The two issues around which this collection revolves are that it is impossible to address biopolitics without taking the animal question into account, and that the animal question inherently concerns the politics of life beyond species barriers. Although biopolitical theories are necessarily structured around animal metaphors, they predominantly refer to human corporeality. On the other hand, the animal question is typically treated as an ethical issue, that is, a question of how human beings, the dominant species, ought to learn how to live peaceably with and respect other forms of life. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the fields of biopolitics and animal studies problematises, reconceptualises, and redefines these categories in order to realise the full potential of the biopolitical framework of analysis in the context of animal studies and praxis.
Explores the intersection of biopolitics and the animal question, pushing the debate in new directions
Arvustused
If the reflection opened by Foucault focused on the animalization of the human being, it missed the political question of animal life. This book, perhaps for the first time, breaks down this door, no longer looking at the animal from the point of view of the human, but at the human from the point of view of the animal species. From this perspective, the great questions of anti-racism, feminism and decolonization receive new light. Together with the post-human, the reflection on the post-animal opens a new season of affirmative biopolitics. -- Roberto Esposito, author of Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy Cimatti and Salzani manage to put together an outstanding collection of cutting-edge contributions by gathering many lucid voices among the most daring contemporary thinkers in animal and bio-political studies alike. -- Francesco Guercio * DALPS *
Introduction: What is a Biopolitical Animal? - Felice Cimatti and Carlo
Salzani
Part I: The Animal of Biopolitics
Chapter 1: Turning Back to Nature: Foucault and the Practice of Animality -
Matthew Calarco
Chapter 2: Community and Animality in the Ancient Cynics - Vanessa Lemm
Chapter 3: Biopolitics of COVID-19 and the Space of Animals: A Planetary
Perspective - Miguel Vatter
Chapter 4: How to Chirp like a Cricket: Agamben and the Reversal of
Anthropogenesis - Sergei Prozorov
Chapter 5: Animality and Inoperativity: Interspecies Form-of-Life - Sherryl
Vint
Part II: Tales of Biopolitics and Animality
Chapter 6: Restraining Biopolitics: On Dino Buzzatis Living Animals -
Timothy Campbell
Chapter 7: Cages and Mirrors: Mr. Palomar and the Albino Gorilla - Serenella
Iovino
Chapter 8: Bunnies and Biopolitics: Killing, Culling and Caring for Rabbits -
David Redmalm and Erica von Essen
Chapter 9: Deading Life and the Undying Animal: Necropolitics After the
Factory Farm - James K. Stanescu
Chapter 10: Factory Farms for Fishes: Aquaculture, Biopolitics and Resistance
- Dinesh Wadiwel
Part III: Reconceptualising Biopolitics
Chapter 11: Imagining Liberation beyond Biopolitics: The Biopolitical War
against Animals and Strategies for Ending It - Zipporah Weisberg
Chapter 12: Animal Magnetism: (Bio)Political Theologies Between the Creature
and the Animal - Diego Rossello
Chapter 13: Creaturely Biopolitics - Carlo Salzani
Chapter 14: A Dog's Life: From the Biopolitical Animal to the Posthuman -
Felice Cimatti
Afterword: Locating Race and Animality amidst the Politics of Interspecies
Life - Neel Ahuja
Index
Felice Cimatti is Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Calabria. His research interests, moving from the semiological study of the languages of nonhuman animals, mainly concern the complex relationships between language, society, and human mind/body. His latest books include Unbecoming Human. Philosophy of Animality after Deleuze (2020), Bio-semiotic Ontology: The Philosophy of Giorgio Prodi (2018), and, co-edited with Carlo Salzani, Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020). His new book, Il postanimale. La natura dopo lAntropocene (2021), is being translated into English. Carlo Salzani is Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, Guest Scholar at the Messerli Research Institute of Vienna, Austria, and faculty member of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT). His research interests focus on animal ethics, posthumanism, and biopolitics. Among his recent publications are the co-edited volumes A Responsibility to the World: Saramago, Politics and Philosophy (2023) and Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020), and the books Agamben and the Animal (2022) and Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique: Essays on Violence and Experience (2021).
