CFP - Political Animals: Animality, Community, and the Future of the Body Politic | Dossier edited by Carlo Salzani

Receipt of works in the form of scientific articles, essays, reviews, interviews, literary texts, images or other formats that reflect on the theme, with a deadline of June 30, 2025.

Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle provided Western political philosophy with a model that would establish the coordinates that define and organize politics and subjectivity in the West: in Book I of his Politics, he defined "man" (the masculine in the English translation, absent in the Greek anthropos, which underlines the exclusionary logic of this tradition) as a politikon zōon, a "political animal", emphasizing that the human polis is a natural form of community. "Man" is the animal that lives in the polis. However, in the History of Animals, Aristotle had defined political "man" as a subset of other political animals, including "man, bee, wasp, ant, and crane" (I.1, 488a, 8-13). What distinguishes "man" from other political animals, however, is that he is so "to a greater degree than bees or other gregarious animals" (Politics I.2, 1253a, 7), and this is because "man alone among animals is endowed with the faculty of logos." If all animals possess the capacity to emit sounds (phōnē), which "serves to indicate pleasure and pain," man's peculiarity is language (logos), which "serves to declare what is advantageous or harmful," thus providing "the perception of good and evil, of just and unjust" (I.2, 1253a, 10-18).

If politics and biology are already intertwined in this definition, the possession of the logos nevertheless functions as an exclusionary apparatus that excludes the phōnē, that is, animality (including human animality), from the human community and the body politic. According to biopolitical theories, this structure – with the separation between animality and political community – collapses when, in late modernity, biological life begins to be included as the main focus of political strategies, and the "body politic" ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a literal description. Life and body are now at the center of politics. The contemporary definition of "political animal" emphasizes not only the "animality" of the political, but also opens the "political" to other forms of non-human embodiment. The progressive intersections between ethology, life sciences, philosophy, and politics have led to the adoption of the label "political" for more and more non-human communities, beginning with Frans de Waal's seminal work, Chimpanzee Politics (1982). Today, it is widely accepted that human politics is only one of many species-specific ways of articulating the communal nature of social animals.

If these historical transformations have had a significant impact on political philosophy, providing it with a kind of "animal (or biopolitical) turn," they have also influenced philosophical projects that seek to extend to nonhuman animals the considerations and protections previously reserved for humans, conferring a "political turn" on animal ethics and animal studies. If, until the early 2010s, the focus of these projects was almost exclusively on the ethics and moral status of nonhuman animals, political issues now gain prominence, questioning the place and role of not only (human) animality, but also nonhuman animals in the theory and practice of extended communities and the multispecies body politic. The label "political animals" thus becomes an invitation to the radical reinvention of the very ideas of community and politics that we have inherited from the Western tradition.

This issue of the journal (Des)troços invites contributions that address one or more of these intertwined threads, from the place of animals and animality in traditional political philosophy, through the transformations of their roles operated by biopolitical theories, to the ongoing "political turn" in animal ethics.

In addition to this thematic dossier, the journal (Des)troços accepts continuous general submissions related to radical thought and the journal's editorial line, as described in: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/about. Contributions must be sent through the OJS system, following the rules for submission of texts (https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/about/submissions) by June 30, 2025. Degree requirements do not apply to authors of artistic productions, whose contributions will be evaluated exclusively by the editorial committee. The texts will be reviewed by the editorial committee and through blind peer review. Once approved, the texts and images will be published in the 11th edition of the magazine, scheduled for the second half of 2025.

Finally, as part of our internationalization policies, which aim to expand the circulation of texts published in (Des)troços as much as possible, the best articles submitted in foreign languages will be translated into Portuguese, while the best articles submitted in Portuguese will be translated into English. These translations are possible thanks to funding from FAPEMIG (Research Support Foundation of the State of Minas Gerais), to whom we are grateful.

Dossier edited by Carlo Salzani | Carlo Salzani is a visiting researcher at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna and a faculty member at the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT). Her research interests include animal ethics, literary studies on animals, animals and politics, and biopolitics. His most recent publications include the book Agamben and the Animal (2022) and the co-edited volume The Biopolitical Animal (2024).