Vercors and Michel Onfray’s Post-Monotheistic Reworking of the Judeo-Christian Concept of the ‘Animal’

This article investigates Michel Onfray and Vercors’s re-evaluation of our antiquated understanding of humanity that partly originates from Judeo-Christian ideology and Cartesian philosophy. With a strong dose of scientific realism, they discuss our primary animality linking us to evolutionary processes that were billions of years in the making. When empirical evidence is considered, Onfray and Vercors illustrate how the Judeo-Christian, Cartesian, dichotomous vision of the ‘animal’ defined in opposition to the human collapses. As opposed to being surrounded by soulless automata that do not possess any of our ‘propers’, we are immersed in a sea of other-than-human semiosis.