Identity, difference, indistinction

Abstract

The past few decades have given rise to a wide variety of approaches to theoretical  and practical discourse concerning animals. In this paper, I focus on three important but rather distinct approaches that have emerged in this period, all of which would have us fundamentally  reconsider the ontological, ethical, and political issues surrounding animal life and the human/ animal distinction. I seek to take critical account of two of these chief discourses (which I approach under the rubrics of identity and diff erence) while also aiming to give some additional form and content to an emerging third approach (which I label indistinction). My aim in what follows is neither to eliminate the first two approaches in favor of the third, nor is it to establish a dialectic in which the first two approaches are subsumed in a third, higher  form. Rather, I examine all three of these modes of thought and practice with an eye toward their  transformative potential for struggles for justice involving animal life and human-animal relations, underscoring their  respective promises and limits while at the same time suggesting the need for increased attention to those discourses and practices examined under the rubric of indistinction.