Memories of a present time about animal love

Abstract

In this essay, we will try to understand to what extent the philosophical tradition based on the principle of equality, linked to the notion of human nature, would have gradually led to the justification and even to the foundation of an ethical and political disregard for animal and for animality. More precisely, from a perspective that mobilizes Michel Foucault's interpretations  of the care of the self in the Socratic-platonic period, under the light [A] of Jean-Pierre Vernant's analysis of the differences between archaic and classical antiquity, but also [B] of Judith Butler's reflections on moral violence, we will indicate how the philosophical emergence of the principle of equality would have influenced the structure of a moralistic dynamic that explicitly or implicitly violates the animal, and all who are biologically or ethically distinguished from the norms that describe the human being and prescribe their humanity. Our article consists of four parts that mark the temporality of the animal question and express its urgency in the present time. Through the narration of possible articulations between the present and the past, we seek to diagnose the anthropocentric limits of ethical ad political philosophy and, at the same time, to envision non-anthropocentric relationships between humans and animals.