Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer have an article-length reply to Slavoj Zizek’s essay, “The Prospects of Radical Politics Today,” (and Zizek’s book, On Violence) both in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. It is generally a re-statement of their well-known position on animal ethics – along with a series of unhelpful, party-line comments (e.g, “Since arguments in the Continental tradition are stated differently than in analytic moral philosophy,” “An approach that, among other things, has allowed us to grant equal protection to the interests of non-paradigmatic humans [...] meets with many difficulties, which have been thoroughly explored in Anglo-American philosophy, but not, as yet, in Continental philosophy, where the requirements of rigor and consistency are not always mandatory,” and, lastly, they criticize Zizek for misciting the title of one of Singer’s books – most likely a typo – even though there are a few typos in their own reply). They do, however, in passing raise an important question: that of the reduction of humans to “bare life,” or, again, to the status of animals, and how this relates to animal rights. This is a problem that has not been adequately discussed in either “Anglo-American” or “Continental” philosophy.
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This is the personal website of Craig McFarlane, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Sociology at York University, Toronto and a lecturer in the Department of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa. I also contribute to The Inhumanities.
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4 Comments
I’d bet we haven’t heard the end of this one. Thanks for the links.
Singer, who advertises himself on campuses as the “most important living philosopher”, always keeps his ad hominem arguments concerning the dubious polemical divide between analytical and continental philosophy close at hand.
It wouldn’t take too much work to translate Zizek’s dialectical reasoning into a predicate calculus, but Singer is more interested in repeating the same old canards about rigor and consistency.
Interesting. This is almost word for word what he said in “Repeating Lenin” and “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance”. So, Zizek’s been saying this for at least six years.
I noticed that Zizek’s piece is also published in _The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, vol Two_ (Continuum: 2006) with the same title. I had the feeling that I had read it somewhere before.
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