Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Dufourcq, Annabelle

Titel

Animal bodies and the virtual: Animals as real phantoms

Ist Teil von

• The Imaginary of Animals, 2022, Vol.1, p.91-130

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter focuses on the ontological ubiquity of (human and non-human) animals. It demonstrates that a tentative, creative relation to meaning is at work in the very flesh of every living being so that animals can never be essentially defined as self-coincident, bound-to-the-actual realities: They are rather, literally, phantoms. This idea is tackled starting from a close critical reading of Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior. The concept of Gestalt, such as understood by Merleau-Ponty, entails the description of living beings and especially animals as phantoms, along the model of phantom limbs. The Structure of Behavior only outlines this idea in an ambivalent manner. I develop the theory of animal-phantoms and show how it conflicts with the separation between the human and the animal realms that Merleau-Ponty foregrounds in his earlier work. This chapter also demonstrates that such an hauntology of animals operates at the heart of Darwin's Origin of Species. It is the imaginary of Darwin that must be invoked here, such as unveiled by Gillian Beer in Darwin's Plots, an imaginary that I want to understand at a more ontological level. The imaginary of animals thus appears as the real subject of empirical animal sciences.