Domesticating Animals: A Description of a Certain Disturbance
Domesticating Animals: A Description of a Certain Disturbance
Author(s): Szymon WróbelSubject(s): Anthropology, Social Sciences, Geography, Regional studies, Human Geography, Sociology, Demography and human biology
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Summary/Abstract: In his text, reading mainly the texts of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Kafka, the author asks 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, looking for adventure, devoid of the traces of resentment towards other living beings, and as a result the only one which is acceptable in the contemporary world? The mono-individual species (a term formulated by Lévi-Strauss) are analyzed by the author 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.
Journal: Teksty Drugie
- Issue Year: 2015
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 270-289
- Page Count: 20
- Language: English