Without Offending Humans

Without Offending Humans

A Critique of Animal Rights

Élisabeth de Fontenay

Translated by Will Bishop

What do humans owe to animals?

168 Pages, 5 x 8 in

  • Paperback
  • 9780816676057
  • Published: August 16, 2012
  • Series: Posthumanities
BUY
  • eBook
  • 9781452934839
  • Published: August 16, 2012
  • Series: Posthumanities
BUY

Details

Without Offending Humans

A Critique of Animal Rights

Series: Posthumanities

Élisabeth de Fontenay

Translated by Will Bishop

ISBN: 9780816676057

Publication date: August 16th, 2012

168 Pages

8 x 5

"Without Offending Humans is an excellent, timely, well-argued book. Élisabeth de Fontenay is an original thinker, urging us to consider a rethought version of historical materialism and a utopic animalism." —Leonard Lawler, author of Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy

A central thinker on the question of the animal in continental thought, Élisabeth de Fontenay moves in this volume from Jacques Derrida’s uneasily intimate writing on animals to a passionate frontal engagement with political and ethical theory as it has been applied to animals—along with a stinging critique of the work of Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri as well as with other “utilitarian” philosophers of animal–human relations.

Humans and animals are different from one another. To conflate them is to be intellectually sentimental. And yet, from our position of dominance, do we not owe them more than we often acknowledge? In the searching first chapter on Derrida, she sets out “three levels of deconstruction” that are “testimony to the radicalization and shift of that philosopher’s argument: a strategy through the animal, exposition to an animal or to this animal, and compassion toward animals.” For Fontenay, Derrida’s writing is particularly far-reaching when it comes to thinking about animals, and she suggests many other possible philosophical resources including Adorno, Leibniz, and Merleau-Ponty.

Fontenay is at her most compelling in describing philosophy’s ongoing indifference to animal life—shading into savagery, underpinned by denial—and how attempts to exclude the animal from ethical systems have in fact demeaned humanity. But Fontenay’s essays carry more than philosophical significance. Without Offending Humans reveals a careful and emotionally sensitive thinker who explores the unfolding of humans’ assessments of their relationship to animals—and the consequences of these assessments for how we define ourselves.

Born in 1934, Élisabeth de Fontenay was closely associated with the late Jacques Derrida and is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Sorbonne. She is the author of Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité and Diderot: Reason and Resonance.

Will Bishop received his doctorate in French literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Paris, where he teaches and translates.


Contents


Preface


1. Their Secret Elect

2. The Improper

3. Between Possessions and Persons

4. Rhetorics of Dehumanization

5. They Are Sleeping and We Are Watching over Them

6. The Pathetic Pranks of Bio-Art

7. The Ordinariness of Barbarity


Notes

Index