Preliminary Considerations...

Having offered oh-so-many times to guest write on my friends blog, the Wet Hot American Vegan, and having failed oh-so-many times, I decided that it was time to piece together my own vegan blog and jump into the blogosphere with everyone else. Each time I thought of something to contribute to WHAVegan, I had moved on to a bigger and better idea before it came together. Surely this is a sign that my own blog is in order, so here we go. In starting, I tip my hat to the patriarchs and demigods of webVegans. VeganDad, Vegan Yum Yum and PPK are some of the most noteworthy, but there are thousands out there that do this way better than I do. After all, I’m basically here to brag about my cooking.
I may confine this blog to food and veganism, I may not. My other kreecher comforts will probably find their place in here soon enough: Philosophy (Post-Kantian), Critical Theory, running, indie folk music and post-rock to name a few. So don’t be alarmed if you come across a book reveiw or a rant here. They are indeed not edible, but that’s just the way I slap the keyboard.
The title of this blog, and its subtitle, are a little humorous homage to recent posthumanist ‘scholars,’ Specifically, Jacques Derrida’s lecture ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (more to follow)” and Cary Wofle’s essay “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion.” Derrida’s work exemplifies, and Wolfe’s explains the gravity of the current animal rights movement; a gravity not acknowledged by their analytic counterparts. Modern analytic ethics (a-la Peter Singer and Tom Regan) are correct as far as they go in asserting the moral status of animals, citing the absence of any morally-relevant characteristics that distinguish us from animals. These perspectives do most of the pragmatic work in making the case for animal ethics, and they should be abundantly applauded for this. But these perspectives fail to recognize that profundity of ‘animal rights’ (an unhelpful and blunt term in both its parts). These Anglophone, analytic ethicists would paint for us a picture of a human ethical agent so progressed in its ethical theory that it touches the fringes of significance in finally ascribing moral status to non-human animals. But these ethicists are riding the waves of an ideological revolution, never once pausing to realize their motion, never noticing that their microscopic perspective masks a macroscopic Copernican Revolution. The analytic perspective on animal rights is but a symptom of a greater and more profound shift in Western ideology. In the shadow of Darwin’s evolution and Kant’s transcendental psychology we are beginning to fully realize that the human experience is not THE experience of the world, but only AN experience of it, and the comfy throne that humans hold at the center of relevance and orientation is exposed as an arbitrary center. The Human of the Enlightenment is beginning to unravel, and the naked animal out of which it was born stands exposed among many. Analytic ‘animal rights’ philosophers would have us believe they are touching the fringes of ethical consideration, pausing to take note of the faint similarity that non-human animals share with us. They fail to realize that the very topology that allows such a declaration, a declaration from the human from at the ‘center’ about the animal on the ‘fringes’ or 'margins' is unraveling at is very core, and that indeed they are the ones pulling the thread, ignorant to the consequence. I am reminded of Neitzsche's madman, who warns the villiagers that the Death of God forever disoriented them, throwing them into a cosmic tailspin in which relevance will forever slip through their fingers. A similar shift is charecteristised by these Singerian ethisists, though instead of the Death of God we might call it the Death of Man, or at least a fundamental reconsideration of the properties of Man--a Disrobing of Man, perhaps. From this, macroscopic perspective, ethicists have not discovered the faintly human in animals, but we have all discovered the animality within ourselves, and the relationship between humans and animals, indeed the very topology that holds all ethical declarations in perspective, is overthrown.
This is not to say that animal issues are the most important issues in applied ethics today. Animal rights activists have a striking tendency to block out all other justice issues, and this is a shame. It is a confusion that stems from an inability to realize that metaethical primacy and applied ethical urgency need not coalesce. Nevertheless, it seems evident to me that animality—both the human in the animal, and the animal in the human, is at the very core of any contemporary ethical theory, if it chooses to excavate deep enough into the topic at hand. We must speak out for humans and non-human animals, and we must realize that the ideological support structure of injustice toward either inevitably entangles the two. This is the perspective on animal ethics that Derrida exemplifies and Wolfe identifies, and I find it to be a far more fitting than Singer’s or Regan’s (or Linzey’s, or Nussbaum’s, or (barely) Rorty’s etc). For more on this, check out Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am, or Wolfe's Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory or Zoontologies. There are many other great titles on the subject, but these are the ones I feel most comfortable recommending.
For a thorough A-B-Cs of Veganism and Animal Rights, check out Colleen Patrick Goudreu's podcast Vegetarian Food For Thought. I can't reccomend it enough.
And if you need a five-minute wirlwind tour of the essentail reasons to go vegan, click here, but brace yourself.
ANYWAY! Onto the foodstuffs!