Acceso usuarios
Jorge Morte García
El diagnóstico de este artículo es el siguiente: el especismo es la prueba de que el Antropoceno ha sido pensado desde una gramática antropocéntrica, la cual invisibiliza a distintos niveles las necesidades, el dolor y la agencia no humana en las Relaciones Internacionales (RRII). Con el fin de consolidar una lucha efectiva contra este punto ciego, propongo un marco posthumanimalista que permita reorientar las políticas hacia una justicia multiespecie.
Metodológicamente, este texto se compone de cuatro movimientos principales. Primero, una genealogía situada de las fronteras dialécticas humano-animal, asumida por Aristóteles, René Descartes e Immanuel Kant, además del desplazamiento que introduce Jeremy Bentham al incluir la sintiencia como consideración moral; esta genealogía, anclada a la modernidad euroatlántica, se pone en tensión con ontologías críticas como el Buen Vivir (Acosta) o los derechos de la naturaleza (Viaene). En segundo lugar, se deconstruyen dichas fronteras mediante Jacques Derrida (la subjetividad humana a merced de la mirada del gato) y Cary Wolfe (contenido enfrentado a metodología en los animal studies). En tercer lugar, se sigue la propuesta revolucionaria de Rosi Braidotti: un monismo de la inmanencia, de inspiración spinozista, que revela un giro zoecéntrico y posthumanimalista apoyado en los devenires animal, tierra y máquina. Por último, el artículo operativiza estos recursos mediante las figuras conceptuales de Donna Haraway (cíborg y especies de compañía) y el enfoque de Katherine Hayles sobre la información encarnada y la cognición distribuida, así como a través de la ética del cuidado de María Puig de la Bellacasa y su traducción a la seguridad de Cameron Harrington.
En diálogo con propuestas de RRII en el Antropoceno (Chandler, Rothe y Müller) y con resistencias situadas como las se dan en el río Samaná y los peces bocachico (Arias-Henao), se esboza una agenda para unas RRII posthumanimalistas: que permiten una soberanía zoecéntrica con representación de ensamblajes socioecológicos, una seguridad del cuidado orientada a la resiliencia de sistemas multiespecie y un desarrollo entendido como simbiosis regenerativa, medido por el bienestar multiespecie, la integridad ecosistémica y el sufrimiento evitado, más allá de la acumulación de capital.
The Anthropocene has been widely misconceived through an anthropocentric lens that consequently naturalises human sovereignty and renders non-human others ethically negligible within International Relations (IR). This ar-ticle inquires into the grammar that misreads the planetary condition and advances a posthumanimalist framework oriented towards multispecies justice. The goal is to move away from hegemonic standpoints on this matter and to sketch institutional designs, metrics and decision-making apparatuses that can register this political transfiguration.The argument unfolds in four main steps. It begins with a situated critical genealogy of the semantic and symbolic construction of the dialectical hierarchy human-animal that has constituted the current psychological understanding of otherness. Rather than claiming universal validity, this genealogy is anchored in European modernity and its phil-osophical canon. Invoking Aristotelian hylomorphism, Cartesian dualism, and Kantian dignity, this article delves into the human as the only bearer of reason, sovereignty, as well as autonomy, relegating the animal to a mere resource or indirect duty. On the other hand, Bentham’s philosophical hedonistic turn brings back the animal to the realm of morality by recognising its sentience, which in return helps reframe the question from can they (think, speak)? to can they suffer?. This criterion, while opening the door to multispecies accountability, remains insufficient. At this point, non-Western ontologies appear, revealing counter-narratives to the extractive interests of the Global North and its unethical, albeit hegemonic, bond with nature. Building on this, Jacques Derrida’s intimate scene with a cat’s gaze destabilises the self-assured human subject and highlights that experiences such as nudity only exist within the sphere of human conceptuality. Thus, we could argue that emotions linked to these supposedly human-only experiences such as shame, loyalty or distrust could be subject to their own deconstruction. Furthermore, attending to the animot, Derrida reveals how the semantic erasure of animals under a single category enacts a regime of non-criminal sacrifice towards it. This deconstruction is political, not just an abstract psychological crisis. It extends to the very foundations of the liberal subject in IR and urges us to question the power relations that have historically silenced subaltern and non-human subjectivities. In addition, following Cary Wolfe, the article shows how the humanist framework permeates animal studies, blurring the distinction between content and method: it is urgent that the scholar keeps in mind at all times that only by the inclusion of animals in one’s investigation does not guarantee the dismantling of humanistic methodologies if the subject producing knowledge remains unquestioned. Together, these contributions unsettle the anthropocentric subject at the heart of IR and prepare the ground for an ontological reframing. The third movement grounds itself in this deconstructive moment by introducing Rosi Braidotti’s metaphysics of immanence, wherein human and non-human entities coexist as modes of a single substance that disintegrates hierarchical difference. These bodies are affectable and driven by their conatus and modulated by their varying potential; no transcendental outside stabilises a hierarchy of worth. This article highlights how Braidotti’s triad of becomings (becoming-animal, becoming-earth, and becoming-machine) reconfigures subjectivity as a relational, posthumanimal node within wider socio-eco-technical assemblages. Nonetheless, this ontological shift is solidified by an affirmative ethos that centres human and non-human will and power on the political affirmation of we wantand we will, moving beyond the melancholy of ecological apocalypse. Subsequently, this theoretical foreground needs to be operationalised in order to enact the posthumanimalist for-mulation in the specific domains of IR. Haraway’s cyborg and companion species are not to be misunderstood as techno-fetishes; instead, they must be described as a figurative persona that reminds us that we are no less than carbon-silicon assemblages mediated by normativity. It privileges situated affinities over essential exclusivity and reframes our understanding of how we relate to other non-human animals and technologies: not as sovereign mas-ters or pure victims, but as co-constituted companions within dense networks of obligation. The companion species figure further challenges the one-way narrative of dominance and control, recasting human-animal relations as reciprocal disciplining and co-authorship. Crucially, this framework moves from theory to situated resistance. We examine the case of the Las Mesas communities in Colombia and the alliance with the bocachico fish against hydro-electric extractivism. In parallel, Hayles serves as a methodological compass that guides the posthumanimal across the cybernetic spaces that we all inhabit. First, by insisting on the embodiment of information, she prevents it from being treated as if it floated freely, prior to any sort of material support. Distinguishing body (repeatable historical model) from embod-iment (situated, performative and non-replicable) impedes data-fetish fantasies and keeps medium and context in view. Secondly, her account of distributed cognition sheds light on the ever-spreading processes of decision, plan-ning, and action, refusing to treat them as standalone phenomena and instead understanding them as co-produced by human and non-human actants, dissected into several sites and devices. This shift from Man-measure-of-all-things to Data-measure-of-all-things requires, the article argues, an explicit politics of care to avoid reproducing new forms of extractivism. Here, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s material-semiotic ethics of care is mobilised to insist that care is never neutral kindness but a thick, compromised practice that sustains life in worlds that may nonetheless be objectionable. On this basis, Cameron Harrington’s proposal of a security of care is brought into IR debates on the Anthropocene. Instead of securitas being the complete absence of care, he proposes a paradigm shift towards the ongoing, in-complete labour of maintaining vulnerable assemblages within liveable thresholds. In line with this paper’s overall arguments, the security of care is able to juxtapose these developments with alternative ontologies that understand human flourishing as inseparable from ecological integrity and legal recognition of non-human agency. Moreover, these perspectives do not merely expand the list of candidates to participate; they contest the Euro-Atlantic gene-alogy of nature and development that underpins mainstream IR. This methodological design contributes both ontologically and ethically, distilling the implications of this posthu-manimalist framework for three core IR domains: sovereignty, security and development. Sovereignty becomes zoecentric, reorganising established hierarchies into shared stewardship over socio-eco-technical systems, including forms of legal and political representation for ecosystems themselves. Security shifts from state-centric defence’s anarchic billiard-ball metaphor towards the protection of interdependent human-animal-machine-environment sys-tems. Lastly, development transforms into regenerative symbiosis instead of linear growth, with success measured in terms of multispecies well-being, avoided suffering and ecosystem integrity, in resonance with Buen Vivir’s cri-tique of extractivist accumulation. The content of this text advocates an affirmative ethics, not a naïve optimism, to which human animals and non-hu-man ones merge metaphorically together into one life. Ethical accountability has to be fairly distributed among the members of the infinite, and always-potential, array of human-animal-machine assemblages to make sure that responsibility is precisely mapped, rather than taking abstract actors alone. In the Anthropocene, the web of life is entangled in immanent systems from which it is inseparable. A posthumanimalist IR abandons romanticisation of nature and demonisation of technology, instead it puts at the centre of its task the designing of an architecture that aligns institutions, metrics and technologies to the superior interests of those entanglements and thus prepares the ground for a genuinely more-than-human Earth.
