Animal Phenomenology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes inspiration from Franz Kafka’s metonymic animal literature to develop his concepts of institution and “sardonic humanism.” Metonymy is a literary device, an instituting dimension of language, that allows us a lateral access to animality and expression. Kafka’s dog story enacts a radical reflection, a critical phenomenology parodying human life. Kafka puts forward a philosophy of generative openness to the animal, against social alienation. This reading comes with Merleau-Ponty’s existential redeployment of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unconscious as expressive passivity or institution of adulthood. As instituting–instituted, we are always between preserving and surpassing the past, though different comportments and institutions can dogmatically or openly take up these possibilities. Kafka’s (struggle through) metonymic animal literature reminds us that philosophical truth is expressive, that unconscious desire animates language, and that the oppressive silencing of the generative past, the feeling child and the other animal, is at the root of society’s institutionalized oppression. Institution offers a literary method of phenomenologically resisting, of creative critique

Aesthetics · Art · Elegy · Epistemology · Existentialism · Humanism · Institution · Linguistics · Literature · Metonymy · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Unconscious mind · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology

• On Method in Animal Studies

  Dominic O’key•English Language Notes•2025

  Incluir item

• Tracking Animal Studies

  Mario Ortiz-Robles•English Language Notes•2025

  Incluir item

• Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World

  Glen A Mazis•Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the…•2016

  Incluir item

• Touch of Doubt - On Haptic Scepticism

  Rachel Anna Aumiller, Rachel Aumiller•Touch of Doubt - On Haptic…•2021

  Incluir item