When we look into the eyes of an animal, we do not just see but are seen. We become acutely aware that we do not gaze at the animal as some object, “animal,” but that the animal gazes back; it sees us, and we are seen by it. As Jacques Derrida argues in The Animal That Therefore I Am, the human being captured by the gaze of an animal catches sight of “the abyssal limit of the human.”¹ Here, regarding and regarded, the human is undefined, amorphous; here, two creatures are seen by each other, and each stands at the dissolving border between them. Through the eyes of an animal, we come to see that the world is just as much theirs as it is ours. The gaze of the animal creates a rupture, however small, in what I will call the anthropocentric illusion—the belief that the human being lies at the center of all creation, that the human is nature’s cosmic protagonist. Despite the ruptures created by the animal gaze, the mass production and slaughter of sentient beings confirms the preservation and strength of that illusion today. I argue that slaughterhouse walls—which prevent the gaze of the animal from escaping and peering into human eyes—serve to keep pathos at bay and thus to perpetuate the anthropocentric illusion. But while the walling-off of slaughter allows the common meat eater to evade the gaze of the suffering animal, slaughterhouse workers cannot avoid these eyes. Considering the testimony of these workers, I argue that while the encounters with the gaze of the suffering animal constitute evident breaks in the anthropocentric illusion, the illusion is never fully overcome. Because human thought has come to condemn animality, relegating the animal to the “unthought,” to the status of commodity—to meat product, the illusion is never broken. It is not until we give up the entire war between rationality and animality, logos and pathos, that we can overcome our alienation from nature and no longer entitle ourselves to use and abuse the “beasts” below us.

In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud argues that religious ideas are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.”² These wishes, he suggests, can be traced back to our infantile helplessness, our need for protection, love, and—as I will explicitly argue—cosmic centrality, a confirmation that one’s own sentience is no accident and that the universe takes a special interest in human life. These wishes are the remnants of the child’s wish for a father, who evokes in the child the ambivalent mixture of fear, reverence, and trust. Woven into the child’s relationship with the father is the desire “at least to be his only beloved child,”³ to occupy a central place in the attention and life of the parent. These persistent infantile wishes endure and are projected outward and upward into a God who fulfills them. By extension, the whole of humanity derives from their wishes a God who claims the human being as his own special creation. Fulfilling the need for human centrality, this religion grants us a world in which God’s chosen species of primate is raised above nature and all other beings.

This anthropocentric illusion is maintained and perpetuated by the legislative Judeo-Christian God, the father of humanity, who says: “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion […] over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”⁴ This mass illusion—for Freud, the “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity”—will only be dissolved upon the human being’s return to nature.⁵ Without the anesthetizing illusion that cradles them at the center of the cosmos, humans must live with nature, a return to homo natura. Without their God, they “will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence.” A humanity that embraces its identity as part of nature no longer has divine license to subjugate the rest of the universe.

The anthropocentric illusion is one in which man is not only raised above other animals but in which all other animals become “the animal,” and the human animal becomes simply “human.” In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida explores the construction of “the animal” by introducing the word animot both to capture the plurality of beings conflated by “the animal” (“l’animal,” pl. “animaux,” of which “animot” is a homophone in French) and to expose the ways in which a word (mot, in French) is simply a word and yet has become central to distinguishing humans from animals. Humanity, then, is defined by its distinction and separation from l’animot. 

Derrida traces violence against animals and animality to a “Judeo-Christiano-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a sacrificial war that is as old as Genesis,” a battle that finds its place in Kantian morality.⁶ The “I think,” which belongs to the rational animal, condemns all others to the “unthought,” to the unconscious. However, it is not just other creatures that populate the “unthought,” but also the animality within us—the “animal that I am.”⁷ Kant is so intent on banishing animality from morality that, for him, moral worth must be independent of our animalistic inclinations; morality must depend on reason alone. Goodness is drained of sentiment and tethered to reason. It is God who is the divine intellect, perfect rationality—in other words, the non-animal. God is the antithesis of l’animot. He is the outward and illusory projection of all that seemingly separates us from the animal. He is the human animal filtered through a process of de-animalization, emerging as a nebulous and superior intelligence that ordains all things. Animal sacrifice, both the slaughter of animals and the eradication of animality within us, thereby becomes a command of reason, of logos; all animality must be eliminated. For Derrida, this is a war to the death and will lead to the very end of animality, resulting in a world “without any animal worthy of the name and living for something other than to become a means for man: livestock, tool, meat, body, or experimental life form.”⁸ The annihilation of animality in favor of rationality will lead to a world in which the animal is de-animated, transformed into a mere machine, a piece of practical equipment to be used without reservation.

From another angle, this war against the animal is a war between logos and pathos, rationality and compassion—a “war is waged over the matter of pity.”⁹ Derrida contemplates Jeremy Bentham’s pivotal claim that our treatment of nonhuman animals should not be guided by whether they can reason but whether they can suffer. For Derrida, this question represents a revolutionary shift in thinking, as it “no longer simply concerns the logos.”¹⁰ However, Derrida emphasizes that Bentham’s question itself “leaves no room for doubt”; there has never been doubt regarding whether animals can suffer.¹¹ For Derrida, Bentham does not ask us to investigate a self-evident fact, but he instead “open[s] the immense question of pathos and the pathological.”¹² It is undeniable, Derrida argues, that we contain within us “the possibility of giving vent to a surge of compassion even if it is then misunderstood, repressed or denied, held at bay.”¹³ This war waged against the animal, against pathos, is therefore a war waged against compassion. Pathos and compassion are conquered by rationality and logos, by God, by the illusion that centers the human being and “protects” our species from its own nature and instincts. It is an illusion that creates a rift between our suffering and theirs, that allows us to avert our eyes from the lower beasts, to cast doubt on our immediate and undeniable propensity to “suffer for them and with them.”¹⁴

The industrialization of animal agriculture in the past two centuries has driven and intensified the sacrificial war against the animal. Contemporary husbandry has, on the one hand, expanded the reproduction, commodification, and slaughter of animals to a horrifying degree (which would seem to fuel pathos), and it has technologically transformed into a highly self-contained and concealed killing apparatus (which keeps pathos at bay), on the other. That is, the sectioning off of animal slaughter and its seclusion behind slaughterhouse walls prevents us from seeing and being seen through the eyes of the other—from confronting the “gaze called ‘animal,’ which would offer to us sight of “the abyssal limit of the human.”¹⁵ However, there is a human being whose gaze is not inhibited, who cannot avoid the gaze called “animal” and who, day after day, is subject to the war over pity: the slaughterhouse worker.

Interviews conducted by Eimear McLoughlin and published in her 2017 article “Knowing Cows” unveil the emotional impact of slaughterhouse work. McLoughlin carried out sixteen interviews during a visit to an Irish slaughterhouse, finding consistent reports of emotional repression, the commodification of animal bodies, and the reframing of slaughtering practices as efficient food production. However, she also uncovered deeply hidden displays of pathos and the ways in which the “veneer” of stoicism is “persistently managed and at times, shattered.”¹⁶ She found that while the ideal slaughterhouse worker is apparently unemotional and embodies “unerringly hegemonic ideals,” this identity is one that is “routinely constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in the daily travails of killing.”¹⁷ This testimony not only confirms the undeniability of compassion and the waking of pathos but also presents the experiences of slaughterhouse workers as ruptures in the anthropocentric illusion.

One worker, Tom, a veteran of 30 years at the slaughterhouse admitted his susceptibility to forming connections with his cattle: 

You’ve had them for 12 months and it can be hard to let some of them go—but that’s part of it. You’d know them but that’s part of it … so you can bring in more … Saying that, they’re all different … They all have their different personalities. No two cows are the same..

Here, the “unthought” bangs at the door of consciousness. The walls of the slaughterhouse are no shield for Tom, who works within them. He is besieged by the gaze called “animal.” He must “see and be seen through the eyes of the other, in the seeing and not just seen eyes of the other.” He can neither fully commodify nor fully empathize with his animals, and therefore, since the penetrating gaze of the animal forces itself upon him—pathos, ever-present, must be forcibly repressed, kept in, kept at bay. 

McLoughlin gives her own account of one cow’s painful entry into the slaughterhouse, while Tom and the others catalog and corral the cattle:

Her head rested on the Holstein Friesian in front of her as they were squeezed through the crush pen where their tags were read. Her eyes glistened as she rested her head on the hind of the female in front of her. […] She blinked slowly, as Tom and the others shouted numbers and breeds across the animals’ heads. Her watery eyes blinked again and a stream of liquid ploughed a furrow through her dusty, charcoal coat. […] When Tom opened the gate to herd her group through, she was the last one to leave the pen.¹⁸

McLoughlin suggests that the workers face an irreconcilable conflict, perceiving the cows both as individuals and as inanimate commodities. 

The gaze of the suffering animal is unavoidable within the slaughterhouse walls, and heaving one’s gaze returned by the animal, one not only encounters the harrowing power of pathos but gains a glimpse of the limits of the “human” being, in Derrida’s words, “the ends of man, […] the border crossing from which man dares to announce himself to himself.”¹⁹ The spellbinding force of the anthropocentric illusion is broken—even if briefly—as one stares into the fearful eyes of the limping cow. And yet, it is the relegation of animality to the “unthought” that actively works against pathos, that maintains the integrity of the illusion. One can see and be seen by an animal, feel a pang of sadness when the bolt gun delivers its stunning blow, but, after all, it is a cow, an item of food, a number stamped on an ear tag. We are human beings; they are farm animals. In the words of one of McLoughlin’s interviewees, a health inspector:

You see this animal being killed. You know it’s wrong but you stop seeing the animal, you only see a process … This animal … that has thoughts … in four or five minutes, there will be bits of it all over the place. 

While the gaze of the animal has overwhelming power, it will not shatter the anthropocentric illusion until the “I think” reimagines itself, until “I think” begins in the gaze of the animal.²⁰ We will not free ourselves from the illusion until we can accept the universe’s indifference and revel in our likeness, not to God, but to other species. We will not free ourselves and other sentient beings, until God, pure reason, the perfect non-animal, no longer rules the cosmos.

1. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, translated by David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008), 12.
2. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, translated James Strachey (Norton, 1961), 30.
3. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 19.
4. Genesis 1:26 (NRSV).
5. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 43.
6. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 101.
7. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 102.
8. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 109.
9. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 29.
10. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 27.
11. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 28.
12. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 26.
13. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 28.
14. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 28.
15. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12.
16. Eimear McLoughlin, “Knowing Cows: Transformative Mobilizations of Human and Non-Human Bodies in an Emotionography of the Slaughterhouse,” Gender, Work and Organization 26, no. 3 (2019), 338.
17. McLoughlin, “Knowing Cows,” 338.
18. McLoughlin, “Knowing Cows,” 334.
19. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12-13.
20. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 29.