Biopolítica, Animalidad y Máquina Antropológica en la Obra de Horacio Quiroga

This work examines the short stories of Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga within a biopolitical frame as it relates to the representations of animals in the texts. It delineates two corpora of stories where animals are presented as real or metaphor and a second where they make use of human speech and are the protagonists of the stories. In both, the relationship between animals and humans is studied in connection to how Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine demarcates the difference between lives to make live and to let die. Quiroga’s work problematizes this differentiation in the bodies of human and non-human animals, but relies on the same mechanisms of exclusion as early XX century Southern Cone society to establish the rearticulated hierarchies. However, in stories where close proximity to real animals in the lives of his human characters occur in proximity to death, the machine is suspended and traces of different organizations of lives and bodies are displayed.