III. Denegation and Negotiation
There is another reason why
veganism is better characterized as an embodied sensibility rather than a conclusion
to the ethical project, and it is that vegans and vegetarians cannot avoid
doing violence (or being complicit with preexisting patterns of violence) to
animals, as well as to life and its ecosystems more generally. As Jacques
Derrida helpfully reminds us in an interview, “Vegetarians, too, partake of
animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation.” This
statement speaks volumes to the pretensions of “ethical veganism/vegetarianism,”
and it can be elaborated in several ways. For consideration of time and space,
I will draw out two (interrelated) implications of the statement, one concrete
and the other abstract.
The concrete implication. The current mode of production and our
economic system are based on exploitation of labor—human and animal labor—as
well as the subjugation of nature and life to the cravings of the market. On
this fact it is pointless to disagree. And this super-structural violence
necessarily reproduces itself in the production of all food, not just in the
more obvious case of the meat produced in factory farms. Though it is not
comfortable to consider, the land and labor required for the cultivation of
domesticated crops at the center of vegan and vegetarian diets is an ecological
disturbance, one that causes the deaths of countless forms of life—not only of
the crops themselves, but of insects, other invertebrates, and smaller mammals.
Furthermore, farms rely on the physical labor (and therefore on the suffering
and exploitation) of many human and animal workers. Thus, vegetarians and
vegans, too, partake of animals and of humans. It is sheer ideology to think
that a simple change in diet can change this fact, can make one guiltless
before an Other’s face.
The abstract implication. At the same time that he acknowledges
these more concrete patterns of institutionalized violence against humans,
animals, and ecosystems, Derrida references a dimension of Emmanuel Levinas’s
ethical thought. For Derrida, following Levinas, our confrontation or
interaction with the Other always entails some measure of violence, antagonism,
power. This is not to suggest that it is acceptable for things remain the way
they are or that we attempt to revert to some imagined pastoral past—indeed, as
Derrida and Levinas would insist, we must change,
for we can minimize this violence. But, in the final analysis, it will not do
to think that we can rid ourselves completely of this violence simply by
evoking an alternative economic paradigm. Even if we were to replace the
current economic system with a more just one, even if our current mode of
production were to be replaced, our encounters with our Other animals would
retain the ineradicable trace of this violence.
If Derrida is right—and I believe
that, in this case, he is essentially correct—it simply will not do for honest
vegans and vegetarians to deny the existence of a violence with which they are always
already complicit, a violence that their continued existence, in fact, calls
for, necessitates. Therefore, veganism or vegetarianism would be more rightly
understood as an embodied sensibility. If we wish to emphasize the ethical
dimension of our choice, it will require a new ethical vocabulary, one that
does not evoke some telos or notion
of moral truth but instead positions veganism and vegetarianism as an embodied
response to what we have decided is an impermissible violence enacted against
human and nonhuman animals alike as well as to the various ecosystems to which
they belong and in which they participate.
And here, again, Spinoza’s work
on ethics, especially when read alongside that of Derrida and Levinas, is
particularly useful. Veganism is not the termination of a predictable program
or calculation that we mindlessly perform but is rather an intellectually
enriching movement practiced concurrently with other radical pursuits. It is, at bottom, a
way of relating to the world, a way of relating that attempts to minimize the
damage I cause, even as I allow myself to be transformed by this encounter with an Other animal.
