Albín Kuchta: Anima ergo sum
We warmly invite you to a lecture by Albín Kuchta from the Slovak Academy of Sciences, who translated The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida into Slovak. The lecture will take place at the Painting Studio Delta 5.5 at 16:00.
Painting studio Delta, AFAD, Hviezdoslavovo nám. 18, Bratislava
Anima ergo sum
In the book The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida describes the relationship of theory and literature to animals, which is not always positive. In the lecture, I will introduce this book and explain the concept of “auto-bio-morphism”, through which I define Derrida’s position. Auto-bio-morphism offers an interpretation of the world based on the concept of life (in Greek, bios, anima) and on personal experience (autobiography as an ecological phenomenon), while assuming that the structure of the entire world is the structure of life, as argued by Derrida and other environmental thinkers. This concept refers to biocentrism, a term used in environmental philosophy. It denotes a paradigm opposed to anthropocentrism. According to Callicott, biocentrism consists in recognizing the value of all beings in the biotic community and defines the environmental community as the Earth community, the community of living beings in the broadest sense of the word. This also includes bacteria, stones and other inorganic entities. In the lecture, I propose to expand the concept of biocentrism and examine how it relates to the concept of auto-bio-morphism.