The "Beautiful Abyss" of Human Cruelty, Anthropogenic Violence, and Other-Than-Human Friendship in Yamen Manaï’s Bel Abîme
ORCID
Moser: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3824-1021
MSU Affiliation
College of Arts and Sciences; Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures
Creation Date
2026-06-01
Abstract
Yamen Manaï’s novel Bel Abîme upholds Dominique Lestel’s contention that friends are those who we hold near and dear in our hybrid communities. Lestel and Manaï’s reexamination of the reality of other-than-human friendship presents our domesticated pets as sentient, semiotic agents with whom we co-construct meaning and a sense of identity together in the “enchanted space of trans-specific communication.” Additionally, our species appears to derive immense psychological and moral benefits from polyspecific encounters that enable us to reach a higher stage of ethical development. Nonetheless, Lestel and Manaï recognize that we cannot extend the family circle to include even more other-than-human co-inhabitants of the biosphere unless we (re-) establish a more sustainable way of living and being in the world. Not only is climate change a question of survival, but it is also a matter of preserving the spaces of meaning in which we are forever transformed by the non-human Other.
Publication Date
7-26-2022
Publication Title
Humanities
Publisher
MDPI
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Moser, Keith. 2022. "The “Beautiful Abyss” of Human Cruelty, Anthropogenic Violence, and Other-Than-Human Friendship in Yamen Manaï’s Bel Abîme" Humanities 11, no. 4: 94. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11040094
