Therianthropy : "animal studies" and (un)becoming a human

The subject of the paper is animal studies: a new field of research that is rapidly growing in popularity within the humanities. The author attempts to identify the fundamental assumptions that tacitly dominate the field. One such premise discussed in the article is the thesis that Judeo-Christian tradition underlies the oppressive model of human-animal relations. To support her arguments, the author provides an analysis of animal topics and ideas of animal nature held by humans that are found in ancient literature, first of all in the Bible and the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Further in the paper, these readings are confronted with a different neo-Spinosian paradigm of thinking about the human-animal relation that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. The leading motif of the analysis is the literary and philosophical concept of therianthropy (metamorphosis of a human into an animal), which is common to all the narrations discussed. The author highlights the continuity of the tradition of the monistic and pantheistic ways of thinking about nature. She interprets the highly syncretic paradigm of animal studies, which is now dominant, as a new form of such thinking. The article is also an attempt to formulate a different rationale for the studies that is founded on the delimiting theoretical proposition of Michael Lundblad and the critical revision of post-Deleuzian rhetoric.