Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997 Derrida's speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida's thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994) such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida's (...) text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida's asides on the verb ‘to follow’, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come? (shrink)

Sheep Pig Goat is a performance-based research project, commissioned and presented publicly as a “creative research studio” by Wellcome Collection during the exhibition Making Nature. The project brought together performers from across artforms, a number of livestock animals and academic researchers from various disciplines to explore, in public, a set of interrelated questions concerned with interspecies empathy, understanding and communication. The key methodology of the research was a series of improvised performative encounters between human and non-human agents. These were framed (...) by public conversations involving visitors to the research studio and a series of panel presentations and discussions with visiting academics. Following this initial public presentation of the research, a short film was made of the project. This was screened in the galleries at Wellcome Collection as part of a follow-on exhibition, ‘A Museum of Modern Nature’. Subsequently, an extensive archive entry for Wellcome Library was commissioned and created. The project was further developed at the University of Surrey School of Veterinary Medicine in 2020. This iteration expanded the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary reach of the project, bringing the perspectives of veterinary scientists into the project for the first time. Key findings of the research concern methodological advancements in Human-Animal studies, specifically the need for multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, and multivalent perspectives, in order for non-human animals to begin to be seen as active subjects rather than passive objects. The project also impacted pedagogies and practices in a Veterinary School setting. It has led to numerous creative and scholarly outcomes and responses, including a published interview, podcast and three symposium presentations. (shrink)

Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869, is a classic text in natural history and the theory of evolution. Amidst heroic hunting narratives and picturesque descriptions of local fauna and flora, stands out a curious episode in which Wallace describes adopting a baby orangutan, whose mother he had killed. Wallace, a British naturalist and collector, cultivated an affectionate relationship with the orphaned orangutan, often referring to her as his “baby.” This paper examines how the orangutan was transformed from (...) being a moving target for museum display, to a beloved companion but also a scientific specimen. In this process, Wallace redesigned his colonial bungalow to a space that combined domestic settings with engineered nature-like environments, a familiar construction in later primate research. I use Wallace’s adoption episode to discuss how affect and care were interwoven into the exploitative relations of British naturalists and physiologists and the animals they studied. The account of Wallace’s idiosyncratic relationship with the orangutan is augmented with additional documentation of the close relationships of scientists with research animals, staged as familial kinship. The emergence of the “laboratory pet” demonstrates how the production of knowledge, the sharing of households, and human-animal emotional ties were interwoven in early biomedical research. (shrink)

Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or redesign existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology’s specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a new regime of articulation, i.e. a new way of articulating the (...) questions and phenomena it wants to address. Instead of describing actual existing biological systems, the field aims to describe biological possibilities. In the second part I corroborate this hypothesis through a comparison between early research in the field of the origins of life and contemporary synthetic biologists, who are not so much interested in the historical origin of life on Earth, but rather in a universal biology of the possible origins of any life whatsoever. (shrink)