Worldly Autonomy, Welteigenständigkeit
Animal existence does not depend on its social legibility to humans. Its social and worldly reality precedes and exceeds the systems that attempt to define it.
First nature is not merely the environment in which human society encounters animals. It is a reality of existence and relations that exceeds the anthropocentric organisation of the social.
An antibiologistische Tiersoziologie begins from the recognition that animals already exist as knowing, socially relating and autonomous subjects. It therefore does not seek merely to improve their position within an anthropocentrically constituted social order, but questions the foundations and mechanisms through which that order establishes and reproduces its authority.
—
