What Animals Teach Us about Politics

Abstract

In What Animals Teach Us about Politics , Brian Massumi takes up question of the animal. By treating human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of primitive state of nature and accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of mutual inclusion. Massumi finds conceptual resources for this logic in work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, theory of play, and thought of Alfred North Whitehead.