Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

AàC | Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic | Destroços – Revista de Pensamento Radical | date limite des propositions 30 juin

 

Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic | Destroços – Revista de Pensamento Radical | Dossier édité par Carlo Salzani | date limite des propositions 30 juin.

Submissions will be accepted in the form of scientific articles, essays, reviews, interviews, literary texts, images or other formats that reflect on the theme, with a deadline of June 30, 2025.


Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle provided Western political philosophy with a model that would establish the coordinates that define and organize Western politics and subjectivity: in Book I of his Politics, he defined “man” (the masculine in the English translation, absent in the Greek anthropos,underlines the exclusionary logic of this tradition) as a politikon zōon, a “political animal,” emphasizing that the human polis is a natural form of community. “Man” is the animal that lives in the polis. In the History of Animals, however,

Aristotle had defined political “man” as a subset of other political animals, including “man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane” (I.1, 488a, 8-13). What distinguishes “man” from the other political animals, however, is that he is so “to a higher degree than bees or other gregarious animals” (Politics I.2, 1253a, 7), and this is because “man alone of the animals is endowed with the faculty of logos.” If all animals are endowed with the “making of sounds” (phōnē), which “serves to indicate pleasure and pain,” man’s peculiarity is language (logos), which “serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse,” thereby providing “the perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust” (I.2, 1253a, 10-18).

If politics and biology are already intertwined in this definition, the possession of logos nevertheless functions as an exclusionary apparatus that excludes phōnē, that is, animality (including human animality), from the human community and the body politic. And this is the founding act of the human polis that will characterize Western political philosophy until the late twentieth century. According to biopolitical theories, this structure – with the separation of animality and political community – collapses when, in late modernity, biological life begins to be included as the main focus of political strategies, and the “body politic” ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a literal description. Life and the body are now at the center of politics. Today’s definition of the “political animal” not only emphasizes therefore the “animality” of the political, but also opens up the “political” to other, nonhuman forms of embodiment. Progressive intersections between ethology, the life sciences, philosophy, and politics led to the adoption of the label “political” for more and more nonhuman communities, beginning with Frans de Waal’s seminal Chimpanzee Politics (1982). Human politics, it is now widely accepted, is but one of many speciesspecific forms of articulating the communal nature of social animals.

If these epochal transformations have had a strong impact on political philosophy, giving it a kind of “animal (or biopolitical) turn,” they have also had an important impact on those philosophical projects that seek to extend to nonhuman animals the considerations and protections previously reserved for humans, giving animal ethics and animal studies a“political turn.” If until the early 2010s the focus of these projects was almost exclusively on ethics and the moral status of nonhuman animals, political questions now come to the fore, questioning the place and role not only of (human) animality, but also of nonhuman animals in the theory and practice of extended communities and in a multispecies body politic. “Political animals” is now a label that calls for the radical reinvention of the very the ideas of community and politics that we have inherited from the Western tradition.

This volume of (Des)troços invites contributions that address one or more of these intertwined threads, from the place of animals and animality in traditional political philosophy, to the transformations of their roles operated by biopolitical theories, to the “political turn” currently occurring in animal ethics.

Additionally, beyond this thematic issue, the journal (Des)troços accepts ongoing general submissions related to radical thought and the journal’s editorial line, as described at: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/about. Contributions should be submitted via the OJS system, following the submission rules for texts (https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/about/submissions) by June 30, 2025. The degree requirements do not apply to authors of artistic productions, whose contributions will be evaluated solely by the editorial committee. Texts will be reviewed by the editorial committee and through a double-blind review process. Once approved, texts and images will be published in the journal’s eleventh issue, scheduled for release in the second half of 2025.

Finally, as part of our internationalization policies aimed at maximizing the circulation of texts published in (Des)troços, the best articles submitted in foreign languages will be translated into Portuguese, while the best articles submitted in Portuguese will be translated into English. These translations are made possible thanks to funding from FAPEMIG (Minas Gerais State Agency for Research and Development) , to whom we extend our gratitude.

Dossier edited by Carlo Salzani

 

 


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
cristinalvares (1 février 2025). AàC | Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic | Destroços – Revista de Pensamento Radical | date limite des propositions 30 juin. Animots. Consulté le 21 mars 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/1380f


Vous aimerez aussi...