Framed Encounters, Disruptive Encounters: Encountering Animals Within and Beyond Human-Animal Cultures

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that we do not encounter animals per se but animals that are already charged with particular significations. We are inevitably immersed in a lifeworld in which animals play a role as participants in human-animal constellations, which I denote “human-animal cultures”, that is, in habituated practices shared between different species. Therefore, we are tacitly familiar with most of the animals we encounter. Moreover, human significations of animals are framed by what Husserl calls the “anthropological world”, i.e. the constitution of significations of animals as pets, livestock, vermin etc. from a shared human socio-cultural point of view. On a regular basis, we encounter animals that appear to be nothing but mere cases of particular classifications like pets, livestock or vermin. These are “framed encounters”. Our affective responses differ according to their different social roles, we have different intuitions regarding the proper treatment of, say, dogs, cows and mice. However, as Derrida and others have pointed out, there is the possibility – prototypically described through the experience of seeing oneself seen by an Other – of encountering an animal in its singularity. These “disruptive encounters” have the potential to thwart tacitly habituated dispositions of perceiving and treating animals.