NIETZSCHE, THE MAN, THE ANIMAL. FOR AN ANIMALITY REVISITED

Abstract

This paper presents a re-reading of animality and the human-non­-human separation, and a review of humanist ideas, in order to establish other ontological-political distributions to define the man and the non-human animal. This also involves questioning its conception of the body. Starting from Nietzsche’s critiques, Giorgio Agamben and Jean-François Lyotard put humanism into question and revalue a certain emptiness or indeterminacy as ineffable components of the human condition, rendering the separation of the living between the human and the non-human as inoperative. On this topic, Emanuele Coccia adds to the discussion the forgotten element in the ontological­-political distributions that define man in opposition to the non-human animal: the plant, a non-human living being but also not an animal, and yet a paradigm of an alternative way of life that surpasses them. These perspectives on human and non-human animality are inserted into post-humanist relational ontologies.

Keywords: Nietzsche. Humanism. Animality. Body.