Animated Encounters

ABSTRACT

“Animated Encounters” presents a series of vignettes that include theoretical meditations on psychoanalysis and animal studies and descriptions of encounters with other-than-human beings in local and mass mediated contexts. It seeks a way to think about and experience subjectivities beyond anthropocentrism.

Notes

¹ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (New York, NY: Vintage, reprinted 1990).

² Barbara Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons (New York, NY: Aldine, 1989, reprinted 2009); see also “Reflections” in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 107–120. On elephants and trauma, see Charles Siebert, “An Elephant Crack-Up?” The New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2006, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?_r=0. Siebert discusses the work of Eve Abe, a Ugandan ethologist and wildlife-management consultant comparatively studying the traumatic effects of war on elephants and humans in Uganda. He also mentions Carol Buckley, founder of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, which practices psychotherapy on traumatized elephants, and Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist who writes about the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, which also practices trauma rehabilitation. Bradshaw coined the term “trans-species psyche” to describe the commonalities of thought, feeling, and subjective experience across species lines; see G. A. Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Mark Bekoff and Franz De Waal have also dedicated their lives to demonstrating transpecific commonalities among the living, especially with regard to cognition and emotion.

³ In an unpublished paper, “Animal Unconscious,” Nathan Snaza makes the argument that, for Freud, the unconscious is animal and that subsequent poststructuralist readers of Freud, by virtue of their own anthropocentrism, often efface the ways Freud continued to think seriously about the animality of the human. Nicholas Ray, who also thinks about the continuities among human and nonhuman animals that have been reified by the ideological notion of species, argues the case somewhat differently, noting that the progressive “instinctualization” of drives tends to reinstate the opposition between animal and human through a domestication of the animal in the human and the unconscious itself. See “Interrogating the Human/Animal Relation in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents” in Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies, 6(1), 10–40. For other writings on psychoanalysis and its pertinence to the other-than-human, see also Ray, “Psychoanalysis & ‘The Animal’: A Reading of the Metapsychology of Jean Laplanche,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 10(1), 40–66; Carla Freccero, “Response: Mirrors of Culture,” California Italian Studies, 2(1); Special Issue: Italian Futures, ed. Albert Ascoli and Randolph Starn, retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8c91s0ck; Michael Zizer, “Animal Mirrors,” in Angelaki, 12(3) 11–33. My argument does not ignore—but takes a different tack from—arguments that rightly critique the places where psychoanalysis could—but does not—refrain from human exceptionalism. See Katie Gentile’s paper in this issue.

⁴ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

⁵ “Mountains.” Planet Earth II. BBC, BBC 1. November 13, 2016.

⁶ Brian Massumi, “The Supernormal Animal,” in Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 1–17.

⁷ Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthro-zoo-genesis,” Body & Society, 10(2–3),111–134, at 125.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carla Freccero

Carla Freccero, is Distinguished Professor of Literature, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she has taught since 1991. She has authored several books in the fields of Renaissance Studies, U.S. popular culture, queer and feminist studies, and edited collections in animal studies. She has also published essays in early modern French, feminist and queer theory; psychoanalysis; animal studies; popular culture; and histories of sexuality. Her current project, Animal Inscription, examines writing, figurality, and human animal being.