‘When They Fight Back’: A cinematic archive of animal resistance and world wars

Abstract

Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive ‘When They Fight Back’ records incidences of when animals ‘fought back’. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as ‘conflicts’. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires ‘for’ the Animal. As such, the archive stages a Clausewitzian case of escalation from resistances into total war. In open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight back – and because they fight back, humanism has built its own form of resistance (i.e., politics, ethics, aesthetics, biopolitics, international relations, etc.). I conclude that Human Being (as a form of resistance) must be surrendered if the war on life itself is to end.

When you have to deal with an animal you have to treat them like an animal.

Harry Truman after the dropping of the atomic bomb¹

Introduction

Shot by the Honolulu police in front of a terrified crowd on 20 August 1994, Tyke was dead at just twenty years old. Tyke was truly an international superstar. Born in Mozambique, Tyke didn't run away to join the circus out of teen angst. Tyke was captured as a kid and shipped to the United States. Once in the US, Tyke was sold to the Hawthorn Corporation and treated like an animal. A horrible fate for a young one filled with so much potential; Tyke didn't take to the strange new role. According to those who worked there, young Tyke was a ‘troublemaker’.² Brian McMillan said Tyke ‘would run away when you tried to do anything … [Tyke] just didn't have a good attitude.’³ Humiliation, beatings, captivity, trauma, alienation, and loneliness defined their ‘training’. They claimed that ‘Tyke required a lot more work – “tuning up” and “heavy-handed discipline” – compared to other(s).’⁴ In the mid 1970s, Tyke's publicly witnessed beating by the keeper, Allen Campbell, was so bad that Tyke ‘was screaming and bending down … to avoid being hit.’⁵ Whenever he walked past, Tyke would cower. To be sure, Tyke had tried to escape captivity many times. In 1993, in Pennsylvania, and in 1992, Tyke made a break for it at the North Dakota State Fair.⁶ Both times a handler had been injured in Tyke's daring escapes. By 1994, in Hawaii, enough was enough. This time Tyke, an eight-thousand-pound African Bush Elephant – one of the world's largest land animals – didn't want to take it anymore and didn't want to run. This time Tyke sought something else. Tyke charged the trainer William ‘Dallas’ Beckwith and killed Allen Campbell in the effort. McMillan said, ‘When an elephant gets spooked they normally try to get away. … That elephant didn't want to get away. That elephant wanted blood.’⁷ Never having found freedom, Tyke finally surrendered to nerve damage, brain haemorrhages, and 87 bullets on a downtown street in front of a Honolulu crowd.⁸ They said the elephant went ‘wild’.⁹ I think Tyke fought back.

Tyke's story took centre stage in my preparations for the 2020 International Studies Association meeting in Honolulu (which was cancelled because of a viral autoimmunity war named COVID-19), where I was to meet the many contributors to this Special Issue. I was to present on an introductory, undisciplined archival experimentation in underzoomanism; an animal archive titled ‘When They Fight Back’. The archive had begun as a simple empirical collection of reported cases of animal resistance used to create a Zotero citation bank and host a public film series. I was to report on its beautiful failure. The archive's initial goal was to collect, record, and discuss bona fide cases of animal conflict into one of three categories: react, revolt, or resist. However, it quickly snowballed and then grew rhizomatically across media types, beyond discursive domains, and into the wilds of competing epistemic communities. The archive collapsed under its own weight. To be sure this indicated my weakness and depraved training as a social scientist; however, it also demonstrated the impossibility of containing the simple research question ‘Do animals resist? When, how and why?’

Granted, to take animal resistance seriously, our starting point should be to recognise animal resistance and their effects/goals. There are some notable examples in the animal studies literature. Jason Hribal's work recounts animal horror stories like Tyke's from inside cages, enclosures, and tanks, and collects the history of animals that resisted their domination (understood as a lack of consent) and positis that because of their resistance, their moral concience, they created meaniful historical change in the treatement of other animals.¹⁰ Sue Donalson and Will Kymlicka take up the liberal framework of consent and argue that animals should instead be afforded graduated domestic citzenship or quasi-international sovereignty that treats resistance as an engine for a new evolved national/global zoopolis.¹¹ Kathryn Gillespie, Fahim Amir, and Sarat Colling empasise the underbelly liberal consent/citizenship to emphasise capitalist exploitation, objectification, and commodification.¹² For Colling, animals speak through resistance and if we learn to listen, we can see that animals and humans share a special social justice solidarity – crossing boundaries and asserting our mutual oppression and liberation against global capitalism.¹³ Together, these approaches tend to reproduce the assumptions of 1990s IR debates but general resistance studies definitions are helpful in unpacking some assumed theoretical commitments about resistance. In this literature, resistance is theorised as an act or pattern of actions that is connected to a context; it might be a formal display or an everyday practice and while it might undermine power-relations, it might also inadvertently strengthen them.¹⁴ As such, while animal resistance is inclusive of reacting, responding, and revolting (reactions to capitalism and/or sovereign power), it could also be more dispersed (in that it might also address disciplinary and biopolitical dispositifs). In the context of a biopolitical dispositif, for instance, animal resistance might take the form of counter-conduct with other than expected objectives or methods.¹⁵ Amir takes up this idea of counter-conduct, resistance to domination makes animals political agents; as living labour they are ‘powerful co-producers’ of the contempory world.¹⁶ Their counter-conduct has the effect of shaping the global assemblage in which they/we live and resist.

‘When They Fight Back’'s research question acknowledged the liberal, social justice, and biopolitical traditions but is different because it no longer sought to make animals count in the domain of human problematics but instead affirmed how they matter in non-human politics, which I argue manifest as world wars (i.e., Events). In other words, if looking for empirical evidence of animal resistance constitutes another example of asking animals to prove their existential worth in and through the very assumed variables (language, consciousness, ethics, resistance) that reinforce human supremacy and its problematics (Capitalism, Social Justice, Modernity), how can day-to-day resistances that exceed interhuman relations be studied? Instead of cumulating into an already established all-inclusive and moralistic world picture of animals resisting property, capitalism, domination, humans, the meaning of resistance mutated in the archive, revealing interdependent lines of unfolding action and recoding earlier concepts like react, revolt, and resist.¹⁷ Anyone familiar with Foucault's tale of the Chinese archive understands the problem. ‘When They Fight Back’'s failure to totalise was also its creative success. Instead of becoming fixed, whole, and comprehensive, resistance became a montage of moving scenes, competing screens, and dissolving subjects. Simply put, the archival project became cinematic – both using cinema as a subjectivity machine to keep up with the mutations invited by the question of resistance and by rejecting the humanist practice of representing political events within a single archival frame.¹⁸ In the context of the Honolulu conference (and this Special Issue), the archive challenged how to think about Tyke's story in International Relations (IR). Tyke figures in IR in at least four ways:

1. (1) At the level of the international political economy and biopolitics of animal life. To examine this would require a deep engagement not only with the animal entertainment industry (i.e., circuses, pet care, wildlife tourism, nature television) and the animal slaughter economy (i.e., food, fashion, research, poaching, hunting, nuisance extermination), but also with the immediate and future soft violence of becoming externalities (i.e., wildlife displacement, species extinction, habitat devastation). IR would also extend to the different global, national, and local ways that animals are directly discussed and/or erased without animals necessarily being the ‘focus’ (i.e., property and tort law, food and health safety legislation, commodity markets and futures, etc.). Simply acknowledging the facts of life for animal populations would require mapping an already existing world of global interspecies relations and assemblages.¹⁹

2. (2) At the level of the discursive production of the global, the political, and the animal, and their epistemological relationships to the concept of sovereignty. To examine this would require asking what those interested in IR are already prepared to consider valuable/real subjects of politics and what is excluded or made foreign in the process. There are some more obvious uses of animals that are considered global and/or political (i.e., military research and conflict, wildlife and species management, international trade and economic development, global governance, and ecological and social movements). However, most animal life would be found discursively irrelevant because of the dichotomies of nature/political, domestic/international, anarchy/sovereignty at play in the disciplinary construction of IR. The question of the anarchic animal only makes sense if it is explained in and through sovereign human terms (and vice versa). If this metaphysical and discursive complexity is explored, then IR (if we could still call it that) would become a study of what Megan Glick calls ‘infrahumanisms’. Infrahumanism studies how the management of human/animal boundaries has impacted the vast network of biopolitical practices manifest in both hierarchies of speciation and human differentiation.²⁰ IR would study the global governmentality of species.²¹

3. (3) Tyke could also figure in IR at the level of reconfiguring human ideas about human being and difference. We could ask how does the animal via regulation, extermination, negation, and exclusion sit at the ontological heart of how humans understand and construct themselves in relationship to the world, other species, and themselves? We could explore how all human activity reproduces the distinction between ‘animal’ and ‘human’ via humanism or what Derrida would call ‘carnophallogocentrism’,²² Agamben would call the ‘anthropological machine’,²³ Foucault would call ‘biopolitics’,²⁴ and Wolfe would call ‘zoontolgoies’.²⁵ Moreover, the very word animal, Derrida objects, implies that a bird and a whale are the same before they are different because of the sovereignty that they (and in the end also humans) are said to lack (i.e., language, politics, world). Animal difference disappears under the general word ‘animal’. As such, Derrida invents the word ‘animot’ to retain the plurality of being that is erased in the metaphysical opposition of the animal/human dichotomy.²⁶ And yet, inversely, via Sylvia Wynter, Claire Jean Kim, Carol J. Adams, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson we could also explore how the animal and animality is mobilised in order to create the biocentric fantasy of the unified and yet diverse human via white supremacy, colonialism, anti-Black and Indigenous racism, sexism, and homophobia.²⁷ Instead of leaving animots to represent animal diversity, we could also add humans back into the mix and thereby expand the definition of ‘animots’ to acknowledge being more-than-human assigned categories. Expanding on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's concept of undercommons, where strange solidarities can emerge in defiance and excess of white supremacy as state sovereignty,²⁸ IR could explore underzoomanisms to defy and exceed speciesism.

4. (4) Tyke could also reveal that, instead of seeing the state of human affairs as peaceful except for our relations with other humans, the history of human politics is to recast as always already waging a kind of war on animals, in particular, and animots, in general. IR is itself part of this broader war of worlds. In the context of open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight back; and because they fight back, humanism has built its own reactionary forces (i.e., human societies, cultures, politics, economics, ethics, aesthetics, etc.). It is hard to see this world war and IR's role in reproducing it because the scale of the conflict is so total and totalising that this war on life's diversification has become synonymous with human being itself. As such, IR could become a mapping of this war against animals, one that Dinesh Wadiwel (via Foucault) argues is a continuation of war through peaceful politics waged against animals through the enactment of human subjectivity, institutions, and epistemology.²⁹ However, war could additionally be thought of as more than simply a reactive force and an attempt to impose politics/order/peace. Instead, world wars would be rethought as generative and escalating forces. They are Events. As Jairus Grove suggests, war making is world making and vice versa.³⁰ As a classic Clausewitzian case of escalation into total war, human being became these world wars (and forgot how to live otherwise). It is an anthropocentric war fought against animot forms of life. As such, Tyke could inspire IR to seek an end to these more-than-human world wars and become other-wise.

In the face of this overwhelming, rhizomatic cascade, ‘When They Fight Back’ unfolded cinematically by enlarging the refrains of resistance from zoo habitats to imaginative habits in literature and film. Towards these varied ends, this article presents three overlapping and mutating packs: (1) Resistance is enough attends to singular instances of conflict. Whereas asking if animals suffer is an ethical question, asking if animals resist is something else. Animals don't need to count in humanism's ethical deliberations (wither domination, exploitation, and inequality) nor do they need to speak fine liberal words of resistance (I, Demands, Rights); resistance is good enough. Period. Importantly, this realisation releases animal studies from the paradoxical obligation to define animal resistance in human terms and/or via human resonances (history, capitalism, law, etc.). Animals resist. Animal resistance is a declaration of war, not a request for accommodation in human problematics. Animals/animots unite, you have nothing to lose but your Great Chain of Being. Wars might make themselves evident in territorial conflict etc., but they emerge from forces beyond material constraints and social justice deliberations. Animal resistance is a demand for animot futures that are themselves, thankfully, unintelligible. (2) Animals already fight back everywhere focuses on animal resistance, not as an exception, but as a norm. Animals always already resist being human. Moreover, they already are political beings because they resist; they don't need to suffer to count. Humanism's refusal to acknowledge their resistance only says something about humanism's poorness in the world. The implication being, instead of exploring if animal life should be assimilated into the already existing ethical and political discourse of humanist IR in some grand puffery of interspecies citizenship, democracy or cosmopolitanism, animal resistance should be recognised as the already existing basis and essential target of human politics. (3) Animal resistance changes everything even when animals materially disappear, resistance continues. Animal resistance is not something discovered, late at night, in abstract debates over dinner options; on the contrary, animal resistance is at the heart of all human enterprise. Animals might be indifferent to humans, but humans are totally into animals. Contra to those who argue that animals are excluded, this article accepts (via Foucault) that the animal (via desires and resistance) is at the centre of discipline (i.e., sexuality, colonialism, pathology, and psychosis) and biopolitics (population health and security).³¹ The human attempt to discipline, assimilate, pacify, colonise, annul, demean, love, disfigure, police, save, and, in the final instances, secure and/or exterminate the animal and itself is built upon the centring of animal desire and resistance. Humanism resists animal/animot resistance via war. As such, ‘When They Fight Back’ is a double effort to appreciate animal resistance within the context of world wars and to release the animal from its central figuration in the story of human self-stated fashioning to see what animot futures animal resistance can inspire. As such, in this article's coda, I'll propose that recasting world wars invites animot futurism through human surrender and treason.

Resistance is enough: Individuals, everywhere

The first finding of ‘When They Fight Back’ was that individual animot/human conflicts were everywhere. Small revelation. Positive and negative conflicts were collected via human stories and/or measures. To organise ‘everywhere’, the stories were classified as revolt, reaction, or resistance. Revolt was defined as when an animal had had enough of certain human behaviours or constraints. It found that revolt was generally portrayed as mysterious or mythos-poetic (i.e., the human world bubble was punctured, nobody saw that coming…). Reaction was a general category that implied no discernible pattern (i.e., mistake, cause–effect). In the stories we archived, animal nature and human stupidity were often used to explain animal reactions. Reaction was often a way that revolt and resistance were explained away. As a heuristic, we accepted that resistance would inspire human acknowledgement of willfulness. Humans portrayed these events as threats, competition, dangers, attacks, but these animal actors were also presented as heroes, guides, innocents, and inspiring. Willfulness was seen more often ascribed to actions when animals helped humans than when humans were hurt.

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Whether in a circus, zoo, or home, captivity is the public prism (habitat) that most commonly showcases human/animal conflict and is amply seen in the animal resistance literature. It is also most closely related to traditional concepts and practices of international/interspecies relations. Because of animals’ already existing captivity, human/animal conflicts are habitually framed in terms of escaping, crossing, or ignoring reified concepts of territory, borders, and security. Animal enters Human space and/or Human enters Animal space equals animal becomes a danger. Archival conflicts between humans and animals in captivity generally end up with the animal being killed.³² Two polar bears at the Prospect Park Zoo were shot in 1987 after an 11-year-old climbed into the exhibit and tried to take a dip in the moat while the polar bears slept. Tatiana, a Siberian Tiger, was shot at the San Francisco Zoo in 2007 after she leapt out of the enclosure and mauled a young man after (because?) he, and his friends, threw rocks at her. Two lions at the Santiago Metropolitan Zoo were shot in 2016 when a suicidal man – rationally intending to be killed by a lion – entered their enclosure. Neither good behaviour of the animal, stupid behaviour of humans, or failures of humanity factor into interspecies zookeepers’ targeting of animal reaction, revolt, and resistance. Reminiscent of 1990s debates in international political theory about the role of the state in conflict, captivity naturalises abstract ideas about borders, territory, and security in and through regulated, artificial, and guarded material discourses and practices that, in turn, constitute interspecies relationships between animals and humans.

Sometimes when the artificial discourse about territory, borders, and security is breached, transversal ideas about resistance, those that exceed normal categories of React and Revolt, emerge from their enclosure and are debated. Harambe is one of those transversal ‘sometimes’. Harambe (an endangered 450 lb male, Silverback, Western lowland Gorilla, born in captivity in Brownsville, Texas) was killed because a three-year-old boy climbed over a three-foot fence and fell fifteen feet into the enclosure's moat.³³ The zookeepers thought that the boy was in danger. Appearing to be an obvious chain of reasoning, this is a complex collection of territorial assumptions: The child entered Harambe's space. Harambe has a space. The child is in danger. Harambe is a Gorilla. Harambe is endangered. Harambe is a danger. The famed primatologist Jane Goodall explained that the Harambe incident was ‘awful for the child, the parents, Harambe, the zoo, the keepers, and the public. But when people come into contact with wild animals, life and death decisions sometimes have to be made.’³⁴ Goodall's ephemeral word ‘when’ should be read as a permanent state of exception: whenever. Appearing third in her list of awfuls, Harambe's plight hardly gets its fair share of empathy. In a territorialising epistemology, Harambe's actions were reduced to always already being wild (even when born in a zoo). Born wild, animals react and revolt; this is the a priori target of captivity.

But what about resistance? Some professed that Harambe had dragged the boy to safety and was standing over the boy to protect him. There are lots of archival examples that support this thesis: In 1986, when a five-year-old boy fell into the gorilla (male) enclosure at Jersey Zoo in the UK, a gorilla checked in on the unconscious child and then fled. In 1996, when a three-year-old boy fell twenty feet into a gorilla (Binti Jua-female) enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, a female gorilla picked up the unconscious boy and carried him on her back right to the door for the zookeepers.³⁵ Was Harambe a hero? Should they have killed Harambe? Did humans fail to understand the complexity of Harambe's (and the child's) objectives? Was he defying human stereotypes about ‘how animals act’ by protecting another? Why was Harambe in captivity? If humans are in danger, why is Harambe endangered? What would a human do if they were Harambe? What would you do if you were forced to live in a zoo, circus, or camp? How would you resist if the only options were docility or death, and docility didn't get you anywhere but more here? Any ambiguity about individual capabilities, intentions, and actions might be forgiven by conceding that you/they did not have any space to resist in the highly securitised territory of the circus, zoo, or camp. The point isn't to anthropomorphise resistance. Quite the reverse: How can any animal resist the very conditions of their own existential captivity?

In the end, the decision to shoot a captive animal required zookeepers to value the life of a single individual over the entire endangered species represented in a cosmopolitan zoo-space that justifies its institutional existence around preserving that very endangered life and/or teaching about its value. These instances of doubt reveal a built-in ambiguity at the heart of human/animal relations. Despite the overwhelming violence and cruelty directed towards animals, (some) humans want to love them more than almost anything else in the world (and sometimes more). This love, fascination, and hope for animals create zoos, pets, fashion, YouTube videos, and the conditions for a whole archival genre of reporting about ‘hero’ animals. Mostly dependent on Hollywood television and films (for example, Littlest Hobo, Old Yeller), the constitutive discourse emphasises news stories about animals who act in ways that get to count as if they were acts of human resistance (i.e., rational, deliberative, self-sacrificing, noble, and premeditative). In addition to being exemplary cases for the utilitarianism of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation,³⁶ children and animals are also key locations for defining humane treatment because they both figure as ‘missing links’ to the past, the future, and the imaginary.³⁷ Moreover, that the child who climbed over the fence was racialised, shaped the public interpretation of the actions of the child, parents, zookeepers, and Harambe. Sure, Harambe was opened onto martyrdom in an upswell of public indignation; but the public also re-enacted racist falsehoods about black parenting and became apoplectic about a black life mattering. As Claire Jean Kim further explains, although primates are main characters in humanity's story about ‘missing links’ via racial and zoological colonial collections, the white ““human” ejects itself from the superset category of animal and ejects from within itself the subset category of black.’³⁸ Harambe, therefore, uniquely sits at the heart of IR's humanist zoological-racial project. Whether Harambe picked up the child to save him or not, Harambe cannot help but resist human being. Kim concludes with ‘the hope that Harambe's tale will trouble the zoological-racial order in which he lived and died by exposing the circuits of unremitting violence that go into making the black, the animal and their nearness to each other.’³⁹ Such hopes inspire experimental thoughts and actions. Sometimes, we could imagine that animals would rally others to their cause through opportunistic strategic symbolic acts (and even violence) and smash human expectations. If humans cannot afford space and time for animal resistance (reasoned, intentional, symbolic, unintended, irrational, or otherwise), all actions to the contrary are dismissed, at best, and targeted, at worst. Animal heroism and animal resistance wouldn't have a chance to rise above the threshold of human assumptions about their world and their captivity.

‘When They Fight Back’ expanded into the wild where the captivity story, it could be argued, is inverted. Although the wild is usually defined as the absence of enclosures, the concept (like that of nature) is made possible by spatial metaphors (i.e., Park and Preserve). The wild occurs outside and outdoors and therefore in nature and the wilderness. The wild is said to be without enclosures, laws, or governments. In this light, it is not a far leap in IR to see how the zoo/wild reproduces (or originates) the dichotomy between domestic/international and state/anarchy. Enlarging the territorial circle recasts captivity, not as a place behind walls, but as a regularised state of affairs and a disciplined state of mind – a habit and habitat. Enlarging the enclosure invites questions about the way human/animal relationships are regularised precisely because this assumption hides all the axiological, epistemological, and ontological assumptions about animal/human resistance. In this enlargement, ascribing logical motives to animals (i.e., securing territory, resources, and dominance) ironically looks less experimental than it does in captivity conflicts; however, by essentialising the wild and wildness via exceptional and tautological statements like ‘in the wild they are wild, in nature they act natural’ resistance is hidden.

The story of a grizzly killing in Katmai National Park and Preserve's 16,500 square kilometres shines a light on a bigger territorial enclosure than that of the zoo or circus and perhaps with bigger children. This was the first known bear attack resulting in human death in the park and, more generally, attacks by grizzly bears are universally rare.⁴⁰ Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard had been flown to a remote campsite in Katmai National Park in late summer 2003. When the pilot returned on 6 October 2003, he discovered a ‘nasty’ looking bear eating a human rib cage.⁴¹ Treadwell's video camera recorded a six-minute audio clip. Whereas Huguenard's death is recounted in gendered screams, Treadwell's is said to have ended reflectively, telling Huguenard ‘I'm dying, get out of here … Get out of here! I'm dying!’⁴² The attack was shocking and invited speculation in the media. Although their death was accepted as tragic, many people also felt that ‘he got what he deserved.’⁴³ Had he not figuratively climbed over a fence into a bigger, but wild, zoo? For the record, nobody questions their parents’ competency as parents.

When our interspecies rangers (replacing zookeepers) arrived to recover any human remains, the responsible bear (now known as Bear 141) was reported to have attacked them.⁴⁴ Despite being in the wild and the rangers being in the bear's domain, Bear 141 was shot 11 times with a semi-automatic handgun as if he were in a zoo.⁴⁵ Another bear, much younger, was also killed when it charged the ranger recovery team after having seen its friend gunned down.⁴⁶ In this case, nobody proposed that Bear 141 and its comrade were martyrs.

In a twist of fate, the sensational news coverage made a case for human martyrdom, not animal. According to Julie Kalil Schutten, ‘Treadwell's death started a conversation that challenged the ideology of humans as separate from “wild nature”.’⁴⁷ In 1997, Treadwell had written a book called Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska.⁴⁸ He also had founded an organisation called ‘Grizzly People’ dedicated to ‘preserving bears and their wilderness habitat’, which transformed him into a celebrity environmentalist on the late-night talk show circuit.⁴⁹ With these goals in mind, Treadwell (irrationally?) refused to follow the park's zoo rules banning food in tents – don't feed the animals. When the rangers created a ‘Treadwell Rule’ that required all camps be moved at least one mile every five days, he resisted this ‘rational’ rule too. In many eyes he was crazy – gone wild. He intended for the bears to get used to living with him and humanity to understand living with bears.⁵⁰ Treadwell had spent a decade living with grizzly bears at the national park in a collaborative effort to protect the bears living there from hunting and human harm.⁵¹ Pitched as ‘A mesmerizing portrait of a man who staged a 13-year dance with death’,⁵² the Oscar-winning film Grizzly Man (2005) renewed speculation about Treadwell's (irrational?) and the bear's (rational?) motives.

Despite the opportunity to explore the transversal ‘sometimes’ of human/animal resistance, Treadwell's story was reduced to regularising the habitual animal/human relationships – bears being bears and humans getting in the way. They discount Treadwell's rational/irrational martyrdom: (1) Bear experts indicated that during this time of year, when food was scarce, bears would be competitively ‘fattening’ up for winter.⁵³ Treadwell and Huguenard were just another food source for hungry bears. Treadwell and Huguenard erred not only by keeping food in the tent, their mission's purpose (to live with bears) was also the problem. (2) The Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist, Larry Van Daele, stated that Treadwell set up his bear-viewing camp in such a way that bears wishing to cross the area would have to either go through the lake or walk right next to the tent. It was a territorial clash. He stated that a person could not have designed a more dangerous location to set up camp.⁵⁴ The only way to live with bears, in other words, is to employ distances, enclosures, and captivity. (3) Some were more generous to Treadwell and put the mistake on the shoulders of Bear 141. Treadwell's recording indicated that he was investigating this ‘new bear’ that came into their camp and Treadwell had returned to the site after the bears with whom he regularly socialised with had gone into hibernation. Ironically, Bear 141 might not have known Treadwell's past benevolent behaviour and goodwill towards other bears.⁵⁵ It was either a rogue encounter or Bear 141 thought Treadwell was a dangerous human. (4) Bear 141 was ‘nasty’ and already had a history with our interspecies wildlife officers.⁵⁶ The necropsy of Bear 141 revealed that they had tranquillised the bear to extract a tooth and tattoo his lip. Some proposed that this likely caused Bear 141 trauma and generated trepidation about humans.⁵⁷ Maybe Bear 141 had just had enough of these intruders and fought back?

Animal conflicts are part of a much bigger archive of animal resistance that naturalises the regularisation of human/animal relations and reveals a violent archive that exceeds their individual encounters. When a little girl was pulled into the water by a ‘revolutionary’ sea lion or a sea lion that ‘mistakenly’ took her dress for a ‘fish’, the father repeated Jane Goodall's doctrine: whenever.⁵⁸ He explained that, regardless of the seal's intentions, she learnt the lesson the hard way.⁵⁹ Stay away from animals. Treadwell politicised this foundational human/animal whenever in his public campaigns to live differently with bears, but Bear 141 also politicised it by eating Treadwell and Huguenard. Whereas Tyke charged his keeper, Harambe's resistance was politicised by being acknowledged and, in a rare occasion for an animal that breaks the doctrine of whenever, grieved. ⁶⁰ Any attempt to make sense of the conflicts reinforced already existing distinctions about zoo/wild, animal/human, human/human relations and yet the stories also brought those discursive frames into some disrepute because, as we explore next, animals resist everywhere, whenever.

Animals already fight back: Everywhere, whenever

Most animal/human relationships were not presented as conflicts (above) but were generally organised around reducing everyday normalised resistance (living). Entire literatures and academic disciplines have developed to describe, debate, and regulate how humans should handle animal revolt, reaction, or resistance (from biology to anthropology and animal studies). Examples included regulating animals designated with a human purpose (i.e., livestock, research animals) and those with no human purpose (i.e., wild animals, co-dwellers, interlopers). In this way there might well be a conflict (resistance, reaction, revolt) from the perspective of the animal/animot but the human subject was instead concerned with regularising something else (i.e., productivity, populations, health, safety, and humans). Animal conflict was presented as an externality or a friction that must be minimised (sometimes with huge capital expenditures) but not necessarily appreciated on its own terms. The exception was in cases where animals with a human purpose invited ethical reflection. Ethical conversations were often uncertain since they straddled caring about the animal and/or optimising a created and harmful situation. In the end, the majority of what counted as acts of revolt and resistance were treated as ‘fact of being’ or ‘fact of life’ (reactions). Namely, the very existence of the animal posed a problem for humans and yet ironically, in this admission, was an acknowledgement of animal resistance. The fact of being alive was a form of resistance to human purposes (i.e., slaughter, research, companionship, and entertainment). It is as if humans wished that animals were born in petri dishes, ready for ethical consumption … Tired of the war, permanent peace – human victory – is sought.

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‘When They Fight Back’ quickly discovered that there is a well-established literature that demonstrates how animals and animal/human relations are negatively represented. In their study of National Geographic, Linda Kalof and Ramona Fruja Amtho document three common representations of animal human relations: ‘(1) Animals as dangerous and disruptive to humans and their property (35.6%); (2) Humans as dangerous and disruptive to the natural world (34.9%); and (3) Animals as dangerous and disruptive to the natural world (29.6%).’⁶¹ Animals acting badly make up two-thirds of the stories reported but, taken together, all of the stories show negativity and conflict as the cornerstones of human/animal relations. They chart how animal confrontations moved from being part of the thrill of exploration of the ‘wild’, to danger to human physical bodies (i.e., sharp snapping teeth) to dangers to human health (i.e., carriers of disease) and, most recently, as invasive pests (i.e., deer, geese, bears) who destroy both human property and even nature itself.⁶² It is commonplace to assume that negativity and conflict are natural states of affairs instead of regularised states of affairs.

Kalof and Amtho's category ‘Animals as dangerous and disruptive to humans and their property’ pushed ‘When They Fight Back’ beyond circuses, zoos, parks, wilds into the endless but mostly hidden regulated domains (habitats) of research labs, urban dwellings, and factory farms. Instead of treating them as spaces of captivity (though they are also that), ‘When They Fight Back’ categorised them differently since these were also highly regularised and functional spaces: (1) In the case of research labs, they were like circuses because of the totalisation of life in cages yet the epistemological orientation was different since researchers did not want to train animals (for a circus audience), they wanted animals to react ‘naturally’ to human stimulus (like in a zoo). Animal resistance, as such, was an object to be observed (valued) and/or overcome (negated). (2) In urban settings, the space of ‘nuisance animals’ was in between that of the open wild and the circus/zoo/lab. Whereas the urban functioned like a circus/zoo/lab for humans, for the animals it became an extension of their ‘natural’ habitat and/or became vacation parks, a plentiful refuge from their work year in the wild. (3) In the case of pet care, the discourse becomes less militarised and more medicalised. The psychology of correct training moves from the school, prison, and hospital into the disciplinary space of the home, kennel, and field. Diagnostics and discipline become sado-masochistic and eugenical.

Despite the endless list of examples, one consistent theme emerged from these highly regularised and functional spaces: they did not deny or debate that animals resist human plans. On the contrary, they take resistance as a given whenever and everywhere. Instead of having to justify looking for resistance in the first place (as one might have to do in debates about animal ethics, rights, wellness), they occupationally seek to turn animal resistance against animals.

Here the farm, not the zoo or the wild, exemplified this cinematic insight. The literature around the industrial production of animals as food, while still maintaining a discourse of territory, security, and survival, focuses on how to maximise production and knowledge. This is a shift from a territorialising strategy to a biopolitical strategy and from a discourse of dominion to that of stewardship. Instead of keeping animals behind enclosures and in captivity, while they also do that, the goal is to extract as much life from animals as possible so that humans (and other animals) can maximise theirs. There is a double biopolitical move here: one governing humans (maximise life) and the other regularising conflict with animals (maximise production).⁶³ In the archival effort, we noted that the majority of this literature focuses on animal/human physiology, genetics, and, importantly, behaviour.⁶⁴ But an interesting tension emerged because while the behaviour of the animals is pathologised, the behaviour of (some) humans was measured as ethical and/or humane.

The story of Temple Grandin illustrates this biopolitical tension so that the treatment of animal resistance can be seen in this revised light. Grandin famously illustrated how animal ethics and the reduction of animal suffering will improve the bottom line of farmers (even industrial farmers). She argued against brute force, top-down, territorialising, and terrorising farming and instead argued that if we understood how animals perceived reality (how they resisted) they would be more compliant.⁶⁵ The farm explains a substrate operating in the zoo, lab, circus, park, and wilds because it reveals modernity's core biopolitical ethos – maximise species potential at all costs, not through force, but through contentment until death. It translates overt conflict into a regularised reduction of animal resistance (even in humans). Obviously, seeing biopolitics as a tool to industrialise life is not unique to animal behaviour studies, nevertheless Grandin's approach to farms appears exceptional, and yet, exemplary. Why?

Simply stated, in her own estimation, Grandin straddled the human/animal divide. Drawing from her experiences as an autistic human (and a woman), Grandin said she was able to empathise with animals better than others. Her central argument is that there are multiple kinds of thinking.⁶⁶ She explained that, as a highly logical being who thinks through pictures, associations, and signals, she was able to empathise with how animals think since they also share predominantly sensory, associative, image-oriented thinking.⁶⁷ She explains that, through autism, she can see patterns in animal behaviour/emotion and transversally ‘sometimes’ she claims to think like animals. As such, she positions herself as a kind of ‘alien’ translator. When she translates the animal experience via the autistic experience of exclusion, she transfers standing from humans to animals (valuing other ways of thinking) by critiquing the normalised human assumptions about how the world works (dominating other ways of being). The result is a more humane treatment of animals. Valuing the diversity of ways of thinking is, in itself, an exciting and transformative opportunity and recognises that some forms of thinking are marginalised to the point that they are said not to exist at all. Yet, by removing ‘disturbing’ sensory information in a slaughter yard, for example, cows freely (happily, unknowingly, helplessly?) walk to their deaths. Here animals (more) willingly submit to human desires because the animal's knowledge of danger, not their will to resist, has been targeted and undermined. To this end, Grandin focused on the emotions and knowledge of animals, not their behaviours, to create a novel discourse on animal freedom. Animal freedom and the good life means free from fear and distress, discomfort, hunger and thirst, pain, injury and disease, and the freedom to express normal animal behaviour.⁶⁸ It does not rise to the level of freedom from human influence or governance over their lives. On the contrary, Grandin's ethical biopolitical project is remobilised against perceived animal interests (not being killed) in favour of societally invisible animal interests (maximising biopolitical freedom) and regularly stated human interests (maximising production). Grandin's approach appears exceptional, therefore, because it is a more perfect expression of a biopolitical interspecies relationship.

Grandin's critique of what she calls ‘top-down-thinking’⁶⁹ and what others call Western scientific expert knowledge,⁷⁰ appears less exceptional, and yet more problematic, when we see this sleight of hand reproduced in other domains. For example, it is becoming commonplace to use previously excluded Indigenous knowledge to understand animals and/or modify their behaviour.⁷¹ Here Indigenous knowledge is used in ways that don't necessarily support Indigenous resistance or resurgence. In her work on human/elephant conflict over resources, space, and understanding, for example, Lucy King drew from undervalued/misunderstood Kenyan folklore/knowledge, which explained that elephants were afraid of bees.⁷² She surmised that bees attacked the wet parts of elephants (eyes, etc.) where, despite their size, they were most vulnerable. As such, King explored using bee fences to keep wild elephants out of farmer's crops, villages, and homes. Her aim is admirable; to create a form of coexistence from what is a war on elephants (via poaching, habitat reduction, and human expansion) but it is not clear that it is used towards Indigenous or animal ends. The aim is to mollify resistance or resurgence to ‘top-down-thinking’ via coexistence.

Grandin's turn of hand is also similar, in spirit, to other more recent philosophical and ethnographic approaches that try to think with those beings that have been denied epistemological standing.⁷³ This requires thinking through ‘animacity’, what Chen defines as ‘the qualities of agency, awareness, mobility and liveness’.⁷⁴ Bridge building – appreciation of otherness – learning to listen and see non-human life has become a hallmark of this trend in academic research. To this end, ‘understanding the ways in which relationships to other (people and) species already form part of our (and their) self-understanding will be useful in developing … multispecies justice and multispecies cosmopolitanism.’⁷⁵ Here the problem isn't animals; instead, the problem is human capacity to enlarge their circle to include ‘the lives of animals’.⁷⁶ Since Jacob von Uexkull introduced the concept of umwelt, biologists and philosophers have been attempting to expand their scope to include the study of the lifeworlds of other beings.⁷⁷ On that basis, others have attempted to develop more-than-human polities that embrace interspecies citizenship, democracy, and culture.⁷⁸ Together they offer models of humanness that are opened anew to their already existing relationships with the world's other ‘kin’ or ‘creatures’.⁷⁹ Yet, if Grandin's approach doesn't abandon the ultimate purpose of human/animal relationships – maximise species potential at all costs, not though force, but though contentment until death – do these new literatures also participate in turning animals against themselves?

To get to the heart of the Grandian problematic, we should ask ‘why animal life now?’ We quickly find the core assumption in the literature: that animals have been excluded from human consideration and need to be included into ethical and political debates. This add-animals and-stir approach, however, misses the key biopolitical insight: humans are invested in animals ‘not because animals constitute “others” but because animality provides the subtending notion of subjective desire that gives rise to biopower in the first place.’⁸⁰ Foucault explained, ‘from the moment when philosophy became anthropology (when thought became focused on Human Life), and men [sic] decided to find their place in the plenitude of the natural order, the animal lost that power of negativity, and assumed a positive form of an evolution between the determinism of nature and the reason of man [sic].’⁸¹ As such, animals ceased to be excluded and instead became the basis of human understanding and management via controlling desire (with the practices of sexuality and neoliberal capitalism as exemplaries).⁸² Theorists like Clair Jean Kim would add to this all-to-humanist speciesism an attention to ‘zoological racism’, which is anchored in the human/animal binary.⁸³ Kim explains ‘Blackness and animalness, then, form poles in a closed loop of being. Blackness is a species construct (“meaning in proximity to the animal”) and animalness is a racial construct (meaning “in proximity to the black”), and the two are dynamically interconstituted all the way down …’.⁸⁴ As Aph Ko argues, animal studies and anthropology create white supremacy, not because social oppressions (i.e., race, gender, homophobia, animality) are intersecting, but because they are co-constituting.⁸⁵ Animals are not excluded from politics; they sit at the heart of biopolitics, they were incorporated into the domain of reason as an object of study (animal desire).⁸⁶ Less an oppositional condition of possibility that can be flipped or erased though inclusion, modern biopolitics, the zoological-sexual-racial-class order, is already a ‘law of coexistence’.⁸⁷ It is war.

The valuing of other forms of knowledge and/or their ontological inclusion/exclusion, as such, doesn't necessarily help us understand animal resistance. Mobilising Jeremy Bentham, Derrida states ‘the question is not whether animals can think, reason, speak, etc., something we still pretend to be asking ourselves … The first and decisive question would rather be to know whether animals can suffer.’⁸⁸ It opens, at best, to an ethic, whereby the other is always already part of who I am and therefore I always already owe the other ethical consideration – the animal therefore I am. This is an ethical question; but the political question doesn't concern suffering – it's about resisting. Thinking about resistance in this way requires setting aside humanist notions of resistance that exclude, by definition, animal actors (i.e., most definitions of politics). To be clear, the examples of Grandin's approach are important because of their acceptance of the facticity of other thinking beings resisting humanism. That is the novel part for ‘When They Fight Back’: the meaning of the resistance is not important nor is its intentionality. Its simplicity evades the lure of endless complications of language games and making animals speak.⁸⁹ Instead, there is a straightforward acknowledgement that animals resist and that resistance changes what politics means. Animals don't need the idea of the ‘rational will’ to establish political standing. Whereas animal resistance literatures attempt to gauge whether an action in the animal world measures up to a rich standard of resistance set by humans, this literature is interesting because it always already admits that animals resist whenever and everywhere.

This paradox is precisely why farming is not ‘out there’. Animal resistance is at the heart of the human archive that is a world war (which I will take up in the concluding section). Human beings seek to control, dominate, and destroy the entirety of animal resistance for our own ‘good’. The battlefield is consistent but not uniform. It is not a uniform human experience reacting to a uniform animal experience. Zoos, circuses, homes, parks, cities, labs, laws, farms, safaris, etc. take on different forms but regardless there is an attempt by (some) humans to annihilate animal existence in the name of human supremacy. Humanism cannot be made to embrace the animal or bridge the species divide since to be human is, by definition, the violent response to the animal. Human being is organised around our resistance when they fight back. Built on that resistance is the attempt to assimilate, pacify, own, colonise, annul, love, demean, disfigure, discriminate and, in the final instance, annihilate the animal and its animot friends.

Animal resistance changes everything: Always, nowhere

Animals figured back into literatures even once they had been written out, excluded, and/or eliminated. In other words, once the animot had become the animal, once the animal had been transformed into a product, commodity, property, or category, what was left was an erasure to be filled with human projections (i.e., animal movies, novels and fables, advertisement avatars, faux-animal products, animal jurisprudence, and animal philosophy). In the violent absence of animal life, the animal becomes a cypher for human dramas, understanding, and passions. It would be reasonable to expect that animal resistance would be totally absent when the animal is totally absent. However, this isn't the case. Instead, the animal acts as a remainder (i.e., cuteness, tragedy, and resonance) that either compels human stories to reveal their own limitations or to reveal their own culpability. They figure, in other words, as a ‘non-place’ from which the entire human projection can be mapped.

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The tragedy identified in ‘When They Fight Back’ is, intriguing accounts of animal guile and ingenuity aside, animals hardly have a chance in the face of this overwhelming human effort to win the war against animal resistance at all costs. Nevertheless, even in the face of extinction, resistance emerges again. The archival reach of ‘When They Fight Back’ grew into the arena of aesthetic practices. In advertisements, children's stories, literary fiction, cinema, painting, sculpture, fashion, etc., the animal was present even in the absence of the animal. In the totalising absence created through the material exclusion, erasure, and extinction of animal resistance on the one hand, the animal rematerialises as a figure for human dramas, understanding, passions, and imagination on the other.

The animal has long figured in the aesthetic domain. The earliest aesthetic expressions of humans, some 43,000 years ago, were of non-human animals. In the mammoth encyclopaedic undertaking titled Animals in Art and Thought to the End of The Middle Ages, Francis Klingender begins with the simple observations that the history of art begins with animals because ‘animals were the first subject to challenge the artistic faculties …’.⁹⁰ As humans fought animal resistance in the hunt, they learnt to capture them further in their art despite the aesthetic challenge. Evelyn Antal and John Harthan, who compiled the encyclopaedia after Klingender's death, commented that ‘much has been written recently about the animal component in human nature, but here the role of the “naked ape” is reversed and we see, instead, animals in the habiliments of men.’⁹¹ Klingender's thesis was that whatever the precise relationship, this aesthetic journey ‘transforms the real animal into a symbol onto which human feelings and wishes may be projected’.⁹² Klingender organised the encyclopaedia around Freud's distinction between the reality principle and the pleasure principle to capture this tension between resisting animals and constructing humanity. Here the biopolitical subtending of desire moves from the hidden depths of human psychology to the external expressions of aesthetics. The former is rooted in relentless and brutish struggle and the latter is projected in a ‘dream-world of wish fulfilment where all creatures are friends’.⁹³

On the side of relentless and brutish struggle, Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany is a perfect expression of the archival target of ‘When They Fight Back’. Gibson reduces the evolutionary drive to that of eating or being eaten since ‘the whole of nature, as it has been said, is the conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.’⁹⁴ Titbits of wisdom like this, in the form of literary stories, reports, images, and quotes, festoon the central Calvinist premise – that mastery of nature comes only after mastery of oneself – of the two-part project (the first concerning birds instead of beasts). In other words, civilisation is a form of domestication that we share with those other animals who we have domesticated in its name. Like Klingender's volume, Gibson's text begins with Ecclesiastes III, 19: ‘a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast’ but also includes the more famous lines ‘all go unto one place; all are of the dust and all turn to dust again.’ Gibson's concern with human aesthetic endeavours is tempered by his awe for the returning freedoms of the wilds. He regularly lifts the majestic unknowability of the wilds up high and condemns the stupidities of the rational drives of civilisation. Ironically, he gathers all this wisdom from those self-same human literatures. In and through the absence of the animal, the humanist project – the dream world of wish fulfilment where all creatures are friends – grows.

While not 43,000 years old, the relationship between film and animals is also primal.⁹⁵ The technical term ‘rendering’ in the cinematic production of images connects the sourcing of gelatinous animal materials needed to make the materiality of celluloid film possible.⁹⁶ Some of the first subjects of films were running horses, electrocuted elephants, and monster gorillas. Since it was a medium organised around motion, cinema could capture the wild, the pulse, the danger, and the energy of the beast. Cinema is an animal/animot literature. It constitutes a Deleuzian freedom from humanism by disabling the brain's screening of the world that reproduces human habits of thought. Its unique capacity generates cinematic subjectivities in and through making/watching film with others. Cinema, as such, invites animal/animot resistance to surface since it was uniquely suited to transversal ‘sometimes’.

Yet, animal films are some of the most ostracised films, and are generally treated as kids’ stories. They are the cute genre that functions similarly to Aesop's fables by dispensing pedagogical morals and wisdom, yet when filmed for adults they tackle some of the most difficult questions of our times. The birthright of a free lion, the wild play of a wolf, the pain of a lovesick dog, the impossibility of a penguin march – each resonated beyond the simplicity of their childlike story.⁹⁷ The very first feature film, King Kong (1933) uses a misunderstood gorilla to complicate assumptions about modernity itself (film, celebrity, capitalism, evolutionism, colonialism, sexism, scientism, urbanism, etc.). The battle cry of the film was ‘He's always been King of his world. But we'll teach him fear!’⁹⁸ The film tempts recurring Western interspeciest questions: Can they still love us after what we have done? Given its colonial roots, it (now) reads as a study of the racial-zoological order. Furthermore, although films regularly showed animals resisting humans, animals are also shown as winning. Jaws (1975) toys with its human hunters, outsmarting them over and over.⁹⁹ More recently, White God (2014) shows dogs breaking out of detention/extermination camps and taking over the city.¹⁰⁰ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) shows primates defending their culture, community, and lives.¹⁰¹

However, animals also stood as an outside to the human condition in and through their physical absence. The absence/presence of the animal enabled humans to survey the wreckage of human progress and, perhaps more importantly, imagine that it could be or could have been otherwise. In this way, the films transmit what Johnathan Lear calls radical hope.¹⁰² Resisting in the face of cultural devastation or genocidal threats of extinction, animal hope exceeds their presence/absence. As we struggle with the taming in the Black Stallion (1979) or Whale Rider (2002), we might also recognise that the child is becoming more-than-human.¹⁰³ It constitutes a seed, a prefigurative form of political resistance that enacts what it hopes to see in the future. It is the fact that animals still exist and persist in the face of extinction that resonates beyond the fictional stories, lessons, and pedagogical objectives. One would assume that animal resistance would be absent when the animal is absent. Yet, the animal (like child) is figured and figures. Although they cannot do so on their own terms – they cannot enter the debates about the question of the human – that which is excluded reappears. In their absence they figure, in other words, as an Archimedean place from which the entire human world can be mapped and perhaps moved. Their presence haunts their absence.

At worst, animal films doubly erased animals by projecting human assumptions about animals onto human representations of animals but, at best, they critiqued humanity's total war on animal resistance. The film The Turin Horse (2011) amplifies animal resistance best.¹⁰⁴ Referencing the horse that refused to work and was beaten so hard that Nietzsche wept his final words ‘Mother, I am dumb’, the film only offers a casual walk-on of the title's namesake. Before death, Nietzsche returned to the animal – unable to speak and yet resisting human superiority's stupidity. As such, the temporary presence of the animal in the film also evokes a strange sense of interspecies solidarity (which Nietzsche exemplifies).¹⁰⁵ As we watch the human world disappear into the Ecclesiastical wind and dust of despair, hopelessness, and insanity that the Encyclopaedias (above) promised would unite us all, The Turin Horse invites the audience to reimagine its ecumenical fate. It marks the place of resistance and the force of resistance that exceeds human understanding. Like Nietzsche, the audience stands before The Turin Horse stupefied by its windy unending war.

Perhaps what is captured in animal films stands outside of anthropomorphic projections onto animals so that humans can be freed of human habits of thinking? Although an interesting contrast to mythopolitical and religious uses of anthropomorphic projections to capture or channel the human imagination, animal films carry something more than projections for humans. Animal resistance isn't only about physical survival but also about a force that will over time gnaw at the narratives of human supremacy. Resistance emerges again and again in such regularity that it forms the cinematic refrain of ‘When They Fight Back’. Always and nowhere: gorillas helping out, bears eating humans, elephants seeking revenge, cows dragging their feet, horses on celluloid. The cinematic archive documents what I'm calling world wars.

World wars as cinematic archive

‘When They Fight Back’ is an animal archive that simultaneously demonstrates the death and destruction of the human archive. A cinematic archive emerges from expanding, escalating refrains and packs of resistances. ‘When They Fight Back’ shows that animal resistance is everywhere, whenever, and always. Animal resistance is united in and through a reframing of resistance, not in terms of an individual case of reactive and/or wilful politics, but in terms of a general capacity to resist. The anthrophilosophical ‘question of the animal’ is therefore abandoned. No longer privileging human measures of qualification (do we reason, speak, suffer, (or even) resist), the broader question of politics is transformed: what is the capacity to resist being subsumed into a world where resistance to our very conditions of existences are no longer possible? Animals aren't political because they can become honorifically human, they are political because they resist, and this resistance holds out for other worlds and futures. Contrary to the promise in animal resistance literatures, therefore, instances of animal resistance and resonance cannot simply become the ground of new liberal romanticised multispecies solidarity and struggle of differentiated individuals in the statist domain of citizenship, rights, and welfare. This impulse forgets that while animal resistance is a question of politics, it is also importantly always already a question of war. Allowing the state to decide politics would be animal defeat as peace. Hope remains: While individual acts of resistance are generally incapable of overturning the conditions of their necessity, over time and, more importantly, with sufficient reproduction of suffering and/or joy, resistance resonates and, with resonance, new conditions and dependent worlds of resistance can be sustained and/or created. Consistent with this cinematic, rhizomatic archive, resistance can create sufficient capacities within the continuation of war: resistances resonate, resonances create further continuances and capacities; as Deleuze's Nietzsche would say, worlds do not return the same.¹⁰⁶ This is an understanding of resistance from within the context of world wars, beyond the philosophical domain of the state and its affairs.

What is central to the inversion of Clausewitz's famous thesis that ‘war is the continuation of politics’ is not, ironically, that war continues through state policy (although it is also this). What is at stake in this inversion is a warning to all: beware of the forces released in war since war is a generative engine that consumes bodies, destroys worlds, and enslaves futures via escalation. War is not limited by politics (even if it ends). Why? War transforms politics because war continues through its nemesis resistance – resistance is generative and escalatory. Howard Caygill explains, ‘War – in Clausewitz's clear and unambiguous definition – is dedicated to the overcoming of the enemy's capacity to resist. The reciprocal also holds: war is also the preservation and enhancement of the same capacity against the onslaught of the enemy.’¹⁰⁷ In other words, the preservation and enhancement of the capacity to resist is both the reciprocal driving force and target in war. But resistance is not restricted to war between states and war like activities. Not only does war leave the theatres of interstate combat via the capacity to resist into everyday actions, tactics, and weapons of the weak,¹⁰⁸ but as Caygill charts, the preservation and enhancement of the capacity to resist drives into thought, consciousness, and subject creation.¹⁰⁹ Resistance creates reciprocal cycles in politics, philosophy, biography, literature, film, etc.¹¹⁰ The same extends for animal resistance. Animal resistance seeks both to resist the enemy and to renew the capacity to resist in the name of a future.

Moreover, to affirm the reciprocal quality of resistance in broader wars requires understanding the capacity to resist, as Derrida (via Freud) suggests, as ‘resistance to resistances’.¹¹¹ For Freud, ‘resistance was a psychic reality that blocked the passage of the psyche into freedom. One of the mind's best defences, it cuts subjects off from the pain and mess of the inner life.’¹¹² If rejoined with Clausewitz, resistance to resistance becomes both the interior life and the external being of the political (and war its continuation). As Derrida collapsed the distinction between animal/humans, here resistance collapses the distinction between interior and external political life. The promise of ‘humans’ standing in solidarity with ‘animals’, therefore, becomes an impossible liberal dream; it's a delirium of categorical beings. One depends on the destruction of the other via escalation in war. Therefore, resisting the fantasy of the ‘liberal will’ and ‘liberal world’ requires seeing the liberal self, state, and world as part of the very human condition that animal/animot resistance seeks to overturn.

When taken together, ‘When They Fight Back’ is an archive of the more-than-human world wars that are inhabited in different and differing ways. Animal resistance as reciprocal exchange is at the heart of both international politics and ‘When They Fight Back’. In this way, Tyke, Harambe, Bear 141 are exemplary subjects of IR. They resonate with what Roland Bleiker calls transversal dissent – a political practice that not only transgresses boundaries, stories, identities, but also questions the logics through which these practices have come to have significance.¹¹³ While for Bleiker (via Michael Shapiro) the task of the human critical IR scholar is to engage in disruptive, multidisciplinary readings in order to explore the ‘interconnected, multilayered, and constantly shifting nature of transversal struggles in global politics’,¹¹⁴ the task of the animal is simply to resist in this broader world war. Animals need not become IR scholars to resist.

It is too early to celebrate this resistance, however. Again, the danger that Clausewitz identifies is that day-to-day conflicts escalate into world wars.¹¹⁵ Rene Girard argues that this mimetic escalation starts with the growth of human communities (via the scapegoat) and has grown globally to encompass humanity's apocalyptic habits and habitats.¹¹⁶ World wars were mistakenly thought to be only wars between humans (and sovereigns). War exceeds the human, makes the human, and comes to define human being.¹¹⁷ Leonard Lawyer argues that ‘the worst possible violence’ exceeds individual human interactions and engulfs all of human existence.¹¹⁸ Different than Girard, its roots are auto-affective reactions to a ‘pre-ethical violence’ that cannot be eliminated from the humanist project because it is no longer willed; it emerges from the metaphysical shackling of identity to difference in war via resistance.¹¹⁹ In the context of this project, the worst violence emerges as a reaction, a revolt, against animal resistance because of the helplessness, powerlessness, weakness that is experienced in the face of an enemy. As such, humans and animals alike appear trapped with an ever-escalating cycle of worsening violence. As Jairus Grove suggests, war is ‘a dominant form of life cosmologically at odds with the idea of collectively thriving … (and) so caustic, it calls into question if there has ever been anything as universal as a human species to be threatened, much less saved.’¹²⁰ World War becomes Human Being, a form of life, an active hostility on a scale never imagined and, in a fashion, so total and totalising that the target has become life's diversification, resistance, creativity itself.

Yet, if resistance to resistance is the norm, not the exception, and the more world wars take centre stage (via nuclear threats, climate change, mass extinction, immunitary pandemics, global impoverishment, etc.), then interhuman relations necessarily must be dethroned of their world-historical importance. Via centring animal resistance, the human crown is to be cut off international political theory – if it is to be up to the task, IR must (re)write animot archives. It must account for the wars that exceed its disciplinary obsessions and instead turn to the conditions of possibility for those very interhuman conflicts and/or the forms of life that exceed human being. In this light it is hopeful, via Sylvia Wynter, that the worst possible violence and biocentric being has a history, a culture and a politics to be archived since, if it can be archived, it could always be, and perhaps already is, otherwise.¹²¹ Robert Shilliam uses the symbol of the Sankofa – a bird that looks back to take an egg off its back – to access the deep relations, groundings that, if affirmed, can ‘turn over and oxygenate the past’ in the name of an ultimate catalogue of relations and reenchanted futures.¹²²

Yet the claim that animal resistance and interhuman resistance are now inseparable is still to be dethroned – are humans and animals condemned to reproduce this escalating war? What should be done to separate the apparent inseparability of worlds? This question not only identifies exclusions and differences in responsibility for the violence,¹²³ it disarms the trap of endless inevitable escalating relations of war. To the extent that humans and animals are already inseparable, engaging in world politics, interspecies relations, planetary politics, and multispecies democracy are thoroughly implicated in world wars and offer little promise. If IR is thoroughly animal, efforts must be made to release the animal from human ambitions instead of incorporating the animal more thoroughly in its epistemological and ontological designs. Humanity's total war with animals must end. While Wadiwel proposes a truce between humans and animals,¹²⁴ it would be also worthwhile to remember that a treaty, truce, and/or jus in bello invites: (1) rationalisation of parties; (2) increased anthropocentric legal relations and categories; (3) consolidation of gains or spoils without necessary admission of guilt, payment of reparations and ceding of lands; and (4) respite for future manoeuvres. Truces and sanctuaries seem welcome pauses because they invite more liberal interpersonal relations (friendship, connection, love, laws, diplomacy); yet, more liberalism and humanism, does little to transform and/or end the broader wars it relies upon and generates.¹²⁵ It is more productive to take up Wadiwel's discussion of ‘desertion-insubordination’ and push beyond truce and sanctuary.¹²⁶ IR should seek a higher purpose and, as Saskia Stucki suggests, pursue ‘jus contra bellum’ to prevent war itself and/or abandon IR's stately vocation.¹²⁷ Simply put, if to resist human reason is treason, then humans must surrender if this war is to end.

Pushing his Kantian sentiment to more-than-human ends, Leonard Lawlor's affirmative guide is instructive: Treat others in a ‘non-useful’ way and ‘let them be ends in themselves’.¹²⁸ In a twist of fate, ‘Letting be, letting go and doing without the power to dominate even demands a kind of superhuman strength.’¹²⁹ We require a more than human strength – animot strength. Because of humanity's overwhelming presence on the planet, IR must think about strength and solidarity differently than the cosmopolitan drive to include everything in its wake (i.e., path and funeral) and instead become indifferent.¹³⁰ Animot strength is indifference. Indifference, William Watkin explains, is ‘the suspension of clear difference between a founding common and an operative proper where even the concepts of identity and difference are themselves indifferentiated (their clear oppositional separation rendered questionable).’¹³¹ Indifference releases the escalatory relations that are bound up in war/resistance. The aim here is not to show more complex more-than-human relations but instead to release, suspend, and dissolve the tensions, relations, and oppositions so that other (non-)relational forms of togetherness can be amplified. Simply put: to win a future, humans must lose the war. Indifference is animot strength and animot futurism. A radically indifferent IR would become about actively disentangling animal life from its world wars. But at what cost and toward what end?

The cost of surrendering need not reinforce Frantz Fanon's timeless fear of reducing humans to a mere biological mechanism and becoming ‘nothing, absolutely nothing’ through ‘surrendering’ their ‘narcissism’.¹³² In the uneven light of ecological collapse and mass species extinction, overcoming nature via human freedom proves not as emancipatory as imagined. What Fanon wants to ‘grasp’ may ultimately exceed the human/counter-human project in and through the animot – an undifferentiated form of becoming. Let them be – we are not animals but, then, the key point is that neither are they! Are we not both animot before we are animals? Underzoological expressions? Are we not both more and less than our categories? Other-wise too? Surely, it is possible to live, not by emphasising the with or for each other, but instead celebrating the plurality that exists in the non-relational, suspended along-side. A future unlike a past. Thankfully the world is indifferent to our fate; we must pay it the same generosity and let it enliven, inspire again. Life here would be an indifferent mesh of emerging forms and processes and therefore not a competition among metaphysical organisms, species, races, and genders in a teleological humanist game called liberal cosmopolitan co-evolution. This is indifference; this is surrender; this is a futurism: can IR be open to the already existing resistance of existence? Instead of making meaning and worlds, can IR let meaning and worlds exist and resist? If yes, IR (if it could still be called that) would become about actively removing those forms of human supremacy (reserved for very few) that lock in competition between metaphysical categories and instead open towards emerging life forms and processes hitherto untheorised in its deadly cannon. Remembering Tyke and all those who resit, IR could open onto futures beyond those founded on death, destruction and war. In the end, perhaps ‘When They Fight Back’ wasn't about them fighting us or us fighting them; perhaps animal resistance remains about inspiring, enlivening animots everywhere, whenever they fight back, always.