Autobiographie d’un poulpe. Et autres récits

11.5 × 21.7 cm 160 pages softback april 2021 retail price: 19 €

rights sold to italy (contrasto) and spain (consonni – world spanish rights)

A philosopher and psychologist, Vinciane Despret has always asked questions of our relationship to animals in a number of internationally acclaimed works. She was also the curator of the exhibition “Being Animal” at the Cité des sciences in Paris. This is her fourth work with Actes Sud after her highly acclaimed Habiter en oiseau (“Mondes sauvages” collection, 2019). For 2021, Vinciane Despret has been appointed “intellectual of the year” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where she will be organizing a series of events throughout the period including an octopus performance in April to coincide with the publication of this book.

et autres récits d’anticipation

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN OCTOPUS

and other tales of anticipation

Vinciane Despret

Are you familiar with the vibratory poetry of spiders? Or the sacred architecture of Australian wombats? Or perhaps the ephemeral aphorisms of octopi? Welcome to “therolinguistics”, a discipline invented in the early 1970s by the science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, resuscitated here by Vinciane Despret for the pleasure of all. For indeed, animals do talk and they do have something to say, we simply have to learn how to listen and work out their codes in order to decipher their mysterious messages.

Vinciane Despret takes a series of fascinating scientific debates and situates them in an indeterminate future then lets her imagination run wild. Inspired by recent scientific discoveries Vinciane Despret imagines animal behaviors, whole life stories and perfectly feasible narratives, which who knows, might one day be proved right by future research.

She cleverly blurs the boundaries between scientific facts and poetic meanderings to create a fascinating alternative reality: what if indeed spiders are trying to send signals to us to stop the incessant white noise of the human machine? What if through their strange constructions of cubic feces, wombats are demonstrating a new form of all-inclusive cosmology for whoever might pass, visible or invisible, animal or human, thus offering us a formidable lesson in life and tolerance? And what if octopi, as early believers in metempsychosis, were frantic not to be able to guarantee the reincarnation of their souls due to overfishing and ocean pollution? Through this surprising thought experiment, Vinciane Despret shows a new salutary vision that opens up the path to different ways of being human on Earth.