Exploring Animal Encounters

Philosophical, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives

Dominik Ohrem, Matthew Calarco, Dominik Ohrem, Matthew Calarco

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319925035
• eBook ISBN: 9783319925042
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.

Part IIntroductory Essay

© The Author(s) 2018

Dominik Ohrem and Matthew Calarco (eds.)Exploring Animal EncountersPalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92504-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Some Thoughts on (Animal) Encounter

Dominik Ohrem¹

(1)

North American Department, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

Dominik Ohrem

End Abstract

In the common usage of the term, the kind of meeting denoted by the concept of “encounter” that informs the title of the present collection of essays is not just any kind of meeting but a meeting by chance, an unexpected coming together or coming upon each other whose outcome and consequences cannot be foreseen in their entirety or even at all. Depending on their context and the relationship between the parties involved, encounters can range from joyful surprises to awkward moments to challenging, unpleasant, or even dangerous situations. This last possibility is what Merriam-Webster lists as the first meaning of the verb “to encounter”: to meet someone or something not only unexpectedly but “as an adversary or enemy,” “to engage in conflict with”¹ someone or something either in an actual physical or in a more figurative sense (we may encounter, for example, a logical or ethical problem). Following Gilles Deleuze, we can also think of the event of encounter in terms of its potentially transformative influence on thought itself. Indeed, for Deleuze, the possibility of true thought—thought, that is, that moves (us) beyond habitual and habituated modes of thinking into the realms of the different and the new—emerges from precisely such moments of surprise or disturbance commonly associated with the idea of encounter, from our relation to a world that impresses itself on us as a challenge to thought and a challenge to think. “Something in the world forces us to think,” Deleuze writes. “This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”²

The essays collected in this volume engage with the specificities of (thinking) encounters between humans and animals in a variety of contexts and from different disciplinary or interdisciplinary angles. How can we make sense of the potentials and implications of animal encounters, and in what ways are such types of encounter necessarily mediated or negotiated in or through human writing, art, and institutions? What kinds of encounter are possible or desirable (and for whom), particularly from distinctly postanthropocentric ethical or political perspectives? And while it is commonly acknowledged that our ways of thinking about animals shape our encounters with them, should we perhaps pay closer attention to the inverse possibility that the affective force of animal encounters might unsettle, or lead us to question, those engrained ways of relating to nonhuman creatures, testifying to the role of encounters as events that open up all of the parties involved to the possibility of change and transformation?³ While the essays collected here are primarily concerned with encounters between humans and other animals, animal encounters might not only (ideally) help bring about a deeper understanding and appreciation of, as well as care for, nonhuman beings but also prompt a critical engagement with the “question” of human animality and prevailing arguments about anthropological difference. In their most potent form, animal encounters might articulate a challenge to the very tenability of such arguments (or, as it were, perform their untenability); such encounters might disrupt the workings of the “anthropological machine” and unsettle the anthropocentric dispositives that continue to shape social, ecological, and other relations between human and nonhuman beings, “forcing the nuances of the human/animal binary to quiver and flex,” as Sarah McFarland puts it in her contribution to this volume.⁴ While, as will be discussed in more detail below, we must be careful not to idealize animal encounters and look at them solely with a view to their transformative potentials, animal encounters might thus be read as participating in what, following Matthew Calarco’s discussion of prevailing animal philosophical approaches, might be called an onto-politics of “indistinction” (also see James Goebel’s contribution to this volume).⁵ Animal encounters, that is, might play a significant role in undermining the persistent yet never sufficient attempts at drawing distinctions, or the distinction, between humans and animals, confronting the imperative for anthropological difference that has influenced, if not largely determined, dominant ways of seeing and knowing in Western histories and societies with the troubling elusiveness of anthropological différance—the continuous deferral, the shifting and unstable criteria, and, perhaps, the ultimate undecidability of what exactly it is that is “proper to man.”⁶

Before providing a more detailed discussion of the individual contributions to this volume in the final section of this introductory essay, in the following pages I would like to offer some thoughts on the meanings and politics of encounter both in a broader sense and with regard to the (inter)specifics of animal encounter. I should emphasize, however, that the following reflections are not intended to provide some kind of theoretical or conceptual framework for this volume, not only because the aims of this introduction are much less ambitious but because all of the essays come with their own perspectives on animal encounters, on how we might think about or approach such encounters, and what implications we might draw from them. Ideally, what this introductory chapter might thus be able to accomplish is to highlight, in the form of a humble and respectful companion, some resonances and points of interconnection with the perspectives presented in the various contributions to this volume.

Alterity, Power, and the Politics of Encounter

One of the reasons an engagement with the idea of encounter might prove a worthwhile endeavor for those working in the field of animal studies is that this idea resonates well with the relational approaches that shape current discussions in these fields (be it from philosophical, sociological, historical, or other angles) while at the same time providing a conceptual tool that allows us to make sense of the ways in which different forms of human-animal relations are shaped by specific events or time-spaces that may set them on new trajectories or have other (transformative but perhaps also stabilizing) effects. The concept of encounter offers a potentially fruitful way to grapple with the troubled spectrum of living-with on an endangered planet and also lends itself to negotiating the inherently global or planetary outlook of the Anthropocene with the specificity of those multiple, non-capitalized “situated anthropocenes” that constitute our local naturalcultural, multispecies lifeworlds.⁷ Woven into broader earth systems, these situated anthropocenes are the sphere and scale in and on which patterns of conviviality are open to—not necessarily conscious or even “strategic”—experimentation; they are, in other words, spaces of encounter—familiar perhaps, yet never simply and fully knowable in all their depth and breadth.

According to Timothy Morton, an element of strangeness pervades even our more immediate lifeworlds precisely because, he argues, “[t]he essence of the local isn’t familiarity but the uncanny, the strangely familiar and familiarly strange.”⁸ For Morton , this uncanniness, this element of strangeness that persists in spite of the familiarity that develops through permanent inhabitance or the regularity of social relations is particularly connected with the more-than-human. In reference to the animal and other life forms who, in their vast, entangled collectivity, make up what he calls the ecological “mesh,” Morton uses the term “strange strangers”—strangers whose “strangeness itself is strange”—as a way of “explor[ing] the paradoxes and fissures of identity within ‘human’ and ‘animal.’”⁹

The strange stranger is at the limits of our imagining … Even if biology knew all the species on Earth, we would still encounter them as strange strangers, because of the inner logic of knowledge. The more you know about something, the stranger it grows … The more we know about life forms, the more we recognize our connection with them and the stranger they become.¹⁰

One might wonder, of course, whether the (strange) strangeness of nonhuman creatures and the specificity but also diversity of human-animal relations can be adequately explained with reference to the “inner logic of knowledge” and the truism that “[t]he more you know about something, the stranger it grows.” (Morton explains, for example, that the more we know about the origins of the First World War, “the more ambiguous your conclusions become.”¹¹ But can—and should—we compare the “strangeness” of historical periods and similar objects of human knowledge production with our intercorporeal-intersubjective engagements with other living beings?) Morton makes an important point, however, by reminding us, firstly, that the potentiality of encounter does not have to be relegated to some (hyperbolic, spectacular) elsewhere but permeates the very mundane sphere of the familiar and, secondly, that just because something has become familiar this does not mean that it is ever simply and fully known or k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introductory Essay
• Part II. Re-encountering Animals: Philosophy, Ethics, Politics
• Part III. Personal Essay
• Part IV. Strange Encounters: Animal Bodies and Species Boundaries
• Back Matter