The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field interweaving three discourses: (1) Posthuman Thought, which investigates the ways global networks and inhuman socio-economic forces displace humanist and anthropocentric definitions of Man, and which rearticulates the human/non-human relation; (2) the biopolitical framework of thinkers such as Foucault, Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Wolfe, and Esposito, that studies the emergent form of biopower in today’s societies of control, whose object is no longer the body but the forces of life itself; and (3) Critical Animal Studies, an academic-activist discourse that challenges the institutional and discursive violence inflicted on the environment, as well as on human and non-human animals. We’ll familiarize ourselves with each of these three discourses’ major texts, particularly with the political relation between the non-human and human forms of otherness (such as women, blacks, and homosexuals); we’ll study the aesthetic expressions of this relation in literature (for example, in the works of Kafka, Coetzee, and Safran-Foer), in film (For example, in the works of David Lynch, Ken Loach, and Denis Côté), and in activist art installations; and we’ll trace the genealogy of the “animal” in philosophical thought (from the Cynics and Aristotle in antiquity to that of Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben and others).