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.

My dissertation examines the correlations between the natural and supernatural, agency and authority, and meaning and language in the work of the modernist American writers H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Djuna Barnes. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, I argue that the different kinds of spectral and otherworldly figures that appear in these works – ghosts, the living dead, divinities, individuals who are also amorphous multiplicities – correlate to the modes of negation of parental imperatives that structure the language-use of their authors. I contrast H.D.‘s and Barnes‘s visions of the relation of language to meaning and the personal to the social using Lacan‘s delineation of the different modes of psychic negation that enable or disable language use: repression, disavowal, and foreclosure. According to this model, H.D.‘s work evidences foreclosure: a mode of thought and language that fails to differentiate words, thoughts, and people from one another. This incapacity endangers the psyche with the hallucinatory return of or haunting by what cannot be symbolized. In contrast, Barnes‘s work suggests disavowal, and her language renders experience in distorted forms. She repudiates power figures and the unspeakable meanings associated with them, but her work portrays the spectral, surreptitious return of these figures and meanings. Writing that witnesses or stages a return to a state of non-difference between symbol and symbolized, as Barnes‘s and H.D.‘s work does, calls for different interpretative and methodological strategies than those usual in literary criticism. To read such work primarily as symbolic communication is to lose perspective on the structures of thought and language that it grapples with. A perspective that is rigorous and radically different from the works‘ own is necessary to produce readings of it that make symbolic ―sense,‖ though it is unable to fully account for experiences that are not conceivable. To this end, I describe ―disorders,‖ types of thought and language that psychoanalysis implicates in interminable human suffering, without drawing conclusions about the range of experiences that might be concurrent with asymbolic or anti-symbolic thought and writing. / Graduate / 2019-08-31 / 0298 / 0591