Passwords. Major reference of the thought of the living, this outstanding observer of animals and of those who study them devotes an essay to life with the dead, another essential theme of an abundant journey of inventiveness.
by Florent Georgesco
It was not, at first, without difficulty. The labels walked: “ethologist”, “ethnopsychologist” … Vinciane Despret was none of this, but how to define someone whose main task, since the publication, in 1996, of her first book, birth of a theory ethological. The dance of the chipped cortrople (the impediments of thinking in circles; reissued in 2021 with the subtitle as a title, and vice versa), always consisted in blurring the tracks? “I let myself go !, Explain today to the” world of books “the associate professor at the University of Liège (Belgium). I am a philosopher, that’s where I feel at home. But when, when I started, there were not many of us claiming to conduct empirical investigations, to practice a philosophy of field. It was natural that we have trouble tidying up in a box. Over the years, it ‘is relaxed. “
The thirteen books that she has published since, not to mention many collaborations, have played their role in this progressive softening, by their theoretical audacity, their ability to renew our relationship with animals, to which most are devoted, or With the dead, subject of his new essay, the dead at work. Savants and players, of an inexhaustible theoretical and stylistic inventiveness, hybridizing disciplines, approaches, forms, they have become a major reference in the thought of the living. A few milestones to find your way in the towers and detours of one of the most stimulating works of the last decades.
Even ethologists with whom, in the mid -1990s, Vinciane Despret observed the dances of an amazing bird, the chipped craterope, in the Negev desert, in Israel, first took it for the ‘One of their own. “They saw that I was incompetent, but they imagined that I was learning my job,” she recalls. Now, it was they, first, that she had come to study, and that was the job she learned: “Observe the researchers who observe”, she summarizes in and if the animals wrote? (Bayard, 2022), before adding: “I don’t know much about animals, I know the researchers a little.”
Merles, horses, cats, penguins, dogs, octopus, spiders, chimpanzees, swallows, rats, foxes, sheep, parrots …: animals that populate their books, where they are examined so close, with such attention What they do, what they feel and, you have to let go of the word, what they think, seem to be wrong against this assertion. However, it is not the philosopher who holds the magnifying glass. She accompanies researchers in the field, reads their articles, their books, evaluates, reogence, otherwise articulates their knowledge.
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