This symposium addresses the relationship between the human and the non-human across different aesthetic-discursive registers such as literature, film, philosophy, and anthropology. It seeks to think through a fundamental problem in the contemporary world related to the critique of speciesism, of anthropocentrism, of environmental devastation, and also of the ways of representing the non-human from a perspective that is not only political but also aesthetic.
In his commentary on Kantian anthropology, Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, in asking about the meaning of following the animal, but also of following anthropocentrism, notes that “[t]he socialization of human culture is bound up with that weakening, that domestication of the trained animal. It is nothing other than the becoming-livestock of the animal. The appropriation, the training, the domestication of trained livestock […] are human socialization” (2008: 117). Based on this observation, it is possible to affirm that anthropocentrism and domestication are related: human socialization would be built upon the subjugation and even the extermination of the animal. Throughout modernity, this logic has also extended to those forms of human life considered “animalized” or “bare,” in Agamben’s biopolitical terms.
At present, neofascist discourses revive those discursive figures of the animalization of the other that Derrida links to that form of violence “predominantly machista, just like the very domination of warlike, strategic, hunting, viriloid predominance” (2008: 125). This problem has become even more urgent in the contemporary world, traversed by continuous outbreaks of zoonotic diseases that reveal the disastrous consequences of the capitalist exploitation of the animal based on speciesism. Faced with all these contexts, new narratives about the relationship between species are emerging, seeking new stories not tied to progress and predation, but multispecies ones. As Anna Tsing notes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, it is a matter of looking and feeling around us to become aware of the possibilities of collaborative survival in a world traversed by precarity.
Should the reclaiming of a new way of thinking about the animal come from the Global South? This conviction, understood in various reflections on the persistence of colonial epistemes, can be confirmed through a growing corpus of Latin American texts on anthrozoology, mid-twentieth-century fictions such as those of José de la Cuadra and Horacio Quiroga, but also contemporary ones such as that of Samanta Schweblin, of artists such as Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Wilfrido Land, and of theoretical essays such as those of Gamaliel Churata, Rodolfo Kusch, Alicia Puleo, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, paving the way for the paradigm shift now taking place in the relationship between diverse living forms and humans.
In this sense, the symposium seeks to address this problem from different disciplines and fields of knowledge, such as history, philosophy, literature, sociology, the arts, and political ecology, which allow us to understand the new narratives about relationships among species.
