Author Biographies pp

Marco Maurizi, activist and philosopher, and Massimo Filippi, editor of the journal Liberazioni. Rivista di critica antispecista, also present as authors in the book reviewed here. Carlo Salzani, the co-editor of the book, dedicates a section to Giorgio Agamben’s thought. According to Salzani, animality occupies a central point in Agambenian reflection as sovereignty is nothing but the “anthropological machine” that separates man and animal, placing the former’s dominion over the latter. Only a thought capable of going beyond such opposition can disable this machine and cancel out its deadly effects on both human and nonhuman animals, thus moving towards the idea of a life as destituent power.

Matías Saidel and Diego Rossello’s essay examines Roberto Esposito’s philosophy. Although he is not directly involved in antispeciesism or a reflection on animality, Esposito has nevertheless engaged in a deconstruction of political devices to highlight the harmful attempts to immunize the human from any “contamination” of “the animal.” A similar subject, linked to the “posthuman” perspective, is dealt with in the paper by Giovanni Leghissa. Marco Maurizi works off the Frankfurt School by elaborating the implications of the human/animal and reason/nature dialectic. His essay traces the history of Italian Marxism, showing how these problems are frequently present from Labriola to the post-workerists like Antonio Negri, and outlines the perspectives and unresolved issues of the debate. The book continues with Federica Giardini’s essay connecting animality with sexual difference as developed by Italian feminist thinkers such as Adriana Cavarero, Rosi Braidotti and Carla Lonzi, claiming that both animals and women need liberation from patriarchy, a notion also fundamental to CAS. This second section closes with Alma Massaro’s paper illustrating the attention to animals found in Paolo De Benedetti’s theology who perceives them as pure and “edenic” beings that, unlike men, are incapable of wickedness. The third section opens with an essay by Massimo Filippi, who deconstructs the paradigm of the slaughterhouse and the sacrificial policy according to which the very notion of human rational Subject is an effect of the anthropocentric separation of humans from animals, based on the consumption of the latter as merely flesh. Even the biological concept of “species” is, for Filippi, only a device to separate humans from other living