Programme

Lecture by researcher Oxana Timofeeva: The Living Soul.

In Slavic languages, the word ‘animal’, zivotnoe, derives from zivot (“life, body”), whereas a Latin root for the ‘animal’ is anima (“life, soul”). Etymologically, animal life is thus the place of an encounter between body and soul. In Christian culture, those two terms comprise a contradiction, which creates a lot of ambiguity. Doesn't animal life create a kind of unity, where body and soul are one and the same thing? This lecture invites us to think through this unity both dialectically and psychoanalytically.