ANIMAL ETHICS AND HUMAN IDENTITY IN J.M. COETZEE’S THE LIVES OF ANIMALS ALAN NORTHOVER Alan Northover is registered for a PhD with the English Department at the University of Pretoria. alan.northover@gmail.com Abstract The article aims to position J.M. Coetzee’s The lives of animals within the animal rights debate and assess both his use of and his failure to use key philosophical texts in the animal rights movement. This task is complicated by his adoption of the controversial persona, Elizabeth Costello, who paradoxically uses reason to attack reason and continuously evokes the Holocaust analogy. The paper attempts to understand her views in relation to the leading animal rights philosophers, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, but also emphasizes her departure from their respectively utilitarian and rights-based positions, offsetting these against the positions of Mary Midgley, deep ecology, ecofeminism and the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre. The paper concludes with a consideration of views expressed by Coetzee in an interview and a speech. Positioning J.M. Coetzee within the animal rights debate is a task complicated by his apparent adoption of the controversial figure of Elizabeth Costello as his persona. Her apparently paradoxical rejection of rationality in favour of the sympathetic imagination and her sustained analogy between animal exploitation and the Holocaust in The lives of animals are especially problematic. Indeed, some critics (Kunkel 1999, Singer 1999:91 and Webb 1999) 1 are unwilling to identify her views with those of Coetzee and believe that he uses the fictional mode of the philosophical dialogue in order to express more extreme views than he himself would be prepared to admit to. However, I will argue that her views are, in fact, not that extreme in relation to the work of the leading animal rights philosophers and that they can be defended 1 Since the reviews of Kunkel and Webb are web pages, page references cannot be provided.