Ray, NJ (2014) Interrogating the human/animal relation in Freud’s 'Civilization and its Discontents'. Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, 6 (1). pp. 10-40. ISSN 2151-8645
Abstract
This essay tracks the conceptualizations and representations of the human/animal relation in Freud’s late anthropological work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Rather than seeking to identify a univocal Freudian position on this problematic, I examine the variances and tensions that mark Freud’s thinking with respect to it. Animals and animality, I argue, are not just critical points of reference and illustration in his text but also potential ‘pressure’ points at which distinct theoretical orientations and assumptions overlap and where, under scrutiny, the cogency of Freud’s main theses on man and civilization can be put at risk. However, rather than seeking to attack Freud or demolish his argument, I propose that these instabilities may be read as indices of a certain constraint exerted on thought by the human/animal relation as such – a constraint that Freud himself partially apprehends, and incipiently interrogates, within what Leo Bersani has called the ‘unconscious’ of the text itself: the speculative – and frequently unappreciated – footnotes on anthropogenesis in chapter 4.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014, Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper published in Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Freud; Human / Animal; Psychoanalysis; BipedaIism; Anthropogenesis |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 19 Oct 2015 10:01 |
Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2020 12:32 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | DePauw University |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:87242 |