WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #4-25: Deconstructing the species: Debate on the need for an intersection of struggles: second contribution - second and final part (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 To complete the description of speciesism, we must examine what we have

called the devices for the dismemberment of animal bodies (human and
otherwise). These devices are both material and performative. Material
devices are the farm, the slaughterhouse, the laboratory and all the
other non-places of confinement and reification with their structures
designed down to the smallest details and which leave nothing to chance:
from the choice of the place where to build them (generally far from
inhabited centers so as to hide them from view and not cause health and
hygiene problems) to the architecture, as functional as possible to the
purposes of the specific sector of exploitation; from the "optimization"
of spaces (arrangement of offices, cages, operating tables and
disassembly lines) to the maniacal, bureaucratic and certified precision
with which every aspect of industrial activity is standardized; from
working hours to the tasks of workers or technicians; from tiles to
facilitate cleaning operations to systems for the disposal of
non-marketable waste, etc.

Performative devices are also multiple and include a series of words
that kill, of which it is possible to give only an incomplete list here:
1) national and supranational laws that regulate both dismemberment
practices - "humane slaughter", "good experimentation" and "animal
welfare" - and public subsidies to support them; 2) resolutions by
industry associations or trade unions; 3) regulatory provisions on how
and where to hunt, how and where to set up circuses, how to provide
catering, how to manage kennels, etc.; 4) administrative measures aimed,
for example, at defining the spaces in which "companion" animals can
enter or from which they are strictly banned, or the conditions that
entail the "suppression" of biting dogs.

For further clarity, it is worth emphasizing that what is being argued
is not the inexistence of biological traits that are more or more
frequently present in this or that "species" or, in other words, that
there are no differences between humans, dogs, gazelles and beetles.
What is being argued is that the operation of identifying the
characteristics that allow us to draw the boundary line between Man and
Animal - the species line that is more mobile than ever in its presumed
immobility - is not a neutral and natural operation, but a normative and
normalizing decision. Put more simply: what allows us to distinguish
Homo sapiens is not so much the simple observation of a "mute" series of
more or less exclusive characteristics, but rather that these are made
to speak by the indisputability of the species norm (the sum of ideology
and devices) that, in the shadows, has already decided who is worthy of
living and who can instead be slaughtered in complete tranquility.

So, if we really want to overcome speciesism, we must move
simultaneously on two fronts: its systems of knowledge (its ideology and
its narratives) must be deconstructed and its sectioning structures (its
material and performative power devices) must be dismantled, if only
because, once the system is operating at full capacity, the empty
center, the mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion and the devices of
dismemberment reinforce each other, since, here as elsewhere, they are
not independent of each other, but chase each other in a vicious circle,
in which the fable of the empty center normalizes the calculations of
inclusion/exclusion and the devices in which the latter naturalize the
fable of the empty center.

This double operation of deconstruction and dismantling can only take
shape in an affirmative politics of joy, in which the shapelessness of
life no longer generates repulsion, disgust or terror of the dissimilar,
but the powerful desire to create new being: new worlds, new subjects,
new desires and new pleasures, through an uninterrupted succession of
productive alienations. In short, we need more than ever an
anti-speciesism that understands that the problem does not lie in where
the border lines are drawn or how many these should be, but in the very
fact that they continue to be drawn. Let us call this anti-speciesism
slimy anti-speciesism of the common.

By embracing the idea of the species as a genealogical line, this
further movement of opposition to speciesism considers living animals,
without any exception, as hybrids and mongrels, in a word improper.
Animals, both human and non-human, are constitutively relational: they
are not individuals who enter into relationships, but relationships
that, eventually, losing richness and power, can become individualized.
We are all intertwined relationships, we are all part of an incessant
creolization with "who" preceded us, with "who" accompanied us and
accompanies us and with "who" will follow us. In other words, we are not
so much different individuals, but rather singularities immersed in a
continuous process of alienating differentiation, of becoming-with-between.

Anti-speciesism of the common because what more than anything else puts
the notion of "species" in a state of arrest is the recognition of the
fault line of impersonal and transpersonal life that runs through the
entire sensual living being; living being that, desiring and desiring to
be recognized, "calls" us into the most intimate entrails and folds of
the flesh. The common is the space in perpetual change where the
vulnerability and finitude of different sensual bodies meet the "animal"
power to rejoice, to play, to become inactive, that is, to move and feel
without a pre-established purpose, thus escaping the categorical
imperatives of productivity and reproduction. The common is what allows
anti-speciesism to go beyond the bíos - the specialized life that
biological sciences deal with - towards zoé - which is not bare life but
the productive power of worlds. It is not surprising, then, that for the
anti-speciesism of the common, freedom is liberation, a collective
process that materializes between and with others. Which, ultimately,
corresponds to giving freedom back its original meaning that derives
from the idea of common growth, of a blossoming understood as the
connective power of life.

Slimy anti-speciesism because there is no intention of falling into the
sneaky crypto-anthropocentric traps or, on the contrary, into the
separationist ones that have characterized anti-speciesism up to now in
which recognition is given respectively to the pseudo-humanoid Animal
similar to Us (The Great Ape) or to the Animal totally alien to Us as
still-Natural (The Ultra-Originary Wild): the Other or, better, the
others precede us and if much more often they are dissimilar to us to
the point of repulsion, they are nevertheless inextricably linked to us
both phylogenetically and ecologically.

If the Covid-19 pandemic had taught us anything, we would have
understood that, like it or not, the world we live in is shapeless,
slimy and common. For this reason we need a neo-materialist
anti-speciesism capable of responding to the challenges that this world
poses to us, an anti-speciesism that does not feel called to show and
demonstrate the indisputable, that is, that animals suffer, but to ask
how it is possible to politically modify the existing. Therefore,
precisely because we have never been speciesist, we can propose a new
definition of anti-speciesism that, echoing Marx and Engels to overcome
them, could sound like this: "Anti-speciesism is not a state of affairs
that must be established, an ideal to which reality must conform.
Anti-speciesism is the real movement that, by liberating and liberating
us, abolishes the present state of affairs."

Massimo Filippi

https://umanitanova.org/decostruire-la-specie-seconda-e-ultima-parte/
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