Derrida's Theory of Alterity and Critical Animal Studies

Philosophers are deeply divided over how to address questions about human-animal relations. A movement within contemporary Anglophone philosophy sparked in the 1970s by Peter Singer aims to extend existing ethical theories, such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, to include nonhuman animals. More recently, a substantial body of work drawing on several figures in poststructuralist philosophy has emerged critiquing not only the treatment of nonhuman animals by humans, but also the approach of Anglophone animal ethicists, arguing that doing justice to animals calls for a radical upheaval in ethics, as well as ontology, epistemology, and political philosophy.;I argue that the schism between these two approaches to human-animal relations derives from their shared misapprehension of the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. Understanding this relationship requires a theory of how human and nonhuman animals are "other" to each other, i.e. a theory of alterity. To this end, I employ the theory of alterity developed by Jacques Derrida. In particular, I draw on Derrida's view that the alterity of an other one encounters can be neither wholly elided nor wholly preserved, since an encounter with an other consists not in a unidirectional movement from radical otherness to increasing degrees of understanding and elision of alterity, but rather in a process of oscillation in which coming to know the other paradoxically gives rise to an unending succession of confrontations with the other as radically other.;I examine several discourses on human-animal relations characteristic of both the Anglophone and poststructuralist movements in animal studies, arguing that theorists in each movement make symmetrical errors in their respective understandings of the form of alterity relating humans and nonhuman animals. While Singer and other Anglophone ethicists attempt to circumscribe the alterity of nonhuman animals, numerous figures in poststructuralist animal studies seek to construct discourses and practices that maintain their radical alterity. Arguing that neither of these goals can be achieved, I develop a novel form of animal rights discourse that constitutes an attempt to face rather than flee from the inescapable process of oscillation between confronting and eliding the radical alterity of nonhuman animals.