Roland Borgards

Abstract

Animal Studies grew out of the deconstruction of the socalled anthropological difference, i.e. as a critique of the idea that humans and animals stand in hierarchical opposition. This lead to larger theoretical debates about relationality which are also at the heart of the Environmental Humanities: the newly conceived animal is a being entangled, caught up in and bound up with others – other animals, humans, plants, weather, minerals, the entire web of life. Animal studies thus extends into plantary dimensions: only a planetary thinking which understands animals as enveloped in more encompassing relations can form an adequate conception of animals. As Cultural Animals Studies are becoming more integrated with the Environmental Humanities, they are also transforming into Planetary Animal Studies. This talk will argue that this necessary turn towards a planetary perspective also hold out the prospect of decolonizing Animal Studies and Environmental Humanities. The inherent multiplicity of the planetary is also a multiplicity of ontologies, of different modes of access to the world. Even in its critiques of Western thought, most scholarship in Animals Studies and the Environmental Humanities remains beholden to it. Planetary Animal Studies can open a pathway out of this impasse, allowing for new forms of theory and practive in the Environmental Humanities which lead beyond customary forms of Western rationality.