DOMESTICATING ANIMALS:DESCRIPTION OF A CERTAIN DISTURBANCE
DOMESTICATING ANIMALS:DESCRIPTION OF A CERTAIN DISTURBANCE

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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