Vinciane Despret

This essay outlines where the history of animals is now, and suggests where it and the historiographical issues
raised by the inclusion of animals in a study of the past might go in the future. The essay traces shifts in the idea
that animals recorded in textual documentation are always and only human representations, looks at the potential
for animals to be historical agents and at the questions of animal agency and the possibility of recovering an
animal’s point of view in historical work using the findings of animal welfare science. It also engages with the nature
of the documents available to historians of animals, and uses some contemporary theoretical work—particularly
that of Vinciane Despret—to think about new ways of engaging with the intraspecific and interspecific encounters
of animals and humans in history.

Esta resenha trata do novo livro de Juliana Fausto, A cosmopolítica dos animais, recém-publicado pela editora brasileira n-1 em conjunto com a editora Hedra. Entremeando histórias, filosofia, etologia, antropologia e ciências biológicas, a autora elabora uma série de definições para “política” que estão além do escopo reducionista da filosofia política antropocêntrica dos cânones. Tais definições explicitam vínculos relevantes entre cosmopolítica e animalidade e exploram, em diálogo com autores como Donna Haraway, Lynn Margulis, Paul B. Preciado e Vinciane Despret, outras possibilidades de se engajar teoricamente com os próprios animais.

In Vinciane Despret’s book, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, she tells sto-ries about animals that surprise us, that challenge our assumptions about the capabilities of ani-mals, and that illustrate how we might best come to know them. Despret engages with the history of animal science and scientific methodology, while also turning her attention to less conventional sources of animal knowledge, such as Youtube videos, domestic animal breeders, and animal caregivers. For Despret, knowing more about animals requires knowing more with them, expand-ing our knowledge practices beyond conventional scientific models that often emphasize dis-tanced observation, generalization, and laboratory research. Despret highlights relational practic-es that function through care and curiosity, understanding animals as collaborators, with interests and valuable input. By drawing our attention to anecdotes, amateurs, and anomalies, Despret challenges scientific conventions that dismiss all three, and illuminates fascinating stories about what animals might show us if we “ask the right questions”.

Across the world, the coronavirus pandemic may have prepared us for a new ecological paradigm: we are confined on Earth with other living beings. But we still need to know how to tell the stories of these beings. In recent decades, scholars in the environmental humanities and social sciences have experimented with new ways of paying attention to the world and all its narratives. They have thus invented practices of narration to thwart our insensitivity to the fate of other living beings with whom we are linked. These practices cannot be reduced to human representations or projections, but are rather proposals for imagining various common causes and, ultimately, what Bruno Latour calls a common world. My inquiry in this chapter is to collect these narratives as real methods of knowledge about the connections between humans and non-humans. To illustrate these new knowledge experiences, I discuss the narrative practices offered by Vinciane Despret’s work, as well as the importance of entangled stories in Donna Haraway, Baptiste Morizot, and Deborah Bird Rose’s writing. By telling stories about the lives of animals and plants, these researchers have become the spokespersons for those with whom we live together but who cannot testify alone. These narratives are therefore capable of multiplying our world through diverse existences, stories of dependence, and other ways of living in a damaged planet. The hope is that they inspire us to regain a terrestrial footing.

Où sont les morts ? Cette question hante les endeuillés, mais l’impossibilité d’y répondre pèse particulièrement sur ceux qui doivent ajouter à la douleur de la perte la disparition du corps et l’effacement des traces. Cheminant avec les œuvres de Stéphanie Solinas, W.G. Sebald et Rithy Panh, cet article s’attache à la manière dont les disparus travaillent la culture, enfouis dans la terre des rizières et la poussière des villes, tapis dans les archives et dans le chagrin, insaisissables mais néanmoins tangibles.

Quando osserviamo gli animali, spesso ci dimentichiamo che siamo a nostra volta oggetto del loro sguardo e della loro curiosità. È proprio l’analisi di questa reciprocità di relazioni a essere il cardine dell’etologia filosofica di Vinciane Despret, docente all’Università di Liegi e da oltre vent’anni impegnata in una ricerca interdisciplinare volta a comprendere «che cosa rispondono gli animali se facciamo le domande giuste», come
recita il titolo del suo libro più famoso.

This chapter addresses critical posthumanities as faced with a challenge to contextualise the now and recognise “the complexities of the posthuman predicament” (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018, p. 1), in order to be able to adequately respond to those living conditions of contemporary times within higher education pedagogies. It is done firstly, by indicating two tendencies that both contextualise “our today” (Bunz, Kaiser, & Thiele, 2017, p. 15) as a land of otherwise. Secondly, by offering a response to thus defined “our today”: care as a methodology. The latter conceptualisation is thought-of as a way of “[cooking] values and facts together as part of one brew” (Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012, p. 16) in an effort to bring together knowledge production and care in higher education. It is introduced through a diffractive reading of Natalie Jeremijenko’s experimental artwork and scholarly work by Vinciane Despret.

In this article, I consider the UK based arts company Fevered Sleep's project Sheep Pig Goat alongside the work of foundational animal studies scholar and philosopher of science, Vinciane Despret – whose important book, What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) was one text amongst many others that the company themselves read as part of the preparation for the project. In particular, I draw from Despret to explore multiple possible understandings of the notion of “interspecies empathy,” noting that, for Fevered Sleep, a core aim of the project was to investigate how performance might ‘increase understanding of, and empathy towards nonhuman animals’ (both their own as a company and those of the audiences who encounter their work) . Here, though, the mode of empathy I am reaching toward is not one that operates through analogy or identification, but an “embodied empathy” that operates as a mode of affective thinking alongside rather than “about” the animal, and as a performative encounter between human and nonhuman animals that produces both parties anew.

Throughout the essay I return to the idea of a reciprocally transformative interspecies encounter in contrast to the problem of inclusion by analogy or resemblance: wherein a concept, category or domain (whether “performance,” “empathy,” “knowledge,” or the domain of equality or rights itself) is ostensibly extended to include nonhuman animals but only by a gesture of appropriation of the other into the same, rather than the transformation of the category itself through the encounter with the other. For example, critics have already argued that it is not enough to merely quantitatively increase the domain of contemporary morality in order to include a greater number of individuals--as animal rights advocate Peter Singer’s “expanding circle” model seems to propose.  Rather, we need new ethical models that do not rely on principles of resemblance: where nonhuman animals are afforded rights only to the extent that they can be asserted to be “just like us.” There is a double-bind to this scenario: one in which humans are torn between the welfare benefits likely associated with the extension of legal rights to nonhumans, but at the same time skeptical of their underlying logic which reinforces rather than challenges the presumed moral superiority of humans. This, I argue, is a double-bind that requires us to think difference and continuity, heterogeneity and commonality together, rather than as mutually exclusive.

Nell’osservare gli animali spesso ci dimentichiamo che siamo a nostra volta oggetto del loro sguardo e della loro curiosità. È proprio l’analisi di questa reciprocità di relazioni a essere il cardine dell’etologia filosofica di Vinciane Despret, docente dell’Università di Liegi, da oltre vent’anni impegnata in una ricerca interdisciplinare volta a comprendere, appunto, «che cosa rispondono gli animali se facciamo loro le giuste domande». Vinciane Despret sarà in Italia, a Bologna, nel fine settimana, ospite della sesta edizione delle Giornate Internazionali di Studi sulla Relazione Uomo-Animale, organizzate da Siua (www.siua.it) e dal suo direttore, l’etologo Roberto Marchesini e quest’anno dedicate al comportamento sociale degli animali.

To name is not to say what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in the mode that the name calls for. (Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 43) A first glance is caught by an extraordinary geodesy. A gauzed sun in a deep blue sky shines down on a clutter of glacial masses, floating cloudlike above the surface of the white ground below. Shattered ice, seemingly released from the earth's gravitational pull, lines a distant horizon. Frozen, the vista nevertheless transforms after a few moments, as perceptual input processing mechanisms recalibrate. The focus adjusts, and the arresting scene, recalling any number of science-fictional visions of airborne islands, resolves into a figure not quite so fantastical, though perhaps no less disorienting than the initial impression.

Esse artigo parte da pergunta Como inventar um método? não em direção à resposta a essa questão, mas antes a uma discussão sobre a postura do pesquisador no exercício de construção de metodologias de pesquisa. Para tanto, buscamos pôr em questão aqueles modos de fazer pesquisa que são marcados pela hierarquização entre o pesquisador e seu objeto de estudo. Como alternativa trazemos a postura ética assumida pelo personagem do diplomata construído por Vinciane Despret para o desdobrarmos em duas ferramentas que, acreditamos, podem contribuir para colocar em análise as relações assimétricas entre os atores da pesquisa. Quais sejam: a irredutibilidade das diferenças entre os atores presentes no campo da pesquisa e o reconhecimento da multiplicidade das verdades e dos modos de existência. 

“Os mortos são gente como os outros”. A partir dessa proposição, feita por um de seus intelocutores em campo, a autora se lança numa investigação sobre os dispositivos e agenciamentos que permitem reduzir distâncias entre vivos e mortos e operar a comunicação entre eles. Respeitando as indeterminações aí presentes, incorporando-as à descrição e restituindo a riqueza das operações engendradas pelos atores, inclusive seus próprios modos de investigar o significado das mensagens dos mortos/espíritos, o texto aborda uma variedade de temas que animam o debate antropológico, tais como: antropomorfismo, rituais de possessão, comunicação inteligível e sensível, regimes de verdade, dispositivos terapêuticos, entre outros.

... Search result page. Title: Tecnogénesis. La construcción técnica de las ecologías humanas (2 Volúmenes). Author: Tomás Sánchez Criado, (Ed.), Reseña de Pablo Santoro. Abstract: Journal: AIBR : Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana. Issn: 16959752. EIssn: 15789705. ...

This is the first working paper for UrbEur PhD. “Lupi, agnelli, etologi, sociologi. Considerazioni su un testo di etologia, ad uso dei ricercatori sociali” (Wolves, lambs, ethologists, sociologists. Some considerations on an ethology books, for social researchers”), reflects on the book “Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau” by Vinciane Despret and on some of its epistemological consequences for social research.

Keywords:
epistemology, Vinciane Despret, Charles Sanders Peirce, pragmatism, ethology, abduction

In this article, I consider the UK based arts company Fevered Sleep's project Sheep Pig Goat alongside the work of foundational animal studies scholar and philosopher of science, Vinciane Despret – whose important book, What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) was one text amongst many others that the company themselves read as part of the preparation for the project. In particular, I draw from Despret to explore multiple possible understandings of the notion of “interspecies empathy,” noting that, for Fevered Sleep, a core aim of the project was to investigate how performance might ‘increase understanding of, and empathy towards nonhuman animals’ (both their own as a company and those of the audiences who encounter their work) . Here, though, the mode of empathy I am reaching toward is not one that operates through analogy or identification, but an “embodied empathy” that operates as a mode of affective thinking alongside rather than “about” the animal, and as a performative encounter between human and nonhuman animals that produces both parties anew. Throughout the essay I return to the idea of a reciprocally transformative interspecies encounter in contrast to the problem of inclusion by analogy or resemblance: wherein a concept, category or domain (whether “performance,” “empathy,” “knowledge,” or the domain of equality or rights itself) is ostensibly extended to include nonhuman animals but only by a gesture of appropriation of the other into the same, rather than the transformation of the category itself through the encounter with the other. For example, critics have already argued that it is not enough to merely quantitatively increase the domain of contemporary morality in order to include a greater number of individuals--as animal rights advocate Peter Singer’s “expanding circle” model seems to propose. Rather, we need new ethical models that do not rely on principles of resemblance: where nonhuman animals are afforded rights only to the extent that they can be asserted to be “just like us.” There is a double-bind to this scenario: one in which humans are torn between the welfare benefits likely associated with the extension of legal rights to nonhumans, but at the same time skeptical of their underlying logic which reinforces rather than challenges the presumed moral superiority of humans. This, I argue, is a double-bind that requires us to think difference and continuity, heterogeneity and commonality together, rather than as mutually exclusive.