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The article talks about the relation that a philosopher has to maintain with his environment, focusing on the field philosophy of philosopher Günther Anders, and discusses the need to move from the field notion to milieu, the inexhaustible nature of milieu, and the ethological approach to concepts.

This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Dominique Lestel's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; realist-Cartesian and bi-constructivist ethology; biosemiotics; philo- sophical anthropology; animal studies; the other-than-human; veganism; and technology. It touches on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Shepard, and Donna Haraway. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Relations between humans and animals occur under myriad forms and with profound richness. However, taking account of these relations often poses a considerable difficulty. That humans have a strong interest in many other animals, and that humans give rise to a reciprocal interest among many animals, is an important cultural and evolutionary occurrence. Common living and the sharing (or co-constitution) of territory often give rise to social ties between humans and animals. It is important to study the material dimensions that render possible friendship between species. Distance often complicates the material proximity of these relations. The human voice and music are significant conduits of communication between species. Excessive focus on formal symbolic communication has often occluded the significant affective exchange that takes place between species by means of human voice and language. Music, as explored by Jim Nollman, constitutes a “privileged vector” of interspecies communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant post-Enlightenment Western view of animals has seen them as some kind of machine, objects of no true moral significance, which it is permissible to subject to a range of treatments that would never be tolerated if practised on humans. In reality, defenders of animals, rather than being sentimentalists or somehow insufficiently attached to their own species, are far more in accord with scientific evidence and with the best interests of humanity itself. Animals are fundamentally makers and interpreters of meaning. The rejection of anthropomorphism and anecdote, and the illusion of the invisible observer, are the weapons of an ethnocentric positivism that should be rejected in favour of a strong heuristic position regarding the emotions, consciousness and abilities of animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul Shepard, while rarely encoun- tering the other, nevertheless prove to be surprisingly complementary. Derrida acknowl- edges the impossibility and necessity of the human/animal frontier, thinking the human/ animal relation in a paradigm of seeing and being seen, conceived in particular in the context of a sphere of the intimate. Shepard's not merely biological but ontological interpretation of evolution argues that humans need animals, not only metabolically but for their mental development. From the positive dependence of the human on the animal follows an infinite debt that can never be repaid; but in attempting to do so lies the responsibility and destiny of the human, that most animal animal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The position of veganism is ulti- mately inconsistent, speciesist and unrealistic. To be human is to fully embrace the fact that our bodies can be formed from other animals. Unlike vegans, carnivores permit themselves to be intoxicated by other animals and take plea- sure in meat eating. Nevertheless, factory farming should be rejected and meat consumed responsibly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To the three classic wounds to human narcissism – that of Copernicus (man does not live in a geocentric universe), Darwin (man is an animal), and Freud (man is not the master of his unconscious) – there must be appended a fourth wound: man is not the only subject in the universe. While most philoso- phers are unwilling to accept it, ethological research shows that animals are also subjects; indeed, in human/animal hybrid communities, certain animals can become individuals or even persons. Through animal biography, anec- dotes, and other often disqualified but nonethe- less empirical forms of knowledge, we can come to know these singular animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Biological attention to evolution and animal life has primarily emphasized a filiative approach that, although important, overlooks crucial dimensions highlighted by an ecological approach to animal human societies. Increased attention to singular animals and critical scrutiny of the operating definitions of society and culture indicates that vast dimensions of this area have been overlooked and remain to be studied. It is particularly important to pursue the aspects of signification, meaning, individuation, and subjectivity. Attention to animal human societies, or to animal cultures that develop in the heart of human cultures, shows that humans and animals often form extimate relations based on particular aspects of animal subjectivity. With certain species we share a dense form of intertwining built on natural, cultural, and biographical histories. Beyond that, an argument on biosemiotic grounds maintains that culture is intrinsic to the living. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This extract from Lestel's Paroles de singes analyses the methodological debates of the research into the linguistic capabilities of great apes. Lestel uncovers the strategic blindness, methodological fumbling, and other “mirror effects” of these experiments, and reflects on the questions of anthropomorphism and common knowledge. Are the apes simulating language; are the ape-researchers simulating results? Parallels with research into artificial intelligence reveal a preoccupation with questions of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The convergence between ethology and ethnography has significantly transformed studies of animal subjectivity and culture. The future of both fields lies in a cultural zoology that treats animals as subjects partaking in culture. Nonetheless, significant resistance to such an approach exists on each side of the dis- ciplinary divide. Biologists and social scientists content themselves with definitions of culture that prevent them from taking heed of crucial dimensions of it. Beyond that, the very organiz- ation of scholarly knowledge in university disci- plines is predicated upon an absolute split between humans and other animals, with ethol- ogy charged with understanding non-human animal behavior and the social sciences directed almost exclusively to human cultures. The most promising approaches of the present and future rely on a mixture of methods and definitions that challenges and expands the disciplines involved as well as the very understanding of animal life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an extract from the second half of Lestel's book Animality (1996/2007). His book is divided into two parts. In the first part Lestel considers a number of ways in which humans and animals have been represented, particularly with respect to their supposed differences and borderline cases, over the course of Western history. To this end one reads of various depictions, construc- tions, and erasures of animals, including those of feral children, the animal-machines of Des- cartes and company, animals of ethological study, as well as artistic animals, suffering animals, speaking animals, cultural animals, and more. The first part is largely devoted, then, to past representations of animals as seen through Lestel's unique perspective. The second part, much of which is translated here, conveys Lestel's own observations, as developed most explicitly in his concept of “hybrid com- munities” between humans and animals. It is equal parts evolutionary and cultural anthropol- ogy, ethological ethnography, and philosophical creation of concepts, all in an attempt to situate “animality” at the interface of animals and humans. Rather than think animality, therefore, on the basis of animals, Lestel conceptualizes animality as a characteristic that develops between humans and animals in as much as they share, despite their curious alterity to one another, meaning and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background in zoömusicology. The discipline of zoömusicology is a pioneering enterprise that requires the collaboration of practices, methodologies, and expert knowledge from a variety of areas. Pre-existing models for such research by musicologists are either absent or at best insubstantial. The various tasks at hand include the collection of extant recordings, the observation and recording of animals in the field, sonographic examination (and notation where feasible), and various types of musicological analyses. Zoömusicology contends with the methodological and conceptual issues that arise when music theory, designed to illuminate human musical traditions (especially the Western classical one), is applied to animal song. Background in ethology. With the break with the Cartesian tradition of the animal machine, an authentic science of animal behaviour emerged over the last two centuries, evolving both conceptually and methodologically. For example, Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and others recognised that man is also an animal. Lorenz, von Frisch, and Tinbergen founded the field of ethology, where a major challenge remains: that of accepting that animal communication is pertinent to the realm of signification rather than merely the realm of information transmission. Aims. This paper aims to extend the range of contexts in which musicologists contribute. The paper proposes a methodology and a rationale for the study of birdsong by musicologists that, in addressing both sound and musical behaviour, could be relevant to a range of issues on the natureculture continuum. Main contribution. Results to date of our systematic exploration suggest that pied butcherbird song and human music share many characteristics and the divide between them is therefore narrow. While some musical elements might be species-specific, many others appear to transcend the species boundary. Implications. Eurocentric and anthropocentric musical assumptions and preoccupations have resulted in a paucity of studies of the sonic constructs and concomitant behaviour of other species by musicologists. When sonographic analysis of birdsong recordings became possible, biologists occupied this area of research, although not with a trained ear so much as a trained eye. Much of the biologists' focus has been on the functional significance of birdsong, but we should not assume that function and aesthetics are mutually exclusive. Any claims that music is a uniquely human activity must be considered provisional without further research into the potentially musical practices of other animals, and we expect such research to yield substantial surprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the research programs of teaching symbolic language to chimpanzees, pointing on the dichotomy between artificial language vs. ASL, and the dichotomy between researchers who decided to establish emotional relationships between themselves and the apes, and those who have seen apes as instrumental devices. It is concluded that the experiments with the most interesting results have been both with artificial language and ASL, but with strong affiliation between researchers and animal involved in the experiments. The experiments on talking apes are not so much experiments in psycholinguistics (how far can animal learn human language) but wonderful experiments in the communities of communication between human beings and great apes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the research programs of teaching symbolic language to chimpanzees, pointing on the dichotomy between artificial language vs. ASL, and the dichotomy between researchers who decided to establish emotional relationships between themselves and the apes, and those who have seen apes as instrumental devices. It is concluded that the experiments with the most interesting results have been both with artificial language and ASL, but with strong affiliation between researchers and animal involved in the experiments. The experiments on talking apes are not so much experiments in psycholinguistics (how far can animal learn human language) but wonderful experiments in the communities of communication between human beings and great apes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the relationships between evolution, cognitions and cultures. Ways of conceiving anthropology; Domestication of human beings by chimpanzees; Cognitive innovation and culture in chimpanzees.