Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body Book

As much as I like other other review, I have to call for a change of emphasis on one point. The reviewer, "M.," writes: He believes that, as bodily beings, we have the capacity to relate the phenomenological characteristics of embodiment intersubjectively and across species, thereby furnishing a rich locus for compassionate reflection. It's not that "we have the capacity"; rather, it's that this capacity of being with each other as bodily beings as bodied in a habitat, this "symphysis" as he calls it (see 78, where he contrasts the sharing of symphysis with the 'mere' projection of empathy), is fundamental, and therefore that the various Cartesians and other solipsists are the ones who must be compelled to argue their case. Thus, he writes, "...our moral starting position is already one of corporeal compassion with other species and so the burden of proof would not be upon anyone to justify transpecific 'traction' of moral symphysis but rather on the anthropocentrist who wishes to deny, dissolve, or otherwise dis-tract us from our proto-ethical predisposition toward somatic/animalic ties of conviviality" (94, original emphasis).

Although I agree *entirely* with the pragmatic, phenomenological ethics based on shared bodiment (note the lack of an em-, which is Acampora's quite deliberate style), I'd like to give this a 4.5 on the basis of gaps in its bibliography. I wouldn't be such a creep about this had Acampora not been at this subject since the early 90s. He develops many ideas out of 'Continental Philosophy,' but still doesn't really use Derrida, and what he does use is limited to (some of) the animal material ('Force of Law' was badly needed in some places, I think). I noticed his habitual 'strolling through thinkers' method (perhaps because I've done it myself) in which the question always becomes 'is their approach on animals good' rather than 'what can I do with this.' Generally speaking: too bad. This works well with Heidegger (who's well-known for his gross betrayals on the question of...animals (and others)), but perhaps not so well with Husserl (whose betrayal of animals is not so fundamental, I think, so far as I know). Merleau-Ponty of course is put to work, but Levinas appears only indirectly: there's no strong consideration on whether we can rescue Levinas's 'face' for transspecies contexts, pace Levinas's refusal to do so himself. And Deleuze and Guattari? Cixous? Elizabeth Grosz?? Just barely, if at all. And the use of Foucault is rather by-the-numbers. (however, I love his characterization of Agamben's The Open as "hyper-theory run amok" (174 n49)...but, for all that, he could have shown SOME awareness of Agamben's distinctions between bios and zoe in Homo Sacer, which is surely useful to animal studies). There are other gaps: there's none of the work on human meat-eating by Julia Twigg or Nick Fiddes, and Simon Glendinning's On Being with Others is strangely absent. And the section on Nietzsche's praise of animal 'wildness,' where Acampora describes Nietzsche's discovery of an authentic wild animality in the sadly docile bodied-despite-itself human, seems to reinstate the animal-human boundary simply by this discovery itself! It would have been better for Acampora to just let the Nietzsche stay in its original article.

I also wonder about the 'animist' bias. First sentence: "My aim in this study is to produce a proto-ethical essay on moral experience involving other animate beings" (xiii). I want a more thoroughgoing suspicion of life itself, since I think speaking in terms of "animate beings," despite Acampora's phenomenology, perpetuates the notion that "life," something separate, "dwells in" a body. That is, to speak of "anima" means to speak, however accidentally, of lived embodiment rather than a rigorously anti-Cartesian bodiment.

Nonetheless, despite these gaps, this book is essential for animal ethicists, animal rights activists (who need to lose Singer and Regan's mentalist biases), and for fans of phenomenology, especially people interested in the conjunction of ethics and phenomenology. It's clearly written, and short, and, again, I agree with it throughout, so there's no good excuse not to give it an afternoon.