Agenda

08 Oct 2026 14:00

Toward a Negative Zoology: (Not) Knowing More-than-Human Worlds

Aula Baratto Ca’ Foscari Dorsoduro 3246 Venezia

Toward a Negative Zoology: (Not) Knowing More-than-Human Worlds

Mayanthi Fernando

8 October 2026
14.00–16.00

Aula Baratto
Ca’ Foscari, Dorsoduro 3246 Venezia

Chair: Roberta Raffaetà, University of Trento

Discussant:
Fabio Vicini, University of Verona
Matteo Benussi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

I take as my starting point Muhammad Asad’s observation in The Message of the Quran that human sense-perception is limited, and that there must therefore be more-than-human worlds “beyond our ken.” Drawing together contemporary ethological work on animals’ sensory worlds and a 10th-century Islamic epistle on animals’ capacities to worship the divine, I imagine possible worlds that nonhumans—dogs and ghosts, pigs and gods, cats and jinn—may be worlding without and unbeknownst to humans. Such not-knowing, I contend, decenters the secular fantasy of human mastery that underpins the Anthropocene. Riffing on the concept of negative theology, I argue for a kind of negative zoology, where the human is an onto-epistemological limit and the difference of the other—divine, animal—is unbridgeable, and I offer that limit as an ethical and political opportunity for a more-than-secular orientation to living and acting as humans.

Mayanthi Fernando is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include secularity; Islam; more-than-multispecies ecologies; histories of the body and consciousness; liberalism and law; and gender and sexuality. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke, 2014) and co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader (Duke, 2021). Her next monograph, Companion Spirits: More-Than-Secular Journeys in More-Than-Human Worlds will be out next March with Duke University Press.

Guest hosted by the ERC HealthXCross GA n. 949742
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 949742 ERC-HealthXCross)

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

DFBC, NICHE, uniTN, ERC HealthXCross

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