Hippopolis/Cynopolis.

This article explores alternative narrations of the political and the cosmopolitical. It focuses on two animal images: the horse and the dog. Animal images have been commonly used in political literature, leading to such acclaimed masterpieces as Pancatantra, Attar's Conference of the Birds, and more recently Orwell's Animal Farm. This article, however, looks beyond the instrumental usage of animal images and examines the theoretical potential their symbolic exchange establishes and the popular imaginative charge it installs in (cosmo)political discourse. It is concerned with what these narratives and their investigation enable in terms of political practice, and what their exclusion and marginalisation disables. For example, the enabling of political analysis that looks beyond the science of government and order and into the everyday impact of mythic and psychic states; or the framing of the cosmopolitan debate essentially around a Western human rights discourse that excludes animal life, or ecological and theosophic knowledge. Moving from the horse-rule exemplifications of ancient Greek mythography to the politicisation of the dog image in the cynic way of life, the paper finally turns to a mythic depiction of cosmopolis as the guiding of the chariot of Zeus, which involves the task of mediating the world through spiritual or cosmic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]