Living as a Bird. Vinciane Despret

the text itself, on the subject of Robert Ardrey’s book The Territorial Imperative, which looks for the instinctive origins of property and nations (no less) within the animal kingdom. Under the pretext of an invitation to humility (let us accept our animal origins and our instincts, and all will be well), the reader finds himself confronted with the return of the most conservative and patriarchal natural law of our social organizations. In order not to waste time, we will simply draw attention to the criticism made by Engels, at the end of the nineteenth century, of social Darwinists, when he denounced what he called ‘a conjuring trick’: we transpose our concepts, our uses and our categories of society onto nature, then we reapply them to society, and these categories, organizations and uses become natural laws.

      12 12. Nice, ‘The role of territory in bird life’, p. 470.

      13 13. I. Stengers, Civiliser la modernité? Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, ‘Drama’ collection, 2017, pp. 135–8.

      14 14. M. Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

      15 15. M. Serres, The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 39.

      16 16. M. Serres, Darwin, Bonaparte et le Samaritain: une philosophie de l’histoire. Paris: Le Pommier, 2016, p. 16, and onwards for all other quotations in this section.

      17 17. Serres, Malfeasance, p. 1.

      18 18. Ibid., p. 3.

      19 19. Ibid., p. 8.

      20 20. Ibid., p. 12.

      21 21. Ibid., p. 3.

      22 22. For the exact reference see ibid., p. 41.

      23 23. J.-C. Bailly, The Animal Side. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.

      24 24. L. Giuggioli, J. R. Potts, D. I. Rubenstein and S. A. Levin, ‘Stigmergy, collective actions, and animal social spacing’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 42 (2013): 16904–9.

      25 25. V. Geist, ‘On the rutting behavior of the mountain goat’, Journal of Mammology, 45/4 (1965): 562; H. Hediger, Wild Animals in Captivity. London: Butterworths, 1950.

      26 26. R. A. Hinde, ‘The biological significance of the territories of birds’, Ibis, 98 (1956): 340–69, at p. 342.

      27 27. My thanks to Baptiste Morizot, my generous and attentive reader, for drawing my attention to this.