Desarticulación de la máquina antropológica en “Axolotl” de Julio Cortázar.

RESUMEN: La literatura de Julio Cortázar ha expresado en diversos momentos la cuestión animal, dando constancia de su habilidad para exponer la percepción del tiempo animal, su espacio, su campo visual, su umwelt, el medio del animal (vox Uexküll). En este artículo se analiza la obra “Axolotl” (1956), como pieza crucial de las preocupaciones de Cortázar en su búsqueda por confrontar la máquina antropológica, vista como la forma de negación de la animalidad humana y la subordinación de lo animal, según Giorgio Agamben. De ahí que la hipótesis de este artículo sostiene que “Axolotl”, más que expresar una confrontación humano-animal, incide en el devenir-animal (Deleuze y Guattari) como vía de acceso a una posibilidad ontológica. Con ello, el devenir animal conforma un dispositivo de oposición y desarticulación de la máquina antropológica, a través de líneas de fuga y desterritorializaciones; además, en el plano discursivo, esta ficción plantea la posibilidad para una zoo-autobiografía, una capacidad compartida para producir un discurso del yo, animal y humano, ambos como animales autobiográficos (Derrida). ABSTRACT: Julio Cortázar's literature has expressed the animal question on many occasions, giving evidence of his ability to expose animals' perception of time, space, and visual field, the umwelt, the medium of the animal (vox Uexküll). This article analyzes the work “Axolotl” (1956), as a crucial piece of Cortázar's concerns in his search to confront the anthropological machine, seen it as the form of denial of human animality and the subordination of what is animal, according to Giorgio Agamben. Consequently, this article's hypothesis maintains that Axolotl, rather than expressing a human-animal confrontation, affects the becoming-animal as a way to access an ontological possibility. Thus, the becoming-animal (Deleuze and Guattari) forms a device of opposition and disarticulation of the anthropological machine through lines of flight and deterritorializations. Furthermore, on the discursive plane, this fiction raises the possibility for a zoo-autobiography, which implies a shared capacity to produce a self, animal and human, discourse, considering both as autobiographical animals (Derrida).

Kantian Ethics and the Animal Turn. On the Contemporary Defence of Kant’s Indirect Duty View

Criticism of Kant’s position on our moral relationship with animals dates back to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Leonard Nelson, but historically Kantian scholars have shown limited interest in the human-animal relationship as such. This situation changed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of several publications arguing for the direct moral considerability of animals within the Kantian ethical framework. Against this, another contemporary Kantian approach has continued to defend Kant’s indirect duty view. In this approach it is argued, first, that it is impossible to establish direct duties to animals, and second, that this is also unnecessary because the Kantian notion that we have indirect duties to animals has far-reaching practical consequences and is to that extent adequate. This paper explores the argument of the far-reaching duties regarding animals in Kant’s ethics and seeks to show that Kantians underestimate essential differences between Kant and his rivals today (i.e., proponents of animal rights and utilitarians) on a practical and fundamental level. It also argues that Kant’s indirect duty view has not been defended convincingly: the defence tends to neglect theory-immanent problems in Kant’s ethics connected with unfounded value assumptions and unconvincing arguments for the denial of animals’ moral status. However, it is suggested that although the human-animal relationship was not a central concern of Kant’s, examination of the animal question within the framework of Kant’s ethics helps us to develop conceptual clarity about his duty concept and the limitations of the reciprocity argument.

Audial and Visual Conversation in Mary Oliver's Dog Songs: Language as a Trans-Species Faculty

The essay investigates Mary Oliver’s reflection upon, and questioning of, language as a marker of human/nonhuman divide as it unfolds in her second, 2013 “species collection” on dogs, Dog Songs (her first one being Owls and Other Fantasies, her 2006 similar collection, portraying her ways of communicating with birds). Through an exploration of both the visual and audial modes of Oliver’s conversations with the dogs she owned in her life, and treated as companions, this study demonstrates that the poet held an attitude toward the nonhuman which in contemporary theoretical terms would be defined as an “indistinction approach” to the animal question (Calarco 2015). In Dog Songs, Oliver portrays a proximity between humans and animals that ultimately preserves an unavoidable distance. Her writing exploits both her intuition of animals’ capacity for agency and creativity—which accompanies the de-emphasizing of human uniqueness—and her consciousness that we need tropes from human experience to convey our perception of nonhuman ways of life. Moreover, through her representation of the animal’s gaze, of a powerfully ironic reversal of the aims (and effects) of the pathetic fallacy, and of narrative empathy, she proves that an imaginative use of language makes poetry a distinct space for our efforts to envisage an ecosystem that animals may inhabit as our equals.

Engaging the “Animal Question” in International Relations

By raising the “animal question” in International Relations (IR), this essay seeks to contribute not only to put animals and human–animal relations on the IR agenda, but also to move the field in a less anthropocentric and non-speciesist direction. More specifically, the essay does three things: First, it makes animals visible within some of the main empirical realms conventionally treated as the subject matter of IR. Second, it reflects on IR's neglect of animals and human–animal relations in relation to both how IR has been constituted as a field and the broader socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. Third, it explores various ways in which IR scholars can start incorporating and take animals and human–animal relations seriously in studies on international relations.

Ethical Humanism and the Animal Question: Vercors’s You Shall Know Them (Les Animaux dénaturés)

Vercors’s You Shall Know Them, published shortly after WWII, grapples with the question of how to define humans and how to differentiate them from animals. This “animal question” is closely linked to the “law of the strongest” and a long history of racism, imperialism, and capitalism, as exposed in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Archeologists, looking for fossils, discover a tribe of intelligent ape-like hominids in New Guinea, and no one can determine if they are human or another species of great apes. A businessman wants to castrate most males, intern them in camps, and use them as cheap labor in his wool mills, an ominous reference to the Nazi concentration camps that had so recently shaken Vercors’s humanist convictions, laying bare the bestiality of humans. After a long trial, it is decided that the hominids should be considered human, because, worshipping fire, they manifest a spirit of religion. Like Camus’s “Human Crisis” lecture of 1946, You Shall Know Them is a call for the restoration of human dignity, annihilated by the savagery of the war.

Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics

Michel Serres and Luc Ferry represent the two opposing views of ecology in contemporary French philosophy. Serres calls for a “natural contract” that would ensure a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Ferry rejects Serres’s ecocentric world view, embracing instead modernist humanism that places humans squarely in the center of the world. Part 1 of Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics presents three contemporary novels that depict the world as both a beautiful and fragile place, in danger of being destroyed—as Serres fears—by human technological progress. Part 2 studies two novels that address the animal question. What is the difference between humans and animals? Are humans animals, or have they been torn away from their animality? Can humans justify their inhumane treatment of animals? Part 3 analyzes two novelists, both avowed humanists who—one through humor and the other through humanitarianism—explore potential undesirable effects of environmentalism. The conclusion states that “environmentalism is a humanism.” Traditional humanism must yield to an ecological humanism that gives dignity and respect to both humans and the earth, acknowledging the unbreakable bond between human and humus.