Unbecoming Human
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€107.99
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.
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).