Overview

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, to continental philosophy and 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.

Full Product Details

9781474443395

Table of Contents

Reviews

A powerful new voice from Italy, the philosopher Felice Cimatti has written one of the most courageous books on the stakes of human animality that I have ever read. In Unbecoming Human, Cimatti argues that only by taking our own animality more seriously can we truly face the existential crises presented by the rise of the homo economicus. The result is both a devastating critique of much of contemporary animal studies and an attempt to imagine a world without persons, subjects, and objects. A stunning work.--Timothy Campbell, Cornell University

A powerful new voice from Italy, the philosopher Felice Cimatti has written one of the most courageous books on the stakes of human animality that I have ever read. In Unbecoming Human, Cimatti argues that only by taking our own animality more seriously can we truly face the existential crises presented by the rise of the homo economicus. The result is both a devastating critique of much of contemporary animal studies and an attempt to imagine a world without persons, subjects, and objects. A stunning work. -- Timothy Campbell, Cornell University

Author Information

Felice Cimatti is Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Calabria. His research interests, moving from the semiological study of the languages of nonhuman animals, mainly concern the complex relationships between language, society, and human mind/body. His latest books include Unbecoming Human. Philosophy of Animality after Deleuze (2020), Bio-semiotic Ontology: The Philosophy of Giorgio Prodi (2018), and, co-edited with Carlo Salzani, Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020). His new book, Il postanimale. La natura dopo l’Antropocene (2021), is being translated into English. Fabio Gironi is an independent researcher. He is the author of Analytic and Continental Kantianism: The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux (Routledge, 2017) and Naturalizing Badiou: Mathematical Ontology and Structural Realism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is the translator of Becoming Animal: Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze by Felice Cimatti (EUP, 2020).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available