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Animalities

The Biopolitical Animal

Edited by Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani

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£24.99

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About this book

Explores the intersection of biopolitics and the animal question, pushing the debate in new directions
  • Remedies the inherent species blindness of biopolitical theories that have so far mostly excluded nonhuman subjects
  • Contributes to the 'political turn' in animal studies that problematises and expands the scope of inquiry beyond the traditional comfort zone of ethics and ecology
  • Clarifies and concretises into new, powerful interventions the important work that has preceded it at the intersection of biopolitics and animal studies
  • Addresses the necessary intersection of biopolitics and animality from a number of different perspectives, from ancient philosophy to literary and postcolonial theory, from political theology to philosophical ethology and critical theory
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.

Reviews

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.
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.
Table of contents

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 Buzzati’s 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

About the contributors

Felice Cimatti

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 l’Antropocene (2021), is being translated into English.

Carlo Salzani

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).

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