Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights

A central thinker on the question of the animal in continental thought, Élisabeth de Fontenay moves in this volume from Jacques Derridas uneasily intimate writing on animals to a passionate frontal engagement with political and ethical theory as it has been applied to animalsalong with a stinging critique of the work of Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri as well as with other utilitarian philosophers of animalhuman 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 philosophers argument: a strategy through the animal, exposition to an animal or to this animal, and compassion toward animals. For Fontenay, Derridas 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 philosophys ongoing indifference to animal lifeshading into savagery, underpinned by denialand how attempts to exclude the animal from ethical systems have in fact demeaned humanity. But Fontenays 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 animalsand the consequences of these assessments for how we define ourselves.