1. Quem tem medo dos animais
Ângelo Machado, UFMG
Depois de uma rápida apresentação sobre as teorias do medo e sua neurobiologia pretende-se abordar o tema do medo dos animais na história do Brasil e no Brasil atual, bem como nos contos infantis tradicionais. Serão apresentados dados originais sobre os animais que causam mais medo nas crianças, distribuídos em categorias de acordo com o perigo real que oferecem. São feitas considerações sobre o medo dos animais e da floresta como veículos de uma imagem negativa da biodiversidade que pode ser um componente psicológico de sua destruição.
2. The question of animality at the dawn of the 21st century: biodiversity, artificial animality and endangered humans
Dominique Lestel, ENS/Archives Husserl, Paris
The twenty-first century is in front of three major challenges linked with the question of animality: the loss of biodiversity, the emergence of an increasingly more convincing artificial animality, and the necessity to design a philosophy able to cope with the essential issues at stake with animality itself. In our talk, we shall show that these three questions are closely linked together, much more than what we used to think, and that human survival is a key problem to deal with.
3. Monstrous races and strange cases: the ill-fated hybrid
Tom Tyler, Oxford Brookes University
It is little known that St Christopher, the popular patron saint of travellers, is identified in early written accounts as a member of the ferocious Eastern race of Cynocephali (dog-heads) and was martyred in barbaric manner by King Dagnus of Lycia. In this essay I explore Foucault’s account of the correlation between monstrous beings and monstrous practices during the medieval period: as obdurate mixtures, monsters transgress both natural and social law, thereby requiring of sovereign power a spectacularly violent punitive response. I look in particular at two collections of monsters from the early medieval period, the text known as The Wonders of the East and the Liber Monstrorum (Book of Monsters). We find therein all manner of “monstrous races of men” who, between them, bring into question the limits of the human. I close with a final deviant hybrid from modern literature whose cautionary tale Foucault helps to diagnose, but who, like St Christopher, ultimately meets a terrible fate.
4. Transgressing the limits of the human: the meanings of animal
pornography
Randy Malamud, Georgia State University
I will explore the proliferation of animal pornography, which has increased dramatically with the general explosion of the internet in the last 15 years. I will discuss how prevalent this material is, how it is distributed, what its legal status is, how many people are watching it. Cognitively and ethically, what does animal pornography means to the human viewer? We look at animals in so many other ways, many of which are also overdetermined and somehow perverse, and which work to constrain the animal in a human cultural frame: zoos, circuses, “safari” parks, “nature” documentaries, advertisements, cartoons, and so forth. Here we have one more way in which people look at animals, a genre which nurtures (arguably) the most violent and degrading image of the framed animal. What is it about aficionados of animal pornography that might incline them to watch these images? How do these films relate to other (arguably pornographic, exploitative, demeaning) images of animals in less-obviously transgressive venues? For the scholar of visual culture confronting these profoundly perverse images, what insights may we reap and what possible generalizations may we extrapolate about the ethical construction of the human-animal relationship in our world? To pose a question I frequently raise in my scholarship, what can be done to rebut these degradations?
