법의 새로운 기초로서 동물권 담론

This article deals with animal rights discourse and Sigmund Freud’s theory of primordial horde in relation to the interdisciplinary study of law, mythology and animal studies. Animals became invisible from human life following modernization and rationalization. However, since the 1970s, animals have come back into the philosophical discourse, evoking changes in law. The rapid growth of animal rights discourse is one of the impressive examples of those changes. There is a possibility that this phenomenon might be interpreted as the restoration of mythological thinking, which rendered animals as intrinsically familiar beings to humans, since granting rights to animals inevitably makes the status of animals closer to that of humans. If we can say that the essence of animal rights discourse has deep connections to mythological thinking, the law which develops animal rights cannot help but reflect on its rationality-centered traditions. Because, for human reason to be established, mythological thinking was repressed and accused of being pre-modern. In here, animal rights discourse might contribute to a new proposal for the basis of law. This article analyzes the treatment of animals as ‘thing’ metaphors in law, and tries to address psychoanalytical reasons why such a metaphor was formed and maintained and what kinds of problems it could bring. Furthermore, the author also discusses Freud’s case studies, zoologists’ intersubjective experiences with animals, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of ‘animal-becoming’, in regards to grounding new concepts of legal personality. These theories contribute to the establishment of the concept of relational personhood in diverse dimensions-both unconscious and conscious-and to the expansion the status of legal personhood to animals. Lastly, the article briefly addresses the meaning of Freud’s theory of primal horde, which Lacan called modern myth, in relation to jurisprudence.