A return to cruelty, but where?

The only claim with any merit I can see in Elisbeth Roudinesco's "dialogue" with Derrida on animals is the distaste for a world expunged of cruelty. I'm not sure how important this really is to her--it comes up late in the interview, seemingly by accident, and is preceded by what I take to be "serious" questions about food supply and the treatment of nonparadigmatic humans--but this lateness by the sign of importance. Who knows.

ER: "I am always worried that we moving toward the construction of a sanitized society, without passions, without conflicts, without insults or verbal violence, without any risk of death, without cruelty." (For What Tomorrow, 75)

The claim is that cruelty must be somewhere in the world, that it is something valuable to humans, and that reducing it by fiat in some places relocates it (psychically, probably geographically, and with some concern about an ontological relocation). Unlike the claim for "the necessity for industrial organization in raising and slaughtering animals, which makes it possible to prevent so many humans from starving," (71) or "the necessity for humans to eat meat" (68), the displacement by prohibition theory has at least some empirical validity. The questions I would put to this configuration of theory and instance is 1) whether vegetarianism constitutes the kind of institutional prohibition which can be cited on behalf of this theory 2) whether industrial farming is not itself the greater purveyor of an absent cruelty in our world and 3) whether the kind of need that attaches to the idea of "cruelty" must, or even can, be met by factory farming/ingestion/harm to animals. It seems to me that the construction of an animal necessary for these processes to go forward under the law first strips the animal of the capacity to be in a relation of cruelty. Hence this economy has multiplied so radically. It's like trying to sate hungry by drinking Kool Aid.

So: a first step toward a crueler world is seeing animals as more like persons at least to the extent that, as Derrida consistently argues, their suffering matters. There would then be a super abundance of cruelty, more than enough for Roudinescu, more than Sade himself could imagine. Roudinescu diagnoses her problem precisely: "But I prefer not to see it, even though I know that this intolerable thing exists" (71). How will we ever enjoy cruelty if our first task is not to see it? I see cruelty everywhere, it is under my fingernails. This is probably what helps to make vegetarianism so satisfying for me: it allows me (in a psychoanalytic sense of internal policing) to see more cruelty and to enjoy it without the bad conscience of the subject of law.

Oh, Google Books offers For What Tomorrow if you want to see for yourself. My characterization of Roudinesco's absurdities has actually been pretty generous compared to what she says.