Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More-than-Human Condition

Abstract

Edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrö and Steve Hinchliffe (Routledge, 2017)

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics captures the way a decentralized form of governing measures and mobilizes life itself through a number of technologies, such as demographics, surveillance and health initiatives, with the aim to prolong and enhance the lives of a population. According to Foucault, this biopolitical form of governing characteristic of modernity implies a detached and technical stance towards individual lives. In short, biopolitics turns individual lives into life as a mass noun. Interestingly, when human life is treated as a resource, human’s self-proclaimed position as the crown of creation is unsettled and humans find themselves part of the same biopolitical nexus as many other animals. The technologies and consequences of the biopolitization of humans and other animals is the subject of the volume Humans, Animals and Biopolitics, edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrö and Steve Hinchliffe. It is a book that should be required reading for Foucauldian theorists and human-animal studies scholars alike.