Kalpana Rahita Seshadri: HumAnimal: race, law, language

Abstract

We recall Jacques Derrida’s critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework from Seminar Twelve of The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume 1: ‘‘I don’t believe, for example, that the distinction between bios and zōē is a reliable and effective instrument, sufficiently sharp and, to use Agamben’s language, which is not mine here, sufficiently deep to get to the depth of this ‘[so-called] founding event’’’ (Derrida 2009, 326). This is a crucial element in Derrida’s critique of Agamben’s work on bio-politics. However for Kalpana Rahita Seshadri this critique needs to be subdued and reimagined in order to show how Derrida’s thinking itself underpins Agamben’s work on bio-politics. For as much as Derrida lambasts Agamben’s binary separation of bios and zōē, Seshadri’s HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language posits that a Derridean notion connects these two concepts, thus allowing Agamben to highlight and resist the ‘bare life’ resulting from bio-political mechanisms. Seshadri’s vibrant and lucid book (published in the University of Minnesota Press’ Posthumanities series) begins by setting out the risk in her thesis. In attempting ‘‘to discern the prevalence of what can be termed nonsovereign power, a power without right, as that which empties the legitimized power of disciplines and law (moral and juridical)’’ the risk which Seshadri faces is that she conceptualizes this ‘‘nonsovereign power’’ as ‘‘the temporal spacing that is constitutive of all named identities—what Derrida indicates as the ‘trace’ or the play of differance—thereby