Keywords
animals
animality
zoomorphism
anthropomorphism
anthropocentrism
How to Cite
Abstract
The article discusses zoomorphism as part of the anthropocentric discourse aimed at establishing human dominance over animals. Basing on Jacques Derrida’s 1997 paper “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” the article approaches anthropomorphism and zoomorphism as culturally sanctioned ways of misrepresenting animality and shaping human attitudes towards real-life animals. A symptom of the misrepresentation is the gap between animals and their linguistic denotations. The specific aim of the article is to demonstrate that zoomorphism as used in everyday language conserves the human-centered vision of the world by ignoring the differences between individual animals. The discussion concludes by arguing that zoomorphism can be remedied by the individualizing aspects of anthropomorphism.
References
Baker S., Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation, Manchester 1993.
Derrida J., The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), “Critical Inquiry” Winter 2002, no. 2.
Derrida J., “Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An interview with Jacques
Derrida, [in:] Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor and J-L Nancy, New York and London 1991.
Derrida J., Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington, R. Bowlby, Chicago and London 1989.
Francione G., Animals, Property, and the Law, Philadelphia 1995.
Garrard G., Ecocriticism, London and New York 2012.
Grandin T., Johnson C., Animals in Translation: The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, London 2005.
Leahy M., Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective, London 1994.
Midgley M., Animals and Why They Matter, Athens, GA 1983.
Morton T., The Ecological Thought, London 2010.
Nussbaum M., Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, MA and London 2006.
Regan T., The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1983.
Rowlands M., Animal Rights. A Philosophical Defense, New York 1998.
Singer P., Animal Liberation, New York 1990.
Willis R.G., Man and Beast, London 1974.
Wilson E.O., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, London 2000.
Wolfe C., Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Chicago 2003.
Young K.E., Beastly Politics: Derrida, Animals, and the Political Economy of Meat, “Spectra: The Aspect Journal” 2015, no. 2, <https://spectrajournal.org/SPECTRA/article/view/240/168> [accessed 10.08.2016].
License
Authors
Authors of texts accepted for publication in Przestrzenie Teorii are required to complete, sign and return to the editor's office the Agreement for granting a royalty-free license to works with a commitment to grant a CC sub-license.
Under the agreement, the authors of texts published in Przestrzenie Teorii grant the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań a non-exclusive, royalty-free license and authorize the use of Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Creative Commons sub-license.
The authors retain the right to continue the free disposal of the work.
Users
Interested Internet users are entitled to use works published in Przestrzenie Teorii since 2015, for non-commercial purposes only, under the following conditions:
- attribution - obligation to provide, together with the distributed work, information about the authorship, title, source (link to the original work, DOI) and the license itself.
- no derivatives - the work must be preserved in its original form, without the author's consent it is not possible to distribute the modified work, such as translations, publications, etc.
Copyrights are reserved for all texts published before 2015.
Miscellaneous
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań retains the right to magazines as a whole (layout, graphic form, title, cover design, logo etc.).