Where is the animal?

 posted by Katherine Perlo   It is important to explain how the subaltern state of animals, even more than of subaltern humans, is reinforced by control of language and ideas, or epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice , as outlined by Miranda Fricker (2007), consists of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The first “ occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word”, for example due to racial prejudice, while the second “occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker, 2007, p. 1), for example due to the absence of relevant social and political concepts. We may see the idea as foreshadowed by Marx’s observation that “the ruling ideas of any age are those of the ruling class,” who exert “control over the means of intellectual production” (quoted in Jessop, 2014, p. 5-6). This is seen i...