IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE: human and non-human animals, movement, and bio-political existence

This paper examines the proposition that movement offers new insight into the relationship between human and non-human animals, a relationship that is important to understanding contemporary bio-political existence. It draws on a recent commemoration of transhumance, the seasonal movement of herds and herders, to analyse different conceptions of movement and their implications for the relationship between human and non-human animals. On this basis, the paper argues that current attempts to address the violence of the relationship by establishing the subjectivity of non-human animals are not the answer. It proposes instead that Nancy’s rearticulation of existence as oscillating between the detachment of singularity and the attachments of multiplicity offers a more productive way of reconfiguring the relationship between human and non-human animals. This offers an understanding of the relationship as always already transforming, and in a manner that does not, at the same time, undermine the possibility of political action.