The cow that gazes at us: precarious life and fiction

Authors

  • Martín de Mauro Rucovsky Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; CONICET

Abstract

Draw from two recent texts, Cuaderno de campo, a story of the Argentinian Carlos Rios published in 2014 and De gados e homens, a short novel of the Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia published in 2013, we propose to explore the figure of the cow and in particular the animal face within the simbolic universe of the slaughterhouse. In these texts, the slaughterhouse and the bovine face shows a politics of corporeal vulnerability that inquire Judith Butler’s analysis of Emmanuel Levinas, the face and precarious life, which sustain and implicit hierarchy for the living human. Therefore, these re-writings of slaughterhouses work as a knowledge of precarity, that is to say, they point to a share vulnerability or living precarity that proves the affective and sensitive dimmension that emerges in the between human and bovine bodies.

Keywords:

Re-Writing of slaughterhouseQ, Carlos Río, Ana Paula Maia, Precarity, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, Face, Animality, Anthropocentrism, Biopolitics