“Dogs Don’t Vote”: Diatribe and Animality in Peroratas, by Fernando Vallejo

Abstract

This article focuses on the animal rights diatribes included by Fernando Vallejo in Peroratas (2013), a volume that contains speeches and editorial texts published in both Spain and Latin America. On the one hand, the article analyses to what end he directs his diatribes. On the other, it proposes a reading in which Vallejo’s animal rights tirades are distanced from the dialogic will that characterises the diatribe and instead conform to a style of attack and deprecation. In fact, his drawn-out speeches demand not legislation that attends to a dignified life, but a transposition that takes rights from humans and grants them to wild and domestic animals. While they may well be read from a perspective that exclusively privileges animal rights, I propose to read Vallejo’s diatribes with an eye towards a cynical vocation – with important ironic elements – derived from their regionalist filiation. More broadly, I begin with an eye to the way in which they oppose ‘positive thinking’ and indirectly question the ethic of happiness that rules in certain cultural discourses.

Keywords:

• Diatribe
• Fernando Vallejo
• irony
• cynicism
• positive thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is worth recalling here that the Greek term “kyon” (κυνικός), which corresponds to “dog”, is the etymological root of “cynicism” (Rivano 1991, 1).

2 The very biography of the French philosopher alerts us to the dangers of this tool: he lost his main sponsor – Frederick the Great, King of Prussia – precisely because of a famous diatribe about courtly life (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, from 1755).

3 This includes the collection Contra, from the Mexican publisher Tumbona, which published essays against something – against children, against an active life, against the “México lindo” discourse, etcetera – in short and brief formats, and even the collection Nuevos Cuadernos Anagrama, which operates according to similar editorial logics and policies.

4 ¿Pero por qué les estoy hablando de perros y de compasión y misericordia por unos simples animales a ustedes que (…) hoy no pasan de ser unos degradados morales?

Dios no existe y me importa un comino que se vaya al diablo este planeta. Para mí, simplemente, los animales son mi prójimo, los quiero y considero una solemne ruindad ir a matarlos por diversión. ¡Pero qué! Educados como hemos sido los colombianos y los españoles en la infame religión de Cristo que no tuvo ni una sola palabra de compasión por ellos.

¿Y los toros? ¿Los toros, que sufren y sienten como yo, compañeros míos en el dolor de la vida, mis hermanos? ¿Ellos qué? Torturados, acuchillados y befados (…) ¿Quién se duele de los toros y ha levantado su voz en Colombia antes que nadie, aun con riesgo de su vida, para que no los sigan masacrando?

5 La vida animal conjuga modos de hacer visibles cuerpos y relaciones entre cuerpos: desafía presupuestos sobre la especificidad y la esencia de lo humano, y desbarata su forma misma a partir de una inestabilidad figurativa que problematiza la definición de lo humano como evidencia y ontología.

6 “Animals are not things and they have a soul and they are neither negotiable nor manipulable and there is a hierarchy among them established based on the complexity of their nervous systems, due to which they suffer and feel like we do: the hierarchy of pain. In this hierarchy, mammals, the Linnaean class to which we pertain, are on top. The higher an animal is in the hierarchy of pain, the more we are obliged to respect it. Horses, cows, dogs, dolphins, whales, and rats are mammals like us and have two eyes like us, a nose like us, intestines like us, they are our companions in life’s horror, we have to respect them, they are our neighbours. And god forbid that the clever and ingenious that never seem to miss an opportunity come now crying to me, to justify their way of thinking and living, that then we shouldn’t kill even the mosquitos. Between mosquitos and whales there lies an abyss: that of their nervous systems” (Vallejo 2013, 61).

7 Infame la religión judía que no respetaba a los animales, e infame la religión cristiana que nació de ella. ¿Cómo se puede sacrificar un cordero, que siente y sufre como nosotros, en el altar de Dios, que no existe?

¡Cómo vamos a comparar a un japonés – que es un hombrecito bajito, feíto, amarillo, cruel – con una ballena que es un animal grande y hermoso!

Y sin embargo candidatos altruistas al Premio Nobel de medicina, médicos y científicos generosos, siguen experimentando con ellos, con los chimpancés y los mandriles y los macacos inoculándoles el virus del SIDA dizque para producir una vacuna dizque para salvar dizque a la humanidad. ¡Mentirosos! ¡Pendejos! La humanidad no tiene salvación, siempre ha estado perdida. Que se jodan los drogadictos de jeringa y los maricas si se infectaron de sida, suya es la culpa. Y dejen tranquilos a los simios.

8 When D.C. Muecke (1982, 4) develops the idea of “corrective ironies”, it is by attending to those that have a clearly indicated target and which seek to amend a behaviour or action: that is, to correct something. Hutcheon re-elaborates Muecke’s concept, further indicating the levels of affective charge that diverse corrective ironies would have and how they tend to be associated with satire (1992, 226).

9 “Those who sought to promote enlightenment in such a society fought a losing battle” (1987, 11), Sloterdijk writes as regards cynicism during the Weimar Republic, precisely describing the defeat of a certain set of enlightenment ideals that may well be read into many of Vallejo’s texts, where this “final grammarian”, this man who symbolically maintains reason’s torch, is abandoned in a world where he has no one with whom to communicate in those terms – nor any way to do so. In fact, he prefers animals to interlocutors incapable of sustaining enlightenment ideals.

10 Despite the concept easily lending itself to error (Schmidt-Welle 2012), regionalist literature, at least in this context, does not refer so much to that which emphasises or is produced in certain regions. Instead, it refers to that which problematises indigenismo or country life at the beginnings of the twentieth century.

11 El animal remite menos a una forma, un cuerpo formado, que a una interrogación insistente sobre la forma como tal.

12 Cuando hay seis mil millones de personas, o sea un seis con nueve ceros a la derecha, uno es un cero a la izquierda. No valemos nada: ni un cacahuate. Hoy vale más un chimpancé que un hombre. O un gorila o un orangután. Están como a doscientos cincuenta mil dólares. ¿Y para qué queremos tanta gente si no nos vamos a acostar con ellos?

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (11170311).

Notes on contributors

Gonzalo Maier

Gonzalo Maier is Associate Professor at Universidad Andrés Bello, Chile. He holds a PhD from Radboud Universiteit, The Netherlands. He was the co-editor of Todos los mundos posibles: Una geografía de Daniel Guebel (Beatriz Viterbo, 2016) and some of his articles have appeared in Chasqui, Neophilologus, Symposium, Confluencia, among other journals. E-mail: [email protected]