Critical Animal Studies

Katerina Kolozova is a Macedonian philosopher whose publications from last two decades aim to analyze various topics using François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” or “non-standard philosophy.” Non-philosophy could be roughly described as radicalized deconstruction:
Laruelle claims that not everything can be grasped by a philosophy: for Laruelle, “philosophy is too serious an affair to be left to the philosophers alone.”1  Non-philosophy opposes the “principle of sufficient philosophy” through which philosophy determines and decides
what is real. According to Laruelle, the ultimate limit of philosophical thought and its self-proclaimed sufficiency lies in its inherent tendency to close itself in a transcendental system of autofetishist conceptions, which presume that one can grasp the Real (“The Real is neither capable of being known or even ‘thought,’ but can be described in axioms. [...]
Even ‘immanence’ only serves to name the Real which tolerates nothing but axiomatic descriptions or formulations.”) by a philosophical thought, or that the Real could be mediated only through human thought. Laruelle criticizes this tendency of philosophy, which is usually expressing itself through the structure of “philosophical Decision.” (“To philosophize is to decide Reality and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to
be able to order them in the universal order of the Principle of Reason [Logos].”) Katerina Kolozova use Laruelle’s non-philosophy to explore more explicitly political topics. In the Cut Of Th e Real (2014),  she criticized certain dogmatism of poststructuralist philosophy and feminist theory, namely their symptomatic rejection of the Real and the
One. In Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism (2015) and The Lived Revolution (2016) Kolozova presented a rereading of Marx, whose work she found relevant for the critique of speculative philosophical dimension of the capitalist economy, embodied in the 2008 global finance crisis, and in the latter book, she explored the possibility of a new political solidarity, based on “bodies in pain.” Kolozova doesn’t call to philosophically reconstruct Marx’s thought for the current situation, but she goes back to Marx with the help of Laruelle’s non-Marxism, contrary to the usual approach of Marxist philosophers, who often
try to create certain philosophical system of Marx’s work. Together with Eileen A. Joy,  Kolozova edited the anthology After the “Speculative Turn” (2016),  which addressed recent realist and materialist tendencies in feminist philosophy. In her most recent book, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019),  Kolozova aimed to explore broader philosophical foundations of neoliberal capitalism, and its dealing with nonhuman animals and their suffering. According to Kolozova, “We have to start by coming to terms with what we did to the animals in the constitutive act of philosophy and via proxy to all those dehumanised that belong to the species of man ‘by courtesy’ only.”

İnsanın hayvan üzerindeki her türlü tahakkümü toplum fertlerinin gözünde meşru ve kabul edilebilir kılmak için bugüne kadar çeşitli gerekçeler sıralandı. Ancak kimse bir kalbin atmak için ne kadar çaba sarf ettiğinden bahsetmedi.

Belki evinizi bir kuş, kedi ya da köpekle paylaşıyorsunuz. Belki de her sabah işe gitmeden mahallenizde dolaşarak sokakta yaşayan hayvanlara mama bırakıyor; hasta olanları iyileştirmek için zamanınızı ve paranızı ayırıyorsunuz. Belki de, bir adım daha ileri giderek, her türlü hayvansal ürünü tüketmeyi reddediyor ve çevrenizi de bu yönde etkilemeye çalışıyorsunuz. Yine de bunlar hayvanlara yöneltilen şiddet ve örgütlü saldırganlığı engellemek için yeterli değil… Hayvan sömürüsü hayatımızın her alanında bizleri sarmış durumda. Ve hayvan deneyleri meselesi belki de bunların en başında geliyor. İyileşmek için aldığımız bir ilaç başka bir canlının ölmesine neden olabiliyor. Diğer insanlara daha güzel gözükmek için kullandığımız krem bir canın çektiği ıstırabın izlerini taşıyor. Bindiğimiz araçların yakıtı, ofisimizdeki kalemin mürekkebi, elimizden düşmeyen cep telefonumuz kısacası yaşamımız hayvanlara yapılan zulümle kuşatılmış durumda. Bu durumdan ancak konuyu derinlemesine irdeleyerek kurtulabiliriz.

Gerçekten dünyayı değiştirmeyi ve bütün türlerin sömürüsüz bir şekilde birlikte yaşamasını istiyorsak kendimizi kandırmaktan artık vazgeçmeliyiz. Bu şiddetin, adaletsizliğin, yaşam hakkı ihlalinin son bulması belki de yüzyıllar sürecek. Türcülük duvarı yıkılırken, bir tuğlasını da biz çekip kopartabilirsek, ne mutlu bize.

Bu kitap, hayvan deneylerine karşı mücadelenin prensiplerini olabildiğince anlaşılabilir bir dille ortaya koyuyor. Ayrıca hayvanlar üzerinde yapılan biyomedikal araştırmalara karşı sağlam zemine oturan etik ve bilimsel bir muhalefetin doğuşunu müjdeliyor.

The catalyst was a 2010 editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Harold Fromm, in which he accused vegans of “grandstanding” and ridiculous idealism. Fromm’s a big name in ecocritical circles, so I was a bit taken aback by the piece. I decided to explore the way that veganism is perceived, specifically in the US, specifically post-9/11, so I wrote The Vegan Studies Project as a way of examining how veganism is depicted in the media, in literature, and in popular culture, and the way that that depiction has evolved over time. The original title of the book was “The Vegan Body Project” – I had a blog of the same name – as I had initially planned to look at the way vegan bodies are depicted and scrutinized. There is a chapter in the book that engages with the way that women’s bodies are pathologized when women are vegan, especially when they have children. But the project became so much bigger, and I decided that I’d treat the book as a kind of primer for what a field of academic study based on various analyses of veganism might look like. And then things just kind of took off in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, including an invitation to be the keynote speaker at a conference on vegan theory at Oxford soon after the publication of the book

For centuries, animals have worked alongside humans in a wide variety of workplaces, yet they are rarely recognized as workers or accorded labour rights. Many animal rights advocates have argued that using animals for their labour is inherently oppressive, and that animal labour should therefore be abolished. Recently, however, some people have argued that work can be a source of meaning, self-development and social membership for animals, as it is for humans, and that our goal should be to create good work for animals, not to abolish work. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the benefits and drawbacks of animal labour as a site for interspecies justice. What kind of work is good work for animals? What kinds of labour rights are appropriate for animal workers? Can animals consent to work? Would recognizing animals as “workers” improve their legal and political status, or would it simply reinforce the perception that they are beasts of burden? Can a focus on labour help create bonds between the animal rights movement and other social justice movements? These and other questions are explored in depth. While the authors defend a range of views on these questions, their contributions make clear that the question of labour deserves a central place in any account of justice between humans and animals.

Despite the evidence concerning the substantial greenhouse gases emissions resulting from animal-based food production, climate policies and institutions around the world have barely made an issue of this link until very recently. To better understand this lack of attention, we focus on the discursive role of think tanks as prominent but under researched actors attempting to shape public policy. This contribution examines whether European think tanks have discussed animal-based diets regarding climate change policies and mitigation actions. We conduct a frame analysis study of 110 European think tanks, encoding all their available online output in English related to the link between global heating and animal-based food. We conclude that European think tanks have contributed to a manufacturing of ignorance regarding the impact our dietary choices have on the climate. Ideological reasons related to economic, anthropocentric and patriarchal worldviews explain this role. Free eprint: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7PAMIHESZIZRUM9NWBKV/full?target=10.1080%2F09644016.2021.1933842&