"Would you buy a cat's fur?": La soledad de los animales (2014), by Daniel Rodríguez Barrón

Abstract

The objective of this text is to analyze the existing tensions in the relationship between
animality and human society raised by the Mexican author Daniel Rodríguez Barrón in his
novel La soledad de los Animales (2014), especially when he describes the way in which the
industry and the market determine the tragic fate of non-human beings. Methodologically
speaking, the reflections of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, developed in the book The
Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), are used to point out the systematic recurrence of
animal control and the validity of a civilizing frontier that it separates humanity from the
fauna and that, frequently, it seems to deny or ignore everything that unfolds on the other
side. The foregoing, then, in order to conclude and point out that La soledad de los animales
––in the context of recent Mexican literature–– is a rather complex, critical and devastating
work, which describes the interests of the capitalist development model and, likewise, the
schemes of that anthropocentric paradigm that minimizes the role of the rest of the living
species.