Manifeste pour une écologie de la différence

How can we put an end to the relationship of domination and violence that we maintain with nature in general and with animals in particular? Can we hope to achieve this by learning to reconcile ourselves with the life that is supposed to link humans and animals in an essential way, and to enter into resonance with a nature that has stopped speaking to us? The aim of this manifesto is to show the limits and weaknesses of the principle of such a solution by pleading for an ecology of difference. The animal, conceived as a sensitive and vulnerable being, deserving as such of pity and compassion, is a philosophical abstraction which, under the guise of elevating the status of animals and guaranteeing them a form of moral and legal protection, begins by doing them violence by not respecting their fundamental otherness and the richness of their way of life. The planet – even and perhaps more than ever in the age of the Anthropocene – also demands to be understood in its strangeness as a creative, potentially uncontrollable and fundamentally unpredictable nature.