Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy

Abstract

In what follows, I want to suggest that a good deal of confusion about studies has stemmed from our inability to locate question properly.1 More specifically, if philosophical work that takes moral status of non-human animals seriously is, in some obvious sense, posthumanist (i.e., challenging ontological and ethical divide between humans and non-humans that is a linchpin of philosophical humanism), such work may still be quite humanist on an internal theoretical and methodological level that recontains and even undermines an otherwise admirable philosophical project. My aim here is to map a kind of philosophical or theoretical spectrum that moves from humanist approaches to posthumanism (or anti-anthropocentrism) to posthumanist approaches to posthumanism, moving from a cluster that includes Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian capabilities approach, Peter Singer's utilitarianism, and Tom Regan's post-Kantian animal rights philosophy at one end, through post-Wittgensteinian work of philosopher Cora Diamond (itself inflected by Stanley Cavell's writings on philosophical skepticism), to, finally, later work of Jacques Derrida on the question of animal. My point will not be to pursue a kind of more-posthumanist-than-thou sweepstakes, but rather to try to bring out how very admirable impulses behind any variety of philosophy that challenges anthropocentrism and speciesism (impulses that I respect wherever they may be found) demand a certain reconfiguration of what philosophy (or theory) is and how it can (and cannot) respond to challenge that all of these figures want to engage: challenge of sharing planet with non-human subjects. Such differences should not obscure a remarkable fact with which I'd like to begin: that figures as diverse as Nussbaum, Diamond, and Derrida all set out from same starting point that anchors our ethical response to non-human animals: namely, how our shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude makes us, as Diamond will put it, fellow creatures in ways that subsume more traditional markers of ethical consideration, such as capacity for reason, ability to enter into