More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power

Abstract

This article unravels the processes of abjection that render certain nonhumans as abject, devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. It argues that these processes play a constitutive role in practices of state-making and sovereign power. Abjection works towards the exclusion and rejection of certain parts of a supposed socio-material order, which, for one reason or another, confuse dominant categorizations, trespass certain spatial boundaries or challenge socially produced distinctions and hierarchies (Bataille, 1970 [1934]; Kristeva, 1982). Abjected nonhumans thus regularly become the target of state-induced practices of elimination and culling – as is the case, for instance, with species classified as ‘invasive’, as ‘pests’, as ‘biosecurity threat’ or as ‘disease reservoirs’. Yet, abjection also points to the ability of nonhumans to unsettle, challenge and confuse dominant boundaries and established orders. Abject beings inhabit “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) from which they challenge and transcend sovereign impulses to order, govern and eliminate their existence. Taking cue from previous works on abjection and sovereign power, on the one hand, and works on the role of nonhumans in political processes, on the other, I argue that abjection and state-making are not only intertwined but also crucially played out in relation to nonhuman forms of life and death. My wider conceptual aim is to illustrate what an engagement with processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of more-than-human political geographies.