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Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art

Online ISBN:
9781452947334
Print ISBN:
9780816672967
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art

Ron Broglio
Ron Broglio
Assistant Professor, English, Arizona State University
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Published online:
24 August 2015
Published in print:
21 November 2011
Online ISBN:
9781452947334
Print ISBN:
9780816672967
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

What is it like to be an animal? This book aims to find out from the inside, from underneath the fur and feathers. In examining this question, it bypasses the perspectives of biology or natural history to explore how one can construct an animal phenomenology, to think and feel as an animal other—or any other. Until now phenomenology has grappled with how humans are embedded in their world. According to philosophical tradition, animals do not practice the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with depth of being. Without human interiority, philosophers have believed, animals live on the surface of things. But, the book argues, the surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals, and as such he turns to humans who work with surfaces: contemporary artists. Taking on the negative claim of animals living only on the surface and turning the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human-animal engagement, the book considers artists—including Damien Hirst, Carolee Schneemann, Olly and Suzi, and Marcus Coates—who take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In doing so, these artists develop languages of interspecies expression that both challenge philosophy and fashion new concepts for animal studies.

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