Animal Studies: Disobedient Notes Around the Edges

Abstract

The article analyzes general theoretical and methodological tendencies in animal studies. The author traces how interests in issues affecting animals transformed from activism to theory. In the focus of the text are the figures of animal welfare activist Ruth Harrison, animal liberation inspirer Peter Singer, theorist Cary Wolfe, philosopher Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, Tatiana Goricheva, and others. The author underlines the crucial role of different liberation movements of the 1960s to 1970s that helped raise the problem of the animal at the level of social, governmental and academic institutions. The article addresses issues of anthropocentrism, speciesism, zoo-proletariat, the Antropocene and interspecies response-ability. Animal studies appears as a line of investigation that successfully rejects the stigma of being as “frivolous” and “negligible" a topic as animals themselves. In the author's view, animal studies - on equal footing with other studies - marks the appearance of a new humanities, theorizing questions of the alternative subject, knowledge and society. Special prominence is given to the contribution of feminism, feminist new materialism, and posthu- 9 manism to the growth of the discipline. The author notes the influence of the Anglo-Saxon reception of Jacques Derrida's works that - along with a criticism of Rene Descartes' and Martin Heidegger's philosophy - became the foundation for animal studies.