Larousse Animal Life

This book is the first extended critical study of the early modern poet Edmund Spenser from the perspective of animal studies. With an introduction situating Spenser in current discussions of animal life and literary form, and early modern animal studies, the book proceeds in four sections: “Animals and Cultural Practices”; “Animals, Slavery, and Race”; “Animals in Complaints”; “Readers and Poetics in The Faerie Queene”. Contributors discuss a broad range of Spenser’s work, putting it into dialogue with a number of early modern discourses, including politics, poetics, and natural history.

This book provides a critical and innovative reassessment of contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting with a critique of the “official philosophical narration” of animal studies, and then a reassessment of Descartes' animal-machine paradigm, Simone Ghelli tracks down the conceptual coordinates of what he calls “the paradigm of the suffering animal.” The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while contesting the metaphysical and anthropocentric structure of western axiology, eventually redefines and re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering, that is on the mutual compassion sentient beings feel before the unjust sight of their finitude. The suffering animal paradigm shows how, within our philosophical tradition, the animal question has been always intertwined with the questions of atheism and of materialism. The ultimate aim of this research is to define the “ethical equilibrium” between aspects of the living, such as weakness and power, joy and suffering, life and death, which our philosophical tradition largely tends to consider as mutually excluding. To overcome such oppositions means avoiding opposing, in our ethical and political discourse, the defense of the vulnerability of the weak and the freedom of the powerful.