Animals transform humans; animals have occupations; animals are strangers to humans; animals make us make choices; these are positions that may shock us but are sure to interest us. Philosopher and psychologist, Vinciane Despret analyzes the relationships between humans and animals in a work that constantly involves several different disciplines.

In his Geography, Kant describes an elephant as having “a short tail with long stiff hairs as if for cleaning out pipes.” Two and a half centuries later, a piece of news intrigues scientists: elephants have attacked villages and blocked roads in the western part of Uganda. An event that is all the more surprising, because there were not many elephants in that region at the time, and there was no shortage of the food that elephants seek. Similar occurrences had been observed elsewhere in Africa, and those who had remarked on these events went as far as to suggest that a generation of “juvenile delinquent” elephants had been produced, a phenomenon that was undoubtedly due to a loosening of the social bond between elephants, the result of more extensive hunting of elephants, and of a programme of elimination. Some even spoke of a kind of “post-traumatic syndrome,” causing the elephants to be incapable of managing their stress and violent impulses.

This simple example, drawn from many others, illustrates the evolution of the relationship between humans and animals, the relationship of humans to animals. It also sums up the importance of the work of the psychologist and philosopher Vinciane Despret of Liège. In an exposition in which she served as the scientific commissioner at the Great Hall of La Villette in Paris, in Bêtes et Hommes (Editions Gallimard), and in her last book, she puts a fundamental question to the modern world: “Who do human beings of the modern world want to live with, and how?”

Together with Yolande Bacot, director of exposition programmes, and Catherine Mariette, she has, as the trio explains it, “worked, hesitated, explored, learned.” She has tried to understand these transformations, which involve human beings as well as animals in new adventures in relationships that force them to redefine their respective identities. A social question, a fundamental question of philosophy for a researcher whose work constantly involves several different disciplines, including ethnology and, precisely, philosophy. In her book, which is illustrated with numerous artistic works that question the living world and its unchanging character, Vinciane Despret in fact gives us a look at the state of contemporary research in this area.

In four long chapters – Animals transform humans; Animals are strangers to humans; Animals have occupations; Animals make us make choices – her ambition is to explore “situations in which humans and non-human animals are mutually transformed, in which they affect each other, exchange propositions, and modify their relationships.”At the same time, but from the publisher Actes Sud this time, another of her books, titled Etre bête (Being an animal), written with Jocelyne Porcher, deals with the relationship that unites animals and the human beings who are closest to the animal world: farmers and stock raisers.