Anthropo-eccentrism

“Can one, even in the name of fiction, think of a world without animals … ? Does animality participate in every concept of the world, even of the human world? … The horizon of the ends of the animal is not only a fiction … . It is, if you’ll permit me to say it, the horizon of a real hypothesis … . [which] can develop only as the symptom of a desire or phantasm: the tableau of a world after animality, after a sort of holocaust, a would from which animality, at first present to man, would have one day disappeared: destroyed or annihilated by man, either purely and simply—something that seems almost impossible if one feels we are heading down the path toward such a world without animals—or by means of a devitalizing or disanimalizing treatment, what others would call the denaturing of animality, the production of figures of animality that are so new that they appear monstrous enough to call for a change of name. This science fiction is more and more credible, having begun with taming and domestication, dressage, neutering, and acculturation, and is being pursued with medico-industrial exploitation, overwhelming interventions upon animal milieus and reproduction, genetic transplants, cloning, etc.”

“What would the world be without them?  The sky without birds, the oceans and rivers without fish, the earth without tigers or wolves, ice floes melted with humans below and nothing but humans fighting over water sources.  Is it even possible to want that?

In relation to this tendency, which seems ineluctable, every animal is a beginning, an engagement, a point of animation and intensity, a resistance.

Any politics that takes no account of this (which is to virtually all politics) is a criminal politics.”