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The History of Animals: A Philosophy
Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals: A Philosophy is an original and ambitious treatment of the "animal question." While philosophers have always made distinctions between human beings and animals, Timofeeva imagines a world free of such walls and borders. Timofeeva shows the way towards the full acceptance of our animality; an acceptance which does not mean the return to our animal roots, or anything similar. The freedom generated by this acceptance operates through negativity; is an effect of the rejection of the very core of metaphysical philosophy and Christian culture, traditionally opposed to our 'animal' nature and seemingly detached from it.
With a foreword by Slavoj Zizek, this book is accessible, jargon-free and ideal for students and all those interested in re-imagining how we engage with animals and the environment.
With a foreword by Slavoj Zizek, this book is accessible, jargon-free and ideal for students and all those interested in re-imagining how we engage with animals and the environment.
192 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 12, 2022
اثر تیموفیوا تاریخچهای ست از مواجههی اندیشمندان و بهخصوص فیلسوفان بزرگ تاریخ با جانوران غیرانسان. افلاطون، ارسطو، باتای، هگل، آگامبن و هایدگر و عدهای دیگر در اشکال متفاوت و ناسازگاری به حیوانات اندیشیدهاند و هرکدام در مورد نسبت انسان و [باقی] حیوانات سخن گفتهاند. آیا ما انسانها، همانطور که آگامبن ادعا میکند، ماشینهایی نیستیم که ناممان انسان است چون توانستهایم ناممان را انسان بگذاریم؟ آیا ما همان امکانِ بازشناسی اِنسانیت خود نیستیم؟
September 30, 2019
Bu yıl üzerine okuma yapmak istediğim bir konuyla alakalı giriş kitabı olarak seçtim. Çok da severek okudum. Biraz felsefe bilgisi gerektiriyor. Fakat hayvanlara, hayvanın felsefedeki yerine çok güzel değiniyor.
October 6, 2023
حقیقت تلخ:
حیوانات هرگز به کل از بین نمیروند بلکه در وضعیت "از بین رفتن دائمی" به حیات خود ادامه میدهند. وجود آنها تبدیل به شبح میشود یا به بیان فراطبیعی، مدرنیته حیوانات را در عالم مردگان زنده، معلق نگه میدارد. حیوانات از زندگی روزمرهی ما ناپدید میشوند، ولی اشباح آنها مدام در هنرها، نظریه و فرهنگ بصری سر برمیآورد.
حیوانات هرگز به کل از بین نمیروند بلکه در وضعیت "از بین رفتن دائمی" به حیات خود ادامه میدهند. وجود آنها تبدیل به شبح میشود یا به بیان فراطبیعی، مدرنیته حیوانات را در عالم مردگان زنده، معلق نگه میدارد. حیوانات از زندگی روزمرهی ما ناپدید میشوند، ولی اشباح آنها مدام در هنرها، نظریه و فرهنگ بصری سر برمیآورد.
September 1, 2025
Ten Piešek v Davidkovi would love this
May 20, 2018
I bought this at Glee Books in Sydney. I was a little wary, give the preface was by the philosopher-comedian Zizek -- you know, the guy who extolled those Americans who wanted real change to vote for Trump (OK, that's a cheap shot). Timofeeva charts the depiction of animals in western Philosophy--the high point is her consideration of animals in Hegel and Heidegger (but not the Bible). Deleuze and Guattari are skimmed over and there's no mention at all of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation or of American transcendentalism or deep ecology. It's an insular treatment of the figure of animals 'philosophy': so there's no consideration of Darwin or of the discovery of DNA. She writes clearly, for a Lacanian, with only the odd lapse into High Theoreticise: "There is a certain symmetry, of course, between exclusion as the effect of a historically determined set of social practices and discursive procedures, on the one hand, and the repression that denotes rather a universal political operation and the subjective experience of the unconscious." Yes, of course! The dissertationesque patchwork quilt of quotations stifles her book as every third sentence is from another text. I'd like to hear more of Timofeeva's own thoughts on the lives of animals. What does she think about extinction? Is it OK to wipe out species or to consider other animals (or other intelligent mammals) simply as resources? What of ecofeminist lines of thought? Still, a quirky scholarly work.
April 13, 2024
животные от аристотеля до оксаны тимофеевой. особенно понравилась последнее эссе о животных у андрея платонова
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January 24, 2020Mid-January. Cold days. Struggling for motivation and looking for something else to put my mind to, I dip my toe into the developments with the Labour leadership election. Horrified at how dismal it all seems, I shut the computer and pick up Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals.
The History of Animals has sat unread on my shelf for over a year. But I've long wanted to read more of Timofeeva's stuff – a few years back I read this essay of hers, on e-flux, which has the amazing title 'Communism with a Nonhuman Face'. There, Timofeeva writes about the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his poem 'Ode to Revolution'. The poem reads: "You send sailors | To the sinking cruiser | there | where a forgotten kitten was mewing." Timofeeva argues that it is this seemingly absurd and irrational gesture of cross-species generosity, of risking the lives of an entire battalion of soldiers for a politically insignificant creature, one "forgotten kitten" – it is this gesture that bears the mark of class struggle. Although Timofeeva returns to Mayakovsky in The History of Animals, her focus is on the philosophical tradition: Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, even Bataille. In this book, she sets out to challenge a lazy rhetorical-critical manoeuvre that's popular within current humanities scholarship, namely: arguing that philosophy has heretofore been anthropocentric, and thus a new non-anthropocentric philosophy must be written in its place. By returning to this purportedly anthropocentric canon, reading it both on its own terms and against the grain, Timofeeva seeks to disturb the presuppositions that govern posthumanism's Oedipal slaying of the father.
This a fun book, for someone like me. There's some good writing on Kafka. And there's a great chapter on fish and species-being. Timofeeva utilises Marx's critique of Feuerbach in The German Ideology in order to set up a dialectical sense of natural history. But I think the main line of thought I took from the book concerns animals and the law. Today, we're seeing animal rights groups increasingly organise around the issue of extending legal personhood to sentient beings, such as apes. But this call to include animals within the law must be historicised. Before European modernity, animals were already included within juridical responsibility. There are hundreds of documented cases of "animal trials" from the early modern period, in which bees and rats and pigs and sheep and fish were brought before a court for breaking the law. Because the bees swarmed and abandoned the nest, thus depriving the village of honey, they were to be held to account. Because the dog attacked and killed a baby, it was to be tried. Witness testimonies were read, judgements were to be pronounced. But as the years went on, the defence counsels -- the lawyers who advocated on behalf of the accused animals -- began to try out the argument that, because animals had no intellect, because they were "just animals", they should not be tried in a court of law. Numerous cases were won on behalf of accused animals in which their lawyers argued that the whole rationale for trying animals was faulty. This move, which saved accused animals from certain death or imprisonment, was celebrated as a considerable step towards modern rationality. Surely rational humans must not kill animals for their misdeeds because they know no better? But in fact, by making this humanistic gesture, modernity banishes the animal from legal standing, depriving it of sentience, and thus laying the epistemological and ontological groundwork for the kinds of anthroponormativities that still prevail today. This moment of humanistic intervention, which is coeval with the origins of enclosure and primitive accumulation, establishes modernity's treatment of animals as things, as objects, as machines.
As Timofeeva writes in an interview with the LARB, "It’s not easy to decide what would be more humanist: to charge a pig that bit a child with a criminal assault and behead it in the main square, or to defend it by saying that a pig cannot be condemned, because it lacks intelligence, morality, and, therefore, is outside the law. Here lies the paradox: from our perspective, medieval animal trials look simply preposterous, while the position of their humanist advocates is easier to understand. But isn’t it that precisely within the logic of the latter the culture of slaughterhouse becomes possible?"
The History of Animals has sat unread on my shelf for over a year. But I've long wanted to read more of Timofeeva's stuff – a few years back I read this essay of hers, on e-flux, which has the amazing title 'Communism with a Nonhuman Face'. There, Timofeeva writes about the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his poem 'Ode to Revolution'. The poem reads: "You send sailors | To the sinking cruiser | there | where a forgotten kitten was mewing." Timofeeva argues that it is this seemingly absurd and irrational gesture of cross-species generosity, of risking the lives of an entire battalion of soldiers for a politically insignificant creature, one "forgotten kitten" – it is this gesture that bears the mark of class struggle. Although Timofeeva returns to Mayakovsky in The History of Animals, her focus is on the philosophical tradition: Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, even Bataille. In this book, she sets out to challenge a lazy rhetorical-critical manoeuvre that's popular within current humanities scholarship, namely: arguing that philosophy has heretofore been anthropocentric, and thus a new non-anthropocentric philosophy must be written in its place. By returning to this purportedly anthropocentric canon, reading it both on its own terms and against the grain, Timofeeva seeks to disturb the presuppositions that govern posthumanism's Oedipal slaying of the father.
This a fun book, for someone like me. There's some good writing on Kafka. And there's a great chapter on fish and species-being. Timofeeva utilises Marx's critique of Feuerbach in The German Ideology in order to set up a dialectical sense of natural history. But I think the main line of thought I took from the book concerns animals and the law. Today, we're seeing animal rights groups increasingly organise around the issue of extending legal personhood to sentient beings, such as apes. But this call to include animals within the law must be historicised. Before European modernity, animals were already included within juridical responsibility. There are hundreds of documented cases of "animal trials" from the early modern period, in which bees and rats and pigs and sheep and fish were brought before a court for breaking the law. Because the bees swarmed and abandoned the nest, thus depriving the village of honey, they were to be held to account. Because the dog attacked and killed a baby, it was to be tried. Witness testimonies were read, judgements were to be pronounced. But as the years went on, the defence counsels -- the lawyers who advocated on behalf of the accused animals -- began to try out the argument that, because animals had no intellect, because they were "just animals", they should not be tried in a court of law. Numerous cases were won on behalf of accused animals in which their lawyers argued that the whole rationale for trying animals was faulty. This move, which saved accused animals from certain death or imprisonment, was celebrated as a considerable step towards modern rationality. Surely rational humans must not kill animals for their misdeeds because they know no better? But in fact, by making this humanistic gesture, modernity banishes the animal from legal standing, depriving it of sentience, and thus laying the epistemological and ontological groundwork for the kinds of anthroponormativities that still prevail today. This moment of humanistic intervention, which is coeval with the origins of enclosure and primitive accumulation, establishes modernity's treatment of animals as things, as objects, as machines.
As Timofeeva writes in an interview with the LARB, "It’s not easy to decide what would be more humanist: to charge a pig that bit a child with a criminal assault and behead it in the main square, or to defend it by saying that a pig cannot be condemned, because it lacks intelligence, morality, and, therefore, is outside the law. Here lies the paradox: from our perspective, medieval animal trials look simply preposterous, while the position of their humanist advocates is easier to understand. But isn’t it that precisely within the logic of the latter the culture of slaughterhouse becomes possible?"
January 22, 2023
It's more of a history of animals IN philosophy, discussing how different philosophers approached the animal kingdom. The author doesn't seem particularly interested in real world biology, repeatedly conflating Neanderthals and modern humans in their discussion of ancient culture and unable/unwilling to introduce a more modern understanding of animal behaviour in an interesting way. The way elephants interact with their dead, the behaviour of whale mothers towards dead infants, corvid intelligence and the intricacies of great ape behaviour could've all been brought into this to examine the opinions of Hegel, Batailles etc. Instead you just get to read Hegel's moronic thoughts on the animal kingdom treated with serious scholarly attention (animals can't evolve, amphibians are sickly chimaeras, etc). I enjoyed reading Bataille's thoughts on animal intelligence and the extracts from Soviet author Andrei Platonov; these two were a breath of fresh air who both seemed to see what I see in the animal. I really enjoyed the chapters 'Dialectics of the Fish' and 'Poor Life'. All in all I think this was a purely academic exercise (and if you're an academic in this field, you might appreciate this book more) the various philosophical approaches to the animal mind examined don't really correspond to any biological reality, there's not much here for the reader like me who's actually interested in the animals themselves! The real things!
February 12, 2022
After small, but quite insightful and personal "Homeland" (not translated to English yet, I think), I was expecting to find more of Oxana's personal outlook on the topic of animals and their relationship with the human world. However, instead it's more of an overview of the different philosophers views on animal world — from Aristotle and Hegel to Agamben and Batailles.
The most interesting pieces are on Kafka's fables and historical treatment of animals within the judicial system. Otherwise I didn't feel that philosophers have much interesting to say about animals, in the end focusing on human being still. I think this might be of the most interest to serious philosophy buffs — and for the rest, a biology book would be a better time investment.
The most interesting pieces are on Kafka's fables and historical treatment of animals within the judicial system. Otherwise I didn't feel that philosophers have much interesting to say about animals, in the end focusing on human being still. I think this might be of the most interest to serious philosophy buffs — and for the rest, a biology book would be a better time investment.
November 28, 2025
Oxana Timofeeva’nın, ne kadar sindirebilldiğimden emin olmamakla birlikte, kavrayabildiğim kadarıyla bahsetmek istediğim “Hayvanların Tarihi: Felsefi Bir Deneme” adlı kitabı, çağrıştırdığı biyolojik veya zoolojik bakış açısından ziyade ontolojik bir yaklaşım benimseyen, doygun ve düşünsel açıdan talepkâr bir eser.
Timofeeva, hayvanlarla olan ilişkimizin ve onları kavrayışımızın geçmişine yaptığı bu felsefi yolculukla, okuru, kendimize dair kavrayışımızın tarihsel kökenlerine götürerek, “hayvan”ı, doğada gezinen herhangi bir canlıdan ziyade, insanın kendi "insanlığını" kanıtlamak için sürekli olarak dışladığı, bastırdığı ve ötekileştirdiği bir imge olarak ele alıyor.
Kavram olarak, (bilinen) ilk büyük felsefi ayrımı yapan Aristoteles’ten başlayıp günümüze kadar gelen süreci değerlendiren Timofeeva, felsefe tarihi boyunca hayvanın, “dilsiz", "dünyasız" ve "tarihsiz" bir alana hapsedildiğini ve bu dışlamanın her zaman sadece teoride kalmadığını anlatıyor.
Okuru, Orta Çağ’da hayvanların mahkemelerde yargılanıp infaz edilmesi hakkında ilginç örneklerle buluşturan yazar, insanın, kendi yasasının mutlaklığını kanıtlamak için hayvanı bile o yasanın bir öznesi (ya da kurbanı) haline getirebildiğini gösteriyor.
Hayvanların, antik dönemlerdeki saygı nesnesi olma konumundan modern kesimhaneler ve evcil hayvan dükkanlarına uzanan tarihsel yolculuğunu, hicvi bir dille kötü bir kariyer olarak tanımlayan Timofeeva, Hegel’den Deleuze’e filozofların konuya yönelik argümanlarını da ele alırken, Kafka’nın varlıksal sınır ihlali yapan melez hayvan/insan karakterlerini ve Platonov’un eserlerindeki hayvan yaklaşımını da tartışmasına dâhil ediyor.
Felsefeye ciddi sayılabilecek bir ilgi duymayan okurlar tarafından sıkıcı bulunacağına şüphe etmediğim "Hayvanların Tarihi", hümanizmin konfor alanının dışını düşünmeye davet eden, yoğun bir kitap.
İnsanı, özündeki şiddetle yüzleşmeye ve hayvanın tarihi susturulmuşluğu karşısında, sınıflandırılmamış bir uzlaşı ve varoluşa çağıran "Hayvanların Tarihi"ni, kendimizi ve çevremizi kavrayışımızın tarihi ve felsefi bir yorumlaması hakkında kapsamlıca düşünmeye ilgi duyacağına inanan yetişkin okurlara öneririm.
Timofeeva, hayvanlarla olan ilişkimizin ve onları kavrayışımızın geçmişine yaptığı bu felsefi yolculukla, okuru, kendimize dair kavrayışımızın tarihsel kökenlerine götürerek, “hayvan”ı, doğada gezinen herhangi bir canlıdan ziyade, insanın kendi "insanlığını" kanıtlamak için sürekli olarak dışladığı, bastırdığı ve ötekileştirdiği bir imge olarak ele alıyor.
Kavram olarak, (bilinen) ilk büyük felsefi ayrımı yapan Aristoteles’ten başlayıp günümüze kadar gelen süreci değerlendiren Timofeeva, felsefe tarihi boyunca hayvanın, “dilsiz", "dünyasız" ve "tarihsiz" bir alana hapsedildiğini ve bu dışlamanın her zaman sadece teoride kalmadığını anlatıyor.
Okuru, Orta Çağ’da hayvanların mahkemelerde yargılanıp infaz edilmesi hakkında ilginç örneklerle buluşturan yazar, insanın, kendi yasasının mutlaklığını kanıtlamak için hayvanı bile o yasanın bir öznesi (ya da kurbanı) haline getirebildiğini gösteriyor.
Hayvanların, antik dönemlerdeki saygı nesnesi olma konumundan modern kesimhaneler ve evcil hayvan dükkanlarına uzanan tarihsel yolculuğunu, hicvi bir dille kötü bir kariyer olarak tanımlayan Timofeeva, Hegel’den Deleuze’e filozofların konuya yönelik argümanlarını da ele alırken, Kafka’nın varlıksal sınır ihlali yapan melez hayvan/insan karakterlerini ve Platonov’un eserlerindeki hayvan yaklaşımını da tartışmasına dâhil ediyor.
Felsefeye ciddi sayılabilecek bir ilgi duymayan okurlar tarafından sıkıcı bulunacağına şüphe etmediğim "Hayvanların Tarihi", hümanizmin konfor alanının dışını düşünmeye davet eden, yoğun bir kitap.
İnsanı, özündeki şiddetle yüzleşmeye ve hayvanın tarihi susturulmuşluğu karşısında, sınıflandırılmamış bir uzlaşı ve varoluşa çağıran "Hayvanların Tarihi"ni, kendimizi ve çevremizi kavrayışımızın tarihi ve felsefi bir yorumlaması hakkında kapsamlıca düşünmeye ilgi duyacağına inanan yetişkin okurlara öneririm.
January 14, 2021
At Oidipus ve Yasa Önünde bölümlerinin akıl alıcı temposu ve ezber bozan na-insanmerkezci yaklaşımından sonra ne oldu da tüm oklar yeniden insana döndü anlayamadım. Hayvanların tarihini okumak çok daha keyifliydi. İlk iki bölüm ve beni Andrei Platonov ile tanıştırdığı için mutluyum.
October 20, 2022
Slavoj Zizek'in sunuşuyla yayımlanmış "Hayvanların Tarihi", hayvan meselesine felsefi bir cepheden bakan denemelerden oluşuyor. Kesinlikle çok zihin açıcı. Peşi sıra Gilbert Simondon'un "Hayvan ve İnsan Üzerine İki Ders"i (Norgunk, 2019) ve Vanessa Lemm'in "Nietzsche'nin Hayvanları" (Gram, 2018) da okunabilir.
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