Ebook: Unbecoming Human: Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze

Explores the Deleuzian idea of becoming animal

• Proposes a philosophical concept of animality that applies to both human and nonhuman living beings
• Draws the first fully detailed cartography of the complex field of animality as it appears in continental philosophy, literary studies, environmental humanities, anthropocene studies, feminist studies, posthumanism, and critical animal studies
• Covers two points that have never before been addressed: the deep connection between the question of the lack of animality in human beings and language; and the connection between post-humanism and human animality
• Explores the problem of animality in psychoanalysis, in particular in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller
• Comments on some of the most important scientists and philosophers who dealt with the theme of animality: von Uexküll, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari and Agamben

The animality of human beings is completely unknown. Being human means to be something other than an animal, to not be an animal. Felice Cimatti, with reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze, explores what human animality looks like. He shows that becoming animal means to stop thinking of humanity as the reference point of nature and the world. It means that our value as humans has the very same value as a cloud, a rock or a spider.

Drawing on a wide range of texts – from philosophical ethology to classical texts, and from continental philosophy to literature – Cimatti creates a dialogue with Flaubert, Derrida, Temple Grandin, Heidegger as well as Malaparte and Landolfi – as part of this intriguing discussion about our humanity – and our unknown animality.

Literary Case Studies

Franz Kafka: 'The Wish to be a Red Indian' and 'A Report to an Academy'
Temple Grandin: Animals in Translation: The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow
Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt
D. H. Lawrence: 'St Mawr' and 'The Man Who Died'
Gustave Flaubert: 'La légende de saint-Julien l'Hospitalier'
Romeo Castellucci's theatre