Kemmerer closes the book with an appendix entitled “Factory Farming andFemales.” For activists and scholars already informed about animals’ treatment atthe hands of industrialized agriculture and the particular toll that the institutiontakes on female animals, the appendix likely will not add much. For readersunfamiliar with these issues, the appendix will be both disturbing and illuminat-ing. Kemmerer’s overview of factory farms and female, farmed animals is briefbut accurate insofar as the animal issues are concerned. The section on “freerange, cruelty-free, and organic” animal products is particularly important duringa time when consumers of animal products are becoming more and more con-vinced that they can buy their way out of the moral problems created by usinganimals for food. However, as with the Lance essay, I cannot help but wonder ifan opportunity to end on a note of intersectionality was missed. The appendixwould better highlight the important work of the volume if, in addition todetailing the horrific treatment of female animals in factory farms, it delved intothe issues of social justice for women relative to factory farms. How many work-ers in chicken operations are women? How did they come to those jobs? Howare they treated? These questions remain unexplored despite the ways in whichfactory farming brings together multiple forms of injustice for animals andhumans.

Despite the occasional missed opportunity to highlight interlocking oppres-sions, Sister Species is an important book for both activists and scholars. Throughthe empowering use of women’s voices it exemplifies how the personal is politi-cal and reminds us that looking about us for our contribution to injustice else-where is a crucial part of fighting for liberation anywhere. Sister Species is not apassive volume to be read, thought about, and then forgotten. It is a call toaction.

REFERENCE

Gaard, Greta. 2001. Tools for a cross-cultural feminist ethics: Exploring ethical contentsand contexts in the Makah whale hunt. Hypatia 16 (1): 1–26.

Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. By KELLY OLIVER.New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Chloe Taylor

Kelly Oliver’s Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human is an importantcontribution to the burgeoning field of critical animal studies within continentalphilosophy. With an introduction, conclusion, and twelve chapters that take onten continental philosophers—Rousseau, Herder, Derrida, Beauvoir, Lacan,

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Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Agamben, Freud, and Kristeva—as well as shorter dis-cussions of continental thinkers such as Levinas, Oliver’s book is virtually a sur-vey of the philosophy of animals in the continental tradition, as well as asustained and provocative critical engagement with this field. The major influ-ence throughout the work is Jacques Derrida; however, Animal Lessons is also awork of feminist philosophy, drawing consistently on feminist insights in order tochallenge prevalent assumptions about the human–nonhuman relation in Wes-tern thought. As such, it is crucial reading for continental philosophers, criticalanimal theorists, and feminist scholars. Unable to do justice to all of the sectionsof this book in the space allotted to me, I will focus in what follows on thechapters that are likely to be of most interest to feminist philosophers.

Oliver’s introduction, “Biting the Hand That Feeds You,” argues that philoso-phies of alterity and difference have been disappointing when it comes to think-ing about other animals; whereas antihumanist and anti-Cartesian philosophiesremain humanistic with respect to other animals, maintaining a Cartesian under-standing of animals even while rejecting a Cartesian view of the human subject,philosophers of alterity and difference have rejected the animal as too other tofall within the ethical sphere and have failed to see the differences between ani-mals. Providing an overview of the manners in which continental philosophershave relied on and learned from other animals in their accounts of the human,even while they have effaced and assimilated those animals in their philosophies,Oliver argues that philosophers—like Western culture generally—have oftenengaged in a cruel pedagogy that kills and dissects its teachers.

Part 1 of Oliver’s book, “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights?” consists of a sin-gle chapter, “The Right to Remain Silent.” This chapter draws out theconnections between women and nonhuman animals both in terms of theiroppression and in terms of the analogization of their causes in the Animal Libera-tion Movement. Drawing largely on feminist insights in order to challenge therights view that, along with welfarist approaches, has dominated Anglo-Americanthinking about human–nonhuman animal relations, Oliver raises a series of objec-tions to the rights approach to animal ethics. Even while arguing that rights aresomething that other animals (like humans) cannot not want, Oliver follows phi-losophers such as Val Plumwood in suggesting that the rights approach relies onand further entrenches a speciesist and hierarchical human/animal dichotomy andfails to consider nonhuman animals on their own terms. Oliver turns at the end ofher chapter to continental approaches to the ethics of vulnerability and responsi-bility as an alternative for thinking about interspecies relations, even while criti-cizing continental thinkers of vulnerability and alterity for failing to consider theprecariousness of the lives of other animals and our responsibility toward them.

Part 2, “Animal Pedagogy,” includes chapters on Rousseau and Herder. Chap-ter 2, “You Are What You Eat: Rousseau’s Cat,” discusses the lessons that Rous-seau learned from nonhuman animals, as well as the ways his texts were taken

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up by de Man and Derrida. Although Rousseau suggests that we learn to behuman in response to other animals, and that the kind of humans we are isrelated to whether and how we hunt and eat animals, animals are forgotten—infavor of “the animal”—in early deconstructionist readings of Rousseau. Chapter3, “Say the Human Responded,” contrasts Rousseau with Herder on the questionof humanity’s relation to other animals; a discussion of Heidegger’s response toHerder concludes the chapter.

Part 3 consists of two chapters on Derrida. Chapter 4, “Derrida’s and Rous-seau’s Good Taste,” returns to the Rousseau–Derrida dialogue, and once more tothe questions of eating, this time putting Rousseau’s instructions for a vegetariandiet in Emile in conversation with Derrida’s late interview, “Eating Well.” Chap-ter 5, “Sexual Difference, Animal Difference,” takes up Derrida’s similar proble-matization of the binary thinking behind sexual difference feminism (whichreduces sex difference to two) and his problematization of the human/animaldifference (in which “the animal” is conceived as a mere negation of man). Theethics and politics of difference that both feminism and animal ethics require,suggests Oliver, is one that goes beyond such binary thinking to show the vastdiversity of sex, sexuality, and animality. Noting the way that “animals [make][Derrida] wonder about sex” and “sexual difference... incites his bestiary as well”(149), Oliver’s intriguing argument is that thinking about the diversity of ani-mals—and the sexual diversity of animals in particular—helps us see the diver-sity, and particularly the sexual diversity, of humans; as Oliver puts it,“challenging the man/animal binary from the side of the animal can helpexplode the man/woman binary” (140).

Part 4 includes chapter 6, on Simone de Beauvoir, and chapter 7, on JacquesLacan. The chapter on Beauvoir, “The Beaver’s Struggle with Species Being,”explores the tensions in Beauvoir’s discussions of the human/animal and femalehuman/female animal binaries. As Oliver notes, Beauvoir simultaneously aims to“redeem the reputation” of female animals of all species—suggesting that femalesof all species are “the second sex”—and to “wrest woman from the side of theanimal in the man/animal divide” (159), arguing that women are humans andhumans are not an animal species. In the final sections of the chapter Oliverargues that Beauvoir’s distinction between human and animal, which makesmen’s hunting of nonhuman animals an activity expressive of human transcen-dence (even though such hunting is also undertaken by nonhuman animals),should have likewise led her to re-evaluate the production/reproduction distinc-tion and to argue that reproduction can be a meaningful project when under-taken by women. Unfortunately, however, Beauvoir accepts not only speciesistbut also masculinist values that valorize the destruction of nature even whiledenigrating reproduction as animal repetition.

Part 5, “Estranged Kinship,” consists of chapters on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,and Agamben, and part 6, “Psychoanalysis and the Science of Kinship,” concludes

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the book with chapters on Freud and Kristeva. In these final chapters, “Freud’sZoophilia” and “Kristeva’s Strays,” Oliver discusses animal phobias and motherphobias, totem animals, the relationships between the animal and the abject andbetween animal difference and sexual difference, and poses the question of “whythe taboo against eating the abject maternal body does not also apply to eatingthe abject animal body” (292). Drawing insight from Kristeva, Oliver argues thatwe deny our kinship with animals precisely by eating them, and thus “we are notwhat we eat, and eating animals proves that we are not like them” (296). Thesechapters provide fascinating explorations of the proliferation of animals in Freud’stexts and their relative absence from Kristeva’s writings; indeed, as Oliver notes,for Kristeva, animal bodies are always stand-ins for the maternal body, as alimen-tary restrictions become about incest taboos, and the life’s blood of animals sym-bolizes the mother’s menstrual flow. In such a way, Oliver argues, our realindebtedness to nonhuman animals—including dead animals—is disavowed(297), and neither Freud nor Kristeva ever thematized this disavowal of the ani-mals we kill and eat. Returning to themes that she has tracked through three cen-turies of Western thought, Oliver concludes her book by arguing that for Kristeva,as for many thinkers before her, “human life and human meaning … are bought atthe expense of animal life and animal meaning” (300), and “human kinship isbought at the expense of animal kinship” (302).

Oliver’s book begins and ends as a work of mourning for her cat Kaos: thebook is dedicated to Kaos and opens with a poem to her; the conclusion to thebook justifies this dedication. Although, Oliver tells us, she has been warnedagainst dedicating her books to nonhuman animals if she wishes to be taken seri-ously as a scholar—a warning that suggests that nonhuman animals are a trivial,if not ridiculous, concern—Oliver reiterates the arguments that she has demon-strated over the course of her book: the very concept of the human is caught upwith that of the animal, and speciesism is the ideological underpinning of thevarious ways that we oppress—dehumanize—other humans. This being the case,it makes little sense to rank human ethical concerns over ethical concern forother animals, and what we need is an ethics—what Oliver calls a “sustainableethics” and an “ethics without limits”—that accounts for our interdependencewith our animal kin.

Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy. By KATHY RUDY.Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Frances Bartkowski

Kathy Rudy’s book is perfectly named. Its title does much of the work shedemands of readers. The verbal and adjectival phrase “loving animals” describes

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