The Wild Bestiary of the Living World

This article offers an analysis of the editorial and intellectual success of contemporary accounts of the living world. Drawing on the works of Vinciane Despret and Baptiste Morizot, it examines the social, historical, and epistemological conditions of a literature that claims to move beyond the nature/culture dualism to establish a “harmonious cohabitation of species” in the Anthropocene era. A new reading of the critiques of human exceptionalism shows that these narratives, while animated by a desire for a renewed sensitivity to the living world, tend to reproduce forms of anthropomorphism and to universalize socially situated dispositions characteristic of groups possessing high levels of cultural capital. The ontology of sensibilities they seek to develop paradoxically contributes to legitimizing certain commercial and institutional uses of contemporary ecology.