Animal Metaphors, Biopolitics, and the Animal Question

Abstract

The “animal question” is a broad philosophical debate that erodes the purportedly tidy, sharp division between the human and the nonhuman, calling into question a widely accepted anthropocentrism and mankind’s supposed 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.