I would like to point out an interesting technique in picturing the aliens in SF books and TV series. In order to differentiate the humans and the extraterrestrials, writers give the latter animal traits: they “talk animalish,” borrowing from the animal world elements that would serve as a way of describing what is not human. The first part of the below text presents some of the most popular animal aliens in the recent SF history. The second is concentrated on writings of China Miéville and Stanisław Lem. Miéville’s world, Bas-Lag, abounds in curious animal sentient races. The writer has defined in detail one more race, Ariekei, for the needs of his latest book. Lem, on the other hand, is a great and humorous theoretician of how they aliens would look like and what the ways we think about them are.

In my text, I ask—investigating mainly the works of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Kafka—if humanity empowered by kinship or even contamination with other species would be a sick society, frail and ill-selected, or whether it would rather be a society which is active and audacious, devoid of the traces of resentment towards other living beings. I analyze the mono-individual species (the term was formulated by Lévi-Strauss) on the basis of examples which are clinical (Freud’s Hans, Sándor Ferenczi’s little Arpad), literary (Kafka’s Gregor Samsa), and also those borrowed from mass culture (Spider-Man and Batman) in order to illustrate the course of the process of domestication of the animal as well as the dedomestication of the human and their consequences for delineating an uncertain boundary between a human and an animal in the contemporary world.

Taking Barthes’ discussion of Aesop’s lion as my starting point, I examine the notion of the stereotype as it applies to the use of animals in philosophy and cultural theory. By employing an illustrative selection of animal ciphers from Saussure and Austin, and animal indices from Peirce and Schopenhauer, I argue that theory’s beasts are always at risk of becoming either exemplars of a deadening, generic Animal or mere stultifying stereotypes. Gilbert Ryle’s faithful dog, Fido, as well as a number of Aesop’s edifying animals, help to demonstrate that these two dangers are not inescapable, however. I close by indicating two strategies for preventing the unnecessary inhibition of the creatures of critical theory, focusing on Derrida’s individual and gently unruly cat.

Diverse concepts of animality have played important role within the processes of modern secularisation and its anti-theological turn in the modern making of “man.” By turning the conceptual focus towards the animal side of human being, and specifically by describing and explaining “the human nature” in terms of its “animality,” modern philosophical anthropology has changed, gradually, into naturalistic, godless discourse of a purely material life. The discovery of the “animal in man,” its increasing impact through evolution theory eventually led to the denial of human supremacy. Since secularisation in its essence intends to emancipate humanity, it is interesting how animalisation can be related to emancipation. In the article Montaigne’s conception of animality is examined as an early case of this thinking.

The essay tries to approach the question of whether it is conceivable to bring the human and animal to the common existential denominator, to open the possibility of thinking in terms of the “humanimal.” Thus, what presents itself as the major problem is the issue of whether or not it is possible to, borrowing the phrase from e.e. cummings’s poem, “unanimal mankind.” Various paths which one may take inspecting this territory open yet another vital interrogation concerning the degree to which the societal dimension of human culture and “formalized humanity” (Herman Melville’s phrase) is enracinated in the presocietal, primeval world of which the animal is representative.

It is a recent tendency to read certain pre- and early-modern thinkers as “anticipatory critics” of modernity; the name of Michel de Montaigne often comes up in this context. Most of the critical approaches treat Montaigne like a pre-Rousseau proto-romantic which is indeed is an important part of Montaigne’s thinking. However, as I show in this paper, his Essays also allow for a different interpretation. Namely, I demonstrate that 1) Montaigne’s appraisal of Nature is far from a romantic-idyllic one; 2) his understanding of the interspecies division is more subtle than it is often thought; 3) his thought thus interpreted includes an ethics of becoming-animal that is based on a radically anti-Platonic (and thus anti-Cartesian) body-mind economy.

One striking difference between humans and animals, at least in ancient and medieval thought, is the human capacity for evil. In his Natural History, Pliny portrays elephants and some other animals as superior to humans, arguing that they do not harm their own kind. Elephants are particularly ethical, refusing to harm other creatures, even at the peril of their own lives. The monstrous human races are described in neutral terms. Caesar, on the other hand, is portrayed as a destructive if admirable monster that has destroyed many millions of human lives. This representation of the animal and the half-human monster as morally admirable or at least neutral is modified by Saint Augustine and subsequent theologians who associate the animal and the monstrous with the divine, the human with imperfect knowledge and character.

In this paper, I shall briefly outline some of the negative influences within the Christian tradition that have some bearing on the moral status of animals. These are principally that animals have no mind or reason, no immortal soul, sentiency, or moral status. These influences have given rise to notions of “instrumentalism” and “humanism” within the Catholic tradition that have eclipsed the moral status of animals. However, countervailing forces are at work weakening the grip of Thomism, and issuing in a general moral sensitivity to animals, as witnessed by the Catholic Catechism, the statements of Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI. Most especially Pope Francis’ insistence that humans should “protect” not only creation, but also individual creatures is probably the most progressive papal statement on animals to date.

I focus on the monastery life in Europe and its predomination of vita contemplativa upon vita activa. It is not hard to distinguish within Christianity its Manichaean component whose characteristic feature is a grudge against matter, body and sexuality. This complexity of ideas brought about the contempt of vital elements of human existence, so that its animal past, still present in Zivilisationsprozess. An alternative anthropology inspired by an evolutionism should based on the presumption that only through the appreciation of an animal dimension of us—instead of monastic desire of becoming an angel—will it be possible to create new perspectives for renegotiation of the human–animal boundaries.

The idea of my article is to challenge traditional ways of confronting animality with humanity. Either in order to define human superiority over animals and construct “man” as an “animal and something much more,” or in order to launch the idea of an animal as being less stupid than it has always been supposed to be, the comparison between humans and animals is concentrated on suppressing animality (in humans as superiors as well as in animals—as wrongly conceived to be “stupid”) and affirming humanity. This is a dialectic interplay of two related concepts of “man” and “beast” petrifying a false vision of common fate of people and animals. This kind of false consciousness makes animals and people badly interdependent. I claim that this mental figure should be overcomeby applying the very category of “being human” to so (far) called “animals.”

The main question of my paper—inspired by Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformeln and his reading of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal—is how animals can represent pathos of human experience in a way, which humanistic, purely anthropocentric forms of expression can no longer account for. In order to present my argument I would like to analyse three examples from literature. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte, Thomas Bernhard’s Distortion and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. In all three cases animal are necessary to express human pathos but the intensity of this expression seems to go far beyond the limits of the traditional human-animal division.

Music and animals have been in a close relationship in the history of music: starting from musical instruments made of birds’ bones, through animal voices illustrated in medieval songs and presented in later instrumental music up to chirping and trilling written by Olivier Messian in his birdlike pieces and animal sounds recorded and matched with ideas of the 21st century composers. The purpose of this article is to show the change of the context in which animals were introduced in music from the ancient to contemporary period.

When one closely reads Freud’s case studies one is tempted to say that the unconscious expresses itself through identification with animals. Animals are not just a pretext for symptoms but they seem to play a crucial role in the unconscious of Freud’s patients. A sample of this unconscious affinity with animals is provided by Ratman’s case, who, as Freud claims, “found a living likeness of himself in the rat". In the paper I consider general conditions of this curious difference between “being an animal” and “identifying with an animal” which seems to be disclosed in Ratman’s case. What exactly manifests itself in this curious identification with an animal? What makes the difference between “being an animal” and “identifying with an animal”? Is id an animal, or is id just an effect of id-entification with an animal?

Gernot Böhme discusses the nature of moral good in the light of what he calls proto-ethics, considering how to be human “well.” Here the predicate “good” takes on an adverbial and not an adjectival form, and Böhme refers to the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poiesis to show that today's activistic civilisation with its emphasis on achievement as the effect of activity (poiesis) has deprived humans of their ability to focus on activity itself (praxis). Böhme rejects ideologies which profess the “enhancement” of humans by medical/pharmacological means, and instead postulates the recrea-tion of praxis skills by physical and spiritual training, especially in human relations with nature and the own body. Backing this postulate are numerous examples of how to be human “well.”

As its subtitle suggests, the essay is a phenomenological account of the diverse ways in which light can be experienced by the senses. Gernot Böhme divides these experiences into two types depending on whether they concern the relation between light and space (the categories “light-cleared space,” “lightspace,” “lights in space”) or between light and objects (“things in light,” “light upon things”). Böhme sees the synthesis of both these types of experiences in the illumination phenomenon, in which spatial/light effects and the way in which objects are illuminated combine to create a specific atmos-phere during the sensual, bodily experiencing of space. Böhme also discusses the applications of light effects in contemporary architecture and art.

The author points to the spiritual relationship between certain underlying ideas in the philosophy of Gernot Böhme—especially in the areas of aesthetics and anthropology—and the typical features of Japanese culture as visible in its art, language and everyday life. For this, he turns to Böhme’s essay On the Aesthetics of the Ephemeral to show the typically ephemeral character of the Japanese painting school, he also reflects on the sophisticated aesthetics of Japanese culinary art. In Mueller’s opinion Japanese culture in many ways put some of Böhme’s philosophical postulates to practical use, notably those concerning the contemplative tendencies of individuals, the obliteration in experience of the difference between the subjective and objective (and in language between the active and passive voice), and the passive acceptance of atmospheric factors.

Following the suggestion expressed in the title of this essay, I deal with the idea which allows for considering landscape garden as a paradigmatic indicator of our relationship with nature. Focusing on the idea of landscape garden and its aesthetics I analyze two aesthetic notions: the picturesque and sublime, which are the background of the kind of experience accompanying a perception and participation of and in the landscape and environment. I analyse the kind of experience, which captures all the aspects that situate the human in the environment instead of opposing it. The analysis will be conducted within the framework of aesthetics.

In this essay about the philosophy of human corporeality Böhme asks about the sense of the I—body relation. He enters a polemic with Hegel, who wrote about the self-appropriation of the own body in acts of will, and points to passive acts of bodily sensing like experiencing pain or fear as that which builds an awareness of the own body’s “mineness.” Böhme calls this awareness affected self-givenness, linguistically articulated by the pronouns “mine” and “me,” which are genetically precedent to awareness and the pronoun “I”. Against this categorial background Böhme considers the argumentative role both these philosophical models of the I—body relation could play in contemporary debates on the diverse cultural forms in which the human body has been commercialised.

The author presents Gernot Böhme’s median mode of being theory, which attempts to find an anthropological middle ground between the rational and the irrational, the spiritual and the corporeal and the active and passive in human experience. Böhme’s reflections on the median mode of being are normative in character and linked to the concept of “sovereign man,” which he strongly defends and whose main characteristics Hoffmann outlines in the first part of the essay. Among others, Hoffmann argues against Böhme’s excessive emphasis on the controlling/restrictive functions of awareness at the cost of those functions which serve to protect and stimulate life, his non-distinction between the distance to a cognized object and its intellectual instrumentalisation, and his rather one-sided tendency to seek the sources of European rationalism in the Socra-tean tradition.

My intention in this paper is to answer two quite separate questions in a single interpretational narrative: a) about the philosophical (and often critical) content of Gernot Böhme’s expressis verbis—and, at times, “between the lines”—reference to the legacy of critical theory (especially the philosophical thought of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas), and b) Böhme’s use of interesting mediatory devices to combine three different philosophical discourses: the philosophy of science, ethics and aesthetics. The three are in fact related—after all, Horkheimer ran comparisons between “traditional” and “critical” theory, Adorno is the father of the original aesthetical theory, and Habermas laid the ground for what we call “discursive ethics”—but this is a matter for separate and broader treatment. In this perforce shorter paper I will only attempt some initial reflections on the subject.