity as irreducible components of man. However, nature and the human body are fundamentally ambivalent. The primitive element holds up a disturbing mirror image to the 19th century man. As such, it is tantamount to setting the cat among the pigeons, thereby tarnishing the notion of civilized man and his values. By condemning society as unnatural, Maupassant challenges the actual definition of civilized behaviour, and questions the traditional opposition between the civilized and the uncivilized. The anthropological acceptance of the concept of primitive, and in particular the principle of “participation”, in hindsight throws a different light on Maupassant’s works. This is the angle adopted in the last section. Because it defies norms, the notion of primitive refutes what constitutes the framework and laws of society. Hence Maupassant’s works blur the distinctions between social, sexual and moral behaviour, as well as those between madness and reason, between fantasy and realism. Lastly Maupassant contributes to this breakdown of bearings with his primitive style of writing