The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel

Book excerpt: Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human-animal relations. Throughout such important books as L’Animalité (1996), Les Origines animales de la culture (2001) and L’Animal singulier (2004), he offers a fierce critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human–animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.