쿳시의 『동물들의 삶』에 나타난 동물과 여성: 이성과 감정 사이

Elizabeth Costello is the character of The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee who maintains that reason is not the unchangeable value distinguishing human from animal. She thinks that reason is just the criteria that human has produced for their own interests. Therefore she rants at the academic audience attending her lecture that slaughtering of animal is not different from the Holocaust. The fictional Elizabeth Costello mocks those philosophers who try to discuss suffering of animals in abstract terms. Nobody around her realizes her spiritual wound originating from her radical argument. As an old vegetarian writer, she speaks on behalf of J. M. Coetzee, who performs her in his own Tanner Lectures on meat eating and animal experimentation delivered at Princeton in 1997. Accordingly, The Lives of Animals is Coetzee's performance of a female subject of Elizabeth Costello. Despite the fact that feminists have compellingly drawn a connection between the traditional notion of reason vs emotion and the oppression of women and animal, many animal ethicists fail to incorporate these insights. The link between ability of reason and oppression of others has resulted from philosophers' insistence on the superiority of reason over emotion. Thus, recognition of the inherent continuity between the two is urgently needed to eliminate suffering of others.