Love and Other Injustices

Abstract

In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indifference but its very ground. Love is an indifference to all that does not accomplish its lovability. Dave's offering of an alternative interspecies ethic is what she calls indifference to difference—or “being in difference”—and she locates shades of this immanent ethic in precolonial South Asian conceptions of love as well as in a prenationalist revolutionary philosophy of ahimsa. Dave claims that love is an injustice because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save. She argues instead for an impassioned ethics without love: an indifference to difference.