La réduction de l’humanité à l’animalité dans quelques récits d’Henri Michaux
The Reduction of Humanity to Animality in Some of Henri Michaux’s Short Stories

Author(s): Agnieszka Kukuryk
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: animality; cruelty; dehumanisation; comparison; alterity
Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to show how Henri Michaux, a poet of Belgian origin, with the eye of a zoologist, or rather of a naturalist, restores man to nature, and thus to a certain animalism that includes Asian and European populations. The paper will analyze stories in which the narrator refers to human animality, establishing liminal zones that allude to or mistakenly recall phases of anthropogenesis and in which unusual forms of cooperation between humans and animals are established. In turn, the discovery of animality in its strangeness allows the author to radicalize and generalize the experience of otherness.

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