Through a phenomenological study of horse-human relations, this article explores the ways in which, as embodied beings, we live relationally, rather than as separate human identities. Conceptually this challenges oppositional logic and humanist assumptions, but where poststructuralist treatments of these issues tend to remain abstract, this article is concerned with an embodied demonstration of the ways in which we experience a relational or in-between logic in our everyday lives.

Riding: Embodying the Centaur:

Microtubules are long, slender polymers of αβ-tubulin found in all eukaryotic cells. Tubulins associate longitudinally to form protofilaments, and adjacent protofilaments associate laterally to for...

A microtubule bestiary: structural diversity in tubulin polymers

As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‚"play of the world", including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Ranciere's concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an "aesthetics of existence", as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‚ "play of the world" more present in its absences.

Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change

Work on animal symbolism, in particular that of Mary Douglas, suggests that the symbolic value of some animals is grounded in taxonomic anomaly. Yet the work of ethno-zoologists tends to show that folk-taxonomies are consistent and devoid of true anomalies. This raises a first problem. Moreover, not only anomalous animals, but also exemplary animals often take on a symbolic value, thus raising a second problem. A solution to both problems is suggested, based on an examination of the cognitive organization of folk-taxonomies, and with illustrations drawn from Ethiopian, Biblical, and Western culture.

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Why are perfect animals, hybrids, and monsters food for symbolic thought?

Working with Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings, this essay shows how creaturely beings, or transfigurations, dramatize the afterlife of racial slavery, coloniality, the (con)temporality of HIV/AIDS, and how their im/possibility disturbs and breaks with the “order of things” While transitive and transversal in their potentiality for insurgency, Imaginary Beings and Fantastic Zoology also always carry a colonial logic, a conquest paradigm, while also un-resting (if not necessarily liberating) the enjoyment of, what Borges calls, “terrible grounds” Taking up fantastical and imaginary figures, this essay aims to add to Borges’s compendium of beings; this is a tracing of fugitive forces, of pessimistic and potent provocations that break from “the Human,” “the Man,” and their enumerable agents – from the Fanonian invocation of the bestiary, to the +* value form and its racialized and erotico-, bio-, and necropolitical calculus of HIV/AIDS risk, the authors explore transfigurations at th

Impossibility of that

Few readers will want, or be able, to resist this modern bestiary. Here you will find the familiar - Gryphons, Minotaurs and Unicorns - as well as the Monkey of the inkpot and other undeniably curious beasts. Borges' cunning and humorous commentary is sheer delight.

Margarita Guerrero

Papers

The Book of Imaginary Beings

El libro de los seres imaginarios

Obras completas en colaboración

Manual de zoología fantástica

El Martin Fierro