HYBRID COMMUNITIES

Abstract

This article provides an extract from the second half of Lestel's book Animality (1996/2007). His book is divided into two parts. In the first part Lestel considers a number of ways in which humans and animals have been represented, particularly with respect to their supposed differences and borderline cases, over the course of Western history. To this end one reads of various depictions, construc- tions, and erasures of animals, including those of feral children, the animal-machines of Des- cartes and company, animals of ethological study, as well as artistic animals, suffering animals, speaking animals, cultural animals, and more. The first part is largely devoted, then, to past representations of animals as seen through Lestel's unique perspective. The second part, much of which is translated here, conveys Lestel's own observations, as developed most explicitly in his concept of “hybrid com- munities” between humans and animals. It is equal parts evolutionary and cultural anthropol- ogy, ethological ethnography, and philosophical creation of concepts, all in an attempt to situate “animality” at the interface of animals and humans. Rather than think animality, therefore, on the basis of animals, Lestel conceptualizes animality as a characteristic that develops between humans and animals in as much as they share, despite their curious alterity to one another, meaning and interests.

Keywords:

• animality
• hybrid communities
• domestication
• wild(er)ness
• artifacts
• alterity
• companion

Notes

Translated from Dominique Lestel, L'Animalité (Paris: L'Herne, 2007). © 2007 Éditions de L'Herne.

1 In France, the psycholinguist Danièle Dubois carries out very interesting experimental work that calls into question the very notion of “natural category.” She thus brings a bit of fresh air to an environment where it seemed that everyone sought to “naturalize” everything that moves. It is notable that in French “to naturalize” [“naturaliser”] means both “to render natural” and “to stuff” [as in to stuff a toy animal or a taxidermied animal – translator's note].

2 “Tiers pensant” is a term that Lestel employs to suggest what is given in thought in the act of thinking itself. It is a kind of foil, third term, or “third thinking,” to translate it literally, namely what is being thought through in order to arrive at something else. [Translator's note.]

3 The work of Claude Lévi-Strauss is essential on this question (cf. The Savage Mind and Totemism).

4 The “missing link” is a form of life between humans and other primates that is supposed to assure the transition between the one and the other. Untraceable and problematic, it would nevertheless become very popular between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite the protests of Darwin and Huxley (cf. Beer).

5 We could note that David Hume already evokes, albeit quite rapidly, this notion of a dissymmetry in the relations of human to animal.

6 “Wilderness” appears in English in the original. [Translator's note.]

7 On this question I would recommend Goffi (270–73).

8 Lestel's expression “le degré zero de la communauté hybride” may be an implicit reference to Roland Barthes's book title, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (translated as Writing Degree Zero). As a “zero degree,” the expression can alternately mean the “rock bottom” or the “starting point” of a hybrid community. [Translator's note.]

9 In “Mental Events” Davidson argues that “there cannot be strict psychophysical laws” (208). [Translator's note.]