THE ETHICS OF THE CARNIVORE

Any demonstration of the timidity, the contradictions, and the paradoxes of vegetarian rhetoric needs to be accompanied by a positive account of the carnivore’s outlook if we are to defend its legitimacy. We should grant to the vegetarian that the justifications typically offered for meat eating are themselves rather inconsistent. They invoke a weak form of utilitarianism and fail to provide serious responses to genuine questions posed by the vegetarian. One sees this in connection with the dietary aspect of the situation—the need for protein, for example. On this question, the weight of scientific evidence has reached its limit today; it would not be difficult to devise healthful artificial proteins to replace the animal proteins we need, and we could certainly satisfy ourselves with vegetable protein. In general, carnivores have trouble defending their conduct. All too often, they manifest a shameful and defensive attitude that is neither convincing nor effective as a response to the aggression of the vegetarian with whom they find themselves in conflict.

A defense of meat eating is, however, possible on purely ethical grounds. The fundamental rules of life apply to all human beings without exception, and one of the most important principles for preserving harmony on earth is precisely the one that vegetarians reject most vigorously: the principle of reciprocity and exchange between living beings. A special consequence of this principle is an infinite debt on humanity’s part to other animals and the ethical obligation to commemorate this debt constantly. 1 Thus, a human being cannot become an ethical vegetarian but rather must be an ethical carnivore. To see the contrast as being between the ethical vegetarian and the boorish carnivore would be too simple.

A Portrait of the Carnivore as a Predator

Among the mammals shaped by fifty-four million years of evolution, 237 carnivorous species—from the pygmy weasel, which weighs forty-five grams, to the brown bear at fifteen hundred pounds—are descended from a single ancestor. The carnivores comprise eight families: canids, martens, bears, racoons, genets and civets, mongooses, hyenas, and felines. In fact, only 36 percent of carnivores have a dietary regimen composed of more than 60 percent prey. But it should be noted that more than half of the large predators (those that weigh more than forty-five pounds) eat only meat.

Humans, like other apes, are not carnivores sensu stricto, even though we have many things in common with social groupings of gregarious carnivores and primates. Like chimpanzees, humans are omnivores. Thus, Homo sapiens should be characterized as a species that also eats meat. Human beings can eat meat, but they are not required to do so. Here it is the carnivorous dimension of the omnivore that interests me—in particular, the way in which this dimension has shaped humanity.

The philosopher Paul Shepard is acutely interested in this question. He explains that carnivores and herbivores, in contrast with omnivores, are specialists. What I eat conditions not only my relations with the animals I consume but also my relationship to the world generally. Thus, the controversy surrounding the carnivore cannot be reduced to a question of diet. Nor is it simply a matter of the ethics of compassion. Being an omnivore, which means being partly a carnivore, is a fundamental existential state of being whose subtleties must be understood before we seek to eliminate it by force. Being a carnivore, even partly, is tied up at the deepest level with what it means to be human. The question is not simply whether we can be human without being carnivores but whether we would have become humans without having been carnivores and what importance this heritage has for us today.

Making a Big Deal (or Simply a Meal) out of a Dead Animal

In a recent text entitled “Eating Meat and Eating People,” the philosopher Cora Diamond asserts, a bit harshly, that all considerations of animals’ right not to be killed in order to be eaten miss the point. 2 If it were really a matter of rights, nothing would prevent a vegetarian from eating a dead animal that had not been killed for the purpose of being eaten—for example, an animal that died after being hit by a car. Nor would anything prevent a vegetarian from eating a cow accidentally killed by lightning. We could go even further than Diamond and note that a practicing vegetarian who did not want to kill the animal he wanted to eat could invent electronic means for locating an animal that had just died from natural causes to make a meal of it.

Cannibalistic Thoughts

Diamond gets to the crux of the matter when she compares the arguments offered by vegetarians to arguments made against cannibalism. Simply put, a human being is not good to eat, and considerations of the suffering that would be caused by killing the person are entirely beside the point because that is not where the problem lies. For Diamond, we simply cannot understand what is ultimately at stake here if we do not acknowledge that there is an essential difference between human beings and animals. The vegetarian presents a weak justification inasmuch as she appeals exclusively to the capacities of the animals in question. For Diamond, it is not in virtue of any specific features of humans that we do not eat them but rather because not being eaten by another human is part of what it means to be human.

Diamond’s argument is all the more interesting for being open to a twofold debate. A vegetarian could respond that we might be able to alter our conceptions of animals such that eating them would no longer be acceptable. And an extreme (but completely logical) carnivore might argue that Diamond’s position would permit us to eat people; all we would need to do this would be to change our conception of what is human—not a lot, but just a little.

This idea might appear shocking at first blush because most people do not realize the extent to which cannibalism is already present in our culture. Indeed, ours is one of the most cannibalistic cultures ever to have existed, with the exception of the Mayans. A human cannibal 3 is typically defined as a human who eats his or her fellow creatures. But we are not dealing with mathematical logic here, and our definitions can be revised in accordance with the relevant point of view. In the case under consideration, we can characterize the cannibal as someone who metabolically assimilates the flesh of his fellow creatures. This characterization would lead to the conclusion that organ grafts are also instances of cannibalism. Here, however, it would be a matter of nonnutritive cannibalism (one metabolizes the other without eating the other) and of consuming carrion (one contents oneself with metabolizing what one can of the other when one finds him dead but does not kill him). In other words, we live in cultures that practice a sort of kitchenless cannibalism (in contrast with the cannibal practices described by anthropologists)—a cannibalism of the raw rather than of the cooked.

The Ecology of Metabolic Assimilation

The xenografts discussed earlier shed unexpected but exciting light on the question of metabolic assimilation, which ultimately signifies eating . In fact, one can ask whether someone who has received a pig kidney is still an authentic human. From a strictly biological point of view, that individual will be a species of human–porcine hybrid—the frontier has not been crossed, but it has been rendered porous. Even more interesting, this grafted human is constituted (or, rather, reconstituted) through the assimilation of a pig part. Here we lack an ecology of organs—that is, of laws that would permit us to know what each organ becomes in a body, which relations it maintains with other organs apart from the functionalities proper to it, and which representations (symbolic or otherwise) we have of it that enable us to accept it as our own. In the same way, we stand in need of an ecology of the metabolic assimilation of the other. In this connection, the vegetarian’s objections take on an entirely different significance. Indeed, the vegetarian appears as one who refuses to metabolize the animal, to make the animal enter into herself. The vegetarian does not want to expose herself to the animal —and the question is exactly what this signifies.

Eating Justly

The case of the Algonquin of Canada provides an especially rich avenue for thinking about this question. For them, according to descriptions provided by Marie-Pierre Bousquet, the problem is not one of killing the animal but rather of knowing how to kill it, why one is killing it, and what one then does with its corpse. Killing an animal to feed oneself is acceptable, provided that the means of killing entails the least possible suffering for the animal. The Algonquin add that it is necessary to be involved in a process of reciprocity and debt with regard to the animal so as to maximize the products yielded by the body. This last point is fundamental: the animal can be eaten in a just manner only if everything edible in the animal is actually consumed and everything usable is used. What matters is not killing an animal but rather doing so without needless suffering and not wasting anything of the one we have killed. A contrario , killing an animal for entertainment or to get rid of it is unacceptable in the eyes of the Algonquin.

At the topmost level, the carnivore’s point of view can be considered in terms of the Algonquins’ perspective on hunting and the consumption of meat. In their societies, both sorts of activity take place in a system of reciprocal giving—that is, in a somewhat sophisticated system of dependence. The fact of killing an animal in order to eat it leads the hunter to become involved with others of her kind. The animal can be killed and eaten only by respecting a highly restrictive commitment. The Algonquin does not instrumentalize the animal, and she admits that a fundamental characteristic of life consists in a form of cruelty that it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate. Thus, the Algonquin’s attitude is the opposite of that of the vegetarian, who instrumentalizes vegetation and adopts a “Disneyesque” vision of the world in refusing to grant (and to accept) the least place for cruelty in the space of the living.

A vegetarian might object here, and rightly so, that the Algonquin live in an ecosystem (the great forests of Canada) rich in meat and poor in edible vegetation and that for them eating meat is a nutritional choice essential to survival. There is some basis for this remark, but it is not especially pertinent to the question that occupies us here. That the Algonquin have to engage in predation to feed themselves does not necessarily mean that the provision of protein constitutes the heart of the phenomenon, even though it is seen in these terms both by carnivores who perceive in meat nothing more who conceive of predation exclusively in terms of aggression. For their own part, the Algonquin have developed an ethically positive approach to meat, and the temptation of vegetarianism does not make a lot of sense to them. Indeed, the mere fact that I am obligated to choose a particular option in a given situation does not mean that this option is necessarily negative for me. 4

An Ethic of Dependence

The Algonquin example shows that the carnivore’s ethics initially takes the form of an ethic of reciprocity that can be extended further. Thus, one may consider that energies must circulate in the world and that it is the good circulation of these energies that establishes both harmony and justice. Each is the condition for the existence of the other, and predation in general constitutes one of the principles of this harmony.

This ethic of reciprocity involves significant restrictions, for it is an ethic of dependence with which we find ourselves confronted. This point is important because it is precisely the notion of predation that shocks the vegetarian. For the vegetarian, predation is above all aggression inflicted by one living being on another, and it must be reduced as far as possible, if not eliminated altogether. But such a negative view of predation is by no means the only one possible. One can conceive it in more positive terms as the fundamental form of dependence that grounds our relationship to animals. Assuming one’s role as a predator, in other words, amounts to recognizing that one’s existence depends on that of others—and that the existence of others can depend on one’s own existence. All animals are predators, even herbivores such as cows, who feed on grass. It is equally true that plants, such as certain African acacias, alter the chemical composition of their leaves when they are attacked by antelopes, thereby becoming toxic to their attackers. This clearly shows that the acacias perceive the actions of herbivores to be acts of aggression. There is no need for me to be delighted by this, but it would be absurd for me to view it as a metaphysical scandal.

To Eat an Animal Is to Make Oneself Dependent

Thus, a fundamental theme in ethics is that of codependence: whoever eats an animal takes on a dependence with regard to it. To reduce the Algonquin’s consumption of meat to a biological necessity is narrow and reductive. As Paul Shepard writes, in the first instance animals are ingested by human beings as a substance, and then they are ingested in a process of thought before ultimately being incorporated into our psychological structures. 5 Therefore, the question of predation should be considered in terms of its global significance and extended as far as possible. The human being’s relation of dependence vis-à-vis the animal is not as special as that. All living beings are involved in forms of dependence with other living beings. Here there is a principle that is constitutive of life. There is a twofold advantage to being aware of this principle. It reminds us of everything we owe to others and sets a limit, particularly in a quantitative sense, to that which can be taken. To take more than what is necessary is ruled out: no act of predation may place the system in danger. Thus, eating comes back not only to taking on a dependence but also to accepting one’s involvement in it. To eat an animal is to refuse to believe that human beings enjoy a state of exception in the sphere of animality. Assuming one’s position as a carnivore, in other words, constitutes a posture of humility in comparison with the vegetarian, who purports to situate himself above the animality of which he is in fact a part. The vegetarian, as we saw in the first course of this discussion, can be characterized as a human being who refuses to let herself be intoxicated by other animals. Here we distance ourselves even further from the vegetarian vision of peaceful coexistence devoid of reciprocal contamination.

Two points must be emphasized. The first is that dependence here, far from being a passive posture, is on the contrary a very active posture. The second is the need to conceive the positive dimension of dependence in a culture that constantly insists on autonomy and for which such an attitude constitutes a real challenge. We think all too quickly that dependence is something negative. Nonetheless, the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, among others, strongly criticized the idea of autonomy. For him, a vigorous life requires exposing oneself to and accepting confrontation. To refuse to place oneself in danger or to suffer and to refuse to place others in danger and make them suffer are utterly antithetical to life.

Making Oneself Worthy to Receive

An important aspect of the philosophy of the hunter-gatherers is usually greatly minimized when one envisages the operations of reciprocity in terms of the giving and receiving of gifts, which is of special interest to Marcel Mauss. The capacity to receive is in fact at least as fundamental as the capacity to give; in the very process of living, what is at stake is just as much the existential gift of oneself and of others. No doubt it would be necessary to return to the Christian theology of grace in order to find such a perspective. The reading of Mauss undertaken by Jacques Derrida is, from this point of view, quite illuminating when he explains that the true gift is precisely that which cannot be repaid. The animal’s gift of itself gives rise to the hunter’s dependence not on the animal that has been eaten (it is not alive!) but on those who have not been eaten and on those who are responsible for them. For this relation is not established exclusively between animal and hunter but between the hunter, the hunted animal, and the spirit that protects it.

Thus, the ethical imperative is not simply not to take anything without giving something, but above all not to take anything without first having received and to accept this gift. Never be an egoistic predator who refuses to receive . When the Indians kill their prey, they thank its “spirit” for this “gift,” and they do so in such a manner that the species itself continues to proliferate and its members are able to live in good conditions. The question of spirit is important, whatever its nature may be. What matters is that the dependence created by the fact of eating an animal is located on a plane of existence that is not under the hunter’s control. One can always come to terms with an animal; it is much more difficult to come to terms with its “spirit.” To see the hunter’s obligation to the animal in terms of nothing more than enlightened self-interest is to have a deformed and false vision of what is at stake. One is involved not in a negotiation with interlocutors who are more or less cunning but rather in a fundamental alienation that is finally and paradoxically the forfeit of one’s autonomy. This point is essential because dependence thereby acquires a permanence that cannot easily be overcome. As a consequence, eating meat becomes a particularly strong form of addiction. But we are talking about a positive addiction, a constructive one, not a negative and destructive addiction.

The notion of addiction might appear to be out of place here because today addiction is systematically associated in a negative way with the consumption of drugs. But as Avital Ronell explains, so far no one has defined satisfactorily what counts as a drug, and any substance can a priori serve as one. 6 Thus, meat is perfectly amenable to playing this role.

An Existential Ethics

But in what sense is this situation of dependence pertinent for someone like me, who does not necessarily believe in spirits? Such a question, which is posed even by the vegetarian, can be discussed productively only if one is interested not in the nature of spirit but in its function. Dealing with “spirit,” whatever it may be in other respects, returns us to a recognition of the fact that I can be fully human only by negotiating with what surpasses me. The skeptical vegetarian will insist once again, In what sense is it necessary to eat an animal? The response is simple: it is only in a process as fundamental as that of death or metabolic ingestion that I can place myself in such a situation of dependence. It is only in a transaction involving my existence and that of others that I can live and can permit others to live—“permit” meant here in the practical rather than the juridical sense.

Here I by no means place myself in an ethic of compassion (where I would care for the other because he or she suffers and where I would suffer from knowing that he or she suffers) nor in an ethic of equality (where I would care for the other because he or she is as intelligent as I), but rather in an ethic of shared life (I care for the other because the other is the condition for my existence and I the condition for the other’s existence). In this context, the question of suffering is altogether secondary, not because it is legitimate to make an animal suffer (this is never the case), but because what is important certainly goes beyond suffering.

Two Major Mistakes: Greed and Pride

From the standpoint of this ethic of predation, two grave mistakes must be avoided at all costs. The first consists in wanting to escape this system, the second in abusing it. Escaping the system means not respecting its modalities, either by means of greed (in taking more than what is permitted) or by means of pride (in considering oneself a living being above the living, not subject to what connects living beings to one another without exception). Thus, on the one hand, the vegetarian commits the sin of pride in purporting to place herself outside the stakes of life. On the other hand, the hypercarnivore of contemporary Western societies commits the sin of greed in engaging in an excessive consumption of meat that does not correspond to any fundamental dependence.

The Language of Hunger

The defense of the carnivore that I propose here is fundamentally ethical. When vegetarians proclaim their refusal to eat meat, they posit “what is eaten” (the animal) from the very start as if it were prior to the metabolic processes involved in the bodily assimilation of the animal. What does the animal body of the human being become if he no longer eats meat? One will object here that vegetarian or frugivorous animals are not the problem. This is true, but vegetarians no longer consider themselves to have emerged from animality; indeed, Western beings cling to this belief in nonanimality with the diseased insistence of a pretentious little monkey. From this point of view, Darwinism establishes for many people not that they are animals but rather that they once were, which is a different matter altogether. We must eat meat because doing so reminds us constantly that we ourselves are animals born of the flesh of other animals and are in a position to feed other animals. Eating an animal, in other words, is a positive way of affirming our fundamental animality and our constitutive proximity to other animals. This metabolic connection establishes beyond question our continuity with the animal, first because we thereby affirm that our body is their body but also because we admit that we are taking part in what it means to be an animal and in particular what it means to be involved in the stakes of life and death that characterize animality.

Vegetarians Do Not Want to Become Closer to Plants, But Rather to Distance Themselves from Animals

At this point, the vegetarian will object that the situation is exactly the same for plants. By eating plants, we assert our fundamental contiguity with vegetables, grains, and fruits. This could be true, but it is never what vegetarians insist on; on the contrary, they always justify their regimen from the very start not by positing the need to become closer to plants but rather by positing the need to distance themselves from animals. But this is not a straightforward matter. Can we truly distance ourselves from animals? Ernst Bloch notes quite rightly that human beings have not only retained their animal drives but also produced new ones. 7 The animal dimension of human beings is not a remote remnant of the past but an intrinsic aspect that is constantly reactualized. We constantly reactivate our animal past ; it is utterly illusory to believe that we can ever successfully get rid of it. The animal dimensions of the human being are not to be classified among the residues of a more or less obscure past; they are the essential constituents of the human. It is absurd to believe that one day there will exist a human being deprived of animality. Not only is it in the very nature of a human being to be animal, but this animality can itself become transformed over time.

Language Is Not a Substitute for the Predatory Relationship

A second, more subtle objection is that language allows us to think our proximity to the animal without having to eat the animal. Here language would play the role of a substitute for the predatory relationship. It would enable us to understand that we are animals. This objection is too intellectual to be taken seriously. It assumes from the start that language can be a convincing substitute for what the body experiences. It is a little like saying to someone that there is no need to have sexual relations, that it is enough to speak of sex, or that rather than feeding oneself, one may satisfy oneself with speaking of feeding oneself. More than anything else, to make this claim is to misunderstand altogether the significance of our metabolic connection with animals.

Living Our Convergence with Animals, Not Simply Dreaming It

The central pillar of my argument is that our relationship to animality cannot be purely conceptual; we must truly live it , metabolically, in our biological and behavioral body and not simply simulate it in an analytical fashion. This is exactly what is expressed by the philosophy of the Anishinabe of North America, a philosophy according to which the concept of hunting relates back to apprenticeship in the sense that such experiences are ways of connecting ourselves to other creatures possessing an existence. More than a simple search for prey, hunting corresponds to an attempt to understand the hunted animal and to renew and extend 8 the awareness we have of our intense proximity with other animals. Moreover, language is a capacity with two sides: it is capable of the worst as well as the best, as the Greeks quite precociously understood. Before being a capacity on which human beings pride themselves, it is also a handicap of which we must be highly suspicious, particularly when it enables us to adduce truncated reasoning that gives us the illusion that we have already departed from animality.

We Can Pet the Animal Rather Than Eat It (But We Can Also Pet It and Eat It)

A third objection posed by the vegetarian rests on the idea that in order to establish intimate connections with animals we must pet them rather than eat them. Expressed in this concise manner, the objection might appear a little ridiculous, but for all that it is entirely pertinent. It is indeed possible to develop very satisfying relationships with an animal without eating it. However, this situation, which occurs for example with companion animals, is not easily generalizable and encounters real limits. Moreover, the question under discussion is not “How do we live in peace with a favorite companion animal?” I am attempting to elaborate a philosophy of identity rather than one of neighborly relations. What interests me is less a matter of knowing how to share one’s life with a familiar animal than of knowing what it means for a human being to have to share his life with other animals. A quick reading will not make it possible to see the difference between the two; a deeper reading is needed to perceive a fundamental opposition. It is less a matter of being nice to animals than of making one’s fundamental animality explicit and accepting it completely. In this way, one can pet an animal and eat it at the same time.

Devising New Ways to Eat Meat

The vegetarian’s role is ultimately a positive one. After reading all of my criticisms of the vegetarian, the reader may be surprised by such a reversal and charge me with inconsistency, but this would be to misunderstand me. The vegetarian who refuses to eat any meat has gone astray. But she sends the carnivore an important message that the latter would do wrong not to heed. The truth is that eating meat is never a benign matter. This is what we are told by the Algonquin, whom I used as a guiding thread earlier in this chapter. The vegetarian concludes from this truth that we ought to give up the consumption of meat altogether. In coming to this conclusion, the vegetarian reduces the ingestion of meat to a simple dietary practice, even though it is more than that. Many vegetarians justify their refusal to eat meat by arguing that we must not kill animals or cause them to suffer. I have shown that the situation is considerably more complex than vegetarians suppose.

Some vegetarians say something else that is worth considering quite seriously. I call these people “political” vegetarians in contrast with the “ethical” vegetarians I have considered so far. 9 These political vegetarians suggest that the regular consumption of meat by a population that numbers in the billions is more than deadly; it is insane. This argument has to be taken seriously. Factory farming is a disgrace, and the carnivore can only agree with the political vegetarian’s assessment. And when the latter observes that the current population can eat meat only if it is produced by means of factory farming and that the only way to end factory farming is to cease the consumption of meat, this reasoning merits at least some consideration. In rich countries, the consumption of meat has become a habit that no longer involves any hint of commemoration or communion. Thus, the political vegetarian’s argument has nothing in common with the ethical vegetarian’s; what the former is concerned with is a horrible truth that even a carnivore has to acknowledge. At the same time, we must remain sensitive to the limits of the vegetarian’s position. One can perfectly well campaign for a drastic reduction in the consumption of meat without necessarily forbidding it, just as one can campaign for a reduction in the human birth rate. Moreover, vegetarians tend to overlook the specifically political dimension of food production.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has shown that famines have been primarily political and ultimately have little to do with a country’s available food supply. A final point is always left out of the discussion, even though it merits careful consideration: caring for millions of carnivorous companion animals (dogs and cats) has extensive harmful consequences,and yet numerous vegetarians live with these companions. To what extent do vegetarians bear responsibility for them? Of course, one can always try to make one’s dog a vegetarian, but, to employ a euphemism, doing so borders on animal abuse. Strictly speaking, a consistent vegetarian would not only refuse to have any companion animals but would campaign for their elimination — for example, by demanding the systematic sterilization of existing companion animals. Of course, this is an impossible task. But the choice does not become one of either having carnivorous companion animals or not having them. Substantially reducing the number of carnivorous companion animals is certainly a serious option; it would benefit fish, seed-eating birds, and omnivorous birds such as corvids and crows, all of which possess personalities at least as rich and complex as those of the carnivorous animals to which we give preferential treatment. But acknowledging this fact forces us to be open to discussion regarding the consumption of meat—not only by human beings but also by those carnivores who share life with us.

The dangers to the environment posed by meat eating are not imaginary, and they must be taken seriously; but is there, for all that, an aporia in the carnivore’s position? It is a bit hasty to assume that there is. Between the trivialized consumption of anonymous meat and a completely vegetarian diet, there is in fact a third way that neither vegetarians nor carnivores in contemporary Western countries have seriously explored: eating meat in a limited, ritual fashion. This means making each meal with meat into a ceremony or commemoration, consuming meat only on these occasions, and making sure that the only meat we consume in these situations comes from animals that were well treated.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote something in an article in La Repubblica on November 24, 1996, that I endorse wholeheartedly:

"Agronomists will attempt to increase the amount of protein in plants used f proteins in industrial quantities... [but] the appetite for meat will never disappear. Opportunities for the satisfaction of this appetite will become rare, costly, and filled with risk. (Japan has experienced something similar with the fugu or blowfish, which is said to have an exquisite taste but which is deadly if not prepared correctly.) Meat will have a place on the menu in exceptional circumstances. One will consume it with the same mixture of pious reverence and anxiety that, according to ancient mariners, was observed at the cannibalistic meals of some societies. In both cases, it is a matter of having communion with one’s ancestors as well as of being exposed to the risks and dangers posed by living beings that were or have become one’s enemies." 10

Thus, what is needed is to devise new ways to eat others and by the same token—it is the least we can do—to be eaten. For the real scandal is not eating animals but eating them too much and not wanting to be eaten by them. One ought to be able to offer up one’s body to be eaten by animals. This idea will appear shocking to some, but we give our bodies to science, so why not to animals? Not all societies are equally hesitant about such practices. The Sioux, for example, leave their cadavers out in the open, exposed to animals. In Western countries, the hard line on this matter was tempered by faulty technologies. One of the great advantages of traditional coffins was that they could be buried in the ground, and worms and bacteria could dine at their leisure on the cadavers inside them. Cremation can be considered the theft of a cadaver (even if we can reuse the ashes), and cryogenic freezing can be considered a completely unethical practice because the people who insist on it refuse to let their bodies return to the great exchange among the living.

In a very classical fashion, the debate between carnivores and vegetarians has become exclusively about ethics or diet. Is it possible to develop new approaches to the dispute between carnivores and vegetarians? I can offer a hint about what I have in mind here. So far no attention has been paid to a major difference between eating meat and eating only plants, even though it opens up some interesting perspectives: a diet of meat leaves things behind — bones in particular—whereas a diet of plants leaves nothing behind. To this extent one might consider the vegetarian to be the one who does not want to leave any traces of his meal. Until now, art has expressed little creative interest in this question, and the notion of what remains might be profitably exploited. But this may be more an artistic endeavor than a philosophical agenda.

Notes

1 . My interest in this notion of commemoration was inspired by Vinciane Despret over two bottles of wine, and I thank her for it. One can never overestimate the importance of the grape in the history of Western thought, and I think it is worth bearing this in mind in the current discussion of vegetarianism.
2 . Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions , ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93–107.
3 . As far as I know, in every case of criminal cannibalism to have made the news in the second half of the twentieth century, the cannibals have always been male, never female. I offer this important detail to feminists, who may see in it yet another symptom of the monstrosity of men.
4 . In the West, the Stoics went very far in this direction. The love of fate that they proclaimed is the clearest expression of this: love that to which you are obligated. But one might go even further and say: fi nd very positive aspects in that to which you are obligated, such that even if you have the choice, you would still choose that which is imposed upon you at this moment.
5 . Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
6 . Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
7 . Ernst Bloch, Traces , trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006).
8 . Some would have said “deepen” rather than “extend” our awareness. Metaphors of depth always seem to me eminently suspect, and I prefer topographic and geographic metaphors. Someday I will have to return to this point.
9 . Vegetarians, especially ethical ones, will naturally dispute this distinction. They may say, for example, that I am deploying a Machiavellian strategy designed to divide and conquer.
10 . Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La leçon de sagesse des vaches folles,” La Repubblica , November 24, 1996.

By Dominique Lestel in "Eat This Book - A Carnivore Manifesto" (Apologie du Carnivore), translated by Gary Steiner, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016, excerpts pp.57-80. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

Share this post