The Suffering Animal: Life Between Weakness and Power (The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series)

This book provides a critical and innovative reassessment of contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting with a critique of the “official philosophical narration” of animal studies, and then a reassessment of Descartes' animal-machine paradigm, Simone Ghelli tracks down the conceptual coordinates of what he calls “the paradigm of the suffering animal.” The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while contesting the metaphysical and anthropocentric structure of western axiology, eventually redefines and re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering, that is on the mutual compassion sentient beings feel before the unjust sight of their finitude. The suffering animal paradigm shows how, within our philosophical tradition, the animal question has been always intertwined with the questions of atheism and of materialism. The ultimate aim of this research is to define the “ethical equilibrium” between aspects of the living, such as weakness and power, joy and suffering, life and death, which our philosophical tradition largely tends to consider as mutually excluding. To overcome such oppositions means avoiding opposing, in our ethical and political discourse, the defense of the vulnerability of the weak and the freedom of the powerful. Series Editors’ Preface 8 Acknowledgments 10 Contents 12 About the Author 14 Chapter 1: Introduction 15 1.1 An Animal Suffers for Nothing This Side of Good and Evil 15 1.2 Moderns Knew It: The Radical Challenge of the Suffering Animal 18 1.3 Life Is Weak 21 1.4 The Suffering Animal Faces the Extreme 24 1.5 Biodicies for Free Spirits 26 1.6 Luck of Some, Misfortune of All 28 1.7 Preliminary Notes 31 Works Cited 33 Chapter 2: The Sensitive Cogito: Modern Materialism and Its Legacy 34 2.1 A Shaky Canon 34 2.2 The Animal-Machine, or Rather Descartes’ Dangerous Idea 40 2.3 The Rise of the Suffering Animal 51 2.4 The “Innovative Restoration” of the Rational Animal 58 Works Cited 66 Chapter 3: Life Is Overrated: On Darwin’s Ultimate Materialism 69 3.1 The Evolution of the Suffering Animal 69 3.2 The Coral of Life and the Chance of Equality 72 3.3 The Revolt of Sentient Beings and the Chance of Civilization 78 3.4 There Is Life, Therefore God Cannot Exist 89 3.5 The Suffering Animal Versus the Powerful Animal 95 Works Cited 107 Chapter 4: Humanity as a Matter of Civilization: The Primo Levi Case 111 4.1 Thinking Dehumanization by Experience 111 4.2 The Inegalitarian God and Meaningless Suffering 117 4.3 The Salvation of Civilization 125 4.4 “We Weren’t a Pleasant Sight” 136 4.5 The Salvation of Science 143 Works Cited 153 Chapter 5: The Rise of the Powerful Animal: On Deleuze’s Materialism of Power 157 5.1 The Eclipse of the Suffering Animal 157 5.2 Releasing Life: Hume and Bergson 163 5.3 Releasing the Living: Spinoza and Nietzsche 181 5.4 Becoming the Powerful Animal that We Are 202 5.5 The Powerful Animal Reveals Their True Face 213 Works Cited 221 Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Powerful Animal Encounters the Suffering Animal 227 Works Cited 241 Index 243