ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to consider animals as objects (and subjects) of a new critique of political economy, with a special emphasis on the industrial process of killing animals, in what Stiegler defines as “hyper-industrial epoch.” I focus on the human-global carnivorousness as a disruptive innovation of the capitalism of the second half of the twentieth century. If our carnivorousness is an anthropological fact, as Burgat convincingly puts it, the industrial epoch has totally changed our ways and possibilities of (not) seeing animals. Through a cross-reading of Karl Marx’s “general intellect” and Éric Baratay’s “animals-machines,” this chapter tries to show the shift from the reification of animals to their de-animalization by means of the “general intellect,” which took place over the course of the twentieth century and made the explosion of meat consumption possible. This detailed analysis of the anthropological machine’s functioning in hyper-industrialized societies stems from the conviction that a renewal of the political economy is the condition for ethics, insofar as we cannot expect to act ethically towards animals if we are not even able to see them, i.e. to understand the conditions of production and consumption under which they have been de-animalized and made to disappear.
