Work

Animals Give Us a Body We Didn't Have. An Interview with Vinciane Despret

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The following piece is a conversation on how the dead, animals, and people animate each other. We interviewed Vinciane Despret in French, via Zoom, on May 2, 2024; Vinciane was in Brussels, Iwona was in Prague, and Stephen was in Sydney. Despret is not only a key figure in ethology and animal studies because of her empirical studies, her work also has strong philosophical implications. We explore how her work is not just contributing to these fields but changing what she calls our “cognitive routines,” which means deploying sensitive practices of defamiliarizing those routines, listening to what those who “cannot speak” have to say, in particular, in this interview, animals and the dead. Going beyond human language, we discover ways of “feeling the world,” or rather the worlds, of particular beings. By turning to “stories of anticipation,” Despret offers an alternative take on the question of species extinction. Vinciane Despret, Iwona Janicka and Stephen Muecke (2025):“Animals Give Us a Body We Didn’t Have. An Interview with Vinciane Despret.” Environmental Humanities 17(3) 705–712. doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11942118

Source: Environmental Humanities

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17720421

Authors: Despret, Vinciane, Janicka, Iwona, Muecke, Stephen

Institutions: Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy, The University of Notre Dame Australia

Language: English

Topic: Geographies of human-animal interactions

Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: European Commission

Award: Establishing the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague