Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory

This collection explores what the social and philosophical aspects of veganism offer to critical theory. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars working in animal studies and critical animal studies, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture shows how the experience of being vegan, and the conditions of thought fostered by veganism, pose new questions for work across multiple disciplines. Offering accounts of veganism which move beyond contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish dietary preference or set of proscriptions, it explores the messiness and necessary contradictions involved in thinking about or practicing a vegan way of life. By thinking through as well as about veganism, the project establishes the value of a vegan mode of reading, writing, looking, and thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: May 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319733807

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© The Author(s) 2018

Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood (eds.)Thinking Veganism in Literature and CulturePalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_1

Introduction: Thinking Through Veganism

Emelia Quinn¹   and Benjamin Westwood²  

(1)

Wolfson College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

(2)

Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Emelia Quinn (Corresponding author)

Benjamin Westwood

Definitions

Vegan (n.): A person who abstains from all food of animal origin and avoids the use of animal products in other forms or (adj.) Of or relating to vegans or veganism; based on the principles of vegans.¹

Beginning with a definition risks sounding like the most clichéd and unadventurous of wedding speeches: how does the Oxford English Dictionary define the love we are here to celebrate? Or, in this case, the veganism we are here to consecrate academically? Consecration might seem to stretch the accepted topos of vegan discourse, but, as Allison Covey’s essay in this collection shows, faith, belief, and ethical conviction converge compellingly, if messily, in the idea of veganism as a creed. This is just one way of framing it. Over the course of the essays in this collection, a multiplicity of ways of defining veganism emerge; and this implicit acknowledgment of the difficulty of pinning down just what veganism, or a vegan, is, opens up productive new avenues of inquiry.

We want to risk the banality of beginning with a definition, and position this collection of essays as one not only about veganism, but about individual vegans; a project, then, concerned with the social and conceptual coherency of veganism, as well as with questions of self-definition and self-representation. Do we define veganism as an ethical principle, a set of practices, an identity, a form of life?² To think through veganism, as we title this introduction, would therefore mean to cast a critical eye on the concept as such, and to conceive vegan practices as subject positions from which to think.

We do not call to mind a wedding scene arbitrarily, but as a conscious invocation of the assumed heterosexual couple , and the carnivorous wedding breakfast, or isinglass -laced champagne, over which this speech might begin. To be vegan, as multiple essays collected here suggest, is to be continually involved in processes of self-definition, and interpellation. The wedding provides both an analogy of these difficulties, and an example of them. In terms of the former, heterosexual weddings have an uncomfortable potential to incorporate and smooth over dissenting voices or presences, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out. Particularly those individuals who may not want to be part of a sanctioning presence for an institution that defines itself by their exclusion. Sedgwick highlights, in an essay on performative and periperformative utterances, the importance of a third-person witnessing they as a regular, if implicit, part of felicitous performatives; how they depend on the tacit demarcation of the space of a third-person plural, a they of witness—whether or not literally present.³ This is, of course, liable to cause problems for literal or figurative witnesses who do not wish to be interpellated into a scene as a confirming presence, and therefore tacitly to condone and participate in it.

This resistance to interpellation might be provoked by the wedding ceremony, the dinner table, or, indeed, the merging of the two in the wedding breakfast; although suggesting this analogy need not mean conflating the complex, pernicious, and centuries-old oppression of non-normative sexual orientations, with the equally but differently complex and ancient institutions that exploit nonhuman animals.⁴ The iconicity of both, particularly as loci for the nuclear family, create situations where the symbolic importance of assent (or dissent) takes on a special urgency for those to whom the scene commits or represents a conceptual, literary, or lived violence.

One of the central concerns of the essays in this volume is the experience of being and thinking as a vegan, in a world that has normalized, and industrialized, the exploitation of nonhuman life. In such a world, being vegan is analogous to the passive sanction of the queer at a heterosexual wedding. We might think of veganism as an inherently queer mode of being in, and relating to, the world, rather than as a discursively fixed identity category. Specifically, there are four important points of similarity or connection to work in queer theory to which we would draw attention. First, veganism challenges many of the same objects of critique found in queer theory, especially normative gendered and sexual identities.⁵ Second, as Robert McKay’s essay in this collection explores in more depth, veganism expands the scope of queer ideas of alternative affiliation to include relations with nonhuman animals. Third, vegan structurally resembles the use of queer as an umbrella term for a diversity of subject positions, which nonetheless rejects the stultifying logic of identity politics. Finally, in its interest in maligned ideas of utopianism and failure, recent queer theory has engaged directly with issues that, as this volume shows, undergo a productive rethinking through veganism.⁶

Quite aside from the anxiety often generated by a difficult vegan guest, the wedding analogy raises further questions about what being vegan means, and what it entails socially. For example, what is gained or lost by seeing veganism as, more or less, performative or essential? How might we witness critically as vegans, rather than passively sanction?⁷ Sedgwick’s work offers a model for understanding the dynamics of exclusion and compulsory witness that structure the social politics of vegan identity. The perspective of a vegan witness highlights a further exclusion, in the dead nonhuman animals that have been naturalized within these scenes, whether worn or eaten.

Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture attempts to respond to the difficulties and ambiguities raised at this imagined altar of vegan definition, consecration, and witness. Our emphasis on the difficulty of definition challenges received understandings of veganism that have begun to cluster around the term in the contemporary period. Derogatory associations of veganism with ascetic restriction, middle-class lifestyle fads, or Western ethical imperialism, for example, have steadily ossified within dominant cultural narratives.

These simplified versions of veganism seem, in large part, to have precluded interest in it as a productive heuristic lens. A scene in Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals provocatively distils this attitude. In it, the protagonist John seeks to defend his mother’s vegetarianism against the disapprobation of his wife Norma: I don’t see any difference, […] between her revulsion from eating meat and my own revulsion from eating snails or locusts. I have no insight into my motives and I couldn’t care less. I just find it disgusting .⁸ The vegetarianism of his mother Elizabeth Costello is a particularly interesting case, insistent as she is about her own inconsistencies . However, worth noting here is John’s assertion that intellectual inquiry has no place in understanding her vegetarianism. I just find it disgusting is an apt articulation of the reluctance of scholarly enquiry to engage with veganism that this collection seeks to counter. The quotation from Coetzee’s novel reinforces the often-derogatory alignment of vegetarianism and veganism with irrationality or disgust , categories frequently positioned beyond the scope of critical reflection, as much as the common tendency to limit the definition of ethical vegetarianism to little more than a culturally determined food choice.⁹ We contest the idea that intellectual inquiry is at best irrelevant to, and at worst a woeful misunderstanding of, veganism and vegetarianism. And we believe that such reactions have a place in critical thinking. While for John, motive becomes irrelevant in the face of a result that appears ultimately inconsequential, Norma remains incredulous, critical of what she sees as Elizabeth’s transformation of a private fad into a public taboo. The mention of disgust necessarily makes such a definitive binary between the private and public slippery, and theorizing as vegans comes with a concomitant need to address these complications and contradictions.

In referring to Coetzee’s famous vegetarian protagonist here, we are at risk of conflating vegetarianism and veganism, allowing them to become interchangeable terms that refer only to a difference of degree in dietary practice. In looking towards a vegan, rather than vegetarian, theory, we distinguish vegetarianism as being fundamentally attached to, and secure with proscriptions. Vegetarianism, by definition, is an abstinence from meat -eating. While its adherents may often object to other kinds of animal exploitation, perhaps leather and fur , the occupation of a vegetarian identity relies on a clearly defined limit in relation to animal flesh and ingestion. Veganism, as we define it here, is attended instead by contradictions and inconsistencies , and requires an acknowledgment of the need for responses that aren’t geared towards a desire for cohesive practices. Put another way: if, as Matthew Calarco suggests, the distinction between vegetarianism and veganism comes down to a contestation of where one draws the line between ‘symbolic’ and ‘real’ sacrifice ,¹⁰ in Derridean terms, then the vegan condition would be one in which this line is provisional, and continually subject to scrutiny.

To refer, once again, to the work of Sedgwick , just as she insists that sexuality need not be reduced to what we do with our genitals, we must resist reducing veganism to what we put in our mouths. Veganism is messier and further reaching than that; an entanglement of identity, practice, and ethics that refuses to sanction the carnivorous human subject.

This brings into play the question of definitions, as we suggest above. As veganism further permeates public discourse, its reduction to proscriptive dietary practices or pragmatic goals threatens its useful ambiguity. It is a condition of its ability to influence critical inquiry that veganism, and vegan theory, remain multifarious in their definition and flexible in their scope. While naming veganism allows us to specify a particular nexus of identity, practice, and ethics, this nominative act brings tensions to the fore, in that its ossification as a fixed definition marks, to us, the loss of a particular ethical power. "Insofar as vegetarianism holds itself up as the moral code of eating, Calarco suggests, it risks stalling the question of eating well and collapsing into a self-assured form of good conscience."¹¹ To maintain its ability to provoke response, debate, and decision-making that exceeds the narrow bounds imposed by its co-option into a disciplinary taxonomy, veganism cannot be reified as the moral code (of eating), or a moral code concerned solely with eating. We are both what might be called ethical vegans, as are all the contributors to this collection, and it seems important to state that we live our lives, as far as possible, in accordance with an ethical framework based on veganism. In order, though, to avoid collapsing into good conscience and vegan polemic, we need to engage in forms of critical reflection that suspend confident moralizing. The essays in this volume, therefore, use veganism both as a means of critique, and as something to be examined in its own right.

This project defines itself in relation to existing, current, and future work in vegan theory in three key ways. It is a collection of essays that first and foremost prove that veganism is something more than it is assumed to be, offering theorizations beyond contemporary conceptualizations as a faddish dietary preference or set of proscriptions. Secondly, it explores the messiness and necessary contradictions involved in thinking about or practicing a vegan way of life. Thirdly, it traces the ripples of the current vegan moment across different disciplines in the humanities, asking how it changes scholarly practices. This is central to the project’s broader aim of establishing veganism as a mode of thinking and writing with significance beyond those fields with which it is most easily associated. It asks to be read, therefore, as a critical exercise in discussing, debating, and discovering what vegan ways of being in the world might do to our practices of reading.

Historical and Theoretical Contexts

The past decade has seen numerous reports of the devastating impact of animal agriculture and mass meat consumption on the environment, compounded by an unprecedented rise in global human population, predicted to reach 9.7 billion by 2050,¹² and the anticipation of a concomitant explosion in demand for animal products. Veganism, as a response to such crises has increased rapidly over the past few decades. Emerging alongside growing knowledge on animal cognition, intelligence, and rights discourses, veganism has moved from obscurity, since its coinage in 1944, to the mainstream realm of social, political, and economic discourse. For example, a 2010 UN report advocated a global move to meat and dairy -free diets; statistics released by food retailer Ocado showed that UK vegan food sales had risen 1500% from 2015 to 2016; and a recent survey suggested that veganism has risen 350% within the last 10 years in the UK alone, with over half-a-million practicing and self-identified vegans, and a million additional vegetarians.¹³ Numerous studies proclaim veganism to be a viable diet, possible and practicable from birth and perhaps even healthier than conventional meat and dairy -based diets.¹⁴ The urgent relevance of veganism to current ethical and environmental debates thus signals the need to address it as a serious topic of study in its own right.

What we are calling vegan theory has been influenced by various strands of scholarship, incorporating elements from animal studies , ecocriticism , posthumanism , postcolonialism , and queer theory, among others, that have emerged over the past few decades in the humanities.

As we come to terms with the notion of the contemporary period as the Anthropocene , naming a geological age in which human activity has a significant effect on the climate and environment, ecocriticism has come to occupy an increasingly prominent role in humanities scholarship. Loosely defined as the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,¹⁵ ecocritical scholarship seeks to use the imaginative capacities of literature to rethink our relationship to the natural world. The emergence of postcolonialecocriticism and ecofeminism has emphasized its scope as an intersectional mode of criticism that explores the connections between multiple modes of oppression.¹⁶ From the significance of ecofeminism for rethinking ethics itself, recovering the value of emotional responses and interdependence over the dominant ethical model of universal rationality, to Deep Ecology’s emphasis on the need for a personal transformation and holistic understanding of our place within a wider ecosystem, ecocritical scholarship appears directly applicable to the task of conceptualizing veganism.¹⁷ Certainly, veganism’s resistance to the oppression, violence, and domination that characterizes the current global networks of exploitation against nonhuman animals can be seen as a symptom of an anthropocentric human attitude to the environment more broadly. And, in its lived reality in the contemporary world, veganism is motivated for many, first and foremost, by environmental concerns.

However, veganism may be criticized for reinforcing and promoting an alternative model of anthropocentrism in prioritizing ethical actions that are unassimilable and unreciprocated by the nonhuman world, paradoxically reinforcing humanity’s moral exceptionalism. The work of ecocriticism thus implicitly suggests the need to broaden radically the scope of vegan engagements and commitments. Certainly, the ease with which veganism has become associated with a belief in ethical purity and freedom from complicity in exploitative environmental practices suggests a need to open itself to ecocritical theory. As Robert C. Jones writes, forms of veganism that focus solely on identity or economic boycott are to be criticized for their over-investment in self-image, ignoring the vast environmental impact or exploitation of human lives involved even with products labelled vegan.¹⁸

Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 publication The Great Derangement suggests how and why climate change has been left unexplored in the serious novel, arguing that the limitations of existing literary forms preclude it from adequately addressing the urgency and complexity of living in an age of global climate crisis. However, few scholars seem willing to accept veganism as an increasingly prominent and productive mode of creative response to such a crisis. As many of the essays in this collection show, however, veganism can be usefully, if perhaps unexpectedly, thought through in fiction by canonical writers as diverse as Mary Shelley’s iconic Frankenstein , Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby , the Scrivener, and J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace .

Ecofeminism acts as a direct predecessor to a distinctly vegan mode of inquiry, incorporating many of the same concerns and refusing to allow veganism to settle into a single-issue campaign. The broad scope of this work involves ethics and the environment as much as issues of gender, race , and discourse. However, while vegan theory may be seen to work within the frameworks of ecocriticism , it also distinguishes itself by continually prioritizing a return to the nonhuman animals at the centre of veganism’s refusals and disturbances of cultural norms. While the current environmental crisis encourages the adoption, legitimation of, and imagination of possible vegan futures, veganism remains grounded by ethical, practical, economic, and affective commitments to the protection and care of nonhuman animals. Whether adopted on health-based, environmental, economic, cultural, religious, or ethical grounds, the end of the exploitative use of nonhuman animals for human benefit remains central to the definition of vegan praxis, and constitutes the kernel of utopian desire that undergirds it.

Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, published with the University of Georgia Press in 2015, was the first major academic monograph in the humanities focused on veganism. However, veganism’s entry into the academy has not emerged in a vacuum. In the five years preceding Wright’s text, veganism was explored in several academic contexts and forms. As an approach, for example, to critical race studies in A. Breeze Harper’s 2010 Sistah Vegan, and as foundational activist praxis within the emerging discipline of Critical Animal Studies (CAS).

Carol J. Adams’s 1990 The Sexual Politics of Meat, discussed in detail later, was described by the New York Times in 2012, nearly twenty years after its initial publication, as a bible of the vegan community.¹⁹ While it arguably wasn’t until this belated recognition that much else in the name of distinctly vegan studies began to emerge, within this gap work continued to appear under the rubric of vegetarian studies. For example, Nick Fiddes’s 1991 Meat: A Natural Symbol continued much of the work of Adams’s text to interrogate the ways in which meat comes to mean and define itself as a natural symbol of human exceptionalism and dominion over nature. Numerous histories of vegetarianism also appeared. For example, Colin Spencer’s 1993 The Heretic’s Feast, Tristram Stuart’s 2006 The Bloodless Revolution, and Rod Preece’s 2008 Sins of the Flesh. Tracing vegetarian diets and philosophies as far back as prehistoric times, these studies have played an important role in disassociating vegetarianism from connotations of contemporary dietary fads. These books tend to end with a brief concluding remark—or chapter at most—regarding veganism as a late-twentieth-century culmination of vegetarianism. This collection does not seek to establish that veganism, as a dietary choice, did exist in the historical past (though there certainly is wide evidence of the adoption of a specifically vegan diet that stretches back centuries). It does, however , broaden our understanding of veganism by showing different ways in which it functions across historical timelines.

As the number of self-identified vegans continues to grow, there has been a proliferation of studies of veganism within the social sciences and under the general rubric of Critical Animal Studies. Steve Best et al.’s Introducing Critical Animal Studies was full of vitriol for the hypocrisy of mainstream animal studies scholarship that allows its scholars to remain embedded in carnivorist lifestyles, situating personal veganism as a distinctive attribute of CAS scholars.²⁰ Nik Taylor and Richard Twine’s edited collection The Rise of Critical Animal Studies featured a section on veganism and activism, again emphasizing CAS’s steadfast commitment to the significance of veganism for such scholarship. CAS was defined as concerned with the nexus of activism, academia and animal suffering and maltreatment.²¹ It is seen as distinct from the more conventional sphere of animal studies in its commitment to "engaged theory, where [i]n the CAS context, theory must be relevant to understanding and changing the material conditions of animals, and to historicising the still normative concepts that have been largely successful in shielding human-animal relations from critical scrutiny."²² This commitment to opening a dialogue between academic scholarship on human–animal relations and animal activism thus seems the natural home for vegan scholarship, as an attempt to explore the complexities involved in translating personal practice and lived experience into the more heady realm of theory.

However, the emphasis of CAS on concrete pragmatism, encouraging work that focuses directly on activism, and its commitment to the removal of all forms of animal abuse, risks implicating it within a restrictive positivism.²³ For example, Taylor and Twine situate veganism as a central part of the work of CAS while characterizing it as a means to an end. Within their broader interest in systemic modes of oppression, veganism is only an ethico-political beginning to addressing the interconnected oppression of people and animals that needs to be moored to a broader political vision.²⁴ Further, in its desire to distance itself from the better-known discipline of animal studies, as demonstrated by Best et al., CAS scholars have often conflated hypocrisy and abstraction with that which they directly stand against. For example, Helena Pedersen and Vasile Stanescu suggest that CAS, in emphasizing its critical status as working towards actual liberation, not only stands in opposition to more conventional animal studies scholarship but highlights the latter’s inherent tensions, contradictions and conflicts.²⁵ The problem here is the implicit assumption that CAS, when properly done, resists such contradictions and tensions. The essays in this collection, by contrast, seek to understand what an acknowledgment of tension, inconsistency , and contradiction might do to our understanding of vegan identity. Resisting the imposition of prescriptive goals characteristic of CAS , we build on the nonetheless important contributions of work in this area, asking what it means to occupy veganism as a transitional space and interrogating its relation to failure and optimism. Veganism is no doubt connected to the pragmatism and utopian longing for an end to the exploitation of the nonhuman, but, as the essays in this collection prove, it also has further resonances worth tracing.

For example, Laura Wright’s Vegan Studies Project suggests that veganism might best be understood as an orientation, a delicate mixture of something both primal and social, a category […] that constitutes for some people, just perhaps, something somewhat beyond one’s choosing.²⁶ Similarly, Robert McKay’s essay in this collection argues that veganism might be seen better as akin to a form of life rather than a goal-orientated activist practice. In an age in which the adoption of veganism as identity and practice is markedly growing, and in which it is positioned as an important mechanism for political and social change, this collection gives space to explore what these modes of being and behaving do—to our identities and to our scholarly work—when expanded beyond a pragmatic focus on animal liberation. The essays in this collection thus might broadly be characterized as taking a moment of difficulty in our current understandings of veganism, and using it not to find a resolution but to look to what happens when we engage and embrace that which is paradoxical or uncomfortable in our ethical lives.

The publication of Wright’s Vegan Studies Project was closely followed, in early 2016, by the edited collection Critical Perspectives on Veganism. Wright’s foundational monograph introduces potential avenues vegan study might take by tracing the appearance and transformation of veganism in literature, film, TV, and popular US culture since 9/11; whereas Critical Perspectives considers veganism in a broader global context. In the latter are several essays that explore veganism as a way of complicating the version of CAS we have just described. For example, Joshua Schuster’s essay on the vegan and the sovereign makes clear that The vegan does not think that power and violence will go away in a fully vegan world—but that is no reason to relent on a desire for utopian ways of living together. He sees veganism not as a subjectivity secured by a fixed discourse but a complex bind that means drawing lines by being committed to animal well-being, but also troubling the drawing of lines by querying the need for stable identities, definitive categories of selfhood, and sovereign assertions that rebuff all critique.²⁷ However, while there are moments of clear potential for a richer theorization of veganism, Critical Perspectives, taken as a whole, tends toward a focus on practical movements and developments in the contemporary world, for example, featuring articles exploring food blogs, cookery books, and celebrity chefs. In Thinking Veganism, we seek to build on this important work, and continue to expand the focus of vegan theory beyond studies of vegan praxis within a cultural studies frame.

The historical and theoretical context detailed here makes clear the reasons why this collection has emerged when it has. However, veganism’s urgency and activist component is not the primary focus of this study. We see value in taking a step back to dwell on what veganism might do, and what it might mean. In situating veganism as a corrective between Agamben’s critique of law and Levinas’s ethics of love, Anat Pick’s 2012 article Turning to Animals Between Love and Law, anticipates these aims, suggesting how veganism might be used to think beyond explicitly activist agendas; an example of thinking through veganism.²⁸ The finality of the CAS vision, of the achievement of the removal of all forms of animal abuse, benefits here from a supplementary examination of the messier and more complicated challenges faced by veganism.

Utopianism and Insufficiency

The emergence of animal studies within the humanities over the past few decades has seen increasing attention paid to the significance of attending closely to the neglected presence of nonhuman figures across disciplinary boundaries. These developments have opened radically new ways of understanding otherness and agency. A comprehensive history of the discipline is beyond the scope of this introduction, but it is worth considering some of the major themes and ideas that have emerged in the work of Jacques Derrida and Carol J. Adams.²⁹

Since the delivery of Derrida’s 1997 lectures L’animal que donc je suis, published as The Animal That Therefore I Am in an English translation in 2008,³⁰ much subsequent work in animal studies has acknowledged and responded to this probing essay. His thinking influences a number of collections in this volume, and there are, we believe, some key lines of thought that should be pulled out and highlighted for the purposes of this volume.

First, The Animal develops Derrida’s idea of carnophallogocentrism , the ideal of self-present, masculine, carnivorous virility that he sees as underwriting Western society’s vision of subjectivity. The idea is first posited in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject. In arguing that the creation and maintenance of the phallogocentric subject also implies carnivorous virility, we can see how the centrality of animal sacrifice (both symbolic and real) to Derrida’s analysis understandably appeals to those interested in thinking through veganism.³¹ Though, as we indicate later, Adams’s Sexual Politics of Meat lays out in more detail the ways in which this logic of sacrifice operates.

Secondly, vegan theory contributes in nuanced ways to Derrida’s critique of the philosophical investment in the distinction between response and reaction. In The Animal, Derrida draws out the ways in which a long history of post-Cartesian philosophy, running through Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas , has invested this binary with the power to mark off the human from the animal. What the programmed machine, like the animal, supposedly cannot do, Derrida glosses, is not to emit signs but, says [Descartes], to ‘respond.’ We need, Derrida argues, to interrogate more critically "the question of the response."³² However, the mutual exclusivity implied by a Cartesian logic, which would distinguish a rational, self-conscious response from a merely instinctive reaction as such, doesn’t hold up in practice or in theory; either as a locus of human exceptionalism, or as a differentiation in itself. Veganism can be recognized as one of these points where the distinction between response and reaction doesn’t hold—as a shifting, and perhaps unfixable, mix of affect and rationality, a confusion between reasoned, willed response and emotional, instinctive reaction. And, indeed, part of the work of several essays in this collection is both to draw out tensions involved in this tangle of ethical motives and impulse, and to continue, even to enact, Derrida’s critique of this hegemonic Cartesian discourse.

Finally, this collection shows how veganism, as both practice and identity, acknowledges what Derrida identifies as the passivity of suffering. Turning to Jeremy Bentham’s assertion of the capacity to suffer as the fundamental criterion for ethical consideration, Derrida finds at the heart of this question a state of nonpower, and of vulnerability, which he takes as the foundational shared experience between humans and other animals. ‘Can they suffer?’, he suggests,

amounts to asking "Can they not be able?" And what of this inability [impouvoir]? What of the vulnerability felt on the basis of this inability? What is this nonpower at the heart of power? […] Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Morality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion , to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower³³

Although the essays here by Tom Tyler, Natalie Joelle, and Allison Covey broadly consider the kinds of agency available to vegans, other essays in the volume are drawn to scenes of passivity and non-power: interregnums, acts of witness, childhood , and non-devouring gazes. Or, as in Benjamin Westwood’s exploration of refusal, the spaces in between.

Adams’s seminal feminist-vegetarian critical theory in Sexual Politics of Meat stands as a foundational text for the nascent field of vegan studies and theory. Adams seeks to expose the patriarchal story of meat, which promotes an unthinking carnivorism in the service of reinforcing the dominance of male identity. As Calarco explains in the foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Sexual Politics of Meat and Derrida’s Eating Well, emerging almost simultaneously, both work to "call explicit attention to the carnivorism that lies at the heart of classical notions of subjectivity."³⁴ Tracing the vegetarianism latent in canonical women’s literature, Adams firmly establishes the link between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals , suggesting a need to unite feminist and vegetarian politics in order to achieve liberation. While she focuses on the politics of meat -eating and the relation between dismembered bodies and dismembered texts, veganism is at the heart of her theory. Establishing Sexual Politics of Meat as truly a feminist-vegan critical theory, the absence of the term veganism from the bulk of the text is explained as a logistical matter, due to veganism’s relative lexical incomprehensibility at the time of writing, as