Beyond Supremacy: Thinking Animals Without Animality

The philosophies most commonly used to speak in defence of animals retain at the level of their structure a tendency to rejustify the oppression of animals, while also enriching themselves on the back of animal suffering and death. Because of this the philosophical side of Critical Animal Studies remains a quietist project that cannot fully bring to term its resistance to the mass slaughter of animals, or fully actualise its understanding of the stakes and disappearing possibilities. I use Laruellean non-philosophy to propose form of thinking that starts prior to conceptual exploitation, and is capable of contextualising its formal motivations. I also turn to the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler as part of providing a new working milieu for a non-human presupposed inserted into places of reified thought. I begin by working through the thinking of Üexkull, Haraway, and Heidegger, as examples of the conceptual exploitation of animals, and to show the necessity of non-philosophy. In Part I, I demonstrate how Laruelle’s main terms – the One, the world, the universe – are applicable for thinking animal lived experience in a way that isn’t just thinking about animals. These terms allow us all to think from a presupposed ‘animal-without-animality’ with human and animal simply being two outcomes of the insertion of the presupposed into the world: we can then see how reified images of animals traverse even naturalist formations like the body, and can be immediately repurposed by them. In Part II, I work from Laruelle’s concept of the anti-heretic crime. I explore how a concept of the One Real allows us to demystify our understanding of what constitutes violence in the face of accusations of violence against animal liberation activists, and provides us with a vision of radical solidarity. I also examine how thought with the presupposed allows us to avoid a kind of revisionism of ethical response structures that turns them into structures of use of the other, and that links up with historical revisionism. Ultimately I show how revisionism as suppression of non-human knowing takes the form of extinction, and I give an updated assessment of the motives of the anti-heretic crime. Finally, in Part III, I describe a theoretical utopianism that is accessible to non-humans as a form of radical consent. Envisioning this consent and its capacity for orienting thought is necessary for real resistance to the abductions animals and their children are subjected to in the places of the world, and for resistance to the genealogical destruction of their families and the communities of knowledge that non-humans pass through.