Without Offending Humans

Abstract

This book pursues the investigation Fontenay began in her magnum opus, The Silence of the Beasts: Philosophy Confronts Animality with a series of essays of somewhat more topical reach. Fontenay’s perspective is resolutely informed by Continental Philosophy, which brings her to articulate a very strong critique of the pragmatist frame through which animal rights are often defended. Fontenay seeks to maintain the anthropological difference between man and animal that Singer and Cavalieri openly and brazenly, upon Fontenay’s account, ignore. While seeking to articulate the need for animal rights, Fontenay does not for as much encourage an abandon of what she calls the “human exception,” a defense of which she mounts in her chapter on “The Improper.” If the human exception must be maintained, Fontenay is attentive to the ways in which the account of the fragility common to animals and humans should lead to new ways of thinking about ethics and politics. Singer and Cavalieri are taken to task for ignoring the importance of this human exception (and, as a result, minimizing the crimes against humanity committed during the Shoah) and argues that animal rights should further develop their already extant legal status “between possessions and persons.” For Fontenay, it is not enough simply to investigate how philosophers, politicians or artists consider animals or the question of their rights nor is not enough for these different discourses simply to make mention of the “animal cause” to qualify them as allies in the struggle for animal rights.

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