Ecological aesthesis: figurations of the animal spirit in contemporary science, philosophy and literature

ABSTRACTDeborah Bird Rose uses the Aboriginal Yol’ngu term bir’yun – shimmer – to describe the inherent capacity to experience nature’s ancestral and ongoing power (Citation2022). Using Rose’s concept as a leitmotif, this article investigates contemporary figurations of the animal spirit as it moves through the margins of contemporary science, philosophy, and literature. Using becoming figurations like sympoiesis, Gaia, the holobiont, and the Body without Organs (BwO), my argument is underpinned by Deleuze and Guattari’s (Citation1987) philosophical attempts to subvert the dogmatic anthropocentric image of thought via becoming-animal/becoming-intense concepts. Beginning with an exploration of how science is beginning to overturn its own mechanistic view of the animal via new figurations of the animal assemblage, the article turns to a literary example – Robert Holdstock’s Lavondyss (Citation1988) – to examine how we might go about addressing the nature of the becoming-animal assemblage to recapture the experience of shimmer as an ecologically aesthetic praxis.KEYWORDS: ShimmerGaiaholobiont assemblagessympoiesisbecoming-animalbecoming-intense (or how to build a body without organs)overturning the anthropocentric conceit Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsDelphi CarstensDelphi Carstens is lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape with an interest in ecological aesthetics, Deleuze-Guattarian theory and Anthropocene studies. He has published widely on new materialist philosophies, environmentally-just pedagogies, uncanny science fictions, and mythopoiesis, as well as gender and animal studies, most recently with Chantelle Gray in SOTL in the South 7(1).