Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era by Sarat Colling (review)

Sarat Colling's Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era confronts an issue vastly disregarded by activists and animal advocates, an issue that ultimately leads to the constant reaffirmation of logocentrism and human exceptionalism. Assuming that other-than-human animals do not have their own voices and a main role in their struggles for liberation constitutes what Colling names "savior narratives," a very common discourse even among those who care for the more-than-human world. In fact, other-than-human animals are seen, not rarely, as beings without a language of their own, which places them in a misleading position of dependency in relation to humans. Against this background, Colling's book lucidly proposes that "[l]istening to animals' voices is the first step towards replacing savior narratives with solidarity" (Colling 2021, viii).

Through a productive dialogue with scholars across the discipline, field researches, and a thorough analysis of animal representation in multiple narratives, Colling constructs a forceful argument in a text that gathers more than 50 images of those whose lives and destinies are being discussed. Differently from well-known texts that deal with the animal question from a strictly theoretical standpoint, such as Jacques Derrida's "Eating Well" or "The Animal that Therefore I Am," Colling builds her argument by providing the reader with examples of individuals who actually resisted confinement and torture and were, therefore, the agents of their own processes of freedom, effectively speaking for themselves. Old Whitey, for instance, a steer who lived in the first years of the twentieth century, was adamant about escaping the 150,000-acre ranch where he was brought to from Chihuahua, Mexico. Against all odds, he escaped the ranch three times to reach the Diablo Mountains and managed to live there for quite a while before being murdered by the rancher (Colling 2021, 26). As he ran to those mountains, Whitey fought for his freedom in a way that only the oppressed can understand. His will to live was not only unstoppable, but irreconcilable with a broken existence as someone's property. For Colling, Whitey's resistance to being a commodity and unwillingness to abide by the rules of the system caging him should be seen as a "political" act. As she points out, "[a]nimals' opposition to oppressive forces occurs in the context of their social and political positioning as commodities and as living property" (Colling 2021, 12).

Colling's notion of politics distances itself from Aristotle's zoon logon ekhon—a definition that implies humans' unique capacity to think, speak, and "express…the just and the unjust" (quoted in Derrida 2009, 348)—and enters, I believe, the arena of "a different politics, one that is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from the traditional paradigms of the nasty state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating so many facets of modern thought" (Massumi 2014, 2). To be political in this sense, or to resist politically, is to respond actively, expressively and improvisationally to the environment in a way that fosters a "natural politics." The latter presupposes an ethics that embraces an inventive struggle against oppression. In his What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Massumi states that:

To the law of selective adaptation, instinct opposes a power of improvisation more than eager to respond to the call for conformity to external demands with a supernormal twist. Instinct takes the liberty of inventing proposed solutions.… it invents a third way: the excess invention of a more to life. An inventiveness immanent to the topology of experience, one with its lived qualities, at its most subjective leading edge, spontaneously responds to adaptive pressures. For this immanent inventiveness, some give the name "desire."

(2014, 18)

Resistance takes place within this realm of desire and creativity, showing a life pulse that cannot be contained and that encompasses all animals in a spiral continuum, humans included. In this sense, Whitey's case is by no means an isolated...