Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic (continuous publication)
Special Dossier

Putting animal parts into humans: a political analysis

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Johannes Kögel
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg
Bio

Published 2025-11-18

Keywords

  • biopolitics,
  • xenotransplantation,
  • animals,
  • humanization

Copyright (c) 2025 Johannes Kögel

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

KÖGEL, Johannes. Putting animal parts into humans: a political analysis. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 2, p. e61076, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.61076. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/61076. Acesso em: 15 jan. 2026.
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Abstract

The roles of animals—particularly pigs and nonhuman primates—in xenotransplantation reveal complex ethical and symbolic dynamics. Nonhuman primates, due to their cognitive proximity to humans, were increasingly positioned as recipients rather than organ sources, reflecting an ethical “hierarchical upgrade.” Pigs, genetically engineered to provide organs, embody an ambiguous status: highly alienated through biotechnological manipulation and sterile confinement, as “biocapital” commodified and embedded in market logics. Their “humanization”, besides a change of their genetic-make, also features as standing in for humans, even though in a different role than their primate counterparts. The ethical connotation of this may benefit those animals in the long run. Recognizing animal alterity—not merely as biological bodies but as intentional subjects—as, for example, suggested by Amerindian metaphysics, reshapes the understanding of identity and medical practice amid molecular and semiotic conceptions of life. These considerations call for nuanced reflection on the boundaries between nature, culture, and species in contemporary biomedicine.

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