Bestiary of Corona Animals

“Bestiary of Corona Animals” is an essay that illuminates the causal relations between the human tendency to objectify the world, the continuous expansion of extractive activity, the trace effects of the current climate regime, and the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic. These seemingly distinct phenomena, often analyzed and discussed separately, in fact share the same roots. The text introduces a cast of different animals, both fictional and tangibly real, whose personal opinions and experiences— informed by animal rights and ethics, biopower, geopolitics, and necropolitics—give credence to the hypothesis that the human colonization of the natural territory of the virus enabled the pandemic to spread in the first place. These animal voices seek for a type of worlding that provides an equal footing for humans and non-humans, starting by exchanging self-interest for empathic non-understanding and selfless reciprocity: from the isolation of thinking and acting in a vacuum, to a world continuum.

“Bestiary of Corona Animals” is an essay that illuminates the causal relations between the human tendency to objectify the world, the continuous expansion of extractive activity, the trace effects of the current climate regime, and the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic. These seemingly distinct phenomena, often analyzed and discussed separately, in fact share the same roots. The text introduces a cast of different animals, both fictional and tangibly real, whose personal opinions and experiences— informed by animal rights and ethics, biopower, geopolitics, and necropolitics—give credence to the hypothesis that the human colonization of the natural territory of the virus enabled the pandemic to spread in the first place. These animal voices seek for a type of worlding that provides an equal footing for humans and non-humans, starting by exchanging self-interest for empathic non-understanding and selfless reciprocity: from the isolation of thinking and acting in a vacuum, to a world continuum.