Toward a Dynamic Ontology

The Animal Question as a Fracture of the Limit and a Test of Being

Abstract

This article responds to the question of how the human/animal boundary comes to operate, beyond biological classification, as an ontological distribution that determines which forms of life are recognized as having a world and the capacity to respond, and which deaths count as losses that can be mourned. To examine this operation, it proposes the notion of dynamic ontology, not as a total system of being, but as an analysis of the historical, grammatical, and perceptual processes through which this boundary is stabilized, turns certain differences into hierarchies, produces ontological and political effects, and can be displaced. The animal question thus becomes a test of ontology: rather than asserting a resemblance between humans and animals, it compels us to ask what conception of being makes it possible to harm certain bodies without recognizing that the world itself has been affected. From this perspective, the text reconstructs four shifts. First, following Derrida, it examines how the singular “the animal” and the response/reaction opposition secure the metaphysical privilege of the “proper of man”. Second, with Merleau-Ponty, it shows that world is not reducible to sovereign representation, but is articulated as fleshly orientation, habit, and sensible reversibility. Third, the cat’s gaze in Derrida and Plumwood’s account of predation expose the vulnerability of the human subject. Finally, sympoiesis makes it possible to think multispecies justice from material co-belonging rather than human exception.