Louis Borges once grouped animals into three classes: those we watch television with, those we eat, and those we are scared of. Another more psychoanalytically inflected way of classifying these relationships might be the oedipal (you and me on the same sofa), the instrumental (you will end up by being eaten) and the fantasmatic (how exotic, sleek, dangerous you are). In Braidotti’s view a posthuman ethics implies an end to forms of “anthropolatry” which not only obscure emergent forms of species thinking but consign all other species to dangerous, destructive and ecologically untenable forms of subordination. If “becoming animal” in Hiberno-English is an occasional and unfortunate consequence of excessive alcohol consumption, for Braidotti it is a way of realising the irretrievably embodied, material nature of our existence on a planet that we share with innumerable other species that we continue to destroy in vast numbers. The current rate in the loss of species diversity alone is similar in intensity to the event that 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. As against this, the emerging fields of eco-criticism and animal studies show the new kinds of transdisciplinary formations that are coming to the fore in the wake of the crisis of the human in the Anthropocene. In a post-Orwellian move, some animals are beginning to recognise that they might not be more equal than others and are starting to wonder what this might mean for the planet.
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