Background

Born in Anderlecht, Vinciane Despret grew up and still lives in Liège, in one of the most typical parts of town, the historic center. At first a student of philosophy, “something that was leading me straight to the unemployment line,” she says with a smile, she quickly switched over to studying psychology. Then just as quickly she began to study ethology, the study of animal behavior, and she became interested in people who work with animals. A career marked by unforeseeable turns: when she received her diploma in psychology, she was hired by the Department of… philosophy at the University of Liège. The only question in her mind at this time is: how can she reconcile those two disciplines, the two things she is enthusiastic about.

It would seem logical for her to follow the path of the philosophy of science, the path of two great thinkers that she often cites, and often communicates with even today: Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour. She would like to follow the lead of scientists, and to understand “_how they make their subjects interesting,_” to tell the story of their work of “translation,” of invention. She wants to understand and explain how they build a theory, what influences affect them, how the animal that they are observing becomes an actor in this creation of knowledge. Her first essay in the anthropology of ethology will be devoted to a bird, the babbler, as observed by an Israeli ethologist.

Her doctoral dissertation (Savoir des passions, passion de savoir, 1997) was developed along the lines of her typical procedure: she tries to understand how theories of emotions can be analyzed in the same way.

During the rest of her career she would alternate between studying human psychology and ethology. In fact, she would like to put the two disciplines together, and she is interested in what she calls “_the political consequences of our theoretical choices._” Thus she will study “how to live” with animals, as well as questions that are properly political in her view, that are raised by psychotherapeutic practices used with human beings.

The first domain was illustrated, prior to the publication of Bêtes et hommes (Gallimard), by her book entitled Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau (Le Seuil/Les empêcheurs de penser en rond), which began with the study of modifications in our conception of nature, and human beings as functions of political, religious, and social changes in the world: Charles Darwin identified instances of competition in the animal world – not forgetting the relationships of domination that exist between the sexes, another key subject for scientists – that characterized industrial society In the 19th century. Kropotkin, a Russian naturalist and anarchist, found for his part proofs of the existence of solidarity, not simply a struggle for existence…

She has written many articles, attended many conferences, and made many other contributions – not to forget her various teaching assignments. Vinciane Despret recently served as a commissioner for the great exposition, Bêtes et hommes, held in the Great Hall of La Villette, in Paris. She has also received two prices for her work : the scientific humanities price, granted by Sciences-Po, in September 2008 in Paris and the price of the Wernaers International Fund for the research and the diffusion of knowledges.

Her mind is always awake, and very interested on this occasion by a “contrarian” strategy. Vinciane Despret now intends to study a question that may appear to be silly or paradoxical – perhaps even taboo. “How do people define their possible relationships with beings that are characterized by completely other modes of presence and existence, that is, dead people? And how do they explore in their perplexity the possible levels on which they might think of the action, the influence, the absence and presence of dead people?” she asks herself. Returning in this way to human anthropology, she emphasizes that she hopes “to study the modalities in which one enters into a relationship with dead people, much more diverse than that which the traditional doxa of psychologists allow us to understand.”