The Negative Animal
Keywords:
animal, Hegel, immanence, Kojève, negativity
Abstract
In this paper, I analyze some aspects of Hegelian and post- Hegelian thought in order to demonstrate how the concepts of animality and negativity intersect in philosophical reflections on nature. In the first part, I consider the figure of the animal in Hegel’s work and show its necessary relation to negativity. In the second part, I return to Georges Bataille and Alexander Kojève’s discussion of the end of history, where negativity appears with a human face, as something that leaves animals behind. Finally, in the third part, I justify the animal’s claims on negativity as a force of transformation and change through a peculiar political ontology of the fish.
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Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (2005). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Hegel, G.W.F. (1979). Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lacan, Jacques (1991). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli and John Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton.
Lawrence, D.H. (1995). Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1890). The Monadology. In The Philosophical Works of Leibnitz. New Haven, Conn.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels (1976). The German Ideology [1845]. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5: Marx and Engels, 1845–47. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2002). Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Noys, Benjamin (2000). Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Platonov, Andrei (1990). Chevengur. Trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. In The Portable Platonov. Moscow: Glas.
Rand, Sebastian (2010). “Animal Subjectivity and the Nervous System in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.” http://www.academia.edu/797764/.
Rohman, Carrie (2009). Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press.
Published
2013-01-09
How to Cite
Timofeeva, O. (2013). The Negative Animal. Stasis, 1(1). Retrieved from https://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/63
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Articles
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