Creatural Life and the Community of Nothing

Politics of Indistinctness between Human and Animal in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.

Authors

  • Paula Fleisner

Keywords:

animality, living, non-distinction

Abstract

This paper analyzes some of Giorgio Agamben’s ideas that go beyond his well-known negative diagnosis on the operation of power in the West that produced the separation and consequent hierarchy of man and animal, and allow us to measure the scope of that enigmatic sentence with which he closed the conference "La potenza del pensiero" (1987): "It is all the understanding of the living that must be called into question if it is true that life should be thought of as a power that constantly exceeds its forms and its achievements" (2005, 286). Certainly, that conference shows an interest in the "living" which does not end in the analysis of the production of "bare life", and enables us to think of animality in a new way. Thus, life would be seen as a power which does not end in the passage to act of one of the forms it takes: continuous movement of figures that are always-new, always-revocable, always diffusely outlined one over/with the other. Based on this assumption, we track in some marginal texts the proposal of a policy of non-distinction between men and animals.

Author Biography

  • Paula Fleisner

    Docente de Estética en el Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Investigadora Adjunta del CONICET (Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas)

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Published

2014-10-01

Issue

Section

COMUNIDAD DE VIVIENTES

How to Cite

Creatural Life and the Community of Nothing: Politics of Indistinctness between Human and Animal in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. (2014). Revista Latinoamericana De Estudios Críticos Animales, 1(2). https://revistaleca.org/index.php/leca/article/view/14