Christiane Bailey

Les droits des animaux de Regan – trad Enrique Utria

Christiane — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:05:31 +0000

Enrique Utria vient de faire paraître la traduction française de The Case for Animal Rights aux Editions Hermann. Il était temps que la bible du droit des animaux soit disponible au public français! Voilà une très bonne nouvelle.

Les droits des animaux de Tom Regan

Les animaux ont des droits. C’est la thèse que défend Tom Regan dans cette œuvre fondatrice, contribution majeure à la réflexion morale contemporaine. Loin d’être sans pensée, comme l’affirmait Descartes, les animaux que nous mangeons, chassons ou livrons aux expériences scientifiques sont conscients du monde. Leur esprit est empreint de croyances et de désirs, de souvenirs et d’attentes. Ce sont, à ce titre, des êtres dotés d’une valeur morale propre, indépendamment de l’utilité qu’ils peuvent avoir pour nous. Ce n’est pas simplement par compassion pour leur souffrance, mais par égard pour leur valeur que nous devons les traiter avec respect.
La théorie de Regan est la formulation philosophique la plus élaborée et la plus radicale d’une éthique des droits des animaux. Elle pose une exigence de cohérence : si nous refusons l’exploitation des hommes, il nous faut également dénoncer l’exploitation des animaux non humains. L’abolition de l’élevage, de la chasse et de l’expérimentation est requise par la justice.

EXTRAIT :

“Être le sujet-d’une-vie [...] implique plus qu’être simplement en vie [...]: les individus sont sujets-d’une-vie s’ils ont des croyances et des désirs ; une perception, une mémoire et un sens du futur, y compris de leur propre futur ; une vie émotionnelle ainsi que des sentiments de plaisir et de douleur ; des intérêts préférentiels et de bien-être ; l’aptitude à initier une action à la poursuite de leurs désirs et de leurs buts ; une identité psychophysique au cours du temps ; et un bien-être individuel, au sens où la vie dont ils font l’expérience leur réussit bien ou mal, indépendamment logiquement de leur utilité pour les autres et du fait qu’ils soient l’objet des intérêts de qui que ce soit.” (Regan, Le droit des animaux, tr. Utria, p. 479).

Entrevue avec Enrique Utria et Florence Burgat sur les ondes de France Culture le 13 mai 2013: une longue et excellente entrevue avec Stéphane Déligeorges qui vous donnera le goût de plonger dans le grand livre de Regan.

Will Kymlicka, “Animal Rights, Multiculturalism, and The Left”

Christiane — Mon, 13 May 2013 03:51:29 +0000

On April 25, 2013, Kymlicka gave a talk at the Graduate Center which tackle very important issues surrounding animal rights and the Left. He asks, following John Sanbonmatsu, why the Left (marxism, feminism, post-colonialism and so on) have largely been indifferent to human violence against animals.

Although they championed the critique of hierarchies amongst humans, they largely failed to challenge human domination of animals. There have not been many attempt to extend feminist, post-colonial and multiculturalist theory to violence towards animals.

Besides the usual suspects (religion, human exceptionalism and the force of habits), Kymlicka investigates three explanations. Following Arluke, we can think that the Left has not been receptive to animal issues because (1) animal studies would be competing other more important causes (following a zero-sum amount logic), (2) because we run the risk of trivializing human injustices by equating violence towards humans and other animals and (3) because of the spectre of Cultural Imperialism (claiming the vegan imperative would be performing whiteness).

He very clearly and carefully debunk all three worries:

1. Animal concerns would challenge more important causes: It is wrong to think that fighting an injustice is detrimental to other forms of injustices. Oppressions are linked in an interconnected web and we should not be ignoring any form of oppression.

2. Risk of trivializing human injustices: they see interest in animals as a parody. Some people think that holding on to human exceptionalism is necessary to protect some disadvantaged humans, minority or oppressed groups. Kymlicka rightly points out that this is an empirical issue and that we gave evidence to the contrary: the more people believe in human supremacy over animals, the more they tend to be racists and to discriminate outgroups (See Costello and Hodson).

3. The Spectre of Cultural Imperialism: “Animal advocacy may be aimed at protecting vulnerable animals, but many people on the left worry that it will end up reaffirming the privileged status of white middle-class westerners, while stigmatizing minority groups and non-western cultures. Western culture are seen as humane and civilized and others as uncivilized and barbaric.”

3.1 Animal advocacy is associated with a critique of minorities practices and

3.2 Veganism is associated with rich western society and claiming the vegan imperative is seen as performing whiteness.

It is true that public discussion over animal cruelty focuses on the practices of minorities and outsiders (like eating dogs in China), but it is not animal right activists who do that, it is people who support our common farming practices. From an animal rights perspective there is no morally relevant difference between eating dogs and pigs. None is less inherently cruel than the other.

Kymlicka claims that we should avoid the way in which the public debate usually focuses on cruelty and unnecessary suffering because of the fact that it will always target the practices of minorities and other cultures:

“Invoking cultural imperialism as grounds for indifference to animal rights is not only theoretically arbitrary, but counter-productive. […] The conceptual framework of `cruelty’ or `unnecessary suffering’ is catastrophic for animals, but it is also bad for minorities. The concept of “cruelty” or “unnecessary suffering” invites – and indeed makes inevitable – culturally biased mobilizations of animal issues.”

“Practices involving cruelty are by definition those that are not customary in the majority society. This is explicit in animal cruelty laws: they exempt generally accepted practices in the mainstream society. So by definition, the existing legal framework can only target minority practices (or individual psychopathy). Majority practices are inherently immunized from moral and political scrutiny.”

“This is intrinsic to the legal structure we have at the moment. It is inevitable that the majority practices will serve as the normative standard for evaluating animal practices. So, if we continue to use this language of cruelty and unnecessary suffering we are inherently privileging majority animal practices. Because all human violence, or almost all human violence, against animals is unnecessary in the strict sense: human can live flourishing lives without eating meat, wearing leather and without visiting caged animals in zoos and circuses. None of the suffering involved in those practices is necessary in the strict sense [...].”

“From a legal and political perspective, necessary suffering is likely to be whatever we, the majority, do to animals in our generally accepted practices, and unnecessary suffering is what you, the minority, do to animals, particularly if we’re not so keen on you, the minority, in the first place.”

“Anyone who cares about racial and cultural hierarchies should be very concerned about this inherent bias in existing animal cruelty laws and norms. And yet, remarkably, the left has no response to it. The left worries that embracing animal rights will involve complicity with racial bias, and so remains silent about animal oppression. In reality, it’s the opposite: it is precisely by remaining silent that the left is complicit in the perpetuation of a legal and political framework that is inherently biased against minorities.”

“In short, neither majority nor minority is called upon today to justify how they exercise power over animals. Embracing a postcolonial, anti-racist AR agenda – what we call a Multicultural Zoopolis – would have, as its first task, challenging this conspiracy of silence. Such a conversation would be uncomfortable, for both majorities and minorities, since animal exploitation is built deeply into the fabric of contemporary societies. But there is no reason to assume that such a conversation must erode multiculturalist commitments, at least not the sorts of multiculturalist commitments that have been embraced by the left. A Multicultural Zoopolis agenda would be inconsistent with conservative or communitarian conceptions of multiculturalism that endow communities with the right to maintain and reproduce their cultural traditions untouched, regardless of the ethical content or justifiability of those traditions. But this conception, which would accord minorities a right to maintain practices of forced arranged marriages, or honour killings, or female circumcision, has never been embraced by the left. Rather, the left has embraced a transformative conception of multiculturalism, rooted in social justice, human rights and citizenship, aiming to contest status hierarchies that have privileged hegemonic groups while stigmatizing minorities. This progressive conception of multiculturalism, at its best, operates to illuminate unjust political and cultural hierarchies, to de-center hegemonic norms, and to hold the exercise of power morally accountable.”

“Multiculturalism and animal rights are not in conflict, but flow naturally from the same deeper commitments to justice and moral accountability, and there are tools and strategies for defending progressive causes, whether of animal rights or human rights, against the danger of instrumentalization and cultural imperialism.”

(Will Kymlicka & Sue Donaldson)

He convincingly argues that animal liberation is not a movement which reinforce the white privilege and that “any credible account of post-colonialism and of feminism need to be post-humanist”.

Part 1 (one-hour conference). Download the paper on Kymlicka’s Academia page.

Part 2 (question period)

—–

Une excellente conférence de Kymlicka sur la gauche et la cause animale.Il déconstruit trois mythes qui ont empêché la gauche de dénoncer les violences envers les animaux.

1. Défendre les animaux porterait ombrage à des causes plus importantes. Kymlicka : combattre une injustice ne nuit pas au combat contre d’autres injustices. Les diverses formes d’oppression sont liées.

2. Défendre les animaux risquerait de trivialiser les injustices commises envers les humains. Certains pensent que soutenir la suprématie humaine est nécessaire pour protéger les minorités opprimées. Les recherches tendent au contraire à montrer que plus les gens croient en la supériorité humaine sur les animaux, plus ils tendent à être racistes et à discriminer les groupes humains étrangers (voir Costello and Hodson).

3. Le spectre de l’impérialisme humain: les défenseurs des animaux sont faussement associés aux critiques contre les pratiques des minorités et des autres cultures en raison de la mécompréhension de la théorie des droits des animaux et le véganisme est faussement vu comme un privilège des sociétés occidentales, riches et développées.

Kymlicka soutient que soutenir les droits des animaux, au contraire d’être une façon de soutenir le privilège blanc (performing whiteness), est la seule façon crédible d’être post-colonialistes, féministes et de défendre le droit des minorités.

En voici un extrait que j’ai traduit :

“Invoquer l’impérialisme culturel comme une raison d’être indifférent aux droits des animaux est [...] contre-productif. Le cadre conceptuel qui fonctionne en termes de “cruauté” et de “souffrance non-nécessaire” est catastrophique pour les animaux, mais aussi pour les minorités. Ils invitent et rendent inévitables les usages culturellement biaisés des enjeux liés aux animaux.Par définition, les pratiques impliquant la cruauté sont celles qui ne sont pas d’usage commun dans la société majoritaire. Cela est explicite dans les lois contre la cruauté envers les animaux : ils exemptent les pratiques généralement acceptées dans la culture majoritaire. Donc, par définition, le cadre légal existant peut seulement cibler les pratiques des minorités ou la psychopathie individuelle.”[…]“De nos jours, ni la majorité, ni les minorités ne sont appelées à justifié la façon dont ils exercent leur pouvoir sur les animaux. Adopter un agenda des droits des animaux postcolonialiste et antiraciste – ce que nous appelons une Zoopolis multiculturelle – aura pour tâche première de mettre au défi cette conspiration du silence. Une telle conversation sera inconfortable, autant pour les majorités et les minorités, puisque l’exploitation des animaux est profondément enracinée dans le tissu même de nos sociétés contemporaines.Cependant, il n’y a aucune raison de penser qu’une telle conversation éroderait nos engagements pour le multiculturalisme, en tous cas pas le genre d’engagements muticulturalistes qui ont été défendus par la gauche. Un projet pour une Zoopolis multiculturelle sera incompatible avec les visions conservatrices et communautariennes du multiculturalisme qui octroient aux communautés le droit le maintenir et de reproduire leurs traditions culturelles intactes, sans égards aux aspects éthiques et justifiables de ces traditions. Mais cette conception, qui accorderait aux minorités le droit de maintenir des pratiques comme celle du mariage arrangé forcé, des crimes d’honneur et de la circoncision, n’a jamais été adoptée par la gauche. Au contraire, la gauche a adopté une conception progressiste du multiculturalisme, enracinée dans la justice sociale, les droits de la personne et du citoyen, qui visent à contester les hiérarchies qui ont privilégié les groupes hégémoniques en stigmatisant les minorités.Cette conception progressiste du multiculturalisme permet d’illuminer des pratiques injustes et des hiérarchies culturelles, de décentrer les normes hégémoniques et de tenir l’exercice du pouvoir moralement responsable.”

(Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson).

Part 1 (one-hour conference). Download the paper on Kymlicka’s Academia page.

Part 2 (question period)

Navigating A Multispecies World : Conference at Harvard University

Christiane — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:47:11 +0000

Multispecies World Conference at Harvard University

April 25-26, 2013
http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/events/workshops/navigating-a-multispecies-world/

Featuring talks by Stefan Helmreich (Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT) and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT)

Thursday April 25: Room 1550, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

Please arrive and register by 14.45

14.45-16.25: Panel I: Theorizing Subjectivity (Chair: Joe Vitti, graduate student, Harvard Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology)

Agnes Malinowska (University of Chicago): The Solipsism of Vulnerability: Questioning the Turn to Embodied Finitude in Interspecies Ethics

Filippo Bertoni (University of Amsterdam): Life Quarries, Life Queries: underground biological activity and the search for (an answer to) life

Andy Hahn (Oregon State University): “Botanical Thinking: Posthuman Possibilities in Goethe’s Plant Morphology and DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory”

Vincent Duhamel (Universite de Montreal): Knowing How to Flee and When to Hide – A Case for NonHuman Knowledge

Novina Goehlsdorf (Humboldt-Universität Berlin, visiting scholar, Harvard): From non-human to more-than-human: transforming concepts of autism

16.25-16.30: Break

16.30-17.30: Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT (Chair: Neal Akatsuka, graduate student, Harvard Department of Anthropology)

17.30-18.00: Break

18.00-19.30: Screening of “Project Nim” (Introduction: Caroline DeVane, graduate student, Harvard Divinity School)

Friday April 26: Bell Hall, Belfer Building, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge

Please arrive by 8.45

08.45-10.30: Panel II: Navigating Contested Interests (Chair: Michael G. Bennett, Associate Professor, Northeastern School of Law)

Katie Gillespie (University of Washington): The ‘global intimate,’ sexualized violence, and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest dairy production

Ryan Shapiro (MIT): “The most humane practice known to man”: Contesting animal protection in early Twentieth-Century American Vivisection Controversies

Les Beldo (University of Chicago): Anti-Whaling Activism and the Limits of Cetacean ‘Representation’

Ashley Drake (University of Chicago): Applying Individual-Centered Ethnography to the Study of Human-Animal Interaction in Zoos

10.30-10.45: Break

10.45-12.15: Panel III: Individuals in a Multispecies World (Chair: Joanna Radin, Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and of History, Yale School of Medicine)

Elan Abrell (CUNY Graduate Center): “The Possibility of Becoming a Dog”: Bringing Companion Animals from Zoë to Bios through Practices of Empathy in the No Kill Movement

Barnaby McLaughlin (University of Rhode Island): I Can Haz an Electric Cheezburger: Animals, Empathy, and the Internet

Maria Metzler (Harvard): Talking Animals on Trial: The Metaphysical Implications of Balaam’s Ass

Jakobina Arch (Harvard): Humanizing Whales: Religion and the Human-Other Boundary in Early Modern Japan

12.15-13.00: Lunch

13.00-14.45: Panel IV: The Politics of Territories (Chair: Allen T. Rutberg, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Tufts)

Marcus Owens (Harvard): Towards a Multi-Species City

Emily Wanderer (MIT): Biologies of Betrayal: The Care of the Pest, Judas Goats, and the Margins of Mexico

Connie Johnston (Clark University/Harvard University): Farm Animals’ Welfare in the US and EU: Translating, Representing, and Creating Legibility

Amy Hanes (Brandeis): Inept Dads and Matriarchal Moms: Adoptive Patrimony and Value in Elephant Conservation in Cameroon

Barbara Canavan (Oregon State University): Migrating Birds: Biological Sentinels for Human Disease

14.45-15.00: Break

15.00-16.00: Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT (Chair: Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School)

16.00-16.30: Summary reflections (Chair: Caroline DeVane, graduate student, Harvard Divinity School)

Panelists: Joe Vitti (Harvard), Irina Meketa (Boston University), Caterina Scaramelli (MIT)

16.30-17.30: Reception

—-

Navigating a Multispecies World: A Graduate Student Conference on the Species Turn
APRIL 25-26, 2013
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Program on Science, Technology, and
Society (STS), the MIT Department of Anthropology, and the Harvard
Political Ecology Working Group (PEWG).

This conference concerns the recent innovations and insights for the study of ontologies and socialities engendered through the “species turn” — that is, the intellectual turn to, and reflection upon, life beyond the human species in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Emerging over the last few decades of the 20th century, the species turn developed (1) from a diverse array of analytical and theoretical formations concerned with aspects of the nonhuman (animate and inanimate), including actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, the new materialism, and systems theory; and (2) in productive tension with a parallel intellectual development — posthumanism — articulated through such innovative theoretical work as Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? While all approaches hold their own particular aims, objects, and methodologies, they urge us to consider that we, humans, are not alone. That is, we live in a world populated by and constituted through life forms and forms of life beyond the human. And as such, we must critically reconsider who “we” are in terms that challenge the limitations and dangers of anthropocentrism.

We welcome papers from any discipline on topics including, but not limited to:
- Animal rights
- Chimeras
- Human-nonhuman relations
- Interspecies solidarity
- Kinship
- Multispecies biopolitics
- Nonhuman agency
- Nonhuman ethics
- Nonhuman subjectivity
- Nonhuman ontology
- Representations of nonhumans
- Species concept
If you have any questions, please send them to multispeciesworld@gmail.com.

Workshop on Donaldson & Kymlicka Zoopolis (Victoria, June 4-5, 2013)

Christiane — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:39:19 +0000

Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA)
Association Canadienne de Sciences Politiques (ACSP)

« Political Theory »

Workshop on Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson’s Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP, 2011)

June 4th 9:00-12:00 :
Christiane Bailey (U. de Montréal), Zoopolis: A Political Deconstruction of Animal Rights Theories
Laura Janara (UBC), Situating Zoopolis
Clare Palmer (Texas A&M), Contextualist Animal Ethics : A Commentary on Zoopolis
Dinesh Wadiwel (Sydney), Zoopolis: Challenging our Conceptualisation of Political Sovereignty Through Animal Sovereignties
Response by Sue Donaldson & Will Kymlicka

June 4th 13:30-15:30 :
Paul Hamilton (Brock University), Steps Towards Zoopolis? A Comparative Analysis of Recent Constitutional and Legislative Changed to the Status of Animals
Dan Hooley (Toronto), Justice for All : Recognizing Other Animals as Members of Our Political Communities
Emma Planinc (Toronto), The Freedom of Equals and Unequals Alike? Animals as Citizens in the Democratic Zoopolis
Geoffrey Sigalet (Princeton University), Francis Bacon and the Democratic Telos of Animals

June 4th 15:15-16:45
Caleb Basnett (York), Other Political Animals : Aristotle and the Limits of Political Community
Kate Daley (York), Beyond Other Animals : Haraway’s When Species Meet and Privilege within Feminism(s)
John Sanbonmatsu (Worcesthesire Polytechnic Institute), Speciesism as the Ur-Modality of Herrenvolk Politik, or, Can Nonhuman Animals be Slaves?

June 5th 10:30-12:00 :
Stefan Dolgert (Brock), Democratic Rats? Michel Serres, Karni Mata, and the Animal Research Complexité
Laura Janara (UBC), Tracing the Legitimation of Animal Use in Canadian Universities
Dinesh Wadiwel (Sydney), The Universal Cannibalism of the Sea : Comparing Locke and Derrida’s accounts on Dominion, Property and Sovereignty of Animals.

More info : http://www.cpsa2013event.ca/welcome.php

June 5th and 6th, the EPTC/TCEP (which also hold its annual meeting in Victoria), will have 4 panels on animals:

Panels on Animals June 5 and 6 (more detail below):

June 5th 9:00-11:30 : Panel « Phenomenological Approaches to Animal Otherness »
→ Brett Buchanan (Laurentian University) Being Towards Extinction (details)
→ Don Beith (McGill University), Merleau-Ponty’s Animate Epistemology: Learning to Perceive (as) Animals

June 5th 14:00-16:30 : Panel « Animals: Rights, Veganism and Justice »
→ Valéry Giroux (Universite de Montreal), An Antispeciest Approach to Fundamental Rights
→ Sue Donaldson (co-author with Will Kymlicka of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, OUP, 2011), Unruly Beasts: Humans and Animals Sharing the Demos

June 6th 9:00-12:30 : Panel « Veganarchism and Paleoethics: Equality beyond Species »
→ Cynthia Willet (Emory University) Interspecies Living (a serious ethics with a comic twist).
→ Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sidney), Resisting the War Against Animals: Counter-Conduct and Truce
→ John Sanbonmatsu (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)

June 6th 14:00-17:30 : « Book Panel on Gary Steiner’s Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (CUP, 2013) »
→ Patrick Llored (Université de Lyon) author of Jacques Derrida, Politique et éthique de l’animalité (Sils Maria, 2013)
→ Chloë Taylor (Université d’Alberta), « Foucault and the Ethics of Eating » (Foucault Studies, 2010)
→ Jan Dutkiewicz (PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research)
→ Gary Steiner (Bucknell University), Animals and the Moral Community (CUP, 2008), Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)

Download the program for animal panels (PDF)

Complete program of the EPTC

More info : http://christianebailey.com/eptc-tcep-2013/

Télécharger en PDF

Peut-on tirer une éthique de la nature ?

Christiane — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:03:44 +0000

Colloque «Peut-on tirer une éthique de l’observation de la nature?» se tiendra à l’Université de Montréal le 28 et 29 mars 2013.

Voir le programme en fichier joint : Peut-on tirer une éthique de la nature ? *horaire devancé d’une heure*

Une erreur s’y est cependant glissé. Le mot de bienvenue de la première journée du colloque ne durera évidemment pas une heure et quart. Aussi, l’ensemble des activités de la première journée seront devancés d’une heure par rapport à ce qui est indiqué sur l’horaire.

PEUT-ON TIRER UNE ÉTHIQUE DE L’ÉTUDE DE LA NATURE ?
COLLOQUE ORGANISÉ PAR L’ADÉPUM DANS LE CADRE DU MOIS DE LA RECHERCHE ÉTUDIANTE
28 ET 29 MARS 2013

Jeudi 28 mars

13h Mot de bienvenue

13h15 Questions d’épistémologie
«La neutralité axiologique, une thèse épistémologique ou éthique?» (Marc-Kevin Daoust)
«La conscience nécessaire: l’influence de données psychologiques sur trois courants éthiques majeurs» (Félix Gauthier Mongeon)

15h15 Pause

15h30 Éthique animale et éthique de l’environnement
«Moralité(s) humaine(s) et moralités animales» (Christiane Bailey)
«L’écocentrisme et ses appels à la nature comme norme: sont-ils nécessairement fallacieux?» (Antoine C.-Dussault)

17h30 Cocktail

29 mars (vendredi):

9h Conférencier invité (Christian Nadeau)

10h30 Philosophie des sciences
«Les définitions de la vie: le sophisme du combat et l’invisibilité de la collaboration» (Thiago Hutter)
«L’expressivisme moral: une conclusion nécessaire de la critique darwinienne de Sharon Street?» (David Rocheleau-Houle)

12h30 Dîner

13h30 Histoire de la philosophie
«Calliclès et Diogène: les leçons rivales de la nature» (Simon-Pierre Chevarie Cossette)
«Le chaos dans le Zhuangz» (Marion Avarguès)
«La béatitude entre immanence et transcendance chez Maître Eckhart» (Pierre-Luc Desjardins)
«Pratique méditative et action politique chez Henry David Thoreau» (Pierre Graham)
«Le devoir-être dans la préface des Principes de philosophie du doit» (Jeanne Allard)

18h30 Cocktail de fermeture

CFP Representing Animals: Nonhuman ‘Others’ in Human Publics

Christiane — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:41:43 +0000

CFP: AAA 2013 “Representing Animals: Nonhuman ‘Others’ in Human Publics” (deadline 31 March 2013)

CALL FOR PAPERS

For the 112th American Anthropological Association Meeting (http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/), November 20-24, 2013 in Chicago, IL

*Representing Animals: Nonhuman ‘Others’ in Human Publics*

From “Save the Whales” campaigns of the 1960s to the recent rise of the progressive Dutch political party PvdD (“Party for the Animals”), people have searched for ways to incorporate nonhuman animals into the human social order. These efforts expose, but are also limited by, the anthropocentric and humanist assumptions built into legal and political frameworks. Recent attempts by anthropologists to include nonhuman animals in theories of subjectivity have struggled against a similar set of assumptions. Often, anthropologists seek to extend anthropocentric frameworks rather than develop innovative theories that do more than transpose human models onto nonhuman animals. As Cary Wolfe (2009) suggests in his work on posthumanism, the social sciences must move beyond merely ‘de-centering’ the human to truly incorporate the animal within these investigations.

This panel analyzes innovative attempts (recent and historical) to represent animals in human social, legal, and political arenas.
Specifically, we ask: what strategies have been employed for representing animals? What attempts, if any, have been made to go beyond the metaphor of “voicing” or “speaking for” animals? And is it possible to understand any of these attempts from an anthropological perspective without first rethinking some of the underlying assumptions of the discipline?

Possible topics include:

Lawsuits on behalf of or involving animals
Attempts by activists to represent animals in political discourse
Wildlife management regimes
Animal rights and animal welfare movements and NGOs
Accounts of animals in mainstream media
Grassroots campaigns on behalf of specific animals
Biological models of animal behavior
Animals in film and other artistic mediums

We welcome participants from a diverse range of theoretical perspectives and disciplines

Organizers:

Les Beldo, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Comparative Human Development,
University of Chicago

Ashley Drake, Doctoral Student, Department of Comparative Human
Development, University of Chicago

Discussant:

Mary Weismantel, Professor, Northwestern University (Discussant)

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to beldo@uchicago.edu
and adrake@uchicago.edu by *March 31st.

La croyance dans la supériorité humaine comme source de déshumanisation

Christiane — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:09:57 +0000

Plus nous croyons en la supériorité morale de l’homme sur les autres animaux, plus nous sommes susceptibles de déshumaniser certains groupes humains.

Plusieurs critiquent l’extension des droits fondamentaux aux animaux affirmant qu’on devrait s’occuper des humains avant de se préoccuper des autres animaux. Pourtant, des recherches montrent que plus on établit une distinction radicale entre les humains et les animaux, plus on est porté à déshumaniser des groupes humains.

Voici un extrait de Kymlicka and Donaldson qui expriment bien cette idée:

« The evidence shows that the more people sharply distinguish between humans and animals, the more likely they are to dehumanize human outgroups, such as immigrants. Belief in human superiority over animals is empirically correlated with, and causally connected to, belief in the superiority of some human groups over others. correlated with, and causally connected to, belief in the superiority of some human groups over others. When participants in psychological studies are given arguments about human superiority over animals, the outcome is greater prejudice against human outgroups. By contrast, those who recognize that animals possess valued traits and emotions are also more likely to accord equality to human outgroups. Reducing the status divide between humans and animals helps to reduce prejudice and to strengthen belief in equality amongst human groups. » (Kymlicka and Donaldson, Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights, pp. 265-266).

Pour les études des Hodson et Costello :
(2010) Exploring the roots of dehumanization: The role of animal–human similarity in promoting immigrant humanization.
(copie accessible ici)
(2012) Explaining dehumanization among children: The interspecies model of prejudice
(copie disponible ici)

Mark Bekoff en a également discuté dans Psychology Today : http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201206/dehumanization-and-animal-human-similarity

Extraits :

“Beliefs that animals and humans are relatively similar are associated with greater immigrant humanization, which in turn predicted more favorable immigrant attitudes”

“Emphasizing animals as similar to humans (versus humans as similar to animals, or the human—animal divide) resulted in greater immigrant humanization (even among highly prejudiced people).”

“Recognizing that heightened immigrant dehumanization and prejudice follow from an exaggerated human–animal divide, it now becomes imperative to determine when and how beliefs about human superiority or animal inferiority develop. Children are socialized to endorse perceptions of human superiority over other animals through parental influence, religious teachings, cultural traditions, and/or experiences with industries condoning the exploitation of non-human animals. These socialization practices presumably lead children to endorse the cultural “legitimacy” of dominating, victimizing, or ignoring the plight of non-human animals.”

http://gpi.sagepub.com/content/13/1/3.abstract?rss=1

Cela soutient la thèse générale que les mécanismes psychologiques et socio-culturels qui servent à justifier (à rationaliser) les violences et les discriminations ne sont pas essentiellement différents dans le cas des autres humains ou des autres animaux.

Voir également Comment nous nions la vie mentale des animaux pour mieux les manger.

Navigating a Multispecies World – Graduate Student Conference at Harvard University

Christiane — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:52:16 +0000

Multispecies World Conference at Harvard University

The program is out : click here.

April 25-26, 2013, Day 1: 2:45pm-7:30pm, Day 2: 8:45AM-5:30PM
Day 1: William James Hall 1550, Day 2: Bell Hall, Belfer Building, HKS

http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/events/workshops/navigating-a-multispecies-world/

Featuring talks by Stefan Helmreich (Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT) and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT)

The program has not been announced, but there will be a talk by Vincent Duhamel (Université de Montréal): ‘Knowing How to Flee and When to Hide – A Case for Non-Human Knowledge”

—-

CALL FOR PAPERS (deadline 6 March 2013)

Navigating a Multispecies World: A Graduate Student Conference on the Species Turn

APRIL 25-26, 2013
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Program on Science, Technology, and
Society (STS), the MIT Department of Anthropology, and the Harvard
Political Ecology Working Group (PEWG).

We invite papers for a multidisciplinary graduate student conference
to be held at Harvard University from April 25 – April 26, 2013.

Our confirmed speakers include Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor &
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT) and Stefan Helmreich (Elting
E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT).

This conference concerns the recent innovations and insights for the
study of ontologies and socialities engendered through the “species
turn” — that is, the intellectual turn to, and reflection upon, life
beyond the human species in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Emerging over the last few decades of the 20th century, the species
turn developed (1) from a diverse array of analytical and theoretical
formations concerned with aspects of the nonhuman (animate and
inanimate), including actor-network theory, affect theory, animal
studies, assemblage theory, the new materialism, and systems theory;
and (2) in productive tension with a parallel intellectual development
– posthumanism — articulated through such innovative theoretical
work as Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe’s
What Is Posthumanism? While all approaches hold their own particular
aims, objects, and methodologies, they urge us to consider that we,
humans, are not alone. That is, we live in a world populated by and
constituted through life forms and forms of life beyond the human. And
as such, we must critically reconsider who “we” are in terms that
challenge the limitations and dangers of anthropocentrism.

Please submit abstracts of up to 350 words by March 6, 2013, to multispeciesworld@gmail.com. If you have any questions, please send
them to multispeciesworld@gmail.com.

Call for papers Kant and Animals

Christiane — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:58:12 +0000

Conference to be held July 5-8, 2013, hosted by the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, at the Protea Hotel, Kruger Park Gate

This conference will be the first one devoted solely to the topic of the status of non-human animals within Kant’s philosophy. The conference will explore the place of animals in Kant’s Pre-Critical and Critical writings, and with regard to Kant’s epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and natural science.

Topics to be examined will include:

animal cognition (especially animal sensations and spatial representation) and the implications of thinking about animals for Kant’s account of human cognition.
duties to animals
the role of animals in Kant’s biology;
the contrast with animals in Kant’s anthropology.

Confirmed Speakers:

John Callanan (KCL)
Steve Naragon (Manchester)
Jon Garthoff (Tennessee)
Sacha Golob (KCL)
Ina Goy (Concordia)
Patrick Kain (Purdue)
Thaddeus Metz (Johannesburg)
Colin McClear (Cornell)
Nick Stang (Florida)
Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto)
Clinton Tolley (UCSD)
Jennifer Uleman (Purchase College)
Helga Varden (Illinois)
Eric Watkins (UCSD)

Papers, suitable for presentation in 30 minutes, should be sent to Professor Lucy Allais no later than March 31st 2013.

http://enviroethics.org/2013/01/23/call-for-papers-kant-on-animals/

Llored – Politique et ethique de l’animalite de Derrida

Christiane — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:41:36 +0000

En une très courte entrevue de moins de 8 minutes, Patrick Llored, introduit son nouveau livre Jacques Derrida, Politique et éthique de l’animalité paru le 15 janvier aux éditions Sils Maria dans la collection 5 concepts.

Il commence par rappeler que l’on a rarement reconnu que la pensée de l’animal était au centre de la philosophie derridienne (dès De la grammatologie) et déplore que les lecteurs intéressés par la question de l’animal chez Derrida se limitent à L’animal que donc je suis.
Derrida a en effet travaillé la question de la limite et de l’exclusion d’une façon qui a dès le départ inclus les animaux. Il a souligné, comme certains autres penseurs Juifs, la proximité entre la violence antismémite et la violence spéciste.

Ce n’est pas que nous excluons les animaux comme nous excluons certains humains, mais que nous excluons certains humains comme nous excluons les animaux. Ce n’est pas la même chose. L’exclusion de l’animal du social signe le prototype du geste d’exclusion de celui qui n’est pas reconnu comme un membre de la communauté (alors que tous reconnaissent qu’il n’y a jamais de sociétés simplement humaines, qu’elles se sont développées dès leurs origine avec des animaux de d’autres espèces, en tant que communauté mixte).

Il décompose les concepts centraux (dont celui de carnophallogocentrisme) et affirme qu’une éthique de l’animalité passe par la reconnaissance qu’il y a une souveraineté chez tous les animaux.

Dès que je recevrai son livre, j’en ferai une recension détaillée.

Patrick Llored, Jacques Derrida, Politique et éthique de l’animalité (éditions Sils Maria, collection 5 concepts).

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