On the Animal Trail. Baptiste Morizot
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On the Animal Trail
Baptiste Morizot
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
Originally published in French as Sur la piste animale © Actes Sud, France, 2018
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Internal animal prints: Veronika Oliinyk/iStock
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4719-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morizot, Baptiste, author. | Brown, Andrew (Literary translator), translator.
Title: On the animal trail / Baptiste Morizot ; translated by Andrew Brown.
Other titles: Sur la piste animale. English.
Description: English edition | Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, [2021] | “Originally published in French as Sur la piste animale © Actes Sud, France, 2018.” | Includes bibliographical references. | Contents: Preamble: Enforesting oneself -- The signs of the wolf -- A single bear standing erect -- The patience of the panther -- The discreet art of tracking -- Lombric cosmology -- The origin of investigation. | Summary: “How paying attention to the tracks of animals can change our way of relating to the world around us”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020054891 (print) | LCCN 2020054892 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509547173 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509547180 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509547197 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Human-animal relationships--Philosophy. | Tracking and trailing--Personal narratives.
Classification: LCC B105.A55 M6613 2021 (print) | LCC B105.A55 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/7--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054891 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054892
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to all the friends who have contributed from near or far to the expeditions which are at the origin of these texts, as well as reading and commenting on them. Thanks to Frédérique Aït-Touati and Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles for their alert reading and their generous feedback on the manuscript. Thanks to Stéphane Durand for his trust and his friendship. Thanks to Anne de Malleray for giving me the space and the freedom to experiment with these new forms of philosophical tracking narratives.
Thanks to Vinciane Despret for being Vinciane Despret.
Thanks to Estelle, finally, who shares a lot of these explorations with me, as well as sharing the adventure of writing them.
Preface
‘Where are we going tomorrow?’
Where are you going tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe next week, once you’ve reached the last pages of this book? Perhaps you’ll be one of those readers who will have the wonderful experience of being touched, contaminated, infected by the impulses that animate it. I could have written: ‘by the adventure that impels it’, but I’m a little wary of the epic exoticism or predictable storyline which the word ‘adventure’ can convey. I could probably more accurately describe what Baptiste Morizot is proposing by the evocative term ‘initiation’. Being (or becoming) initiated involves the idea of getting to know something or, more precisely, getting to know the art which makes this knowledge possible; and this idea itself takes us back through the centuries to the experience of participating in the Mysteries as practised in ancient paganism.
Thus, this book proposes to initiate us into a very particular art, which could briefly be defined as the art of doing geopolitics by tracking down the invisible. Certainly, put like that, it might seem scary – and you might well wonder if it is really sensible to ask someone to write this preface who hesitates at the word ‘adventure’ but has no qualms about combining ‘geopolitics’ with ‘the invisible’.