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"Lestel, Dominique"
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What Capabilities for the Animal?
In this essay, I defend a bi-constructivist approach to ethology—a constructivist ethology assuming that each animal adopts constructivist strategies. I put it in opposition to what I call a realist-Cartesian approach, which is currently the dominant approach to ethology and comparative psychology. The starting point of the bi-constructivist approach can be formulated as a shift from the classical Aristotelian question “What is an animal?” to the Spinozean question, which is much less classical but which seems to me to be much stronger: “What are the capacities of the animal?”. Is it possible to conceptualize an ethology which insists on interpretation and therefore on invention, innovation and creativity, rather than on causality, the monotony of behavioural routines, and/or genetic or environmental determination? Such an ethology would be based not on the fiction of an absent observer but on fully recognizing the necessity of an observer, who is effectively present in order to get an observation. A
pluralistic ethology
does not dissociate itself from the
marginal epistemologies
of practitioners like animal trainers, hunters, stockbreeders etc., or, moreover, non-western experts. An ethology of this kind is not clamped within the boundaries of purely academic epistemology, obsessed by demarcation lines between the human and the animal. My work on the bi-constructivist approach represents a contribution towards the elaboration of an authentically biosemiotic ethology, one which is significantly different from the mechanical ethology of today.
Journal Article
Eat this book
If we want to improve the treatment of animals, Dominique Lestel argues, we must acknowledge our evolutionary impulse to eat them and we must expand our worldview to see how others consume meat ethically and sustainably. The position of vegans and vegetarians is unrealistic and exclusionary.Eat This Bookcalls at once for a renewed and vigorous defense of animal rights and a more open approach to meat eating that turns us into responsible carnivores.
Lestel skillfully synthesizes Western philosophical views on the moral status of animals and holistic cosmologies that recognize human-animal reciprocity. He shows that the carnivore's position is more coherently ethical than vegetarianism, which isolates humans from the world by treating cruelty, violence, and conflicting interests as phenomena outside of life. Describing how meat eaters assume completely-which is to say, metabolically-their animal status, Lestel opens our eyes to the vital relation between carnivores and animals and carnivores' genuine appreciation of animals' life-sustaining flesh. He vehemently condemns factory farming and the terrible footprint of industrial meat eating. His goal is to recreate a kinship between humans and animals that reminds us of what it means to be tied to the world.
eBook
« Posture Zoo-futuriste » et réanimalisation de l’humain
L’article met en évidence dans notre culture une tendance émergente qui concerne le rapport à l’animal, qui va au-delà des mouvements animalistes contemporains et qui est nommé ‘Zoo-futurisme’. Son objectif est de ne pas se contenter de cohabiter avec l’animal, mais d’aller habiter en lui et de permettre à certains animaux de venir habiter en soi. L’article identifie les six stades par lesquels peut s’effectuer le passage d’une espèce à une autre, avant de montrer qu’il est de toute façon impossible de définir de façon satisfaisante une notion aussi fondamentale que celle d’espèce. L’article finit en cherchant à déterminer la signification de ce mouvement contemporain de réanimalisation de l’humain
This article brings to the fore an emerging cultural trend in terms of relations to animals that goes beyond contemporary animalist movements and is referred to as “Zoo-futurism.” The objective is not merely to cohabit with animals, but to go and inhabit animals while allowing some of them to come and inhabit oneself. The article identifies the six stages through which one species can transit to another, and then shows that, in any case, it is impossible to satisfactorily define a notion as fundamental as that of species. The article ends by attempting to determine the meaning of this contemporary movement of reanimalization of humankind.
Journal Article
The Posture of the Human Exception
Contrary to the European humanist, the vegan does not assume that he can do whatever he wishes with animals, but rather he reinstates the assumption of man's exceptional status in a new form, by refusing to allow himself to be intoxicated by the animal and in considering that the metabolic connections between man and animal should be minimised when it is not possible to suppress them altogether. In her passionate chapter on xenografts, she quotes professor Pierre Cüer, a specialist in organ transplants, who believes that one of the two ethical considerations that he owes each of his patients is 'to reassure a transplant recipient of his continued membership in the human race'. In effect, social Darwinists evoked a quite imaginary struggle for life, but they wanted to regulate the social behaviour of power, not fundamental metabolic processes.
Journal Article
Like the Fingers of the Hand
European thought has traditionally addressed the question of animality in terms of a hygienic border, the problem being how best to characterize what distinguishes humans from animals—that is to say thepropre de l’hommeor that which is “proper to the human”—namely, a characteristic that humans alone possess and that so differentiates them from other animals that it pushes them beyond animality. Such a notion is highly problematic. Searching for competencies that one would find only inHomo sapiensis a more reasonable project, on the condition, however, of being sensitive to the pitfalls of the concepts mobilized
Book Chapter
A SORT OF DESSERT
Paradoxically, this book is written more for vegetarians than for carnivores, even though it will do more to shock the former than the latter. One of the significant problems with which vegetarians are faced is that they are operating in a closed circuit and are not developing critical discourses about their practices and their fundamental standpoint. Here we encounter an ambiguity shared by every discourse that seeks to be both theoretical and militant. An analogy will shed some light on this ambiguity: there is no question that the evolution and fortification of Christianity, quite apart from what one may think
Book Chapter
HORS D’OEUVRE
A very quick history of vegetarian practices is imperative. It is not without value to know how vegetarians arrived at their convictions. Nor is it a trivial matter to demonstrate that the vegetarian position, far from being monolithic, has a complexity greater than the majority of vegetarians believe. There are few histories of vegetarian movements, and some of them are more interesting than others. The one that I consider the best and that has given me the greatest inspiration for the pages that follow is the one published by Colin Spencer in 1993.¹
If Pythagoras is frequently cited as a
Book Chapter
APPETIZER
A vegetarian is a human being whoprefersto eat only plants (vegetables and fruits), even though she possesses metabolically, physically, and financially the capacity to eat meat. Metabolically, she can digest meat, provided that it is available. Someone who does not eat meat because it would make her sick is not really considered a vegetarian. By the same token, an inhabitant of a large Western city who does not have enough money to eat meat cannot be considered a vegetarian.¹ A vegetarian is one who makes apositivechoice (to eat only plants, fruits, and vegetables—and of course
Book Chapter