Antispeciesism

Ng (2016) restates his case for the importance of wild animal suffering (1995). Nevertheless, he suggests that the most effective way to reduce nonhuman suffering overall is to give short-term priority to the suffering of farmed animals. It is not clear that Ng puts forward a successful case. Our current efforts to prevent animal suffering overall should also include raising awareness of wild animal suffering now as well as promoting research on safe and feasible ways to prevent wild animal suffering in the future.

During the Middle Ages in Western Europe, lactation and the transmission of milk were seen as a means to understand relational beings — humans, animals, and gods. Milk had the power to transmit not only nutrition, but also filiation, character, and virtue. Milk created kinship. Resemblance were thought to extend from animal wetnurses to their charges. Women who breastfed animals often appeared as proof of their gender’s animality. From the twelfth century, complex constructions of cross-species and cross-gender relationships are found in Christian iconography and preaching literature. In the following centuries, the conception of our relationship with animals shifts, as animals were not until then ontologically distinct from humans. This chapter argues that milk was depicted as binding its producers and consumers into a kinship relation from the Middle Ages to  the early twentieth century, milk’s power of transmission might have disappeared, being replaced by a humanist (speciecist) paradigm.

AbstrAct The present article is based on the assumption that consideration of non-human animals is an important element of an integral reading of Christian Scriptures. As several authors have suggested animals, as God's creation, have intrinsic value and play an active part in the reconciliation process of the whole Earth. Such a reading of Scripture entails an interesting critique of the ways humans today relate to animals. Moving from this assumption, the present article will focus on EU legislation regarding farm animals, presenting the challenges following from its being mainly economically driven. The primary aim of this paper is, therefore, to show how Christian spirituality could help develop a new comprehensive ethics for living beings, beyond the paradigm of the " human benefit " ; it will also suggest that Christian " respect for integrity of creation " could inform EU policy in a positive and more humane way regarding other animals.

Siguiendo el concepto de especismo propuesto por Peter Singer, este artículo considera a la novela Eldest (2005)  de  Christopher  Paolini  tanto  una  herramienta  pedagógica  como  un  producto  ideológico que critica la prevalencia sistémica del especismo y promueve una relación respetuosa con los animales no humanos. Lo anterior se realiza a través de la promoción de valores antiespecistas sin  obviar  las  limitaciones,  complejidades  y  contradicciones  que  surgen  del  contexto  particular  de  cada  sociedad  o  individuo.  Para  sustentar  la  tesis  expuesta  se  analizan  tres  cuestiones.  La  primera  es la condición de enanos, humanos y dragones como representaciones de la mayoría especista. La segunda es la de los elfos como alternativa minoritaria no especista. Finalmente, se analiza el proceso de formación y cambio de Eragon como instrumento pedagógico de promoción del antiespecismo.

Social Sciences have paid attention to the animal issue as an element of Nature, to understand different cultural representations. Currently there is a theoretical broadening questioning the relationship among human and non-human animals. A relationship that produces pain and suffering to non-human animals by humans for various means.
An example of this is the slaughterhouse where non-human animals are killed, an action supported by a social representation of feeding by the death of Others.
The proposal of this poster is to construct theoretical possibilities for the study in the Social Sciences of the suffering and pain of non-human animals departing from theories on vulnerability and also to contribute to a sensitive collective conscience to the advocacy for animal liberation. We start from these approaches because they reflect on the places where social life is strained and penetrate into the knowledge of the limit zones of existence. Spaces of genocide, refugee camps, colonies, clandestine detention centers are places far from the social order of citizenship and the hu- man where the impossibility of dignified existence occurs.
Our hypothesis is that these concepts can help us to understand the particularities of non-human animal suffering.

·Necropolitics and its standardized exception space
Concept coined by Achille Mbembe, in order to explain the logics that make possible the exercise of killing. Rethinking Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (1996), Mbembe rescues the idea according to which the sovereign right to kill is a constituent element of modern states.
This sovereign right maintains a close relationship with the Schmittian concept of sovereignty being the power to decide the state of exception. The modern sovereignty structures the spaces where power operates outside the law with the reservation of the right to killing Others for the members of a State.

Necropolitics is defined by two characteristics:
1. The possibility of constitution of spaces at the margins of the law where the guarantees of the judicial order are suspended and the violence operates at the service of the “civilization”.
2. The sovereign carries out the tasks of civilizing the forms of killing by the attribution of rational objectives and a technological sophistication to those acts of killing.

The Slaughterhouse
as a standardized exception space
of phage necropolitics

Slaughterhouses are spaces of exception where humans exercise their sovereign right to kill non-human animals under a rationalized but arbitrary attribution of diets. Non-human animals are constituted as an Other that inhabits the margins of the Law and are governed like a population to control their life and death at a certain time. The spaces where they move are delimited, their bodies are controlled in terms of production and they are placed in an object status.

The control of the movement of non-human animals when they arrive at the slaughterhouses is possible thanks to the architectural forms of the slaughterhouse and the sites generated by the division of livestock work under a Taylorist scheme of industrial rationalization.

The control of the bodies is possible due to the increasingly sophisticated tools to convert the control of non-human animals population and their vital processes in productivity indicators. We emphasize here the control of their weight, the systematization and dosage of their feeding, the dosage of the veterinary supplies and finally the control of their gestation and reproduction with pregnancy detectors, echographs, insemination carts and foals. On the other hand, there are the tools that kill non-human animals. Among them we highlight: the fuddle with captive bolt, electrocarnosis, electrocution, electric shock in water tank and knife immobilization.

Therefore, the slaughterhouse is a place of standardized exception where the practices of killing non-human animals are routinized and their bodies become mere consumable meat at the service of a cultural, political and scientific representation based on food arbitrariness.

·Habeas viscus and the non human life in the limits of the existence
Phage necropolitics is the materialization of the representation of non-human animals as mere flesh. This conversion is not far from what Hortense Spillers understands by Habeas Viscus. She uses this concept to distinguish it from the Habeas Corpus (Spillers, 1987) which is understood as the recognition of the body as a legal identity of the subject while the Habeas Viscus is the negation of that recognition and therefore submission and violence are possible on bodies defined as mere flesh and viscera. It is the desubjectivation of a body and the submission to the ignominy of the scientific and political discourses of our time. Using Spillers’s postulates, Alexander Weheliye is situated analytically in the place where life becomes impossible and reflects on the paradox of how is life in those places where existence is in a liminal position (Weheliye, 2014). He understood that the figure of Western Man has become an overrepresentation of the meaning of being human in relation to other human life forms that were categorized as human waste.

We follow this outline to understand how the life of the non-human animals in the slaughterhouses has been constituted, because within the different socio-political hierarchies and circulation of categories, as for what meat is the one from which the human being must be fed, these are situated in the assumption of a sovereign condition of possibility of a repressible, eliminable life and submitted to the phage violence of the human species. In this sense, their lives do not matter more than in the incarnation of their bodies and in inhabiting the horror of the sovereign machinery of killing.

Therefore, the possibility to enter the political community is denied and their ability to establish themselves as subjects of rights is eliminated. At a crossroads of discourses on human food and political sovereignty to let live and kill, non-human animals who suffer the slaughterhouse reality are left out even of the very classification of the animal kingdom. If gradients are established within the animal kingdom, non-human animals living the normalized exception of slaughterhouses could be classified as sub-animals since they inhabit the worst of the situations of necro-political cartography. The life of the non-human animals in the slaughterhouses are, following Butler, the lives that lose the dignity of being lived and therefore also of being cried (Burgos, Butler & Prado, 2008; Butler, 2010).

Weheliye’s work assumes a greater challenge, trying to think what existence is like in the zones of exception. Criticizing Agamben’s conception of the Musselman as absolute inhumanity and total desubjectivation, Weheliye understands that in these places there are agencies and political resistance to the systems and machinery of total subjugation (Weheliye, 2014). Through the expansion of the conception of language, he considers that there are linguistic forms of naked existence (Weheliye, 2008). This reflections can be framed in the line of those made by Jason Hribal, who works for the recognition of animals within the social history observing their forms of resistance to submission by humans. This tells us about a relationship and an agency that is defined as “the ability of minorities to influence and guide their own lives” (Hribal, 2014: 66).

A life in the history of resistance against the Slaughterhouse

Within this conception we situate the story of one particular cow in 2018, who resisted and negated the necropolitical logics, escaping from them. This story is just an example showing the agency of non-human animals against the extensive machinery of killing that we detailed before, story in which vanishing lines and particular forms of constitution of resilient subject are found. In 2018 in Poland, a cow had already a history of rebellion, so the workers of the slaughterhouse were asked to make greater use of tranquilizers with her as they tried to take her to the slaughterhouse. After ignoring this request, she was taken off the premises to put her inside the truck that would take her to the slaughterhouse. Then, she managed to knock down the fence and run across the fields, getting to the shores of Lake Nyskie. Seeing that she was being chased, she threw herself into the lake and swam to a peninsula where she dodged the gas-calming bullets she was being shot with. After three weeks of an intense struggle for her life, her persecutors gave up on continuing the struggle to kill her. A fugitive from the tentacles of the necropower who sought to de-subject her, her resistance was avowed for the owner of the farm, who understood that she had the right to live after her insistence on finding a way to have another life.

Abstract. The concept of "declassed" usually refers to human animals in a marginal situation, this is, it is a lexical item with the [+ human] feature. Western dominant discourse does not use the term "marginal" to refer to nonhuman animals because it integrates them into a lower category: they are objects or belongings with no resemblance to a live being. So, their identity is denied and they become entities without needs or abilities of living beings, unless their representation refers to something risky or dangerous for humans. In this case, they seem to be a risk because they are alive.
The present work aims to analyze the construction of speciesist representations in graphic press speaking about homeless dogs. We will take as a starting point the hypothesis that these representations construct the concept of "homeless animal" as a sanitary risk for the human species and, therefore, nonhuman animals are described as the enemy and their resemblance is not the resemblance of a live being. We will analyze three texts, extracted from the digital versions of three different newspapers, published in different countries and written in different languages.
We will adopt Social Semiotics by Hodge and Kress [1988] as the main theoretical framework. In order to cover both verbal and visual material, the development of the analysis will adopt the tools proposed by Hodge and Kress [1993] for the assignment of thematic papers and description of processes in the verbal material together with the elements systematized by Kress and van Leeuwen [1996] for image analysis and Ekman [2003] and Kendon [2004] for gestural analysis.
Key words: Speciesism; CDA; Social Semiotics; social representations.

Se cree habitualmente que los seres humanos no poseen ninguna obligación de prevenir o aliviar los daños que los animales padecen en la naturaleza. Lo que pasa en el medio natural no es de nuestra incumbencia moral. Esta idea, que ha sido referida en la literatura como la " intuición laissez-faire " (Palmer 2010), se asienta en dos asunciones fundamentales: (i) los animales salvajes llevan, en general, vidas con un alto nivel de bienestar (o, por lo menos, con un bienestar neto positivo), solamente amenazadas por interferencias humanas ocasionales, y (ii) sólo tenemos razones para ayudar a los animales en necesidad cuando ese estado de cosas está causado por la acción humana. El objetivo de este artículo es disputar ambas asunciones.

I explore opportunities for political activism from a feminist anti­speciesist perspective. I reconcile the two often separated fields of academia and activism by examining theoretical conceptualisations of political action and their application to lived realities. I specifically focus on depicting processes of objectification utilised by the dominant culture. I offer a feminist critique of normative discourses regarding political action and counter­cultural organising, that are based on our understanding of the Public Sphere as an arena of rationality, debate, diplomacy and equality.I expose public sphere discourse as a means of reproducing dominant processes of objectification and othering.
In other words, I argue that our understanding of political action in fact contributes to the hierarchical categorisation of all life and thus the exclusion of the minoritarian from political action. This is due to the fact that our understanding of the political is utterly based on an anthropocentric masculinist, or what I term (hu)man world view. To allow for a truly non­hierarchical and just socio­political economy, I urge not only to include human identity dimensions such as gender, disability, race and class in our political thinking, but also to extend our consideration to other species, and thus make our resistance not only a feminist, anti­racist, anti­classist and anti­ableist one but also an anti­speciesist one.
I do so by exploring Patricia MacCormack's conceptualisation of the ahuman; a state of divorcing resistance to normativity from a focus on the oppressed and shifting towards a definition and dismantling of the privileged, (hu)man. I arrive at this conclusion by exploring possibilities of emancipation, which, I argue, are found in dismantling the majoritarian subject instead of actively improving the minoritarian position. I thus suggest to move away from a phallogocentric humanist system of signification, based on representation and instead work towards the undoing of (hu)man texts.

Alors que certains artistes n’hésitent pas à mettre à mort des êtres doués de sensibilité dans le cadre de leur pratique, d’autres souhaitent au contraire interroger notre rapport de domination envers les espèces non humaines en empruntant ce que je propose d’appeler une « esthétique antispéciste ». Si elle a longtemps été employée comme instrument pour assoir la suprématie humaine, la taxidermie peut paradoxalement être réappropriée dans cette optique. C’est précisément ce que fait Angela Singer, qui entreprend de subvertir le regard humain en transformant des animaux naturalisés – dont elle retrace l’histoire – en véritables mémoriaux.
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While some artists think nothing of putting sentient beings to death as part of their practice, others prefer to question humans’ dominant relationship with non-human species by adopting what I propose to call an “anti-speciesist aesthetic.” Although taxidermy has historically served as a vehicle for promoting white man’s supremacy, it may, paradoxically, be appropriated to this end. This is precisely what Angela Singer does when she subverts the human gaze by transforming mounted animals—whose history she retraces—into veritable memorials.

Quando le rappresentazioni e le simbologie animali ridimensionano e mettono in discussione lo statuto umano, ci si trova di fronte al passaggio dal teriomorfismo alla questione animale. Ciò significa che, da semplici tropi, le figure animali divengono operatori epistemologici che forzano un ripensamento dell'antropocentrismo e mettono in luce i limiti dello specismo. Le raccolte di poesie Macello (2004) e La Morte Moglie (2013) di Ivano Ferrari sono, all'interno della letteratura italiana, tra i più recenti ed intensi esempi di questo passaggio dal teriomorfismo alla questione animale. Queste poesie costituiscono un diario in presa diretta del periodo che Ivano Ferrari ha trascorso come operaio al mattatoio di Belfiore, presso Mantova. La sua scrittura testimonia le tensioni presenti nel rapporto umano-animale quando questi, fuori e dentro il mattatoio, diventano rispettivamente carnefice e vittima, svelando anche i profondi legami tra crudeltà verso l'animale (interspecifica) e crudeltà verso l'umano (intraspecifica). I componimenti di Ferrari mostrano inoltre come, proprio nell'inumanità dello spazio del mattatoio, sia possibile un contatto con l'animale che riduce la distanza tra specie causata dall'antropocentrismo.

In questo articolo difendiamo la tesi secondo cui l'animalismo filosofico, come teoria metafisica ed etica, risulti essere la descrizione più appropriata del contemporaneo attraverso le sue implicazioni artistiche, filosofiche, e per l'impatto sugli human studies.

Bozza draft poi ricorretta per la pubblicazione ufficiale di:
(2016) L. Caffo, V. Sonzogni,“L’animalismo come contemporaneo: filosofia, arte, animal studies, in F. Cimatti, S. Gensini, S. Plastina (a cura di), in Bestie filosofi e altri animali, Mimesis, Milano - Udine 2016, ISBN 9788857527697, pp. 260 - 289.

Intervista a David Del Principe, curatore del numero speciale di Gothic Studies sull'ecogotico. Una lettura del testo di Bram Stoker che intreccia questione animale, questioni di genere e colonialismo britannico prendendo le mosse dalla centralità dell'alimentazione nel romanzo.