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is the encounter between the Same/self and the Other, and that all interactions are
ethical or have an ethical dimension.
At the outset it has to be acknowledged that there is a considerable degree of
difficulty in developing a full-blown Levinasian account of human—animal ethical
relations. When asked directly about human—non-human ethical relations (in
Wright et al. 1988:169-172), Levinas replied at one point that 'it is clear…the
ethical extends to all living things.' Yet he also made it plain that was he keen to
distinguish the human, and also the human 'break…with pure being', as central to
his project, stating that '[t]he aim of being is being itself. However, with the
appearance of the human—and this is my entire philosophy—there is something
more important than my life, and that is the life of the other' (in Wright et al. 1988:
172). Thus, for Levinas the notions both of 'the face'—a tricky concept which
seems to revolve around the presence of the other, and yet hints at a sort of
ungainable 'wormhole' into the ultimate alterity of Otherness—and of the
'encounter' seem irrevocably set in the human realm.
Taking a pragmatist approach to these concepts (see Emel 1991), however, it
seems that they can still be usefully deployed in considerations of human—animal
relations. The importance of adopting an ethics of encounter is that in conventional
ethical approaches—such as the 'descriptive', which 'characterise[s] existing moral
schemes', or the 'normative', which constructs a 'suitable moral basis for informing
human conduct' (Proctor 1998:9)—the scope of what falls into ethical focus is formed
in a complex dialectic between what is and what some assert should be of moral
significance. The problem here is who (or what) is left outside of this scope, and
plenty are. Those outside are rendered faceless and voiceless, and this has generally
been the fate of animals in normative ethics. Only if someone from within argues
for the inclusion of some previously ignored outsiders do they achieve even the
possibility of an uncertain foothold in the process. As Lynn (1998a: 286) puts it,
'animals cannot organise and challenge the practice for themselves, they require
human interlocutors to speak and act in their interests.' Levinas's approach to
ethics, on the other hand, initially at least, does not deal in these forms of normative
or even descriptive ethics. For Levinas, the encounter is ethical in a way prior to any
conceptualisation or rationalisation of ethics. 'The term ethics always signifies the
fact of the encounter, of the relation of myself with the Other' (Levinas, in Critchley
1992:17). Thus, as Davis (1996:48) points out, for Levinas, '[t]he ethical is the
broader domain, where ethical experiences and relationships occur before the
foundation of ethics in the sense of philosophically established principles, rules or
codes.'
So the initial proposition here is that all encounters are ethical, or have an ethical
resonance. This may vary in magnitude and may be deemed ethical or otherwise in
more conventional terms, but, if 'everything in the universe is encounters, happy or
unhappy encounters' (Deleuze, in Thrift 1996:29), or if the world is ultimately just
a 'scene of transactions' (Dewey, in Goodman 1995:2), then this view of ethics may
be a device with which to build away from the chronically partial and
anthropocentric established constructions of ethics (and, it should be added, of
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