“Why look at animals?” Ethic of otherness and animality in John Berger

Abstract

This paper propose a reading and application of the homo sacer metaphysical concept, central to the Giorgio Agamben In his text Why Look at Animals? John Berger comments on how the animal metaphor was an indispensable resource for revealing a closeness between species, and that without the example of animals it would be unlikely, for example, to describe events such as those narrated by Homer in The Iliad. The correlation between similar and heterogeneous lives allowed human beings, inspired by animals, to provide answers to the first questions. It is reasonable to say that the first metaphor was that of the animal, as a way of sharing the world that was both common and different to them. But our relationship with non-human animals also contains contradictions; the creation of the zoo represented the raising of a monument to the impossibility of any reunion with animality. Instead of being liberated, animals were captured by other political categories. For John Berger the ambiguities remain "They are the objects of our ever-increasing knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and so is an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the more distant they become."