Jacques Derrida’s influential The Animal That Therefore I Am begins with a scene of seeing, as he stands exposed before “a cat that looks at [him] without moving, just to see.” For Donna Haraway, in When Species Meet, it’s key that Derrida “understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings.” This seminar strays onto this scene also, in order to consider this face-to-face encounter, and to consider, in particular, the representation of these human and non-human seeing animals and what they see. Or, what they perceive, because the sight of these faces is surely asymmetrical and must touch also on scent, sound, and taste. In representing this scene, therefore, how can one express, as Derrida puts it, the “desire to escape the alternative of a projection that appropriates and an interruption that excludes” the other? In turn, how does recognition of the animal’s desire “to manifest to me in some way its experience of my language, of my words and of my nudity” (Derrida) affect my world?
This seminar seeks theoretically-informed papers addressing seeing animals in visual art, film, and comics and graphic novels, but it will also consider texts dealing with what might be more generally called animal writing and the language of animals’ worlds. Possible topics include:
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The visual representation of animals
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The figurative animal
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Representing animal senses
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Figuring animal experience
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The language of animal experience
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Animal perspectives on the human (world)
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Seeing animals, ethics, and rights