Embodied Communication and Interspecies Justice
Description
This book advances a bold phenomenological foundation for animal legal personhood. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, care ethics, ethology, Indigenous studies, and critical human-animal scholarship, Aubert develops a post-anthropocentric account of animals as embodied, intentional, communicative, and vulnerable agents. The book challenges dominant cognitive and anthropocentric criteria for inclusion in moral and legal communities, proposing instead an ethics grounded in attentiveness, relationality, and embodied communication. Through vivid multispecies encounters, Aubert identifies animals' fundamental interests and preference-based agency, advancing a framework for translating their standpoints into legal institutions. Interweaving analytic clarity with personal reflection, this interdisciplinary study reimagines animal rights, legal subjecthood, and ecological care for the Anthropocene, offering an innovative path forward for law, ethics, and environmental humanities.
Reviews / Votes
"Anna Aubert's book is a personal, beautifully written, and vivid exploration of animals' experiences, agency, and relationships. It offers an inspiring and much-needed revision for building more respectful and deeply caring ways of coexisting with animals through ethics and law, drawing readers into the richness of their individual lives with vivid detail, sensitivity, and compassion. A timely, original, and important book." (Marc Bekoff, author of "The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy-and Why They Matter" (2024))
"In this outstanding book, Anna Aubert adopts a post-anthropocentric ethics to imagine and defend 'rights
with
and
for
animals,' inviting us to see non-human beings as individuals capable of teaching us much on interspecies relations. Drawing on numerous intriguing philosophical, juridical, ethological, literary, and artistic reflections, Aubert crafts a kaleidoscopic reflection on a living world, and reshapes our crystalized notions of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, communication, vulnerability, agency, and empathy. The result is a fascinating and original work that opens new avenues of discussion for contemporary studies on animal lives." (Maria Esther Maciel, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
More details
Person
Anna Caramuru Pessôa Aubert is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, working on animal farming and climate change within the Brazilian constitutional landscape.
Content
Chapter 1. Introducing the book.- Part I - Phenomenological considerations for human-animal ethics.- Chapter 2. Human-centred animal ethics.- Chapter 3. Depicting animals through phenomenology.- Chapter 4. Phenomenological considerations for an animal ethics.- Part II - Listening to animals.- Chapter 5. Collaboration.- Chapter 6. Trauma.- Chapter 7. Love.- Chapter 8. Care.- Part III - Crafting animal law in a post-anthropocentric world.- Chapter 9. Turning to law.- Chapter 10. Imagining rights with and for animals.- Chapter 11. Autonomy of the agentic body-subject.- Chapter 12. The 'agency' turn. Conclusion.