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RESUMEN: Nudo de tensión entre vida biológica e historicidad, la animalidad recorre la serie de mataderos que la crítica argentina ha indagado como ficción soberana, pautada por el dualismo político. La polarización de 1840 plasmada en El matadero de Echeverría, con titubeos narrativos frente a voces y cuerpos animalizados del sector popular, retorna desde mediados del siglo XX en versiones de la dicotomía civilización-barbarie, que mantienen la distinción naturaleza-cultura y las coordenadas de historicidad antropocéntrica, como la crónica de Walsh que en 1967 enmienda el reparto clasista de Echeverría. El umbral crítico de la vida (Agamben) emerge en reescrituras recientes del matadero, donde el flujo del capital atraviesa no solo el cuerpo del trabajador sino lo viviente. Un cuento de Kohan (2009) y una novela de Maia (2013) descubren bajo la dicotomía la complejidad de pasajes entre animales y humanos, donde indagan las economías de relaciones entre vidas protegidas y abandonadas. Confrontando las conflictividades culturales argentina y brasileña, marcadas por el peso de economías agroexportadoras y el dualismo como control de mezclas, estos relatos de trabajadores del ganado inquieren lo difuso del borde vida-muerte tras dos siglos de progreso humanista en América Latina. ABSTRACT: Animality, a knot of tension between biological life and historicity, runs through the series of slaughterhouses that Argentine critics have investigated as sovereign fiction, guided by political dualism. The 1840 polarization embodied in Echeverría´s El matadero (The Slaughterhouse), with narrative hesitations about voices and animalized bodies of popular sector, has returned since the middle of the 20th century in versions of the civilization-barbarity dichotomy, which maintain the nature-culture distinction and the coordinates of anthropocentric historicity, such as Walsh's chronicle that in 1967 amends the class distribution of Echeverría. The critical threshold of life (Agamben) emerges in recent rewritings of the slaughterhouse, where the flow of capital passes through not only the body of the worker but also the living being. A story by Kohan (2009) and a novel by Maia (2013) discover under dichotomy the complexity of passages between animals and humans, where they investigate the economies of relationships between protected and abandoned lives. By confronting Argentine and Brazilian cultural conflicts, both marked by the weight of agro-export economies and dualism as control of mixtures, these stories of cattle workers inquire about the diffuseness of the life-death border after two centuries of humanist progress in Latin America.

The article focuses on the recent debate, about gift and the non-market economies, born especially around the new lecture of classical texts of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi. The article is meant to show that the renewed interest is rooted in the contemporary crisis of relationships, of social ties, and in the effects of commodification of the utilitarian market economies. The theme of the gift is a narrative and theorethical tool to rethinking about the exchange and the social relationships throughout, both from the affective and private point of view than economical and collective too.