“Who Is An Animal? Looking for Animal Subjectivities”
A Lecture by Roberto Marchesini
Italian Cultural Institute
Wednesday, June 6, 7pm
Roberto Marchesini will discuss new ways to understand human–animal interactions. Discussing topics such as human identity, our relationship with animals and the environment, and our culture, the author will refer to the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy, bridging a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences. Applying cognitive science, zooanthropology, and philosophy to engage in a series of empirical, theoretical, and practice-based engagements with animal life, Roberto Marchesini will explore the deep animal–human bond and its philosophical, cultural, political instances.
The reflection about animal subjectivity – namely the difference between an object or a machine, on the one hand, and a nonhuman animal, on the other – demands an ontological inquiry in its broader philosophical sense. Classical ethology and behaviourism have limited themselves to describing the animal machine. The theories on animal cognition have attempted to express a pale subjectivity through the function of awareness. However, these theories have not criticised the basic model, namely that of animal expression as the result of automatism, and therefore have supported a deterministic attitude in the analysis of behaviour. A deeper analysis of subjectivity is required. Animal subjectivity is a meta-predicate condition and the accounts of an ontological difference between species or between individuals concern only predicates. We must start again, following the Cartesian comparative animal/machine path, but contrary to Descartes not to find analogies but to show differences. We must radically review animal ontology by reinterpreting not only subjective behaviour but the whole course of life.
Roberto Marchesini is Director of Siua (School of Human-Animal Interactions) and the Centro Studi Filosofia Postumanista (Center for the Study of Posthumanist Philosophy), both based in Bologna, Italy. Roberto Marchesini is a veterinary doctor, ethologist, and philosopher who has been involved in the study of animals since the 1980s. He combines scientific and philosophical perspectives to address a range of questions about evolution, behaviour, mind, subjectivity, culture, and ethics. With colleagues he developed a school of animal interaction and training that is based on treating animals (dogs, horses, cats, others) as minded interlocutors in a social interaction, rather than the using negative reinforcement and simple conditioning. He is the best known exponent of zooanthropology and post humanism in Italy, and he has developed unique versions of both that can contribute to the anglophone literature on them. His zooanthropology holds that culture is present among nonhuman animals and that human culture and identity are built upon animal references and interactions at every level. His account of posthumanism focusses on ending the centuries-long delusion by which humans convinced themselves that they were distinct from the animal realm in paying heed to our animality and our deep constitutive ties to other animals. His writings span the gamut from lyric poetry (The God Pan 1988) to cognitive science (Multiple Intelligences 2008), zooanthropology (Zooanthropology 2005, 2007, 2014), posthumanism (Posthuman 2002, The Twilight of the Human 2009), and bioethics (The Chimera Factory 1999, Against Animal Rights? 2014). He was a student of the Italian entomologist and ethologist Giorgio Celli and had a long collaboration with the astrophysicist Margherita Hack. He has written or co-written more than 30 books, including “Dizionario bilingue: italiano/gatto – imparare a parlare gatto correntemente” and “Dizionarario bilingue: italiano/cane- imparare a parlare cane correntemente”, bilingual dictionaries for learning how to speak fluently in dog and cat language. He is the author of 100 scientific essays and runs an ethology blog on the major Italian Newspaper “Il Corriere della Sera.” He is also member of this scientific and editorial boards: Minding Animal International, The World Phenomenology Institute, and the Book Series Numanities (Springer).
Free and open to the public.