Papers by Chiara Stefanoni
Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex, 2024
If it is true that the slaughterhouse is an institution that remains “hidden in plain sight’, as ... more If it is true that the slaughterhouse is an institution that remains “hidden in plain sight’, as argued by Timothy Pachirat, this chapter proposes to enter it through the words of Italian poet Ivano Ferrari, author of the collection Slaughterhouse, written during his employment as a worker in Mantua's slaughterhouse. The chapter employs the framework of the indistinction approach to the animal question as theorized by Matthew Calarco to analyze Ferrari's poems and highlight their antispeciesist potential. Through this lens, first, Ferrari's writings reveal how violence is differentially and intersectionally distributed onto human (workers) and non-human (animals) bodies inside the slaughterhouse. Second, with a complementary move, attention is given to those poems unveiling trajectories that suspend the perpetuation of the human/animal distinction and speak of shocking reductions, of violent experiences dismantling human privilege and giving awareness that humans too are flesh and meat. Ferrari is labeled “poet of indistinction”, and it is claimed that his poems sing both the dimension of vulnerability with its ambivalence between unchecked violence and gateway for a non-anthropocentric ethos of care and compassion, and the dimension of potentiality, manifested in animal resistance and animal word, which enable a zoopoétique reading of his work.
Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex, 2024
The conceptual pair of “visibility/concealment” is foundational to the field of animal studies an... more The conceptual pair of “visibility/concealment” is foundational to the field of animal studies and the animal advocacy movement, substantiating the idea that uncovering violence against non-human animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses can lead to its eradication. This perspective and consequent activist strategies fall under the scope of “the politics of sight”. This chapter, first, challenges on a theoretical level the equation between vision and truth underpinning the politics of sight by succinctly outlining a materialist approach for the critique of violence in which the Foucauldian notion of apparatus (dispositif), as a network of practices and knowledges, plays a crucial role. Second, the relevance of sight is further challenged on a historical basis. Analysing the knowledges involved in the rise of the modern industrial slaughterhouse in the nineteenth-century West, this chapter shows the primacy of miasmatic theory and, thus, smell. On the other side, sight emerges as a main element in the moralizing, utilitarian, anthropocentric and classist, narrative of the early animal advocacy associations. Finally, the chapter briefly examines as a case-study the slaughterhouse tours both in nineteenth century and contemporary settings (e.g., transparency campaign by meat industry) in which the equation between violence and visibility/concealment stands at a highly problematic level.
aut aut, 2024
Quali sono le connessioni tra l’oppressione su base di specie e quella su base razziale? Come pre... more Quali sono le connessioni tra l’oppressione su base di specie e quella su base razziale? Come prendere sul serio il “temutissimo paragone” tra specismo e razzismo, oltre il mero uso analogico che ne fa certa retorica animalista e senza riaprire le ferite originarie del razzismo?
Attraverso il prisma dell’eugenetica – tratteggiato qui mediante alcune vignette storiche e con prospettiva intersezionale – è possibile comprendere gli intrecci di potere e sapere che coinvolgono animali e umani, così come i processi di animalizzazione e razzializzazione.
Liberazioni. Rivista di critica antispecista, 2022
Quintessenza dell’orrore e della violenza specista. Complesso centralizzato, meccanizzato e multi... more Quintessenza dell’orrore e della violenza specista. Complesso centralizzato, meccanizzato e multidimensionale, lontano dai centri urbani per
l’uccisione e lo smembramento in serie di animali...
Liberazioni. Rivista di Critica Antispecista, 2022
Dualismo è lo schema concettuale cardine del pensiero occidentale, è la struttura logica che pres... more Dualismo è lo schema concettuale cardine del pensiero occidentale, è la struttura logica che presiede alla costruzione di una differenza tra opposti, assoluta e non conciliabile in quanto il suo significato risiede in una separazione escludente-includente...
This essay enquires the genealogical question of the ontological distinction of the "Human&q... more This essay enquires the genealogical question of the ontological distinction of the "Human" and of the "Animal" adopting and reinterpreting the anthropological theory of Rene Girard, in particular his theory of violent victimage sacrifice. The claim is that speciesism is not a moral prejudice, rather is grounded in power relations.
Consecutio Rerum, 2021
Following Althusser and the Neue Marx Lektüre's approach to Marx's critique of political economy,... more Following Althusser and the Neue Marx Lektüre's approach to Marx's critique of political economy, this article aims to reconstruct the structural anatomy of capitalist societies, showing, alongside the forms of use-value production, the necessary emergence of specific social forms of population production process along lines of race, gender and species. The analysis of the Trinity Formula shows how labour and capital appear in this enchanted world as equally necessary so much so that they constitute the anatomy of that "imaginary community" called the nation. Drawing on the Althusserian notion of ideology in its relation with the Verkehrung of Trinity Formula, we claim that the nation is a fetishized social form, a way of organizing political unity. From this perspective, the nation is continually shaped by the actions of the state as a welfare state which assures the reproduction of the labour-power mitigating capitalistic destructive tendencies toward it. The welfare state, though, does not exhaust the ways of organizing unity that are held under the nation form: first, following Balibar, we will briefly discuss the function of imaginary ethnos. Then, confronting Foucauldian population's dispositif analysis, we will overcome a boundary and a lacuna of Marxian perspective developing a non-reductionist multi-level logic of social materiality able not to fall into the material/cultural dichotomy. Thus, we will demonstrate and fully analyze the emergence of generativity and anthropological social forms and their indispensable role in the process of the production of all the social figures necessary for the reproduction of capitalist social complexes.
Liberazioni. Rivista di critica antispecista, 2021
The idea that the concealment of slaughterhouses is historically and conceptually linked to the f... more The idea that the concealment of slaughterhouses is historically and conceptually linked to the fact that animal suffering is unbearable to see is extremely rooted in the field of human-animal studies, including that of critical animal studies. In this paper, thanks to a closer study of the dynamics that led to the birth of the modern slaughterhouse in the second half of the nineteenth century, I argue that such process is mainly linked to another of the five senses: not sight but smell. The smell, indeed, was crucial to the miasmatic theory of the time, which was at the center of hygienists' concerns sustaining the slaughterhouse reforms.
Animal Studies Journal, 2020
This article takes a genealogical approach to the material origin of what Italian philosopher Gio... more This article takes a genealogical approach to the material origin of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘anthropological machine’, analyzing the dispositif by which the ontological and axiological dualism between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ first took place in archaic societies. Using some key concepts of René Girard’s anthropology, it is possible to argue that this dualism is rooted in the violent practice of victimage sacrifice. In other words, I claim that the anthropological machine is originally performed by a sacrificial dispositif. Though in modern society the human/animal dichotomy is performed by other dispositifs, the trace of this origin remains in the form of what Gianfranco Mormino calls sacrificial survivals. An analysis of the survival of the violent parameter of equality demonstrates that making a conceptual shift to equality as equal vulnerability is the key to creating a break with the long-lasting effects of the sacrificial dispositif. Continental and feminist approaches to animal studies reflect deeply on vulnerability since it appears to be a promising dimension with which to ground human-animal relations in non-violent ways. If we link these attempts with the Girardian context, it is possible to understand their radical potential for creating socio-political change
Di stelle, atomi e poemi. Ishtar Studies Vol. 3, 2019
Can animals resist their exploitation? If so, how is it possible to conceptualise their resistanc... more Can animals resist their exploitation? If so, how is it possible to conceptualise their resistance, being sensitive to the different contexts of their oppression (zoos, circuses, intensive farms, labs)? The paper presents a reasoned and systematic introduction to the concept of animal resistance within the field of critical animal studies, exploring its strenghts for antispeciesism both from the theoretical point of view and the activist one.
Liberazioni vol. X, n. 38, 2019
Liberazioni. Rivista di critica antispecista n. 31, inverno , 2017
Book Reviews by Chiara Stefanoni
Recensione a Tommaso Petrucciani, Per una più mite servitù, Protezione degli animali e civilizzaz... more Recensione a Tommaso Petrucciani, Per una più mite servitù, Protezione degli animali e civilizzazione degli italiani (1800-1913), Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2020.
LaBalenaBianca - Rivista di Cultura Militante, 2021
Recensiona al numero 389 di “Aut aut”, a cura di Alessandro dal Lago e Massimo Filippi: fascicolo... more Recensiona al numero 389 di “Aut aut”, a cura di Alessandro dal Lago e Massimo Filippi: fascicolo speciale dedicato a una problematizzazione filosofica, sociologica, antropologica della pandemia Covid-19
A-Rivista Anarchica, 2017
PER IL TESTO COMPLETO VISUALIZZA IL LINK ALL'URL SOPRA Recensione di: Massimo Filippi "Questioni ... more PER IL TESTO COMPLETO VISUALIZZA IL LINK ALL'URL SOPRA Recensione di: Massimo Filippi "Questioni di specie" (Elèuthera 2017)
Books by Chiara Stefanoni
Le attuali inimmaginabili ed esorbitanti dimensioni dello sfruttamento e dell'uccisione degli ani... more Le attuali inimmaginabili ed esorbitanti dimensioni dello sfruttamento e dell'uccisione degli animali impongono alla riflessione non solo un ripensamento in senso etico dei rapporti umano-animale, ma un'urgente messa in questione delle categorie stesse di "Umano" e "Animale". Dopo un inquadramento teorico del dibattito sull'antispecismo, da "Liberazione animale" di Peter Singer alle correnti contemporanee ispirate alla filosofia continentale, al femminismo e al post-strutturalismo, questo studio s'interroga sull' origine materiale di tale dicotomia così fondativa del pensiero occidentale. Seguendo e approfondendo l'accostamento, proposto da Gianfranco Mormino, tra la teoria del sacrifcio vittimario elaborata da René Girard e il concetto di "macchina antropologica" di Giorgio Agamben, questo studio individua nella pratica sacrificale delle società arcaiche il primo dispositivo - in senso foucaultiano - che ha dato luogo al dualismo Umano/Animale, concentrandosi in particolare sul parametro violento di uguaglianza che tale dispositivo mette in funzione. Approfondendo luci e ombre del concetto di uguaglianza, questa ricerca, poi, mostra come un cambio di paradigma verso l'uguaglianza intesa come pari vulnerabilità - proposta dall'antispecismo più maturo - possa essere la chiave per creare una rottura con gli effetti a lungo termine del dispositivo sacrificale e impostare le relazioni umano-animale su basi non-violente e più giuste.
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Papers by Chiara Stefanoni
Attraverso il prisma dell’eugenetica – tratteggiato qui mediante alcune vignette storiche e con prospettiva intersezionale – è possibile comprendere gli intrecci di potere e sapere che coinvolgono animali e umani, così come i processi di animalizzazione e razzializzazione.
l’uccisione e lo smembramento in serie di animali...
Book Reviews by Chiara Stefanoni
Books by Chiara Stefanoni
Attraverso il prisma dell’eugenetica – tratteggiato qui mediante alcune vignette storiche e con prospettiva intersezionale – è possibile comprendere gli intrecci di potere e sapere che coinvolgono animali e umani, così come i processi di animalizzazione e razzializzazione.
l’uccisione e lo smembramento in serie di animali...