The Biopolitical Animal

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.

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).