Uomo, animale, sesso, amore. La linea divisoria (original) (raw)
Related papers
Italian Philosophy before the Animals Review of Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Journal of Italian Philosophy, Volume 5 , 2022
At the stormy beginning of a new millennium, the theme of animality has gained popularity in philosophy, possibly due to the intensifying grip of governmental devices on the biological aspects of human and non-human life. Contagion, nutrition, reproduction, environment, and others have become political themes of the utmost importance. They have overtaken subjects of greater prominence from the last century, such as freedom, equality, justice, and independence. A further element that characterised the 'animal turn' was the growing importance of the relationship between humans, animals, and the ecosystem. In this regard, it is useful to recall that, starting in the 1970s, Peter Singer and Tom Regan called for greater moral consideration for animals, thus opening a debate that is still ongoing today. At the beginning of the 2000s, two texts were published that had a profound impact upon the terms and concepts of that debate: The Open: Man and Animal by Giorgio Agamben and The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida.
The “animal question” is a broad philosophical debate that erodes the tidy, sharp division between the human and the nonhuman, calling into question a widely accepted anthropocentrism and mankind’s ontological privilege. This approach to human-animal interaction is taken, therefore, to sabotage speciesism, the prejudice that animals are inferior to humans, which justifies the discrimination practiced by man against other species. Also, by making the borderland between humans and animals mobile – and, to a certain degree, unsafe – the animal question problematizes human identity and subjectivity. For this reason, one of the main goals of the animal question is to radically challenge the discontinuity between animals and human beings. This criticism should then lead to a displacement of the human realm and open a debate on repositioning anthropocentrism or even making it obsolete. Among the many voices that have raised animal questions in Italian culture, two make themselves particularly significant due to the clarity of their arguments and the consistency of their positions. Poet Mario Luzi and philosopher Giorgio Agamben pose the question of interspecies relations in terms that are not only radical, but also complementary, giving us a transdisciplinary understanding of the human-animal divide.
Interrogating the “Animal”: An Investigation into the Ethics of Man-Animal Divide
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Humanity defines itself through an animal other, the animal in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of accommodation and hospitality which posthuman philosophy provides in conceptualizing the position of alterity of the “animal”. Building on the writing of Jacque Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I will argue how Posthumanism can radicalize the way in which the anthropocentric worldview looks at the animal as other, questioning the positioning and relevance of speciesism and species boundary. Also, the issue of the agency has been interrogated in this research article. I have also argued for a new mode of conceptualizing the “other” / the “animal” which abolishes the hierarchical view of anthropocentric conception of nonhuman but instead views the other from the lens of companionship, borrowing from the ideas of “companionship” and “Chuthulucene” of Donna J. Haraway. The paper is an attempt to expand ...
The Italian Animal: A Heterodox Tradition
Introduction to Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani (eds.), Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 1-18, 2020
The introduction presents the rationale of the volume, arguing for a specificity in the way in which the Italian tradition – and contemporary Italian philosophy in particular – approached the animal question, and which, from the perspective of the Anglo-American “orthodoxy” (in the field of Animal studies, for example) appears as heterodox. After a brief historical overview of modern animal protection movements in Italy, we explore the argument that Italian philosophy as such presents a specific relation to its “outside”: life. We argue therefore that this peculiar relation caused Italian philosophy to bypass Cartesianism – and the logocentrism that, with it, marked the whole of modern Western philosophy – and to approach the animal question in a very specific and original (and therefore also heterodox) way.