Эротические рассказы

On the Animal Trail. Baptiste MorizotЧитать онлайн книгу.

On the Animal Trail - Baptiste Morizot


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while it exists in prodigious forms on Earth, among us, before our very eyes, but discreet in its muteness.’4 We send probes and even messages to the four corners of the universe, and we walk through the forest as noisy as a troop of baboons on the razzle, which can only confirm our strange conviction that we are alone in this world. It’s time to come back down to earth.5

      So Morizot’s project asks us to dispense with a metaphysics that has caused definite and palpable damage and that we cannot hope to patch up with a few good intentions. The first thing that needs to be revised is the old idea that we humans are the only political animals. (Indeed, we should be concerned about the fact that when we declare ourselves to be animals, this is often a way of laying claim to a quality that simply confirms our exceptionalism.) But wolves are political animals too: they know all about rules, the boundaries of territories, ways of organizing themselves in space, codes of conduct and precedence. And the same applies to many social animals. Morizot takes up, and extends to other living beings – for example, to the worms in the worm composter, whose habits are similar to our own – the idea that what we need to relearn are truly social relationships with them. Tracking, as a geopolitical practice, then becomes the art of asking everyday questions. The answers to those questions will form habits, prepare alliances or anticipate possible conflicts, in an attempt to find a more civilized, more diplomatic solution: ‘Who inhabits this place? And how do they live? How do they establish their territory in this world? At what points does their action impact on my life, and vice versa? What are our points of friction, our possible alliances and the rules of cohabitation to be invented in order to live in harmony?’

      After all, as Morizot says, tracking is above all ‘an art of finding our way back home’. Or rather, he implies, it is an art of finding ourselves at home: but this ‘at home’ is not the same as before, just as the ‘self’ which finally finds itself at home has itself become different.

      Tracking means learning to rediscover a habitable and more hospitable world where feeling ‘at home’ no longer makes us stingy and jealous little proprietors (the ‘masters and possessors of nature’, as seemed so obvious to Descartes), but cohabitants marvelling at the quality of life in the presence of other beings.

      Tracking means enriching our habits. It is a form of becoming, of self-metamorphosis: ‘activating in oneself the powers of a different body’, as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes. It means finding in ourselves the crow’s leaping curiosity, the worm’s way of being alive – perhaps even, like the worm, feeling ourselves breathing through our skins – the bear’s desiring patience, or the panther’s replete patience, or the very different patience of the wolf parents of a turbulent pup. It means gaining access, as Morizot says, ‘to the prompts specific to another body’.

      But ‘all this,’ he adds, ‘is very difficult to formulate, we have to circle round it.’

      In the wonderful book in which he recounts his long friendship with a bitch called Mélodie, the Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi discusses the difficulties that his adopted language imposes on his way of describing the relationship between him and his animal companion. He writes:

      We inherit, then, a language which in certain respects accentuates the tendency to de-animate the world around us – as evidenced by the simple fact (to take just one example as highlighted by Bruno Latour) that we only have at our disposal the grammatical categories of passivity and activity.

      To narrate the activity of tracking, as Morizot does, to narrate the effects of this ‘finding our way back home’, involved learning to get rid of certain words, playing tricks with syntax so as to account for presences or, more precisely, effects of presence, so as to evoke affects that flood through the body (joy, desire, surprise, uncertainty, patience, fear sometimes), to use the writing of the investigation in order to touch on what goes beyond this writing, as Morizot himself was touched while writing. He had to twist the language of philosophy, to defamiliarize himself from it, to poetically force the grammar, sometimes forge terms or divert their meaning (what he has elsewhere called a semantic wilding),7 because none of the terms we have inherited could express the event of the encounter or the grace of awaiting it. To create, in other words, a poetics of inhabiting, an experimental poetics, out in the open air, with plural bodies.

      Where are you going tomorrow? Actually, from the very first words, you will already be on your way.

      Vinciane Despret

      1 1. Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le Parti pris des animaux (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2013).

      2 2. The idea of thinking about the relationships with living things


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