12/24/2023 0 Comments PresentifyIn short, Guardia paints a lively picture of nonhuman experience by appealing solely to the dreams of animals. They are subjects who, through their own activity, penetrate the density of existence, endowing it with purpose, sense and meaning.Īsleep, animals also renounce the real world to give themselves over to a phantasmatic universe Thus, when he says that animals have sensibilité, what he is saying is that they register and process all sorts of internal and external stimuli and have various degrees of self-awareness, including their own modes of perceiving and interpreting the world, as well as a layered emotional life. Guardia’s argument puts all these associations into play. In its French context, however, the term captures a larger constellation of meanings, including what Anglophones call ‘sensation’, but also ‘sentience’, ‘sensoriality’, ‘sentiment’, ‘sensibility’ and even ‘sense’. Usually, this term is translated into English as ‘sensation’, creating the unfortunate impression that the only thing under consideration is an animal’s capacity to react instinctively and mechanically to the external world. If anything, Guardia says, dreams bear witness to the sensibilité intrinsic to animal life. For this reason, the dreams of animals upend the image of the animal-machine that Europeans inherited from René Descartes in the 17th century. Guardia took these metamorphoses to be such an essential feature of the ebb and flow of animal experience that he believed it was time for philosophers to formulate a radically new philosophy of animality – a non-mechanistic one, to be exact.Īs psychic events, dreams are too complex to be reduced to a collection of unselfconscious, visceral automatisms. In 1892, two decades after the publication of The Descent of Man, the Spanish philosopher José Miguel Guardia had an article published in the French journal Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger in which, following Darwin, he maintained that other earthlings are as intimately acquainted with ‘the metamorphoses of the nocturnal imagination’ as we are. Other animals may not ponder deep, existential questions, but the fact that they dream proves that they possess formidable memories and complex imaginations, even if their dreams flow in and out of them, as Darwin says, ‘without the aid of any form of language’. But can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures in the chase? and this would be a form of self-consciousness. In The Descent of Man (1871), for instance, Darwin writes: No one supposes that one of the lower animals reflects whence he comes or whither he goes, – what is death or what is life, and so forth. Nineteenth-century naturalists such as Charles Darwin wrote at length about the dreams of other species from an evolutionary perspective, often to drive home the point that our minds and those of our fellow nonhumans exist on a natural continuum. Interest in the dreams of animals is nothing new. According to Matisse’s personal assistant, ‘the white elephant is performing its act standing on a ball, under dazzling circus lights, while memories of his native black forest assail him like red tongues of fire, with all the violence of arrows’.Ī powerful example of Matisse’s ‘fauvism’ (a style of art named after fauve, meaning ‘wild beast’ in French), this work invites us to consider not only the real-life nightmares that human institutions such as the circus are for the unlucky creatures who end up in them, but also the literal nightmares – and, by extension, dreams – that these creatures experience in these and other places at night, when the body rests but the mind wanders. The animal’s body is traversed by piercing flashes of red, and fenced in on all sides by large and black undulant shapes that resemble some kind of ancestral algae. ![]() In one of these cut-outs, Le Cauchemar de l’éléphant blanc (‘The Nightmare of the White Elephant’, 1947), an elephant balances on a circus ball. Art Gallery of New South Wales/ Margaret Hannah Olley Art Trust 2014. Henri Matisse (France, b.1869, d.1954) The Nightmare of the White Elephant from the illustrated book Jazz 1947. He would cut out large chucks of gouache-painted paper and arrange the pieces into visually arresting feats of abstraction, often depicting vegetable and animal life. Due to a case of partial blindness, the French painter Henri Matisse began experimenting with a new artistic method in the final decades of his life.
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