Zarathustra’s Philosafari

Author(s)

  • Antoine Traisnel Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10050

Abstract

This essay imagines Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a zoological excursion that maps a series of human-animal encounters in which the human is but one species among others. Zarathustra is the reader’s guide for this “philosafari,” as he appears to be an incarnation of “the acknowledging one [who] goes among men as among animals.” By seeing the human – but also the animal – as animal, Zarathustra proposes a revaluation of the epistemic pretensions of the human gaze. It is through spectatorial distance, I argue, that Nietzsche moderates the difficult relations between the humans and their animal relatives.

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Author Biography

  • Antoine Traisnel

    Antoine Traisnel is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He also holds a doctorate in American Literature from the Université Charles-de-Gaulle, Lille 3. He is currently completing his book manuscript, Blasted Allegories: Après-coups critiques de Nathaniel Hawthorne, which addresses the critical dimensions of allegory in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romances (forthcoming from Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2012). He has taught and published in the fields of 19th and 20th-century American, French and German literature, philosophy, and zoology. He has been the recipient of the Fulbright and the Georges Lurcy Fellowship.

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Published

2012-02-12

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Traisnel, Antoine. 2012. “Zarathustra’s Philosafari”. Humanimalia 3 (2): 83-106. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10050.