Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

POSTHUMAN ANTISPECIESISM

Roberto Marchesini

To cite this article: Roberto Marchesini (2016) POSTHUMAN ANTISPECIESISM, Angelaki, 21:1,
217-233, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2016.1163853

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1163853

Published online: 21 Apr 2016.

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 21 number 1 march 2016

translators foreword
The 2014 book Contro i diritti degli animali?
Proposta per un antispecismo postumanista is
Marchesinis analysis of the concept of specie-
sism from a posthumanist perspective.
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Tracing speciesism from its coining by

Richard Ryder in 1970, he evaluates how it
has gured into conceptual debates and politi-
cal movements. Ryder intended speciesism as a
term that would denote discrimination against
nonhuman animals as racism and sexism
denote discrimination in terms of race and
gender. His idea was part of wider cultural
changes critical of imperialism, colonialism,
and resource exploitation and working
towards new forms of ecological and social
justice. Though Ryder devised the concept, it
was disseminated through the work of Peter
Singer. Both authors saw antispeciesism as
an important part of political organization
that would challenge oppressive treatment of
nonhuman animals. The concept and the think-
ing around it were also expanded in the work of
Tom Regan, who added a deontological
framing for the argument in addition to the
utilitarian one provided by Singer.
Though Marchesini points to the importance
of the groundbreaking early formulations of
antispeciesism, he also holds that, notwith-
standing the strong personal sympathies for
animals on the part of those early thinkers,
the ethical frame in which those arguments
were set remains a humanist one that will con-
tinue to reintroduce the notion of a separation
between human and nonhuman animals. He
argues that both consequentialism and deontol-
ogy are ethical systems that were developed in
the heyday of Western philosophical human-
ism and that as such it is difcult to
roberto marchesini
translated by jeffrey bussolini
POSTHUMAN
ANTISPECIESISM
disentangle them from that lineage. Focusing
on Benthams famous question can they
suffer? in addressing the ethics of animal
treatment, Marchesini argues that the stan-
dard on sentience or suffering places too
much emphasis on pain alone and fails to
take account of a more robust conception of
the well-being and ourishing of animals.
While the deontological approach argues that
animals are the subject-of-a-life that must be
treated as ethical ends in themselves, whether
or not they recognize or claim those rights,
Marchesini believes that this frame again
relies on a conception of the universal that over-
looks the particularities of species-specic
experience and reintroduces forms of
speciesism.

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/16/010217-17 2016 Jeffrey Bussolini

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1163853

217
 posthuman antispeciesism
As a result, Marchesini believes that it is
urgent to develop forms of antispeciesism that
are posthumanist and draw on philosophical
developments of recent decades. While earlier
authors on speciesism and animal rights cer-
tainly demonstrate an interest in animal
experience, he believes that the lack of a sus-
tained ethological engagement has often
served to limit the degree of knowledge and
appreciation about nonhuman animal experi-
ences and frames of reference. Donna Har-
aways and Vinciane Desprets investigations
as well as Marchesinis work in terms of zooan-
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thropology and posthumanism offer approaches
that are more ethologically informed and can
be said to constitute a philosophical ethology.
Gilles Deleuze drew on ethology in a manner
that picked up the vibrancy of the biological
approach and articulated how it was a central
concept of reference in philosophy.
Other forms of posthumanist thought that
dont demonstrate the same degree of engage-
ment with ethology have also contributed
crucial dimensions to a posthumanist antispe-
ciesism. Jacques Derridas critical effort in
deconstructing the humananimal binary has
important and still largely unrecognized impli-
cations for thinking speciesism. Versions of
singularity present in the work of Michel Fou-
cault, Giorgio Agamben, and Deleuze offer
strong tools for thinking about the specicity
of animal experiences; Agambens concept of
the anthropological machine presents another
dimension of the deconstruction of the
humananimal divide.
Building on the more individual-centered
ethical arguments about speciesism and
animal rights, Marchesini also points to a criti-
cal theory tradition that emphasizes social and
institutional structures that oppress and
exploit animals. Part of this tradition also
takes up and extends the Frankfurt School argu-
ment that human domination and domination
of nature are deeply intertwined. While he
nds this critical theory approach to have
added important elements to the understanding
of speciesism, and its social and political side to
be indispensable for contemporary organizing
and engagements in the area, he also nds
that in some formulations it has introduced
too wide an analytical gulf between theory
and practice in focusing primarily on practices
and thus overlooking ideology. He also believes
that the approach has sometimes engaged in
largely fruitless and irresolvable searches for
the decisive origin of speciesism.
Marchesinis posthumanist antispeciesism is
one that seeks to build on the thought about
speciesism and posthumanism to bring those
two approaches into productive diffraction.
He seeks to draw on the most important devel-
opments in ethical, ethological, deconstructive,
and ontological research to update and
strengthen the antispeciesist account by
paying heed to better attention to the experi-
ences of animals and to philosophical advances
that have further challenged humanism. This
posthumanist antispeciesism is an immanent
one that combines scientic and humanistic
knowledge, description and ethics, theory and
politics. Only by encompassing these dimen-
sions can it hope to take account of the multifa-
ceted dimensions of the issue.
I believe that humanism is the most extreme
form of anthropocentrism, setting up the
human as pure and autopoietic entity (that gen-
erates itself in a self-referential manner), as
measure and subsumption of the world, and
likewise tracing for the human being an ontopoi-
esis that is disjunctive from all other animals.
For this reason I speak of the humanistic
roots of speciesism, where it is not possible
to restrain their budding expressions, since
like the Lernaean Hydra they will always be
capable of sprouting new forms of speciesism.
to begin with, a bit of history
First of all we should linger a bit on the term,
coined in 1970 by the British psychologist
Richard Ryder as an analogy to racism and
sexism, designating discrimination, in habitual
practices, towards nonhuman individuals. The
word-concept remarked upon by Ryder follows
or gives explicit meaning to those discussions
that since the middle of the 1960s began to
denounce certain oppressive practices, above
218

all the outcome of techno-scientic development
and industrialization, in the confrontations with
other species. I refer to sources such as Ruth
Harrisons Animal Machine or Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson, which in the 1970s inaugu-
rated the leitmotif of the white paper.1 In retro-
spect, also exemplary would be The Naked
Empress/Slaughter of the Innocent by Hans
Ruesch,2 a veritable manifesto of
antivivisectionism.3
In these years attention was concentrated on
particular practices, such as the use of fur or
vivisection; it was a ght against specic and
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easily identiable activities rather than an
effort to give a coherent organization to the
debate on the use of animals or an ethical dimen-
sion that would reconsider such practices. The
epithet speciesist was not yet used to stigma-
tize abusers and it was not seen as incoherent to
demonstrate against fur and then feast on a
bloody steak. Also unknown to these animal
rights advocates in nuce was Ryder himself,
who would nd wider recognition only when
Peter Singer cited him in his book Animal Lib-
eration.4 But, at least for the Italian frame of
reference, a dozen years had to go by. In the
meantime, those battling against the abuse of
animals were caught between the pietistic love
of zoophilia all love and tears and the aes- ities) or beyond this showing the schizophrenia
thetic of horror.
Only in the next decade would the occasions
to give a fuller sense to the so-called animal
question come about, also through the develop-
ment of that transdisciplinary laboratory inau-
gurated by the bioethics of Van Potter.5 This
was a time of contestation against imperialist
politics, of ecological revolution in the name of
a return to nature and banishing all that
menaces the resources of the planet, of the
development of the thinking of complexity
and the systemic valuation of processes and
equilibria. There was discussion of attention
towards new possible moral patients, such as
future generations or the Earth itself, personi-
ed in Gaia.6 It is in this context that a more
articulated discussion on the rapport between
humans and other species emerges. In short,
moral philosophy is ready to digest the whole
debate and from here forward will confront
219
marchesini
the problem in an analytical mode, hiding
under the table (and almost feeling ashamed
of) both love towards animals and iconography
in the style of Carpenter. Even if obviously
such an iconic approach always remains ready
to be aunted when needed: the origins are
not easy to forget.
In particular it is with Singer that the debate
on speciesism developed in clear arguments
about its prejudicial and tautological character,7
dismantling the three justicatory arguments
usually adopted that see speciesism as:
(a) Normal behavior of nature and of the pro-
cesses of competition and selection among
species.
(b) Attribution of the status of moral patient
only to ratiocinating subjects who are
therefore capable of moral action.
(c) Natural election, accorded by proximity
or sympathy to members of ones own
species.
It was a matter of wholly analyzing these
apparently well-founded assertions to show
their faults through complex dialectic oper-
ations, such as the reference to so-called mar-
ginal cases (like newborns and persons
affected with certain types of mental disabil-
of speaking of the human condition and the
Humean scissors (the is-ought problem) then
seeking a foundation in a generic natural
condition.8
The debate that developed in the 1980s
showed the insufciency of these three justica-
tory arguments, confronted above all in the
context of analytic philosophy. Inevitably they
were limited to the ethical eld, transforming
the problem of speciesism into a reasoning to
be confronted in the terms dictated by a
certain paradigm. Speciesism and anthropo-
centrism thus come to collide from a conceptual
point of view, and both require further consider-
ation as to values and social systems based on
specic practices, transforming these last
factors into consequences of an ideology to be
overcome.
Reading these texts today, even recognizing
their revolutionary nature, one cannot but feel
 posthuman antispeciesism
a sense of anachronism. Why? That is the inves-
tigation that motivates this study, that is to say,
seeking to understand if there is still any sense
in posing the question of speciesism in tra-
ditional terms, or those that characterized the
critique and the proposals at the end of the
last century.
Without wanting to write a history of the
movement,9 it is nonetheless essential to style
a minimal genealogy of the concept. In the last
decade of the twentieth century the animal ques-
tion will come to be known in terms of animal
liberation, while animal rights enters the
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debate as a protagonist, giving support to a
series of leitmotifs centered on some supporting
themes:
(a) The nonhuman animal as moral
patient, hence stabilizing the terms of
its condition, for example the character
of sentience rather than biographical/
existential status.
(b) The interests of nonhumans, in respect
to basic shared predicates, for instance
those specied in the Brambell Report
of 1965, also dened as welfare, or more
incisively in terms of inalienable rights.10
(c) Restrictions or proactive obligations
towards heterospecics and as a conse-
quence individual prescriptions or the
promotion of new norms conforming to
them.
If we consider the approaches followed we
cannot fail to note a certain prevalence of indi-
vidual ethics (the respect of nonhumans as
requirements with which the individual must
conform, in order to perfect its own state of
ethical coherence) and of restrictive morality
(the obligation to abstain from doing certain
activities, up to the extreme conception of liber-
ation of the heterospecic from interaction with
the human being). What considerations are
raised in light of this? First off, a certain ten-
dency to consider the animal question in terms
of ethics or a discussion on speciesist ideology
came to be developed, overshadowing all the
other foci of inquiry and interpretation, for
instance the historical circumstances and the
forms of social organization that have led to
the emergence of practices that are exploitative
of animals. As a second aspect, the very fact of
measuring speciesism in terms of individual
conduct leads to concentrating more on the
private ethics of the person than the general con-
sequences of practices, with the result of high-
lighting a prototype of the animal rights
activist based entirely on coherence, which
facilitates phenomena of neo-Catharism and
sectarianism.
As a third aspect, the idea that the primary
interest would be non-suffering11 leads to
the privileging of abstention (not-doing) rather
than delineating a truly prescriptive canon,
with the risk of confusing well-being with
welfare: a strongly speciesist vision since it is
incapable of considering the dimension of the
other. The idea that the capability for suffer-
ing, or the capacity for sentience, with the prin-
ciple of pain as the fulcrum of debate, must
constitute the cardinal point of the antispecie-
sist discussion, not only fails to take into
account the fact that the state of well-being
follows other coordinates, but in fact conrms
humanist anthropocentrism in its emphasis on
that which joins, or, in privileging shared
characteristics, hypostatizing the idea of the
human being as measure. We do not take
account often in good faith, and it is not
only an ethological question that anthropo-
morphism is a form of anthropocentrism, even
if masked by concessions.
The formulation that came to be delineated
by Tom Regan seems to overcome the conse-
quentialist vision centered on suffering by iden-
tifying an a priori principle, that of subjectivity.
It indicates inalienable predicates and unavoid-
able deontological normativity, advancing a
kind of antispeciesist natural law. The charac-
teristic of subjectivity, which Regan species
in the syntagm being-subject-of-a-life,12
unfolds into a property of existence the life
of an animal belongs to it that is made explicit
in a biographical singularity.
The productivity of the twentieth-century
animal rights discussion is undeniable, and yet
as we will have occasion to see in the pages
that follow, we cannot dene animal rights as a
true and proper critique of speciesism because
220

it is still strongly centered on hidden species-
isms or cryptospeciesisms:13 at rst glance
camouaged in the body-environment of the lib-
erationist objective but, no less important, not
invalidating it in terms of marginalization and
the emptying of meaning.
Both the consequentialist conception, in the
Benthamian they can suffer, and the deonto-
logical conception, where subjectivity trans-
forms existence into an act of possession, that
hinge of reection on animal interests, take
away specicity from speciesism, advancing per-
spectives that deect rather than focus the
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problem. We get the sense that it would be
like taking a snail from its shell and wondering
how it is going to live. Speciesism is rst of all a
not taking account of inherency that which is
proper-to-the-subject on the basis of the
shared, as if this were the key aspect of the inva-
lidation, but this would mean assuming the idea
of a universality of interests, which is precisely a
speciesism.14
All this seems somewhat theoretical but in
fact it is not, as the aberrations of the concepts
of animal welfare from the 1980s concretely
show. But it provides a way of talking about
it. The point is that starting from the interpre-
tive and prescriptive criteria of utilitarianism
(Singer) and natural law (Regan), which charac-
terize the debate from this period on speciesism,
inevitably drags it into the universal. It is not a
matter only of an aberration referable to the
concept of interest, but more generally of the
valuation and acceptance of inherency, or the
denition of an ontological plurality. The dif-
culty of placing the question of inherency at
the center of the discussion is amply discussed
in the succeeding period: in the limitation of
the shared concept of sentience; in the error of
forcing subjectivity and consciousness to
coincide; in the Cartesian risk hidden in a
walled-off vision of the concept of the Umwelt
(world-environment); in the paradox of decon-
structing the concept of species in the name of
a singularity that, in being too centered on indi-
viduality, actually depersonalizes the heterospe-
cic in taking it out of a particular eld of
immersion/expression. As we will see, such
221
marchesini
aporias are in fact implicit in the humanist
paradigm.
With the rst decade of the twenty-rst
century the term speciesism was enriched
with new arguments, going beyond the praxis
denition of Ryder and the moral denitions
of Singer and Regan. Those put forward
include new deconstructions of the character-
istics of species, taking up the considerations
of the later Derrida in LAnimal que donc je
suis or the conceptions of singularity that,
albeit in various ways, are found in Gilles
Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio
Agamben.15
The critique of speciesism thus nds itself
needing to confront, and in some authors
extend, the critique of identity that character-
ized the second half of the twentieth century.
In this way a new analysis of speciesism devel-
ops through a set of criteria somewhat different
from those of the 1980s. This new analysis is
more in line with Continental philosophy and
sees the emergence of a new ontology based pri-
marily on the singular and relational immersion
of the subject rather than on an autarchical and
categorial denition. In the thinking of authors
such as Vinciane Despret, Matthew Calarco,
Donna Haraway, Dario Martinelli, and Ralph
Acampora an approach is dened that notably
moves away from considerations centered on
shared belonging. The concept of symphysis
in Acampora, the interest in the trans-specic
in Martinelli, or the denition of zoography in
Calarco all represent attempts to bring a rela-
tional ontology into the light and thus to
unmask speciesism in its dichotomous, or dis-
junctive/devaluing, character.
We nd ourselves confronted with proposals
that in some sense represent drifts away from
the humanist paradigm and that I would
dene as posthumanist, even if different
authors call it by different terms such as non-
humanism or humanimalism. Putting relation
and transgression at the center, rather than the
rigid connes of the Umwelten, represents an
area of research that I also wanted to emphasize
in two books, Il concetto di soglia [The Concept
of the Threshold] and Post-human.
 posthuman antispeciesism
On the other hand, I hold to be erroneous and
contradictory such proposals as:
(1) Not dening a clear difference between
the zootechnical use of the heterospecic
and the referential function of the zooan-
thropological relation with the
heterospecic.
(2) Pretending to overcome the concept of the
Umwelt by simply negating the inherency
or, to be precise, the proper-of-the-species,
through a deconstruction or negation of
identity in the name of an aspecic and
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indistinct singularity.
(3) Considering the biographical identity and
the here-and-now of the subject in a
generic quodlibet [whatever] or in a preva-
lence of ontogenesis (of the biographical)
over the phylogenetic.
Another perspective which has been devel-
oped in the last decade is the consideration of
speciesism not as the predominance of an ideol-
ogy but as an historical and social structure of
exploitation of other species entailed in post-
Neolithic practices, in particular in the process
of domestication. This debate also presents a
considerable plurality of positions16 even if it
nonetheless seems to be centered on the effec-
tiveness and concreteness of processes of exploi-
tation such as logics of reication and use of the
animal-other sustained by a precise social struc-
ture and consequently having a precise histori-
cal course. These authors make a direct link,
emphasizing the connections between specie-
sism (understood in primis as exploitation of
the heterospecic) and other systems of power
and domination, such as capitalism. We can
take as an example the critical considerations
that Carl Boggs singles out in the traditional
approach to the problem of speciesism:
(1) The fact of isolating the problem of animal
exploitation from other social and ecologi-
cal problems that in fact sustain it.
(2) The linking of the concept of right to
questions of individual choice, making
for an undervaluation of social and
power structures that determine the
exploitation as praxis.
(3) Not being able to produce a political
program capable of envisioning strategic
choices able to impact the problem.
There is a very strong link between the reec-
tions of these authors and the critical theory of
the Frankfurt School, in particular the thought
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,17
and the mode of reading their thought indicated
by Derrida. It concerns a vision that makes a
clean break with the liberal tradition that
still informs the animal rights approaches of
the rst authors in the area in its reading of
speciesism not as mistaken conviction con-
cerning our relations with heterospecics but
as a specic mode of construction: ones own
life, the social organization that it derives
from, and the means of production that
sustain society in its totality.
To my mind there are two themes that
characterize these approaches:
(1) Underlining the strict relation that runs
between animal breeding/raising and the
exploitation of the heterospecic, identify-
ing the process of domestication as the
point of departure of the speciesist act
or, if one wishes, its inception and its
explication.
(2) Connecting speciesism in a strong, in
some cases even inseparable, manner to
other forms of human exploitation, revisit-
ing the Agambenian concept of the anthro-
pological machine18 and linking liberation
of human beings to the liberation of non-
human animals.
Undoubtedly there is a nexus in my view
recursive and not necessarily linear between
the discrimination towards the heterospecic
and that towards the human-other, and likewise
the tie between capitalism and the exploitation
of the heterospecic is recognizable. And yet I
think it is mistaken to consider such a relation
to be explanatory in an exhaustive sense, forget-
ting the nodes that link these philosophies to the
humanistic paradigm and, as we will see, their
reference to a outopia that is the product of
leaning on the stable center of an anthropo-
centric conception of completion.
222

From a totally different perspective, some
authors such as Leonardo Caffo (Il maiale
non fa la rivoluzione) and Melanie Joy under-
line the importance of sticking to the argument
in the strict sense (the question of the liberation
of nonhumans) by pointing out the specic char-
acter of speciesism. Several aspects are notice-
able in this postulate, and not only from a
strategic vantage point as might appear at rst
glance. Certainly, pragmatically or politically
we could say that remaining concentrated on
speciesism as speciesism would mean avoiding
taking it for granted that every form of liber-
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ation acts on the same operators and that they
thus present a uniformity in terms of strategy
and useful actions. This can be synthesized in
two considerations that such authors reject:
(1) That processes of liberation would be
necessarily linked like dominoes, where
the liberation of humans would bring as
a consequence the liberation of animals
or vice versa, since both agents would be
under the same principle of exploitation.
(2) That it would be possible to think of
bringing together activists in either a cen-
trifugal sense (antispeciesists towards
other forms of liberation) or a centripetal
sense (those who ght for human rights
towards the antispeciesist cause) in a sort
of oceanic liberation movement under
the principle of liberate everyone.
This means conceptually and pragmatically
refuting the uniformity of the principle of
exploitation and noting the fact (which is any-
thing but banal and taken for granted) that we
can be confronted with situations where
human interests and nonhuman interests nd
agreement neither in strategic terms nor in pol-
itical agendas.
But the most interesting analysis of this
reection regards, in my view, aspects that are
not properly strategic. Focusing on speciesism,
that is on what is proper to speciesism, means
avoiding making it uniform with other forms
of discrimination, such as sexism and racism
that, while reprehensible and requiring critical
consideration, nonetheless present different
characteristics than speciesism. Only at rst
223
marchesini
glance does weak antispeciesism propose priori-
ties and focus, avoiding dilution of the animal
question in the tangle of problems about dis-
crimination, where actually the concentration
on the nonhuman takes on a connotation of rec-
ognition and operative specicity.
In reality, what is put to the test in this view
is the peculiarity of speciesism, or the non-
coincidence or contiguity of such discrimination
in regard to other forms, as three reasons seem
to indicate:
(1) The non-coincidence/non-juxtaposition of
interests and the impossibility of subsum-
ing them to universal concepts, from
which springs the rebuke of the concept
of Umwelt as a problematic node with
which we must engage with an attitude
of humility.
(2) The incapacity of the heterospecic to lay
claim to its own interests or take an active
part in the emancipatory process, being
unable either to rise up or to present any
grievances (cahiers de doleances).
(3) The properly altruistic signication of
those who ght to overcome every form
of speciesist discrimination and to give
to animals that which is proper to them,
and thus the prevalence of the gift-offering
model over the protest-claiming one that,
by contrast, characterizes other liberation
movements.
the critique of speciesism as
caesura
If it is true that we must not fail to appreciate
the numerous critiques of anthropocentrism
found in earlier authors, such as the explications
of the 1970s and the philosophical currents that
have confronted one another in the last two cen-
turies with the twilight of humanism, we should
not forget their indissoluble tie to this paradigm
that inevitably creates problems of internal
coherence for the critique of speciesism. The
search for antecedents to a critique of human
domination of other animals is clear in the
unearthing of faint pronouncements from the
history of philosophical thought, most often in
 posthuman antispeciesism
the form of reverie [dream], of auguries, or of
simple aphorisms, but they never enter into
the deeper theoretical texture of the philoso-
phers in question.19 Compassion towards
animals recalls a type of capitatio benevolentiae
more than constituting a strong critique of
anthropocentrism. This is also the case since
humanism was always a convenient cover to
give free expression to post-Platonic solipsism:
distancing oneself from the shadow-world to
close oneself up in proper reasoning. Humanism
is the negation of animality: in the human being
conning animality to mere corporeity, in the
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nonhuman characterizing it in mechanomorphic
terms.
The humanist, even if proclaiming himself to
be in favor of nonhuman animals, always mani-
fests a sense of elevated superiority, of con-
sidered detachment, and therefore of non-
involvement with animality. Closed within the
echo chamber of the Cartesian cogito, she pre-
tends to speak of animals without knowing
animals, considering them an inconvenient pres-
ence in her thought, a sort of contamination that
mars crystalline cogitations with organic
material. For the humanist the animal is in the
text, it does not exist outside of the text, in a
game of mirrors where one can deduce the pre-
dicates of the nonhuman simply through the
eminent use of comparison. What is easy to
discern in these pages is the continuation of a
discourse between the select few that shies
away from the opacity of the world.
The animal that the humanist encounters is
herself: improper as animal, vulnerable
because it echoes the memento mori, at a dis-
tance like the crowd that watches the tightrope
walker in his vicissitudes on the rope.
The possible critique that is derived is tired,
dystonic, incoherent, and incapable of getting at
the heart of the problem because this would
mean calling into question the whole edice
that the philosopher has constructed around
herself, along the paths of essentialism, logo-
centrism, the scala naturae, free will, dichoto-
mous operations, rationalism, elevation, and
the innite rites of purication.
The critique of speciesism is therefore a
caesura, a fracture in the fault line of Western
thought, a domino whose tiles have been labor-
iously set up by humanism and which will be
knocked down. If we take into consideration
the cardinal points of humanist thought we
cannot help but recognize a foundational anthro-
pocentrism that transforms surrounding reality,
that is to say all that which does not fall within
the boundaries of the human that stage
restricted to the requirements of the single
actor: the one who has autopoietic destinies in
his hands, the only one capable of rendering
the theatre a place of meaning, of creating poss-
ible worlds.
If we stay within the humanistic paradigm we
nd ourselves forced either to annihilate other-
ness (hence anthropomorphization) or to decon-
struct identity (hence the indistinct
singularity)20 or otherwise to reject all that
which is not human in the res extensa. Human-
ism admits one sole type of subjectivity, that of
the human, and therefore the heterospecic is
forced to pass through the Caudine Forks of
such predicates of subjectivity which
amounts to a trial already lost from the start,
inasmuch as by denition animal alterity is
alterity tout court if it wishes to claim any
ontological title.
Examples of this tendency are not lacking.
The need to recognize the subjectivity of con-
sciousness or an explanatory type is a clear
example of such an aberration that claims:
(1) That consciousness indicates the level of
subjectivity, when we know well that,
even in the human being, that which is a
subject (in the proper sense of the term),
as implicating a singular positioning of
the entity in the here-and-now, does not
coincide with that which is conscious.
(2) That the proof and the parameters of con-
sciousness must be those valid for the
human being and validated by the
human being. As we see, the conception
of subjectivity is the outcome of two
very precise humanistic determinations
that we could attribute to the autopoietic
character that we link to the concept of
subjectivity and the anthropometric trans-
formation proper to the Vitruvian reading
224

of the human being. If we remain within
this conception of subjectivity, we will
inevitably assign a lack of subjectivity or
a state of lesser subjectivity to the
nonhuman.
We encounter the same difculty if we try to
dene the characteristics of alterity remaining
within the emancipatory conception such as is
presented by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in
his De hominis dignitate: in this case either
we close the heterospecic in the interior of an
inviolable Umwelt (declaring it to be res
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extensa de facto) which necessarily renders it
poor in world, as Martin Heidegger (Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Metaphysics) already well
understood, or we deconstruct it, like the huma-
nistic angel, eradicating any inherency from it
and in this way de facto negating any even
minimal title to its own being.
In reading these lines of reasoning we could
come to invert the Derridean postulate into an
everything is outside of the text, but
obviously this would be an exaggeration. And
Jean Piaget and Gaston Bachelard may have
been on to something in considering the experi-
ential decit and the prevalence of the projective
as major epistemological obstacles. We can
return to Bachelards (51) own words: I
believe that we can learn against something,
maybe even against someone, and certainly
against oneself.
Anthropocentrism is the rst obstacle in the
interpretation of the nonhuman, a reading that
is speciesism a priori because it is built on the
dichotomy, propaedeutic to a separation that
permits only the free ow of projections.
Indeed, in what other way can we understand
the categorization of animality or the transform-
ation of the nonhuman into automaton or,
further, the collision between animality and
the ancestral? This concerns a projection that
refuses to enter into direct contact with the
resistance of the real.
Experiencing means encountering in order to
put ones hypotheses to the test and to dialogue
with the other, avoiding shutting oneself up
inside of a monologue or a concert of monologic
creatures, even given the paradox that this
225
marchesini
image can express. But humanism built its
own barriers to keep out the nonhuman,
placing facts in a non-osmotic container with
respect to values, menacing experience with
the accusation of the naturalistic fallacy, build-
ing for itself its own ecosystem in which differ-
ent rules of tness reign, where it is no longer
truth that constitutes a selective hammer but
theoretical productivity, the capacity to distance
the tightrope walker even further from the
crowd. The humanistic human clambers about
with difculty in the smoke of his own words,
fractal structures of signication to declare
that he is not an animal, that animals have
nothing to do with him, that the difference
between the human and the nonhuman does
not rest on a predicate but on a complex con-
dition. If we are not ready to unmask this
project, rejecting this thinking at its base, we
will only be able to accomplish a cosmetic oper-
ation of maquillage, leaving strong speciesism
to grow untouched that which corrupts the
depths of our reasoning: the humanistic aspira-
tion not to be animal, the utopian desire for
another reality, the concrete fear of encounter-
ing ourselves in the eyes of the nonhuman,
and the knowledge of the void that lls up our
words.
humanistic principles and
speciesism
If we wish to overcome the humanistic aporias
that transform antispeciesism into a tautology
or discourse vitiated by internal contradictions,
it is indispensable to controvert the basic prin-
ciples of humanism, namely:
(1) The paradigm of human incompleteness,
or the idea of a lack capable of making a
being totally free and emancipated from
nature, demiurge of its own destiny.
(2) The concept of culture as autopoietic,
autarchic, disjunctive, and elevative that
transforms the human into a tightrope
walker that must respond only to herself.
(3) The ergonomic vision of techne, conceived
as the arts of constructing instruments
that, in an ancillary mode, enhance
 posthuman antispeciesism

inherent predicates but do not impact the
purity of the human.
(4) The concept of episteme as measure and
subsumption of the world, transformed
into an object to dominate, where no dialo-
gical relation with the nonhuman is
admitted, since the res extensa is dead
de facto and therefore in its confrontations
it can act only in an inductive or deductive
way.
(5) The idea of the human as end and as
meaning, with the emptying out of all
other entities, that even if they persist do
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completeness into a product to avail them-
selves of or into an instrument to use as
potential for their own predicates, trans-
forming all nonhuman reality into object,
thus carrying out a complete reication
of the nonhuman, which is to say that
the nonhuman must be given over ergono-
mically to the ends of the human.
(4) Through the metric-subsumptive vision,
explicit in Vitruvian anthropometry, the
human being absorbed the nonhuman,
declaring itself the measure of the world
(not in a sophistic sense but a categorial

not exist and that therefore could at any
moment be transformed into a variable,
rst step towards annihilation.
These basic principles are, each in their own
way, obstacles to any critical argument on spe-
ciesism, even if apparently it is only the fth
point that explicitly constitutes
discrimination.
From my point of view, however, speciesism
is more of a technique through which the human
denes itself than a system of discrimination
against the nonhuman:
(1) Through incompleteness we declare our
liberty from any determination by the
natura naturans, projecting our rank
into another dimension and setting
human will as the principle of subjectivity,
unlike nonhumans whose complete or
rooted being excludes them from any
form of self-determination or presence in
the here-and-now.
(2) Through the reading of culture as our
thing [cosa nostra], or as emanative
entity (reproductive or exonerative) and
as pure expression of the human being,
and as disjunctive and elevative process
in regards to the nonhuman, we declare
that the proper of the human being
relates to the human in autonomy, empty-
ing the nonhuman of any dialogical value,
and equally that the proper of the human
being is opposed to the condition of the
nonhuman.
(3) Through the ergonomic vision of techne
human beings transform the world in its
sense) and thus model or, better,
Caudine Fork that inevitably transforms
the nonhuman into an approximation
and container of the world, rendering the
nonhuman bereft of any additive
meaning in regards to the human.
(5) Through anthropocentric teleology all of
a
reality is bent to human ends and the
meanings human beings attribute to
them; in this way the nonhuman is annihi-
lated, becoming a presenceabsence, and
in this sense lacking its own value, from
which springs the prevalence of so-called
indirect arguments in the lions share of
animal rights discussions, indicative of
the difculty of calling into question not
only the preeminence of human telos but
beyond this the prejudice of the ground-
lessness of nonhuman existence.
In the face of these considerations, it appears
evident that there can also be speciesists in phi-
losophical positions and actions that are not
necessarily oppressive, that are not directly dis-
criminative or else not traceable to a direct refer-
ence to nonhuman animals. The problem of the
humanistic paradigm lies in the anthropocentric
project that characterizes it, based on the exalta-
tion of the human as sole protagonist endowed
with existential title in contradiction to the
inertia and passivity of the nonhuman. The
humanistic paradigm is based on an act of sub-
stitution that, following the medieval theo-
centric canon, simply places the human being
in the place of god. In this perspective the de-
nition of outopia stands out for the human

226

being, that is an ontopoietic goal located in a
beyond that inevitably devalues nature (which
is considered dystopic with regards to human
predicates).
Thomas Moores Utopia a point of conver-
gence between the prexes eu and ou and
therefore not necessarily positioned in a beyond
loses the prex eu in being assimilated into
humanistic thought and becomes synonymous
with the island-which-is-nowhere that demands
an inevitably anthropocentric formalization
from humans. The outopia (from here on
utopia) becomes a negation of nature in this
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way such that every theory of completion con-
tinues to assume an anthropocentric perspective
(constructed on anthroporeferential coordinates)
with implicit speciesist consequences.
Humanism is founded on the type of subjec-
tivity that attributes to the human being the
status of demiurge of its own destiny.
As we have seen, the liberty of the human
being as decisional arbiter and in terms of
ontological self-determination is derived only
from the action of severing Epimethean con-
tents, that is to say in considering the human
being free from determinations of rank and
therefore exonerated from having to respond
(if not in the somatic components) to the
demands of the natura naturans, which is con-
versely the condition of the nonhuman animals
(for humanism, simply animals). Humanism
and Prometheanism are in effect onomasiologi-
cal. In this sense, as we see on the other hand
in the contemporary debate on speciesism,
either we respect species-specic diversity,
thus transforming it into an iron determination
(Umwelt) that excludes any form of liberty to
the nonhuman, or we are forced to deconstruct
species-specic identity, but, in doing so, we
come to lose the inherent centrality of the non-
human in the denition of its own interests.
In other words, to the antispeciesism that
does not challenge humanism few possibilities
remain, all of them strongly incoherent and con-
tradictory (which is to say implicitly speciesist):
(1) Retaining the species-specicity of the
nonhuman but losing the principle of
subjectivity.
227
marchesini
(2) Focusing on the character of subjectivity
but annihilating any predicate of
inherency.
A word of caution is in order: both of these
solutions are intrinsically speciesist. Starting
from the second option, there is no doubt that
the anthropomorphic assimilation or the decon-
struction of identity would be speciesist acts:
speciesism is rst of all the negation of the char-
acter of alterity, the severing of every inherency.
What worse act of speciesism could there be
than to negate a specicity to the nonhuman,
that is to say its own dimension made explicit
in the orientations, expectations, needs, and
interests that characterize it, as an integral
part of its ontic properties? Can we truly think
of respecting a dog X, ignoring the fact that
even before being an individual X he is a dog,
that is a subject that interprets his own presence
in the here-and-now according to coordinates
that are different from those of the human? If
anthropomorphization is excessively anthropo-
centric, even more so is the deconstruction of
identity of the species in the name of a nomina-
listic singularity that, in its ontological horizon-
tality, inevitably commits the sin of the
anthropomorphization of identity.
The same thing could be said of the rst
option. There seems little doubt that the follow-
ing are signicant indicators of speciesism:
(a) The deterministic conception of being-in-
the-world, or the attribution of a juxtapo-
sition of species and individual, that
inviolable Umwelt without marginality
that closes off any possible encounter.
(b) The exclusively perceptual reading of
immersion, which does not take into
account the fact that the interface has a
primarily cognitive character.
(c) The heavily categorial vision of animality,
which precludes any emotional or motiva-
tional positionality in the here-and-now to
nonhuman subjects.
If we accept this, either we return to the limit-
ing interpretation of the animal as a dead thing,
which is evoked in the Cartesian principle, or we
fall into the grasp of Nagels rhetorical question.
 posthuman antispeciesism
The interpretation of the character of subjectiv-
ity, dichotomized between the telluric condition
of the beast and the evanescent status of the
angel, is the fruit of that ontological demon-
stration carried out in De hominis dignitate of
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As long as we
continue to consider human ontology in terms
of purity and self-determination, transforming
the world into an ergonomic entity, we will
inevitably be mired in speciesism. And we
would remain so, even if we reset any interaction
with the nonhuman.
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speciesism as negation of the
character of alterity
By speciesism I mean, therefore, all the forms of
devaluation of the nonhuman, in ontological and
epistemological terms, or the negation of the
character of alterity of the heterospecic (there-
fore not limited only to the ways of treating
other animals), in practices and in moral con-
siderations that result from how human beings
dene their own ontology. Speciesism will there-
fore not be overwhelmed or contested while
remaining within the hymn exalting the
human being. To have a coherent discourse on
speciesism it is therefore indispensable to go
to its roots, which in Western thought lead prin-
cipally to the humanistic paradigm.
It is necessary to start from the character of
alterity, the true conceptual nucleus of specie-
sism, taking full account of the fact that the
humanistic project built its ideological anthro-
pocentrism through transforming the nonhu-
man into a stage/background, namely through
pulling the character of alterity from heterospe-
cics themselves.
When is the character of alterity negated?
There are different ways to realize such a nega-
tion and all of them follow from the ve
points enumerated above relative to speciesism:
(1) Refuting the existence of an alterity, that
is of any proper to the nonhuman, in the
idea of human as subsumption.
(2) Considering the human as the unit of
measure of alterity, transforming it from
being-other into being-less.
(3) Stigmatizing alterity as other-than-self or
totally unrelated and not as other-with-
self, that is capable of dialogue and
moments of encounter/juxtaposition.
(4) Treating diversity as unimportant or as not
bearing its own inherency, justifying the
negligence or the deconstruction of identity.
If we subject these four points regarding the
negation of alterity to close examination, we
notice that the discriminative principles are
implicated in the way in which humans auto-
dene themselves, posing the animal other as a
counter-term that is denigrated and emptied of
ontological content. The negation of alterity
regards not only the evacuation of the contents
of alterity but beyond this of the relational sig-
nicance of alterity. Therefore, the idea that
the human being would be self-sufcient from
an ontological point of view is speciesist, just
as is the afrmation that with nonhumans
there could only be a relation of use and that
there would not be referential processes as
with inter-human relations.
My suggested denition of speciesism is in
this sense much broader: speciesism is the nega-
tion of the character of alterity to heterospeci-
cs, where by alterity I mean the acceptance:
(1) Of three ontological predicates of the non-
human that can be summed up in terms
of:
(a) Subjectivity (being the constructor of
ones own being-there).
(b) Diversity (being characterized by
inherency).
(c) Singularity (being positioned in a
here-and-now).
(2) Of two dialogical predicates of the nonhu-
man that can be summed up in terms of:
(a) Other-with-self (alterity as possibility
of encounter).
(b) Referentiality (alterity as ontopoietic
promoter).
We will have opportunity to further develop
this argument later, but for now it is important
to underline that speciesism is in primis the
negation of a nonhuman alterity, inasmuch as
228

it maintains that only humans would be in pos-
session of these predicates, or rather that the
human being realizes its own humanity, as dis-
tinction, precisely in these predicates. For
humanism the human being is what the hetero-
specic is not.
It is necessary, however, to re-read the predi-
cates (a), (b), (c), (d ), and (e) and to understand
how the negation of alterity proper to humanism
has given rise to a strongly resilient structure
that deects every approach that attempts to
place speciesism under critical scrutiny.
For humanism, only the human being:
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(a) Is a subject, free in the decisions it takes,
and therefore characterized by a self-
determination; everything else is sub-
jected to the laws of nature.
(b) Has an inherency, that is a proper that
allows it to build worlds; other animals
are closed in their Umwelt.
(c) Lives in a present, has a here-and-now,
since its own existence is claried in the
knowledge of death.
(d) Can nd a neighbor in the human other,
someone to encounter and someone with
whom to dialogue; animals are unfathom-
able entities and if they were in communi-
cation with the human they would have
nothing to say.
(e) Can learn something from another human
being, who therefore has a referential
action; the nonhuman can only be an
object of study.
For these reasons I maintain that speciesism
comes to be congured more in the ways that
humans interpret themselves rather than in
terms of how they treat nonhuman animals.
We fall into a speciesist fractal each time we
assume an essentialist conception of ontology
because in essentialism the dialogical predicates
of alterity are negated. Moreover, we condemn
ourselves to being speciesists if we do not call
into question the innite ways in which the Car-
tesian dichotomy arises again.
Scrutinizing the humanistic roots of specie-
sism does not, however, mean attributing to
humanism all the anthropocentric and speciesist
implications. On the other hand, asking what
229
marchesini
the origin of speciesism is would be,21 in my
opinion, a useless waste of time, a pointless
and distracting question that is in many ways
itself an expression of speciesism. The contem-
porary debate on antispeciesism concerning
the primacy of practices over ideology springs
from a direct vision of causality that is impli-
cated in anthropocentric epistemology.
However, it concerns a question that goes
beyond the argument in itself in the sense
that it could apply to many other contexts
and that asks us to choose one causal direction
between the two terms of praxis and justi-
cation, or, if you wish, between thought and
action, as if these were two separate things.
Acting is thinking and vice versa, even if
often there is no equivalence between the two
terms, neither with regards to isomorphism
nor the expressive gradient: sometimes
thought is more important than action, other
times it is action that goes beyond. Further-
more, there is a recursiveness between doing
and justifying, but they bear on different con-
tents and semantic levels: the thought that
brings me to do a certain action does not corre-
spond to what I call upon afterwards to justify
the action. For this reason I
maintain that every focus
adopted has its own heuristic
function for understanding the
emergence of thought-actions
characterized by speciesism.
disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
Translated from Roberto Marchesini, Contro i diritti
degli animali? Proposta per un antispecismo postuma-
nista (Casale Monferrato: Sonda, 2014) 1130.
1 A collection of documents aimed at denouncing
difficult social phenomena.
2 The complete text was made available by the
Hans Ruesch Foundation and is available at
 posthuman antispeciesism
<www.hansruesch.net/articoli/Imperatrice%
20Nuda%20(1976).pdf>.
3 The attention towards the horrifying, well rep-
resented in the Italian film Mondo Cane from
1962 based on the script by Paolo Cavara and
Gualterio Jacopetti, also characterizes the commu-
nicative styles of this reality excessive and full of
gore and still confined to the underground with
respect to other themes of the 1968 movements.
4 The book appeared in Italy for the first time in
1987 with the title Liberazione animale by
Edizioni LAV, later to be published by Il Saggiatore
in 1991.
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5 It was Van Rensselaer Potter who in 1971 coined
the neologism bioethics.
6 As it is possible, for instance, to read in Lovelock.
7 Going on to delineate what he intends by the
term speciesism, Singer writes in Animal Liberation
(6) that it is a prejudice or attitude of bias in
favour of the interests of members of ones own
species and against those of members of other
species.
8 From an animal rights point of view conceptua-
lizing facts and values as distinct is a losing prop-
osition and we can take an example of this: if you
hold that nonhuman animals are sentient beings,
you are basing it on scientific research, inasmuch
as you proceed from a consideration of facts and,
consequently, if you separate ethics from facts,
inevitably your reasoning loses its foundation.
The total separation would count only inside of
an anthropocentric paradigm, but if you wish to
twist free from this, the Humean scissors no
longer apply! The antispeciesist discourse con-
stantly appeals to facts for confirmation, and it suf-
fices to think of the discourses on marginal cases,
on sentience, on phylogenetic similarity; therefore,
we must avoid the drift of direct descent as much
as the drift of total separation and we must
assume this vision: scientific research poses pro-
blems to which ethical reflection must give
answers and ethical reflection poses problems to
which scientific research must give responses in a
relation between the parties that must be of a pro-
blematic nature.
9 For anyone interested in following the history of
the animal rights movement, I suggest reading the
excellent book by the anthropologist Sabrina
Tonutti.
10 Drawn up in 1965 by the Farm Animal Welfare
Council (FAWC), the Brambell Report enumerated
the five liberties that would guarantee well-
being to farm animals, namely freedom: (1) from
hunger, from thirst, and from poor nutrition; (2)
to have an adequate physical environment; (3)
from pain and sickness; (4) to manifest the behav-
ioral characteristics proper to their species; (5)
from fear.
11 According to Jeremy Benthams famous asser-
tion: the problem is not can they reason?, nor
can they talk?, but can they suffer? (cited in
Singer 23).
12 Regan writes: individuals are subjects-of-a-
life if they have beliefs and desires; perception,
memory, and a sense of the future, including
their own future; an emotional life together
with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference-
and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate
action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psy-
chophysical identity over time; and an individual
welfare in the sense that their experiential life
fares well or ill for them, logically independently
of their utility for others and logically indepen-
dently of their being the object of anyone elses
interests (243).
13 According to the definition of cryptospeciesism
given by Leonardo Caffo in Il maiale non fa la rivolu-
zione (42).
14 The expression of a universal interest is itself
speciesist as is the concept of pain in Bentham,
that can, according to some perspectives, be con-
sidered as a particular type of universal interest
of the type every species has the interest of not
experiencing suffering inasmuch as it is based
on the idea that a criterion can exist that applies
in an indistinct way if it is applied to all beings.
15 For Giorgio Agamben I am thinking of his use of
the term quodlibet which occurs in the text Means
without Ends.
16 Albeit with some variations of approach and
argument, I refer to authors such as: Ted Benton;
David Nibert, Animal Rights/Human Rights and his
recent Animal Oppression and Human Violence;
Carol Adams; Massimo Filippi, Natura infranta,
and with Filippo Trasatti his recent Crimini in
tempo di pace; John Zerzan; Zipporah Weisberg;
John Sanbonmatsu; Marco Maurizi, Al di l della
natura and Le parole e le cozze.
230

17 We can think here of Max Horkheimers text
Dawn and Decline, in which he described the sky-
scraper of capitalism that rules over the exploita-
tion of animals: A cross section of todays social
structure would have to show the following: At
the top, the feuding tycoons of the various capital-
ist power constellations. Below them, the lesser
magnates, the large landowners and the entire
staff of important co-workers. Below that, and
in various layers, the large numbers of pro-
fessionals, smaller employees, political stooges,
the military and the professors, the engineers
and heads of office down to the typists. And
even further down what is left of the independent,
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small existences, craftsmen, grocers, farmers e
tutti quanti, then the proletarian, from the most
highly paid, skilled workers down to the unskilled
and the permanently unemployed, the poor, the
aged and the sick. It is only below these that we
encounter the actual foundation of misery on
which this structure rises, for up to now we
have been talking only of the highly developed
capitalist countries whose entire existence is
based on the horrible exploitation apparatus at
work in the partly or wholly colonial territories,
i.e., in the far larger part of the world. Extended
regions in the Balkans are torture chambers, the
mass misery in India, China, Africa boggles the
mind. Below the spaces where the coolies of the
earth perish by the millions, the indescribable,
unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal
hell in human society, would have to be depicted,
the sweat, blood, despair of the animals. We hear
a great deal these days about the intuition of
essence. Anyone who once intuited the
essence of the skyscraper on whose highest
floor our philosophers are allowed to pursue
their discussion will no longer be surprised that
they know so little about the real height at
which they find themselves, and that they always
talk only about an imaginary one. Such a person
knows, and they may suspect, that otherwise
they might become dizzy. He is no longer sur-
prised that they would rather set up a system of
values than one of disvalues, that they rather
talk about man in general than about the con-
crete individual, about being generally rather
than their own. For if they did, they might be pun-
ished by being sent to a lower floor. The observer
will no longer be surprised that they prattle about
the eternal for as does the mortar, that prattle
holds together this house of present-day
mankind. The basement of that house is a
231
marchesini
slaughterhouse, its roof a cathedral, but from
the windows of the upper floors, it affords a
really beautiful view of the starry heavens (66).
18 Present in the text The Open. Agamben writes
that Homo sapiens is neither a clearly defined
species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine
or device for producing the recognition of the
human (26). The anthropological machine is thus
an anthropogenic artifice that produces the
human through the double process of inclusion/
exclusion and continues: Both machines are able
to function only by establishing a zone of indiffer-
ence at their centers, within which the articula-
tion between human and animal must take
place (3738).
19 Worthy of mention in this sense are the
research and the papers that have been produced
in Italy by scholars such as Luisella Battaglia,
Silvana Castignone (I diritti degli animali and Povere
bestie), Vilma Baricalla, and Gino Ditadi.
20 In the operation that Calarco carries out, for
instance, in Zoographies. He defines his concept of
indistinction, in an interview conducted with
Leonardo Caffo (Indistinti nella carne che
dunque siamo), as not intending, superficially,
to stabilize an identity, or, not meaning that they
(the animals) are now seen like us (human
beings), and vice versa; it means that what we call
human, and what we call animal, are now entering
a completely different zone of profound indistinc-
tion that requires us to use non-conventional lin-
guistic alternatives, different ideas and concepts, if
we want to speak about them. In other words,
indistinction means that we have ethical and onto-
logical work to do. An inexorable question reveals
itself: how could that which human beings and
animals refer to be thought differently from an
ethical and ontological point of view? We know
the old approaches of human/animal demarcation
(ontologically, human beings are separated from
animals by an abyss, and ethically, human beings
have more intrinsic value than animals). But if the
concept of human disappears, and with it that of
animal, then we will no longer know who we
are and what we could become, what type of
affects and relations we could have, what type of
world we would be able to build or inhabit. In
other words, the vision of the human and the
animals as indistinct requires thinking all of us in a
shared space of ontological and ethical
experimentation.
 posthuman antispeciesism
21 As, for instance, those who seek to identify it in
the process of domestication.
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Jeffrey Bussolini
Sociology Anthropology Department
City University of New York
2800 Victory Boulevard
Staten Island, NY 10314
USA
E-mail: jbussolini@mac.com