Animal Rights and Conceptual-Terminological Domination
“Animal” is not merely a biological category. It is a political infrastructure of domination: a conceptual-terminological construct that organizes the non-human as a manageable difference, thereby establishing a hierarchy of thought and action – a hierarchy in which the “human mind/human spirit” [das Geistig-Menschliche, everything pertaining to the human mind] as an idea pits the supposedly non-thinking animal against itself in an antagonism [“supposed to be grounded in nature”].
Where Criticism of Authority Ends in Itself > On Blind Spots in Animal Advocacy
- Five Preliminary Statements
- Anyone who defines “animal” in the manner presently customary exercises a form of power.
- Anyone who criticizes power without examining their own power to define, remains within the structure.
- Aid, without the aid of critical analysis, potentially stabilizes hierarchies.
- Violence ends in physical assault, but (nevertheless) begins with compartmentalization.
- Freedom that seeks to label and manage everything, generally remains domination.
- The shortened critique
In German-speaking countries, animal rights activism is generally understood as a moral extension. Animals should be taken into account because they suffer. Because they feel. Because they are similar to us. The problem, however, does not lie in compassion. The problem lies in the narrow perspectives on animals and animal concerns.
While there is a general expectation – and broad recognition – that social power relations among humans are analyzed in a nuanced way – economically, culturally, historically, psychologically – when it comes to animal issues, the conclusion is simply deducted, and a moral appeal with a very narrow framing around animal independence is supposed to be sufficient – a framing that is itself rarely questioned, because, according to the normalized view, the entire realm of animal existence does not constitute topics that humans would regard as game changing agents in the world [as ‚in der Welt die Dinge bewegend‘, as making a difference in the world], as pertaining to thought and mind, as “narrating,” or as contextual.
Human culture and its self-preservation shape the past, present, and future, while animals are assigned a role in the course of events – one that is assigned in one way or another but is always secondary and subject to human claims of dominance. However, the fact that relationality – from a different position and especially against an animal backdrop – also represents its own history, present, and future, that must be regarded as central in a non-human-centric way, is a consideration which is generally not taken into account; instead, various side stages are created for the dislocated, human-dominated “original nature.”
A campaign, an image, a call for reform are therefore limited in their impact to the messages that can be conveyed within a specific framework and approach. While the campaign addresses a social conflict, it does not necessarily address the reality of injustice and the structures that perpetuate injustice from a broader perspective.
If one’s own understanding of injustice and speciesist systems of injustice is limited this implicitly signals that less analysis was needed for animals, because the issue is addressed only within such fixed boundaries. It is precisely in this refusal to engage in a comprehensive critique of domination – one that would do justice to the subject – that a hierarchy becomes apparent.
III. The Power of Definition
“Animal” is not simply a neutral category when it comes to people’s attitudes toward the subject of their conversation. “Animal” is encoded as a social free pass to set aside general ethical relevance, to organize relationality and evaluation of perspectivity, to establish one’s own system-conforming boundaries of comprehension of subjectivity, and so on.
Whoever defines what an animal is simultaneously determines, among other things:
- what status he wishes to assign to animals,
- what rights he considers relevant and “worthy of being granted”,
- what role animals play for him in relation to himself,
- how far his understanding of relationality reaches and how nuanced his conception of it is.
Defense, too, operates within a framework embodied by the concept of “animal.” The formation of this category can therefore always be questioned – even if the claim of defense is ostensibly established at first glance.
If animals are granted limited ethical status but continue to exist as a group defined not in terms of their autonomy but within human terms and concepts, the structure remains intact. The position may have shifted – but not the system.
- The Parallel in regards to Nature
The same pattern is evident in environmental protection.
Nature, the natural world, is generally protected:
- because it is useful, can be instrumentalised, is a resource,
- because it is the basis of human existence,
- because it is perceived as stabilising and regenerative,
- because it must be preserved to the extent and in the manner necessary for “our” lives to continue on the basis of existing ecosystems and ecologies. In other words, “nature” is protected conditionally, subject to human claims of utility and dominion of whatever kind.
Nature appears as an instrument – even when it is being protected. In everyday discourse, it is not granted an independent measuring standard. For society, it exists within the framework of human purposes. The same happens with animals, albeit on a more ‘animalesquely’-personified, emotional level, in which they become morally relevant: but not conceptually independent in > direct triangulation with the world and, in this respect, as ethical, formative agents and fellow living beings, co-beings [Mitlebewesen].
- The Boundaries of Freedom
The Western concept of freedom is powerful – but it is centered. It grants the subject potential freedom, with boundaries set by epistemological and historically established value-based consensuses. It conceives of morality from the perspective of the human being, in that the building blocks of social relationality are tied to human self-experience, and a long chain of ascription prevents animals and relationality – as a conceived and felt social value – from being linked together, from a human perspective. What is interesting about the Western idea of freedom is that it distributes recognition.
What this freedom hardly allows for (and its universality enables it to apply its frameworks from virtually any perspective that enters into a relationship of compatibility), is a realm that is permitted to elude its classification:
As soon as animals or nature cease to be seen as manageable categories and instead become independent points of reference, the system as an idea begins to falter. And for this reason freedom often ends where the concepts it employs and recognizes as valid no longer apply.
- Violence Begins Earlier
Violence is not alone the absolute hell of the slaughter processes, the torture in any form of harshest confinement, or just any form of physical, psychological and tierlich-seelischer destruction. Violence begins where something is completely forced into a category, especially a problematic, negating category where the designated Other as counterpart is typically reduced to:
- Resource,
- Object,
- Manageable object of protection,
- A case requiring moral consideration
and the interplay of such administrative categories. As long as this form of categorisation is not critically examined, the analysis of the psychology of human violence remains incomplete in terms of speciesism and the objectification of animals. One criticizes the action to a certain degree, but one allows for omissions and thus consciously refrains from addressing all the depths of thought architectures and orders that make such attitudinal approaches possible.
VII. Why accommodation is not the solution at this time
From a new perspective that is capable of conceiving of animal rights as a distinct and unique field without evading fundamental questions of rights, it is possible to move beyond a mere claim for the granting of rights – the very foundations of which have, after all, been shaped by a culture of exclusion and transgression. For if, in the course of an attempt to create supposed compatibility, the basic categories which make up the unique characteristics of animal objectification remain untouched anyway, then the hierarchy will still persist.
A radical stance makes it difficult to align with movements that rely in part on limiting, pragmatic solutions. Not because reforms are wrong, but because they are often considered to be sufficient. Yet as long as the question of who holds the power to define remains unresolved, the structure itself remains intact.
As long as animals must be categorized in terms, in order to be recognized, their defense remains part of the very same order that renders them available. A critique of domination that fails to reflect on this limit is self-defeating. Anyone who wishes to fully expose force, must begin where it is most inconspicuous: in the act of authoritative categorization, which underestimates relationality.
VIII. Language, Speech, and Relationality
Criticism of the category “animal” does not imply that understanding animal existence and animality is impossible. On the contrary. A genuine approach can only be made where language reflects on its own function of ordering and no longer tacitly presents itself as a neutral description of the world. The problem lies less in language itself than in the way its terms are organized – often closely tied to specific forms of human self-definition.
A different practice of language and terminology would therefore not attempt to classify animals entirely within human systems of classification, but would take relationality seriously. Language could function less as an instrument of classification and more as a medium of relationship. From such a perspective, the first question would not be what animals are within classificatory terms, but how encounter, coexistence, and shared relationships to the world [as Weltbezüge] can be described.
This, however, presupposes that the notion of humaneness also becomes more open. As long as “being human” is conceived primarily in terms of homogeneity and the devaluation of the non-human – through concepts of reason, language, culture, or morality that are far too narrowly conceived – then talking about animals will remain a language of definitional distance and, ultimately, of managing the Other, who is conceived as existing outside of this order.
A relational language, conversely, could acknowledge that animal existence must not be fully encompassed by human categories. It would not attempt to fully grasp the non-human in a pervasive manner in order to classify it [the non-human] within existing human systems, but would leave room for that which may, in many respects, elude the canonizing logic of human conceptual frameworks. In this liminal space, a different form of engagement and recognition could emerge: namely, a recognition of openness within shared world-relationships [geteilte Weltbezüge] while simultaneously respecting autonomy.
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07.06.2026