Bodily Uniqueness and Symbolization

Abstract

In The Lives of Animals Coetzee (2004: 59–115) tells the story of a fictional Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, who is invited to give a lecture at Appleton College, an imaginary American university. Costello is haunted by the pervasive indifference to the terrible way in which humans treat animals in practices such as factory farming, a violence that she compares to the horror of the death camps during the Shoah (Coetzee, 2004: 62–6). Coetzee’s story has generally been understood as a way of confronting (within a fictional frame) the ethical issue of how we should treat animals. Peter Singer, for instance, takes Coetzee’s story to be a way of presenting arguments for a kind of radical egalitarianism between human and non- human animals (Singer, 1999: 85–92). Cora Diamond has criticized Singer’s position by asserting that the rights discourse somehow distorts and trivializes Elizabeth’s experience of bodily exposure by converting it into a philosophical problem about the moral status of animals (Diamond, 2008: 48). For her, Costello is not just a device to put forward ideas about animal rights; rather she has a significance of her own: the wounded animal at the centre of the story is Elizabeth Costello herself: ‘if we see in the lectures a wounded woman, one thing that wounds her is precisely the common and taken-for-granted mode of thought that how we should treat animals is an ethical issue, and the knowledge that she will be taken to be contributing, or intending to contribute, to discussion of it.