The Philosophers’ Dinner, or the Difficulty of Dissent

“Admirable theorists, who have been giving scrupulous and impartial attention to other questions, tend, when the animal issue heaves up its head, to throw the first argument which occurs to them and run”¹⁾.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with a time difference of a few years, one could find two philosophers comfortably eating their dinners, one at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London, and the other at the Englischer Hof in Frankfurt am Main. They both were critical of contemporary paradigms, they both had defended animals, and they both ate meat. Had they had a chance to exchange a word on the topic – the younger one could speak English – they might have agreed on the defence line of the permissibility of their meat eating. “If the being eaten were all,” would say utilitarian jurist Jeremy Bentham, “there is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of them as we like to eat: we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature”²⁾. “Sympathy for animals,” would assent iconoclast philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer “should not carry us to the length of having to abstain from animal food, like the Brahmins; for in nature the capacity for suffering keeps pace with intelligence, and thus man would suffer more by going without animal food, especially in the North, than the animal does through a quick and always unforeseen death – which should, however, be made even easier by means of chloroform.”³⁾.

Is it so? Are animals obtuse? We know that they aren’t. Is the death we inflict on them in order to eat their flesh “speedy” and “quick”? We know that it wasn’t then, and that, two centuries later, it has become infinitely crueller, to the point of overflowing their entire life. Thus, if one can deem with Peter Singer that these two great thinkers of the past self-servingly “lowered their standard of argument”⁴⁾ – and of adherence to reality!—what about the contemporary philosophers who are facing the intensive, industrialized raising, confining, breeding, fattening, and killing of animals for food in factory farms?

To address the issue of what Richard Twine defined as “the animal industrial complex” – the system normalising the institutionalised exploitation of animals as commodities through a multiple set of networks and relationships between the agricultural sector, governments, and science – means confronting some crucial elements. The first one is the question of the justifications based on the alleged inferior moral status of nonhuman beings, behind which lie centuries of fallacious anthropocentric arguments that have only recently been dismantled. Then, there is the obstacle of the entrenched habit of consuming animal flesh supported by the drive to social conformity – a habit (or habitus!) so ingrained that even the most acute analyst of the surreptitious naturalization of what is cultural, Pierre Bourdieu, could not demystify it. And finally, in the background, looms the immense power and pervasiveness of a capitalist exploitive machine which not only captures lawmakers and agencies and constructs discursive strategies to support the industry, but can also favour specific repressive policies.

Nonetheless, that those who pretend to be critical of contemporary society cannot identify in the animal-industrial complex the heart of the exploitation system – the Arendtian realm where everything is possible —is nothing short of scandalous. For, apart from a few interventions by environmental philosophers (consider the early condemnations of “the transmogrification of organic to mechanical processes” in factory farms) and apart from the oppositional field generated by the dismantling of the anthropocentric paradigm – an area linked to what were haughtily defined by an orthodox scholar as “the remote and habitually marginalized confines of animal welfare activism”⁵⁾ – what reigns in the mainstream radical philosophical territory is silence.

Being an absence, silence is by definition unconveyable. But specific evasions are not. And such evasions occur just in the case of the critical categories used to diagnose and politically challenge current social pathologies. If when, after the Second World War, factory farming was exploding and Ruth Harrison published her pioneering Animal Machines, radical political philosophy was dominated by traditionally humanist approaches of Marxist matrix, at present, new critical frameworks prevail. Such frameworks revolve around two families of concepts, which, though somehow intertwined, are different in that they place emphasis on differing aspects of the powerful-powerless relationship. One is centered on the idea of being in the power of, or wholly subject to, someone else, and is captured by the notion of spoliation. The other revolves around the idea of being managed, or manipulated and tampered with, and can be summarized by the notion of subjection. And both are instantly dropped as soon as the species boundary is reached.

Consider first the concept of “bare life,” foreshadowed in Arendt’s idea of the “mere existence” of those whose exclusion from the legal regime is “an invitation to murder,” and reconceptualized and popularized by Giorgio Agamben to diagnose and challenge spoliation. Despite some indeterminateness in its use, the category of bare life basically refers to a contingent situation of powerlessness imposed upon individuals. Forged in connection with an analysis of the relation between lawmaking and menace of death, the notion was further developed in the context of more recent reflections on the intertwinements between political power and the realm of arbitrary violence. In synthesis, bare life is life “exposed to an unconditioned threat of death”⁶⁾. The reduction to bare life has thus to do with a form of subjective impotence – a kind of spoliation with respect to one’s kind of existence – and with a form of objective impotence – a state of rightlessness that may include the liability to be killed with impunity. And the examples mentioned in the literature range from refugees to stateless people to the “Muselmann” in the camp to the overcomatose attached to life-support systems. But isn’t the factory farm, as Cary Wolfe observed, “the site of the very ur-form” of that absolute spoliation that the notion of bare life epitomizes⁷⁾? Aren’t farmed animals both totally divested of their proper life and abandoned without rights in the hands of their exploiters? No words on this.

Or consider the two main Foucauldian notions confronting subjection – the notions of biopower and biopolitics. The former focuses on the subjection of beings to disciplines and technologies affecting the bodies – an anatomo-politics of the corporeal aimed at making bodies docile and useful. And the latter addresses the power’s maximization of control over life and death, and the subjection of populations to regimes of management of biological functions like reproduction, mortality, and morbidity⁸⁾. Given that in industrial farms bodies are, among other things, subjected to techno-scientific dispositifs effecting both their mass maiming and their phenotypical and genotypical manipulation, how could Foucault erase animals from the scene? And what about the recent neo-Marxist attempts to revive along analogous lines their traditional approach, as is the case with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, who theorize the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power, and further elaborate on biopower in connection with the networks and technologies of global capitalism, stressing the importance for capitalist societies of a biopolitics revolving around the somatic or corporeal? Within their analysis, just a remark on the fact that the farm progressively became a factory, “with all of the factory’s discipline, technology, wage relations, and so forth”⁹⁾, and not a word on the plight of the nonhumans involved.

This kind of epistemic blindness manifests itself not only when what is in question is the direct denunciation of social pathologies but also when addressing the problem of expected global calamities. Confronted with the recent zoonoses, authors from different ideological corners offer a common example of Freudian resistance. Thus, celebrated conservative philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, while attributing outbreaks to globalization’s facilitation of microbial spread, lightheartedly erases the role of the animal industrial complex in mobilizing protopandemic pathogens through its expansion into primary landscapes, only to advocate a planetary network of researchers working for mutual human protection – no protection for the exploited nonhumans is considered. In a similar vein, radical Leftist philosopher Slavoj Žižek after foreshadowing a society beyond nation-state based on full unconditional human solidarity, and foreseeing that the coronavirus will compel us “to re-invent communism,” pushes the erasure of human consumptive responsibility even further by suggesting that we resist the temptation to treat epidemics as the cruel punishment of humanity for the ruthless exploitation of other forms of life on earth¹⁰⁾. No pity for the live chickens, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and insects huddled together and sharing their breath, blood, and faeces, who are sold in the open-air stalls of wet markets.

Against this depressing scenario, within which no one challenges factory farming – let alone renounces eating meat – a perspective seems to stand out as an exception: Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist approach aimed at destabilizing traditional Western binary assumptions. And while deconstruction avowedly draws inspiration from Martin Heidegger’s Destruktion of philosophical distortions, Derrida recurrently stressed that, if there is a question on which he dissents from Heidegger, it is the “discourse of animality.” When it comes to animals, he claims, Heidegger’s revolution in thinking comes to an end, and the axioms of the profoundest humanism resurface. In contrast with this, while illustrating deconstruction’s engagement in the demand for justice, he advances the suggestion that the human-animal boundary might be among the binary oppositions that, being constructed, can be destabilized and deconstructed. Then, imputing to Western philosophy a “sacrificial structure” which allows the noncriminal putting to death of animals, he straightforwardly criticizes in the present treatment of nonhumans the specific features of technological manipulation – the organization and exploitation of an artificial survival in conditions that once would have been deemed monstrous, the “genocidal torture that we often inflict […] by raising en masse, in an industrialized manner, the herds to be exterminated”¹¹⁾. The condemnation of factory farming could not be clearer. Should we then abolish meat eating? No. Once again, habitus and the humanist doxa triumph. Surprisingly, Derrida claims that, since when we introject corpses the act is symbolic in the case of humans, and both real and symbolic in the case of nonhumans, not only the task of ascertaining our responsibility is too “enormous” to be undertaken, but, due to the symbolic aspect, vegetarians practise a different mode of denegation: they too “partake of animals, even of men [sic]”. As a consequence, “the moral question is […] not, nor has it ever been” whether one should or should not eat animals¹²⁾.

Apparently, the philosophers’ dinner continues unabated. Will the new oppositional thinking be able to disrupt it?