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╇╇ 48 Notes╇╇ 71 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. 1 2 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-Â�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- I N T R O D U C T I O N 3 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—Â�which is to say, philosophically—Â�upon the kinds of frameworks and strategies that have become dominant in pro-Â�animal 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—Â�to inhabit—Â�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—Â�both humans and animals—Â�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 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N animal rights. I call this approach to animal issues the identity approach, inasmuch as it founds its ethical and political frameworks on human-Â�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-Â�animal 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-Â� 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-Â�animal relations in a manner that deempha- I N T R O D U C T I O N 5 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-Â�anthropocentric, 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-Â�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 â•… I D E N T I T Y 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-Â�species altruism among various animal species; birds creating elaborate ruses to deceive other animals; squirrels with precise long-Â�term memories; certain primate and bird species demonstrating self-Â�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—Â�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 I D E N T I T Y 7 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-Â�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-Â� 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. 8 I D E N T I T Y 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-Â�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- I D E N T I T Y 9 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-Â�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-Â� constituted by a second substance, mind, by which he means rational, discursive, reflective self-Â�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 beingsâ•.̄â•.̄â•.̄â•s̄ince 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-Â�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 10 I D E N T I T Y the case with Aristotle and Descartes, Kant denies that animals possess rationality and self-Â�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- I D E N T I T Y 11 action with animals. There are certainly instances in the history of Western philosophy of counter-Â�discourses 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 -Â�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-Â�animal 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-Â�animal, 12 I D E N T I T Y non-Â�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-Â�arising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush.”14 That we should find such deep continuity among life-Â�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-Â� 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- I D E N T I T Y 13 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—Â�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-Â�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. 14 I D E N T I T Y To underscore the point made in the previous section, it is important to remember that pro-Â�animal theorists who work within a neo-Â�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—Â�perhaps because of differences in their race, class, gender, or intellectual limitations—Â�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-Â�animal 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 - Â�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 I D E N T I T Y 15 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-Â�animal continuity with the ethical principle of equal consideration to arrive at the conclusion that all sentient animals—Â�whether human or nonhuman—Â�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-Â�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 16 I D E N T I T Y 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-Â�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-Â�of-Â�a-Â�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 I D E N T I T Y 17 that we typically grant such subjectivity to (most) human beings—Â�but do animals also show signs of being subjects-Â�of-Â�a-Â� 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—Â�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—Â�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-Â�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-Â�based egalitarianism 18 I D E N T I T Y 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-Â�animal, continuity-Â�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- I D E N T I T Y 19 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-Â�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 20 I D E N T I T Y 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—Â�that is, for “treating likes alike”—Â�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—Â�that is, the question of who should count morally and why—Â�with significant and destabilizing force.28 By raising direct questions concerning the ethical lines that are supposed to separate human beings from animals, identity-Â�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-Â�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 I D E N T I T Y 21 on animals). Some identity-Â�based theorists have been tempted to limit political transformation primarily to these kinds of personal changes, urging us to see individual veganism and cruelty-Â� 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-Â�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—Â�that humans and animals share much in common, that there are strong reasons to adopt a more egalitarian ethics toward animals, and so on—Â�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-Â�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 22 I D E N T I T Y 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-Â�based approach, there are crucial limitations to this way of thinking about and framing human-Â�animal 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-Â�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-Â�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 I D E N T I T Y 23 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-Â�centered and male-Â�centered thinking and a pernicious dogma that the identity discourse needs to question more thoroughly. Another form of logocentrism appears among identity-Â�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 24 I D E N T I T Y own foundation. There are multiple emotions, affects, and other extra-Â�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-Â�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-Â�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-Â�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 “-Â�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-Â�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 I D E N T I T Y 25 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-Â�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-Â�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-Â� 26 I D E N T I T Y ness) have almost always figured in significant ways for how the human and nonhuman are distinguished—Â�so it is important that we attend to how human-Â�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—Â�and 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-Â�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- I D E N T I T Y 27 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 â•… D I F F E R E N C E In the previous chapter, we saw how identity theorists employ the notion of human-Â�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-Â� 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 D I F F E R E N C E 29 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—Â�including such thinkers as Karl Marx, 30 D I F F E R E N C E Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger—Â�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-Â�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-Â� 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 D I F F E R E N C E 31 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-Â�in-Â�becoming—Â�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. 32 D I F F E R E N C E 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 D I F F E R E N C E 33 do so in view of the Other. In a genuinely ethical relation, I become a different “I,” an ethical sub-Â�ject, someone thrown-Â� under the Other as support. THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMAL The two ideas we have briefly surveyed here—Â�the antihumanist, relational ontology of individuals and the idea that ethics derives from encounters with singular Others—Â�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 34 D I F F E R E N C E 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-Â� 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-Â�and post-Â�anthropocentric trends can be discerned in other rogue Continental philosophers as well.7 Perhaps the most sustained effort to link difference-Â�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 D I F F E R E N C E 35 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-Â�à-Â�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-Â�based theorists have not halted the process of critical analysis too quickly here by focusing primarily on animals. Shouldn’t the cri- 36 D I F F E R E N C E 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-Â�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-Â�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. D I F F E R E N C E 37 M ULTIPLYIN G H U M A N/A NIM A L DIF F ER EN C E S So, how do pro-Â�animal 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—Â�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-Â�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”—Â�as if everything we refer to as animal life could be so easily grouped and understood with a single essence—Â�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-Â� 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 38 D I F F E R E N C E 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-Â�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-Â�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 D I F F E R E N C E 39 of the human/animal boundary here does not, for difference theorists, lead to its full collapse into human-Â�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-Â�animal 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—Â�while sharing much with human beings—Â�can also have very different lives from our own. With regard to heteronomy, pro-Â�animal 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 40 D I F F E R E N C E 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-Â�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—Â�an 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—Â�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 D I F F E R E N C E 41 radical otherness. Although our dominant ethical traditions have often employed fundamental differences to justify value hierarchies and exclusions from the moral community, pro-Â�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-Â�forms. Likewise, Derrida’s notion of the Other with whom one finds oneself in ethical relation is equally capacious. 42 D I F F E R E N C E 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-Â�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—Â�who is one of the most able defenders of the difference-Â�based approach to animals—Â�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-Â�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 D I F F E R E N C E 43 practice of difference. No doubt such an open-Â�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-Â�based animal rights practices. Difference theorists have rightly taught us to be wary of the problematic implications of political projects—Â�like the Great Ape Project and similar movements for animal rights—Â�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-Â�animal theorists like Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan have called attention to this limitation of the rights-Â�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—Â� those who can demonstrate a capacity for so-Â�called rational 44 D I F F E R E N C E agency—Â�and 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-Â�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- D I F F E R E N C E 45 cally around existing, mainstream pro-Â�animal 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-Â�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-Â�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 46 D I F F E R E N C E view of animal justice; and as more activist-Â�and policy-Â�oriented theorists adopt this framework, we will no doubt see such possibilities actualized. This kind of work might take the form of an animal-Â�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- D I F F E R E N C E 47 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—Â�and this is a concern shared by many theorists who work within the difference framework—Â�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 â•… I N D I S T I N C T I O N 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-Â�standing movements and that circulate widely among critical animal studies theorists and radical pro-Â�animal activists. 48 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 49 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-Â�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 50 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 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—Â�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 ani...
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