Das Handeln der Tiere. Tierliche Agency im Fokus der Human-Animal Studies ed. by Sven Wirth, et al (review)

For the first text in German on the topic of animal agency, Das Handeln der Tiere, published by the Berlin-based working group Chimaira, expectations come as high as they are wide-ranging. As one can see from the proliferating number of publications on human-animal studies by Chimaira and others since 2011, this is a new but rapidly expanding field, crossing boundaries of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, biology, literature, creative arts, and cultural studies. While pioneering work has been done mostly on human-animal relationships, such as ethical concerns in the context of food studies, other areas remain untouched. All the more welcome then is this contribution to the field along with the other work of the Chimaira group, two new professorships in human-animal studies in Germany, an extensive and up-to-date website (http://www.human-animal-studies.de), and several academic lectures and seminars on the topic.

With its jargon-free and precise language, definition of multifarious terms and concepts such as "animal," "agency," or "new materialism," and summary of existing theories and research, Das Handeln der Tiere offers a much-needed introduction while simultaneously driving the field forward with its multifaceted investigations. The introduction examines concepts of subjectivity from Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant in order to delineate the Cartesian subject of the Enlightenment emerging from a dismissal of God's omnipotence and a clear demarcation between the sensual and the rational. Accordingly, this model traditionally insists on a strict separation between human and animal, assigning agency to humans alone. Newer definitions however, including the book at hand, have repeatedly shifted the boundaries between humans and animals, if not questioned them altogether. The first part of this volume explores theoretical concepts of animal agency from a historical, philosophical, ethical, and sociological perspective, whereas the second part reflects on concrete instances of animal cooperation, resistance, and interaction that can be conceptualized as nonhuman agency.

Taking into consideration linguistic competence, moral consciousness, willed and unwilled actions, consequences, and economic developments, Mieke Roscher offers a helpful introduction to the historical development of the concept agency and competing contemporary theories such as relational agency, embodied agency, animal agency, and entangled agency. Dominik Ohren complements this groundwork by delineating a postanthropocentric ontology of the body through a more focused exploration of concepts such as autonomy, receptivity, vulnerability, and transcorporeality by Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida, Judith Butler, and Stacy Alaimo. Accordingly, these essays present pressing questions of current research, providing an overview of existing theories and secondary literature. The additional essays continue in this vein, with Leonie Bossert juxtaposing concepts of moral agency in Marc Bekoff's and Jessica Pierce's Wild Justice (2009) and Mark Rowlands's Can Animals be Moral (2012), and Sven Wirth discussing Donna Haraway's notion of animal rights and ethics as well as the controversy it sparked. While these well-researched contributions do not shy away from critically evaluating existing work, they tend to rehearse research rather than develop new concepts. Most of the theories mentioned come from the Anglophone context, forcing contributors to rely on either awkward translation into German or the heavy use of English terms, which both can make the reading process a bit tedious. An exception here is Karsten Balgar's essay that, on the basis of theories by Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, stakes out new ground defining animal embodiment.

The book's second part provides some specific examples that help ground the theoretical claims. Katharina Dornenzweig's essay on language experiments with primates stands out as a particularly valuable piece of scholarship: Dornenzweig cites theories of language competence from Aristotle to Kant, Heidegger, and contemporary philosophers, before critically evaluating language experiments with apes beginning in the 1970s. In what Dornenzweig calls a "new anthropocentrism," humans are seen not only as part of nature, but as the...