bio
Jeffrey bussolini is director of the center for feline studies with ananya mukherjea. Associate professor at City University of New York. With Matthew Chrulew and Brett Buchanan he edited and translated three special issues of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on Philosophical Ethology. He translated Dominique Lestel's book The Friends of My Friends, on animal friendship, for Columbia University Press, is currently translating Vinciane Despret's Naissance d' théorie éthologique for univocal, and translates extensively for Roberto Marchesini. He wrote "Toward Cat Phenomenology: A Search for Animal Being," Found Object 8, Spring 2000, and co-wrote with Dominique Lestel and Matthew Chrulew “The Phenomenology of Animal Life,” Environmental Humanities 5, November 2014.
title
"The Posthumanism of Vinciane Despret, Dominique Lestel, and Roberto Marchesini"
abstract
By pursuing the interdisciplinary hybridization of ethology and philosophy (as well as anthropology, sociology, choreography, and other trajectories), Vinciane Despret, Dominique Lestel, and Roberto Marchesini have developed unique and partly overlapping accounts of posthumanism from a frame that deeply explores (and reframes) the dense interrelations between nonhuman and human animals. Despret's treatment of animal history and agency, Lestel's analysis of animalité and animal culture, and Marchesini's conceptualization of theriomorphism and zooantropologia all indicate that posthuman futures cannot be understood without sustained thinking about profound and variegated aspects of human-animal interaction at the material, representational, social and cultural levels (indeed they develop theories of human relations to technology indebted to our interactions with animals). This presentation of their versions of posthumanism draws on several of their major books (such as Marchesini's Post-human) and the Angelaki journal issues devoted to each of these thinkers (19.3, 20.2, 21.1). Areas of resonance and diversion between their theories will be highlighted, along with the applicability of important concepts from their work.
