Immanence And The Animal

This book reexamines the concept of the animal on the plane of immanence, as opposed to the traditional viewpoint founded on the plane of transcendence. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that philosophy is a discipline of creating concepts, this book traces how the concept of the animal was created in the history of philosophy through re-reading the works of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Derrida and Levinas. Their theories show that the concept of the animal was constructed on the "plane of transcendence" as subservient to the self-serving human, who represents the animal as a negative entity devoid of reason, ethics, the ability to enter into political alliances or even die. With this perspective and a range of theories from thinkers such as Spinoza, Nancy, Haraway and Braidotti as the groundwork, a new positive concept of the animal, operating on the plane of immanence, is sketched out, compelling a reappraisal of the relationships between body and thought, ethics and politics, or life and death. With comprehensive interpretations of the views of several key philosophers, from Kant and Heidegger to Deleuze, Derrida and Agamben, this book will be valuable for scholars of theoretical animal studies and continental philosophy interested in the philosophical significance of the animal question.

Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought. A collection of essential primary and secondary readings on the animal question, it brings together contributions from the following key Continental thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Ferry, Cixous, and Irigaray. Each reading is followed by commentary and analysis from a leading contemporary thinker. The coverage of the subject is exceptionally broad, ranging across perspectives that include existentialism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, phenomenology and feminism. This anthology is an invaluable one-stop resource for anyone researching, teaching or studying animal ethics and animal rights in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, environmental studies and gender and women's studies.

Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals: A Philosophy is an original and ambitious treatment of the "animal question". While philosophers have always made distinctions between human beings and animals, Timofeeva imagines a world free of such walls and borders. Timofeeva shows the way towards the full acceptance of our animality; an acceptance which does not mean the return to our animal roots, or anything similar. The freedom generated by this acceptance operates through negativity; is an effect of the rejection of the very core of metaphysical philosophy and Christian culture, traditionally opposed to our 'animal' nature and seemingly detached from it. With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, this book is accessible, jargon-free and ideal for students and all those interested in re-imagining how we engage with animals and the environment.

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence.

"Problems of Immanence: Studies Critical and Constructive" is a book on the philosophy of religion. The author considers such notions as divine immanence, pantheism, the ethics of monism, the divine personality, the concept of evil, and its opposition to the idea of the divine, determinism, and morality as a form of religion.

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence.

Must a philosophy of life be materialist, and if so, must it also be a philosophy of immanence? In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing trend in continental thought and philosophy and critical theory that has seen a return to the category of immanence. Through consideration of the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Francois Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze and others, this collection aims to examine the interplay between the concepts of immanence, materialism and life, particularly as this interplay can highlight new directions for political inquiry. Furthermore, critical reflection on this constellation of concepts could also be instructive for continental philosophy of religion, in which ideas about the divine, embodiment, sexual difference, desire, creation and incarnation are refigured in provocative new ways. The way of immanence, however, is not without its dangers. Indeed, it may be that with its affirmation something of importance is lost to material life. Could it be that the integrity of material things requires a transcendent origin? Precisely what are the metaphysical, political and theological consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence in relation to a philosophy of life? This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Why is it important to consider the human today? Exploring this question John Lechte takes inspiration from the interplay of two of Giorgio Agamben's concepts: 'ways of life' and 'bare life'. Stateless people, those who do not have a political community, such as asylum seekers and refugees, are no less human. However the European tradition, represented most clearly in Hannah Arendt's thinking of the opposition between the oikos, as the satisfaction of basic needs, and the polis, as the realm of freedom and glory, proposes the opposite of this. Arendt's famous phrase, 'the right to have rights', means that freedom and full human potential can only be realised in the context of civil society; in short, that only citizens can be fully human. Because Arendt's view is so influential, yet often not acknowledged, it is necessary to undertake a full investigation of the nature and meaning of the human to establish that it is not reducible to the citizen, but is always characterised by a 'way of life' – life mediated by language. The human is never reducible to 'bare life' – a life with no other significance than physical survival. The implications of 'bare life' are investigated through important themes in relation to the human, such as: freedom and necessity, the animal, animality as nature, inclusion and exclusion in politics, the sacred, death and dying, technics and nature, the Same and the Other, the everyday as extraordinary. Journeying through Agamben, Arendt, Bataille, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Schelling, Simondon, and Stiegler, this is a profound search to reveal the truly human.

Writing and Immanence is a book that is attentive to the unabatingly potent, sometimes agonistic, forces at play in the continuing unfoldings of crises of representation. As immanent doing, the writing in the book writes to destabilise the orthodoxies, conventions and unquestioned givens of writing in the academy and, in so doing, is troubled by the ontogenetic uncertainties of its own writing coming into being. In the always active processualism of presencing, the fragility of word and concept creation animates, what Meillassoux has described as ‘the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything’. In working to avoid the formational and structural linearities of a series of numbered consecutive chapters, the book is constructed in and around the movements of the always actualising capaciousness of Acts. In offering engagements with education research and pedagogy and always sensitive to the dynamics of multiplicity, each Act emanates from and feeds into other en(Act)ments in the unfolding emergence of the book. Hence, in agencement, the book offers multiple points of entry and departure. Deleuze has said that a creator is ‘someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities...it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through.’ Therefore, the writing of this book writes to the writing, pedagogic and qualitative research practices of those in education and the humanities who are writing to the creation of such impossibilities.