Agenda

08 Oct 2026 14:00

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

Aula Baratto Ca’ Foscari Dorsoduro 3246 Venezia

Speaker: Mayanthi Fernando

Chair: Roberta Raffaetà, University of Trento
Discussant
Fabio Vicini, University of Verona
Matteo Benussi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Abstract:

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.

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Guest hosted by the ERC HealthXCross GA n. 949742
his 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

Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali, Università di Trento - Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia, ERC HealthXCross GA n. 949742

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