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

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 Stanford University Press
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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.
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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 ani-
mal studies has come increasingly into contact with different dis-
ciplines 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 indi-
viduals 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 intro-
duction 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 theo-
retical grid that will help readers gain access to some of the main
philosophical themes in critical animal studies so they can even-
tually 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-�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 organiza-
tions 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-�animal politics. When one is deeply involved in political
struggles, it can be hard to detect lingering dogmas or shortcom-
ings 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 dis-
cussion. 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 ani-
mals—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 Chap-
ter 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 frame-
works on human-�animal identity. While identity theorists do not
maintain that human beings and animals are identical in every
respect, they do argue that our shared evolutionary history has
given rise to fundamental similarities in terms of certain ethically
relevant traits, such as sentience, subjectivity, and intentionality.
If we accept the basic ethical principle of treating likes alike, then
this would imply, identity theorists argue, that we need funda-
mentally 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 ethi-
cal 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 concep-
tion of human beings based on the radical singularity, or radical
difference, of individuals. Pro-�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-�
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 con-
tains certain shortcomings in terms of its approach to the human/
animal distinction and its politics.
Chapter 3 examines the indistinction approach, which aims to
think about human-�animal relations in a manner that deempha-
 I N T R O D U C T I O N 5

sizes the importance of human uniqueness and the human/ani-

mal 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 demon-
strate their own forms of agency, creativity, and potential. The
political task for indistinction theorists consists primarily in try-
ing 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 chal-
lenges, I argue that emerging forms of non-�anthropocentric,
intersectional animal politics associated with the discourse on
indistinction offer promising means for addressing these chal-
lenges and for advancing struggles for animal justice.

I thank Brian Massumi, Kelly Oliver, and an anonymous reviewer

for helpful comments on the manuscript. My gratitude also goes
to Emily-�Jane Cohen for her unflagging support for this project,
and to Christina Venturacci for helping me work through many
of the ideas discussed herein. I dedicate this book to my students,
past and present.
1 â•… I D E N T I T Y

One of the defining characteristics of our age is the radical break-

down 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 sepa-
rating 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 discov-
ered in varying forms and to varying degrees among a wide num-
ber of animal species. There are numerous scientific and
anecdotal accounts of such breakdowns: primates passing along
novel behaviors through cultural means; elephants grieving and
mourning for dead companions; cross-�species altruism among
various animal species; birds creating elaborate ruses to deceive
other animals; squirrels with precise long-�term memories; certain
primate and bird species demonstrating self-�awareness; tool use
among a number of terrestrial and marine animals; ravens with
stunning capacities for human facial and vocal recognition; con-
fined 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 ani-
mals 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 anthropo-

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

PHILOSOPHICAL ANIMALS

The fundamental breakdown in the effort to delimit sharply

human beings from animals is an important intellectual and sci-
entific development for the philosophers and theorists discussed
in this chapter. They view their own work as carrying through
on the philosophical implications of this event. And in so doing,
they also see themselves as working in opposition to a long-�
standing, dogmatic tendency within the Western philosophical
tradition to deny fundamental similarities among human beings
and animals. Now, to state that philosophy has traditionally been
dogmatic about animals might seem strange at first blush, for
what attracts many people to philosophy is its insistence on rigor-
ously calling into question the dogmas and unthinking preju-
dices 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 per-
ception, 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 contempo-
rary 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 philosophi-
cal discourse in the West up to the present.
Another influential discourse on the human/animal distinc-
tion 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 sen-
sation) are essentially indistinguishable from machines and that
their behavior can be fully explained without recourse to notions
such as mind and self-�awareness. Animals in his account are
complex automata, beings that can react to external stimuli but
lack the ability to know that such reactions are taking place.
Cognizant that this kind of mechanistic explanatory frame-
work might sweep up human behavior within its scope, Des-
cartes maintains that even though human bodies can be largely
explained using the same premises, we are uniquely co-�
constituted by a second substance, mind, by which he means
rational, discursive, reflective self-�consciousness. Proof of the lack
of humanlike mind in animals, Descartes argues, is to be found
in the dual fact that animals are able neither to “make their
thoughts understood” through language nor to solve problems in
creative and novel ways beyond the mechanical “disposition of
their organs.”5 Given that animals lack mind and a sense of self,
experimenting on them (for which Descartes is notorious) and
killing them for food pose no ethical problems. As Descartes
notes in a letter to Henry More, his position “is not so much
cruel to animals as indulgent to human 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 ratio-
nality, mind, and self-�consciousness are the chief markers of that
difference; and that such differences justify the exclusion of ani-
mals from ethical consideration are ideas that remain hegemonic
in certain quarters today.
Let’s consider one final example of traditional, Western philo-
sophical 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-�consciousness. Indeed, it is the human
capacity to think and act reflectively and rationally that, accord-
ing 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 sta-
tus 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 Des-
cartes, 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 mistreat-
ment of other human beings. Hence, Kant argues for the neces-
sity 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 ear-
lier 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 domi-
nant 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-�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 help-
ing us to think critically about the human/animal distinction
and our attitudes toward animals.

N E O -�D A R W I N I A N O N T O L O G Y

So, how might we begin to break out of the intellectual and prac-
tical framework inherited from the dominant discourses in the
Western philosophical tradition? The pro-�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 rela-
tions 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 ani-
mal existence, an ethics that doesn’t simply seek to justify the
status quo but endeavors to correct the dogmas and critical limi-
tations 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 influ-
enced by Charles Darwin that stresses the fundamental continu-
ities 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-�animal,
12 I D E N T I T Y

non-�natural origins.11 Darwin is at great pains to demonstrate

the phylogenetic continuity of all animals with life as a whole,
and he stresses that there is “no fundamental difference between
man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”12 To
this end, Darwin seeks to demonstrate the similar emotional and
behavioral lives of human beings and animals, thereby anticipat-
ing 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 enor-
mously arborescent bush.”14
That we should find such deep continuity among life-�forms as
a whole, and among human beings and animals in particular,
should come as no surprise if we start from an evolutionary per-
spective. One of Darwin’s chief insights is that differences
between humans and animals are best explained as differences of
degree rather than of kind. There are no huge leaps, abysses, or
breaks between species; rather, humans, animals, and all life-�
forms are participating in the same story of life’s evolution, a
story that stretches back some 3.5 billion years. Although, as a
vestige of the philosophical and religious traditions of the West,
we tend to think of “the human” as forming a separate, natural
kind with certain essential traits that we uniquely possess, evolu-
tionary biology has taught us to be critical of that way of think-
ing. 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 clus-
ter 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 les-
son 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 evolu-
tionary 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, subjec-
tivity, 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 concern-

ing animals is the deployment of the principle of equal consider-
ation 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 prin-
ciple is that equal ethical consideration should be given to inter-
ests 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 princi-
ple. 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-�animal theorists who work
within a neo-�Darwinian framework do not wish to argue that
human beings and animals are identical in every respect, only
that there are certain similarities or identities present among
human beings and animals that are ethically relevant. In this
case, what human beings and animals both share are interests.
Thus, if ethics asks us to take the interests of others into account,
and if animals have interests, then we would need some nonarbi-
trary, 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 con-
sideration of interests is used to claim that beings who are identi-
cal 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 iden-
tity I am using to describe the pro-�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 - �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 Hap-
piness Principle, this utilitarian norm aims at increasing in an
impartial manner the amount of happiness, pleasure, or prefer-
ence 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 ques-
tions 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. Con-
sistent 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 ani-
mals 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-�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 medi-
cal reasons. Can such practices be justified? Utilitarian theorists
like Singer do not have absolute, ready-�made answers for such
questions, and no particular practice involving the causing of
pain is ruled out as such in advance within this framework. We
arrive at answers to questions about how to act ethically from the
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 activi-
ties cannot be justified, inasmuch as they do not maximize aggre-
gate 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 scien-
tific knowledge through painful experiments that could likely be
gained by other, noninvasive experimental means). One could
imagine scenarios under which causing animals harm might, in
fact, maximize utility; but, as Singer insists, such scenarios do
not usually match the realities of the factory farming system or
the real-�world practices surrounding animal experimentation. As
such, we must be prepared to rethink some of our most common
interactions with animals in a profound way.
In line with Singer and other identity theorists, animal rights
philosopher Tom Regan seeks to establish a fundamental evolu-
tionary 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 subjec-
tivity (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 avoid-
ing Kant’s exclusion of animals from direct ethical consider-
ation), 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 individ-
ual rights sometimes to be overridden in the pursuit of the great-
est good for the greatest number. Regan fears that in the case of
animals such an approach encourages us to continue seeing ani-
mals 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 accom-
plishes 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 hav-
ing the same kind of subjectivity as human beings have. Of
course, the implication of this kind of rights-�based egalitarianism
18 I D E N T I T Y

is an extremely rigoristic ethics, one that calls for the total aboli-
tion 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 tradi-
tional 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 nor-
mative 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 rem-
edy 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. Cava-
lieri follows philosopher Alan Gewirth in suggesting that human
rights are actually aimed at protecting very basic modes of inten-
tionality 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-�order rationality),
we would risk drawing the line of inclusion too narrowly and
excluding large numbers of human beings from rights protec-
tions.
But if human rights are aimed at protecting the intentional
agency of human beings, why should we ignore the same charac-
teristics 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 king-
dom. 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 dis-
tinction 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, subjec-
tivity, intentionality, and so on) are found in identical or similar
forms among human beings and animals is a significant correc-
tive 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 “treat-
ing likes alike”—Â�are extraordinarily powerful and serve to under-
cut 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-�based theorists do not allow us to rest easily
with a vaguely progressive “humanist” ethic that would purport-
edly include all human beings but leave animals outside the
moral community. Though all of the major identity theorists
share the progressive desire to establish an ethic that would
include the vast majority of human beings, they demonstrate
with admirable rigor that any such broadly constructed ethic will
undoubtedly (if it is to be consistent in its reasoning) have to
include animals within its scope.
Perhaps the most important implication of the identity-�based
approach is that it asks us to transform our individual and collec-
tive 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 prod-
ucts that have been researched and developed by experimenting
 I D E N T I T Y 21

on animals). Some identity-�based theorists have been tempted to

limit political transformation primarily to these kinds of per-
sonal changes, urging us to see individual veganism and cruelty-�
free consumerism as the chief means whereby speciesism is
challenged. I later offer some critical remarks in regard to this
emphasis on personal ethics. But before I take up that point, I
want to emphasize that many other identity-�based activists have
suggested (and I think rightly so) that we must turn our attention
to the collective, political level and seek transformations there as
well. Indeed, the ideas that we have been examining in this
chapter—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 jus-
tice. These ethically based political movements constitute per-
haps the most important fruits of the identity approach.
One particularly noteworthy example of such legal-�political
initiatives is the Great Ape Project. Two of the authors consid-
ered here, Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, are founding mem-
bers 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 continu-
ity 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 protec-
tion 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 inspira-
tion behind legislation that has helped curb invasive research on
great apes in the United States and a number of European coun-
tries. Were such legislation expanded to include all of the princi-
ples laid out within the Great Ape Project, and were it adopted
on a broadly national and international basis, it would mark a
monumental departure from the status quo treatment of animals
in most industrialized nations.

THE PROBLEM OF LOGOCENTRISM

Despite these and other merits of the identity-�based approach,

there are crucial limitations to this way of thinking about and
framing human-�animal interactions. One limitation concerns
the lingering logocentrism found in this approach. Logocentrism
refers to an uncritical focus and overemphasis on logos, under-
stood here as reason and its associated capacities and faculties
(language, consciousness, subjectivity, and so on). Now, as we
saw with Aristotle and Descartes, rationality in this broad form is
what is supposed to separate human beings from animals.
Identity-�based thinkers contest this kind of clean division of
human from animal based on logos and argue instead that reason
appears in varying forms and degrees among other animals; so
their logocentrism should not be confused with the traditional
philosophical variety. Instead, logocentrism reappears among
identity-�based philosophers in the process of developing a sys-
tematic way of making sense of our obligations to animals. Phi-
losophers 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 ver-
sions of animal ethics stand and fall on reason alone.32 In recent
years, feminist theorists have questioned this kind of logocen-
trism by (1) demonstrating the ways in which reason should be
seen as continuous with emotion33 and (2) showing that care and
emotion should play an essential role in ethics more generally
and in animal ethics in particular.34 The privileging of reason
over emotion is, from this feminist perspective, a continuation of
the logocentrism of human-�centered and male-�centered thinking
and a pernicious dogma that the identity discourse needs to ques-
tion more thoroughly.
Another form of logocentrism appears among identity-�based
theorists when they try to explain what gives rise to the project of
animal ethics in the first place. What is the driving force that
makes us change our individual behavior? What creates the dra-
matic 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 think-
ing and practices with regard to animals, this line of thought sug-
gests, 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 peo-
ple (professional philosophers in particular!) might find philosoph-
ical 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-�rational modes through which our thinking and interactions
with animals might be called into question and transformed; and
to suggest that philosophical argumentation plays the only or even
a primary role here is a contentious claim. In the next chapter, we
examine the work of difference-�based theorists who argue that this
kind of logocentrism blocks access to a wide variety of alternative
and promising ways of thinking about animals and transforming
human-�animal interactions.

BEYOND SPECIESISM

The tendency to view animal ethics as comprising primarily giv-

ing 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 ethi-
cal reasoning and practice. We saw earlier that identity-�based
philosophers use the term “speciesism” to refer to the irrational
prejudice that places animals outside the ethical community
without compelling reasons for doing so. They use the term
“speciesism” (with its “-Â�ism” suffix) in order to link it to what
they consider to be similar kinds of irrational and unethical prej-
udices 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 rel-
evantly similar members of other species.
The term “speciesism” has become central not just among
identity-�based theorists but also among much of the work being
done in the broader field of critical animal studies. I would sug-
gest, though, that this term fails adequately to capture the prob-
lem 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 expli-
cable solely or primarily in terms of the irrational beliefs and
behaviors of individuals. Instead, we have learned through this
discourse to see sexism and racism as the result of long-�term his-
torical, 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 pur-
chasing 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 dom-
inant 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 innu-
merable levels.
In place of speciesism as the point of critical contestation, I
suggest that we see the problem at hand as being an instance of
anthropocentrism, or human-�centeredness. It might seem that I
am splitting hairs here in trying to distinguish speciesism from
anthropocentrism, but I believe a great deal hinges on making
this distinction and seeing it clearly. “Anthropocentrism,” as I
define the term, refers to a set of relations and systems of power
that are in the service of those who are considered by the domi-
nant 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-�
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-�centeredness is founded simultane-
ously 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 progres-
sive forms of humanism have openly excluded large swaths of
humanity from their scope of concern. In other words, the domi-
nant trends in our culture have never been toward respect for the
species as a whole but rather for what is considered to be quintes-
sentially 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 ani-
mals 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 privi-
lege of those deemed to be fully human over and against the non-
human; and it is through a complex and violent relation to
animals, animality, and “nonhumans” of various sorts that this
system establishes and reproduces itself. From this perspective, it
becomes clear that the identity-�based approach is anthropocen-
tric 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 differ-
ence 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-�animal evolutionary continuity and the princi-
ple of equal consideration of interests to develop a transforma-
tional 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 ani-
mals. The theorists examined in this chapter, which I have
grouped under the rubric of difference, seek to develop a pro-�
animal ethic and philosophy based not on similarity, continuity,
or identity but instead on an appreciation of the manifold differ-
ences that exist between and among human beings and animals.
For theorists and activists who find the identity position persua-
sive, 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 dif-
ferences, 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 phi-

losophy/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 differ-
ence 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 ter-
minology 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 eth-
ics 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 cri-
tique 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 sub-
jectivity untouched by history. Instead, these critics of humanism
encourage us to think about human individuals as being irreduc-
ibly enmeshed in a series of sociohistorical processes and cultural
relations that constitute us from the ground up. Human exis-
tence 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,” “dispos-
sessed,” 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) out-
side ourselves and into meaningful worlds populated and given
significance by others. My “self” and the worlds in which I move
and have my being are gifts of a sort, received from others, and
not primarily of my own making.
Sometimes referred to as antihumanism because of its strong
rejection of humanism, this view might seem to imply that
human beings have no individuality or subjectivity at all. Might
it really be the case that human beings are little more than by-�
products of culture, fully determined by historical forces beyond
their control? Nearly all critics of humanism refrain, however,
from embracing this kind of determinism and erasure of indi-
viduality. 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, lin-

guistic, 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 prob-
lematic.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 rela-
tions, 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 Levi-
nas.2) I learn to group Others into recognizable and repeatable
categories, thereby neutralizing their singularity and domesticat-
ing 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 vulner-
ability, or someone desperately in need, or someone who does
something that makes me reflect on the selfishness and insensi-
tivity of my daily existence. In such moments, I encounter the
Other as ethically different, as radically different from me, as irre-
ducible 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 funda-
mentally different from me and to whom I unthinkingly do vio-
lence 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 hav-
ing 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 affirm-
ing 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 one-
self, 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. Differ-
ence 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 ani-
mal issues. Most of the theorists who work in Continental phi-
losophy and who start from these basic ideas have, unfortunately,
entirely ignored questions concerning animals and remained nar-
rowly 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 mean-
ing 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 sin-
gularity 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 encoun-
ter 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 Heideg-

gerian and Levinasian ideas about the exceptionalism of the
human have dominated much of the subsequent work done in
Continental philosophy and have thus served largely to reinforce
the dogmatic anthropocentrism of the sort we saw in such figures
as Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.
There have, however, been important exceptions to this
anthropocentric trend in the Continental tradition. As early as
the 1940s, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two founding
figures of Critical Theory, recognized the close linkage between
anthropocentric ontologies and ethics and the domination of
animals; and they also underscored the need to develop post-�
anthropocentric modes of doing philosophy.5 More recently,
Judith Butler, whose work has been foundational for poststruc-
turalist 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 precari-
ous 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 Simi-
lar non-�and post-�anthropocentric trends can be discerned in
other rogue Continental philosophers as well.7
Perhaps the most sustained effort to link difference-�based phi-
losophy 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 stan-
dard 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 prob-
lematic binary oppositions, and not simply for ontological rea-
sons (for example, one could object on ontological grounds alone
that binary distinctions tend more often than not to fail to cap-
ture 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-�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-�based theorists
actually take this broader task to be their main goal, but there are
questions of strategy that need to be raised in carrying out such
work. Does the dismantling of certain oppositions hold more
critical and disruptive potential? Are there particular oppositions
that help to illustrate most effectively the violent and hierarchical
logic of humanism and anthropocentrism?
For Derrida and for many of the difference-�based theorists who
work in animal studies, the answer to such questions is that focus-
ing 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 relation-
ships 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 ani-
mals 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 ana-
lyzing 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-�animal difference theorists challenge the tradi-

tional 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 rel-
evant 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-�animal continuity, as identity theorists do, is to risk cre-
ating 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 extraor-
dinarily reductive. We share the planet with countless animal
species, whose diversity is beyond our intellectual ability fully to
comprehend. To suggest, as many traditional philosophers have,
that animals are to be viewed as sharing a common essence and
as deficient when compared to human beings is, in the difference-�
based account, strongly objectionable. One of the main ways for
us to work our way out of the limitations of this way of thinking
is to attend in a diligent manner to the radical diversity of what
are called “animals” and to recognize that they are not fully
exhausted by such simple categorizations. Indeed, such a task is
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/ani-
mal 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 exclu-
sive 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 propri-
ety, many of them turn out to be things toward which human
beings themselves have complex and differential relations. Such
traditional markers of human exceptionalism as awareness of
death, self-�consciousness, and language are not straightforward
abilities or capacities that we have under our individual control.
They are complex, emergent properties and behaviors, as much
received from others as they are self-�constituted. The main point
here is that markers of human propriety are not distributed in the
distinct and oppositional manner that is sometimes claimed. But
we should be careful to note that the recognition of the blurring
 D I F F E R E N C E 39

of the human/animal boundary here does not, for difference the-

orists, lead to its full collapse into human-�animal identity. Such a
collapse would deny difference rather than multiply and compli-
cate it. At the end of this chapter, we revisit this strategy of com-
plicating the human/animal distinction and examine some of its
possible limitations. First, though, we need to examine the ethi-
cal 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 differ-

ence theorists aim to think about ethics in terms of singularity
(the irreducible uniqueness of the Other) and heteronomy (ethi-
cal 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-�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 heter-
onomy, pro-�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 direc-
tion 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 ulti-
mately 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 concep-
tualized.”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 hierar-
chies and exclusions from the moral community, pro-�animal dif-
ference 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 lim-

ited in terms of the kinds of animals it is able to include within
its normative frameworks. Unless an animal has the kind of ethi-
cally 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 dif-
ference 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 Der-
rida, 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 characteris-
tic 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 new-

comer, and is intent on underscoring the point that this new-
comer can and does take “monstrous” forms beyond those we are
typically prepared to countenance. In Derrida’s thought of differ-
ence, then, there seems to be no way to delimit in advance the
kinds of beings to whom we might find ourselves in ethical rela-
tion.
Not all difference theorists, though, portray ethical consider-
ation in such extensive and open-�ended terms. In describing her
notion of precarious life, Judith Butler is willing to think about
the ethical implications of this concept for human beings and
animals but is unsure about whether it opens up ethical obliga-
tions to beings such as plants.16 Cary Wolfe—Â�who is one of the
most able defenders of the difference-�based approach to ani-
mals—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-�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 differ-
ences that are, in fact, monstrous and unanticipatable; and to
close off in advance the question of how far our ethical responsi-
bilities might extend toward such Others strikes me as funda-
mentally 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-�ended stance ren-

ders 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 exclu-
sions that limit identity-�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 iden-
tity 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 major-
ity of animal species and individuals will never be seen as being
full subjects and will thereby lack important political and legal
protections under this approach. Feminist pro-�animal theorists
like Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan have called attention to
this limitation of the rights-�based approach to animal issues for
many years now, arguing that liberalism has the same exclusionary
effect on women and animals (among others), granting both
groups full standing in the political sphere only by ignoring differ-
ences 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 ani-
mals, women, and other marginalized groups. For Weil, the “ineq-
uities 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-�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 strat-
egy 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 ani-
mals.”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 repro-
duces many of the same problems characteristic of traditional
andro-�and anthropocentric liberalism.22 Similarly, Cary Wolfe
has voiced his support for such initiatives as the Great Ape Proj-
ect, but he offers such support only “in abeyance.”23 Wolfe rec-
ognizes 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 para-
sitic 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-�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-�taken critical remarks about everything from the Great
Ape Project to the pitfalls of purist forms of veganism, one finds
very little among these thinkers that points toward alternative
practices that might aid us in overcoming these limitations.
I should be clear that I am not suggesting that difference
thinkers fail to take a clear normative stance on how we might
interact with and think differently about animals. Such a charge,
which is most commonly issued in regard to Derrida’s work,
derives from a rather crude misreading of difference theorists. It
should be evident from the material that we examined in this
chapter that philosophers of difference are, in fact, hyperethical
and radical political thinkers, concerned with how movements
that seek to address marginalization need to become even more
ethical, even more radical in their desire to change the status quo
in view of justice. I can only admire and endorse this general
stance, and I find no need to question the normative or political
commitments of these thinkers. Rather, what I am suggesting is
that what should follow from a difference-�based approach is a
careful engagement and experimentation with the very kinds of
alternative practices and modes of thought for which this
approach calls. Now, it would be a rather tall order to ask differ-
ence 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 jus-
tice 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-�and policy-�oriented

theorists adopt this framework, we will no doubt see such possi-
bilities actualized. This kind of work might take the form of an
animal-�based politics on the model of radical democratic politics
or even a deconstructive and affirmative reworking of political
rights.24 At present, however, the difference approach has been
characterized primarily by an intellectual and conceptual
approach to animal issues that is somewhat removed from
broader policy and political debates. In the following chapter, I
examine how the indistinction approach helps us to deepen some
of the main ideas developed by difference theorists in view of
reconnecting them to innovative developments in animal ethics
and politics.

B E YO ND HUM A N/A NIM A L DIF FER EN C ES

One final issue about the difference approach that needs to be

addressed is the issue of the anthropological difference, or what, if
anything, separates human beings from animals. Difference the-
orists, 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 ani-
mals and human beings. It might seem that this hypercomplica-
tion 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 differ-
ences) 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 flat-
tening 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 continu-
ity will lead to lumping together the rich diversity of human and
animal life into a single, reductive category. Likewise, their con-
cerns about basing ethics and politics on identity stem from sim-
ilar 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 direc-
tion of homogenizing human beings and animals? Or might it be
the case that leaving aside the project of establishing anthropo-
logical 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 stud-

ies that I refer to with the label of indistinction. I borrow the
concept of indistinction primarily from Gilles Deleuze and Gior-
gio 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 stud-
ies, 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 ana-
lyzed. That the discourse surrounding indistinction is still cur-
rently taking shape should not, however, be taken to imply that
the sentiments associated with this mode of thought are com-
paratively new or not widely shared; on the contrary, I suggest
that the ideas examined in this chapter express sensibilities that
can be found in a number of important and long-�standing move-
ments and that circulate widely among critical animal studies
theorists and radical pro-�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 indistinc-

tion means is briefly to recapitulate how the identity and differ-
ence 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 estab-
lish 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, iden-
tity theorists are at odds with the vast majority of the philosophi-
cal tradition as well as hegemonic cultural and institutional
norms that posit sharp ethical and ontological boundaries sepa-
rating 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 tradi-
tions; so, there is much to be admired in the identity framework’s
challenge to the status quo from the perspective of the indistinc-
tion approach.
Where indistinction theorists would tend to differ from iden-
tity theorists concerns the direction in which such continuity is
sought. Identity theorists often start with human-�centered ethi-
cal frameworks and then seek to demonstrate that these frame-
works extend (often despite their manifest intentions) outward
from human beings to include animals, thereby founding conti-
nuity 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 continu-
ities 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 animals
who are not like us—Â�what is the fate of animals and other beings
who lack the key capacities that would establish the grounds for
basic ethical consideration? When we place human beings at the
center of ethical reflection and then direct our attention outward,
looking for analogues of the human, we have ultimately done
very little to displace the very discourses and practices that gave
rise to the problems at hand. To this end, indistinction theorists
attempt to develop ways of thinking about human beings, ani-
mals, and ethics in a manner that radically displaces human
beings from the center of ethical reflection and that avoids many
of the exclusions associated with lingering forms of anthropocen-
trism.
Part of the attraction of the difference approach from the per-
spective of indistinction is that it doesn’t limit consideration to
anthropocentric capacities. That certain animals might lack a
specific capacity or attribute that is important within a given nor-
mative framework is no reason for withholding full ethical and
political consideration from such animals; the problem might
instead be seen to lie with normative frameworks that treat ethi-
cal consideration as marking an absolute and rigid boundary of
inclusion and exclusion. In delinking consideration from strict
identity, difference theorists open the way to an animal ethics
that is based on singularity and that allows us to appreciate the
richly differentiated modes of existence found among animals.
Where indistinction theorists depart from the difference
framework concerns the specific ways in which difference is
articulated in and through the human/animal distinction. We
have already seen how Derrida and most other difference theo-
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 51

rists aim to complicate the traditional human/animal distinction

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

INDISTINCTION AND BIOLOGISM

Donna Haraway gives voice to one of the chief sentiments of the

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

What is more, the desire to reestablish such propriety is lacking

among many animal theorists and activists. In view of both
political strategy and developing alternative relations with ani-
mals, many indistinction theorists and activists would share with
Haraway the notion of no longer feeling “the need for such a
separation.”3 Instead of stressing abyssal differences, many indis-
tinction theorists instead emphasize and “affirm the pleasure of
connection of human and other living creatures.”4
Haraway arrives at these conclusions about the breakdown of
the human/animal distinction primarily by way of findings from
the biological sciences, but we should emphasize that for Har-
away biological discourse is but one of the vantage points from
which we might reconsider relations between human beings and
animals. This is an essential point to highlight as we start to lay
out the basic elements of the indistinction approach, for some
critics (especially those coming from the difference tradition)
worry that attempts to render human/animal differences indis-
tinct must originate from a kind of “biologism.” Biologism here
means an attempt to understand human beings from a strictly
and reductively biological viewpoint, one that would seek to
eliminate any other kind of knowledge claims or perspectives on
human existence. And inasmuch as biologists classify human
beings as animals (and more specifically, as primates5), it might
be thought this biological claim alone is what sanctions jettison-
ing the anthropological difference. As we just mentioned, indis-
tinction theorists are certainly not averse to biological claims
about human-�animal continuity; and it would be a mistake from
the perspective of this approach to minimize the contribution of
biological discourse in creating the conditions for radically
rethinking human-�animal relations. Biology does, after all, offer
one of the most refined and extensive bodies of knowledge con-
cerning human and animal life we have at our disposal. But there
are many reasons beyond biological ones—Â�including ethical,
political, and ontological reasons—Â�for why we might consider
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 53

leaving behind the search for anthropological differences and

move onto other terrain. In the remainder of this chapter, we
survey some of these other considerations as well as the possibili-
ties for thought and practice that open up beyond the anthropo-
logical difference.

AGAMBEN AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE

Moving beyond biologism, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben

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

would call a performative apparatus, inasmuch as it enacts and

calls into being (which is to say, performs) a certain reality. It is
the machine itself that creates, reproduces, and maintains the
distinction between human life and animal life.
Given the problematic political effects of this distinction, we
can see that the anthropological machine is hardly value neutral.
If one is deemed insufficiently human, one can find oneself vul-
nerable to being killed with impunity (consider the precarious
situation of human beings who find themselves animalized and
dehumanized in various ways). Conversely, those who are deemed
sufficiently human are brought within a biopolitical sphere where
their lives are shaped in ways that are often deeply questionable
(consider the ways in which even well-�intentioned state institu-
tions and programs can shape human beings in ways that are
problematic). Agamben argues that the critique of humanism
and human nature (which we analyzed in Chapter 2), along with
the various problems associated with separating animal life from
human life, have made us aware of the contingent and pernicious
nature of the anthropological machine’s efforts to establish
human propriety. So, instead of reinforcing traditional human/
animal distinctions or searching for new versions of the anthro-
pological difference, Agamben argues that we should aim to stop
this machine and try to think more carefully about the indistinc-
tion of human and animal life, prior to their separation. What
kind of politics might emerge beyond the exclusion of human
animality and the biopolitical shaping of “proper” humanity?
What practices might correspond to a life in which “human” and
“animal” are no longer sharply delimited and separated?
Pro-�animal theorists who are influenced by Agamben find
much that is of interest here, especially the idea of thinking about
life beyond the human/animal distinction. But they would also
go beyond Agamben inasmuch as they wish to discuss the effects
of the anthropological machine not just on the animality of
human beings but on animals themselves. In what kinds of pre-
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 55

carious situations do animals who are seen as nonhuman or not

fully human find themselves within our society? How do their
situations overlap with but also differ from those of various
groups of “animalized” human beings? Furthermore, what might
human-�animal relations as well as animal-�animal relations look
like in a politics that seeks to move beyond the human/animal
distinction? Although Agamben himself is not particularly inter-
ested in these questions, his ideas about human-�animal indistinc-
tion have helped create the space for raising such inquiries. We
give further thought to these questions at the end of the chapter.

THE NIGHT IN WHICH ALL COWS ARE BLACK

If we pursue the line of thought opened up by Haraway, Agam-

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

will be inadequate. Furthermore, as Agamben and other theorists

would point out, the animal world is not in need of being saved
or repaired by human language and thought; it suffices to itself
whether or not it is spoken about or conceptually differentiated
by human beings. Indeed, one of the tasks of philosophy is to
help us work our way to the edges of language in order to catch
sight of that which exceeds our conceptual mastery. So, we do
not want to rush too quickly past the collapse of the human/
animal distinction toward a new set of concepts and miss what
thought encounters in that collapse.
However, the theorists discussed in this chapter do try to
think about human-�animal indistinction in a way that generates
new concepts. What a thought of indistinction ultimately creates
is space for us to think about the field of human beings and ani-
mals in new ways—Â�and this effectively means uncovering new
kinds of identities and differences. So, rather than blocking
thought or conceptual work entirely, pursuing a thought of indis-
tinction is aimed at creating the conditions for other modes of
thought—Â� different ontologies and different practices—Â� to
emerge. The chief difference here is that thinking about the field
of human beings and animals no longer takes its point of depar-
ture either from attempts to extend traditional human traits to
animals (the identity approach) or from efforts aimed at compli-
cating and multiplying anthropological differences (the differ-
ence approach). Instead, the indistinction approach aims to think
about human beings and animals in deeply relational terms that
permit new groupings and new differences to emerge, such that
“the human” is no longer the center or chief point of reference.
And while the indistinction approach is based on a careful
engagement with refined bodies of knowledge concerning human
beings and animals, the alternative ontologies and concepts cre-
ated under this rubric are not offered as an exhaustive or final
account of how to think about this field. The chief task is to cre-
ate ontologies and ways of thinking that challenge the status quo
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 57

and that lead to new ways of living. It is in view of such chal-

lenges and alternative ways of living that the indistinction frame-
work is perhaps most charitably engaged and analyzed.
We turn now to a more detailed analysis of some of the central
concepts and aims associated with indistinction. Although (as
mentioned previously) the concept of indistinction that we are
exploring here is informed by a wide variety of theorists and
fields of research,8 to my mind some of the most illustrative and
thought-�provoking elaborations of this idea are to be found in
the writings of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Val Plumwood.

B E C O M I N G -�A N I M A L

One of Gilles Deleuze’s most influential ideas in the field of criti-

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

privilege of “the human” as a subject position, which in turn is

ultimately aimed at resisting and transforming the unjust and
intolerable established order to which all other (that is to say,
other-�than-�
human) modes of existence are relegated. As
Deleuze writes (along with his frequent coauthor, Félix Guat-
tari), “[W]e become animal so that the animal also becomes
something else.”9
Deleuze finds an exemplary instance of becoming-�animal in
the paintings of artist Francis Bacon.10 Bacon is well known for
his artworks that feature distorted faces and figures, of bodies
that seem to melt and morph beyond their organized and recog-
nizable human form. As if to underscore the ways in which our
embodied existence threatens to unravel our pretensions to being
stable human subjects, Bacon’s paintings often align human bod-
ies with meat and exposed flesh. Deleuze argues that by recalling
us to our vulnerable, fleshy embodiment, Bacon’s paintings assist
us in entering into a zone of indistinction between human and
animal. It is here, in the common zone of exposed embodiment,
that Deleuze says we catch sight of the fact “that every man who
suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and
the beast.”11 In an interview, Bacon himself makes a similar
point, noting, “Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential
carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surpris-
ing that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”12
To inhabit this zone of indistinction is thus to find oneself in a
surprising and profound relation with animals. To be human
typically means to disavow the fact that we, too, are flesh—Â�that
we, too, are meat. But to acknowledge oneself as inhabiting a
shared zone of exposed embodiment with animals is to recognize
that we are in deep and fundamental ways like animals. To be
like an animal is very different from the kind of position associ-
ated with the identity framework in which it is argued that ani-
mals are like us. From a Deleuzean perspective, the identity
framework establishes “formal correspondences” between the
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 59

human and its other only to eliminate the other’s difference by

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

A SHOCKING REDUCTION

Another particularly powerful instance of a thought of human-�

animal indistinction is provided by Val Plumwood in her essay
“Being Prey.”14 Plumwood here recounts being attacked by a
crocodile while out kayaking and her desperate attempts at
escape. Despite being caught in the crocodile’s jaws and being
subjected to multiple death rolls, Plumwood managed eventually
to break loose from the crocodile’s grasp and make it to safety. At
the time of this violent encounter, Plumwood was already a well-�
60 I N D I S T I N C T I O N

established environmental philosopher who had given sustained

thought to animals, ecology, and our obligations to the natural
world. Although one might think that becoming prey for another
animal would darken her ethical outlook, the attack actually
allowed her to deepen her ideas about responsibility and also
rethink the place of human beings alongside animals and the rest
of the natural world.
Plumwood notes that during the attack she found herself in an
incredulous state about becoming prey for another animal (“This
is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon
awake”15). As we noted in our analysis of Deleuze, part of inhab-
iting the subject position of the human is to situate oneself and
other human beings on the side of being fundamentally inedible:
human beings eat others but are not eaten by others, especially
not other animals. But as the attack continued, Plumwood came
to realize the she was undergoing what she calls a “shocking
reduction,”16 away from her privileged subject position to a
shared zone of coexistence with other edible beings. Finding her-
self in the jaws of a crocodile amid a world that was indifferent to
her becoming prey, Plumwood entered into a zone of indistinc-
tion where the differences traditionally posited between human
and animal dropped out. In such a zone, human beings are
exposed, like animals, to the very best and the very worst, to
immeasurable joys and the most horrific forms of predation. To
see oneself as potentially edible—Â�as “meat” in the sense that
Deleuze, Bacon, and Plumwood use the term—Â�is to find oneself
in a surprising, shocking alignment with animals; and to affirm
and to live within the space of that alignment is ultimately to
refuse the dominant culture’s way of creating a sharp split
between human and animal.
Readers who are vegan or vegetarian will perhaps be reminded
here of a standard objection that is often raised against those who
abstain from eating animals: If animals eat other animals, and
we are animals, why shouldn’t we (human animals) eat them
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 61

(nonhuman animals)? How does Plumwood, who became prey

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

W H A T I S “ M O R E ” ╯ . ╯ . ╯ .╯

It is precisely in view of this “more” that we should locate the

recent surge of interest in animal creativity and agency,17 along
with a wide range of other animal potentialities and affects. The-
orists such as Elizabeth Grosz have argued, for example, that we
should understand creative art not as the exclusive activity of
human beings but as having its origins in animality and as woven
into the very fabric of life and the processes of sexual selection.18
Brian Massumi goes beyond Grosz to develop a robust ontology
of human-�animal indiscernibility and suggests that creativity
and play are immanent to animality itself. 19 Following the logic
of indistinction we have been developing here, Massumi demon-
strates that a relational activity like play is characteristic of life
more broadly and is something in which both human beings and
animals are caught up, such that play constitutes a zone in which
the anthropological difference is replaced by a more complex set
of identities and differences.
Perhaps the most thought-�provoking, and certainly the most
directly political, example of the recent work done on animal
agency is to be found in Jason Hribal’s book Fear of the Animal
Planet.20 Assembling a considerable amount of documentary and
anecdotal evidence demonstrating intentional acts of resistance by
animals, Hribal aims to dispel the notions that animals are mere
automatons or (perhaps slightly more generously) moral patients
on the receiving end of human ethical consideration. He shows
that, in slaughterhouses, zoos, circuses, and water parks, animals of
various kinds have mounted a wide variety of struggles against
their captivity and mistreatment. As Hribal explains, such
instances of animal agency and resistance are often hidden from
public view or simply interpreted out of existence. For if we were to
acknowledge that animals are active agents, capable of their own
forms of organized individual and collective resistance, this would
shatter the dominant culture’s views of animals as “mere” objects
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 63

for human use and risk undermining support for the hugely profit-
able industries that exploit animals in these ways.

CONTESTING ANTHROPOCENTRISM

In following the indistinction approach beyond the anthropo-

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

If we think of the anthropological machine as a series of insti-

tutions and apparatuses that capture and reproduce but also con-
strain and kill animal life, then it becomes essential to delimit
some of its chief forms. There can be little doubt that one of its
key forms is ontological and performative, in the sense that this
machine both carves up and enacts reality along lines that aim to
separate the human from animals and animality. We saw in the
first chapter that identity theorists describe a similar process of
exclusion along normative lines in terms of speciesism, which
they understand to be a kind of irrational bias on behalf of mem-
bers of our own species and against members of other animal
species. From the perspective of the indistinction approach, how-
ever, the anthropological machine goes well beyond individual
prejudices to encompass a wide set of systems and structures that
have differing effects on animals, marginalized human beings,
and what is considered to be human animality. This machine
works to institute, maintain, and reproduce an entire world that
rotates around the privilege of those most fully associated with
“the human,” a grouping that has never included the entire
human species and that has only ever included the tiniest frag-
ments of the animal world. As such, the anthropological machine
is not effectively challenged by simply expanding the scope of
what counts as human and bringing particular groups of margin-
alized human beings and certain animals within its orbit. While
this strategy can be politically effective in limited ways, the ulti-
mate aim of pro-�animal politics and other radical justice strug-
gles should be finding a way to delink sociality and community
from anthropocentric criteria of inclusion.
These points have long been recognized by the more radical
wings of pro-�animal and other social justice struggles. Theorists
and activists from these traditions understand well Donna Har-
away’s notion that, by the exclusionary standards of the estab-
lished order, nonhuman beings and the vast majority of human
beings themselves “have never been human.”21 Thus, the politi-
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 65

cal task ought not to be one of trying to accede to this privileged

order but instead of creating a way of life that no longer rotates
around the human and the anthropological difference. It is here,
on this post-�anthropocentric terrain, that the material and con-
ceptual conditions for creating alliances between pro-�animal and
other radical struggles for social justice are to be found.

THE QUESTION CONCERNING CAPITALISM

There can also be little doubt that, in terms of specific practices

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

carry out other horrific forms of violence against both human

beings and animals.23 What is needed is a broader and more
direct challenge to capitalist economic relations as such, one that
recognizes the need to address the joint exploitation of animals
and human beings in a wide variety of industries and practices
across the globe.
To this end, it should be underscored again that direct-�action
animal activists and theorists have been cognizant of these issues
and of the need for developing multidimensional, intersectional
strategies for challenging the economic capture of animal life for
many years now.24 Inspired by the vision of liberating animals
into other possibilities beyond the limitations of the established
order, these activists have mounted a direct assault on corpora-
tions that exploit animals, with the joint aims of inflicting maxi-
mum economic damage and liberating animals from spaces of
confinement and forced labor. Although draconian legal and
punitive tactics have been somewhat successful in limiting and
driving some of these activities further underground, the activists
and theorists associated with direct-�action animal liberation have
been instrumental in helping to develop the kind of ontological
and ethico-�political framework we have been examining in this
chapter. The actions and discourses carried out in these contexts
provide us with glimpses of what life beyond the human/animal
distinction might be like, while also helping to plant the seeds for
the kinds of intersectional, non-�anthropocentric politics toward
which the indistinction framework moves us.
As a general strategy, I would suggest that direct action plays
an essential but not exclusive role in contesting the economic and
anthropocentric status quo. It is clear that, in order to challenge
the existing order of things in a sustained manner, current inter-
sectional linkages among non-�anthropocentric and anti-�/alter-�
globalization movements will have to be deepened and expanded
well beyond direct-�action liberations to meet the acceleration of
capitalist exploitation of animals; in addition, alternative forms
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 67

of economic relations will have to be developed, ones that do not

simply return the productive circuits of capital to the multitude
of productive human agents (as certain neo-�Marxists advocate25)
but that ask serious questions about the place of animals within
the circuits of production as well as the role and extent of produc-
tion as such. In order to live lives that do justice to animals and
other beings and systems inhabiting the planet, we will undoubt-
edly need to shrink massively the influence of capitalist economic
relations in order to allow more space for alternative economic as
well as noneconomic relations to flourish.

LIVING OTHERWISE

The grim realities that characterize the lives and deaths of so

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

is no shortage of extant examples of alternative modes of

human-�animal relations, especially if we are willing to think
beyond the limits of traditional ways of distinguishing human
beings and animals. We can find such examples in a wide vari-
ety of indigenous and nondominant cultures, both past and
present, across the globe. Similarly, ethologists who study ani-
mals noninvasively in their native habitats have also shown us
that myriad alternative relations with animals are possible.
Activist liberations of animals both into native habitats and
into alternative safe havens present us with additional possibili-
ties, while animal sanctuaries and the protection of ecological
zones and corridors for nondomesticated animals point us
toward the kinds of practices that are required for human, ani-
mal, and non-�animal life to flourish jointly.
The challenge for indistinction theorists and activists lies not
so much in developing alternative visions of relation but rather in
attending to the subtle ways in which proposed alternatives
might reinforce certain forms of power and violence that struc-
ture the established order. This problem arises with particular
force in view of our relationship with domesticated animals and
animals that are currently used by human beings in various ways,
for example, as labor, as subjects of research, as companions, and
so on. Some indistinction theorists such as Donna Haraway feel
that these relationships can be refashioned so that animal agency
and subjectivity are respected and maximized, whereas many
activists and theorists (and I count myself among this group)
believe that most of these relationships should be eliminated as
much as possible in favor of other, more liberatory possibilities.
This difference marks one of the major schisms in the field and
will no doubt continue to be a source of argument and tension in
the coming years. The chief point to note here is that creating a
space for alternative modes of relation is not, by itself, inherently
liberatory and does not necessarily lead to a better world than the
current established order.
 I N D I S T I N C T I O N 69

The other major challenge attendant on the indistinction

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

INTRODUCTION

1.╇ For a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical dis-

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

1. IDENTITY

1.╇ Readers interested in fuller surveys of animal behavior that

take a generous approach to animal capacities might wish to con-
sult Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Con-
sciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Marc
71
72 N O T E S

Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
2.╇ Clive D. L. Wynne examines many of these debates in his
Do Animals Think? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2004).
3.╇Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Ind.:
Hackett, 1998), 1256b15–Â�20. That Aristotle regards animals as
existing “for the sake of ” the human should not be taken to
imply that such service is necessarily exhaustive of animal being
as a whole on his account.
4.╇Ibid., 1253a14–Â�18.
5.╇ René Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” in The Philosophi-
cal Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 1:140.
6.╇ René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch,
and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 3:366.
7.╇ Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of
View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 15.
8.╇ Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield
(New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 239.
9.╇Ibid., 240.
10.. See, for example, Gilbert Simondon, Two Lessons on Ani-
mal and Man, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univo-
cal, 2012). I thank Brian Massumi for recalling me to this book.
11.╇ Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David
Kohn, and Sydney Smith, eds., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–Â�
1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 300.
12.╇ Charles R. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), 35.
 N O T E S 73

13.╇ Charles R. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man

and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872). For more complete
and very helpful analyses of the ethical and ontological implica-
tions of Darwinism, I recommend James Rachels, Created from
Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); and Eileen Crist, Images of Ani-
mals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1999), chap. 1.
14.╇ Stephen Jay Gould, “The Evolution of Life on Earth,” Sci-
entific American 271 (1994): 91.
15.╇ David L. Hull, The Metaphysics of Evolution (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1989), 11.
16.╇ Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child
or the Dog? (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), xxv.
17.╇ Different utilitarians define utility in slightly different
ways; Singer’s utilitarianism focuses on the satisfaction/frustra-
tion of preferences.
18.╇ For Singer’s discussion of the importance of sentience and
animal pain/suffering, see his Animal Liberation (New York:
Ecco, 2002), 7–Â�17.
19.╇Ibid., 11.
20.╇ Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Animal
Rights and Human Obligations, ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 112.
21.╇ Ibid. See also Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 243, for a fuller
statement of what constitutes being a subject-�of-�a-�life.
22.╇Regan, Case for Animal Rights, chaps. 1–Â�2. See especially
pages 18–Â�21 for Regan’s neo-Â�Darwinian reasoning.
23.╇ Ibid., chap. 7.
24.╇ Ibid., chap. 9.
25.╇ Paola Cavalieri, The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman
Animals Deserve Human Rights (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), chap. 6.
74 N O T E S

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

2. DIFFERENCE

1.╇ Readers interested in a more complete account of the cri-

tique of humanism and the decentering of the subject are encour-
aged to consult David West’s helpful Continental Philosophy: An
 N O T E S 75

Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), chap. 6. Caroline

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

4.╇ Levinas’s discourse on animals is expertly surveyed by Peter

Atterton in “Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Ani-
mals,” Inquiry 54 (2011): 633–Â�49.
5.╇ Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). See also
Christina Gerhardt, “The Ethics of Animals in Adorno and
Kafka,” New German Critique 33 (2006): 159–Â�78.
6.╇ “If humans actually share a condition of precariousness,
not only just with one another, but also with animals, and
with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who
we ‘are’ undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this
sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-Â�
anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life
valuable.” Pierpaolo Antonello and Roberto Farneti, “Anti-
gone’s Claim: A Conversation with Judith Butler,” Theory &
Event 12 (2009), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_
event/v012/12.1.antonello.html (accessed July 14, 2014). See
also Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
(London: Verso, 2009), 13.
7.╇ Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray both figure prominently
here, especially in view of developing an animal philosophy of
difference. Additional theorists from the Continental tradition
who have important things to say about animals are discussed in
the next chapter.
8.╇ Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1981), 41.
9.╇Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What
Tomorrow╯.╯.╯.╯: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 63.
10.╇ This point is thoughtfully explored by Eileen Crist in
“Ecocide and the Extinction of Animal Minds,” in Ignoring
Nature No More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation, ed.
Marc Bekoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 45–Â�61.
 N O T E S 77

11.╇ As this encounter defies easy summary, I encourage readers

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

20.╇ Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

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

3. INDISTINCTION

1.╇ There are additional intellectual and activist traditions that

figure prominently here—Â�chief among these being Critical The-
ory and anarchism—Â�that I will not cover, as they have been dis-
cussed thoroughly and expertly by others, especially Steven Best
and Anthony Nocella. I should also note that, although I have
not explicitly included Cary Wolfe among the theorists listed
here and have confined discussion of his work to the previous
chapter on difference, Wolfe’s wide-Â�ranging and influential writ-
ings can certainly be read as embracing portions of both the dif-
ference and indistinction frameworks.
2.╇ Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Rein-
vention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151. Despite many
promising aspects of her work that I will highlight here, Haraway
has had a mixed reception among theorists in critical animal
studies, especially in regard to some of her political positions
 N O T E S 79

concerning animals. We will return to this point of contention

briefly at the end of the chapter.
3.╇Ibid., 152.
4.╇Ibid.
5.╇ For an account of this kind of biological classification from
a perspective that is consonant with the one described here, see
Ronnie Zoe Hawkins, “Seeing Ourselves as Primates,” Ethics &
the Environment 7 (2002): 60–Â�103.
6.╇ Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin
Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79.
7.╇ G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9.
8.╇ Among the more influential thinkers I would include under
the rubric of indistinction is Roberto Esposito, a philosopher
whose notion of “the impersonal” or “third person” aims to pro-
vide a concept of life that lies beyond the traditional categories of
the human and the animal (see his Third Person: Politics of Life and
Philosophy of the Impersonal, trans. Zakiya Hanafi [Cambridge,
UK: Polity, 2012]). In a vein that is closer to the concerns of animal
studies and the concerns of this book, philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s
notion of “zoe-Â�egalitarianism” offers a helpful way of rethinking
community with animals and various nonhuman others beyond
anthropocentrism (see her The Posthuman [Cambridge, UK: Pol-
ity, 2013], chap. 2). Likewise, Donna Haraway’s work on “compan-
ion species” develops a powerful conception of how a thought of
indistinction might help us to reenvision ontological relations
between human beings and animals (see her The Companion Spe-
cies Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness [Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003], and When Species Meet [Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008]). Beyond these individual
theorists, there is a rich literature in a number of related fields—Â�
especially in indigenous studies and environmental philosophy—Â�
that places human-�animal interactions within a broader notion of
relation that helps to undercut anthropocentric biases. A broader
80 N O T E S

study of indistinction would require us to examine all of these

thinkers and fields in more depth.
9.╇ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 109.
10.╇Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation,
trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).
11.╇Ibid., 23.
12.╇ David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with
Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 46.
13.╇Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 25.
14.╇ Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” Utne Reader (July–Â�August
2000): 56–Â�61.
15.╇Ibid., 58.
16.╇Ibid., 61.
17.╇ For an excellent overview of this topic, see the essays
collected in Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, eds., Ani-
mals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Boston:
Brill, 2009). See also Cynthia Willett’s Interspecies Ethics (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014) for additional ways of
thinking about animals, ethics, and relation starting from
animal potentiality and agency and not simply from animal
vulnerability.
18.╇ Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the
Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), chap. 2.
19.╇ Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
20.╇ Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden His-
tory of Animal Resistance (Petrolia, Calif.: CounterPunch, 2010.)
21.╇ This phrase, which is a play on the title of Bruno Latour’s
book We Have Never Been Modern, is part of the title of an inter-
view with Donna Haraway. See Nicholas Gane, “When We Have
 N O T E S 81

Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Interview with Donna

Haraway,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 135–Â�58.
22.╇ This point is made with particular force by David Nibert
in his Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration,
Capitalism, and Global Conflict (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013).
23.╇ Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Cli-
mate Change Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
2013), chap. 6.
24.╇ For an overview of some of this work, see the essays col-
lected in Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II, eds., Terrorists or
Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (New
York: Lantern Books, 2004).
25.╇ I have in mind primarily the work of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri. See their Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
26.╇ Important recent texts here include Carol J. Adams and
Lori Gruen, eds., Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other
Animals and the Earth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Anthony J.
Nocella II, Judy K. C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan, eds.,
Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco-�
ability Movement (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Margaret Robin-
son, “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends,” Canadian Journal of
Native Studies 33 (2013): 189–Â�96; A. Breeze Harper, ed., Sistah
Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and
Society (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lantern Books, 2010); Noreen Giffney
and Myra J. Hird, eds., Queering the Non/Human (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2008). See also Kim Socha’s helpful article, “‘Just
Tell the Truth’: A Polemic on the Value of Radical Activism,” in
Confronting Animal Exploitation: Grassroots Essays on Liberation
and Veganism, ed. Kim Socha and Sarahjane Blum (Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland, 2013), 44–Â�65, esp. 60–Â�63.
27.╇ Exemplary work along these lines can be found especially
among indigenous feminist, Chicana queer-�feminist, and eco-
82 N O T E S

feminist theorists and activists. See, for example, Andrea Smith,

“Humanity Through Work,” borderlands 13 (2014): 1–Â�17; Gloria
E. Anzaldúa, “now let us shift╯.╯.╯.â•t̄he path of cono-
cimiento╯.╯.╯.╯inner work, public acts,” in this bridge we call home:
radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and
AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 540–Â�78;
AnaLouise Keating and Kimberly C. Merenda, “Decentering the
Human? Towards a Post-Â�anthropocentric Standpoint Theory,”
Praktyka Teoretyczna 10 (2013): 65–Â�85; and Val Plumwood, Envi-
ronmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York:
Routledge, 2002).