2015 Becoming-Animal Is a Trap for Humans: Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar

Dialogue and Universalism, 2014

Ideas and experiences of animality have played an important role within the processes of modern secularization and its anti-theological turn in the modern making of “man”. By turning the conceptual focus towards the animal part of human being, and specifically by describing and explaining “human nature” in terms of its “animal base”, modern philosophical anthropology changed gradually into naturalistic, godless discourse of a purely material life, and of mind, which ceased to be a divine trace in humankind and instead became an organic and bodily feature shared with other animals. This conceptual “becoming animal” of man in philosophical anthropology and the modern experience of animality seem correlated and reciprocally impactful. On the one hand “animal” has always been a concept constituted in relation to man and God; all three have been elements of the narrative about the universe and its meaning, all three have been ideas that shaped the experience. On the other hand it is the experience of animality in a more scientific sense that in recent times started to inform the ideas. The discovery of the “animal in man”, its increasing impact through evolution theory, that placed man in the purely natural, non-purposeful and random process of the biological, eventually led to a denial of human supremacy and defined its superiority in terms of degree rather than kind. To some extent the animalization of the anthropological undermined and replaced its previous deification: a zoology of the human body defeated the theology of the human soul. As far as secularization in its essence led to emancipation, it is interesting how animalization of man can be related to this process; how becoming animal can liberate the human, and how diverse images and phantasms of the animal might determine human subjectification. A tremendous, early-modern illustration of all these can be found in Michel de Montaigne.

Stellenbosch Socratic Journal, 2023

Contemporary society is undeniably marred by the routine violence which it exacts upon animals. For post-structuralist thinkers, this violence begins with the anthropocentrism of human language. This paper thus follows the poststructuralist work of Jacques Derrida, specifically his strategy of deconstruction, in order to disrupt the anthropogenic violence continually inflicted upon animal beings. In so doing, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing destabilisation of the anthropocentric human(animal) hierarchy by tracing the deconstruction of anthropocentrism in Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). Accordingly, I draw on Derrida's strategy of deconstruction to show how the ostensibly stable human(animal) hierarchy is underwritten by anthropocentrism which is always already contingently established and prone to reversal-and hence, open to its own displacement as a matter of ethico-political urgency. Ultimately, it is shown that The Jungle Book, upon its deconstruction, does not merely reconfigure the human-animal relationship, but renders the very term 'animal' nonsensical.

The French Review, 1990

Review of the Brian Massumi translation of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, a seemingly thankless task given the formidable obstacles that this mammoth work presents. This is not merely a book divided into "plateaus" rather than chapters, it also contains quite evidently a highly specialized vocabulary drawing from an unusually diverse array of discursive fields. However, Massumi is indeed to be thanked heartily not only for substantially clearing this dense terminological thicket, but also for enhancing the peripheral, yet crucial critical apparatus which now renders A Thousand Plateaus more accessible as a research document. In the introductory pages, Massumi's "Notes on the Translation" provide a brief, yet much needed glossary of particular terms encountered in the work. Furthermore, his translator's notes and bibliography provide clear references to writings by Deleuze and Guattari as well as to the many works on which they base their insights. Finally, the index (compiled by Hassan Melehy) is a precious tool for cross-referencing the writers and concepts in play throughout A Thousand Plateaus.

An exploration and evaluation of the theme of the human/animal relation in the thought of Heidegger, Bataille and Deleuze/Guattari.

2020

Queer theories allow us to denaturalize the boundary between animals and humans by showing it to be a social construct. By applying them to cultural products, it becomes clear how the binary opposition “animality-humanity” actually depends on performativity. Among the many movies featuring animal characters, in this paper I analyze Crin Blanc by Albert Lamorisse (1953), by combining part of Harvey Sacks’ work on Membership Categorisation Analysis, of Carmen Dell’Aversano’s research on animal queer and of Frans de Waal’s studies. I will concentrate on the way in which the performance of animality in the representation of the character of Crin Blanc is handled, in the attempt to demonstrate that Crin Blanc actually strengthens the binary opposition of identity categories and anthropocentric hierarchies. Queer theory will allow us to understand how the repressive nature of the imposition of human categories can operate at different levels of the same human artistic product.

Journal of Visual Culture, 2008

French film theorist André Bazin was fascinated by films in which humans and animals are framed together, especially in circumstances in which the presence of one signals the endangerment of the other. By putting Bazin and two films he admired (Kon Tiki and Umberto D) in conversation with Jacques Derrida's writing on the animal and Walter Benjamin's infrahuman optics, this article argues that Bazin's commitments to cinematic realism and the recurrence in his writing of human/animal propinquity signal a distinctly posthumanist ethics. Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration realizes Bazin's interest in a cinema that de-centers and even absents the human. It may also be a film that answers Derrida's call that we not just look at animals, but feel ourselves seen by them.

Deleuze and the Humanities East and West Edited by Rosi Braidotti, Kin Yuen Wong and Amy Kit-sze Chan, 2018

Pratiques, 2019

Antennae, 2017

This paper investigates animal imagery in four films by French artist Camille Henrot: Film Spatial (2007), Cynopolis (2009), The Strife of Love in a Dream (2011), and Grosse Fatigue (2013).

Starting with an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s most intimate encounter with an animal by way of a similar scene in Balthus’s paintings, this essay examines Derrida’s criticism of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the human-animal relation and proposes a way of conceiving the animal-human encounter beyond the traps of narcissism.