The Suffering Animal: Life Between Weakness and Power

In: The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

Abstract

1 Introduction -- 1.1 An Animal Suffers for Nothing This Side of Good and Evil -- 1.2 Moderns Knew It: The Radical Challenge of the Suffering Animal -- 1.3 Life Is Weak -- 1.4 The Suffering Animal Faces the Extreme -- 1.5 Biodicies for Free Spirits -- 1.6 Luck of Some, Misfortune of All -- 1.7 Preliminary Notes -- Works Cited -- 2 The Sensitive Cogito: Modern Materialism and Its Legacy -- 2.1 A Shaky Canon -- 2.2 The Animal-Machine, or Rather Descartes' Dangerous Idea -- 2.3 The Rise of the Suffering Animal -- 2.4 The "Innovative Restoration" of the Rational Animal -- Works Cited -- 3 Life Is Overrated: On Darwin's Ultimate Materialism -- 3.1 The Evolution of the Suffering Animal -- 3.2 The Coral of Life and the Chance of Equality -- 3.3 The Revolt of Sentient Beings and the Chance of Civilization -- 3.4 There Is Life, Therefore God Cannot Exist -- 3.5 The Suffering Animal Versus the Powerful Animal -- Works Cited -- 4 Humanity as a Matter of Civilization: The Primo Levi Case -- 4.1 Thinking Dehumanization by Experience -- 4.2 The Inegalitarian God and Meaningless Suffering -- 4.3 The Salvation of Civilization -- 4.4 "We Weren't a Pleasant Sight" -- 4.5 The Salvation of Science -- Works Cited -- 5 The Rise of the Powerful Animal: On Deleuze's Materialism of Power -- 5.1 The Eclipse of the Suffering Animal -- 5.2 Releasing Life: Hume and Bergson -- 5.3 Releasing the Living: Spinoza and Nietzsche -- 5.4 Becoming the Powerful Animal that We Are -- 5.5 The Powerful Animal Reveals Their True Face -- Works Cited -- 6 Conclusion: The Powerful Animal Encounters the Suffering Animal -- Works Cited.