Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
Jean de La Fontaine's Fables and Staging Affect Across Species in the Anthropocene
Authored By — Suzanne Lalonde

Abstract

Motivated by the American Psychological Association's "Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change", this article rereads Jean de La Fontaine's fables through the lenses of affect theory and posthumanism. It argues that his fables offer elucidation about affective reactions, such as empathy, affective absence, and false affect, which can help account for persistent failures of human responsiveness in the Anthropocene. This article also demonstrates that La Fontaine's fables stage affective entanglements in which human and non-human entities become interwoven. The fabulist's animal characters do not simply mirror human interiority. They expose affective processes that unfold between readers and animal characters. This study further contends that his fables provoke an unsettling selfanalysis of human affect, not primarily through anthropomorphism but through a form of zoomorphism, as readers creatively participate in an embodied staging of affect.

Keywords

Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, Posthumanism, Affect, Psychology, Phenomenology, Anthropocene, Climate Change

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