On Some Animal Portraits. Editing Theodor W. Adorno and Werner Herzog

The lecture focuses on the representation of animals in Werner Herzog’s films. Many of his documentaries feature human subjects who engage in a conflictual relationship with a pristine nature or the communities that inhabit it (The White Diamond, 2004; Fata Morgana, 1971; Grizzly Man, 2005 a.o.). This relationship, necessarily destructive, either for nature or for the subject, is crystallized in several portraits of human beings and animals that double this conflictual relationship with the camera's inability to depict their cohabitation. By crossing these portraits with excerpts from Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, the talk proposes a heuristic montage that aims on the one hand to re-question the canonical Dialectic thanks to a set of theoretical shifts suggested by the encounter between the Aesthetic Theory and several scenes of Herzog's work, and on the other hand, to reconsider the singular relationship of the German director to the representation of nature in order to find an unprecedented critical scope.