Law, decoloniality and multispecie turn/Direito, decolonialidade e giro multiespecie.

Autorda Rocha, Jailson José Gomes

Introduction

Humanity, understood as a biological status and condition, is projected as a validity foundation of the civilizing plan of Modernity. The modern social classification system establishes markers of differentiation between the subject by excellence - one who is, knows, controls and narcissistically self-constitutes - and the other entities or organisms in a state of subjection, since they supposedly would not share with humans the elements of uniqueness (intelligence, rationality, language, morality, sense of justice, etc.). This categorical differentiation between the human and the non-human was and still is essential for the structuring of the modern-colonial modus of animalization of undesirable humans (LUGONES, 2014, p.936).

Therefore, his system of differentiation and categorization of beings establishes a hierarchy that gives a multitude of abiotic beings and entities the status of inconsiderability, of unqualified, reifiable existence, since the organizing principle of the World System is racialization (GROSFOGUEL, 2016; BERNARDINO-COSTA & GROSFOGUEL, 2016), intraspecific and interspecific. Non-human entities - including humans thrown below the line of humanity as condemned to the earth (FANON, 1968) - are left with the epistemic and ontic spaces proper to extraction, control and exploration.

This article aims to bring to light the proposal for a paradigmatic shift in what concerns the traditional conception of society to recognize our existences as inscribed in multispecies worlds, in which human and non-human lives intersect and influence each other to build their historicities.

The notions of subject, agency, subjectivity, identities would be driven to be rethought in order to consider and take seriously the "beyond-human" statute. Humanity as a model species, guiding vector of modern-colonial society, would, in this multi-species logic, become another species that is inscribed in the world through multiple relationships with subjects in the field of animality/vegetation/minerality/deity/ancestry.

The modern markers of humanity solidified a specific legal narrative imposed as universal and unavoidable, but which in fact conceals the fact of being situated in spacetime, a globalized localism (SANTOS, 2002) and ethnocentric. That way, I intended to think in what terms the multispecies turn tensions the sociability based on a normative policy founded on Coloniality.

With this, I announce the thesis of multispecies life that cohabits and is performed in a monotopic of modernity, but that disputes the affirmation of pluriversality as a possible way of ontogenesis of Law. For that, it would be necessary to decolonize the hegemonic world in order to enunciate the alternatives of worlds and modes in their multispecific entanglements, as well as decolonize the Law to adjudicate validity to other normative projects and forms of being and becoming in the common and possible worlds.

Searching for multispecies life

The sharing of space-time between humanity and beings beyond human is a theme that has gained momentum in recent years (TSING, 2015a, 2015b; KOHN, 2013; OGDEN, HALL & TANITA, 2013; KIRKSEY & HELMREICH, 2010; VAN DOOREN, KIRKSEY & MUNSTER, 2016). The field of thought and action related to multispecies studies is booming in academic terms. The approach already counts, even, with significant resonance in Brazilian lands, with emphasis on anthropological production (SEGATA, 2012, 2016; SUSSEKIND, 2017; 2018a; VANDER VELDEN, 2012, 2018; BEVILAQUA, 2011a, 2011b; CAMPOS, 2016; LODY, 1992).

The encounters, presences and relationships between species would resize the understanding of how human lives and ways of being in the world are constituted, from the intertwining with the tangle of non-human entities. They bring up the notion of life in a markedly anti-solipsistic, non-humanistic sense that aims, to a certain extent, to erase the principle of singularity of the human species and its consequent understanding of the world and ways of being/becoming.

This approach tries to overcome a conceptual "exclusive and monospecific" lineage (SUSSEKIND, 2018b, p.161) to think about life and what permeates it beyond the human markers consolidated in Modernity/Coloniality--this tradition of thought and action marked by opposing hierarchical-excluding pairs that sediment the human singularity (of a specific segment of humans, it stands out) as an organizing principle of society. It is in this sense that multispecies studies challenge the "ontological binarism of humanism" (LOCKE, 2017, p. 357, my translation). Thus, this approach brings to light the limitations imposed on the very conception of humanity from a narcissistic isolation that disregards the implications of other species for human becoming (LOCKE, 2018).

Human singularity, this structuring mark of the modern cartesian narrative, adjudicated the predicative of instrumentality to entities beyond the human to the nerve point of announcing a rupture of geological era, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantatiocene (HARAWAY, 2016)/Colonialocene. The Anthropocene idea aims to account for or highlight the structural impact of human intervention on Earth. As an epiphenomenon, it is as if the lexicon brought up "horror" and "could now be seen, at last, by Euro-American centers of power, as well as their colonial and colonized derivations." (GARCIA, 2018, p. 195). (1)

The segregation of humanity from other forms of existences implied a model of exploration of bodies, entities, abiotic elements in such a way as to consider nature as a homogeneous block available to the process of reification as an extraction resource (KIRKSEY, 2017). With that, the subjectivities, agentivities and capacities of these entities and the possible relations with humanity are disregarded, in a sense of non-passivity, of co-construction of realities. The western formula of homo mensura is complemented with the conception of nature as a resource and non-human beings as instruments (SUSSEKIND, 2018a).

As Garcia (2018) shows, despite the history of humanity being a narrative of humans in relation to so many non-humans, these beings were not treated seriously, with due focus, as an integral and interactive part of our social worlds. When stating that "human nature is a relationship among species", Anna Tsing (2015a, p. 184) recognizes that all the entities that inhabit the metaphor and materiality Earth emerge and build their existence in multispecies communities, as if in a web of interdependence. This observation would give a new meaning to the narcissistic mirror of humanity, or at least it would cause some clicks.

The understanding and constitution of the human would take place in a relational way, in interactions beyond the human, whose historicity is forged by a tangle and complex plexus of relationships. As a consequence, we would always be more than human (ASDAL, DRUGLITR0 & HINCHLIFFE, 2016). More, we would always be With and Together.

This tangle of beings would then have the capacity to produce History (HARAWAY, 2016; HRIBAL, 2007; BARATAY, 2012). A History with expansion of producing agents and from Hybrid Communities, where interspecific meetings and mediations are possible (LESTEL, 2011). Thus, experiences and stories of the non-human actor come to have significance that reverberate in the understandings of humanity and animality (TORTORICI & FEW, 2013), not only from an ecological point of view, but also social, political, economic and legal.

The historian Jason Hribal (2003, 2007) starts from the assumption that opposing resistance is one of the main characteristics for the categorization or understanding of a class consciousness. Furthermore, he states that the animals would demonstrate intentional acts of resistance and negotiation regarding work, within the limits of their own exploitation. In recognizing animals as a working class, Hribal affirms animals as beings that produce history. They are active agents in their lives, with the capacity to act intentionally in the context of multispecies relationships that are waged in the context of work. In this way, they are not static characters, allegorical elements of a landscape proper to the narratives of human history.

The paradigmatic turn proposed by multispecies studies causes recursions that are potentially relevant to the understanding and construction of legal spaces and normative discourses. The Juridical would start to be intended in its typically humanist tradition. The narcissistic mirror of Law - the subject of universal abstract law as the cornerstone of Western legal tradition, the ultimate and only recipient of Law - is now questioned and problematized.

Even the proper notion of Animal Law would undergo a reorientation. To speak of Animal Law in a multispecific sense would mean recognizing that there are entities other than the Animal Statute that interact and challenge each other with animal species in their existence. In this context, vegetality, minerality, ancestry, deities are conditions that would play an important role in shaping animalistic dogmatics.

The notion of subject of law starts to be rethought from the consideration of the animal agency (STEWARD, 2009; PEARSON, 2015; HRIBAL, 2007), of the more-than-human personality (REGAN, 2001; FRANCIONE, 1995; WISE, 2014), interspecific communication (HOSTETTER et al., 2001; ZUBERBÜHLER, 2000), plant neurobiology as an insurgent field (STRUIK et al., 2008; TREWAVAS, 2016), the sentience and awareness of non-human animals (LOW, 2012), the Theory of Mind awarded to primates (KRUPENYE et al., 2016; CALL & TOMASELLO, 2008), artificial intelligence and personality of electronic agents (TEUBNER, 2006; KURKI & PIETRZYKOWSKI, 2017).

The western legal monoculture could also be rethought based on reference to cosmopolitics and other ontologies that reorient the possibilities of ethical bases for societies with types of...

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