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Alex Bucik
Dr. David L. Clark
Cultural Studies and Critical Theory
Major Research Project Proposal
January 24, 2015
The Holocaust and Mass Animal Suffering: A Genealogy of a Comparison
In 1949, Martin Heidegger delivered a series of lectures on technology at the University of
Bremen during which he made the following statement: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food
industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination
camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen
bombs” (Heidegger 27). The Bremen lectures stand as Heidegger's only explicit reference to the
Holocaust (de Fontenay 236) and they gain added force insofar as they were “Heidegger's first
speaking engagement after the Second World War” (Mitchell vii). Yet perhaps most importantly,
Heidegger's comparison between industrialized farming practices and the systematic extermination of
Jews and other “undesirables” under Nazi ideology marks the beginning of a fraught debate concerning
analogies between mass animal suffering and the Holocaust, one which continues to ignite ethical
tensions and charged discussion.
My major research project will trace the history of this analogy – from Heidegger's comment in
1949 to contemporary examples in both theory and fiction – in order to examine what effects its
proliferation has had on our current theoretical discourse on animal suffering. In other words, my
project will construct a genealogy of this comparison between what I wish to call the distinct
deathworlds of mass animal suffering and the Holocaust. In attending to the specific contexts in which
the analogy appears, I will argue that the deathworlds comparison has continually shaped, and
continues to direct, the epistemic conditions underlying the moral significance of animal suffering.
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How has the deathworlds analogy affected our thinking regarding animals as beings capable of
suffering? What conversations concerning animal welfare are deemed viable and valid in light of this
comparison? Does considering mass animal suffering in relation to the Holocaust impose limitations
on our discourse about animal life? Answering these questions will require a sustained analysis of
several texts which make use of the deathworlds analogy. In gathering these examples, I will attend to
the ways in which the analogy's function as a statement concerning the moral status of animal suffering
mutates in relation to its immediate textual and historical context. My investigation therefore reflects
Foucault's genealogical method, whereby historical inquiry does not search for an ideal origin, but
instead examines “the concrete body of a development, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its
extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells” (Foucault 80). Coupled with detailed close
readings of select texts where the analogy appears, such a method will reveal how various thinkers
have mobilised the deathworlds comparison in order to provoke specific ethical considerations. The
analogy therefore carries with it a nebulous power to emphasize certain critical concerns regarding both
human and nonhuman suffering, depending on its context of deployment.
In this way, my project differs from other works which similarly aim to understand the effect of
the deathworlds analogy, such as Roberta Kalechofsky's Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The
Problem With Comparisons. Though Kalechofsky acknowledges the suffering animals undergo in
their cultivation as food, she objects to any comparisons between this process and the Holocaust since,
she argues, such analogizing would erase the constitutive differences between the two injustices.
Conversely, Anat Pick in Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film
bluntly declares that “[t]o simply reject as iniquitous the analogy between Jews and animals is also to
refuse to engage fully with the Holocaust itself” (Pick 24). My examination of the deathworlds
analogy presumes its generative power in shaping contemporary discourse around animal suffering and
as such appears more closely tied to Pick's assertion; however, my goal is not to claim wholesale either
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a defence or an indictment of the comparison. Rather, my project will scrupulously interrogate
positions like Kalechofsky's and Pick's equally in order to demonstrate how the deathworlds analogy
cannot be read in a singular and exclusive manner. In other words, I do not intend to argue for either a
supposed necessity or depravity inherent in the comparison; rather, my work will show how such
oppositionally extreme readings of the deathworlds analogy are even possible.
In keeping with this aim, the first section of my project will outline the genealogical method I
am employing and how such a method can offer new insight into the nature of the deathworlds analogy
as a trope with continually shifting intentions. This section will include a detailed explanation of my
methodology, as well as a brief overview of contemporary opinions and positions regarding the validity
and value of the comparison. As mentioned above, Kalechofsky and Pick's respective works will be of
central concern in order to adequately understand how the analogy functions in our current context.
Moreover, I will briefly examine the current discourse on animal suffering which, as Steven Laycock
argues, wavers between the two opposing poles of “authentic expressions of an inaccessible
subjectivity or [our] own projection” of pain onto nonhuman animals (Laycock 275). A genealogical
understanding of the deathworlds analogy, I argue, illuminates the reasons behind this ambivalence
concerning the possibility of animal suffering.
The second section of my project will trace the comparison between the Holocaust and mass
animal suffering across a number of philosophical texts. Beginning with Heidegger's initial comment
in the 1949 Bremen lectures, I will investigate how the purpose behind his comparison between the
“essences” of industrialized farming and systematic genocide becomes ambiguous when read in the
context of Heidegger's greater argument about technology. Is this comparison a sincere conflation by
Heidegger, or is it an attempt to ventriloquize the flattening effect of technology's positioning of
entities within a standing reserve? This ambiguity remains unresolved in Emmanuel Levinas's
response to Heidegger's remark, where the former claims that “[t]his stylistic phrase, this analogy, this
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progression, are beyond commentary” (“As If Consenting to Horror” 487). Levinas's refusal to utter
the analogy in his own words marks a significant judgement on the comparison's viability as a
philosophical statement. And yet Levinas complicates his protest against entertaining the deathworlds
analogy when he flirts with notions of human and nonhuman animal compassion and ethical response
in the autobiographical text “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” Furthermore, Jacques Derrida
expands Levinas's hesitant acceptance of the animal as an other worthy of ethical consideration in The
Animal That Therefore I Am. Critiquing Western philosophy's binary distinction between humans and
what is called “the animal” in general, which he argues facilitates the latter's subjection, Derrida decries
the ongoing violence against animals “which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide”
(The Animal 26). In the same breath, Derrida notes that “there are also animal genocides,” and in doing
so he simultaneously acknowledges the history of the deathworlds analogy while also affording
nonhuman life their own genocidal event, similar to but separate from the Holocaust (The Animal 26).
In this way, the dilemma of Heidegger's ambiguous comparison becomes refigured in Derrida's text,
where the latter recognizes the deathworlds analogy as instrumental but inaccurate. The result, I argue,
is an understanding of animal suffering which requires human suffering as a model – if only
figuratively – in order to gain moral significance.
The third section of my project will proceed from this conception of the analogy as
metaphorical, turning to its use in fiction. Specifically, I will examine two short works of fiction which
make explicit use of the deathworlds analogy: “The Letter Writer” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and The
Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee. In Singer's short story, Holocaust survivor Herman Gombiner lives
alone, accompanied only by a mouse he names Huldah and whom he feeds daily. After falling ill and
being unable to feed her, Herman fears Huldah has died and laments that “for the animals it is an
eternal Treblinka” (Singer 270). Similarly, in Coetzee's novella, English professor Elisabeth Costello
remarks in her address on animal rights that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation,
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cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of” (Coetzee et al. 21). In
both instances I will investigate what happens when this comparison is located within fiction, and
whether the distancing effect achieved by placing the analogy in the mouth of a character significantly
alters the statement's impact on our grasp of animal suffering. I believe that the sheath of fiction may
allow us to approach the analogy without directly calling us to attend to its validity or moral
controversy. Instead, fictitious pronouncements of the deathworlds analogy emphasize more
contextual and affective considerations, such as who is speaking and the events surrounding the
utterance. Contemporary discourses on animal suffering, which stress the role of nonhuman animals as
singular subjects with exclusive experiences of pain, reflect these issues regarding the importance of a
speaker's particularity.
My project will thus illustrate how our current thinking about animal suffering owes much of its
shape to the complex history of analogies between the Holocaust and mass animal suffering. A
genealogical investigation of key instances of the comparison will afford my project a unique
perspective on this contentious issue, without falling into restrictive positions for or against its
employment as a philosophical statement. It would be my privilege to continue this research under the
guidance of my supervisor Dr. David Clark, whose own work regarding both animals and the
Holocaust will no doubt prove essential.
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Preliminary Bibliography
Atterton, Peter. “Ethical Cynicism.” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Eds. Peter Atterton and
Matthew Calarco. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. 51-61.
Benjamin, Andrew. Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Calarco, Matthew. “Heidegger's Zoontology.” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Eds. Peter
Atterton and Matthew Calarco. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. 1830.
---. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia UP,
2008.
Clark, David L. “On Being 'the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals After
Levinas.” Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject. Eds. Barbara Gabriel and Suzan Ilcan.
Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2004. 41-74.
Coetzee, J. M., et al. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.
de Fontenay, Elisabeth. “'In Its Essence the Same Thing'.” Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust. Eds.
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1996.
236-245.
Derrida, Jacques. “'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject.” Points . . . : Interviews, 19741994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. Stanford: Stanford UP,
1995. 255-287.
---. Of Spirit: Heidegger and The Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
---. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York:
Fordham UP, 2008.
---. "To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible.”" Questioning God. Trans. Elizabeth
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Rottenberg. Eds. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and John Scalon. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2001. 21-51.
Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. “Violence Against Animals.” For What Tomorrow . . . : A
Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 62-76.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New
York: Random House, 1984. 76-100.
Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Isaac Bashevis Singer. Columbia: University of Southern
Carolina Press, 1988.
Fromm, Harold. “Coetzee's Postmodern Animals.” The Hudson Review 53.2 (2000): 336-344.
Goldstein, David. “Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating.” Gastronomica: The Journal of
Food and Culture 10.3 (2010): 34-44.
Heidegger, Martin. “Positionality.” Bremen and Frieburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and
Basic Principles of Thinking. Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. 2343.
Kalechofsky, Roberta. Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem With Comparisons. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Krell, David. Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Laycock, Steven W. “The Animal as Animal: A Plea for Open Conceptuality.” Animal Others: On
Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Ed. H. Peter Steeves. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. 271-284.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “As If Consenting to Horror.” Trans. Paula Wissing. Critical Inquiry 15 (1989):
485-488.
---. “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Eds. Peter
Atterton and Matthew Calarco. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. 4750.
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McNeill, William. “Life Beyond the Organism: Animal Being in Heidegger's Freiburg Lectures, 192930.” Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Ed. H. Peter Steeves. Albany:
SUNY Press, 1999. 197-248.
Mitchell, Andrew J. Translator's Foreword. Bremen and Frieburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which
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and Basic Principles of Thinking. By Martin Heidegger. Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. vii-xvi.
Patterson, Charles. “Animals in the Life and Writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer.” Yiddish 14.2-3 (2006):
1-34.
Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York:
Columbia UP, 2011.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. “The Letter Writer.” The Séance and Other Stories. New York: Farrar,
Strauss
& Giroux, 1968. 239-276.
Tremaine, Louis. “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J.M. Coetzee.” Contemporary
Literature 44.4 (2003): 587-612.
Wolfe, Carey. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Wood, David. “Comment ne pas manger – Deconstruction and Humanism.” Animal Others: On
Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Ed. H. Peter Steeves. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. 15-35.
---. “Thinking With Cats.” Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. Eds. Peter Atterton and
Matthew Calarco. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. 129-144.