Desire and the Law: Creative Resistance in the Reluctant Passenger and the Heart of Redness

This chapter offers a critique of animal rights approaches for their weakness in relying on the passage of laws, and in depending upon their proper administration by legal authorities to attempt the protection of animals. Where some thinkers espouse an animal rights perspective, this chapter argues that postcolonial desire is vital to protecting communities in ways that rights discourse and the law cannot in the context of the biopolitical workings of the state and globalized capitalism. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s work on desire and the law in Kafka (1986), the chapter considers the potential of desire to offer creative alternatives, outside of legal discourse, toward the protection of animals and the larger community. Additionally, it recognizes how indigenous environmental knowledge and notions of desire offer ways of relating to animals that can challenge capitalist instrumentalization.