The animal as a means : notes on art zoopolitics.

El animal como medio : notas sobre zoopolíticas artísticas.

Animal Studies have undoubtedly contributed to de-centering thought and art from human shape. However, a certain zoocentrism in some discourses seems to bring us back to the rhetorical metaphysics of foundation and teleology, turning the «Animal» into an end, a privileged object of representation. From the perspective of post-human aesthetic materialism that I will take on herein, we may think of animals not as an end, but as a means: mediums of art (support/matter) and pure mediality, which, just like the Agambean gesture, put in check the very structure of signification and symbolization which has served to keep them tied to humanistic jargon. ftus, in this work we will address several art examples and aesthetic discourses trying to deal with animal matter — with that unstable element in the domain of representation, but exceeding it and therefore allowing to reflect upon what Nicole Shukin has called «animal capital».

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