Introduction

The Introduction contains a short discussion of the premise of the book, which is to analyze the question of the animal as a philosophical concept before attempting to re-create it. It discusses various inspirations – from the classical philosophical figures like Descartes, Kant, Heidegger or Derrida, through animal ethics luminaries Singer, Regan and Nussbaum, to posthumanists such as Haraway and Braidotti. The second part of the Introduction is concerned with explaining why the book, while using a methodology inspired by Deleuze, is not relying on what Matthew Calarco calls the “Indistinction” approach, described by Deleuze in the book on Francis Bacon.