Zoontologies, the Question of the Animal is a collection of essays about “those nonhuman beings called animals (who) pose philosophical and ethical questions that go to the root not just of what we think but of who we are. Their presence asks: what happens when the Other can no longer safely be assumed to be human?”
These collections about “The Animal Question” have spawned and multiplied, many of their core contents get re-spun from book to book, so there is a lot of overlap from collection to collection, but also some real gems. My favorite in this book is by Alphonso Lingis, titled “Animal Body, Inhuman Face.” It’s an über-sexy, gorgeously written essay that extends (and exemplifies the often impossibly textual) Deleuze + Guattari’s Becoming-Animal theories, writ on bodies – on our bodies as ecosystems, our bodies as animal bodies.
Mathew Calarco’s review of Zoontologies writes that “Lingis’s essay overflows not with examples of “the animal” but with animals (understood broadly as living beings), in their multiplicity and heterogeneity: bacteria, sea anemones, rodents, rabbits, cats, cockatoos, jellyfish, whales, lions, wolves, and foxes, to name only a few…Lingis is also concerned to draw attention to the becomings-animal that are constantly at work at the very core of the human. It is especially during sex, Lingis argues, that human beings undergo such becomings: during orgasm, “our impulses, our passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility” (172); he notes further, in a passage that is sure to shock those readers who are confident that a sharp line can be drawn between the human and the animal in the realm of sex, that, “When we, in our so pregnant expression, make love with someone of our own species, we also make love with the horse and the calf, the kitten and cockatoo, the powdery moths and the lustful crickets””
Textually bestial?