The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini

Jeffrey Bussolini, Brett Buchanan, Matthew Chrulew, Jeffrey Bussolini, Brett Buchanan, Matthew Chrulew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351628891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as Il dio Pan (1988), Il concetto di soglia (1996), Post-human (2002), Intelligenze plurime (2008), Epifania animale (2014), and Etologia filosofica (2016), he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life.

Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, his critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesini's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the present and input of other animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

jeffrey bussolini

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ETHOLOGY OF ROBERTO MARCHESINI

Like that of Vinciane Despret and Dominique Lestel, the work of Roberto Marchesini embodies philosophical ethology as an interdisciplinary site that combines natural science, social science and the humanities and that blends empirical observation with theoretical and critical speculation. His version blends veterinary science, entomology, bioethics, zooanthropology, posthumanism, pedagogy, lyric poetry, and phenomenology and focuses on animal–human interactions in their social, historic, cultural, and dynamic dimensions. It also cuts across theory and practice, ranging from philosophical investigations into animality to real-world animal interaction training. Marchesini’s personal and intellectual practice has been deeply influenced by his experience in Italy – he carried out all his studies, in science and in philosophy, at the Università di Bologna – although he has maintained an active dialogue with international research literatures and scholars. Geography and urban context bear mentioning because the characters of the city and the university play into his thought and writing. This essay explores the biographical and disciplinary influences that shape Marchesini’s inquiry and his particular performance of philosophical ethology. Marchesini himself credits many different nonhuman animals – from wasps to preying mantises, dogs, cats, and others – with playing pre-eminent social, identitary, and epistemological roles in his life (Ricordi di animali).¹

biographical elements of marchesini’s work

Boria Sax has previously written that the persistence of a strong pastoral tradition and some differences in the adoption of factory farming in Italy are particularities of context that help to account for the difference between Marchesini’s approach and those that are more common in anglophone scholarship (“Posthumanism” 88). As a middle-sized, left-leaning (long Communist) Italian city in the middle of the agricultural and alimentary heartland of Emilio-Romagna, Bologna would seem to exemplify these factors. Like his mentor Giorgio Celli, Marchesini notes in autobiographical writings that the presence of animals in the city and his frequent opportunities to visit nearby rural and seaside areas while growing up were important factors in the development of his knowledge of animals and ecology (Ricordi di animali; Celli, Vita). But he also notes that many of those areas have since been developed or urbanized, some of this as part of ongoing development that has seen a decrease in agricultural land in favor of increased industry, and that this has decreased access to animals and the countryside for young people growing up in Bologna today (Animali di città; Io e la natura; Natura e pedagogia). Bologna is also the location of the Università di Bologna, the oldest university in the world, and an institution that counts as alumni Albrecht Dürer, Copernicus, Erasmus, Paracelsus, Pico della Mirandola, and Marconi (Post-human 523). It would be difficult to overestimate the scholarly and cultural influence of the university on the city, and indeed the institution served as a source of knowledge for Marchesini and many of his interlocutors. The fact that the institution educated major figures in humanism such as Mirandola and Erasmus gives his own thinking on posthumanism a particular resonance grounded in the very site where those forms of thought first took shape.

Marchesini’s thought and practice were heavily influenced by two mentors who were well-recognized scientists and public intellectuals in Italy: Margherita Hack and Giorgio Celli. Hack was an astrophysicist who directed the astronomical observatory at Trieste (Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste), and Celli was an entomologist and ethologist who directed the entomology institute at Bologna (Istituto di Entomologia “Guido Grandi”). In addition to being internationally known scientists, both were adept scientific communicators and writers who took part in politics and social movements.² Celli was also a writer of plays and fiction who was a member of the “Gruppo 63” with Umberto Eco and won the Pirandello Prize in 1975 for the play Le tentazioni del professor Faust.³

Celli and Hack took part in protests and demonstrations outside the formalized political system as well. Celli was among the first to note the deleterious influences of pesticides and environmental contamination on bees (and thus on human agriculture) and he agitated for changes in ecological policy, among other causes. Hack was an atheist, a vegetarian, and an advocate for women’s and gay rights in Italy, as well as an outspoken critic of Silvio Berlusconi. She frequently contested the Church’s influence on public life in Italy, including its oppressive policies toward women and LGBTQ communities.⁴ In the interview in this special issue Marchesini credits both Hack and Celli as exemplars for scientific practice since they kept drawing on new ideas and concepts, rather than becoming stubbornly attached to a viewpoint or method they had been trained in as students, and they drew liberally from other disciplines and approaches (Bussolini, Chrulew, and Buchanan, “Entering Theriomorphic Worlds”). Both were also fascinated by cats, lived with cats, and wrote extensively about cats and human–feline bonds (Celli, Vita; Gatto; Bello; Hack, Vita; Nove).

Marchesini’s version of philosophical ethology is informed by the particular areas of study and interest that he combines in a unique way to address questions in ethology and animal subjectivity (namely biology/ethology, veterinary medicine, philosophy, human–animal interaction, cognitive science, and zooanthropology). While at university he studied biology under Giorgio Celli, with an emphasis on ethology and entomology, and veterinary science. He conducted studies of Hymenoptera looking at mental maps and cognitive ethology in bees and wasps (Bussolini, Chrulew, and Buchanan, “Entering Theriomorphic Worlds”). He joined in Celli’s studies on the effects of pesticides and pollutants on bees. He took part in animal observations around Bologna, including additional entomology and extensive mammal and bird ethology, and completed the scientific and clinical studies to become a veterinary doctor.

After becoming a practicing veterinarian he carried out advanced research in medical imaging and pathological histology, and specializations in veterinary surgery. He credits his education and experience with giving him a deep knowledge of animal behavior and animal physiology that served as a basis for much of his subsequent work in the area. Yet, like many veterinarians, he also reported feeling some disjunction between the motivations that first led him to the profession and the bulk of the practice he later found himself performing. While initially attracted to the prospect of doing good “for the animals” and working for animal well-being, the professional positions in which he found himself served to highlight many of the contradictions and difficulties of animal treatment. Even in cases where veterinary intervention improved the health of the animal patient, he was painfully aware how much the fear of the unfamiliar (or too familiar) setting of the vet’s office constrained the social and species-specific expression of the animal visitors. He was troubled by needless or frivolous requests for killing animals whose human custodians had tired of caring for them. He encountered situations where it was difficult to treat animals in need due to limitations of coverage and resources. Despite the social commitment and technical knowledge of many veterinary practitioners, he found that the profession overall had failed to incorporate some of the most urgent and cutting-edge questions of ethics and the treatment of animals. He was also troubled to find that, again notwithstanding a number of exceptions, veterinarians often failed to have a thorough knowledge of animal behavior and bioethics.

During this period of his life, Marchesini also found himself employed by the agriculture industry “to pay the bills” (Bussolini, Chrulew, and Buchanan, “Entering Theriomorphic Worlds”). The purpose of his employment was to increase animal welfare in agricultural businesses and decrease risks to animals. Instead, he again saw the depths of the oppression visited on animals by human economic and social systems and was moved to become vegetarian and oppose many of the forms of animal raising and marketing that he witnessed. Seeing the conditions in factory farming and agribusiness convinced him that zootechnical animal husbandry was deeply flawed and routinized a number of extremely cruel practices against animals while also hiding those practices from wider public visibility. Echoing Konrad Lorenz and others, he called such setups lager or concentration camps. He was also influenced during this time by the writings of Hans Ruesch, Ruth Harrison, Richard Ryder, and others. He describes meeting Peter Singer when he was visiting Bologna to promote the Italian translation of Animal Liberation as a catalyst for changing his alimentary choices and lifestyle. Marchesini describes this period as “my 1968, arriving twenty years later and in different terms, but equally disposed toward demonstrations and meetings” (Ricordi di animali 137). He took part in advocating for improved legislation and in direct action by organizing with Lilia Casali and other Italian activists.

One of Marchesini’s impressions while working in zootechnics was that, while there were many forms of cruelty to animals in agriculture and mass production of animals, the greatest cruelty was the denial of species-specific characteristics in the expression of their own movements, desires, and interactions (Bussolini, Chrulew, and Buchanan, “Entering Theriomorphic Worlds”). This realization served as the kernel for the founding of the Scuola di Interazione Uomo–Animale, which would place the ethology of species-specific characteristics, desires, and expressions at the core of its thought and practice. His ethical response in terms of animal rights became the book Oltre il muro: viaggio all’interno degli allevamenti intensivi [Beyond the Wall: A Trip Inside the Factory Farms], published in 1993. He argues that many of the practices of factory farming are unjustifiable cruelty and describes the control of visibility and access that walls off these practices from wider public recognition. In the attention to visibility in and of the slaughterhouse he takes up some of the same themes that Timothy Pachirat will later address (Every Twelve Seconds).

The unease that Marchesini felt working in veterinary practice and animal welfare pushed him in a different direction to pursue questions about the fundamental aspects of relations between nonhuman and human animals. Though he valued his veterinary formation and knowledge, he felt that issues in ethology, philosophy, and anthropology would cut closer to the concerns and motivations that had been driving his engagement with animals. The shocking ethical situations he had encountered also prompted an urgent engagement with bioethics as a site that could contribute to re-evaluating key issues in the human treatment of nonhuman animals (“Posthuman Antispeciesism”). Despite his secure employment and growing career as a veterinary doctor, he felt increasingly ill-at-ease with the practice and with a growing sensibility that he wanted to push further in other directions. As a result he left veterinary practice and returned to the Università di Bologna for more formal study of philosophy, philology, and anthropology. While he had long been interested in these fields and had some exposure to them in prior studies, he felt that their urgency to questions surrounding animals necessitated that he go further and develop professional research capacity in those areas.

Marchesini pursued questions of bioethics and animal treatment, and he focused on ontology, existentialism, deconstruction, and phenomenology in close study of Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and other figures. This study of critical philosophy and philology also built on and reinterpreted his earlier studies in the classics high school⁵ Liceo Marco Minghetti in which he had dealt extensively with Latin and Greek sources. While he had found the study of those classics interesting, and classical sources appear throughout his writings, he had also felt the approach to be somewhat straitjacketed. As an indication of his relative priorities, his enthusiasm for starting high school was far overshadowed by his excitement at living with and caring for a cat (Fragolino/“Little Strawberry”) for the first time, and the greatest excitement of his school days was the feline, ornithological, or human ethology observations he would make before or after the school day (Ricordi di animali).

When he returned to the study of classical sources through the eyes of contemporary philosophy and animal questions, however, he “found new life and importance to those sources and that thinking” (Bussolini, Interview, May 2015). As is frequently demonstrated in this issue, Marchesini tacks back and forth between ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and modern philosophical traditions following the trajectory laid out by questions about animals and animal–human interactions. Tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• General Introduction: Philosophical Ethology
• Introduction: Roberto Marchesini
• Preface: Zootropia, Kinship, and Alterity in the Work of Roberto Marchesini
• 1. The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini
• 2. The God Pan
• 3. Rediscovering the Threshold
• 4. Animals of the City
• 5. Postmodern Chimeras
• 6. The Theriosphere
• 7. Plural Intelligences
• 8. Nonhuman Alterities
• 9. Zoomimesis: Animal Inspiration
• 10. The Therioanthropic Being as Our Neighbour
• 11. Posthuman Antispeciesism
• 12. Philosophical Ethology and Animal Subjectivity
• 13. Entering Theriomorphic Worlds: An Interview with Roberto Marchesini
• Index