Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction 9780804796538

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T H I N K I N G

T H R O U G H

A N I M A L S

T H I N K I N G

T H R O U G H

A N I M A L S Id e ntit y, D i f f e re n c e, In dis tin c tio n

M A T T H E W

C A L A R C O

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 15 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Calarco, Matthew, 1972– author. Thinking through animals : identity, difference, indistinction / Matthew Calarco. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8047-9404-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Animals (Philosophy) 2. Human-animal relationships— Philosophy. 3. Animal welfare—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. B105.A55C34 2015 121'.3—dc23 2015005333 ISBN 978-0-8047-9653-8 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Introduction   1 1   Identity  

6

2   Difference  

28

3   Indistinction  

Notes   71

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INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is to provide a brief account of some of the central theoretical and philosophical trends in the rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies. As work in critical animal studies has come increasingly into contact with different disciplines and social movements, I have received numerous requests for such a book from students, colleagues, correspondents, and activists involved in various social justice struggles. These individuals are generally committed to rethinking our attitudes toward and interactions with animals but tend to be relatively new to the wide variety of theoretical frameworks and positions on offer in the field. I have written this book with that specific audience in mind. As such, my aim here is neither to persuade the reader of the necessity for basic changes in our ideas and practices involving animals, nor is it to provide a general introduction to the wide variety of interdisciplinary topics that are discussed in the field. Other authors have carried out such work ably and admirably.1 What I do aim to provide is a basic theoretical grid that will help readers gain access to some of the main philosophical themes in critical animal studies so they can eventually take up the original works in more depth on their own.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

I have used the term “critical animal studies” here, which has become the dominant label for the kind of perspective adopted in this book. Critical animal studies is often distinguished from other approaches to animal issues, such as animal studies, animal ethics, and so on, with critical animal studies understood as being more explicitly and radically political and the latter approaches as moderately political or even apolitical.2 I will not place a great deal of weight on this distinction in what follows, as I would suggest that transformative potential regarding animal issues can be found in various approaches to animal studies and even in discourses that are not explicitly radical. Moreover, given the interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of much of the work done in critical animal studies, there is a need to engage with a wide array of traditions, texts, and strategies that go well beyond the particular theoretical traditions that are sometimes thought exclusively to undergird the field. That being said, the line of thought I pursue here is animated primarily by the same kinds of ethical and political concerns characteristic of people working in critical animal studies. Thus, I explain each of the frameworks on their own terms, but my critical assessments of them are driven by what I take to be their respective ethical and political potentials and shortcomings. Perhaps a note on my personal involvement in struggles for animal justice will help to explain further the orientation that I take in the book. I first started to learn about the factory farming system, experimentation on animals, and other forms of animal exploitation in my mid-­teens. Shortly thereafter I became a vegan, and I have been passionately involved in animal justice and related social justice movements ever since. Over the past two and a half decades I have worked with activists and organizations of all sorts, from small collectives and local grassroots struggles to large national and international organizations and campaigns. I doubt that a single day has passed in that time when I have not given something of my time and energies to ani-

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mal issues. My hope has always been to contribute something to those groups and organizations that make concrete changes in the lives of animals and that provide animals with the space for richer and more joyful lives. At the same time, I have found it necessary to reflect critically and theoretically—­which is to say, philosophically—­upon the kinds of frameworks and strategies that have become dominant in pro-­a nimal politics. When one is deeply involved in political struggles, it can be hard to detect lingering dogmas or shortcomings inside those struggles. Philosophy and other fields of critical thought provide us with tools that help to identify some of these limitations and thereby to create the conditions for living and thinking differently. The frameworks analyzed here all have this kind of potential in differing ways and to differing degrees. Thus, even as I am critical of certain ideas and positions, I am not dismissive of the thinkers and activists who have formulated them. I have learned a great deal from all of them, and I believe that they all have important things to offer us in the present. As you read through the chapters that follow, I hope you will take the same charitable approach to the frameworks under discussion. The main goal should be not simply to assess each framework in view of its internal coherence or argumentative rigor and accept or reject it accordingly. Instead, I would suggest trying to get inside—­to inhabit—­each perspective in an open and charitable manner. Linger with each perspective for a while, and explore how it might allow us to think differently and, more important, how it might enable us—­both humans and animals—­to live differently. Allow me to provide in closing a brief overview of the chapters you are about to read. I recommend reading the chapters in order, as they build on one another in important ways. In Chapter 1, I examine the key notions that constitute the foundation for many of the modern movements for animal liberation and

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animal rights. I call this approach to animal issues the identity approach, inasmuch as it founds its ethical and political frameworks on human-­animal identity. While identity theorists do not maintain that human beings and animals are identical in every respect, they do argue that our shared evolutionary history has given rise to fundamental similarities in terms of certain ethically relevant traits, such as sentience, subjectivity, and intentionality. If we accept the basic ethical principle of treating likes alike, then this would imply, identity theorists argue, that we need fundamentally to rethink our attitudes toward and interactions with animals who are similar to human beings in ethically relevant ways. I close the chapter with an examination of the central ethical and political upshots of this framework as well as some of its critical limitations. Chapter 2 engages with the difference approach to animal studies found in the writings of philosopher Jacques Derrida and related theorists. Difference theorists in general tend to have a critical relation to standard conceptions of human nature and ethics and seek to develop in their place a more relational conception of human beings based on the radical singularity, or radical difference, of individuals. Pro-­a nimal theorists in this tradition have noted that these critical reworkings of our basic ideas about human nature and ethics also call into question traditional ideas about the human/animal distinction and ethical relations with animals. They argue that a thought of difference, when pursued in view of its implications for animals, can generate an expansive notion of ethics that acknowledges the importance of human-­ animal relations and that respects the singularity of animals. While this framework offers many important insights as well as correctives to other animal philosophies, I suggest that it contains certain shortcomings in terms of its approach to the human/ animal distinction and its politics. Chapter 3 examines the indistinction approach, which aims to think about human-­animal relations in a manner that deempha-

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sizes the importance of human uniqueness and the human/animal distinction. Indistinction theorists and activists explore some of the surprising ways in which human beings find themselves to be like animals (which is rather different from the identity approach, which stresses how animals are like human beings), while also examining the varied ways in which animals demonstrate their own forms of agency, creativity, and potential. The political task for indistinction theorists consists primarily in trying to shrink the influence of the institutional and economic practices that limit animal potentiality and to create other ways of life that allow for both human beings and animals to flourish. Although this approach, like the previous two, faces certain challenges, I argue that emerging forms of non-­a nthropocentric, intersectional animal politics associated with the discourse on indistinction offer promising means for addressing these challenges and for advancing struggles for animal justice. I thank Brian Massumi, Kelly Oliver, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the manuscript. My gratitude also goes to Emily-­Jane Cohen for her unflagging support for this project, and to Christina Venturacci for helping me work through many of the ideas discussed herein. I dedicate this book to my students, past and present.

1 IDENTITY

One of the defining characteristics of our age is the radical breakdown of the human/animal distinction. In both the popular media and in scholarly scientific literature, we are shown almost weekly new pieces of evidence suggesting that the barriers separating humans from animals are not as impermeable as we once thought them to be. Behaviors and capacities widely believed to be unique among human beings are increasingly being discovered in varying forms and to varying degrees among a wide number of animal species. There are numerous scientific and anecdotal accounts of such breakdowns: primates passing along novel behaviors through cultural means; elephants grieving and mourning for dead companions; cross-­species altruism among various animal species; birds creating elaborate ruses to deceive other animals; squirrels with precise long-­term memories; certain primate and bird species demonstrating self-­awareness; tool use among a number of terrestrial and marine animals; ravens with stunning capacities for human facial and vocal recognition; confined animals developing novel means for escaping their confinement—­and this is just a brief, random list.1 Of course, some scientists and critics question whether animals can actually do some of these things and suggest that such 6

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accounts of animal behavior are guilty of unjustified anthropomorphism; other critics argue that there are different, multifactorial ways of distinguishing human beings from animals that would answer some of these challenges to human uniqueness. We need not wade into the fine details of these debates here.2 But we can note that, however the debates turn out with regard to any given claim concerning animal behavior, it is clear that facile attempts to maintain that all human beings are exclusively in possession of some particular trait or set of traits that nonhuman animals lack (language, self-­consciousness, tool use, awareness of death, or some other capacity) are becoming ever less tenable. PHILOSOPHICAL ANIMALS

The fundamental breakdown in the effort to delimit sharply human beings from animals is an important intellectual and scientific development for the philosophers and theorists discussed in this chapter. They view their own work as carrying through on the philosophical implications of this event. And in so doing, they also see themselves as working in opposition to a long-­ standing, dogmatic tendency within the Western philosophical tradition to deny fundamental similarities among human beings and animals. Now, to state that philosophy has traditionally been dogmatic about animals might seem strange at first blush, for what attracts many people to philosophy is its insistence on rigorously calling into question the dogmas and unthinking prejudices of its time. And, while philosophy’s historical reputation for being a leading voice of critical thought is often wholly deserved, on the issue of the distinction between humans and animals and the ethical worth of animals, it has unfortunately and frequently failed to live up to its more admirable ideals. In fact, in many ways, philosophy in the Western tradition has been one of the chief architects in constructing the traditional philosophical and ethical dogmas we have inherited concerning animals.

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Consider, for example, one of the founding figures of ancient Greek philosophy, Aristotle. According to Aristotle, animals are best understood as belonging to a naturalistic schema in which they are situated between plants and human beings and as being ultimately (if not entirely) placed in the service of human beings. In Aristotle’s schema, plants have life, animals have life and perception, and human beings have both characteristics along with rationality (the Greek word for rationality here is logos, a rich term referring to the capacity for discursive language, reason, and other similar traits). Given this ascending scale of the complexity of life, and given that nature makes nothing “in vain,” Aristotle suggests that it is evident “that plants are for the sake of animals, and that the other animals are for the sake of human beings, domestic ones both for using and eating, and most but not all wild ones for food and other kinds of support, so that clothes and the other tools may be got from them.”3 Animals’ lack of rationality also leads Aristotle to insist that they are not genuinely political. Animals are equipped only with “voice” (phōnē, akin to mere sound or code), which is capable of expressing pleasure and pain but is insufficient for political life. Human beings, by contrast, are capable of rational discourse (again, the Greek term is logos), a capacity that allows them to express “what is beneficial or harmful, and hence also what is just or unjust.” As Aristotle goes on to note, “[I]t is peculiar to human beings, in comparison to the other animals, that they alone have perception of what is good or bad, just or unjust, and the rest. And it is community in these that makes a household and a city-­state.”4 Aristotle’s teleological schema and his claims about animal capacities might appear, from our contemporary perspective, rather outmoded; but his assertions that animals lack rationality and can be seen as resources for human beings have nevertheless dominated the vast majority of subsequent philosophical discourse in the West up to the present. Another influential discourse on the human/animal distinction is provided by the founding figure of modern Western phi-

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losophy, René Descartes. Starting from mechanistic premises, Descartes argues that animals (although alive and capable of sensation) are essentially indistinguishable from machines and that their behavior can be fully explained without recourse to notions such as mind and self-­awareness. Animals in his account are complex automata, beings that can react to external stimuli but lack the ability to know that such reactions are taking place. Cognizant that this kind of mechanistic explanatory framework might sweep up human behavior within its scope, Descartes maintains that even though human bodies can be largely explained using the same premises, we are uniquely co-­ constituted by a second substance, mind, by which he means rational, discursive, reflective self-­consciousness. Proof of the lack of humanlike mind in animals, Descartes argues, is to be found in the dual fact that animals are able neither to “make their thoughts understood” through language nor to solve problems in creative and novel ways beyond the mechanical “disposition of their organs.”5 Given that animals lack mind and a sense of self, experimenting on them (for which Descartes is notorious) and killing them for food pose no ethical problems. As Descartes notes in a letter to Henry More, his position “is not so much cruel to animals as indulgent to human beings . . . since it absolves them from the suspicion of crime when they eat or kill animals.”6 As with Aristotle, Descartes’s ideas about the human/ animal distinction appear rather untenable today, given what we now know about animal cognition. Yet the notion that there is a sharp difference between human beings and animals; that rationality, mind, and self-­consciousness are the chief markers of that difference; and that such differences justify the exclusion of animals from ethical consideration are ideas that remain hegemonic in certain quarters today. Let’s consider one final example of traditional, Western philosophical ideas about the human/animal distinction, this one from the famous Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. As is

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the case with Aristotle and Descartes, Kant denies that animals possess rationality and self-­consciousness. Indeed, it is the human capacity to think and act reflectively and rationally that, according to Kant, renders human beings altogether different in “rank and dignity” from all animal and other nonrational beings and that disallows us from reducing human beings merely to the status of instruments to be used for accomplishing our projects.7 Kant insists that inasmuch as animals lack autonomy and moral agency, they can be justifiably used as mere instruments, as mere means to human ends, whether in the form of food or as subjects of painful experiments. To be sure, he does not believe that the lack of autonomy among animals licenses human beings to treat them in any way they might see fit. Departing from Descartes, Kant cautions us against unnecessarily cruel treatment of animals, recognizing that “animal nature has analogies to human nature” and that an animal who has served humans well “deserves reward.”8 But his chief concern here is not with what violence toward animals does to animals themselves; rather, his worry is that mistreatment of animals might lead to the mistreatment of other human beings. Hence, Kant argues for the necessity of cultivating “tender feelings toward dumb animals” that will ultimately assist us in “developing humane feelings toward mankind.”9 With Kant, then, we find yet another philosophical framework that seeks to justify the exclusion of animals from the ethical and political community based on their supposed lack of a particular capacity. This very brief overview of three central philosophers’ views on the human/animal distinction illustrates the claim made earlier that many of the major figures in the tradition have offered rather disappointing and uninspiring ideas about animals and their ethical standing. Not only have influential philosophers repeated many of the anthropocentric tendencies of the dominant culture, but in many cases they have sought to provide a rigorous justification for many of our most violent modes of inter-

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action with animals. There are certainly instances in the history of Western philosophy of counter-­d iscourses that challenge anthropocentrism and that question injustice toward animals, so we ought not paint an entirely negative picture of philosophy on the issue.10 However, it must be said that mainstream Western philosophy has served as more of an obstacle than an aid in helping us to think critically about the human/animal distinction and our attitudes toward animals. N E O -­D A R W I N I A N O N T O L O G Y

So, how might we begin to break out of the intellectual and practical framework inherited from the dominant discourses in the Western philosophical tradition? The pro-­a nimal philosophers we examine in the remainder of this chapter argue that the path beyond this limited framework is twofold. The first step is to update our ontology of the human/animal distinction. (By “ontology” is meant an account of the basic structure of and relations among beings, of the “basic fabric” of things; in the case at hand, the kind of ontology at issue concerns how human beings and animals are constituted and related.) The second step is to construct an ethics that does justice to this revised view of animal existence, an ethics that doesn’t simply seek to justify the status quo but endeavors to correct the dogmas and critical limitations that structure our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals. Let’s examine these two steps in turn. In terms of the human/animal distinction, the philosophers we’re examining here all share an ontological perspective influenced by Charles Darwin that stresses the fundamental continuities found among human beings and animals. Rather than maintaining a sharp break between human and animal life (as Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant all do), Darwin places human beings squarely among animals, arguing that it is only human arrogance that would allow us to think we have non-­a nimal,

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non-­natural origins.11 Darwin is at great pains to demonstrate the phylogenetic continuity of all animals with life as a whole, and he stresses that there is “no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”12 To this end, Darwin seeks to demonstrate the similar emotional and behavioral lives of human beings and animals, thereby anticipating much of the cognitive ethological work mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.13 The image of human beings we receive from Darwin is thus one in which we fit squarely within and at the very late edge of a multipronged branch on the tree of life. In biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s illustrative phrase, human beings should be seen as a “tiny, late-­a rising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush.”14 That we should find such deep continuity among life-­forms as a whole, and among human beings and animals in particular, should come as no surprise if we start from an evolutionary perspective. One of Darwin’s chief insights is that differences between humans and animals are best explained as differences of degree rather than of kind. There are no huge leaps, abysses, or breaks between species; rather, humans, animals, and all life-­ forms are participating in the same story of life’s evolution, a story that stretches back some 3.5 billion years. Although, as a vestige of the philosophical and religious traditions of the West, we tend to think of “the human” as forming a separate, natural kind with certain essential traits that we uniquely possess, evolutionary biology has taught us to be critical of that way of thinking. To locate traits that are universally distributed among the human species but that do not appear to some degree in other species would be highly unusual; and even if such a trait or cluster of traits was to be found only among the human species, such a situation would be, as philosopher of biology David Hull notes, temporary and contingent.15 For identity theorists the chief lesson to derive from this evolutionary perspective is that a shift needs to be made away from a parochial focus on human unique-

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ness toward an understanding of how many basic human traits are found throughout the animal world. Identity theorists do not, of course, argue that human beings and animals are similar or identical in every single respect; but they do insist, on evolutionary grounds, that there is often a deep continuity among human beings and animals with respect to certain ethically salient traits and capacities, such as sentience, cognition, subjectivity, and so on. We will examine a few of these shared, ethically relevant traits in more detail later. EQUAL CONSIDER ATION OF INTERESTS

The second step used to overcome traditional dogmas concerning animals is the deployment of the principle of equal consideration of interests. This principle is common to many ethical frameworks—­in fact, many philosophers consider it to be the founding gesture of ethics per se. The basic idea behind the principle is that equal ethical consideration should be given to interests that are relevantly similar, regardless of the individual whose interests they might be. In pro-­animal theorist Gary Francione’s terms, equal consideration means “treating likes alike.”16 Thus, if an animal has interests (for example, in not being harmed, or not being removed from a particular habitat), the principle of equal consideration of interests suggests that we are called to take those interests into account in our ethical deliberations. The principle also implies that no argument is actually needed for extending ethical consideration to animals; they and all other beings who have interests deserve ethical consideration as a matter of principle. The burden of providing argumentation and reasons lies, instead, with those who deny consideration to animals (or any other individual who has interests). If we were to override or ignore animals’ interests, to treat their lives as mere means to our ends (to use Kant’s language), this principle suggests that we would need compelling reasons for doing so.

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To underscore the point made in the previous section, it is important to remember that pro-­a nimal theorists who work within a neo-­Darwinian framework do not wish to argue that human beings and animals are identical in every respect, only that there are certain similarities or identities present among human beings and animals that are ethically relevant. In this case, what human beings and animals both share are interests. Thus, if ethics asks us to take the interests of others into account, and if animals have interests, then we would need some nonarbitrary, compelling reason for not including animals’ interests in our deliberations. When we arbitrarily override other human beings’ interests—­perhaps because of differences in their race, class, gender, or intellectual limitations—­this is said to indicate an unjustifiable prejudice (racism, classism, and so on). The same is true if we override the interests of animals simply because they are not members of our species; the unjustifiable prejudice here would be a kind of speciesism, or granting of unjustified privilege to our own species. At bottom, then, the principle of equal consideration of interests is used to claim that beings who are identical or fundamentally similar in ethically relevant ways deserve identical or fundamentally similar consideration. It is primarily this focus on the fundamental identity and similarity of humans and animals along ethical lines that gives rise to the label of identity I am using to describe the pro-­a nimal philosophers of this chapter. Let’s now turn to a brief examination of the work of three of the most influential philosophers who employ this approach: Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Paola Cavalieri. P H I L O S O P H I E S O F H U M A N - ­A N I M A L I D E N T I T Y

Peter Singer, an animal liberationist philosopher, works in the utilitarian ethical tradition of such thinkers as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. As a utilitarian, Singer argues that the chief ethical task is to maximize utility, or in

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more common language, to bring about “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Sometimes referred to as the Greatest Happiness Principle, this utilitarian norm aims at increasing in an impartial manner the amount of happiness, pleasure, or preference satisfaction among all of those who are affected by one’s actions.17 To be affected by another’s actions is to have some stake in how one is treated and to have preferences for one state of affairs over another. Utilitarians refer to this broad capacity for being affected, and the more specific capacity for feeling pleasure and pain, as being sentient.18 We commonly and uncontroversially attribute sentience to most human beings and consider this trait important for questions of ethical consideration; but the key question in the context of our discussion is whether animals are sentient and belong to the community of those who are affected by one’s actions. Consistent with Darwinian premises, Singer views sentience as an evolutionary adaptation and argues that it is found not just among human beings but among a wide variety of animals as well.19 The shared sentient condition of human beings and animals would thus entail that, when one is engaged in ethical deliberation, animals are also deserving of having their interests equally taken into account. In other words, Singer combines an ontology of sentient human-­a nimal continuity with the ethical principle of equal consideration to arrive at the conclusion that all sentient animals—­whether human or nonhuman—­are equal. If we adopt this framework of equal consideration of interests for all sentient human and nonhuman animals, then serious questions arise concerning such practices as killing animals for food and experimenting on them for cosmetic testing and medical reasons. Can such practices be justified? Utilitarian theorists like Singer do not have absolute, ready-­made answers for such questions, and no particular practice involving the causing of pain is ruled out as such in advance within this framework. We arrive at answers to questions about how to act ethically from the

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utilitarian perspective only by calculating whether a given action or practice maximizes utility. With regard to such practices as eating and experimenting on animals, Singer argues that our widespread and most common ways of engaging in these activities cannot be justified, inasmuch as they do not maximize aggregate utility. In eating animals and experimenting on them, we sacrifice their most important preferences and interests (among the most important interests would be avoiding the horrific pain often involved in these practices) in favor of our own interests that are comparatively trivial (trivial pleasures would include the enjoyment of eating meat, or the advantage of arriving at scientific knowledge through painful experiments that could likely be gained by other, noninvasive experimental means). One could imagine scenarios under which causing animals harm might, in fact, maximize utility; but, as Singer insists, such scenarios do not usually match the realities of the factory farming system or the real-­world practices surrounding animal experimentation. As such, we must be prepared to rethink some of our most common interactions with animals in a profound way. In line with Singer and other identity theorists, animal rights philosopher Tom Regan seeks to establish a fundamental evolutionary continuity between human beings and animals in regard to ethically relevant traits and then apply an egalitarian ethics in view of that shared trait. For Regan, though, the most ethically relevant property that human beings and animals share is subjectivity (or being a subject-­of-­a-­life, to use Regan’s preferred term) rather than simple sentience. This more complex property includes having conscious preferences and the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, as well as the advanced abilities to “believe and feel things, recall and expect things.”20 For Regan, “all these dimensions of our life,” including “our continued existence or our untimely death”21 (these are things that Singer downplays in terms of their ethical importance regarding animals), are what give individuals their subjectivity and dignity. Regan would note

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that we typically grant such subjectivity to (most) human beings—­but do animals also show signs of being subjects-­of-­a-­ life? Following evolutionary biological premises, Regan builds a detailed case for why we should believe that subjectivity is not the exclusive possession of human beings; and much of the recent work in cognitive ethology bears him out on this point.22 It must be said, though, that subjectivity is probably not found in this more complex form among many animals—­a point that Regan concedes and one that has serious implications for the scope of this kind of animal ethics. So, if subjectivity is not as broadly present among animals as sentience, why does Regan choose this criterion as being the one that is most ethically relevant? The reason is that Regan works within a different ethical tradition than Singer does—­the ethical tradition of rights theory. Inspired by Kantian themes (but avoiding Kant’s exclusion of animals from direct ethical consideration), Regan’s version of rights theory views utilitarianism as a problematic ethical framework inasmuch as it is aggregative in determining the greatest good, thereby allowing certain individual rights sometimes to be overridden in the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. Regan fears that in the case of animals such an approach encourages us to continue seeing animals as mere numbers or resources figuring in our calculative deliberations rather than as individual subjects with rights that ought not in principle be overridden. The ultimate aim of Regan’s rights theory is to remove all human and animal subjects from the category of resources and commodities and to grant them inherent, noninstrumental value.23 Kant’s rights-­based ethical theory effectively accomplishes this same aim with human subjects; and Regan argues there is no major barrier to extending the same basic notion of respect to animals insofar as many animals show evidence of having the same kind of subjectivity as human beings have. Of course, the implication of this kind of rights-­based egalitarianism

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is an extremely rigoristic ethics, one that calls for the total abolition of all instrumental and disrespectful treatment of animals. In contradistinction to Singer’s utilitarian approach, there are virtually no scenarios that one might construct within an animal rights framework where eating animals, hunting them for sport, experimenting on them, or using them for entertainment would be ethically justifiable. Such practices on the rights view would be ruled out in principle, whether or not they might maximize aggregate utility.24 Singer’s and Regan’s pro-­animal, continuity-­based, egalitarian approaches to animal ethics have been influential in reorienting philosophical discourse on animals away from many of the traditional dogmas that we examined previously. The appeal of their writings to those working outside professional philosophy has, however, been limited to a certain extent by the fact that the normative frameworks they use (utilitarianism, rights) are somewhat peculiar to academic philosophy and not necessarily shared by people who do not work in the field. Paola Cavalieri seeks to remedy that limitation by developing an animal ethics that shares many of the sentiments we find in Singer’s and Regan’s writings but that is grounded in a widely shared normative doctrine: the universal doctrine of human rights.25 Although this approach seems at first blush to be paradoxical (human rights for animals?), Cavalieri argues that human rights are, according to their own logic, not exclusively human. Cavalieri employs the same basic argumentative strategy that we have seen in Singer and Regan. If we start from the idea that the doctrine of human rights is widely shared and should serve as our point of departure for ethical discourse, then we need to identify the ethically relevant characteristic or criterion that grants human beings access to the realm of rights holders. Cavalieri follows philosopher Alan Gewirth in suggesting that human rights are actually aimed at protecting very basic modes of intentionality and agency. In Cavalieri’s words, intentionality is “char-

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acterized by the capacity to enjoy freedom and welfare, as well as life which is a precondition for them.”26 If we were to choose another, more exacting criterion (say, higher-­order rationality), we would risk drawing the line of inclusion too narrowly and excluding large numbers of human beings from rights protections. But if human rights are aimed at protecting the intentional agency of human beings, why should we ignore the same characteristics when they appear in animals? Cavalieri argues, against Descartes and following Darwinian evolutionary premises,27 that intentional agency is not distributed exclusively among human beings but can be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. And based on the basic notion of equal consideration, or “treating likes alike,” it would seem patently inconsistent and unfair to respect intentional agency in human beings while ignoring the same capacity when it appears in nonhuman beings. Given that animals and human beings are relevantly similar or identical at the level of intentional agency, it turns out that human rights are not exclusively human but extend outward to include a wide number of animals as well. Cavalieri thus argues that the same basic rights to noninterference that are promised to human beings should be extended to animals and that animals should be protected from the routine institutional violence to which they are subjected. As does Regan, she urges that animals should be seen not as human property but as full and equal members of the moral community. IDENTITY IN PRACTICE

The ethics of identity that we find in Singer, Regan, Cavalieri, and related animal ethicists has much to recommend it. With its stress on evolutionary continuity, it helps us gain a critical edge on the dogmatic binary conceptions of the human/animal distinction that we find repeated throughout much of the history of

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Western philosophy and culture. And while this approach does not (as noted previously) require positing the full identity of human beings and animals in every respect, the idea that certain fundamentally relevant ethical characteristics (sentience, subjectivity, intentionality, and so on) are found in identical or similar forms among human beings and animals is a significant corrective to the countertendency in the tradition toward human exceptionalism. Likewise, the arguments these philosophers make for consistency in our ethical reasoning—­that is, for “treating likes alike”—­are extraordinarily powerful and serve to undercut the blatant contradictions that have structured our traditional ways of excluding animals from ethical consideration. Another important advance that the identity approach offers is that it raises the question of moral considerability—­that is, the question of who should count morally and why—­with significant and destabilizing force.28 By raising direct questions concerning the ethical lines that are supposed to separate human beings from animals, identity-­based theorists do not allow us to rest easily with a vaguely progressive “humanist” ethic that would purportedly include all human beings but leave animals outside the moral community. Though all of the major identity theorists share the progressive desire to establish an ethic that would include the vast majority of human beings, they demonstrate with admirable rigor that any such broadly constructed ethic will undoubtedly (if it is to be consistent in its reasoning) have to include animals within its scope. Perhaps the most important implication of the identity-­based approach is that it asks us to transform our individual and collective lives in the direction of achieving justice for animals. At the most basic level, we are being asked to challenge our speciesist prejudices and change our consumption patterns away from products that cause harm to animals (for example, we might make the ethical decision to become vegan or avoid using products that have been researched and developed by experimenting

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on animals). Some identity-­based theorists have been tempted to limit political transformation primarily to these kinds of personal changes, urging us to see individual veganism and cruelty-­ free consumerism as the chief means whereby speciesism is challenged. I later offer some critical remarks in regard to this emphasis on personal ethics. But before I take up that point, I want to emphasize that many other identity-­based activists have suggested (and I think rightly so) that we must turn our attention to the collective, political level and seek transformations there as well. Indeed, the ideas that we have been examining in this chapter—­that humans and animals share much in common, that there are strong reasons to adopt a more egalitarian ethics toward animals, and so on—­have formed the foundation for the work of many important animal welfare and animal rights organizations as well as for specific political and legal initiatives for animal justice. These ethically based political movements constitute perhaps the most important fruits of the identity approach. One particularly noteworthy example of such legal-­political initiatives is the Great Ape Project. Two of the authors considered here, Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, are founding members of this project, and Tom Regan has also contributed his own work and support to this initiative.29 The aim of the initiative is to “extend the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.”30 The contributors argue that the foundation for this extension is located in the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives shared by the great apes, the very characteristics that we appeal to for the inclusion of human beings within the moral community. Despite certain differences among the great apes, supporters of the Great Ape Project argue that there are fundamental continuity and identity among them in terms of ethically relevant traits. As such, supporters of the project call for the extension of basic human rights principles (including the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture31) to the

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great apes. The ultimate goal is to have these basic rights for great apes enshrined in national and international law. In 2008, the Spanish Parliament passed a (nonbinding) motion to have its laws reflect the basic principles laid out in the Great Ape Project; and the hope is that other nations and international legal bodies will follow suit. At present, the basic framework developed by the philosophers and theorists discussed here has been the inspiration behind legislation that has helped curb invasive research on great apes in the United States and a number of European countries. Were such legislation expanded to include all of the principles laid out within the Great Ape Project, and were it adopted on a broadly national and international basis, it would mark a monumental departure from the status quo treatment of animals in most industrialized nations. THE PROBLEM OF LOGOCENTRISM

Despite these and other merits of the identity-­based approach, there are crucial limitations to this way of thinking about and framing human-­a nimal interactions. One limitation concerns the lingering logocentrism found in this approach. Logocentrism refers to an uncritical focus and overemphasis on logos, understood here as reason and its associated capacities and faculties (language, consciousness, subjectivity, and so on). Now, as we saw with Aristotle and Descartes, rationality in this broad form is what is supposed to separate human beings from animals. Identity-­based thinkers contest this kind of clean division of human from animal based on logos and argue instead that reason appears in varying forms and degrees among other animals; so their logocentrism should not be confused with the traditional philosophical variety. Instead, logocentrism reappears among identity-­based philosophers in the process of developing a systematic way of making sense of our obligations to animals. Philosophers of the sort we are discussing in this chapter generally

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believe that the case for extending ethics to animals must be based on reason and argumentation alone and that any appeal to emotion or pity in building one’s case must be avoided. (Indeed, many philosophers argue that such appeals to emotion or pity in the course of making an argument are logical fallacies.) Further, there is a fear among mainstream philosophers that anyone who seeks to bring animals into the sphere of moral consideration will be charged with sentimentalism, and both Singer and Regan answer this potential charge by insisting that their respective versions of animal ethics stand and fall on reason alone.32 In recent years, feminist theorists have questioned this kind of logocentrism by (1) demonstrating the ways in which reason should be seen as continuous with emotion33 and (2) showing that care and emotion should play an essential role in ethics more generally and in animal ethics in particular.34 The privileging of reason over emotion is, from this feminist perspective, a continuation of the logocentrism of human-­centered and male-­centered thinking and a pernicious dogma that the identity discourse needs to question more thoroughly. Another form of logocentrism appears among identity-­based theorists when they try to explain what gives rise to the project of animal ethics in the first place. What is the driving force that makes us change our individual behavior? What creates the dramatic shift in our lives toward animal justice? Here, too, many philosophers pride themselves on believing that it is reason (and reason alone) that has transformative force. We change our thinking and practices with regard to animals, this line of thought suggests, because we are unable to refute the arguments that animal ethicists offer. The pain of contradiction in our behavior and thought is so powerful that it forces a change in the direction of consistency and justice. It would be unwise to deny that some people (professional philosophers in particular!) might find philosophical arguments sufficient for such transformative purposes; but it would be equally unwise to insist that reason always serves as its

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own foundation. There are multiple emotions, affects, and other extra-­rational modes through which our thinking and interactions with animals might be called into question and transformed; and to suggest that philosophical argumentation plays the only or even a primary role here is a contentious claim. In the next chapter, we examine the work of difference-­based theorists who argue that this kind of logocentrism blocks access to a wide variety of alternative and promising ways of thinking about animals and transforming human-­animal interactions. BEYOND SPECIESISM

The tendency to view animal ethics as comprising primarily giving reasons and being grounded in argumentation leads many philosophers to think that violence toward animals can be largely explained as a consequence of “irrational” thinking and behavior, a failure on the part of individuals to be consistent in their ethical reasoning and practice. We saw earlier that identity-­based philosophers use the term “speciesism” to refer to the irrational prejudice that places animals outside the ethical community without compelling reasons for doing so. They use the term “speciesism” (with its “-­ism” suffix) in order to link it to what they consider to be similar kinds of irrational and unethical prejudices such as racism and sexism. Just as racists and sexists fail to treat likes alike in terms of race and sexual difference, so, identity theorists argue, speciesists fail to give equal consideration to relevantly similar members of other species. The term “speciesism” has become central not just among identity-­based theorists but also among much of the work being done in the broader field of critical animal studies. I would suggest, though, that this term fails adequately to capture the problem at hand concerning the main origins and causes of the subjugated status of animals and their violent exploitation. The limitations with the concept of speciesism become clearer if we

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think about it in relation to the posited analogues of sexism and racism.35 Social science discourse about sexism and racism has convincingly demonstrated that sexism and racism are not explicable solely or primarily in terms of the irrational beliefs and behaviors of individuals. Instead, we have learned through this discourse to see sexism and racism as the result of long-­term historical, linguistic, institutional, cultural, and economic systems of power. As such, it would be absurd to suggest that sexism and racism can be challenged primarily through changing the purchasing habits of individuals and garnering support for certain legal initiatives. Contesting sexism and racism requires us to rethink the whole of our individual and social lives and to make fundamental changes across multiple institutional and economic discourses and practices. The same is true, I would suggest, with regard to addressing the subjugated status of animals in the dominant culture. The problems we are facing in trying to change the status quo concerning animals go well beyond addressing the supposedly “irrational” modes of thought of individuals and require us to think broadly and deeply about how violence toward animals is foundational to our cultures and lives at innumerable levels. In place of speciesism as the point of critical contestation, I suggest that we see the problem at hand as being an instance of anthropocentrism, or human-­centeredness. It might seem that I am splitting hairs here in trying to distinguish speciesism from anthropocentrism, but I believe a great deal hinges on making this distinction and seeing it clearly. “Anthropocentrism,” as I define the term, refers to a set of relations and systems of power that are in the service of those who are considered by the dominant culture to be fully and properly human. What it means to be fully and properly human changes, of course, across time; and, in a concomitant manner, the way in which the human/ nonhuman line is drawn also shifts. In the dominant history of Western culture, in particular, animals and animality (or animal-­

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ness) have almost always figured in significant ways for how the human and nonhuman are distinguished—­so it is important that we attend to how human-­centeredness is founded simultaneously on a relation to and exclusion of animals. What is essential to emphasize here is that neither today nor for most of the dominant history of Western culture have those in power been speciesist. Reigning notions of ethics, community, and even of humanity itself have almost never tracked along the lines of biological species; and even the most liberal and progressive forms of humanism have openly excluded large swaths of humanity from their scope of concern. In other words, the dominant trends in our culture have never been toward respect for the species as a whole but rather for what is considered to be quintessentially human—­a nd this privilege and subject position have always been available only to a small subset of the human species. Thus, when animal ethicists locate one of these quintessential human capacities (say, intentionality or subjectivity) among animals and build an ethics based on that shared identity, they are not displacing anthropocentrism but are instead offering another iteration of it. To be sure, they are not guilty of speciesism in the sense that they allow for ethical obligations to cross species lines. But speciesism isn’t the real problem here. The problem is a series of ideas, practices, and institutions that aim to protect the privilege of those deemed to be fully human over and against the nonhuman; and it is through a complex and violent relation to animals, animality, and “nonhumans” of various sorts that this system establishes and reproduces itself. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the identity-­based approach is anthropocentric in a deep and problematic manner. Not only does this approach fail to provide us with a framework that would include all human beings within its scope, but it is also unable to include vast numbers of animal beings and species. Consistent with anthropocentric logic, this framework seeks to develop a notion of ethics and moral community that rotates around what is con-

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sidered to be quintessentially and relevantly human; it just so happens that certain animals happen to be “human” enough to grant them standing. The fate of other animals, humans, and nonhumans who are not sufficiently like “us” would remain, within the identity framework, as precarious as ever. The difference approach, to which we now turn, attempts to help us address this limit and develop a more capacious and less exclusionary approach to animal ethics.

2 DIFFERENCE

In the previous chapter, we saw how identity theorists employ the notion of human-­animal evolutionary continuity and the principle of equal consideration of interests to develop a transformational animal ethic and philosophy. In the simplest terms, the general aim of that project is to demonstrate ethically relevant similarities among human beings and animals and then to argue that equal consideration entails that similar beings should receive similar moral consideration. This approach grants many animals basic moral standing and provides the normative infrastructure for extending various kinds of legal and political rights to animals. The theorists examined in this chapter, which I have grouped under the rubric of difference, seek to develop a pro-­ animal ethic and philosophy based not on similarity, continuity, or identity but instead on an appreciation of the manifold differences that exist between and among human beings and animals. For theorists and activists who find the identity position persuasive, this approach to thinking about animals might appear at first blush confused and far removed from concrete concerns about improving animals’ lives. How can an appreciation of differences, one might wonder, generate changes in our thinking and practices toward animals? Moreover, the discourse in which this 28

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approach is couched (sometimes referred to as Continental philosophy/theory) is often jargon laden and forbidding, even for professional academics. Critics might, thus, justifiably ask, If a discourse is so complex that it takes years of specialization to understand it, how can it possibly be of use to current struggles for animal justice? Although I do not wish to defend every aspect of the difference approach, I suggest in this chapter that it has very important things to offer us as we seek to think through animals and to transform various practices and institutions that affect animals’ lives. I should note at the outset, though, that the ideas and terminology presented in this chapter are admittedly more difficult to grasp than those discussed in the first chapter. I will make every effort to present these ideas as clearly as possible. If the reader is willing to work through the material with patience and charity, I believe the basic concepts and positions discussed here will be both understandable and fruitful for the task at hand. Before we can turn directly to the development of an animal ethics based on a philosophy of difference, it will be necessary for us first to examine in more depth two key ideas that structure most of the writings of the theorists working in this vein: (1) the critique of humanism and (2) an ethics of otherness. Once we have clarified these two key ideas, we can then understand more fully how they relate to animal ethics and what implications they might have for alternative ways of interacting with animals. THE CRITIQUE OF HUMANISM

Difference theorists are steeped in a philosophical tradition that calls humanism into question in thoroughgoing ways. Humanism here refers to traditional ideas about human nature, especially those ideas that depict human beings as having a fixed nature or identity. Nearly all of the most influential historical figures in the difference tradition—­including such thinkers as Karl Marx,

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Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger—­question the idea that human beings can be adequately characterized by some kind of timeless essence they must enact or by some inner core of subjectivity untouched by history. Instead, these critics of humanism encourage us to think about human individuals as being irreducibly enmeshed in a series of sociohistorical processes and cultural relations that constitute us from the ground up. Human existence is thus seen by the critics of humanism as being deeply historical and as being subject to changing cultural, institutional, and economic conditions. Critics of humanism use a wide variety of vocabularies to describe the complex series of relations that constitute human beings. In opposition to the traditional notion that an individual human being serves as his or her own foundation or center, they prefer to characterize individuals as being “decentered,” “dispossessed,” or “ex-­posed” (in the sense of being posed outward toward others). These concepts suggest that, before we can reflect upon ourselves and think of ourselves as individuals, we have already been “thrown” (to borrow a term from Heidegger) outside ourselves and into meaningful worlds populated and given significance by others. My “self” and the worlds in which I move and have my being are gifts of a sort, received from others, and not primarily of my own making. Sometimes referred to as antihumanism because of its strong rejection of humanism, this view might seem to imply that human beings have no individuality or subjectivity at all. Might it really be the case that human beings are little more than by-­ products of culture, fully determined by historical forces beyond their control? Nearly all critics of humanism refrain, however, from embracing this kind of determinism and erasure of individuality. They are not arguing that human individuals do not exist or that individuals can be fully reduced to or explained in terms of their cultural surroundings. Instead, the chief position they are trying to defend is that human individuals emerge from

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a complex series of relations (historical, cultural, economic, linguistic, and so on) and that human nature cannot be understood outside these relations. Indeed, if human beings are figured as relational/historical from the ground up and as having no simple preexistent/fixed nature, then the very notion of human beings having a “nature” (in the sense of an essence) at all becomes problematic.1 AN ETHICS OF DIFFERENCE

Ethics in the difference tradition arises in view of the prospect of trying to respect and attend to such emergent individuals. So, rather than liquidating individuality, the critique of humanism refigures the individual as a unique node in a network of relations, an irreplaceable being-­in-­becoming—­a singular Other. But given that much of my conceptual apparatus and interactions with others are based on generalizable concepts, I typically fail to attend to Others as singular or unique. (Here, I will write in the first person in order to match the language often used by the primary theorist of the ethics of difference, Emmanuel Levinas.2) I learn to group Others into recognizable and repeatable categories, thereby neutralizing their singularity and domesticating their strangeness. On occasion, however, I have an experience with a particular Other that calls into question my typical ways of thinking and relating. Perhaps I notice someone’s deep vulnerability, or someone desperately in need, or someone who does something that makes me reflect on the selfishness and insensitivity of my daily existence. In such moments, I encounter the Other as ethically different, as radically different from me, as irreducible to my usual ways of understanding and my usual projects and interests. The Other here issues a challenge to my way of life and allows me to recognize that there are Others who are fundamentally different from me and to whom I unthinkingly do violence in my daily life.

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It is entirely possible that, in response to such encounters, I will go on my way and return to my standard ways of living and thinking. An encounter with the Other is not equivalent to having a gun held to my head, forcing me to change my life in the direction of justice; I retain the capacity to reject the Other’s challenge. Yet such an experience can sometimes have an uncanny way of sticking with me, getting under my skin, and slowly reworking my subjectivity and existence from within. In fact, some encounters are so powerful that they lead to me affirming the need to change my life. I recognize that my usual mode of existence fails in profound ways to do justice to the singular lives of Others and that a change in my basic way of living is required. Such acts of affirmation and transformation, of responding to the “call of the Other,” form the core of an ethics of difference. What is important to notice here is that in affirming the call of a singular Other, my affirmation derives from an encounter not entirely of my own making. Just as I find myself having been thrown into a world of Others, here too I find myself thrown into an ethical encounter. As we saw in the previous chapter, identity theorists place a premium on ethical transformation deriving from one’s own rationality, from principles that one gives to oneself, which is typically called autonomy. An ethics of difference starts from the premise that the ultimate origin of ethics resides not with me (my rationality, my freedom, my autonomy) but with the Other, with radical difference, or heteronomy. Difference theorists do not deny, of course, that autonomy plays a role in ethics. As just noted, an ethical encounter is not strongly deterministic and does not force my assent; I have the elbow room available to affirm or negate the Other’s challenge. But whatever my response is, it arises precisely as a response to the Other, from a source radically different from me that calls into question my typical ways of thinking and living. And inasmuch as I affirm the Other’s call and become another kind of person, I

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do so in view of the Other. In a genuinely ethical relation, I become a different “I,” an ethical sub-­ject, someone thrown-­ under the Other as support. THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMAL

The two ideas we have briefly surveyed here—­the antihumanist, relational ontology of individuals and the idea that ethics derives from encounters with singular Others—­constitute the basic starting point for much of the work done by difference theorists. We have yet to see, however, how these ideas might relate to animal issues. Most of the theorists who work in Continental philosophy and who start from these basic ideas have, unfortunately, entirely ignored questions concerning animals and remained narrowly within anthropocentric limits. Concerning the relational ontology of individuals, Martin Heidegger argues that only human beings can be said to be relational in any genuine sense. In his framework, it is only human beings who are open to meaning and who have “worlds” of significance in which they live. Animals are said to be at best “poor in world” and thus largely closed off from the kinds of meaningful relations that constitute human subjectivity.3 In Heidegger’s account, neither are animals capable of speech nor do they have any understanding of death, leaving them in an ontological position similar to the one to which Aristotle assigned them. With regard to the ethics of singularity and heteronomy, the most influential proponent of these ideas, Emmanuel Levinas, argues throughout his key writings that animals are largely excluded from the ethical domain. He maintains that only human beings are able to issue the kind of call that would institute an ethical relation; and he further insists that only human beings are capable of having an ethical encounter with the Other. On occasion, Levinas slightly softens his ethical anthropocentrism and allows for the possibility that his ideas about ethics might stretch beyond the human, but he never

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makes such topics central to his work.4 These kinds of Heideggerian and Levinasian ideas about the exceptionalism of the human have dominated much of the subsequent work done in Continental philosophy and have thus served largely to reinforce the dogmatic anthropocentrism of the sort we saw in such figures as Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. There have, however, been important exceptions to this anthropocentric trend in the Continental tradition. As early as the 1940s, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two founding figures of Critical Theory, recognized the close linkage between anthropocentric ontologies and ethics and the domination of animals; and they also underscored the need to develop post-­ anthropocentric modes of doing philosophy.5 More recently, Judith Butler, whose work has been foundational for poststructuralist feminist and queer theory, has begun to explore the ways in which central concepts in her work extend beyond human beings. She has suggested that her influential concept of precarious life, which is based on the kind of relational ontology and ethics of singularity we have been analyzing here, should be understood as encompassing both human and animal life.6 Similar non-­and post-­a nthropocentric trends can be discerned in other rogue Continental philosophers as well.7 Perhaps the most sustained effort to link difference-­based philosophy to animal issues can be found in the writings of Jacques Derrida. Following the major critics of humanism, Derrida shares deep suspicions about traditional accounts of human nature and their essentializing and naturalizing tendencies. He argues forcefully that the Western philosophical tradition has been dominated by a notion of individual human subjects that obscures the complex matrix of relations and differences that makes such individuals possible, and that one of the chief tasks of thought is to attend to such differences. But Derrida has also been quick to underscore the point that this displacement and decentering of traditional ideas about human subjectivity also

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requires us to revisit our inherited and hegemonic ideas about animals and animality. In other words, the decentering of the subject has the effect of calling into question some of the standard ways in which the human has been defined through and differentiated from the nonhuman, especially other animals. Furthermore, as we move from the critique of humanism to a careful examination of the broader human/animal opposition involved in the humanist heritage, we realize that we are already caught up in a series of pressing ethical and political questions. For the stakes surrounding the human/animal distinction are rarely neutral. Instead, as we have already seen, this opposition is shot through with serious implications for how we think about and relate to both those considered human and animal. Derrida’s work as a whole tends to focus critically on these kinds of problematic binary oppositions, and not simply for ontological reasons (for example, one could object on ontological grounds alone that binary distinctions tend more often than not to fail to capture dynamic fields of difference). Rather, as he explains, such binary oppositions are typically charged with problematic ethical implications and power relations: “In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-­à-­vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.”8 This kind of violent hierarchy is at work in an exemplary fashion in the human/animal distinction. As we begin critically dismantling this opposition, we are confronted with the question of its long history of violence; but (and this is key for philosophers of difference like Derrida) it is only through such dismantling that we are able to gain the critical space to begin thinking about how we might relate both to animals and humans in less violent and less hierarchical ways. Careful readers might be wondering whether difference-­based theorists have not halted the process of critical analysis too quickly here by focusing primarily on animals. Shouldn’t the cri-

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tique of humanism make us think more carefully about how the human has been figured against a host of nonhuman others besides animals (for example, children, women, slaves, nature, to name just a few of the human’s most prominent and common “others”) and how violent hierarchies are at work in all of these oppositions? I would suggest that most difference-­based theorists actually take this broader task to be their main goal, but there are questions of strategy that need to be raised in carrying out such work. Does the dismantling of certain oppositions hold more critical and disruptive potential? Are there particular oppositions that help to illustrate most effectively the violent and hierarchical logic of humanism and anthropocentrism? For Derrida and for many of the difference-­based theorists who work in animal studies, the answer to such questions is that focusing on the human/animal distinction and questions surrounding animals and animality does indeed have this kind of disruptive and illustrative potential. Of course, that point should not be taken to mean that questions concerning animals are not important in their own right; even passing familiarity with the present situation of animals makes it abundantly clear that rethinking our relationships with animals is one of the most pressing tasks of our age. But in addition to the intrinsic value of contesting dominant discourses and practices surrounding animals, this path of critique also has the strategic value of helping to get at the some of the stubborn forms of anthropocentrism that tend to persist in other modes of critical thought. As Derrida notes, the question concerning animals and animality “represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man.’”9 By carefully analyzing the status of animals and animality and how these things figure in the constitution of the human, we can gain a better sense of the deep, internal workings of anthropocentrism and of the anthropocentric logic at work in the formation of other kinds of oppositions and violent hierarchies.

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M ULTIPLYIN G H U M A N/A NIM A L DIF F ER EN C E S

So, how do pro-­a nimal difference theorists challenge the traditional kind of human/animal oppositional ontology we find in thinkers like Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant? Although they would agree with identity theorists that some of the ethically relevant traits thought to be exclusively human are also found in animals, difference theorists do not typically stress continuity among human beings and animals. The primary reason for avoiding such an approach is that difference theorists view the main issue as one of trying to attend to heterogeneities where reductive homogeneities have been posited. Traditional versions of the human/animal distinction divide the field into two large, homogenous groups—­The Human on one side of the divide and The Animal on the other. According to difference theorists, to respond to this kind of division with a discourse based on human-­animal continuity, as identity theorists do, is to risk creating even more homogeneity. Consequently, difference theorists approach the human/animal opposition in a rather different manner. First, difference theorists would have us notice how speaking about the rich diversity of animal life in terms of “The Animal”—­as if everything we refer to as animal life could be so easily grouped and understood with a single essence—­is extraordinarily reductive. We share the planet with countless animal species, whose diversity is beyond our intellectual ability fully to comprehend. To suggest, as many traditional philosophers have, that animals are to be viewed as sharing a common essence and as deficient when compared to human beings is, in the difference-­ based account, strongly objectionable. One of the main ways for us to work our way out of the limitations of this way of thinking is to attend in a diligent manner to the radical diversity of what are called “animals” and to recognize that they are not fully exhausted by such simple categorizations. Indeed, such a task is

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extremely urgent for us today, as the dominant social order is currently engaged in a widespread and systematic destruction of innumerable individual animals and animal kinds just as the broader society is beginning to appreciate the richness of animal life.10 Second, it is essential to note that the traditional human/animal opposition is also reductive of the rich diversity of what we call “human beings.” If we characterize what is quintessentially human as having language, rationality, or moral agency, then those human beings who lack such capacities will typically be seen as less than human rather than differently human. Likewise, if we overemphasize identity and homogeneity among human beings, we will tend to dismiss as unimportant all intrahuman differences. Difference theorists would insist that there are many intrahuman differences (for example, sexual difference or, better, sexual differences) worth attending to and worth allowing to multiply and flourish. Finally, in dismantling traditional forms of the human/animal opposition, difference theorists seek to undercut the notion that there is a simple, single barrier separating human beings from animals. Many of the capacities that have been considered exclusive and “proper” to the human alone turn out to be found among nonhuman beings in varying forms and degrees. And as we start to look more closely at various markers of human propriety, many of them turn out to be things toward which human beings themselves have complex and differential relations. Such traditional markers of human exceptionalism as awareness of death, self-­consciousness, and language are not straightforward abilities or capacities that we have under our individual control. They are complex, emergent properties and behaviors, as much received from others as they are self-­constituted. The main point here is that markers of human propriety are not distributed in the distinct and oppositional manner that is sometimes claimed. But we should be careful to note that the recognition of the blurring

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of the human/animal boundary here does not, for difference theorists, lead to its full collapse into human-­animal identity. Such a collapse would deny difference rather than multiply and complicate it. At the end of this chapter, we revisit this strategy of complicating the human/animal distinction and examine some of its possible limitations. First, though, we need to examine the ethical aspects of the thought of difference in view of its implications for animals. AN ANIMAL ETHICS OF DIFFERENCE

In our examination of the ethics of difference, we saw that difference theorists aim to think about ethics in terms of singularity (the irreducible uniqueness of the Other) and heteronomy (ethical relation and responsibility are initiated by the Other). How might animals fit into this kind of framework? And how might the inclusion of animals in ethical thought transform ethics itself? As the ontological framework we just examined already indicates, pro-­a nimal difference theorists are mostly (but not exclusively) interested in the ways in which animals exceed our reductive modes of categorization. Animals are always more than what our categories allow us to say or think about them. Ethics would thus be in part a matter of attending to that “more,” that difference, in ways that seek to do justice to the singular lives of animals. In so doing, we would need to be prepared to rethink what ethical respect and attention might mean, for it is the case that animals—­while sharing much with human beings—­c an also have very different lives from our own. With regard to heteronomy, pro-­a nimal difference theorists would have us reflect upon the ways in which animals make ethical calls on us in much the same way that other human beings do. Animal ethics in this framework would not, then, be simply a matter of a free choice on my part to extend human ethics to animals on the basis of logical consistency; instead, my encounters with singular animals

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would initiate the ethical relation and challenge me to rethink my spontaneous way of living and to move my life in the direction of justice for other animals. Derrida’s much-­discussed “cat encounter” illustrates how these ethical themes of singularity and heteronomy are at work in our relations with other animals.11 Throughout his analysis of this encounter, Derrida insists that his cat is not a representative of cats as such or a figure for other famous cats found in literature and poetry. And even though he acknowledges that he is forced to label his cat in certain ways (as a cat, as his, as little, as female, and so on) in order to talk about her, he notes that the cat ultimately precedes and exceeds his conceptual machinations. Thus, before he can identify and conceptualize the cat, Derrida says he sees it “as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.”12 In trying to attend to the cat’s singularity, Derrida suggests it is important to recognize that part of what exceeds his understanding and conceptualization is that the cat has her own point of view, one that he knows is there but that he cannot fully inhabit or understand. What is more, the cat’s point of view in this specific encounter is on the scene before Derrida’s reflective, conscious “self” arrives there. As can often happen when a cat is present, Derrida finds himself being watched prior to his own watching. He argues that this kind of event—­a n encounter in which one finds oneself being faced by another animal, in which one receives a gaze and a call from an animal Other that arrives before autonomy can be instituted—­has been systematically ignored by most philosophers. Traditional philosophers “have taken no account of the fact that what they call animal could look at them and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin.”13 In brief, then, difference theorists would have us try to build an animal ethics across and through difference and

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radical otherness. Although our dominant ethical traditions have often employed fundamental differences to justify value hierarchies and exclusions from the moral community, pro-­animal difference theorists hope to restructure ethics in such a way that differences can be acknowledged, respected, and even treasured. RADICALIZING ANIMAL ETHICS

I noted at the end of Chapter 1 that the identity approach is limited in terms of the kinds of animals it is able to include within its normative frameworks. Unless an animal has the kind of ethically relevant capacity that grants a being ethical standing within a given normative theory, it would be excluded from the moral community (and we should recall that this is a problem often noted by identity theorists themselves). Given that an animal ethics of difference is not grounded on establishing biological continuity or ethical identity among human beings and animals, it doesn’t suffer from this kind of problem. A philosophy of difference allows for a much broader range of ethical consideration and, hence, is able to include a wider variety of animals within its scope. But just how broadly can an ethics of difference be thought and practiced? For a thinker such as Derrida, there appear to be few rigid limits either concerning the scope of a relational ontology or an ethics that arises out of such differential relations. He is willing to grant that the relations that make subjectivity possible are at work “well beyond humanity,”14 or (as one Derrida scholar puts it) “all the way down to the minimal forms of life.”15 For Derrida, the potential subjectivities we find among nonhuman beings are certainly not identical with those of the human in every way, but the general processes of relation and becoming that constitute human subjectivity are in his analysis characteristic of all life-­forms. Likewise, Derrida’s notion of the Other with whom one finds oneself in ethical relation is equally capacious.

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He often refers to the Other as an arrivant, an absolute newcomer, and is intent on underscoring the point that this newcomer can and does take “monstrous” forms beyond those we are typically prepared to countenance. In Derrida’s thought of difference, then, there seems to be no way to delimit in advance the kinds of beings to whom we might find ourselves in ethical relation. Not all difference theorists, though, portray ethical consideration in such extensive and open-­ended terms. In describing her notion of precarious life, Judith Butler is willing to think about the ethical implications of this concept for human beings and animals but is unsure about whether it opens up ethical obligations to beings such as plants.16 Cary Wolfe—­who is one of the most able defenders of the difference-­based approach to animals—­is also skeptical of the idea that an ethics of difference extends past animals to plants, ecosystems, and other such living beings and systems.17 The basic position that Wolfe and Butler seem to share is that relations that have ethical content must include a “who,” or a responsive subject, of some sort; in other words, ethics takes place only among beings who have something at stake for them in how they are treated.18 Relations with “what”s (for example, plants or inanimate objects) might be important for understanding how our subjectivity is formed, but we do not have any meaningful ethical responsibilities toward such entities. While this kind of position makes a certain amount of sense, I would suggest that it is ultimately inconsistent with the premises of the difference-­based approach. Once the door of relation and ethical responsibility is opened beyond the human, it is difficult to close it around animals, “who”s, or any other designated group. Finite subjectivity and responsibility open us up to differences that are, in fact, monstrous and unanticipatable; and to close off in advance the question of how far our ethical responsibilities might extend toward such Others strikes me as fundamentally at odds with the general spirit of the thought and

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practice of difference. No doubt such an open-­ended stance renders relation and ethics more complicated; but complicating the ethical in the direction of generosity is, in the final analysis, the primary stake and chief merit of the difference approach. RADICALIZING ANIMAL POLITICS

In line with this broader scope of ethical consideration, difference theorists are also concerned to analyze the kinds of political exclusions that limit identity-­based animal rights practices. Difference theorists have rightly taught us to be wary of the problematic implications of political projects—­like the Great Ape Project and similar movements for animal rights—­that are grounded in identity and analogues with the classical, male subject of liberalism. While great apes, cetaceans, and a handful of mammal and bird species might be able to meet the criteria for full political standing within a liberal political framework, it is clear that the vast majority of animal species and individuals will never be seen as being full subjects and will thereby lack important political and legal protections under this approach. Feminist pro-­animal theorists like Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan have called attention to this limitation of the rights-­based approach to animal issues for many years now, arguing that liberalism has the same exclusionary effect on women and animals (among others), granting both groups full standing in the political sphere only by ignoring differences and allowing other hierarchies to go unchallenged.19 More recently, theorists such as Kari Weil and Kelly Oliver have arrived at similar conclusions about the limitations of liberalism for animals, women, and other marginalized groups. For Weil, the “inequities of rights discourse, whether for humans or for animals, seem inevitable, and just as a prejudicial definition of the human has been used to grant privileges to some while excluding others, so the notion of animal rights privileges a particular group of animals—­ those who can demonstrate a capacity for so-­called rational

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agency—­a nd leaves others unprotected.”20 Oliver also worries about the kinds of hierarchies that are maintained with the strategy of extending rights to certain groups of animals: “Focusing on rights or equality and extending them to animals does not address more essential issues of conceptions of the animal, man or human that continue to feed hierarchies not only among species but also among human beings, some of whom are figured as more like animals.”21 Such concerns about the exclusionary nature of animal rights have not necessarily led to difference theorists opposing animal rights as a whole. More common has been an attitude of partial and critical support for animal rights strategies and initiatives. Derrida writes of his sympathy for animal rights advocates but, like Weil and Oliver, has deep concerns that animal rights reproduces many of the same problems characteristic of traditional andro-­and anthropocentric liberalism.22 Similarly, Cary Wolfe has voiced his support for such initiatives as the Great Ape Project, but he offers such support only “in abeyance.”23 Wolfe recognizes that, for pragmatic reasons, animal rights initiatives are at present among the few viable political projects on offer and provide at least some concrete means of achieving improvements in the treatment of animals. But such pragmatic support and sympathy, Wolfe and Derrida would both insist, does not negate the necessity of also thinking about the critical limitations of such approaches and working toward developing other ways of thinking about and relating to other animals. I take these sympathetic criticisms of the identity framework to be one of the chief advances of the difference approach. The concern for how rights and political protections based on identity tend to create unforeseen exclusions and marginalization is one that I share. Yet this strength also marks a critical limitation in the thought of animal difference. The radicalization of animal politics that we find among difference theorists is chiefly a parasitic mode of political thinking, which is to say, it rotates criti-

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cally around existing, mainstream pro-­a nimal discourses and practices but is unable to generate much that is novel in terms of strategy or policy. Thus, even as difference theorists provide us with well-­taken critical remarks about everything from the Great Ape Project to the pitfalls of purist forms of veganism, one finds very little among these thinkers that points toward alternative practices that might aid us in overcoming these limitations. I should be clear that I am not suggesting that difference thinkers fail to take a clear normative stance on how we might interact with and think differently about animals. Such a charge, which is most commonly issued in regard to Derrida’s work, derives from a rather crude misreading of difference theorists. It should be evident from the material that we examined in this chapter that philosophers of difference are, in fact, hyperethical and radical political thinkers, concerned with how movements that seek to address marginalization need to become even more ethical, even more radical in their desire to change the status quo in view of justice. I can only admire and endorse this general stance, and I find no need to question the normative or political commitments of these thinkers. Rather, what I am suggesting is that what should follow from a difference-­based approach is a careful engagement and experimentation with the very kinds of alternative practices and modes of thought for which this approach calls. Now, it would be a rather tall order to ask difference theorists to generate on their own entirely new practices or modes of thought; but this kind of invention is not required in this instance, as there are a number of approaches to animal justice already at work among theorists and activists that are more in line with the concerns of difference theorists. Yet, rather than engage with these strategies and movements, difference theorists have primarily limited themselves to calling into question the limits of more conservative, mainstream approaches. There is, of course, no intrinsic reason why the difference approach might not generate novel practices and strategies in

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view of animal justice; and as more activist-­and policy-­oriented theorists adopt this framework, we will no doubt see such possibilities actualized. This kind of work might take the form of an animal-­based politics on the model of radical democratic politics or even a deconstructive and affirmative reworking of political rights.24 At present, however, the difference approach has been characterized primarily by an intellectual and conceptual approach to animal issues that is somewhat removed from broader policy and political debates. In the following chapter, I examine how the indistinction approach helps us to deepen some of the main ideas developed by difference theorists in view of reconnecting them to innovative developments in animal ethics and politics. B E YO ND HUM A N/A NIM A L DIF FER EN C ES

One final issue about the difference approach that needs to be addressed is the issue of the anthropological difference, or what, if anything, separates human beings from animals. Difference theorists, as we have seen, are deeply critical of traditional ways of distinguishing human beings from animals. They argue that the classical binary opposition separating The Human from The Animal is too simplistic and reductive to capture the ontological and ethical richness of human and animal life. What is needed, they argue, is more attention to the complex differentiation we find among animals, among human beings, and between animals and human beings. It might seem that this hypercomplication of difference and the blurring of the human/animal boundary are meant to signal the radical dissolution of human/ animal distinctions as such. But for Derrida in particular, the thought of difference is explicitly not aimed at doing away with discourses seeking to determine human propriety. While Derrida contends that all of the traditional ways of distinguishing human beings from animals fail to establish human propriety in a rigor-

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ous manner, such failures have not led him to think that the search for an anthropological difference (or, to put it in terms that are more in line with his thought, anthropological differences) should be abandoned. Derrida insists up through his very last writings on the deconstructive strategy of complicating the human/animal distinction rather than eliminating it; and he also insists on positing a “radical discontinuity” between animals and human beings while underscoring that his work should not be read as renouncing the task of identifying a “proper of man.”25 Derrida’s worry here—­a nd this is a concern shared by many theorists who work within the difference framework—­is that eliminating the human/animal distinction will lead to the flattening out of differences among human beings and animals rather than to their thickening and multiplication. Earlier in this chapter, we noted that difference theorists tend to be wary of biological continuism, assuming that positing biological continuity will lead to lumping together the rich diversity of human and animal life into a single, reductive category. Likewise, their concerns about basing ethics and politics on identity stem from similar concerns about the possible exclusion of differences. It is important to consider, though, whether reductive identity and radical difference are our only two options concerning the human/animal distinction. If we were to set aside the project of establishing an anthropological difference (or anthropological differences), does such a stance necessarily lead us in the direction of homogenizing human beings and animals? Or might it be the case that leaving aside the project of establishing anthropological differences clears the space for other kinds of hitherto unnoticed differences and identities to emerge? The approach that we survey in the next chapter, the indistinction approach, offers us a glimpse of how thought and practice might proceed if we affirm the task of thinking through animals without the guidance of the anthropological difference.

3 INDISTINCTION

In this chapter, we turn to an emergent approach in animal studies that I refer to with the label of indistinction. I borrow the concept of indistinction primarily from Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, although my usage departs from theirs in certain ways. Inspiration for this approach also comes from philosophers Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Val Plumwood, as well as a wide number of theorists in the fields of ecofeminism, queer studies, critical disability studies, and radical animal activism, among others.1 As this is an emergent discourse in animal studies, its terms and implications are not as well defined as those associated with the identity and difference approaches. Thus, my aim in this chapter is to give some form to this position and to situate it with regard to the previous frameworks we have analyzed. That the discourse surrounding indistinction is still currently taking shape should not, however, be taken to imply that the sentiments associated with this mode of thought are comparatively new or not widely shared; on the contrary, I suggest that the ideas examined in this chapter express sensibilities that can be found in a number of important and long-­standing movements and that circulate widely among critical animal studies theorists and radical pro-­animal activists. 48

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READING IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE THROUGH INDISTINCTION

Perhaps the best way to gain an initial grasp on what indistinction means is briefly to recapitulate how the identity and difference frameworks deal with the human/animal distinction in view of how they both overlap and differ from the indistinction approach. We have observed that identity theorists seek to establish an egalitarian ethics based on ethically relevant similarities among human beings and animals. Although human beings and animals are not seen as continuous in every manner in this framework, the continuities that do exist at the ontological and ethical levels are considered to be sufficient for granting basic ethical consideration to animals. In making this argument, identity theorists are at odds with the vast majority of the philosophical tradition as well as hegemonic cultural and institutional norms that posit sharp ethical and ontological boundaries separating human beings from animals. Indistinction theorists are, in line with identity theorists, fundamentally at odds with the kinds of insuperable boundaries typically posited between human beings and animals by dominant intellectual and cultural traditions; so, there is much to be admired in the identity framework’s challenge to the status quo from the perspective of the indistinction approach. Where indistinction theorists would tend to differ from identity theorists concerns the direction in which such continuity is sought. Identity theorists often start with human-­centered ethical frameworks and then seek to demonstrate that these frameworks extend (often despite their manifest intentions) outward from human beings to include animals, thereby founding continuity on the basis of animals exhibiting certain human traits or capacities. It is in this respect that “animals are like us” and that logical consistency entails giving like beings like consideration. Indistinction theorists would neither deny such continuities nor

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question the call for basic consistency in reasoning. They would, however, raise questions about the ways in which such continuities tend to be portrayed as running unidirectionally from human to animal—­why aren’t continuities sought in the other direction? In addition, indistinction theorists would want to interrogate the limits of the identity approach in view of animals who are not like us—­what is the fate of animals and other beings who lack the key capacities that would establish the grounds for basic ethical consideration? When we place human beings at the center of ethical reflection and then direct our attention outward, looking for analogues of the human, we have ultimately done very little to displace the very discourses and practices that gave rise to the problems at hand. To this end, indistinction theorists attempt to develop ways of thinking about human beings, animals, and ethics in a manner that radically displaces human beings from the center of ethical reflection and that avoids many of the exclusions associated with lingering forms of anthropocentrism. Part of the attraction of the difference approach from the perspective of indistinction is that it doesn’t limit consideration to anthropocentric capacities. That certain animals might lack a specific capacity or attribute that is important within a given normative framework is no reason for withholding full ethical and political consideration from such animals; the problem might instead be seen to lie with normative frameworks that treat ethical consideration as marking an absolute and rigid boundary of inclusion and exclusion. In delinking consideration from strict identity, difference theorists open the way to an animal ethics that is based on singularity and that allows us to appreciate the richly differentiated modes of existence found among animals. Where indistinction theorists depart from the difference framework concerns the specific ways in which difference is articulated in and through the human/animal distinction. We have already seen how Derrida and most other difference theo-

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rists aim to complicate the traditional human/animal distinction and to multiply the differences found among and between human beings and animals. This is a common strategy employed by difference theorists in dealing with a broad range of traditional binary differences; and in many contexts it is an effective and important way of reorienting thought and practice. But in view of the human/animal distinction in particular, there is something deeply unsatisfying for indistinction theorists with this strategy. While it is unquestionably correct to critique the traditional human/animal distinction for reducing difference, it is not altogether clear that the best way to displace this distinction is through refining, multiplying, and complicating it. Might it not be more effective to set this distinction aside and also set aside the concern with anthropological difference(s)—­at least temporarily—­in order to develop alternative lines of thought? What other possibilities might open up when we no longer take distinctions between human beings and animals as the chief point of departure for thought and practice? INDISTINCTION AND BIOLOGISM

Donna Haraway gives voice to one of the chief sentiments of the indistinction approach when she refers to the way in which the “last beachheads” of human uniqueness in relation to animals have become so polluted by the late twentieth century that they can no longer be maintained in good conscience.2 The issue here is not simply that all of the traditional ways of cleanly distinguishing human beings from animals have been compromised—­ this is obviously very much the case. Rather, what Haraway and related theorists stress is that the distinctions have been undermined so radically that the very prospect of trying to reestablish them along other lines no longer seems plausible. In other words, the project of searching for a “proper” of the human appears to be no longer tenable; it is as if such a search belongs to another age.

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What is more, the desire to reestablish such propriety is lacking among many animal theorists and activists. In view of both political strategy and developing alternative relations with animals, many indistinction theorists and activists would share with Haraway the notion of no longer feeling “the need for such a separation.”3 Instead of stressing abyssal differences, many indistinction theorists instead emphasize and “affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures.”4 Haraway arrives at these conclusions about the breakdown of the human/animal distinction primarily by way of findings from the biological sciences, but we should emphasize that for Haraway biological discourse is but one of the vantage points from which we might reconsider relations between human beings and animals. This is an essential point to highlight as we start to lay out the basic elements of the indistinction approach, for some critics (especially those coming from the difference tradition) worry that attempts to render human/animal differences indistinct must originate from a kind of “biologism.” Biologism here means an attempt to understand human beings from a strictly and reductively biological viewpoint, one that would seek to eliminate any other kind of knowledge claims or perspectives on human existence. And inasmuch as biologists classify human beings as animals (and more specifically, as primates5), it might be thought this biological claim alone is what sanctions jettisoning the anthropological difference. As we just mentioned, indistinction theorists are certainly not averse to biological claims about human-­animal continuity; and it would be a mistake from the perspective of this approach to minimize the contribution of biological discourse in creating the conditions for radically rethinking human-­animal relations. Biology does, after all, offer one of the most refined and extensive bodies of knowledge concerning human and animal life we have at our disposal. But there are many reasons beyond biological ones—­including ethical, political, and ontological reasons—­for why we might consider

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leaving behind the search for anthropological differences and move onto other terrain. In the remainder of this chapter, we survey some of these other considerations as well as the possibilities for thought and practice that open up beyond the anthropological difference. AGAMBEN AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE

Moving beyond biologism, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben offers us what we might call biopolitical reasons for rethinking our reliance on the human/animal distinction and moving toward a thought of indistinction. The term “biopolitical” derives from the work of Michel Foucault, an influential theorist whose work has helped to uncover the ways in which dominant modes of politics have come increasingly to take the form of the controlling, governing, and shaping of life and not simply wielding the sovereign power to kill. For Agamben, this biopolitical trend has deep roots in Western culture, going back to the ancient Greeks and their ideas about the nature of what constitutes proper political life. On Agamben’s reading, one of the foundational acts of Western politics is the attempt to separate animal life (zōē) from properly political human life (bios), a process that he refers to as anthropogenesis.6 This process of separation takes place first and foremost, he argues, in and through human beings themselves, with the aim of delimiting those aspects of human life that belong to the political sphere (here we should recall our reading of Aristotle on the relationship between human logos and ethical and political community in Chapter 1). This kind of “anthropological machine” is, thus, not simply a descriptive set of concepts and institutions. The separation of human life from animal life within human beings cannot just be read off of the natural world, as if human beings arrive into the world already neatly distributed into various categories and attributes. Instead, the anthropological machine is what philosophers

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would call a performative apparatus, inasmuch as it enacts and calls into being (which is to say, performs) a certain reality. It is the machine itself that creates, reproduces, and maintains the distinction between human life and animal life. Given the problematic political effects of this distinction, we can see that the anthropological machine is hardly value neutral. If one is deemed insufficiently human, one can find oneself vulnerable to being killed with impunity (consider the precarious situation of human beings who find themselves animalized and dehumanized in various ways). Conversely, those who are deemed sufficiently human are brought within a biopolitical sphere where their lives are shaped in ways that are often deeply questionable (consider the ways in which even well-­intentioned state institutions and programs can shape human beings in ways that are problematic). Agamben argues that the critique of humanism and human nature (which we analyzed in Chapter 2), along with the various problems associated with separating animal life from human life, have made us aware of the contingent and pernicious nature of the anthropological machine’s efforts to establish human propriety. So, instead of reinforcing traditional human/ animal distinctions or searching for new versions of the anthropological difference, Agamben argues that we should aim to stop this machine and try to think more carefully about the indistinction of human and animal life, prior to their separation. What kind of politics might emerge beyond the exclusion of human animality and the biopolitical shaping of “proper” humanity? What practices might correspond to a life in which “human” and “animal” are no longer sharply delimited and separated? Pro-­a nimal theorists who are influenced by Agamben find much that is of interest here, especially the idea of thinking about life beyond the human/animal distinction. But they would also go beyond Agamben inasmuch as they wish to discuss the effects of the anthropological machine not just on the animality of human beings but on animals themselves. In what kinds of pre-

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carious situations do animals who are seen as nonhuman or not fully human find themselves within our society? How do their situations overlap with but also differ from those of various groups of “animalized” human beings? Furthermore, what might human-­a nimal relations as well as animal-­a nimal relations look like in a politics that seeks to move beyond the human/animal distinction? Although Agamben himself is not particularly interested in these questions, his ideas about human-­animal indistinction have helped create the space for raising such inquiries. We give further thought to these questions at the end of the chapter. THE NIGHT IN WHICH ALL COWS ARE BLACK

If we pursue the line of thought opened up by Haraway, Agamben, and other theorists of indistinction, another possible concern arises: Does not allowing the human/animal distinction to collapse ultimately transform this field of beings into an undifferentiated mass beyond conceptual understanding? In other words, it would seem that if we are unable to draw a line or lines of difference between human beings and animals, then we might end up finding ourselves reduced to utter silence when referring to this group. German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel raised a similar concern about fellow philosophers who allowed rich fields of conceptual thought to collapse into indistinction, claiming that such an approach turns everything into a “night in which . . . all cows are black,” 7 and thereby rendering thought effectively impossible. Are indistinction theorists leading us into a similar abyss? These are actually very difficult philosophical questions, and we can’t aim to do full justice to them here. But there is certainly something to the point that the notion of indistinction suggests that, with regard to the multitude of beings that we call “human” and “animal,” we are dealing with a field so utterly complex and so deeply relational that any and all concepts we use to refer to it

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will be inadequate. Furthermore, as Agamben and other theorists would point out, the animal world is not in need of being saved or repaired by human language and thought; it suffices to itself whether or not it is spoken about or conceptually differentiated by human beings. Indeed, one of the tasks of philosophy is to help us work our way to the edges of language in order to catch sight of that which exceeds our conceptual mastery. So, we do not want to rush too quickly past the collapse of the human/ animal distinction toward a new set of concepts and miss what thought encounters in that collapse. However, the theorists discussed in this chapter do try to think about human-­animal indistinction in a way that generates new concepts. What a thought of indistinction ultimately creates is space for us to think about the field of human beings and animals in new ways—­a nd this effectively means uncovering new kinds of identities and differences. So, rather than blocking thought or conceptual work entirely, pursuing a thought of indistinction is aimed at creating the conditions for other modes of thought—­ d ifferent ontologies and different practices—­ to emerge. The chief difference here is that thinking about the field of human beings and animals no longer takes its point of departure either from attempts to extend traditional human traits to animals (the identity approach) or from efforts aimed at complicating and multiplying anthropological differences (the difference approach). Instead, the indistinction approach aims to think about human beings and animals in deeply relational terms that permit new groupings and new differences to emerge, such that “the human” is no longer the center or chief point of reference. And while the indistinction approach is based on a careful engagement with refined bodies of knowledge concerning human beings and animals, the alternative ontologies and concepts created under this rubric are not offered as an exhaustive or final account of how to think about this field. The chief task is to create ontologies and ways of thinking that challenge the status quo

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and that lead to new ways of living. It is in view of such challenges and alternative ways of living that the indistinction framework is perhaps most charitably engaged and analyzed. We turn now to a more detailed analysis of some of the central concepts and aims associated with indistinction. Although (as mentioned previously) the concept of indistinction that we are exploring here is informed by a wide variety of theorists and fields of research,8 to my mind some of the most illustrative and thought-­provoking elaborations of this idea are to be found in the writings of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Val Plumwood. B E C O M I N G -­A N I M A L

One of Gilles Deleuze’s most influential ideas in the field of critical animal studies is that of becoming-­animal. For Deleuze, becoming always involves becoming-­other than “Man” or “the human.” As such, becoming-­other is a refusal to enact the ideals and subjectivity that the dominant culture associates with being a full human subject and to enter into a relation with the various minor, or nondominant, modes of existence that are commonly viewed as being the “other” of the human. There are many such others that lead the processes of becoming further and further away from the human, but becoming-­a nimal is a particularly important mode of becoming-­other inasmuch as the animal often serves as the chief limit against which human propriety is instituted (a point that we have seen stressed by difference theorists as well). Deleuze asserts that becoming-­a nimal does not consist in simply imitating animals or in trying somehow to jump across species boundaries but instead involves inhabiting zones of indistinction where traditional binary distinctions between human beings and animals break down. It is important to note that what is at stake for Deleuze in becoming-­a nimal (along with other modes of becoming-­other) is the displacement of the

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privilege of “the human” as a subject position, which in turn is ultimately aimed at resisting and transforming the unjust and intolerable established order to which all other (that is to say, other-­ t han-­ human) modes of existence are relegated. As Deleuze writes (along with his frequent coauthor, Félix Guattari), “[W]e become animal so that the animal also becomes something else.”9 Deleuze finds an exemplary instance of becoming-­a nimal in the paintings of artist Francis Bacon.10 Bacon is well known for his artworks that feature distorted faces and figures, of bodies that seem to melt and morph beyond their organized and recognizable human form. As if to underscore the ways in which our embodied existence threatens to unravel our pretensions to being stable human subjects, Bacon’s paintings often align human bodies with meat and exposed flesh. Deleuze argues that by recalling us to our vulnerable, fleshy embodiment, Bacon’s paintings assist us in entering into a zone of indistinction between human and animal. It is here, in the common zone of exposed embodiment, that Deleuze says we catch sight of the fact “that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast.”11 In an interview, Bacon himself makes a similar point, noting, “Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”12 To inhabit this zone of indistinction is thus to find oneself in a surprising and profound relation with animals. To be human typically means to disavow the fact that we, too, are flesh—­that we, too, are meat. But to acknowledge oneself as inhabiting a shared zone of exposed embodiment with animals is to recognize that we are in deep and fundamental ways like animals. To be like an animal is very different from the kind of position associated with the identity framework in which it is argued that animals are like us. From a Deleuzean perspective, the identity framework establishes “formal correspondences” between the

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human and its other only to eliminate the other’s difference by assimilating it to the sphere of the human. In the context of identity-­based animal ethics, this kind of human-­animal identity would mean seeing animals as being fundamentally inedible, like us. Following Bacon, Deleuze argues that we need to risk seeing ourselves as being like animals, as seeing both ourselves and animals as exposed, vulnerable, meaty bodies. It is only by doing so that we can begin to displace the human from the center of the established order and institute other ways of thought and life. This is effectively what Deleuze (and Guattari) mean when they use the phrase cited previously that “we become animal so that the animal also becomes something else.” To inhabit this zone of indistinction is to gain a fuller sense of what it means for animals to exist in an economic and political order that seeks to reduce them to nothing but meat to be consumed. Further, inasmuch as we share embodiment with animals, we know that their bodies and our bodies can become something more, something beyond the “mere” meat to which the dominant culture tries to reduce them. In line with Deleuze, we could thus say that the pro-­a nimal revolutionary feels a responsibility “before” (or in view of) animals,13 one that aims to challenge the present order and create another world in which such alternative possibilities and potentialities for animals become available. A SHOCKING REDUCTION

Another particularly powerful instance of a thought of human-­ animal indistinction is provided by Val Plumwood in her essay “Being Prey.”14 Plumwood here recounts being attacked by a crocodile while out kayaking and her desperate attempts at escape. Despite being caught in the crocodile’s jaws and being subjected to multiple death rolls, Plumwood managed eventually to break loose from the crocodile’s grasp and make it to safety. At the time of this violent encounter, Plumwood was already a well-­

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established environmental philosopher who had given sustained thought to animals, ecology, and our obligations to the natural world. Although one might think that becoming prey for another animal would darken her ethical outlook, the attack actually allowed her to deepen her ideas about responsibility and also rethink the place of human beings alongside animals and the rest of the natural world. Plumwood notes that during the attack she found herself in an incredulous state about becoming prey for another animal (“This is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon awake”15). As we noted in our analysis of Deleuze, part of inhabiting the subject position of the human is to situate oneself and other human beings on the side of being fundamentally inedible: human beings eat others but are not eaten by others, especially not other animals. But as the attack continued, Plumwood came to realize the she was undergoing what she calls a “shocking reduction,”16 away from her privileged subject position to a shared zone of coexistence with other edible beings. Finding herself in the jaws of a crocodile amid a world that was indifferent to her becoming prey, Plumwood entered into a zone of indistinction where the differences traditionally posited between human and animal dropped out. In such a zone, human beings are exposed, like animals, to the very best and the very worst, to immeasurable joys and the most horrific forms of predation. To see oneself as potentially edible—­a s “meat” in the sense that Deleuze, Bacon, and Plumwood use the term—­is to find oneself in a surprising, shocking alignment with animals; and to affirm and to live within the space of that alignment is ultimately to refuse the dominant culture’s way of creating a sharp split between human and animal. Readers who are vegan or vegetarian will perhaps be reminded here of a standard objection that is often raised against those who abstain from eating animals: If animals eat other animals, and we are animals, why shouldn’t we (human animals) eat them

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(nonhuman animals)? How does Plumwood, who became prey for another animal and was nearly killed and eaten in the process, answer this question? Surely, being brutally attacked by the very thing one loves and has spent one’s life defending (recall that Plumwood was a dedicated environmental activist prior to and at the time of the attack) would cause one to rethink one’s position on the issue. In view of violent animal predation, vegetarianism might seem to make little sense. Yet, for Plumwood, her commitment to vegetarianism was only deepened by the attack. She not only sought to prevent this particular crocodile from being killed, but she came to gain a fuller respect for animal life after the event. In becoming prey for another animal, Plumwood came to recognize a profound, deep identity with animal life that is often foreclosed by our dominant ways of thinking about and relating to animals. This profound identity, one that goes beyond the formal correspondences employed to demonstrate that “animals are like us,” is perhaps the key idea behind the notion of indistinction. It helps us to think about animals and human-­ animal relations outside a strictly human vantage point and to decenter human subjectivity in a radical way. Moreover, as Plumwood recognized during her struggle and eventual escape, she too, like other animals, could make a claim to being something more than prey, more than “mere” meat. Like other animals who resist human efforts at subjection and mastery, Plumwood fought against her own death and subjection. Plumwood notes that she came to see her vegetarianism as a way of respecting animals’ claims to being more than mere meat to be consumed. As with the pro-­animal revolutionary we mentioned in regard to Deleuze, Plumwood’s approach to vegetarianism could be read as a revolutionary act of assisting animals in their efforts to release themselves from subjection to the dominant culture’s systems of domination and toward something more, toward other potentials and possibilities.

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W H A T I S “ M O R E ”   .   .   . 

It is precisely in view of this “more” that we should locate the recent surge of interest in animal creativity and agency,17 along with a wide range of other animal potentialities and affects. Theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz have argued, for example, that we should understand creative art not as the exclusive activity of human beings but as having its origins in animality and as woven into the very fabric of life and the processes of sexual selection.18 Brian Massumi goes beyond Grosz to develop a robust ontology of human-­a nimal indiscernibility and suggests that creativity and play are immanent to animality itself. 19 Following the logic of indistinction we have been developing here, Massumi demonstrates that a relational activity like play is characteristic of life more broadly and is something in which both human beings and animals are caught up, such that play constitutes a zone in which the anthropological difference is replaced by a more complex set of identities and differences. Perhaps the most thought-­provoking, and certainly the most directly political, example of the recent work done on animal agency is to be found in Jason Hribal’s book Fear of the Animal Planet.20 Assembling a considerable amount of documentary and anecdotal evidence demonstrating intentional acts of resistance by animals, Hribal aims to dispel the notions that animals are mere automatons or (perhaps slightly more generously) moral patients on the receiving end of human ethical consideration. He shows that, in slaughterhouses, zoos, circuses, and water parks, animals of various kinds have mounted a wide variety of struggles against their captivity and mistreatment. As Hribal explains, such instances of animal agency and resistance are often hidden from public view or simply interpreted out of existence. For if we were to acknowledge that animals are active agents, capable of their own forms of organized individual and collective resistance, this would shatter the dominant culture’s views of animals as “mere” objects

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for human use and risk undermining support for the hugely profitable industries that exploit animals in these ways. CONTESTING ANTHROPOCENTRISM

In following the indistinction approach beyond the anthropological difference, we have thus far caught a glimpse of some of the deep and surprising ways in which human beings are like animals, and we have gained a sense of the importance of attending to the variable ways in which animals manifest their own forms of agency, creativity, potentiality, and resistance. Much more could be said in terms of the ontology of human-­ animal indistinction, but here we should turn directly to an exploration of some of the political implications of this approach and see where they might lead. For pro-­a nimal theorists who think within this frame, their key concerns tend to be (1) determining which structures of power are most fundamental in perpetuating violence against animals and how best to resist those structures and (2) exploring alternative, less violent ways of living with and among animals. Translating these questions into the concepts from Agamben we examined earlier, indistinction theorists are seeking to figure out how the anthropological machine functions in order both to stop it and to create other forms of life beyond it. There is, of course, no single way to advance such aims. Given the complex history of violence against animals and the variable nature of power in contemporary societies, we should expect a wide variety of political approaches to emerge here. In what follows, I present what I take to be but one way of working through these issues. I hope, though, that this analysis provides a useful perspective on our current situation, one that coheres with the basic sensibilities of most of the people—­both theorists and activists—­who proceed from the premises of an indistinction-­ style mode of thinking.

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If we think of the anthropological machine as a series of institutions and apparatuses that capture and reproduce but also constrain and kill animal life, then it becomes essential to delimit some of its chief forms. There can be little doubt that one of its key forms is ontological and performative, in the sense that this machine both carves up and enacts reality along lines that aim to separate the human from animals and animality. We saw in the first chapter that identity theorists describe a similar process of exclusion along normative lines in terms of speciesism, which they understand to be a kind of irrational bias on behalf of members of our own species and against members of other animal species. From the perspective of the indistinction approach, however, the anthropological machine goes well beyond individual prejudices to encompass a wide set of systems and structures that have differing effects on animals, marginalized human beings, and what is considered to be human animality. This machine works to institute, maintain, and reproduce an entire world that rotates around the privilege of those most fully associated with “the human,” a grouping that has never included the entire human species and that has only ever included the tiniest fragments of the animal world. As such, the anthropological machine is not effectively challenged by simply expanding the scope of what counts as human and bringing particular groups of marginalized human beings and certain animals within its orbit. While this strategy can be politically effective in limited ways, the ultimate aim of pro-­a nimal politics and other radical justice struggles should be finding a way to delink sociality and community from anthropocentric criteria of inclusion. These points have long been recognized by the more radical wings of pro-­animal and other social justice struggles. Theorists and activists from these traditions understand well Donna Haraway’s notion that, by the exclusionary standards of the established order, nonhuman beings and the vast majority of human beings themselves “have never been human.”21 Thus, the politi-

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cal task ought not to be one of trying to accede to this privileged order but instead of creating a way of life that no longer rotates around the human and the anthropological difference. It is here, on this post-­a nthropocentric terrain, that the material and conceptual conditions for creating alliances between pro-­animal and other radical struggles for social justice are to be found. THE QUESTION CONCERNING CAPITALISM

There can also be little doubt that, in terms of specific practices and institutions governing animal lives, the current global capitalist economic order deserves a certain primacy of consideration. Although, as Agamben demonstrates, the anthropological machine has been functioning much longer than capitalism has existed, capitalist economic relations have clearly intensified and extended the effects of anthropocentrism in unprecedented ways.22 Today, the commodification and capture of animal life within the flows of capitalist economic exchange stretch to all corners of the globe, and the forms of violence that attend these economic processes are among the most brutal that capitalism produces. Animal activists and theorists of all stripes have increasingly come to recognize the central role that global capitalism is playing in accelerating the problems they seek to address. Many of the mainstream organizations and activists associated with the identity approach have used vegan outreach campaigns and boycotts of certain animal food and experimentation corporations in order to try to change market signals in a more pro-­a nimal and less violent direction. Such tactics are certainly important and have helped to raise awareness of many of the common abuses in modern capitalist agriculture and medical research. But as theorists like Adrian Parr have convincingly argued, these kinds of limited challenges to capitalist economic relations leave in place a larger set of economic systems and relations that continue to

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carry out other horrific forms of violence against both human beings and animals.23 What is needed is a broader and more direct challenge to capitalist economic relations as such, one that recognizes the need to address the joint exploitation of animals and human beings in a wide variety of industries and practices across the globe. To this end, it should be underscored again that direct-­action animal activists and theorists have been cognizant of these issues and of the need for developing multidimensional, intersectional strategies for challenging the economic capture of animal life for many years now.24 Inspired by the vision of liberating animals into other possibilities beyond the limitations of the established order, these activists have mounted a direct assault on corporations that exploit animals, with the joint aims of inflicting maximum economic damage and liberating animals from spaces of confinement and forced labor. Although draconian legal and punitive tactics have been somewhat successful in limiting and driving some of these activities further underground, the activists and theorists associated with direct-­action animal liberation have been instrumental in helping to develop the kind of ontological and ethico-­political framework we have been examining in this chapter. The actions and discourses carried out in these contexts provide us with glimpses of what life beyond the human/animal distinction might be like, while also helping to plant the seeds for the kinds of intersectional, non-­a nthropocentric politics toward which the indistinction framework moves us. As a general strategy, I would suggest that direct action plays an essential but not exclusive role in contesting the economic and anthropocentric status quo. It is clear that, in order to challenge the existing order of things in a sustained manner, current intersectional linkages among non-­a nthropocentric and anti-­/alter-­ globalization movements will have to be deepened and expanded well beyond direct-­action liberations to meet the acceleration of capitalist exploitation of animals; in addition, alternative forms

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of economic relations will have to be developed, ones that do not simply return the productive circuits of capital to the multitude of productive human agents (as certain neo-­Marxists advocate25) but that ask serious questions about the place of animals within the circuits of production as well as the role and extent of production as such. In order to live lives that do justice to animals and other beings and systems inhabiting the planet, we will undoubtedly need to shrink massively the influence of capitalist economic relations in order to allow more space for alternative economic as well as noneconomic relations to flourish. LIVING OTHERWISE

The grim realities that characterize the lives and deaths of so many animals today can make the prospect of creating and implementing alternative ways of life seem like an abstract, even utopian, project. However, the indistinction approach would have us not simply limit violence toward animals but also imagine and practice other ways of living. If the latter is understood as an attempt to institute a near-­term, global revolution in human-­ animal relationships, then such a project would indeed be utopian. No one who is currently involved in pro-­animal politics can believe widespread transformations will take place in such a short time frame or on such a broad spatial scale. At present, the violent exploitation of animal life at a global level is, in fact, accelerating and increasing exponentially across multiple domains. This means that, for the present time, slowing this increase as much as possible while simultaneously developing alternatives in the interstices of the established order of things is perhaps the only way forward. It might also seem that, given the long history of violence toward animals, such pro-­a nimal alternatives would have to be created from scratch, which would make the political task that much more difficult. Here, though, I would suggest that there

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is no shortage of extant examples of alternative modes of human-­a nimal relations, especially if we are willing to think beyond the limits of traditional ways of distinguishing human beings and animals. We can find such examples in a wide variety of indigenous and nondominant cultures, both past and present, across the globe. Similarly, ethologists who study animals noninvasively in their native habitats have also shown us that myriad alternative relations with animals are possible. Activist liberations of animals both into native habitats and into alternative safe havens present us with additional possibilities, while animal sanctuaries and the protection of ecological zones and corridors for nondomesticated animals point us toward the kinds of practices that are required for human, animal, and non-­a nimal life to flourish jointly. The challenge for indistinction theorists and activists lies not so much in developing alternative visions of relation but rather in attending to the subtle ways in which proposed alternatives might reinforce certain forms of power and violence that structure the established order. This problem arises with particular force in view of our relationship with domesticated animals and animals that are currently used by human beings in various ways, for example, as labor, as subjects of research, as companions, and so on. Some indistinction theorists such as Donna Haraway feel that these relationships can be refashioned so that animal agency and subjectivity are respected and maximized, whereas many activists and theorists (and I count myself among this group) believe that most of these relationships should be eliminated as much as possible in favor of other, more liberatory possibilities. This difference marks one of the major schisms in the field and will no doubt continue to be a source of argument and tension in the coming years. The chief point to note here is that creating a space for alternative modes of relation is not, by itself, inherently liberatory and does not necessarily lead to a better world than the current established order.

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The other major challenge attendant on the indistinction approach consists of finding ways to help alternative modes of relation become more widely accepted and established. To accomplish these aims, animal politics will have to continue to move beyond mainstream efforts at vegan outreach and pro-­ animal legislative efforts (characteristic of the identity approach) toward forming genuine bonds of solidarity with related movements for radical social change (something toward which the difference approach gestures but never fully arrives). The kinds of intersectional groupings currently being formed between animal activists and activists in queer, disability, environmental justice, food justice, feminist, indigenous, racial justice, and alter-­ globalization movements are perhaps the most promising trends in this vein; and they constitute the strongest hope both for countering the effects of the dominant anthropocentric-­capitalist order and for instituting other ways of life.26 Of course, such alliances and intersectional political movements do not come ready-­ made; they have to be constructed through diligent and humble political and theoretical work, and there is no guarantee of success here. Furthermore, given the ways in which many groups of marginalized human beings have been subjected to processes of dehumanization and animalization, there is often understandable resistance to the alignment of animal justice with certain radical struggles. Thus, for this kind of intersectional approach to gain more force, theorists and activists from a variety of struggles will have to find ways to redraw the conceptual-­political field so that value is not allotted exclusively to the human and so that animals, animality, and the entire more-­than-­human world come to be revalued on their own terms.27 These are no minor challenges, but they are certainly ones worth facing and meeting.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.  For a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical discussions surrounding these issues, see Angus Taylor, Animals and Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate, 3rd ed. (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2009). For an overview of the interdisciplinary dimensions of animal studies, see Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-­Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 2.  See Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, eds., The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Anthony J. Nocella, John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka, eds., Defining Critical Animal Studies: An Intersectional Social Justice Approach for Liberation (New York: Peter Lang, 2014). 1. IDENTITY

1.  Readers interested in fuller surveys of animal behavior that take a generous approach to animal capacities might wish to consult Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Marc 71

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Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2.  Clive D. L. Wynne examines many of these debates in his Do Animals Think? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3. Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1998), 1256b15–­20. That Aristotle regards animals as existing “for the sake of ” the human should not be taken to imply that such service is necessarily exhaustive of animal being as a whole on his account. 4. Ibid., 1253a14–­18. 5.  René Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1:140. 6.  René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3:366. 7.  Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 8.  Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 239. 9. Ibid., 240. 10.. See, for example, Gilbert Simondon, Two Lessons on Animal and Man, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2012). I thank Brian Massumi for recalling me to this book. 11.  Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith, eds., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­ 1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 300. 12.  Charles R. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), 35.

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13.  Charles R. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872). For more complete and very helpful analyses of the ethical and ontological implications of Darwinism, I recommend James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), chap. 1. 14.  Stephen Jay Gould, “The Evolution of Life on Earth,” Scientific American 271 (1994): 91. 15.  David L. Hull, The Metaphysics of Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 11. 16.  Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), xxv. 17.  Different utilitarians define utility in slightly different ways; Singer’s utilitarianism focuses on the satisfaction/frustration of preferences. 18.  For Singer’s discussion of the importance of sentience and animal pain/suffering, see his Animal Liberation (New York: Ecco, 2002), 7–­17. 19. Ibid., 11. 20.  Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 112. 21.  Ibid. See also Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 243, for a fuller statement of what constitutes being a subject-­of-­a-­life. 22. Regan, Case for Animal Rights, chaps. 1–­2. See especially pages 18–­21 for Regan’s neo-­Darwinian reasoning. 23.  Ibid., chap. 7. 24.  Ibid., chap. 9. 25.  Paola Cavalieri, The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 6.

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26. Ibid., 138. 27. Ibid., 41–­46. 28.  The language of moral considerability is explored by Kenneth E. Goodpaster in “On Being Morally Considerable,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 308–­25. 29.  Other identity-­based theorists such as Gary Francione, Harlan Miller, James Rachels, Richard Ryder, and Bernard Rollin have also made important contributions to the Great Ape Project. See the texts collected in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 30. Ibid., 4. 31. Ibid. 32.  It should be noted that Regan, in distinction from Singer, acknowledges that he has deep emotions for animals. Regan insists, though, that such emotions are not what drive the logical case for animal rights. 33.  Cathryn Bailey, “On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics,” Ethics & the Environment 10 (2005): 1–­17. 34.  See the essays collected in Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds., Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1996). 35.  A similar version of the following argument is made by David Nibert, although he and I differ on the critical promise of the concept of speciesism. See Nibert’s Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), chap. 1. 2. DIFFERENCE

1.  Readers interested in a more complete account of the critique of humanism and the decentering of the subject are encouraged to consult David West’s helpful Continental Philosophy: An

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Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), chap. 6. Caroline Williams provides a useful discussion of these same themes in the context of French philosophy and its predecessors in her Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject (New York: Athlone Press, 2001). 2.  The first person is often used in discussing Levinasian ethics because my responsibilities are understood to be nonsubstitutable (I do not typically pass them on to others) and nonreciprocal (I do not typically demand that others be ethical toward me). The best way into Levinas’s often complex ideas is through his Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), is Levinas’s most sustained account of an ethics of difference (or, to use his terminology, an ethics of radical alterity, or other-­ness). The ideas I discuss in this section are primarily Levinasian in origin, but they are also informed by several other thinkers who present their own versions of an ethics of difference. See, among others, Jean-­François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 3.  See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176–­273. William McNeill offers a masterful analysis of Heidegger’s lecture course in view of its implications for animals in “Life Beyond the Organism: Animal Being in Heidegger’s Freiburg Lectures, 1929–­30,” in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 197–­248.

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4.  Levinas’s discourse on animals is expertly surveyed by Peter Atterton in “Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Animals,” Inquiry 54 (2011): 633–­49. 5.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). See also Christina Gerhardt, “The Ethics of Animals in Adorno and Kafka,” New German Critique 33 (2006): 159–­78. 6.  “If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we ‘are’ undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-­ anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.” Pierpaolo Antonello and Roberto Farneti, “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation with Judith Butler,” Theory & Event 12 (2009), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_ event/v012/12.1.antonello.html (accessed July 14, 2014). See also Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 13. 7.  Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray both figure prominently here, especially in view of developing an animal philosophy of difference. Additional theorists from the Continental tradition who have important things to say about animals are discussed in the next chapter. 8.  Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 41. 9. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 63. 10.  This point is thoughtfully explored by Eileen Crist in “Ecocide and the Extinction of Animal Minds,” in Ignoring Nature No More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation, ed. Marc Bekoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 45–­61.

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11.  As this encounter defies easy summary, I encourage readers to examine the text for themselves. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3–­11. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Ibid., 13. 14.  Jacques Derrida (with Jean-­Luc Nancy), “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-­Luc Nancy, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell (New York: Routledge, 1991), 274. 15.  Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 19. 16.  “Let us acknowledge that these [the fetus, embryo, animal, and so on] are all organisms that are living in one sense or another; to say this, however, is not yet to furnish any substantial arguments for one policy or another. After all, plants are living things, but vegetarians do not usually object to eating them. More generally, it can be argued that processes of life themselves require destruction and degeneration, but this does not in any way tell us which sorts of destruction are ethically salient and which are not” (Butler, Frames of War, 16). 17.  Wolfe approvingly cites Butler’s ideas about the problems of extending ethics to plants in Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 19. For a contrasting approach that seeks to extend a philosophy of difference to plants, see Michael Marder, Plant-­Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 18. Wolfe, Before the Law, 83. 19.  See Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-­ Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), as well as Adams’s coedited volume with Josephine Donovan, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1996).

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20.  Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 21.  Kelly Oliver, “Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness,” Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010): 279–­80. For a fuller development of Oliver’s response ethics in relation to animals, see her Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 22.  Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 64–­65, 67. 23.  Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 192. 24.  For a thoughtful example of how the difference approach might be linked with a post-­deconstructive concept of rights, see Eric Daniel Jonas, “Derrida’s Theory of Alterity and Critical Animal Studies” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2014). 25.  Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 72, 66. 3. INDISTINCTION

1.  There are additional intellectual and activist traditions that figure prominently here—­chief among these being Critical Theory and anarchism—­that I will not cover, as they have been discussed thoroughly and expertly by others, especially Steven Best and Anthony Nocella. I should also note that, although I have not explicitly included Cary Wolfe among the theorists listed here and have confined discussion of his work to the previous chapter on difference, Wolfe’s wide-­ranging and influential writings can certainly be read as embracing portions of both the difference and indistinction frameworks. 2.  Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151. Despite many promising aspects of her work that I will highlight here, Haraway has had a mixed reception among theorists in critical animal studies, especially in regard to some of her political positions

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concerning animals. We will return to this point of contention briefly at the end of the chapter. 3. Ibid., 152. 4. Ibid. 5.  For an account of this kind of biological classification from a perspective that is consonant with the one described here, see Ronnie Zoe Hawkins, “Seeing Ourselves as Primates,” Ethics & the Environment 7 (2002): 60–­103. 6.  Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79. 7.  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9. 8.  Among the more influential thinkers I would include under the rubric of indistinction is Roberto Esposito, a philosopher whose notion of “the impersonal” or “third person” aims to provide a concept of life that lies beyond the traditional categories of the human and the animal (see his Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal, trans. Zakiya Hanafi [Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012]). In a vein that is closer to the concerns of animal studies and the concerns of this book, philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “zoe-­egalitarianism” offers a helpful way of rethinking community with animals and various nonhuman others beyond anthropocentrism (see her The Posthuman [Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013], chap. 2). Likewise, Donna Haraway’s work on “companion species” develops a powerful conception of how a thought of indistinction might help us to reenvision ontological relations between human beings and animals (see her The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness [Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003], and When Species Meet [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008]). Beyond these individual theorists, there is a rich literature in a number of related fields—­ especially in indigenous studies and environmental philosophy—­ that places human-­animal interactions within a broader notion of relation that helps to undercut anthropocentric biases. A broader

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study of indistinction would require us to examine all of these thinkers and fields in more depth. 9.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 109. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 11. Ibid., 23. 12.  David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 46. 13. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 25. 14.  Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” Utne Reader (July–­August 2000): 56–­61. 15. Ibid., 58. 16. Ibid., 61. 17.  For an excellent overview of this topic, see the essays collected in Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, eds., Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Boston: Brill, 2009). See also Cynthia Willett’s Interspecies Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) for additional ways of thinking about animals, ethics, and relation starting from animal potentiality and agency and not simply from animal vulnerability. 18.  Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chap. 2. 19.  Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 20.  Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (Petrolia, Calif.: CounterPunch, 2010.) 21.  This phrase, which is a play on the title of Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern, is part of the title of an interview with Donna Haraway. See Nicholas Gane, “When We Have

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Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Interview with Donna Haraway,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 135–­58. 22.  This point is made with particular force by David Nibert in his Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 23.  Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), chap. 6. 24.  For an overview of some of this work, see the essays collected in Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds., Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (New York: Lantern Books, 2004). 25.  I have in mind primarily the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. See their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 26.  Important recent texts here include Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, eds., Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K. C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan, eds., Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-­ ability Movement (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Margaret Robinson, “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 33 (2013): 189–­96; A. Breeze Harper, ed., Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lantern Books, 2010); Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, eds., Queering the Non/Human (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). See also Kim Socha’s helpful article, “‘Just Tell the Truth’: A Polemic on the Value of Radical Activism,” in Confronting Animal Exploitation: Grassroots Essays on Liberation and Veganism, ed. Kim Socha and Sarahjane Blum (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2013), 44–­65, esp. 60–­63. 27.  Exemplary work along these lines can be found especially among indigenous feminist, Chicana queer-­feminist, and eco-

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feminist theorists and activists. See, for example, Andrea Smith, “Humanity Through Work,” borderlands 13 (2014): 1–­17; Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts,” in this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 540–­78; AnaLouise Keating and Kimberly C. Merenda, “Decentering the Human? Towards a Post-­a nthropocentric Standpoint Theory,” Praktyka Teoretyczna 10 (2013): 65–­85; and Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2002).