The starting point is the observation that the separation of the human from everything else of living and the determination of some of his characteristic, which (necessarily hierarchically) separate him from everything else, especially from nature, or from animals or the “animal” in himself, is an obvious tendency of Western religion, metaphysics, philosophy and science. There is always a relationship of power between subject and object, between the human and the animal, whereby the dominant pole determines the signifying order, the type of difference, and consolidates the mechanisms of differentiation, which, through the fixation on the limit, produce the meaning of the other. The singular concept “animal”, on which the identity of man is based, becomes a negative principle as such or the sum of all shortcomings. I explore the relations of violence, sacrificial structures and consumption schemes between the man and the animal through the prism of Derrida's concept of carnophalogocentrism, the mechanism of becoming an anthropo-centric Western subject. I am interested in how symbolic violence, which inflicts violence on a heterogeneous multitude of beings, by reconstructing it under the sign of identity “as such” or “in general”, as an “animal”, and real or physical violence are related and interdependent. Real violence, of which the ingestion of animal flesh is a paradigmatic example, and symbolic violence, expressed through the metaphorical ingestion of animals through language and representation in general, are intertwined and mutually enabled and sustained.
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