Czasopismo naukowe – rocznik internetowy – „Zoophilologica. Polish Journal of  Animal Studies” ma na celu interdyscyplinarne badania nad  znaczeniami, jakie przypisuje się zwierzętom. Sposób uzgadniania tej wiedzy oraz rekonstrukcja nowoczesnych obszarów węzłowych dla  myślenia o  świecie zwierząt i  ludzi wiążą się z  potrzebą wytworzenia środowiska wymiany treści niemieszczących się w  ramach jednej dziedziny. Czasopismo to  ma stanowić forum wypowiedzi zarówno dla teoretyków i historyków kultury, jak i  specjalistów z zakresu zoologii i historii nauki. Jedną z  hipotez założycielskich czasopisma jest przekonanie, że perspektywa studiów nad zwierzętami (animal studies) pozwala na bezpośrednie powiązanie dyskusji światopoglądowych ze zmianami kulturowymi w relacji ludzie – zwierzęta. Poświadczają to już opracowane badania anglojęzyczne, a niniejsze czasopismo postawiło sobie za cel rekonstrukcję relacji ludzi i zwierząt w  krajach Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej oraz innych obszarach kulturowych. Zaproponowana perspektywa ma w  kolejnych publikacjach odsłonić niedostrzegane dotąd przemiany wzorów kultury i moralności, które są obecne w  najnowszych dyskusjach ekologicznie zorientowanej humanistyki i jej wersji„post”.

Humanum, ludzkie nie stoi przed tym ani nad tym, co zwierzęce. A zwierzęce? Jakie jest zwierzęce? Czy nie jest tak, że za ambiwalentnym i nieswojskim/nieoswojonym pojęciem zwierzęcego kryją się sprzeczne myśli i wyobrażenia? I że rodzi ono jednocześnie pozytywne i negatywne konotacje? Zwierzęce zdaje się wyrażać jednocześnie podziw dla innych/niedocieczonych istot i pogardę dla „niższego”/„gorszego” bytu. Zwierzęce, głęboko ukryte, siedzi w człowieku, w którym uaktywnia się, gdy ten usiłuje uwolnić się od pierwotnych instynktów albo ubolewa nad tym, że dawno je utracił. Zwierzęce to dzikie, niepokojące, niespokojne, nieokreślone, tajemnicze, obce… Co to jest „zwierzęce”? Parafrazując Michaiła Epsteina – obrazy „zwierzęcego” w kulturze to swoiste lustro ludzkiej samoświadomości. Oddajemy do rąk Czytelników pierwszy zeszyt tematyczny czasopisma zatytułowany Zwierzęce, w którym zamieszczono artykuły różnych autorów: literaturoznawców, językoznawców, kulturoznawców i filozofów. Wszyscy oni próbują – każdy na swój sposób – odpowiedzieć na pytanie: czym (nie) jest „zwierzęce”? E-czasopismo o specjalistycznym charakterze jest poświęcone nie tylko publikowaniu badań z zakresu nowej dyscypliny wiedzy – zoofilologii, która poniekąd stanowi połączenie zoopoetyki i zoosemiotyki. Idea powstania czasopisma wychodzi naprzeciw współczesnym oczekiwaniom i wpisuje się w nurt interdyscyplinarnych dziedzin spod znaku „zoo”, a więc zoosemiotyki, zooantropologii, zooteologii, zoomuzykologii etc.

Justyna Tymieniecka-Suchanek

This article is entirely dedicated to zoophilology—a new discipline of research, which emerged with the fusion of philological sciences and modern, ethically deepened animal studies. The author— following Aleksander Nawarecki, who coined the term—is trying to define the genesis, subject of research, and methodology of zoophilology. Its most important intellectual context is the non-anthropocentric humanities, also called posthumanities. One of the main tasks of zoophilology studies is to show how writers question the evaluative opposition between men and animals. More and more often getting to know the perspective of animals—their non-human point of view, which is so difficult to imagine— is becoming one of the ambitions of modern literature and art. The role of zoophilologists is conceived as trying to analyze and interpret such “postanthropocentric” texts. It is an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of how literature enables us to put ourselves in the position of others.

The author’s essay is a collection of several short, seemingly casual reflections which contain more profound themes, giving the reader much food for thought. Starting from a personal wish to explore the question of animality, the author delves into the issues of biopoetics and zootheology, before once more returning to personal reflections, which lead him to the negation of the human and the animal as equal existences under law.

The aim of this short article is to discuss the state of research in a field which attempts to combine animal studies with theology and religious studies, and to map its discourse, tentatively called “critical ecotheology” and construed as environmental ethics accompanied by a religious inspiration and theological justification which is derived from dogmas and religious attitudes of different world religions. The attempt at providing a theoretical framework for ecotheology was inspired by the pioneering work of scholars who came in September 2014 to Bonn, Germany, for a conference on human-animal relations in religious traditions. The problems brought up by their presentations provoked a discussion of the presence of animals in the thinking, practices, and rituals of various religions and their theologies, highlighting the role of religious culture in negotiating different senses of the animal. The article concludes with the idea that a review of religious and theological issues from the perspective of animal studies may lead to the revision of many concepts and theoretical paradigms within the history and anthropology of religion, while helping to articulate the significance of animals and the need for their protection in the activity of religious groups and individuals.

The text constitutes an attempt to discuss the idea of the “animal” itself, which is an empty set. Following Jacques Derrida’s line of thought, we remain surprised, asking what links the elephant with the ant or the echidna with the hedgehog. The only benefit of the concept of the “animal” lies in revealing the way in which humans try to extricate themselves from the net designed by them for “animals,” but ultimately end up wrapping it tightly about themselves. The question about the socalled “animal” constitutes part of the battle over language that seems to have forgotten that it was born from the relation with animals; however, it preserves this knowledge not in the scientific jargon, but in those of its registers which allow people to talk about the individual relation not with the “animal,” but with the concrete individual of a concrete species.

Reading Jacques Derrida’s essay Che cos’è la poesia? as well as poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Hardy, and Tadeusz Kijonka, we want to argue that the animal helps us to redefine the human subject. When pondering the fuzzy boundary between the human and the non-human, man interprets himself/herself not as a subject isolated in its sublime aspirations but, rather, as a fragile connection, delicate relation with what begs for his/her protection and care.

Krótki raport autorstwa Donalda Weslinga powstał w oparciu o cztery monografie i dwie antologie tekstów napisanych po 2007 roku. Timothy Morton to – zdaniem Weslinga—modelowy przykład teoretyka i stylisty działającego w obszarze stosunkowo nowej dziedziny, jaką jest ekokrytyka materialna. Wesling rozpoczyna omówienie od wprowadzenia diagramu obrazującego kierunki wpływu od filozofów po krytyków literackich. Głównym teoretykiem w pionowym wymiarze diagramu jest Bruno Latour kładący nacisk na sprawczość podmiotów nie-ludzkich (zwierzęta, przedmioty). W wymiarze poziomym kategorie oscylują pomiędzy studiami nad zwierzętami z jednej strony a ontologią zorientowaną na przedmiot z drugiej. Morton wiele uwagi poświęcił definiowaniu relacji pomiędzy człowiekiem i zwierzęciem, ale jego ostatnie prace i eseje sytuują go zdecydowanie w obszarze szkoły przedmiotu. Wesling formułuje trzy pytania dotyczące roli, jaką w ekokrytyce odgrywają narracja, język duchowy oraz fakt naukowy. Pytania te, które są wynikiem lektury tekstów Mortona, mają znaczenie również dla studiów nad zwierzętami.

The article analyzes the position of Tom Regan (the author of a theory of animal rights) toward the admissibility of the use of force in defense of animals. The key issue here is the definitional dispute about the legitimacy of violent actions directed towards things and defining the criteria that justify such violence. Regan’s conclusion is presented in the context of different forms of violence as well as its definition, the contemporary realities of animal exploitation, and the history of direct action in defense of animals.

The article asks questions about the human cognitive abilities – how it is to be an animal of a species
different from one’s own. Using as a basis the doubts of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, the author proceeds to discuss the standpoint of ethnologists Frans de Waal and Konrad Lorenz, who accept the limitations of the human cognitive apparatus and language, with the help of which we describe what we call the “animal.” The author suggests that the problem of contemporary humanities and animal studies lies not in anthropodenial, but in anthropomorphism, rooted in the centrism typical of our species, which seems impossible to overcome. The author also proposes a thesis that the way to overcome this issue is for people to gain knowledge about these limitations. This knowledge, supported by interspecies empathy, developed in the process of coevolution of animal species (humans being one of them), is the most effective tool of heuristics.

The aim of this article is to discuss Agamben’s distinction between dzoē and bios and verify if the category of bare life would be relevant to the life of animals. At first glance, following Agamben’s line of thought, one might say that the very helplessness of the modern law in the face of dzoē results in ephemeral and certainly not inalienable animal rights. Thus, what Agamben calls homo sacer would also refer to animals as animal sacrum. However, when extended to include animals, Agamben’s philosophical project shows serious constraints which are cleverly camouflaged under the linguistic argument and his rather selective interpretation of Aristotle’s works.

In the article it is argued that the conviction that verbally expressed language (as commonly employed by humans) is necessary for thinking is not justified. Animals have been found to employ various communication systems (languages) and, though these are different from human language, they testify to consciousness and thought. Recent research among autistic people has indicated that they frequently think in images rather than words, and it is suggested that this was the original feature of human thinking and may also be the basis of animal thinking.

The article is  a  reconnaissance. The  author of  the  paper aims at  providing a  comparison of  mathematical and empirical results of  research on the  evolution of  language. The  content of  the  paper focuses on issues relating to the emergence of  language. The author seeks to answer the question: What differentiates human and animal communication?

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of swarming and its expression in modern technologies and art. The main focus of this work is a philosophical comprehension and interpretation of the performance Mind-Controlled Cyborgroach created by the Moscow art-group “18 Apples.” The author discusses the phenomenon of the uncanny as a manifestation of entomophobia and technophobia, and she explores the ontological questions of human and animal being and compares categories of “natural” and “human” technics. The article also focuses on the problem of the Other in the context of the basic tasks of bioethics.

The main question discussed in this article is: Can we re-interpret naturalism’s novels or short stories from a non-human perspective? The researchers of animal studies perceive the world as an ecosystem where humans, animals, and plants live in a symbiosis. They also perceive the human as a part of nature. Moreover, with regard to Charles Darwin’s discoveries, it is worth to mention that the theorists of naturalism called the human being an animal. Naturalists introduce a new protagonist into literature called the animal hero. Thanks to animal studies, he is perceived as a subject, not a thing (as was the case earlier). What is more, we can reconstruct different relations between species. One of the most important problems for naturalism and animal studies is empathy towards other creatures. Naturalists, as well as the researchers of animal studies, use different tools to analyse and interpret novels and short stories. First of all, they introduce different narrators in order to be objective. Furthermore, they indicate parallelisms between the human and animal world, they avoid subjective comments, and sometimes they use the strategy called the stream of consciousness to present other creatures’ thoughts.

The article discusses the issue of living and thinking with pets. The author analyzes examples of popular literature, particularly books addressed to families and women, in order to seek for animal agency in the plot. The thesis is based on an assumption about the special bond between pets and female characters in such novels. Verifying the theory of Yi-Fu Tuan from his book Dominance and Affection. Making of Pets, the article questions pets as an effect of the human tendency to domination over nature and taking comfort in a coherent view of animals. Pets, according to Tuan’s theory, ought to be reflections of human desires and needs. The domination in its roots is male, but its repressive demands involve pets as well as women. This is the premise whereby the special relation between pets and female owners has evolved. That is the reason why it is important to examine the meaning of human-animal relations by considering gender. The space where the bond between women and their pets starts and develops is also significant. The home is the third main character of each novel, and maintains an actually dynamic relation with others.

Considerations about the human condition and humankind’s place in nature are a vital part of the works of Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz’s cosmological vision is based on a deeply dualistic structure. On the one hand, we have got the human and civilisation – which is a synonym of purposefulness and divine order; on the other hand, there is the wild, cruel and untameable nature, whose activity is full of chaos and is meaningless from the metaphysical point of view. There is a sort of inconsistency in this seemingly ordered structure of reality, which seems to constitute the principle of Miłosz’s anthropology. The human in his essence is a “paradoxical being”; it is difficult to classify him in an unambiguous way. He is considered as the only creature that is composed of God’s elements – immortal soul, consciousness, and intellect. These properties detach him from nature and bring him closer to God in the hierarchy. Still, he is a biological creature and that disgraceful fact is difficult to accept for Miłosz; therefore, an attempt to draw a clear line between
man and nature is reflected so clearly in Miłosz’s works. The purpose of the article is to analyse a few works of Czesław Miłosz with regard to the issues mentioned above. Undeniably, the ideas presented by Miłosz are deeply rooted in Western philosophy.

A poetic interest in animals is one result of Ryszard Krynicki’s being inspired by Japanese haiku, which he combines with the distinctive meanings of Western culture. Buddhist tradition allows him to see an animal as a representative of the universe in common with humans, and as a real existencein-itself. In his poems the Eastern sensitivity and way of thinking become an opportunity to revise humanity’s imaging of nature. Paradoxically, therefore, what is spiritual allows Krynicki to experience an empirical encounter with the animal and show the conditions for the questioning of the anthropocentric paradigm.

The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which the forms and presence of animals are presented in the works of the German writer, Sebald, through selected approaches in animal studies. The article shows that animalistic discourse plays an important, if not central, part in Sebald’s literary imagination, which has gone largely unnoticed by critics for a long time, due to their predominant focus on the issues of memory, the Holocaust, and melancholia. The main subjects of analysis here are the novels The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, which are focused predominantly on the issue of human-animal relationships both on a textual and on a visual level. Firstly, the author will characterise the images of animals depicted in Sebald’s prose, then she will examine the animal cartographies, i.e. spaces where the writer locates his non-human protagonists, and in the end, the text will analyse the poetics of contrast and analogy through which Sebald describes the entanglement of the human’s mind in the exploitation of animals. The analysis will demonstrate that the coexistence of humans and animals in Sebald’s works is not linear, but rather creates sophisticated constellations of ostensibly distanced events from various periods and sources. Sebald places an animal’s suffering right at the centre of the turbulent and disastrous history of the 19th and 20th centuries and, through this inclusive gesture of empathy towards non-human animals, strictly breaks with the anthropocentric perspective of writing.

Punktem wyjścia dla zaproponowanej tu analizy twórczości kanadyjskiej poetki Lorny Crozier jest dyskusja nad zmianami w postrzeganiu zwierząt, które zachodzą we współczesnej kulturze Zachodu. Granica między człowiekiem a zwierzęciem jest dzisiaj szczególnie płynna, czego dowodem są, między innymi, zmiany w zapisach prawnych regulujących status małp człekokształtnych. Tradycyjna dychotomia człowiek – zwierzę bądź kultura – natura wydaje się natomiast szczególnie interesująca w kontekście kanadyjskim, gdzie dzikość natury postrzegana była przede wszystkim jako zagrożenie, przed którym należy się bronić. Teoretycy „kanadyjskości” ustanawiali więc jednoznaczne granice między naturą a cywilizacją. Lorna Crozier – kanadyjska poetka prerii – postrzega jednak te granice nie jako linie rozłamu, ale jako miejsca spotkań człowieka i zwierzęcia, w których komunikacja między – lub ponad – gatunkowa staje się możliwa.

The text is an interpretation of a poem by Justyna Bargielska titled Katullka from the Nudelman (2014) volume. The author uses the literary idea of meeting herself from many years before. The occasion was her discovery of her own childish notes showing her knowledge about the world in the form of three riddles. The most difficult and most important of them (“How many animals did Moses take onto the Ark”?) is based on the mixing of two expressions: “Noah’s Ark” and “the Ark of the Covenant” (Moses’). The deceptive question of the child forces us to seek animals in the Bible (especially in the Decalogue), which leads to surprising theological conclusions concerning relations with God and animals. In the finale of the poem, the writing of the seven-year-old girl is eaten by a roe deer; this is a symbolic suggestion of a “communion” between the child-like and the animal-like.

The article deals with the analysis of Polish and Russian definitions of the owad / насекомое (“insect”) lexemes. On the basis of these definitions, the author tries to answer the question whether, from the linguistic point of view, insects are perceived as animals or not. It appears that in the majority of the Polish dictionary sources, the insect is not classified as an animal, while the Russian dictionary sources seem to be more consistent in classifying the insect as an animal. According to the author, this may be the result of the fact that the Polish dictionaries reflect linguistic notions of insects and, according to these notions, insects are not animals. On the other hand, the Russian dictionaries rely on scientific premises. These premises assume that an insect is an animal.

The article is devoted to the attitudes of Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition companions towards animals on the way to the South Pole – both the animals they brought with them on the ship “Terra Nova” and those they encountered in Antarctica. Scott took 34 dogs and 19 Manchu ponies on this arduous expedition. None of them survived. This aim is to draw attention to the human dimension of the expedition, but it becomes a contribution to the history of relationships between humans and animals in Europe just before the First World War. Analysis of the reports of Robert F. Scott and Apsley Cherry-Garrard (a member of the expedition) allows us to conclude that the explorers felt a great deal of affection for the animals. In the face of their tragic fate, they often reflected on their own guilt and mistakes. The suffering of animals was marked firmly in their minds, and the only kind of justification was their desire to enrich humanity with new knowledge.

The main aim of the article is to draw attention to a different hell than that of the Nazi concentration camps, namely, the cruel test of human possibilities, impulses, and reactions that was the Siege of Leningrad. Mass famine, which had a solid scientific basis and proved to be one of the most effective weapons of the 20th century, was again used there. The besieged man, left to his survival instinct, shows an only seemingly (in)human face, which is manifested in eating domestic animals but also in cannibalism (this was a taboo issue for many years). Fortunately, the horrific experiment conducted on the city’s inhabitants revealed also successful, even heroic, attempts to maintain humanity and dignity. One of these is surely the history of the Leningrad Zoo, which functioned as usual during the siege (except for the winter of 1941–1942). It demonstrates not only the importance of bonds between man and animal, but also confirms that, in the face of suffering, famine, and fear, all beings are equal.