Matthew Chrulew
Biographic Data
| ID | 81759 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Chrulew |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Chrulew |
| SIGNATURE | CHRULEW M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Curtin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6044-2383 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 281 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Worlds and Stories
This provocation reviews the growing interest in practices of description in literary, cultural, and environmental studies. It argues that in the environmental humanities the craft of description is essential but somewhat neglected. The multispecies worlds encountered by environmental humanities researchers necessarily have to be well described, not only objectively but also rhetorically, to engage readers. Different kinds of expertise (literary,…
Animal Cultures at the Edge of Extinction
Over the course of the latter part of the 20th century the notion that some animals might partake in a cultural form of life has gained growing support in the natural sciences. Iconic examples of tool using chimpanzees, sweet potato washing macaques, and milk bottle opening birds have captured scientific and popular interest alike. But at the same time that this effort to describe, define, and study animal cultures was developing, the global ecol…
Traits
Abnormal Animals
Stereotyped pacing, self-biting, coprophagia, and other such behaviors have long been observed among animals in menageries and zoos. Yet it was only in the mid-twentieth century that such phenomena were scientifically problematized as abnormal—as deleterious modifications of natural behavioral norms due to captivity, specifically, anthropogenic modes of enclosure and exhibition that inadequately transposed natural environmental conditions. In the…
Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding
Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings…
My Place, My Duty: Zoo Biology as Field Philosophy in the Work of Heini Hediger
It is not my place to enter into philosophical debates here; my duty is rather to convey the facts, gathered through immediate observation of and experience with animals, that could potentially con
Introduction: Field Philosophy and Other Experiments
you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them – that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with
Foucault and Animals
Foucault and Animals is the first collection of its kind to explore the relevance of Michel Foucault’s thought for the question of the animal. Chrulew and Wadiwel bring together essays from emerging and established scholars that illuminate the place of animals and animality within Foucault’s texts, and open up his highly influential range of concepts and methods to different domains of human-animal relations including experimentation, training, z…
Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations
Animals as Biopolitical Subjects
Francis's Planetary Practice
Entering Theriomorphic Worlds: An Interview With Roberto Marchesini
This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposit…
Vinciane Despret
Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human–animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and to be interesting. In scientific research animals are too often reduced to uninteresting, instinctive machines, whereas other modes of engagement allow us to see the wonderfully surprising, culturally rich, and i…
On Asking the Right Questions: An Interview With Vinciane Despret
This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Vinciane Despret's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; stories and storytelling; feminism; philosophical anthropology; animal studies; collaborative research; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in books. It touches on thinkers and artists including Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luc P…
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language

An art of both caring and locking up: Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden
“An art of both caring and locking up”:Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden Matthew Chrulew (bio) In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopolitical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content…
The Animal Outside the Text: An Interview With Dominique Lestel
© 2014 Taylor and Francis. This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Dominique Lestel's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; realist-Cartesian and bi-constructivist ethology; biosemiotics; philo-sophical anthropology; animal studies; the other-than-human; veganism; and technology. It touches on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Shepard, and Donna H…
Zoopolitics
Zoopolitics1 Patrick Llored (bio) Translated by Matthew Chrulew (bio) and Brett Buchanan (bio) We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Derrida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human [le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rati…
The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel
Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and …
The Phenomenology of Animal Life
This paper presents a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, which is opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates. The method is elaborated through the examples of a knot-tying orangutan in a Paris zoo and chile-eating cats in a New York apartment. We show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust c…
Pastoral counter-conducts: Religious resistance in Foucault's genealogy of Christianity
The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault's genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of "pastoral power" characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and tota…
General Introduction: Philosophical Ethology
A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs a…
Introduction: Fabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida's The Beast & the Sovereign
IntroductionFabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign Matthew Chrulew (bio) and Chris Danta (bio) “In the beginning was the fable.” — Paul Valéry Jacques Derrida’s lectures on La bête et le souverain, given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and its opposition and overlap with bestiality. Published in two volumes by Éditions Galilée, and …
Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism
2014). Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism. Anthrozoos: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 315-318
Suspicion and Love
Recent philosophy has witnessed a number of prominent and ambivalent encounters with Christianity. Alongside the retrievals of Paul and political theology, thinkers such as Žižek and Negri argue that in our era of imperial sovereignty and advanced global capitalism, the most appropriate politics is one of love. These attempts to reinvigorate progressive materialism are often characterised as a break with the relativist tendencies of French philos…
Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities
Welcome to the first volume of this new, international, open-access journal.Environmental Humanities aims to support and further a wide range of conversations on environmental issues in this time of growing awareness of the ecological and social challenges facing all life on earth.The field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, both in research and teaching.In just the past few years, a number of research centres and undergraduate and p…
Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation
The Phenomenology of Animal Life
This paper presents a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, which is opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates. The method is elaborated through the examples of a knot-tying orangutan in a Paris zoo and chile-eating cats in a New York apartment. We show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust c…
Pastoral counter-conducts: Religious resistance in Foucault's genealogy of Christianity
The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault's genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of "pastoral power" characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and tota…
On Asking the Right Questions: An Interview With Vinciane Despret
This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Vinciane Despret's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; stories and storytelling; feminism; philosophical anthropology; animal studies; collaborative research; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in books. It touches on thinkers and artists including Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luc P…
General Introduction: Philosophical Ethology
A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs a…
Introduction: Field Philosophy and Other Experiments
you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them – that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with
The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel
Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and …
Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding
Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings…
The Animal Outside the Text: An Interview With Dominique Lestel
© 2014 Taylor and Francis. This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Dominique Lestel's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; realist-Cartesian and bi-constructivist ethology; biosemiotics; philo-sophical anthropology; animal studies; the other-than-human; veganism; and technology. It touches on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Shepard, and Donna H…
Reversing Extinction: Restoration and Resurrection in the Pleistocene Rewilding Projects

Animal Cultures at the Edge of Extinction
Over the course of the latter part of the 20th century the notion that some animals might partake in a cultural form of life has gained growing support in the natural sciences. Iconic examples of tool using chimpanzees, sweet potato washing macaques, and milk bottle opening birds have captured scientific and popular interest alike. But at the same time that this effort to describe, define, and study animal cultures was developing, the global ecol…
My Place, My Duty: Zoo Biology as Field Philosophy in the Work of Heini Hediger
It is not my place to enter into philosophical debates here; my duty is rather to convey the facts, gathered through immediate observation of and experience with animals, that could potentially con
Suspicion and Love
Recent philosophy has witnessed a number of prominent and ambivalent encounters with Christianity. Alongside the retrievals of Paul and political theology, thinkers such as Žižek and Negri argue that in our era of imperial sovereignty and advanced global capitalism, the most appropriate politics is one of love. These attempts to reinvigorate progressive materialism are often characterised as a break with the relativist tendencies of French philos…
Entering Theriomorphic Worlds: An Interview With Roberto Marchesini
This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposit…
An art of both caring and locking up: Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden
“An art of both caring and locking up”:Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden Matthew Chrulew (bio) In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopolitical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content…
Zoopolitics
Zoopolitics1 Patrick Llored (bio) Translated by Matthew Chrulew (bio) and Brett Buchanan (bio) We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Derrida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human [le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rati…
Feline divinanimality: Derrida and the discourse of species in Genesis
Jacques Derrida’s most sustained intervention in questions of human-animal relations, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, seeks to recast the relation of Western subjectivity to the animal Other(s) on whose sacrifice it has hinged. In particular, Derrida offers an insightful reading of the early chapters of Genesis, a central text for the construction of Judaeo-Christian species humanism, which intertwines thematically with the aut…
Reversing Extinction: Restoration and Resurrection in the Pleistocene Rewilding Projects

Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation
Animals in Biopolitical Theory: Between Agamben and Negri
I ANIMALS IN BIOPOLITICAL THEORY Michel Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics' has attained a renewed prominence in recent years through its reworking by, among others, key Italian philosophers Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben. As Foucault described it, modern politics is biopolitical insofar as it secures and wagers the very life of the human species. Both Negri and Agamben have incorporated a modified idea of biopolitics into their different diagn…
Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities
Welcome to the first volume of this new, international, open-access journal.Environmental Humanities aims to support and further a wide range of conversations on environmental issues in this time of growing awareness of the ecological and social challenges facing all life on earth.The field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, both in research and teaching.In just the past few years, a number of research centres and undergraduate and p…
Suspicion and Love
Recent philosophy has witnessed a number of prominent and ambivalent encounters with Christianity. Alongside the retrievals of Paul and political theology, thinkers such as Žižek and Negri argue that in our era of imperial sovereignty and advanced global capitalism, the most appropriate politics is one of love. These attempts to reinvigorate progressive materialism are often characterised as a break with the relativist tendencies of French philos…
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language

An art of both caring and locking up: Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden
“An art of both caring and locking up”:Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden Matthew Chrulew (bio) In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopolitical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content…
The Animal Outside the Text: An Interview With Dominique Lestel
© 2014 Taylor and Francis. This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Dominique Lestel's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; realist-Cartesian and bi-constructivist ethology; biosemiotics; philo-sophical anthropology; animal studies; the other-than-human; veganism; and technology. It touches on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Shepard, and Donna H…
Zoopolitics
Zoopolitics1 Patrick Llored (bio) Translated by Matthew Chrulew (bio) and Brett Buchanan (bio) We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Derrida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human [le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rati…
The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel
Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and …
The Phenomenology of Animal Life
This paper presents a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, which is opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates. The method is elaborated through the examples of a knot-tying orangutan in a Paris zoo and chile-eating cats in a New York apartment. We show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust c…
Pastoral counter-conducts: Religious resistance in Foucault's genealogy of Christianity
The internal resistance to religious forms of power is often at issue in Michel Foucault's genealogy of Christianity. For this anti-clerical Nietzschean, religion is, like science, always a battle over bodies and souls. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he traced the nature and descent of an apparatus of "pastoral power" characterized by confession, direction, obedience, and sacrifice. Governmental rationality, both individualizing and tota…
General Introduction: Philosophical Ethology
A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs a…
Introduction: Fabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida's The Beast & the Sovereign
IntroductionFabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign Matthew Chrulew (bio) and Chris Danta (bio) “In the beginning was the fable.” — Paul Valéry Jacques Derrida’s lectures on La bête et le souverain, given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and its opposition and overlap with bestiality. Published in two volumes by Éditions Galilée, and …
Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism
2014). Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism. Anthrozoos: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 315-318
Vinciane Despret
Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human–animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and to be interesting. In scientific research animals are too often reduced to uninteresting, instinctive machines, whereas other modes of engagement allow us to see the wonderfully surprising, culturally rich, and i…
On Asking the Right Questions: An Interview With Vinciane Despret
This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Vinciane Despret's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; stories and storytelling; feminism; philosophical anthropology; animal studies; collaborative research; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in books. It touches on thinkers and artists including Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luc P…
Francis's Planetary Practice
Entering Theriomorphic Worlds: An Interview With Roberto Marchesini
This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposit…
Foucault and Animals
Foucault and Animals is the first collection of its kind to explore the relevance of Michel Foucault’s thought for the question of the animal. Chrulew and Wadiwel bring together essays from emerging and established scholars that illuminate the place of animals and animality within Foucault’s texts, and open up his highly influential range of concepts and methods to different domains of human-animal relations including experimentation, training, z…
Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations
Animals as Biopolitical Subjects
My Place, My Duty: Zoo Biology as Field Philosophy in the Work of Heini Hediger
It is not my place to enter into philosophical debates here; my duty is rather to convey the facts, gathered through immediate observation of and experience with animals, that could potentially con
Introduction: Field Philosophy and Other Experiments
you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them – that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with
Geographies of human-animal interactions (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (12 works) · Biology (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Ecology (9 works)