Sinnlichkeit und Entsinnlichung des Tötens

Ein Beitrag zur Grausamkeit, „Humanität“ und Mysophobie im Wiener Fleischergewerbe im Fin de Siècle

Abstract

The article examines the sensual dimension of skilled manual work in Viennese butcheries around 1900. At this time, kosher slaughtering was heavily criticised as anti-modern and archaic. Social, cultural and economic transformations had changed working practices, professional self-images and the ethics of butchers, and new medical perspectives had led to a diversification of human-animal-relations. In the middle of the 19th century modern killing practices had manifested themselves in the building of slaughterhouses, and had led to a rationalization of work and to a new biopolitical regulation of life and death. The occupation and utilization of “bare life” (Giorgio Agamben) desensitised the ideal of slaughtering and sharpened criticism of slaughter in a Jewish kosher way because it was characterised by a sensuality of killing animals that the so-called modern work denied. A new regime of production
not only established a radical asymmetry in human-animal relations, but also dynamised the cultural and emotional parameters of society in fin-de-siècle Vienna.