Document type : scientific article published in Zilsel
Author: Dominique Guillo
Preview: Over the past thirty years or so a current of thought has gradually taken hold in the Humanities and Social Sciences calling for radical change in the ways that these disciplines view "non-humans" and, more specifically, animals. According to those who figure most prominently in this movement, the revolution that needs to be accomplished would be on an unprecedented scale as the wrong to be righted is deep, ancient, and widespread. The movement's aim is to persuade the 'West' - and all those elsewhere on the planet who have adopted its patterns of thought, whether willingly or unwillingly - that a mist has invaded their minds over nearly half a millennium, since the advent of 'Modernity'. This mist has, they say, led them to mistake the image they have of the world for the world itself, an image where they have cut it up into categories to describe its constituent features. The "Western", "modern" gaze would thus be inhabited by an "ontology" (Descola) founded on a "Great Division" (Latour) between Nature and Culture. They consider this fundamental division to be replicated and intensified by a whole series of other divisions operated by further dichotomies, each of which reinforces the previous one by aligning itself with it, thereby allocating entities to one or other side of an uncrossable divide: Matter / Spirit, Object / Subject, Primitive / Modern, Nonhuman / Human, etc. "Modernity", in this view, was an ontological power grab that reduced the ontologies of other societies - and with them, other ways of conceiving nonhumans - to the status of superstitions and relegated all nonhumans indiscriminately to a vast category of inert things devoid of agency.
