Roberto Marchesini
Roberto Marchesini (born 1959) is an Italian philosopher, ethologist and essayist.
Contro i diritti degli animali?
[edit]- Roberto Marchesini, Contro i diritti degli animali? Proposta per un antispecismo postumanista, Edizioni Sonda, Casale Monferrato, 2014. ISBN 978-88-7106-735-3
In recent years, speciesism, as a topic of debate, or as a counterterm towards which to direct a proposal or a movement aimed at criticising its principles, has received a great deal of attention, although not always in a coherent and appropriate way. Thinking about speciesism has become almost a philosophical prolegomenon or a basic problematic issue, confirming in some ways the testamentary expression of Jacques Derrida, who handed us this topic as a philosophical question of the future.
Quotes
[edit]- The word-concept [speciesism] highlighted by Ryder follows or gives explicit meaning to those discussions that, since the mid-1960s, have begun to denounce certain practices, resulting above all from technical-scientific development and industrialisation, which are oppressive (to put it mildly) towards other species. I am referring to essays such as Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison or Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, essays that would later, in the 1970s, inaugurate the leitmotif of the white paper. In this regard, The Imperatrice nuda (Naked Empress) by Hans Ruesch is exemplary, a true manifesto of anti-vivisectionism. (p. 11)
- With the first decade of the twenty-first century, the term "speciesism" has been enriched with new predicates, going beyond the praxic definition of Ryder and the moral definition of Singer and Regan. New deconstructions of the character of species are emerging, taking up the considerations of Derrida's final essay L'animale che dunque sono (The Animal That Therefore I Am) or the conceptions of singularity that characterise the proposals, which, albeit in a varied way, can be found in Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. (p. 16)
- Every time the Cartesian idea of animals as automata is mentioned – "Don't worry, it's the creaking of a machine" – people are stunned, forgetting that most of the interpretation of animal behaviour is informed to the letter by the concept of res extensa. The animal, reduced to a dead thing and studied on the autopsy table, is declared non-existent: for it, death is not given but simply the cessation of organic functions. (p. 32)
- That animals can suffer, to put it in Bentham's terms, or are exposed to pain, to recall Derrida, is beyond dispute, even if some researchers (lacking the faintest ethnographic knowledge) persist in subjecting cats to extremely painful tests – with unequivocal behavioural responses – and then claim that there is no scientific evidence. I imagine that the only evidence that would convince them (perhaps) would be if the cat explicitly told them to get lost. (pp. 37-38)
- [...] well-being is based on a dynamic (not homeostatic) balance between inputs, in terms of gratification and fulfilment, and outputs, in terms of fatigue, stress and so on. Since it is not possible to eliminate the outgoings in an individual's life, as stress, frustration and fatigue are part of life, it is clear that depriving them of the incomings means that, inevitably, the balance will go into the red within a short time. If it were true that removing the outputs is enough to ensure well-being, a zebra at the zoo should be the happiest animal on this Earth. [...] If this were really the case, hypothetically putting the zoo in direct relation to the savannah, we would expect all the zebras to move from the savannah to the zoo. Conversely, the only zebra in the zoo would undoubtedly head for the savannah. (pp. 39-40)
- Ethology is the science that allows human beings to encounter animal otherness in its behavioural expression – in perception as in communication, in motivation as in cognition – and this cognitive exercise not only allows us to acquire important data on the peculiarities of non-humans but also gives rise to a training ground for anthropodecentrism because it accustoms us to considering the human point of view as relative, that is, neither metric nor subsumptive of possibilities. (pp. 64-65)
- An ethologist knows that the legs of the cheetah speak of the speed of the gazelle. (p. 75)
- My memories as a trainee at the slaughterhouse in Bologna are still vivid in the trepidation I felt in front of the short space that separated the processing tunnel from the disassembly line, a minimal gap between the greatness of life and the nothingness of death, in handling those organs still warm with life and beating uselessly, and in observing their boundless perfection. (p. 77)
- Sometimes predation is chilling, as is the case with the praying mantis which, having grasped the victim's body, slowly devours it with a swaying of its triangular head that makes it look like an embroiderer, except that with each pass, an orbit of flesh is removed from the prey's somatic tissue. The habits of solitary wasps also seem terrifying to us, as they anaesthetise the motor control of a caterpillar and inseminate its body with eggs from which sarcophagous larvae will hatch and empty it from the inside. [...] Predation seems even more disturbing to us if the predator seems to be mocking or playing with its prey, as a cat does with a mouse or an orca with a seal. (p. 77)
- [...] the speed of the cheetah is the same as that of the gazelle and vice versa, so we can say that in the cheetah, speed was created by the gazelle, as well as the reverse. (p. 78)
- Zooanthropology as a discipline was created to highlight the fact that, like it or not, there are no cultural barriers between species and that there are therefore continuous shifts in perspective between subjects despite their differences in perspective. (p. 155)
- [...] for posthumanist philosophy, animal liberation represents the conceptual core, just as human liberation did for humanism. It is clear that for posthumanism, animal liberation represents the true liberation of humankind. (p. 163)