The conference itself, centering on the question, what is "the animal" (what is "the animal"?), brought together scholars from different schools and fields. We got to hear a polemic paper calling for "vegan cinema" to replace the obviously "species-ist" cinema that we take for granted. There were obviously major issues here that the scholar overlooked, including, but not limited to, his assertion that animal actors are like slaves, and that all animals should be disallowed from appearing in films. Does a form of vegan cinema thereby seek to cease representing animals at all?
The best papers that I heard worked instead to theorize not a revolution in animal rights, but to change our conception of animals themselves. Animal rights seems to presuppose that we humans understand what rights are best for animals. But an animal can never give its assent or voice its opinion in the litigious language of rights and judgements. In claiming that we "understand" another being, according to Emmanuel Levinas, we extricate ourselves from our ethical responsibility to him. The rhetoric of animal rights follows the same internal logic as the argument for hunting and killing animals: that ultimately, humans know what's best.
Walking away from the conference, M and I were still not sure, in the end, what it was that this conference meant by "the animal." By creating a discursive category and calling it "the animal", academics cordon off animals from an idea of animal, and as the conference made clear, there are as many ways to conceptualize an animal as there are animals in the wide wild world.
