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Abstract Michel Foucault 's notion of 'biopolitics ' has attained a renewed prominence in recent years through its reworking by, among others, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben, who have each incorporated it into their different diagnoses of our contemporary political situation. But for all their attention to biology and life, and indeed the politicuation of such, they give little consideration to the subjection ofanimab within the regimes of biopower they critique. This essay will examine the biopolitical theories of these key Italian philosophers, asking whether and how they might be elaborated in eco- and zoo-political terms, such that we might critique the animalüing reduction and biological production of human and nonhuman life together.
Keywords biopolitics, animals, Agamben, Negri, Foucault
I ANIMALS IN BIOPOLITICAL THEORY
Michel Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics' has attained a renewed prominence in recent years through its reworking by, among others, key Italian philosophers Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben. As Foucault described it, modern politics is ¿apolitical insofar as it secures and wagers the very life of the human species. Both Negri and Agamben have incorporated a modified idea of biopolitics into their different diagnoses of our contemporary political situation: for Negri and his collaborator Michael Hardt, within the controversial notion of 'Empire' as a global system of power; and for Agamben, within the sovereign state of exception become the norm and the concomitant isolation of humanity's 'bare life.' But for all their attention to biology and life, and indeed the politicisation of such, they give little consideration to the subjection of animals within the regimes of biopower they critique. It will be important to ask whether and how their analyses of biopolitics might be elaborated in eco- and zoo-political terms.
Others have traced with great care how Agamben's conception of biopolitics significantly (and perhaps - or not - faithfully) 'betrays' his inheritance of the concept from Foucault.1 Negri's own critique of Agamben's use of the term indicates their significant philosophical differences over power and potentiality. A number of other thinkers, such as the Italian philosophers Paolo Virno and Roberto Esposito,2 have offered their own analyses and criticisms, making for a highly contested and often inconsistent field, contrasting, for example, 'negative' and 'affirmative' biopolitics, and possible pathways between or beyond them -...