Publication Details

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the unrepresentability of non-human (e.g. animal, angelic, etc.). The essay distinguishes two approaches to this unrepresentability, a negative and a positive one. The negative approach (connected here with the “linear” model of perception) denies the unrepresentability, and tries to convert it into some kind of representation (e.g. Descartes’s chimeras). The positive approach (connected to the “topological” model of perception) accepts to some extent the unrepresentability of non-human, but it overcomes at the same time the conception of representation as such. The question is then, how depiction and imagination should be explained in the framework of the topological model of perception. As an example of a topological perception, the essay analyses the experience of perceiving in the fog.