Biopolitical Animal

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 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).

• Introduction: What is a Biopolitical Animal? - Felice Cimatti and Carlo SalzaniPart I: The Animal of BiopoliticsChapter 1: Turning Back to Nature: Foucault and the Practice of Animality - Matthew CalarcoChapter 2: Community and Animality in the Ancient Cynics - Vanessa LemmChapter 3: Biopolitics of COVID-19 and the Space of Animals: A Planetary Perspective - Miguel VatterChapter 4: How to Chirp like a Cricket: Agamben and the Reversal of Anthropogenesis - Sergei ProzorovChapter 5: Animality and Inoperativity: Interspecies Form-of-Life - Sherryl VintPart II: Tales of Biopolitics and AnimalityChapter 6: Restraining Biopolitics: On Dino Buzzati’s Living Animals - Timothy CampbellChapter 7: Cages and Mirrors: Mr. Palomar and the Albino Gorilla - Serenella IovinoChapter 8: Bunnies and Biopolitics: Killing, Culling and Caring for Rabbits - David Redmalm and Erica von EssenChapter 9: Deading Life and the Undying Animal: Necropolitics After the Factory Farm - James K. StanescuChapter 10: Factory Farms for Fishes: Aquaculture, Biopolitics and Resistance - Dinesh WadiwelPart III: Reconceptualising BiopoliticsChapter 11: Imagining Liberation beyond Biopolitics: The Biopolitical ‘War against Animals’ and Strategies for Ending It - Zipporah WeisbergChapter 12: Animal Magnetism: (Bio)Political Theologies Between the Creature and the Animal - Diego RosselloChapter 13: Creaturely Biopolitics - Carlo SalzaniChapter 14: A Dog's Life: From the Biopolitical Animal to the Posthuman - Felice CimattiAfterword: Locating Race and Animality amidst the Politics of Interspecies Life - Neel AhujaIndex

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.