Mówienie w imieniu a mówienie o
Representation: Speaking for and Speaking of

Author(s): Małgorzata Poks
Subject(s): Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: representation; good/bad representation; ideology; unstable representation; epistemological violence; colonisation
Summary/Abstract: The article ponders the question of animal representation in cultural as well as legal/political discourses, tracing the entanglements of both in mechanisms of power. Regarding convictions as mental representations of reality, the author considers the role of representing subject’s point of view and moral judgment for the adequacy of representation, highlighting the indissoluble tangle of ethics and esthetics, the latter understood as the work of imagination. The argument points to the necessity of forging new models of ontological and ethical human-animal relations, which would be capable of questioning the ontological-axiological interspecies boundaries of species. As concerns the idea of 'speaking for' animals, the article credits the political turn in Animal Studies and the constructivist turn in political theory with the potential for loosening the excessively anthropocentric legal-political discourses. Faced with the ethical dilemma whether to represent selectively in the name of justice for nonhuman animals (colonization), or become silent and, by renouncing the epistemic violence inscribed in representing the nonhuman other who cannot speak for him- or herself, silently condone the very violence one disapproves of, the author concludes that the always already false representation (as a construct of the representing subject) acquires the characteristics of moral imperative.

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