Discourses gone astray: restoring animality, humanity, and language

摘要

These two recently published books both deal with the role of discourse or language in the context of ecological devastation, and both approach this topic by using animals as points of reference. The texts are interrelated not only in thematic terms, but also via Stibbe's references to Abram's work, and by the two authors' explicit association with deep ecology. Animals erased proposes a rare combination of animal protection and deep ecological environmentalism - in environmental and animal ethics, such a combination, which can do justice to both individual and system, is just what is needed, in my opinion. Three of the chapters in Becoming animal are categorized under the rubric 'Depth Ecology' (Shadow - Depth Ecology I, Depth -Depth Ecology II, Mood - Depth Ecology III). The linguistic orientation of Abram's sequel to the magnificent The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1997) is demonstrated by the fact that a further three chapters are in a similar manner categorized under the rubric of 'Language.'