“‘Staying with the (political) trouble.’ Imaging new political-philosophical vocabularies for the here and now.” Review of Vulnerability in Resistance (2017) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Animal rights activists and advocates attempt to include nonhuman animals in the human community through reasoned philosophical tracts and by direct action. In so doing, both philosophers and activists aim to expand the boundaries of the human community to include the question of nonhuman livelihood as a viable political question of justice. However, dominant animal rights discourse fails to analyze the boundary of the political community as marked by a historical division between logical animals (humans) and phonic animals (nonhumans). In so doing, this discourse merely enables nonhumans to become mute political objects of representation rather than subjects of speech, and thus maintains the exclusion of animals from the political community of speaking subjects. By turning to the work of radical democrats Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe, I argue for a re-conceptualization of animal subjectivity and speech that promises a new framework for attending to the needs and standpoints of nonhuman animals. By analyzing historical and ongoing modes of political exclusion from the democratic community, radical democracy promises a more historically grounded method of exploring the way in which animals are currently denied entry into the field of politics. After providing this alternative methodology for thinking about animal oppression through the lens of radical democracy, I shift the discussion from an analysis of border construction to investigate border contestation by exploring three episodes of nonhuman resistance. I argue that attending to the concerns of animals through a lens of radical democracy requires humans to pay attention to events of nonhuman resistance whereby animals oppose their exclusion from the political community. To do so, the paper uses Bruno Latour’s work on ‘speech prostheses’ and argues for deploying multiple and potentially conflicting vehicles of speech to make audible nonhuman voices. Through the notion of ‘speech prostheses’, I show how nonhuman resistance makes the oppression of animals not only an object of political deliberation, but also more importantly, transforms the animals themselves into subjects of politics. Therefore, the concept of ‘speech prostheses’ illuminates both how animals contest their political exclusion and also how this contestation enables animals to become subjects of discourse. This combination of political approaches ultimately entails rethinking animal subjectivity, as events of border contestation illustrate that nonhuman animals are both agents of resistance and subjects of democracy.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2023
Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective 'One Struggle' in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of 'actually existing intersectionality', illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.
THE ANIMAL-TO-COME: ZOOPOLITICS IN DECONSTRUCTION
2021
Now available in paperback. 30% discount with the code PAPER30 https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-animal-to-come.html —Thinking the politics of animals and animality beyond the critique of anthropocentrism and the concerns of biopolitics What happens to political thought if we take the problematic nature of the human-animal distinction, not as something to be demonstrated, but rather as a given? What sorts of animal-existential possibilities are derived by tracking not the animal but the animal-to-come through the inherited traditions and institutions that continue to shape prevailing concepts of culture and politics? In THE ANIMAL-TO-COME, Robert Briggs lays out an original interpretation of Derrida’s work which takes the ‘question of the animal’ beyond the critique of political and philosophical anthropocentrism. Eschewing approaches grounded in animal vulnerability, Briggs reviews theories of power, politics and culture in terms of their capacity to enable novel images of ‘zoopolitics’. Along the way he engages with recently translated work in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) and Dominique Lestel’s empirical and constructivist phenomenology of human-animal relations. Through these and other interventions, THE ANIMAL-TO-COME departs from well-established positions in animal studies to develop new ways of thinking animal politics today.
Cultural Anthropology, 2023
Abstract Activism in favor of non-human animals is on the rise throughout Mexico despite ongoing and episodic violence. Activists, also known as animalistas, represent themselves as the “voice” of non-human animals as they seek rights and well-being for animals. In Ciudad Juárez, a border city once considered the most dangerous city in the world (2008–2012), animalistas engage in complex ways with non-human bodies as they seek to “speak” for them. This article analyzes the relationship between injured bodies and voice in Ciudad Juárez’s animalista movement, with the act of the rescue as the point of inception. Injured animal bodies prove central for activists because anthropogenic violence transforms dogs’ bodies. Non-human injured bodies, and their visual representations, allow animalistas to position themselves as the voice of an animal that survived an abuse while also individualizing and depolitizicing—through the discourse of pathology—violence against dogs. RESUMEN A pesar de la violencia continua y esporádica en México, el activismo a favor de los animales no humanos ha incrementado. En la búsqueda de derechos y el bienestar de animales no-humanos, las personas activistas, o animalistas, se presentan a sí mismas como la “voz” de los animales. En la ciudad fronteriza de Ciudad Juárez, que alguna vez fue consideraba la más violenta del mundo (2008–2012), las animalistas se relacionan de manera compleja con los cuerpos no-humanos para poder “hablar” por ellos. Este artículo analiza la relación entre cuerpos lesionados y voz en el movimiento animalista de Ciudad Juárez, enfatizando el acto del rescate como un momento clave. Los cuerpos lesionados de perros son fundamentales para las activistas porque la violencia antropogénica los transforma. Así los cuerpos animales lesionados, y sus representaciones visuales, les permiten posicionarse como la voz de animales sobrevivientes al abuso, mientras que individualiza y despolitiza—a través de un discurso patologizante—la violencia contra perros.
Resisting Bodies: Between the Politics of Vulnerability and "We-Can"
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2024
This article presents a critical phenomenology of embodiment in radical democratic struggles, focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests. It contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler, with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Arendt) and competence (Merleau-Ponty). Attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution of social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens’ movement among others and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement.
Ideological Monkey Wrenching: Nonhuman Animal Politics beyond Suffering
Corman, L. (2017). Ideological Monkey Wrenching: Nonhuman Animal Politics beyond Suffering. In D. Nibert (Ed.) Animal Oppression and Capitalism – Volume 2: The Oppressive and Destructive Role of Capitalism (pp. 252-269). Santa Barbara, CA/Denver, CO: Praeger Press.
This chapter asks critical animal studies scholars, intersectional nonhuman animal advocates, and anyone who recognizes that profit drives the overwhelming majority of violence against other animals to take seriously their exploitation while refusing to reduce nonhuman animal subjectivities to representations of suffering and victimization. This kind of beyond suffering approach, which some advocates and scholars may see as fiddling while Rome burns, is a necessary antidote to capitalist objectification of nonhuman animals. That said, suffering should not be dismissed or neglected in efforts to end exploitation. Rather, we must discuss suffering, but we should do so in conjunction with other, richer versions of other animals' experiences beyond suffering. This including but beyond suffering approach strongly resonates with other social justice movements that have long resisted both the homogenization and the reductionism of various subjects to pure victims. These movements, which have fought hard against dehumanization, recognize that objectification manifests as denial of full or even partial subjectivity and thus exclusion from the realm of full humanity.