The Biopolitical Animal - (Animalities) by Felice Cimatti & Carlo Salzani (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores the intersection of biopolitics and the animal question, pushing the debate in new directions

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

Explores the intersection of biopolitics and the animal question, pushing the debate in new directions The two issues around which this collection revolves is 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, Italy. 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).

Review Quotes

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"

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

About the Author

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).