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Europe’s (post-)colonial borders have been recently marked by a profusion of cases of violence against racialised migrants with the use of police dogs, following a continual process of integration of canines into the border apparatus of violence. Engaging simultaneously with the recent post-colonial literature on border and migration security and the incipient domain of animal studies, this article investigates the colonial and racial origins and effects of this phenomenon. Contextualising the weaponisation of dogs at Europe’s borders today within a much longer history of racial violence, the article shows how canines have been systematically deployed by colonial and white supremacist powers against racialised bodies as tools to enact and secure racial order. Attentive to the ways in which modern humanness has been predicated upon its removal from the food chain, the article argues that the use of police dogs at Europe’s borders operates by reinforcing the non- or less-than-human status of racialised migrants by marking them as ‘animal-like’ and ‘edible’ bodies. Conceptualising this method as ‘the politics of edibility’, the article then shows how the exposure of migrants to the threat of ‘dog bites’ functions as a form of reinforcing racial hierarchies in a Europe traversed by racial anxieties.

The present paper represents a phenomenological reflexion on the question of animality. Drawing from a selection of phenomenological texts, ranging from Husserl and Heidegger to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the author pleads for a different view of animality than that which would posit a neatly cut anthropological difference between the human subject and animal. In the final section of the text, the difficult question of inter-animality (as opposed to intersubjectivity) is treated in some detail.

Animals have a peculiar place in the works of Adalbert Stifter, a 19th century Czech and Austrian writer. He describes them in his prose, but also in an unpublished essay ‘Zur Psichologie der Thiere’, where he bases his concept of the animal on both likeness and difference. In Stifter’s short story Der Kondor, the animal gaze represents this duality, allowing an imagined conversation. As a result, the cat in the story becomes a subject, anticipating the philosophy of Martin Buber and Jacques Derrida that explored the language of the animal’s gaze.

This article develops a Hegelian account of self-consciousness by grounding it in being animal. It draws on contemporary naturalist and rationalist philosophy to support a transformative picture of the relationship between self-consciousness and animal purposes, setting work by Danielle Macbeth, Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson, and Matthew Boyle into dialogue with two passages from Hegel’s Aesthetics. Because we are conscious of them as such, the article argues, our ends are never simply given to us and must be determined, which means working them out collectively. But this makes dependency a structural feature of human life, as attaining the right relation to our ends means finding ourselves through the eyes of others instantiating our lifeform. Grounding these Hegelian insights in a naturalistic understanding of organic norms, we see that we should not oppose the self-transparency afforded by rationality to the opacity of animal drives. The article concludes that the mark of rationality is not the capacity to transcend or control animal instinct but that we can be problems to ourselves. Spiritual life is just natural life: natural life finding itself problematic.

In his Perjury and Pardon seminar Jacques Derrida outlines a positive conception of materiality. He does so while criticising Paul de Man’s textual conception of it. For Derrida, this is too linguistic, too formalist, and thus incapable of accounting for a bodily quality of matter. But Derrida also criticises a secure referentiality from before spoken language as is entailed by a pre-critical recourse to ordinary language. Between these two options, he seeks for a third definition of materiality, whose main characteristic is auto-deixis. In turn, this characteristic is formulated by Derrida as coincident with auto-hetero-affection, which, according to him, is the attribute that defines finite animality. The introductory part of the paper shows how this late definition is enrooted in Derrida’s early development of a grammatological project, which implied a critical consideration of the confluence of cybernetics, semiotics, and life sciences. The central part of the paper demonstrates how Derrida’s definition stems from a close reading of De Man’s texts. The last part analyses the meaning of this definition and develops its epistemological consequences.

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida's final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2001-2003), as the explicit themes of the seminar, namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal, come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world.

Abstract On the occasion of the publication of Derrida's unedited seminar Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity (1984-5, 2018), which includes significant pages on Heidegger's discourse on animality, this article proposes reopening the dossier that the French philosopher had dedicated to that discourse throughout his work. It aims to elaborate an overall interpretation of this dossier in the light of the grammatological account of the living, which, at the moment of sketching his intellectual biography, Derrida himself acknowledges as the shared feature of his work. In particular, the article takes into examination the readings of Heidegger's thesis that \"the animal is poor in world\" which Derrida had offered since Of Spirit: Heidegger and The Question (1987). As the examination develops, it is shown that Derrida's critical reelaboration of Heidegger's discourse is shaped as a Nietzschean-type perspectivism.

Under the rubric of an \"anthropology of life,\" I call for expanding the reach of ethnography beyond the boundaries of the human. Drawing on research among the Upper Amazonian Runa and focusing, for heuristic purposes, on a particular ethnological conundrum concerning how to interpret the dreams dogs have, I examine the relationships, both intimate and fraught, that the Runa have with other lifeforms. Analytical frameworks that fashion their tools from what is unique to humans (language, culture, society, and history) or, alternatively, what humans are commonly supposed to share with animals are inadequate to this task. By contrast, I turn to an embodied and emergentist understanding of semiosis-one that treats sign processes as inherent to life and not just restricted to humans-as well as to an appreciation for Amazonian preoccupations with inhabiting the points of view of nonhuman selves, to move anthropology beyond \"the human,\" both as analytic and as bounded object of study.