A Cosmopolítica Dos Animais (original) (raw)

The present thesis aims to investigate, from a philosophical standpoint, the political life of other-than-human animals in the context of the Anthropocene. Amid several configurations, errancy, confinement, experimentation and extinction are privileged as actual conceptual situations, the analysis and problematization of which require a combined approach between philosophy and other discourses, such as ethology, biology, anthropology, history and literature. The first step consists of an exploration of the animal's place in the polis taking as a starting point a confrontation between classic and contemporary ideas regarding politics; following that, an analysis of the zoo viewed as a model of human politics, to which are offered, as alternatives, possible features of an animal politics taking as a starting point the several meanings of the concept of play; the third section examines multispecies experiments in the realm of the arts, especially literature, and in the realm of scientific practices, noting different modes of worlding respective to each; lastly, we proceed to the elaboration of a notion of extinction, not so much as a fact but as a event in the face of which the imaginative cultivation of grief narratives and experiences of continuity is necessary. So reasoning, we conclude that, although accosted on all sides, otherthan-human animals live and offer cosmopolitical possibilities in the face of which humanity, understood as ontological exception, proves itself to be an apolitical power.