Abstract
Much of the recent work that has been done in critical animal/animality studies revolves around the challenge of thinking about animals in other-than-anthropocentric terms. The difficulties associated with this task are varied and formidable, inasmuch as anthropocentrism, while not fully saturating the social field, is nevertheless ubiquitous to at least some degree in many of the dominant culture’s concepts, practices, and institutions. The aim of the present essay was to explore in more depth what I take to be one of the more promising avenues for pursuing a thought and practice relating to animals that issues a thoroughgoing challenge to anthropocentrism and that opens up new possibilities for thought and for life. I use the term indistinction as the name for this general approach to rethinking animality and the human–animal distinction, and I provide here a brief overview of that approach through a reading of portions of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Val Plumwood.
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Notes
It should be noted that the devaluing and de-ranking of human attributes by Nietzsche is strategic and provisional, a gesture aimed at checking human arrogance. Nietzsche certainly has other things to say elsewhere about the human and its place in the natural order that are less negative. That said, even Nietzsche’s more positive remarks about the human and its more “interesting” status among other beings are ultimately aimed at human self-overcoming toward a condition beyond “man.”
Nietzsche’s attitude toward anthropocentrism, like his attitude toward related phenomena, is not always consistent throughout his writings. His work can certainly be read, at least at a performative level, as reinstating the very anthropocentrism he often criticizes. The reading of his work that I am presenting here does not aim at doing full justice to Nietzsche’s writings on anthropocentrism as a whole. Instead, I am pulling on one thread within his work and unraveling it in order to think more fully about the positive potential of his critique of anthropocentrism. Although there are other threads in his work that would counteract the reading I am pursuing here, I do believe that the position I am outlining represents the dominant thrust of Nietzsche’s mature thoughts on anthropocentrism.
I do not mean to imply that because animals (and humans) can be eaten that they should be eaten, and that seeing animals as more than meat means simply continuing to eat animals in the same way as before but doing so with respect for their non-meat modes of existence. The aim here is instead to deepen and radicalize veganism, and to transform what it means to treat animals with maximal respect. Ultimately, the line of thought I am developing here would suggest that even the most rigorous vegans are always already and irreducibly involved in processes of “meatification” (to borrow a term from Tony Weis) and the consumption of animals. Thus, the question of our relationship with animals (and theirs with us) becomes not one of consumptive purity but of constantly reexamining (1) the ways in which our practices fail to acknowledge how animals are something more than meat and (2) the ways in which we define ourselves as human by seeking to remove ourselves from the realm of edibility. I explore these themes in a forthcoming essay (“Contesting the Sacrificial Order of Veganism”) that serves as a supplement to the present piece. I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and questions along these and other lines.
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Calarco, M. Being toward meat: anthropocentrism, indistinction, and veganism. Dialect Anthropol 38, 415–429 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9349-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9349-y