The Animal-To-ComeZoo-Politics in Deconstruction

• Offers a reinterpretation of concepts of institution, culture and power in the service of thinking animal politics beyond a biopolitical framework
• Provides an interdisciplinary approach to analysing ‘human-animal’ distinctions as forms of institutional (rather than ontological) difference
• Includes analyses of animal behaviours and practices revealing new potentialities in human-animal interactions
• Engages with both established Continental thinkers, Derrida, Foucault, Arendt, and recently translated work by key figures in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Dominique Lestel and Vinciane Despret
• Reformulates ‘the animal-to-come’ as a means for reflecting on and further developing ‘the question of the animal’ in contemporary humanities inquiry
• Reads Derrida’s deconstructive interrogation of the human-animal distinction in the context of his ‘quasi-messianic’ logic of ‘the future-to-come’

What happens to political thought if we take the problematic nature of the human–animal distinction as a given, not as something to be demonstrated? What sorts of animal-existential possibilities are derived by tracking not the animal but the animal-to-come through the inherited traditions and institutions that continue to shape prevailing concepts of culture and politics?

Robert Briggs lays out an original interpretation of Derrida’s that which takes the question of the animal beyond the critique of political and philosophical anthropocentrism. Eschewing approaches grounded in animal vulnerability, Briggs reviews theories of power, politics and culture in terms of their capacity to enable novel images of zoopolitics. Along the way he engages with recently translated work in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) and Dominique Lestel’s empirical and constructivist phenomenology of human-animal relations. Through these and other interventions, Briggs departs from well-established positions in animal studies to develop new ways of thinking animal politics today.