Attending with Shame to the Animal Crisis: On the Contributions of Murdoch and Deleuze to a Politics of Sight

Abstract In Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory (2022), Alice Crary and Lori Gruen diagnose a crisis in human–animal relations, emphasizing its political nature and critiquing the limited scope of orthodox animal ethics. They propose an “ethics and politics of sight” to confront this crisis, drawing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy of attention. This article argues that while Murdoch’s account of attention provides insight into the perceptual dimension of this crisis, it does not fully address its political and emotional aspects. Murdoch’s focus on personal improvement ignores the structural roots of moral misperceptions, limiting its applicability to a collective politics of sight. Moreover, the lack of a systematic account of the emotional dimension of attention undermines her explanation of the latter’s transformative potential. Therefore, this article applies Gilles Deleuze’s concept of shame to extend Murdochian attention to include emotional and political dimensions. By analyzing the role of shame in moral perception, this article contributes to debates on how emotions affect ethical human–animal issues and moral thought and practice more generally. Specifically, we argue that shame provides a critical perspective on the normative infrastructure that determines society’s relation to animals by rendering visible aspects of the shameful and the intolerable behind a façade of normalcy.