ABSTRACT
This chapter thinks through the figure of the circle to explore the relationships between performance, philosophy and animals: from circular arguments to the circle of moral consideration. Informed by François Laruelle’s notion of non-philosophy and Fevered Sleep’s interspecies performance work Sheep Pig Goat (2017), the essay asks how performance might transform philosophy, and how performance might be transformed by the animal. Of particular concern is the question of how to perform a movement of thought which enables the qualitative extension, rather than merely a quantitative expansion of philosophy in contact with performance, and correlatively, the animalization of performance rather than the evaluation of nonhuman animal behaviour according to humanist standards of what counts as ‘performance’.
