[mscp] Fables of Thought - UNSW - Nov 29

[Esther Anatolitis]

The School of English, University of New South Wales, invites you to a
day
symposium on the subject of animals in philosophy, literature and film:

Thinking with Animals: Fables of Thought

Keynote speakers: Prof. Andrew Benjamin (UTS), Prof. Paul Patton (UNSW)

Throughout Western civilization, animals have been denied those
qualities
that traditionally designate human sovereignty: reason, language, a
soul,
an ethical relation to death or to the world. Especially since the
1970s,
however, the hegemony of this view of animals has been challenged.
Scholars
in all fields are now paying close attention to the ways in which
thinking
about animals calls into question the sovereignties of the human
subject.
As Emmanuel Levinas has written: "Those animals that portray men [in
fables]
give the fable its particular color inasmuch as men are seen as these
animals
and not only through these animals; the animals stop and fill up
thought.
It is in this that all the power and originality of allegory lies". With
papers in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, film and cultural
studies,
this symposium seeks to interrogate our relation to animals by first
acknowledging
the great debt thought owes to them.


Date: Tues Nov. 29, 2005
Venue: Room 211 Morven Brown Building, Gate 8, University of New South
Wales,
Kensington.

Cost: $20 (full); $10 (student)

For further information visit http://www.thinkingwithanimals.com
or contact

Dr Chris Danta
c.danta at unsw.edu.au
02 93853248

RSVP desirable

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