期刊名称：E-rea : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1638-1718
出版年度：2008
卷号：6
期号：1
页码：1
出版社：Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
摘要：The last decade of the twentieth century, which engineered the births of the cloned sheep Dolly and Polly, seems to have exacerbated the paradoxical perception that the meditation on animals, such as they had been conceived and thought of for centuries as distinct, separate, different, was drawing to an end. The “animal question”, pregnant with so many hotly debated issues—metaphysical, logical, eschatological, legal, epistemological, philosophical—, had reached a turning point in a now broken continuity, to be replaced by the newly emerging awareness that animals have a history of their own—not just an man-centered one— (Delort), that their Umwelt interacts with our own (Despret)—in short that the gap between the animal and the human realm was narrowing, nay virtually closing. Philosophers like Elizabeth de Fontenay began to put philosophy to the test of animality, and went about doing so by drawing on the paradigms famously set by Michel Foucault in his Histoire de la Folie, when he argued that madness was confined and excluded before it was silenced by Reason, thus losing its power to point to the limits of social order. However methodologically and morally shocking the move may appear, Elizabeth de Fontenay proposes to replace the words “fou” and “folie” by “animal” and “animalité” in Foucault’s magisterial attempt to establish “l’archéologie de ce silence”:
