This book investigates how Western culture has constructed, mediated, and distorted animality across a wide range of symbolic practices, including literature, cinema, visual arts, music, theatre, and everyday language. It challenges the assumption that cultural representations of animals are merely aesthetic or ideological artefacts. On the contrary, representations of animality consistently reveal deep anthropological layers, often rooted in pre-rational, atavistic, and affective structures that shape human self-understanding. Culture, in this sense, does not transcend animality, but incessantly negotiates its presence and its repression. 
Central to the book is a critical interrogation of the human–animal divide, approached through the lens of representation. Western thought has largely oscillated between two conceptions of the human: first, as an ontologically exceptional being defined by a lack of animal predicates and endowed exclusive capacities such as rationality or language; second, as a culturally produced entity whose symbolic world establishes a radical separation from nature and animal life. Dark Mirror argues that both models are grounded in an implicit anthropocentrism that has profoundly shaped cultural representations of non-human animals. Against this background, the book argues that animality is not a contrastive category opposed to the human, but an ontological and biological dimension that manifests itself in multiple, species-specific forms. From this perspective, the human appears not as a non-animal, but as a particular declension of animality. On this basis, the book examines how cultural representations of animals function as a reflective surface — a dark mirror — through which humans negotiate identity, alterity, hierarchy, and domination, while simultaneously revealing the interdependence that binds human and non-human lives.

Dario Martinelli is Full Professor of History and Theory of Arts at Kaunas University of Technology, Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and Musicology at the Universities of Helsinki and Lapland.

Roberto Marchesini is Director of School of Human-Animal Interactions and the Center for the Study of Posthumanist Philosophy, both based in Bologna, Italy.