Resisting beyond the human : animals and their advocates

Oliver, Catherine (2023) Resisting beyond the human : animals and their advocates. In: Critical Geographies of Resistance :. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 41-58. ISBN 9781800882874

Abstract

Underneath organised and visible resistance - protest, refusal, disruption - are multiple (and singular) ever-emergent bonds of friendship. Where resistance has more commonly been reliant on comradery and a shared object of intentionality, in this chapter I propose that such a conceptualisation of resistance relationships demeans their value and removes responsibility. In the UK, animal activism has a well-established history, but with the emergence [and simultaneous co-option] of contemporary veganism, the refusal of resistance is foregrounded at the expense of disruptive and transformative ethico-political ends. Where animals are traditionally understood as extensive or supplementary in more-than-human and animal geographies, vegan geographies dissembles these hierarchies in imaginative theories and practices of decentring the human. Within this, the subject/object binary of categorisations must be disrupted to (re)consider who matters (Oliver, 2020). Taking animals seriously beyond allegory demands a refusal of the more-than-human (that legitimises the category of the less-than-human). If, as geographers, we are to think critically about resistance, this must be situated in multispecies and uncertain worlds, we need to consider animals’ own resistance to being strangers. Temporality, spatiality & subjectivity are (re-)opened to (re-)negotiation with this ‘animal question’, where resistance is already a refusal and a revolution of everyday life. In this chapter, I contend that the predetermined category of activist as exceptional, untied to the world and without responsibility, needs to be de-centred as the only or most privileged means of resistance. The temporally and spatially enduring bonds of friendship are understood as already beyond a ‘way of life’ (Foucault, 2005). Friendship’s destruction of strangeness [and thus distance] is here an approach of resistance: to unsettle the intentional resistant subject by unsettling the subject itself as inherently (white, western) human. Inevitably, we conclude that in the face of uncertain futures - where maybe the human doesn’t and shouldn’t survive (Povinelli, 2018) - friendship may itself resist late liberal western sentiments in its opening beyond the human. Animals within these resistance narratives are vital to de-centring human dominance of subjectivity, not because of their intentionality but ever-present resistance to their own disappearance. In uncertain worlds, the position of animals must be itself resisted as metaphor or potentiality, where they are already mutual constitutors of the world. Friendship’s simultaneous power and resistance, inclusion and exclusion, bounding and unbounding, is explored across ethico-politically and historically contingent subjects – both human and non-human – who depend upon friendship as sustenance and transformation. A chapter in three parts, friendship-as-resistance is structured as such: (1) understanding friendship within a finite history (Nancy, 1990) to build a trajectory of resistance in which we remain implicated; (2) a critique of the present through considerations of the ways the ‘more-than-human’ legitimises the ‘less-than-human’, and a call for its critique centring animals; (3) the necessity of a friendship as beyond human and with non-humans in de-centring the human.