ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how animal welfarism works not only on the discursive level, but also how it 'binds' people by way of affective investment in a specific worldview. The objective is to account, at least in part, for the remarkable stability and attractiveness of animal welfare discourse as a hegemonic view of the human-animal relationship. In Lacanian terms, animal welfarism offers the lacking subject a secure identity in being 'animal friendly', thus relieving it of guilt over complicity in animal exploitation. In the context of animal welfare discourse, the enemy often takes the form of a deviant or racialized animal abuser, or, more abstractly, figures as the threat of impersonal technological or economic development. A critical theory of speciesism take note of the animal abuser as a symptom, as a fantasmatic positivization of the social antagonism, a condensation point for the immanent negativity which has to be repressed for the discourse of animal welfare.
