Matthew Calarco

En las páginas finales de “El futuro de la profesión o la universidad sin condición”, Derrida sugiere que el futuro de las humanidades tendrá que incluir un análisis de la historia de los conceptos que instituyen varias de las disciplinas que componen las humanidades. Dichos análisis históricos, señala, no habrían de ser neutrales. Por el contrario, estarían guiados por un intento de abrir estas disciplinas a modos de alteridad que no han sido pensados cuando se han constituido sus fundamentos. Que este tipo de consideración crítica también ha de ser extendido hasta incluir las problemáticas fundamentales de las humanidades en cuanto tales y en su conjunto (y no sólo de las disciplinas individuales que caen bajo esta rúbrica) es algo que Derrida no elude. De hecho, esta exigencia crítica es el primer tema que él señala cuando intenta delinear un proyecto positivo y cuasi-programático para las humanidades. Sugiere que las humanidades, si han de mantener el espíritu ético a partir del cual se constituyeron, tendrán que girar sus lentes críticos sobre sus propios conceptos fundamentales, esto es, sobre el concepto de “lo humano”.

A transformative vision for human-animal relations on personal, social, and environmental levels. The Three Ethologies offers a fresh, affirmative vision for rebuilding human-animal relations. Venturing beyond the usual scholarly and activist emphasis on restricting harm, Matthew Calarco develops a new philosophy for understanding animal behavior—a practice known as ethology—through three distinct but interrelated lenses: mental ethology, which rebuilds individual subjectivity; social ethology, which rethinks our communal relations; and environmental ethology, which reconfigures our relationship to the land we co-inhabit with our animal kin. Drawing on developments in philosophy, (eco)feminist theory, critical geography, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, Calarco casts an inspiring vision of how ethological living can help us to reimagine our ideas about goodness, truth, and beauty.

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.

The present dissertation begins with a discussion of the motif of conscience as it appears in the work of three prominent contemporary continental philosophers: Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. These three thinkers offer strikingly original analyses of the concept of conscience that promise to help us rethink the place of the ethical in contemporary thought. Typically, both in the history of philosophy and in much of contemporary moral discourse, conscience is understood as a moral faculty arising from one's own self that offers moral directives in difficult ethical situations. All three of these philosophers complicate this picture by arguing that the "voice" of conscience originates elsewhere than within oneself. The significance of this analysis is that it leads to another and different thought of obligation---one in which the other's demand, rather than one's own ethical knowledge, becomes the foundation of ethics. ;The concluding chapters of the dissertation inquire into who this "other" is that obligates us. In the Western metaphysical tradition, moral philosophers have typically argued that we have obligations only to other human beings; but what if our obligations extend beyond human beings, perhaps to animals and other natural entities? I argue that although both Heidegger and Levinas attempt to limit obligation and conscience to human beings, the logic of their respective theories of conscience should forbid any such restriction. The dissertation concludes with an examination of Derrida's writings on the question of the animal in order to explore the manner in which a deconstructive approach to animal ethics offers an alternative understanding of the status of animals with respect to the ethico-political