If it is our aim to come to a more effective way of confronting the issue of the treatment of non-human animals and, more specifically, the rearing and use of animals in scientific research, then a range of approaches from the European or ‘Continental’ tradition of philosophy (such as deconstruction or biopolitical analysis, for example) would seem to have the potential to overcome alternative and directly humanist approaches to the question of the significance of animal life. The terms and designations according to which the lives of animals tend to be judged are inescapably humanist or anthropocentric (questions of rights, subjectivity and agency), while moral philosophy, in its dealings with moral agents and moral patients, is already defined in terms of certain human characteristics (rationality, symbolic use of language, etc.) to which non-human animals inevitably fail to conform. Therefore, we must conclude, other animals are simply not worthy of moral consideration.

One key move, which Jacques Derrida will come to embody, is to resist the tendency to frame discussions in terms of ‘the animal’ (participating in a symbolic sacrifice that is supposedly constitutive of human identity), and instead to consider the fates of animals, or the actual bodies being subjected to the forces of regularisation, optimisation (via genetic engineering, etc.), and commodification in laboratory or intensively farmed conditions. An immediate difficulty is to constitute, convincingly, a form of resistance that matches up to or challenges the legislative ‘readiness to hand’ of the more traditional moral theories that carve up reality in terms of identifiable groups of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, or those to whom a law can apply and those to whom it cannot.

In this chapter, I will look at three ways of thinking the relations between animals and pathology that reflect some of the concerns of the field of critical animal studies, and some key responses in Continental philosophy that suggest moments of rupture or resistance within those debates, offering the potential for alternative conceptualisations of animal life. First of all, the use of animals for research into disease tends to be debated, principally within traditional moral philosophy, in terms of the possible justifications for violence against non-human animals.