It all started with a childhood memory that leaves a mark for the rest of your life. As a child, sociologist Kaoutar Harchi saw one of her little friends, Mustapha, “five years, six years”being bitten by a Belgian Malinois shepherd of the police. The reaction of the inhabitants of the neighborhood was not long in coming, asking to do “kill this dog that attacks our children – and the police retort – You’re the dogs, you’re the ones we’re going to kill”. Confusion : “Who were the animals? Who were the humans?”
Usually, “We say: they are the animals; we are the humans, so that the boundary that separates animality from humanity remains.”. But sometimes men get involved and question the humanity of some. Animal names then fly around: “Rat, bicot, mongoose (…)vermin, viper. Where can such a process come from?
Exploring Western history from the modern period to the present day, Kaoutar Harchi, in So the animal and usshows how the operation of hierarchizing species which is based on the separation of nature and culture always ends up having dramatic consequences. Not only for animals but also for certain categories of population, notably the colonized, women and workers.
Animalisation
Everything that has been undertaken to dominate, exploit, control, and supervise these humanities has first been experimented on animals, she maintains. “The domination of humans over animals is in no way a domination closed in on itself but, on the contrary, an open domination, which opens onto another: the domination of humans over other humans.” This is what she calls animalization. From then on, “animality turns out to be a state, not biological, but political”, which leads to the worst atrocities.
The statement may seem excessive. But the many examples put forward come – it must be recognized – to shake the reluctance that we might have to follow the researcher in her extremely documented demonstration. From hunting and breeding animals to those of the Amerindians, there is only one step that the colonists took, capturing men and women made male and female, put in cages, at work and forced to reproduce.
From the force-feeding of geese to that of imprisoned suffragettes on hunger strike to defend the rights of women and, for some of them, animals, the step has also been taken. Just like for the experiments on mice which became experiments on human bodies by the Nazis and other eugenicists. As for assembly line work and Taylorism, it finds its origin in the large slaughterhouses of Chicago…
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