Comparison or seeing-as? The holocaust and factory farming

This chapter examines the emotional and philosophical responses to Elizabeth Costello. It argues that they both come from the interpretation of the text as making a comparison between the Holocaust and our treatment of animals. The chapter identifies a different task for philosophy, additional to the dominant tradition of argumentation whose importance Cora Diamond never denies. Costello presents herself as “wounded” by our treatment of animals, and her confrontation with that difficulty of reality is “haunted,” as Diamond says, by the imagery of the Holocaust. Costello turns to the imagery of the Holocaust as a way of dealing with her difficulty to conceptualize and argue about the difficulty of the reality of what we do to animals. Costello’s imagistic seeing-as experience, her affectively charged condensation, also involves imaginative associations that are not similarities, but inversions.