scholarly journals Zoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral. Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, and the Politics of Predation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56
Author(s):  
Tessa Laird
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Animal Abuse ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

This paper proposes a creative neologism: zoognosis, with an added g, to indicate that knowledges can be transmitted virally from animals to humans. If so, what are the animals trying to tell us? Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) provides an opportunity to find out. Mackay’s prescient novel was written before, but published during, the COVID-19 pandemic, and is about a ‘zooflu’ that enables the infected to understand animals. The author has forged a poetic language based on animal sensory perceptions, what ethologist Jakob von Uexküll termed Umwelten. In doing so Mackay effects a ‘becoming-animal’ of the text, reintroducing readers to their own animality. Mackay’s ‘perspectivism’ enables us to see from the point-of-view of non-human animals, forcing a reckoning with animal abuse and extractive lifeways. While her speculative fiction is bleak, it offers tools for attunement and thinking-with non-human others.

scholarly journals Konrad Lorenz’s epistemological criticism towards Jakob von Uexküll

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 637-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Brentani
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Critical Lines

In the work of Lorenz we find an initial phase of great concordance with Uexkülls theory of animals’ surrounding-world (Umweltlehre), followed by a progressive distance and by the occurrence of more and more critical statements. The moment of greater cohesion between Lorenz and Uexküll is represented by the work Der Kumpan, which is focused on the concept of companion, functional circles, social Umwelt. The great change in Lorenz’ evaluation of Uexküll is marked by the conference of 1948 Referat über Jakob von Uexküll, where Lorenz highlights the vitalist position of Uexküll. In the works of the years after World War II, the influence of the Estonian Biologist greatly diminishes, even though Lorenz continues to express his admiration for particular studies and concepts of Uexküll. References to Uexküll’s work are less and far in between, while the difference is highlighted between the uexküllian theoretical frame (vitalistic) and Lorenz’s one (Darwinian and evolutionist). The two main critical lines of argument developed by Lorenz in this process are the biological and the epistemological one: on the biological side Lorenz heavily criticizes Uexküll’s vitalism and his faith in harmonizing forces and supernatural factors (which leads to concepts such as the perfect fusion of all biological species in their environment and the absence of rudimentary organs). On the epistemological side, Lorenz, arguing from the point of view of the critical realism, accuses Uexküll of postulating the separateness of all living beings, a separateness which is due to the  Kantian idea that every subject of knowledge and action is imprisoned in the transcendental circle of its representations and attitudes.

scholarly journals Vindicación de Uexküll en Merleau-Ponty, Simondon y Deleuze

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (21) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Heredia
Keyword(s):  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

El propósito de este artículo es analizar las lecturas producidas por Merleau-Ponty, Simondon y Deleuze a propósito de la biología teórica de Jakob von Uexküll. La hipótesis que se pondrá en juego consiste en sostener que, frente a las interpretaciones críticas de que fuera objeto en la antropología filosófica alemana (1928-1944), las lecturas de los tres filósofos franceses operan una revalorización post-antropocéntrica de la teoría uexkülliana, y lo hacen desde horizontes teóricos ontológicos y genéticos.

scholarly journals The Many Worlds of Jean-Luc Nancy

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Martin Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Many Worlds ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
The Many ◽  
Privileged Site

This article explores what the work of Jean-Luc Nancy might offer to an ecological and ontological pluralism, by considering Nancy's treatment of the relation between the worlds inhabited by beings of all sorts. Situating Nancy's work in this area in relation to its key reference point, namely Heidegger's assertion a of pre-eminently human access to ‘world’ in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and through this, to the work of Jakob von Uexküll, the article traces both Nancy's rejection of Heidegger's persistent anthropocentrism and his own attachment to human language as a privileged site for the exposure of the nontotalizable plurality of singular beings. It concludes by suggesting that the human exceptionalism evoked by this attachment might, if translated into a minimal anthropocentrism, add a useful edge to ecological notions of pluralist coexistence by recalling that the incommensurability of the many worlds of beings of all sorts may at times shade into antagonistic incompatibility.

scholarly journals Notes towards a semiotics of parasitism

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-439
Author(s):  
Han-liang Chang
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
The Times ◽  
Creative Writings ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Biological Foundation

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly survey the literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology.

scholarly journals A Biologia Kantiana de Jakob von Uexküll

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (21) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Cristina Borges de Souza ◽  
Arthur Araujo
Keyword(s):  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

Como proposta, o artigo procura mostrar em que sentido a biologia teórica de Uexküll expande princípios da epistemologia kantiana: a ideia de que a estrutura cognitiva referente à organização da experiência sensorial não se restringe ao ser humano e incluiria também formas orgânicas não-humanas. De um ponto de vista metodológico, Uexküll estabelece as bases de uma teoria geral do organismo que conjuga elementos da epistemologia kantiana e observações fisiológicas. Como estratégia de desenvolvimento deste artigo, em particular, vamos explorar a continuidade entre a fundamentação kantiana da biologia teórica (1926) e a teoria de Umwelt (1934).     

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