Becoming Animal

Now available in India. Forthcoming in the rest of the world in November 2024.

A kaleidoscopic exploration of the unstable boundary between human and animal, the written word and the living world.

In this wide-ranging philosophical essay, Teresa Präauer sets out to investigate figures of transformation, transmission and translation—across languages, cultures, genres, media, spaces and species. Hybrids, chimeras, monsters and liminal creatures of all sorts inhabit these pages, as indeed they do the pages of the cultural archive from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day: everything from the harpies, ape-men and cynocephali found at the edges of medieval maps and natural histories to the Krampuses and Furries that roam through Alpine villages and convention centres today. Yet these chimeras are not aberrations; rather, they reveal an essential truth about culture and artistic expression. What emerges in Becoming Animal is a kind of cultural zoology, an image of human culture as an ongoing negotiation with the non-human world, a constant probing of the limits of the nameable and knowable. Words and images, as Präauer shows, are (like) living beings, constantly evolving, metamorphosing and . . . becoming animal.