Humans and (Other) Animals in a Biopolitical Frame Free
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Published:March 2017
This chapter works dialectically to put into crisis the central terms of postsovereignty: subject, life, living, norm, value, equivalence. Sifting through the work of Foucault, Esposito, Derrida, Levi Bryant, and Martin Hägglund in search of a nonexclusionary, nonimmunitarian who (neither human nor nonhuman) to whom things might matter, the chapter ends by making a case for a paradoxically responsible decisionism, a decisionism that endlessly limits itself by closing off any recourse to a perspective outside the frame of biopolitics. By doing away with immunity and its reciprocal trappings, the chapter suggests, we could arrive at an affirmative, and thus far more radical, vision of biopolitics and community, one predicated not on a strict economy of equilibrium but on an uneconomical apportionment of valuation, perspective, and responsibility.