Faith and pomp in the post-flood: animal becoming, and human abjection in The submerged language by Manoel Herzog

Abstract

This article is an exercise in transdisciplinary thinking in the field of Law and Literature, but which has as its theoretical paradigm the thought of Giorgio Agamben, particularly in the books The Open: The man, the animal, the series Homo Sacer and Nudity, and as critical material Manoel Herzog's romance The Submerged Language. This work, located within of what has been called cli-fi/Anthropecene Fiction, proposes to think about the unthinkable that the earth-world must be completely different after the rise of the oceans by the action of man. In this fiction, in which the animal becoming and the abjection of the human are consequences of legal norms by the believer/junky duality, and social distinctions allow those who enjoy privileges to search for the satisfaction of an ox hunger, revealing the arbitrary and exceptional political nature that characterizes contemporary biopolitical societies. The methodology undertaken was transdisciplinarity, with bibliographic research as its procedure.