A human-animal problematic and the production of pedagogical clearings in the classroom

Abstract

This paper springboards from entanglements involving humanisms, classroom teaching, and eco-disaster. Drawing on Derrida’s l’animot, Marchesini’s theriomorphism and animal epiphany, and Rice and Rud’s blurring, we mine the deep potentials in postfoundationalist approaches to distinction-making and violence in regard to a human-animal problematic. The approaches taken via these different “theoretical” engagements suffuse autoethnographic-style accounts of two classroom-based instances in an upper elementary school in the midwestern United States. These instances introduce the notion of pedagogical clearings, challenging fixed and power-laden notions of “self.” Students’ responses, issues of representation (-isms of humanism), and “multispecies” insights that co-presenced in instructional spaces are discussed. We argue that a static-circular economy of [“human”] self that underwrites eco-crises can be temporarily decentered and deferred per Derrida and blurred and suspended per Marchesini and Rice and Rud, experienced as glimpses of “non-anthropocentric” possibilities, offering fleeting, significant instances of l’animot.