ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the construction of the concept of the animal on a plane of immanence. It focuses on the four crucial areas identified in Chapter 4: thought, ethics, politics and death. Following Spinoza, it shows that “animal” thinking is not something that should be judged, but rather something that happens as necessarily as any other event. Read from this perspective, philosophical texts such as Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?, informed by a contemporary ethological perspective, can be read as guides to animal thinking rather than vestiges of speciesism. Analyzing animal, immanent ethics starts with Deleuze’s understanding of ethology. This kind of ethics always involves uncertainty and experimentation and cannot be grasped in any form of moral law. “Animal” politics reject any community based on an abstract trait such as sovereignty or law. Positively, it involves a Spinozian reinterpretation of posthumanist “symbiotic” theories, and a reading of Nancy’s Inoperative Community, proposing a broadly understood finitude as the cornerstone of political coexistence. Finally, the last part of the chapter seeks a way to reject the humanist exceptionalism of death. This is accomplished through the analysis of Deleuze, Spinoza and Braidotti. In a radically immanent, “animal” reading, life and death become ontologically irrelevant categories.
