The Cult of Heidegger: doomsday, fascism, roots, and biopolitics

Perhaps you have heard of Heidegger's "black notebooks," which seem to strongly indicate that not only was he a fascist and racist, but his racism was sometimes tied specifically to his philosophical work (we already knew that about his fascism). (For more on the black notebooks, read this Chronicle article, h/t Peter). It has been known for a long time that Heidegger was a Nazi, but the degree of his Nazism has always been fairly debated. Oh, we know he was an agrarian fascist, but at least not a technological one! We know he said some pretty fascist things, but, as Heidegger pointed out, those pre-socratic philosophers are really distracting from the jackboots all around you. Et cetera. Every time some new fact comes out that further confirms that he was a bit of a fascist and a racist, there are those who come to his defense. Social psychologists, examining doomsday cults after the world has failed to end, have noted that while some members leave after the prophecy turns out to be wrong, those that stay believe all the harder. Certain Heideggerians operate the same way, with each new revelation only making them stronger believers in Heidegger's ultimate undermining of the Nazi worldview. Please, read the Chronicle article I linked to, you will see at least a few of those defenses.

Now, my attack is not against everyone who finds Heidegger helpful (some of my best friends are heideggerians!). And it is probable that if you mostly read Heidegger for the metaphysics, you might not need to take seriously his fascism (maybe). However, there exists Heideggerian environmental philosophy, Heideggerian Left political philosophy, Heideggerian ethics, etc. If you want to engage Heidegger for politics and ethics, you are going to have to seriously deal with his fascism. Not brush it aside, excuse it, call it lamentable or naive, but face it head on. And doing so means confronting the fact that Heidegger's political comments are not somehow exterior to his philosophy, but are throughly bound up in his fascism. The Chronicle article is very strong here (in a few other places, less so):

Moreover, many of Heidegger’s key concepts appear to overlap with those of fascism—though experts have never, until perhaps now, seen them linked explicitly to Jews. For example, the philosopher is scathing in his criticism of modernity’s wayward drift, the soullessness and ahistoricity of the cosmopolitan, and the rule of technology and science. He believed that the answer to this crisis of civilization lay in the revolutionary empowerment of the ethnic nation, or Volksgemeinschaft. And not just any Volk could pull mankind off its destructive path, but rather specifically the German Volk.
"We regularly see terms in Heidegger’s work like das Volk, ‘homelessness,’ ‘uprootedness,’ and ‘worldlessness,’" says Florian Grosser, a Heidegger expert in the philosophy department of the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland. Such terms, he notes, were the standard vocabulary of Europe’s anti-Semitic right, regularly applied to Jews. But in Heidegger’s published work, "it’s not Jews he’s talking about, but rather the fate of modern man. So, if indeed he goes further in the notebooks, Mr. Grosser says, "we’re going to have to look at exactly how he connects these concepts to Jews. It could be very problematic." 

This is very much the argument of Charles Bambach's excellent (if sympathetic) book, Heidegger's Roots. As Deleuze and Guattari said in A Thousand Plateaus, "We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much." Understanding Heidegger means understanding that his fears of the anonymous other, of free floating intelligence, and of rootless peoples are fears that bound up in a particular kind of fascism. It doesn't mean it has to be fascist, but you can't ignore that connection, either. It also means understanding Heidegger's idea of what it means to be a philosopher, and the importance of philosophy (later, of thinking), is bound up with its own vision of hierarchy and authenticity. Perhaps Heidegger is most fascist in his conception of what it means to do philosophy itself.

And we need to be careful in understanding his thinking. It has become common to claim that the critique of biopolitics is rooted in Heidegger, particularly his critique of en-framing (see, variously, Nancy, Campbell, and Wolfe. All excellent books, regardless of my next point). I understand where this is coming from, but we cannot disassociate Heidegger's critique of technology and en-framing from his broader commitments with those critiques. Specifically, his critique of technology and en-framing are based in a broader commitment to authenticity, particularly authenticity around death. This understanding of authenticity is the very thing that makes the Holocaust itself unthinkable for Heidgger (for this argument, see Todd Presner's Mobile Modernity, chapter six, "Auschwitz." He is really good on this argument, and I wish I had seen this book while writing "Beyond Biopolitics"). I would add to Presner's argument that Heidegger's critique of technology and en-framing is also connected to his divide between the human animal and other animals. In other words, rather than critiquing en-framing being the beginning of understanding the biopolitical, it replicates the biopolitical by by advocating for the proper and authentic disposition of bios.

Guest Post: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics in the Age of Bio-Mechanical Reproduction

"Guest Post: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics in the Age of Bio-Mechanical Reproduction"
Vasile Stanescu
[What follows is a guest post by Vasile Stanescu. It began as an extended comment on my most recent blog post. I, however, gave the post its title, so any issues you have with that are on me. If you are interested in writing a guest post for my blog, please feel free to email me at james.stanescu@gmail.com]

I think there is another link between these two long quotations. I think the polar bears do not “matter” because of calculative logics that only values species. While killing individual polar bears both wholly matters in its own right and does hurt the species as whole, the idea is that it only kills individual animals. However, animals in our culture have no “individuality;” animals are believed to be interchangeable, so a polar bear's “loss” is only perceived if there are no more polar bears at all.  There is a similar logic at play with the current project to try and clone extinct animals from preserved DNA (no, not from amber). The danger of such a project is that there would seem to be no need (for many) to worry about animals’ loss or death or suffering as long as an infinite number of new animals could be “recreated” in the future. Indeed, there probably wouldn’t even be the “need” to recreate them in any literal sense (for many) as long as the potential of reaction existed –the simple idea of the possible animals or the DNA bank would stave off some peoples fears of species extinction and biodiversity loss based on the same idea that animals are infinitely reproducible. (We should write an article on the idea of animals’ rights in the age of mechanical reproduction). Here is an ABC article on the practice: "Scientist Preserve Endangered Species' DNA"; and here is  a link to a nonprofit working on the topic:  The Frozen Ark. The main idea I want to highlight from these practices is the much-repeated phrase that the point of preserving these animals DNA is as a “treasure-trove of knowledge.” What comes to matter via these discourses are not the animals themselves, but only the “knowledge” they represent which, since the animals can be transformed into knowledge, need not be grieved (much less saved) since they (it?) can be “preserved” forever.

So too, I think a similar calculus is at play in the new found fears for the global poor. It is worth remembering that the ethnographic fairs, zoos, sideshows, and circus of the 16-21 century have all paired the “exotic” animal with the “exotic” culture. Again, what seems to be at play is not a fear or concern of actual or individual people but a loss of “cultural” or  “linguistic” diversity. And, much like “DNA banks” we witness the rise of “linguistic banks” to preserve languages before they are “lost forever.” For example, here’s an article on “Preserving Language Diversity: Computers can be a tool for making the survival of languages possible.” Again, a technological fix (to re-appropriate Homer Simpson’s claim about beer : Technology apparently has become “both the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”). But what is even more important is the way in which linguistic and cultural diversity is justified:

Languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before. I estimate that there are about 15 percent fewer languages now than in 1500 A.D. This is alarming in itself, but, just as important, the consequent reduction of cultural diversity may threaten humanity's survival. Our adaptive success as a species - with over 5 billion people in such diverse environments as jungles, deserts, and the Arctic - is due to "culture," implying the communication of ideas through language. Linguistic diversity relates to adaptational ideas about property, health care, food, children, power, and disputes. The loss of language diversity diminishes our ability to adapt because it decreases the pool of knowledge from which to draw. 

The point is the calculative logic is, itself, a type of computeresque way of understanding the world. Somehow these moments of empathy or caring are elided in which the suffering of the world (be it animal or citizens of the global south) becomes repacked as only enlightened self-interest. The Endangered Languages Project, funded, in part, by Google, makes this linkages between animals and languages (and the easy techno fixes that are being proffered) even more clear, claiming:

Languages are entities that are alive and in constant flux, and their extinction is not new; however, the pace at which languages are disappearing today has no precedent and is alarming. Over 40 percent of the world’s approximate 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing. But today we have tools and technology at our fingertips that could become a game changer.
The Endangered Languages Project puts technology at the service of the organizations and individuals working to confront the language endangerment by documenting, preserving and teaching them. Through this website, users can not only access the most up to date and comprehensive information on Endangered Languages as well as samples being provided by partners, but also play an active role in putting their languages online by submitting information or samples in the form of text, audio or video files. In addition, users will be able to share best practices and case studies through a knowledge sharing section and through joining relevant Google Groups.

I know that “Thing theory” has long been an interest of ours, but I cannot help but wonder—what are the political stakes behind defining languages themselves as an endangered living entity nearing extinction? I see in this move the erasure of the speakers of these languages who cannot but matter less as long as the “languages” themselves are “protected.” Furthermore, however, it seems to me that static perseveration via an audio of video upload (more true in the second example than the first) only “preservers” a language if it in fact ceases, itself, to be a living entity at all. Again, much like the DNA banks, the idea seems to be that static preservation of languages will, in some way or some manner, allow for their “recreation” in the future—although who would respeak these languages in the future (if anyone) is never addressed. In other words what we are offered is not the languages' protection but instead only a techno-mausoleum to their loss. More importantly, like the DNA banks to the “vanishing” animals, there seems to be a way in which the disappearing of the people (both individually and as groups) seems to no longer “count” since the formula that people=culture=language=information means that people can be “stored.” As though a person's language was her “cultural DNA,” as it were. The losses are rendered ungrievable because they can be endlessly preserved and recreated. Again, just in case anyone thinks I am making a stretch between this idea of species loss and linguistic and cultural loss here is an excerpt from the Endangered Languages Project on “Endangered languages: Why so important”:

The disappearance of an individual language constitutes a monumental loss of scientific information and cultural knowledge, comparable in gravity to the loss of a species - for example the Bengal tiger or the white whale. However, the disappearance of whole families of languages is a tragedy comparable in magnitude to the loss of whole branches of the animal kingdom (classes, orders, families), such as the loss of all felines or all cetaceans. Just as it would be difficult to understand the animal kingdom with major branches missing, it is impossible to understand the history and classification of human languages with the loss of entire language families.

The point of this, for me, is the calculus by which either “culture” or “species” becomes valued. Animals, themselves, as themselves, matter not at all. Even the loss of the entire species, as a group of animals who have all now died, matters not at all. What is calculated to count, to matter, is only the “monumental loss of scientific information.” So too, I wish to argue, the people of the global south are not, in and of themselves, deemed to count. While, as you know, I am a huge critic of Achille Mbembe (from his unnecessary coining of the neologism “necropolitics” to his incorrect understanding of Foucault) in this one area I have to completely agree with him that “death” in the post-colony are simply uncounted by "us," are simply viewed as a “letting die” of all involved. In both cases, for animals and the world’s poor, all that seems to “count” is the “monumental” scientific information. However if both animals and the poor are rendered as purely informational, as only counting in terms of the knowledge they can express, the very forces which are now fueling their shared destruction (Western capitalist global technological development and control) can, ironically, be viewed as the vehicle for their salvation by transforming both human and animals into pure information which can be “protected,” “preserved,”  and mechanically reproduced forever.

Anti-Spinoza

It’s also true that to attack Spinozism is considered on par with wanting to kill innocent life itself – this poor wastrel of a man, this “innocent life,” as Deleuze puts it. We philosophers and theorists admire those who have been threatened and excommunicated, those who have done their philosophy under the most arduous and dangerous conditions, and by this move we flatter our- selves to think that we too brave the worst in merely being philosophers. It seems rude to our self-understanding to attack a Socrates or a Spinoza, as if they didn’t face enough in their own lives, and especially if that means siding with those reactionary dogmatists who excoriated “Spinozism” for centuries after Spinoza died having left unfinished his chapter on democracy in the Political Treatise. And now, centuries later, he is tellingly judged to be an “innocent life,” as if life itself were a matter of guilt or innocence, or a matter of those “suffused with life itself” or those who are not – as if one can make any such juridical distinctions independent of a fully biopoliticized logic.  

--Peter Gratton, "Spinoza and the Biopolitical Roots of Modernity."

Hunting power, a correlate to pastoral power. On Grégorie Chamayou's Manhunts.

Jason Read has an interesting and smart post on Grégorie Chamayou's book Manhunts: A Philosophical History. I have been meaning to do a post on that book for a while, and this is a good opportunity. So, make sure to go read Jason Read's post first, then come read this post. Don't worry, we'll wait for you.

First, a couple of quick additions to the feel of the book. It is relatively short--I read it in two afternoons. As Jason Read points out, there is a slightly disjointed feel to the book, as we move from one historical point of the manhunt to another. However, Chamayou does an excellent job coming in reminding us of how this all links up (and if we don't get it the first time, it has a well done conclusion tying it all together). The disjointedness has a theoretical point. Chamayou specifically contrasts his project to Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat, because for Girard the scapegoat has an ahistorical character. Chamayou wants to try to ground his work in specificity (one can see this also being a critique of Agamben, that Chamayou also contrasts his work with).
Despite the contrast, Manhunts has the feel of a book by Agamben, or Daniel Heller-Roazen, and I mean that in the best sense. Whatever problems I have had with Agamben, I have always enjoyed reading his books, and Manhunts has that remarkable pacing I have always found satisfying in Agamben's books. Now, it is pretty clear that Chamayou is both anthropocentric and a humanist (the book ends with a cry for universal humanism, and the ambivalent nature of humanism with its possibilities for universalism are alluded to more than once), but I still think this is an excellent book for those of us working in posthumanism and critical animal studies.

The nature of this book is to distill and explain the logics and diagrams of a particular form of power--cynegetic (hunting) power. This is exciting because the rise of analysis of biopolitics has taken a problematic direction. In the thanatopolitical understanding of the biopolitical, the Nazi Lager comes to have an almost platonic form of evil, so that analysis of biopolitics come to (a) see everything as an extension of the camp, and (b) all other evils come to be understood only in how close they come to reflecting Auschwitz. While a thorough understanding of the diagrams of power that made the Holocaust possible seems utterly necessary, this platonic evil comes to make analysis of power nearly impossible. The cure is to do something like Chamayou has done, and instead develop genealogies of power that is not just biopolitics (Foucault, I feel, would be the first to agree). So, back to cynegetic power.

As Chamayou notes (and I have elsewhere) in both Plato and Aristotle hunting is seen as an essential part of political theory and philosophical anthropology.

In the Sophist, Plato emphasizes the fact that hunting cannot be reduced to tracking wild animals. Among the different branches of the cynegetic art there is also an art of manhunting, which is in turn subdivided into several categories: “Let us define piracy, manstealing, tyranny, the whole military art, by one name, as hunting with violence.” Although not all these forms are equally tolerated—for example, Plato condemns piracy, “the chasing of men on the high seas,” because it transforms those who practice it into “cruel and lawless hunters”—war appears, by contrast, to be a form of legitimate hunting that is worthy of citizens. Aristotle says much the same: “the art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit.” Greek philosophers conceive manhunting as an “art” or technology of power. There is an “art of acquiring slaves.” From the outset, domination is examined in a technological perspective: what must masters do to be masters? On what procedures does their power depend? (p.5)

Chamayou is particularly interested in charting this cynegetic power, particularly as a correlate to Foucault's pastoral power.
There are several of us in animal studies who are engaging with Foucault's understanding of pastoral power in thinking through human domination of other animals. In particular, you should read Anand Pandian's "Pastoral Power in the Postcolony" in Animals and the Human Imagination, and read Nicole Shukin's "Tense Animals: On Other Species in Pastoral Power." They are both, actually, really good article, and you should actually read them. Chamayou, however, is not just interested in pastoral power, but its correlate or opposition. Here, another long quotation:

Michel Foucault located, on the basis of Hebrew tradition, the emergence of a pastoral power. But I think this genealogy is missing an essential component. To what, in fact, is the pastorate opposed? In the Old Testament, Foucault explains, “the bad kings, those who are denounced for having betrayed their task, are designated as bad shepherds, not in relation to individuals, but always in reference the whole.” But the figure of the bad king cannot be reduced to the case of the failed shepherd. The real counterpoint to pastoral power, what is opposed to it not simply as a defective form of itself but as its true antithesis, its inverted double and at the same time its foil, is Nimrod, the hunter of men. In the long history of the thematization of power that began in Hebrew tradition, there are in fact two opposing terms: Abraham and Nimrod, pastoral power and cynegetic power. What are the characteristics of this opposition? The first principle of pastoral power is its transcendence. God is the supreme shepherd, but he entrusts his flock to subordinate shepherds. The schema is that of the human shepherds’ entire dependency and complete submission to divine authority. With Nimrod the opposite is true: far rom receiving his people from the hand of God, he captures it by force, with his own hands. The reign of the hunter-king is not only the first power on Earth but also the first power that is specifically terrestrial, whose authority is not inherited from a transcendent source. Nimrod is the first figure of the immanence of power. His rationality is that of a physics rather than a theology of power. This is the first major characteristic of the opposition between cynegetic power and pastoral power: the immanence of the power relationship or the transcendence of the divine law as the foundation of political authority. (pp. 14-15)

While Chamayou will frequently disturb this easy division in his book, it still basically functions throughout. Cynegetic power is fundamentally concerned with accumulation (particularly primitive accumulation) and massification. Pastoral power is concerned with growth and good government. It is concerned with the individual health and life of those in its sway. Cynegetic power is none of these things. It is the logic of the levy and raid. It divides, but does not individualize. Abraham grew a flock, Nimrod conquered an empire.
Chamayou's book is concerned with following the historical development of the concept of cynegetic power. We spend time with colonization and the hunt of indigenous people, hunting of enslaved people, the hunt of the poor in Europe, the hunting of lynching gangs, the police hunt, the hunt of foreigners, the hunt of Jewish people, and the current hunt for undocumented workers. The concern for questions of capital, race, and colonization is a nice corrective to certain texts of current biopolitics that finds within the Nazi Lager the entirety of modern political thought (yes, I mean Agamben and Esposito). One could wish that Chamayou did not take the man of the Manhunt so literally, and take seriously some of the more obviously gendered manhunts. In particular, the withhunt seems glaringly obvious in its omission. Luckily, Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch has us taken care of on that front. One could also wish he had taken a serious consideration in the ways that hunting of nonhuman animals have contributed to some of these problems, like the connection between hunting and colonial imperialism. Luckily, John M. MacKenzie's The Empire of Nature has us covered on that front. Let us, though, continue on charting the characteristics of cynegetic power.
Chamayou further argues:

manhunting becomes a means of waging cynegetic war—a kind of war that has the following characteristics: (l) it does not take the form of a direct confrontation, but of a process of tracking down; (2) the power relationship is marked by a radical dissymmetry in weapons; (3) its structure is not that of a duel: a third term is mobilized as a mediation; (4) the enemy is not recognized as such, that is, as an equal—he is only a prey; (5) use is made of nonnoble means related to policing or hunting rather than to the classical military register. (p. 73)

Several important points here. A cynegetic war is not a traditional war. Clausewitz famously compared war to a dual, however the entire point of hunting is to never engage in a dual. This is why, for Chamayou's latest book The Theory of the Drone (not yet translated), he explains that the drone turned the battlefield into a global hunting ground. Also, Chamayou's opposition to the view of the hunt as being opposed to a dual is part, as Jason Read pointed out above, his opposition to Hegel's master/slave dialectic.

Cynegetic power is seeks to accumulate, it seeks to capture, it takes territory, it divides and massifies. It sees the other not as an equal or a foe, but as prey, and seeks the subjugation and/or eradication of this prey. I am sure you can see that even though Chamayou is horribly humanist and anthropocentric, I see potential in the concept of cynegetic power. This is something I hope to take up in another post, but the question of non-native ("invasive") species is one that is rooted in cynegetic power. Or at least, one we will have trouble understanding if we only have recourse to pastoral power. Why, after all, if there are non-lethal alternatives to dealing with non-native species (assuming we even do), do we so often turn to hunting? To policies of "contain, control, and eradicate"? Or, as the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy once put it, a "mega kill, poison, and burn" plan? As I said, I hope to come back to this, but I think we will need recourse to cynegetic power to understand such moves.

What does Critical Animal Studies have to offer?

The very short answer is obvious: A lot.

As I am writing this paper on CAS and queer theory, I keep thinking about this. My paper is very much about how certain aspects of queer theory help us think through certain issues in CAS. Queer theory does more than simply make visible an abject subject (though it certainly would do enough if it was all that it did), it also provides insights, tools, and methodologies for other fields of research and inquiry. So, I am trying to think through some of the things that CAS can offer to other lines of inquiry, besides simply bringing forth and giving weight to a repressed subject (that of course never being a 'simple task'). For example, I think CAS has allowed me to think through the questions of the biopolitical. The many problems I have with Agamben aside, I think he gets right that the biopolitical is rooted in an anthropological machine. Critical animal studies gives us tools for understanding that anthropological machine, and hopefully tools for dismantling it, as well. Moreover, CAS has given me the ability to understand the central importance of the issue of opacity. I think I have often talked about how wonderful I think Glissant's book, The Poetics of Relation, is. One of the major themes in the book is the political affirmation of opacity. CAS gives us ways to begin to think of ethics and politics with beings who obviously maintain their opacity.

There are many other areas (I am pretty tired right now), but I think we will shortly be seeing more and more research projects that uses CAS to think through and extend projects in other fields, at the same time those fields will continue to influence critical animal studies.

Clarifying on immunity (or, It's never Lupus)

Levi has a good post up on immunity, which ends this way:

Am I missing something? I’m not quite clear as to why Scu sees the necessity of distinguishing between immunity and autoimmunity and why he thinks Derrida is insufficient here. If anything, I think Luhmann comes up short here in not sufficiently exploring the possibility of systems auto-destructing or devouring themselves from within (which isn’t to say that a Luhmannian account of this couldn’t be developed, only that he doesn’t seem to explore this phenomenon very closely).

This caused me to reread my last post, and it made it me realize, uhm, how rambling and unclear it was. So, once more. A lot of this will be repetitive for many of you (including Levi), but it should help me being clearer.

An autoimmune disease is when the body's immune system cannot recognize part of its self as self, and therefore responds to healthy cells and tissues as if they were harmful (allergies are distinct from autoimmune diseases, but are similar and the treatment tends to be similar as well). You can see why this is such an important trope for understanding the ways that protective systems in society can actually be harmful. Levi gives the example of the Patriot Act, but let's take another example, the invasion of Iraq. In this case America is attacked. There are any number of proper immune responses, but invading Iraq is certainly not one of them. This entails a fundamental confusion, unable to tell one set of Muslims apart from another set in much the same way our own immune system gets confused. And like any allergic or autoimmune response, this caused a great deal of harm. (And I think we can all see why this goes to the heart of questions of biopolitics, no?).
Now, my argument isn't against the importance of thinking about autoimmunity, but against the particular way that Derrida talks about these issues. There is a way for which the immune for Derrida slips so easily into the autoimmune. Thus, if you look at "Faith and Knowledge" where Derrida introduces this concept he repeats "once immunity and auto-immune" at least twice, and then goes on and argues:

But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity. (p. 81 and p. 82 in Acts of Religion).

And that is all true, and important, and unarguable against, and yet....
Yet, this doesn't provide a way to think the immune without it seeming to always slip into the autoimmune. And that worries me, it worries me that people will see every action of immunitary logic as autoimmunitary. The immune system is, well, important. While autoimmune disorders and allergies are important threats, only an idiot would get rid of their immune system in order to cure themselves of those threats. When I talked about Haraway's comments on the obsession with autoimmune diseases distracting us from global distributions of health and the problem of, say, parasites, I think this has important implications for the model of immune system for society. Think about the Zapatistas for a minute. They went to war against the Mexican government on January 1, 1994, the same day as NAFTA went into effect. If you read "A Storm and a Prophecy" neo-liberalism is expressed in exactly the terms of a parasite, set to destroy the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. The actions of the EZLN, including the early direct military actions, are understandable as an immunitary response to the parasites of neo-liberalism. If the figure of the immune system is going to be useful, then that means we need to be able to think both immunitary response and the threat of autoimmune diseases which is just one threat among others. If our fear of the autoimmune becomes hegemonic, then we will have trouble taking appropriate immunitary responses. This becomes all the more true, because it is the immune system that makes you feel bad. So, for example, many patients in late stage AIDS don't feel sick. Because the feeling of sickness comes from the immune system, not from those infections and cancers and parasites that are killing you. Thus, we end up with the issue of Immune Reconstitution Syndrome, where a person's immune system starts working again and paradoxically makes the patient feel much, much worse. The reactions of the immune system are both necessary and uncomfortable, at best. If this holds true socially (and indeed, that should be one of the questions for those eager to extend the logic of immunity to sociality) then there is already a great impetus for people to oppose the immune reactions. To always see them as dangerous and unnecessary.
Another note here, the hemoglobins that attack parasites are also the hemoglobins that are behind allergies. There is a theory that allergies are so much worse in the developed world because of the fact that parasites is a significantly less of a problem here, and therefore the bored hemoglobins engage in hyper-immune responses. I think the focus on autoimmunity in our social theory might also be a question of perspective, of a people that do not as directly feel the parasites.
So, I agree that autoimmune diseases are bad things, both socially and physically. But they aren't the only problem, and we need to be able to think immunity broadly and usefully. Otherwise, the insight of autoimmunity will become a bit like how Virno has characterized the concept of biopolitics:

my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

The last thing we need is for autoimmune to function that way. For every time we see an immunitary action we automatically assume it is an autoimmune response that needs to be avoided. Remember, it's never lupus.

The metalepsis of immunity and autoimmunity

Levi has a nice post in response to my post on Luhmann. It does a good job of explaining a bit more of the back ground on issues like risk, systems/environment, immunity, etc. However, it has also made me think that a longer post on immunity and autoimmunity might be needed over here.

For me, as well as for many other thinkers, the issues of biopolitics are bound up with the issues of immunity. For example, in Foucault we are given schematics of power that correlate to responses of disease. So, Foucault explains that responses to leprosy elucidate sovereign power, responses to plague elucidate disciplinary power, and responses to smallpox elucidate governmentality and biopower.[1] But something else emerges in Derrida[2] and in Esposito[3], rather than responses to certain diseases being models or instances of different logics of power, immunity becomes a way of thinking the social itself, a metaphor or map for community and violence. Esposito warns us that in Derrida's formulation of immunity, there seems to be no space (or only an infinitesimal space) between immunity and autoimmunity. I think this is why Esposito turns more and more to Luhmann, for whom immunity provides both a positive and negative influence on a system.
However, as Miller points out (after prompting from Mitchell) in For Derrida, autoimmunity is a "figure of a figure" (p. 124), or a metalepsis. What does that mean? Well, it means that the concept of immunity isn't particularly a natural one, but already a metaphor used to understand the way particular systems of our bodies work. In this case, I really suggest Donna Haraway's "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies"[4] and Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending. In Haraway's case you get an interesting story about the way certain discourses of the immune system work within the coordinates of a military-industrial complex. In Cohen you receive a longer work about how the very idea of immunity and self-defense (two different historical concepts, as Cohen points out) arise and go on to explain the notion of the way the body protects itself. This all means that certain societal arrangements became a figure for understanding the body, and that certain ways the body regulates itself has become a figure for understanding society.
This metalepsis of immunity is something we have to grapple with if we want to seriously understand the concept of immunity. This becomes all the more true if so much is suppose to depend on this issue of immunity; questions of killable and protected, of community and estrangement, of self and other.


[1] See Discipline and Punish and Abnormal for the first two examples. The smallpox example is in Security, Territory, Population.
[2] The major texts that Derrida deals with immunity are "Faith and Knowledge", in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and in Rogues [Thanks to Matt for reminding me]. Hagglund's Radical Atheism is rightly mentioned as a great source on this concept, but I also suggest J. Hillis Miller's For Derrida and W.J. Thomas Mitchell's "Picturing Terror".
[3] Esposito's notions on immunity is worked out in his trilogy Immunitas, Communitas, and Bios. Also in his most recent book, Third Person.
[4] Haraway's work provides a nice contrast to Derrida, as well. Derrida's concern is the way that immunity slips into auto-immunity, but Haraway's essay is provoked by the death of a close friend who died of AIDS (immuno-suppression, not autoimmunity). Also, she has an interesting footnote where she observes that obsession with autoimmunity seems to come at the cost of concerns over things like parasites, which leads us to not "take responsibility for the differences and inequalities of sickness globally." (p. 252, n. 2)

The biopolitics of Michael Pollan and Donna Haraway

Most of you, by now, have seen this blog, which asks the question, Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

This reminded me of some work on Michael Pollan I had been doing, most of the arguments having never made it on here (with this one exception). This time, however, I want us to turn toward a rather strange and discomforting shift in Michael Pollan's justification for meat eating. Once again I will focus on the condensed "An Animal's Place", mostly for cutting and pasting purposes, but also because shorter works can sometimes bring out contradictions more clearly than longer pieces. However, every move that Pollan makes in this essay is replicated in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

In "An Animal's Place," Pollan begins by advancing a rather strong critique of the factory farm. What has caused and allowed to continue the atrocities of the factory farm, according to Pollan, is a specific breakdown in the relationship between humans and animals. Let me quote Pollan:

Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.

What broke down between humans and animals is a face to face relationship (and here, I would like to wet your appetite for a future post on the ethics of Levinas, the problem of faciality in Deleuze and Guattari, and the question of this face to face relationship with animals), and if we want to have a way to eat animals ethically, we have to restore this face to face relationship. After this claim, Pollan's article spends several paragraphs explaining, primarily Peter Singer's, arguments for vegetarianism. After that we have Pollan's response as to why eating animals is ethically okay, even more, ethically superior to vegetarianism. The first reason is the rather bizarre political origin myth that Pollan lays out that I discussed in my previous post. This leads to his second, and more forceful point of the ethical superiority of eating animal flesh from non-factory farms. Again, let me quote Pollan:

Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of ''The Case for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?

First, let us put aside the question if nations, communities, and corporations make any sense in nature, as well. So, the problem with animal rights/animal liberation, according to Pollan, is that these doctrines turn us toward the individual or specific animal, and away from the animal as a species. This is a curious move, for not only does it seem to replace the face to face relationship that Pollan claimed as so central before (now the face of an individual pig must be replaced with the face of The Pig, pig in general), but it changes entirely the level by which we are to understand and answer ethical and political question. These questions have now been deplaced to the level of the population, to the level of the species. Michael Pollan goes on to contend that without humans eating animals, many domesticated species would die out. So, at the level of the population, we now have a moral imperative to eat and kill animals so that the population does not die. We have to kill in order to make life live (to steal a phrase from Michael Dillon and Julian Reid). It is the same as the old Vietnam military logic of having to destroy a village in order to save it. However, one might be willing to let Pollan off the hook. He isn't a trained philosopher, and he probably couldn't care less about the question of the biopolitical. Let us turn our attention, now, to someone who should know better.

Donna Haraway's book When Species Meet is a strange and frustrating book for anyone who is serious about questions of animal ethics. It also contains several remarkable similarities to Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma (my brother likes to point out that the books end in exactly the same way, with a bunch of professors roasting a pig in California). It is exactly to this pig roast I would now like to turn. Before turning there, I guess I should stay that until her recent turn to discuss animals, Donna Haraway was an essential and keystone philosopher for much of my early theory days. I even sent her a fanboy email once. And her earlier writing on animals still remains radical and exemplary. I still find her writing and style intoxicating. Even so, let us look at her position on flesh eating in the "parting bites" of WSM. She describes how her friend Gary Lease is a hunter who is incredibly concerned with hunting in ecologically sustainable ways. She further describes "[h]is approach is resolutely tuned to ecological discourses, and he seems tone deaf to the demands individual animals might make as ventriloquized in rights idioms" (pp. 296-297). Again, we see how a certain idea of ecology, an inherently biopolitical, makes us tone deaf to specific beings and is replaced simply by the population. Furthermore, it is a little weird to see Haraway accuse other of ventriloquy trick, considering in an earlier chapter she wrote from a first person perspective of a chicken, a chicken who is okay with being slaughtered, I might add. In her desire for a cosmopolitical moment, we are given to believe that the most important aspects of cosmopolitics is what occurs in the conversations of the professors and students at the dinner party where the roasted pig was served. Displaced at the very moment she insists that eating is centralized, is that eating itself is always a cosmopolitical moment. And while one may have a discussion that does not place one is a field of commitment, the act of eating always a partisan act. And if want to avoid the god-trick of transcendence, as see often argues, we have to understand that non-neutrality is the guarantee of non-transcendence. Only god gets to be neutral. The cosmopolitical moment does not occur when we set aside partisanship (and she so often seems to imply), but can only occur through partisanship. Lastly, the biopolitical movement by which we displace the singular animal for the animal-as-population has extreme importance for any possible cosmopolitics. It forfeits our ability to bring animals into this conversation. It forever exiles animals from agents in cosmopolitics, and rather rigs the game as a discussion among humans, while nearby the corpse of a being that should be central in this cosmopolitical discussion is slowly having its flesh burnt to (humanist) perfection(ism). What you chose to do in that moment matters. It isn't merely a random sentence in the a middle of a paragraph (she eats the flesh), but is the central premise by which the rest of the conversation can possibly occur. Any move that decentralizes your action is a biopolitical god-trick, no matter how many times you say it isn't.

Biopolitics and eurocentrism

Shaviro has a post about biopolitics over at his blog that I am sure will end up generating a lot of discussion. I won't be around for it, and because I am already on vacation (seriously) this will be a short post. Yes, I think the current theory of biopolitics is particularly eurocentric in most of its major incarnations (the French and Italian ones).
I don't find myself particularly invested in the word, biopolitics, but I certainly still find it a useful trope to think through and with. But for me, the question of biopolitics is the question of the politics of humanism.

However, the eurocentrism is something we clearly need to be weary of. Deleuze and Guattari were found of talking about a becoming-minoritarian without, actually, citing very many minorities. The process and practices of decoloniality are rich, and all of us could do to study it. Would it not be helpful, for example, to bring into dialogue the question of biopolitics with Anibal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" (which you can download here http://www.mediafire.com/?cwlaamiomrz )? Or perhaps by understanding the biopolitics of racism by thinking through the giddy multitude of colonial Virgina, and the racialized slavery practices that emerged as a way of separating and splintering the giddy multitude.

But with all that said, the questions of biopolitics seem central to me. That it to say, the questions of how we manipulate and control life, the politics of humanism, the distinction between zoe and bios, the distinction between phone and logos, the ways in which we construct a global linear thought that puts disposable populations on one side and others in a global green zone on the other, all of that falls under the rubric of biopolitics for me.

a very rough draft of a conference paper

This is a rough draft of a paper I am presenting in like a week. Any and all comments are encouraged. Remember this is very rough, full citations and all that is not in yet.


[I]t will eventually be necessary to reconsider the history of this law and to understand that although animals cannot be placed under concepts like citizen […], they are not for all that without a “right.”
- Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow…

I’d like to begin with a thought of digestion, for that is exactly what is at stake in this paper. I’d like to hear the word in its etymological valences, as that which is rooted in separating and arranging. At the same time that digestion is a method of separating and taking apart, it is also a process of assimilation, of how you take something in. Digestion is both separation and assimilation, and it is there that this paper you are about to take in takes place. I begin this way with every thought to the more physical digestion we will be taking place after this panel.
So digestion is a relationship, is a process that can only be conceived as a relationship of the most fundamental sort, what we take into ourselves, and also what we separate from ourselves. And these things are one and the same. So digestion isn’t just about assimilation, but also is about disavowal. I want us to look at this relation of disavowal to a particular place, to the disavowal that Derrida claimed to be the most fundamental disavowal of all. What I want to pay attention to is the disavowal of the animal inside of us, a phrase I want us to hear in its double meaning: Both the animal flesh that many of us digest, but also our very beings as animals.[1]
This relationship of disavowal to animals is, first of all, and most primary, organized by the ways in which we kill animals. I want to make this clear, the primary and fundamental way we relate to animals is the ways in which we kill them. In order to highlight this point, let me briefly cite some statistics that begin The Animal Studies Group’s Killing Animals. Over one billion animals are killed for leather worldwide every year. We kill animals for science and medicine, for recreation such as hunting and blood sports like dog fighting, for cosmetics, for fertilizer, for pet foods, and for jewelry and other forms of decoration. And none of that counts our indirect ways of killing animals by destroying their habitats, leaving out poisons, hitting them with cars, and killing them while harvesting crops. However, by far the most common way we directly kill animals is in the ways we consume them. ). For example, in the US, 45 millions turkeys are killed for thanksgiving, 6 billion broiler chickens are raised and killed every year, a hog sticker could cut as many as 1,100 throats an hour. I don’t know how to highlight for you that to kill animals is at least our most frequent if not also our most fundamental relationship. I also don’t know how to properly draw your attention to the horrors of particular kinds of relationships, of factory farms for example. Except maybe to let it go on without saying, knowing perfectly well that everyone here knows that factory farms are horrors and that our primary relationship to animals are death and disavowal.
Death and disavowal. This applies to the other animal inside of us as well, the animal that we are. Derrida, in discussions of the animal, referred to remarks made by Adorno about Kant, specifically that the animal in an idealist system plays the same role as the Jew in the fascist system.[2] Or as Adorno put it even more forcefully elsewhere, “Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”[3] Now, I don’t want you take Adorno to mean that somehow our current treatment of animals is ethically analogous to Auschwitz, this isn’t simply PETA’s old ad campaign of a Holocaust on your plate. Rather Adorno is making a different, more subtle and more convincing argument, about what allows fascism and Auschwitz to exist in the first place. It is because we hate, or to use Adorno’s word “insult”, the animal in ourselves and others that we, we as a society, are able to control and to kill. It isn’t enough to turn certain others into animals in our discourses, but we have take these others; these racialized, colonized, others; and make the animal we see in them an object of experimentation, an object of administration, and an object of slaughter. In order to prove this claim, I wish I could spend more time with story and story of the ways that we have first had to see the animal in those others before we could colonize, enslave, and/or kill the other. Hopefully two quick examples might suffice (recognizing the perpetual insufficiency to any number of examples at proving a point).
The first is brief note left to us from a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, Zalman Gradowski, “Forget your wife and children, your friends and acquaintances, forget the world you came from. Imagine that what you are seeing are not people, but despicable animals, animals which must be eliminated, for if not – your eyes will grow dim.”[4] Also, consider George Carrington, who recorded his travels in Northern Queensland, remark in 1871 that the Aborigine “has come to be considered in the light of a troublesome wild animal, to be shot and hunted down, whenever seen in open country.”[5] Surely, this last comment calls us to remember that Aristotle understood war to be an extension of hunting. As Aristotle claims in his Politics, “The art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just.”[6] For Aristotle we should hunt down wild beasts, and that logic extends to humans that refuse to be governed. Indeed, Carrington explains that this logic undergrids violence of British colonialism. It is here, in this double disavowal and death of the animal inside of us, that the lynchpin that holds the biopolitical and the thantopolitical together exists.
That last sentence begs a simple question: What do I mean by it? Indeed, biopolitics has come to be one of those words that seems to have lost specific meaning through a proliferation of often contradictory use, much like the words modernity and postmodernity. And yet, I, and it seems those on this panel, insist upon this word, and the thought of this word. So let us take a moment to hear this word, biopolitical.
Often accredited to Foucault, the word biopolitics was actually coined by the Swede, Rudolf Kjellén, in his 1916 book The State as Form of Life (Staten som Lifsform).[7] This is the same man that coined the term geopolitics. Kjellén's was one of the more prominent thinkers of a group of German language political theorists; including Friedrich Ratzel, Karl Haushofer, Karl Binding, Eberhard Dennert, and Edward Hahn. What ties these theorists together is first a belief in the organicist nature of the state (the state was a living entity for these thinkers) and the belief in lebensraum (living space). The term lebensraum, originally coined by biologist would get one of its most sustained treatments under Ratzel, who argued that the German people (the Volk) needed a living space. To acquire this living space the German state needed to be responsible for expansion, and also for cutting away the parasitic parts inside the state. Lebensraum is cited by Hitler directly in Mein Kampf, and forms the basis of much of National Socialism. Within this notion of Lebensraum we see the connection between Nazi's imperial ambition tied to its internal fascisms. Indeed, Lebensraum is a borderline concept, bringing inside and outside into a zone of indetermination. Kjellén radicalizes all of this, bringing geopolitics as being on the same level and totally co-terminus with ethnopolitics. One cannot have a geopolitical vision that is not simultaneously a vision of a particular people. Combined with the thoughts of the other thinkers mentioned earlier, the state, as a form of life, must protect itself. It must cut away the diseased parts, it must exterminate the parasites, it must do all these actions to guarantee its health as a state and the health of its people. This was biopolitics for Kjellén. And you can see this thought in Goebbels diary entry that stated: “We travel through the ghetto. We get out and observe everything in detail. It’s indescribable. These are not human beings any more, they are animals. Therefore, we have not a humanitarian task to perform, but a surgical one. One must cut here, in a radical way. Otherwise, one day, Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.”[8] So when I use the word biopolitics, I always want you to hear it in relation to these fundamental categories of fascism, racism, imperialism, and colonialism.
When Foucault introduced the term to a different set of readers in the 1970s, it was used to describe a period of a new category of power, of the binding together bio-power and anatamo-power. Biopolitics stitched together the disciplinary power over the individual body to a broader governmentality of the life and health of the population. If earlier versions of power rooted in sovereignty had the power to let live or make dead, than biopower’s supplement had the power to make live and let die. This concept of biopolitics would be picked up by many diverse thinkers, particularly several major Italian philosophers including Negri, Esposito, and Virno. And most influentially, at least in the Anglo-phone world, was the encounter of the concept of biopolitics with the work of Giorgio Agamben.
The term biopolitics emerges in Agamben’s work when it begins to take on a specifically political orientation with the Homo Sacer series and the works surrounding those books. The concept of biopolitics takes on a decidedly ontological character under Agamben, and is rooted in the political and legal thought of the Greeks and Romans through the present moment. Furthermore, biopolitics comes to be understood as nothing less than the relationship between two Aristotelian Greek terms, bios and zoe. Both are Greek words for life, preserved in such terms today as biology and zoo, zoe refers to unqualified life. The life held in common between the gods, humans, and animals. Bios, however, is qualified life, life that refers to only humans, specifically to the qualities of life that makes someone specifically human in the first place. There exists a zone of indistinction between bios and zoe, a fundamentally empty and kenomatic space, that allows us to constantly redraw the line between what counts as zoe and what counts as bios, between what counts as discardable life and what counts as life worth living. The metaphysical operator that constantly draws and redraws these lines is termed the anthropological machine. As Agamben put it, this machine “functions by excluding as not […] human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman in the human[.]”[9] It is here, in this play of bios and zoe, that I wish to bring up the question of human rights.
Agamben entitles one of the chapters of Homo Sacer “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” obviously mirroring the title of the Hannah Arendt chapter much of his commentary is devoted to, her title being “The Decline of the Nation-State and End of the Rights of Man.” Agamben is positing the strong relationship, indeed as he describes it a “secret solidarity”[10] , between the violence of the biopolitical on one hand, and the existence of the rights of man on the other. Agamben sees from the beginning, from the very title of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the entanglement of biopolitics and rights. The title itself seems to say a declaration of the rights of zoe and bios, and does the term Man subsume citizen, or the other way around? What is the relationship between man and citizen, and do we not find in this relationship those who are bearers of rights, and those who are not? Moreover, as soon as there was a declaration of rights, immediately there were commentaries and debates about who to include in the rights, and who to exclude: Were women bearers of rights? Children? Foreigners? This concept, of a bearer of rights known as a citizen becomes something completely different from the concept of a subject to sovereignty. If you were born in the lands of a sovereign, you were a subject. If you came into the lands of the sovereign you were a subject. All were subjects, and subjects equally. The concept of the citizen introduces entirely new questions, with entirely new logics: Who counts as a citizen? And if you don’t count as a citizen, what rights, if any, do we have to show you? We know introduce a logic of inclusive exclusion: What parts of the people are not really parts of the people? What parts of Man are not really men? These are the questions that are specific to the nation-state. Nation itself comes from nascere, meaning to be born. So from birth you are now immediately summoned into a biopolitical order, and these questions of the nation-state concern exactly the same sort of questions the Nazis were interested in. The Nazi slogan, Blut und Boden (blood and soil), is really just the apotheoses of the questions of the nation-state. We can see here in America that these questions are still very much a part of our culture in our recent presidential election. You cannot be President, that is to say the executive with the power to execute in both senses of the term, unless you are a naturally-born citizen. What does that mean? That means you have to be a citizen of either blood or soil. Therefore, the very concept of rights, including human rights, immediately, from birth, draws us into the logics of biopolitics. Those of us who wish to fight sovereign violence are implicated in this arcane pact if we insist upon the rhetoric and logic of rights to resist that violence. But what if there isn’t just a secret solidarity that Agamben proposes, but a secret genealogy of rights that stands to radically oppose the anthropological machine upon which the biopolitical is carried out? I speak here, of course, of animal rights.
There exists a wide-spread mistaken notion, even among otherwise brilliant scholars that I respect a lot, that animal rights represent merely an extension of human rights towards animals. For example, Rosi Braidotti’s opposition to animal rights is based almost entirely on here belief that rights are the domain of humanity, so demands for animal rights really are nothing more than a becoming-human.[11] This is, however, incorrect. Not only were their several French revolutionaries that also fought for animal rights, but also several prominent advocates for human rights, like Thomas Paine, who were advocates for animal rights and welfare.[12] However, it goes farther than that, and I’d like to turn towards Hannah Arendt’s “The Decline of the Nation-State and the Ends of the Rights of Man” in her Origins of Totalitarianism that we mentioned earlier. In her discussion of why a more generalized human rights were unable to supported before WWII, she makes this claim: "Even worse was that all societies formed for the protection of the Rights of Man, all attempts to arrive at a new bill of human rights were sponsored by marginal figures-- by a few international jurists without political experience or professional philanthropists supported by uncertain sentiments of professional idealists. The groups they formed, the declarations they issued, showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. No statesman, no political figure of any importance could possibly take them seriously[.]"[13] And that seems, on the whole, to be a true statement. Many of the groups that supported human rights, especially those that fought for the rights of children, were originally groups organized around fighting for animals. Here in the United States, for example, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Towards Animals. He also was the first person to prosecute a case of child abuse, and founded the societies for the prevention of cruelty towards children, the first such societies here in the US. And we could go on and on, seeing similar histories of the Royal SPCA, of Dutch animal rights groups, and more. A full scholarly history awaits to be written fully connecting the ways in which animal rights groups and human rights groups have cross-created each other. But from a philosophical and political stand-point, some conclusions can be drawn.
That animal rights groups would support human rights, particularly those humans like children who are most excluded from the political order, makes sense. Animal rights already represents a valorization of zoe, a refusal to insult the animal, even the animal inside of us. Animal rights doesn’t just stop there, but radically brings into question all the assumptions of duties, obligations, and citizenship that normally come with rights. Derrida has repeatedly recognized that the notion of animal rights would force us to rethink those categories of duties and obligations that since Kant has come with the notion of rights.[14] If we are to keep human rights, we must see them, if not as an extension, at least fundamentally rooted and co-evolved with animal rights. Human rights cannot become another category by which we get to define the human, and determine that those that violate human rights are now somehow outside of humanity. Rather, human rights must be seen as a continued affirmation of the zoe; as a refusal to continue to operate the anthropological machine. I cannot then affirm a certain set of declarations, however interesting, but rather the most minimal, and yet, most profound right. The same right that Hannah Arendt could bring herself to recognize, a right to have rights. It is only then, when all zoe has a right to have rights, that we can end this death and disavowal.

[1] I want to therefore distinguish myself from certain arguments for vegetarianism that takes as its foundation human exceptionalism.
[2] See specifically The Animal That Therefore I Am pp. 100-105. For other references to this passage from Adorno, also see “Fichus” in Paper Machine and “Violence Against Animals” in For What Tomorrow….
[3] As quoted in Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka. P. 53
[4] From Gradowski’s “Writings” in The Scrolls of Auschwitz, p. 175.
[5] Cited in Alison Palmer Colonial Genocide, p. 44
[6] Politics, book I, Ch. 8.
[7] Much of my understanding of the historical nature of the word biopolitics comes from Roberto Esposito’s Bios, see especially pp. 13-24
[8] Cited in Dan Stone’s “The Holocaust and ‘The Human’”, in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History,, p. 239
[9] Agamben, The Open, p. 37.
[10] Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 133.
[11] See Braidotti, Transposistions, particularly pp. 106-112.
[12]For at least some of this history, see Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution.
[13] Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 289, 1954 edition. Emphasis added.
[14] For one example, see the epigraph of this paper.

On two thoughts of posthumanism

This post was inspired by a couple of different things, mainly a few conversations with my brother, and this article which argues that transhumanism has a moral imperative to 'uplift' non-human animals as well as humans. http://jetpress.org/v18/dvorsky.htm
The conversation with my brother had to deal with the problem of saying you study something called posthumanism (like Cary Wolfe does) when you study critical animal studies.
So here is an email I wrote to my brother with some of my thoughts on these issues:
"So you know how we discussed before that there is a certain tension (we can be hip and academic and refer to it as a libidinal economy) between different figurations of the cyborg. So in Haraway there is a desire to bring us back into this world. To make sure we don't engage in either nostalgia or escapist fantasies of being goddesses. She wants to engage in a critique of science and technology that falls into none of the agrarian fascism that pervades Heidegger's kritik of technics. On the other hand you have someone like Stelarc (or like the original meaning of cyborg) and it is obvious that figuration is about a desire for transcendence. That is about a desire for immortality, a desire for leaving community and also for exploring space and completely cutting ourselves off from the earth and the flesh.
This second desire, which often goes by the name transhumanism as much as posthumanism, seems to affirm techne over physis. But more importantly, it seems to affirm bios over zoe. It is dedicated to a human power to utilize techne to destroy the zoe. To make us into pure bios and exterminate the zoe. In this case transhumanism isn't at all a posthumanism, it is rather humanism on speed, terminator humanism, hyperdrive humanism. You get the drift."

outline of my field paper I am writing. Any and all feedback welcomed.

Outline

Critical Animal:
Biopolitics and the Common.

The agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other.

- Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

Section I: Introduction.

Besides wanting to introduce the ground by which the rest of the paper will take place, the biopolitical and the common, I will also want to affirm my concern for animals, as such. Concerning most of the rest of the paper could be argued from a perspective that really only cares about humans, I want to make sure that from the beginning I am committed to ending the slaughter of animals.

Section II: Remnants of Animals: An Ontology of the Damned

1. A Brief History of Biopolitics.

Begin with a brief history of the word, biopolitics. First coined by Rudolf Kjellén, in his 1916 book Staten som Lifsform (The State as Form of Life). Trace the word’s connection to the concept of lebensraum (living-space), and the naturalization of the state that blurs the inside of the state and the outside of the state, demanding both colonialism and a cutting away of the internal parasites of the state. This thought will achieve its fullest theoretical reflection in the 1920s work Staatsbiologie: Anatomie, Phisiologie, Pathologie des Staates by Jakob von Uexkull. (Uexkull’s importance for understanding animals pervades the work by Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, and Agamben). Trace this to Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical as a consent unresolved dialectic between life and politics. Explain how this dialectic plays out in the concept of biohistory (in history of sexuality) and the racial history (in Society Must Be Defended). End with the notion of the thantopolitical.

2. Metaphysical Machines

Explain Agamben’s proliferation of metaphysical machines in his work. Focus on two machines, the state of exception and the anthropological machine (which are the primary machines behind sovereignty and biopolitics, respectively). Despite criticisms to the contrary, both of these machines have not just an ontological make-up, but also a historical and genealogical character. Both machines also operate in very similar ways. Both are fundamentally kenomatic and empty, both work not by producing positive content, but rather by producing a zone of indetermination. Indeed, both simultaneously produce caesuras that force things to be considered either one or the other (legal or illegal, human or animal), while at the same time making sure that there is no way to every truly know what is what. Everything is potentially illegal, everyone is potentially an animal. Explain the precise characteristics of these two machines. Lastly, Agamben’s answer to these machines are the same well, render them inoperative through study.

3. The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon

We can observe the full nature of sovereign power and biopolitics meeting in the annual American ritual of the Thanksgiving Turkey pardon. Fiskesjo invites us to view this ritual in a critical way, but does not take it to its full radical conclusions. First of all we have displayed before us an act of pardoning, which is always a temporal miracle given to the sovereign. But the pardon is also the moment in which we see starkly the power to make dead or let live. At the same time, of what crime is the thanksgiving turkey guilty of? Indeed, the turkeys, genetically modified, seldom live out the year. In this production of life, we also have the full display of the biopolitical power, the power to make live and let die. We have here the co-terminus nature of sovereign power and biopolitics, which results in a thantopolitics.

4. A Fabrication of Corpses

It is now almost a cliché, following the analysis of the Agamben and Foucault, that the death camps of the Nazis represent one of the most profound moments of the meeting of sovereign power and biopolitics. Of course, what makes this so? Why the death camps, as opposed to other sources of state violence and death? Perhaps an answer is found in Arendt’s concept of the fabrication of corpses. To paraphrase her, it was not just who was killed, or how many, but the manner, the fabrication of corpses and so on. However, the death camps did not appear out of thin air. They were rooted in the practices, still relatively new, of factory farming. Models like the Chicago meat packing industry were used in designing the functioning of the death camps. While Arendt came to understand that genocide operated as an inverted murder; instead of concealing the identity of the killer, the purpose of the genocide is to wipe away forever the identity of the victim; the propose of factory farming is always to leave behind remnants of animals.

5. Dying Without Death.

Arendt wasn’t the only one to use the phrase fabrication of corpses; Heidegger did as well in his discussion of man-made mass death. What emerges in his discussion is his argument that the victims of man-made mass death certainly were killed, they did not experience death. He reveals that his real horror of the death camps was that humans became just like animals, unable to experience their own death. This is the first lesson of the ontology of the damned; the damned do not die. They cease living, but the damned do not die. Not death that is recognized in any way we have come to understand death. Neither meaningful nor mourningful, the damned experience a death that is not death.

6. Living Without Life.

The production of life itself, that is at the heart of factory farming, is haunted by its lack of actual life. Many of the animals breed to die are no longer capable of life. Much like the thanksgiving turkey, their bodies cannot sustain life in the long term. This is the second lesson of the ontology of the damned, living without life. A biopolitical production of life that lives until they are let to die. Animals in factory farms most fully embody what Wyschogrod terms a death-world; alive, but with no life-world.

7. Living Dead, Deading Life, and the Ontology of the Damned.

Contemporary theory is obsessed with figurations of the living dead. Specters, ghosts, musselmen, zombies, vampires; these are all figures of something that should be dead but for some reason remain alive. They are one figuration of the damned. The animals of the factory farm are something else entirely. They are the deading life, those that alive but somehow already dead. They are the perfection of the thantopolitical, and the basis of which contemporary productions of the damned depend.

Section III: The Closed: An Ontology of the Common

1. Animal’s Poverty

Heidegger proposed that while humans are world-forming, animals are fundamentally poor in the world. Explain what this means. Point out at the end that Heidegger explains the poverty with a play of words all rooted in nem. Animals are captivated by the world, whereas humans are able to capture the world. In all these plays (being captured by the world, or being able to capture the world) is all played out in words whose root is nem, and nem is rooted in nomos.

2. Schmitt’s Nomos

Explain Schmitt’s concept of the nomos as simultaneous production, distribution, and fundamentally land acquisition. Explain how this is for Schmitt the root of concrete economic and political existence. Also, explain how Deleuze and Guattari’s apparatus of capture depends on a fundamentally similar process. End with Schmitt’s connection of Nomos to the name.

3. A Brief History of the Person

Follow Mauss’ concept of the person. The person is historically rooted in rituals of owning and acquiring things. Indeed, it is only through rituals of owning things that we are able to become a person, acquire a name. Mention that the turkeys pardoned are always given a name.

4. Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomos

Contrast their nomos with Schmitt’s. Explain their nomos as rooted in a refusal to acquire land in the same way that Schmitt understands land acquisition. Their nomos is the nomos of the nomad, who functions much like Schmitt’s pirate. Indeed, the nomad even sees the land as if it is the ocean. This nomos belongs to nomands, it belongs to animals.

5. Poverty and Opportunism.

The poverty of the animal is one that refuses the transcendental. The animal always is stuck not in the humans world, but the haptic environment. The animal therefore is always rooted in a place of opportunism.

6. Becoming-animal, becoming-anonymous.

Section IV: Conclusion.