Animality of the human, humanity of the animal: limits, entanglements and overlaps: A brief presentation of the volume «Animality: philosophical and literary encounters at the boundaries of anthropology»

Abstract

In this paper, we try to lay out a basis for thinking an encounter between the human and the animal. Such an encounter implies to meditate about the animality that relies in ourselves. It also involves to consider the part of humanity that animals might entail. Thus, this very type of encounter can only be properly thought considering the architectonical structure of our subjectivity, organized in terms of experience levels. We end up showing that from an epistemological point of view, the many ways in which the former questions might be approached seem irreducible to one another: thus, the animality is not to be «encountered» and approached on the same way in a fiction story, a phenomenological essay, a medical or an ethological report.