scholarly journals The Many Worlds of Jean-Luc Nancy

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Martin Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Many Worlds ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
The Many ◽  
Privileged Site

This article explores what the work of Jean-Luc Nancy might offer to an ecological and ontological pluralism, by considering Nancy's treatment of the relation between the worlds inhabited by beings of all sorts. Situating Nancy's work in this area in relation to its key reference point, namely Heidegger's assertion a of pre-eminently human access to ‘world’ in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and through this, to the work of Jakob von Uexküll, the article traces both Nancy's rejection of Heidegger's persistent anthropocentrism and his own attachment to human language as a privileged site for the exposure of the nontotalizable plurality of singular beings. It concludes by suggesting that the human exceptionalism evoked by this attachment might, if translated into a minimal anthropocentrism, add a useful edge to ecological notions of pluralist coexistence by recalling that the incommensurability of the many worlds of beings of all sorts may at times shade into antagonistic incompatibility.

Animal listening

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Butler
Keyword(s):  
Human Language ◽  
Human Speech ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

The ‘Elegy on the Nightingale’ is a curious Latin poem of uncertain (but probably post-classical) date and authorship that is transmitted by several medieval manuscripts. It offers a catalogue of animal sounds rich in what linguists call iconicity, and literary scholars, onomatopoeia: to read these verses aloud is to imitate the sounds being described. The poem begins in address to the nightingale of its title, praised for her ability to make music by mimicking all she hears. By the end has the poem itself done the same? For all their playfulness, the verses strike at the heart of our own theoretical commonplaces, starting with the supposed arbitrariness of the sign, always unsettled by such examples, exceptional though they may be. So too did the writing down of non-human sounds preoccupy ancient linguists, who sought to segregate them from language proper. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that these sound-words conjure what they name, especially since, in many cases, it is only our ability to match their sounds to animals we can still hear that enables us to know what the poem is saying. What happens to our understanding of the poetic text as a transcription of human speech or song when we take it seriously as a recording of non-human sound? And even more dramatically, what happens to our understanding of human language when we strive (as this poem strives, albeit surreptitiously) to listen with non-human ears? With some help from the animal imaginings of Jakob von Uexküll, this article attempts some preliminary answers.

The many worlds of reducing interleukin-1

2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (7) ◽  
pp. 1960-1967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles A. Dinarello
Keyword(s):  
Interleukin 1 ◽  
Many Worlds ◽  
The Many

scholarly journals Zoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral. Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, and the Politics of Predation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56
Author(s):  
Tessa Laird
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Animal Abuse ◽  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

This paper proposes a creative neologism: zoognosis, with an added g, to indicate that knowledges can be transmitted virally from animals to humans. If so, what are the animals trying to tell us? Laura Jean Mackay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) provides an opportunity to find out. Mackay’s prescient novel was written before, but published during, the COVID-19 pandemic, and is about a ‘zooflu’ that enables the infected to understand animals. The author has forged a poetic language based on animal sensory perceptions, what ethologist Jakob von Uexküll termed Umwelten. In doing so Mackay effects a ‘becoming-animal’ of the text, reintroducing readers to their own animality. Mackay’s ‘perspectivism’ enables us to see from the point-of-view of non-human animals, forcing a reckoning with animal abuse and extractive lifeways. While her speculative fiction is bleak, it offers tools for attunement and thinking-with non-human others.

scholarly journals Vindicación de Uexküll en Merleau-Ponty, Simondon y Deleuze

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (21) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Heredia
Keyword(s):  
Jakob Von Uexküll ◽  
Von Uexküll

El propósito de este artículo es analizar las lecturas producidas por Merleau-Ponty, Simondon y Deleuze a propósito de la biología teórica de Jakob von Uexküll. La hipótesis que se pondrá en juego consiste en sostener que, frente a las interpretaciones críticas de que fuera objeto en la antropología filosófica alemana (1928-1944), las lecturas de los tres filósofos franceses operan una revalorización post-antropocéntrica de la teoría uexkülliana, y lo hacen desde horizontes teóricos ontológicos y genéticos.

Introduction: the many worlds of Dostoevsky

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Olga Maiorova ◽  
Deborah Martinsen
Keyword(s):  
Many Worlds ◽  
The Many

The Many Ways God Is: Ontological Pluralism and Traditional Christian Theism

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Mark McLeod-Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Many

Traditional Christianity holds that God is a singular way, not dependent on the conceptual machinations of humans. I argue that God can be plural ways, different in different human conceptual schemes, all the while holding to traditional Christianity. In short, I provide a framework for an ontological pluralism that extends not just to the world being various ways but to God being various ways.

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