This paper compares the (cultural) necessity of death/dying, perceived as a sequence of Imaginary--Real--Symbolic, to Van Gennep's three-staged rite of passage. If this logic is disrupted, the subject responsible necessitates attribution of special social status and can come to embody the imagery of a life worth living. This philosophical framework, which includes epistemologies borrowed from medical anthropology, demonstrates there is more for humans to lose than biological (Real) life; a far greater loss is to exist without (Symbolic) reason to live. A critique of prevalent quantitative methodology in assessing links between spirituality and the human body is added.

This article deals with the bewildering question of the human fascination with evil: how is it possible that what is frightening, that what arouses dread and horror, is simultaneously fascinating, inviting of the spectatorial gaze, and the embodiment of terrifying enjoyment? The tremendum and fascinas coincide and irreversibly overlap in Kant’s and Hegel’s respective philosophies of art, defined as an ability to produce sublime effects, effects that are – like the acts of monsters themselves – majestic, immeasurable and unspeakable. The discourse of theoretical psychoanalysis is employed here to demonstrate and account for the fact that the subject willingly participates in, and enjoys, his or her own horror. The sublime object becomes uncanny through our detecting in it the representation of our own wish, the Lacanian object petit a. In this sense, the evil core of monstrosity appears to be nothing less than the fulfilment of the subject’s wish to stand firm on the ethics of desire, the ethical programme formulated by Jacques Lacan. In turn, psychoanalytical rereadings of Kant develop two modalities of the human artistic predicament: distinguishing moral acts from ethical ones, the paper differentiates ‘moral art’ from ‘ethical art’, a distinction according to which morality corresponds to a pacified, socialized, ‘compromised’ or ‘pathological’ sublime, a sublimity known also as beauty, and ethics to an excessive, unsocialized sublime, a sublimity known also as the monstrous. The first is governed by the pleasure principle that aims at ‘civilized discontent’, the latter by the principle of desire that aims at enjoyment.

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Over the past three decades, the veterinary profession has faced a cultural shift towards postspeciesism that requires a reassessment of the foundations of the existing distinctions between human and non-human animals proclaimed by the speciesism paradigm, which represents institutionalized discrimination against species and recognizes only the subjectivity of humans. Based on ethnographic observations in anthropological fieldwork and using speciesism/postspeciesism distinction, we aimed to explain the main causes of small animal practitioners’ work-related stress and apply humanistic knowledge to recommend ways to alleviate the negative effects of the work environment. The explanatory model of disease, illness, and sickness, the example of the concept of family, and the circumstances of the feminization of the veterinary profession are discussed to illustrate the divergence between speciesist naturalistic veterinary knowledge and the postspeciesist cultural framework and its consequences. By failing to accommodate the changing values towards animals and by failing to challenge the anthropocentric hierarchy of values, the speciesist rationale of the veterinary profession contributes to many of the problems faced by practicing veterinarians. The incorporation of a modern moral-philosophical mindset towards animals may not even be possible because veterinary science is subject to a paradigm that is irreversibly tied to institutional discrimination against species and defies reflection on veterinary science itself. However, the veterinary profession has a privileged position in establishing an alternative ontological thinking and an alternative conception of “animal life.” Anthropological knowledge was applied to anticipate further intervention of social and cultural sciences in the problems of small animal practitioners. Rather than further diversifying and increasing expectations towards veterinarians by expecting them to acquire additional skills, we propose another practitioner who can support, mediate, and enhance veterinary performance – the cultural anthropologist. With their deep knowledge of cultural differences and social dynamics, they can collaborate with veterinarians to act as a liaison between cultures, paradigms, and species.