Sacrifice and community
The animal as parergon
Keywords:
biopolitics, sustainability, speciesism, parergonAbstract
The main objective of this work is to show the exclusion-inclusion relation that western culture maintains with regard to nonhuman animals. As evidence of the exclusion, in the first part it will be mentioned the properties postulated by the traditional philosophical systems as exclusively humane, and it will be presented some ethological studies that demonstrate the arbitrariness of such pretension. In the second part, it will be explained the violent and surreptitious inclusion of animals in the human community in practices such as biomedical research or the cattle industry, among others, and it will be questioned its alleged naturalness, sustainability and necessity. It will also be outlined that animal testing must be considered within the scope of biopolitics as a way of producing, administering and taking lives, based on an anthropocentric conception which considers animals (and nature in general) as available products which can be used to satisfy alleged human needs. Finally, it is stated that the concept of parergon, as developed by Jacques Derrida in his essay The truth in painting (1978), allows to express the exclusion-inclusion relation of the animality that guides this article, and to reflect on the aporias that implies thinking about an unconditional hospitality with respect to the living in general.
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