Zoopower

Abstract

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida follows Jeremy Bentham in displacing reason in favour of suffering as the key question in thinking about animals. Derrida’s stress on this ‘nonpower at the heart of power’ is typically taken as foregrounding a compassionate ethics in the face of the vulnerable (animal) other, an interpretation which has been given a political inflection in recent work on animals in biopolitics (Cary Wolfe). By contrast, this chapter proposes a radically different reading of this move with the aim of speculating on a concept of ‘power’ appropriate to identifying and analysing the arenas, operations and stakes of an alternative ‘zoopolitics’. Engaging power as originarily divided and delayed, referred and relayed, Derrida’s account of ‘nonpower’ not only speaks in useful ways to Foucault’s account of ‘productive power’ and his proposals for a ‘microphysics of power’ but, when read alongside Derrida’s work on ‘sovereignty’ (Rogues, The Beast and the Sovereign), also opens the path to a novel account of animal ‘ipseity. The chapter then explores the animal-existential implications of thinking power in this way by reinterpreting a range of zoopolitical scenes discussed by Donna Haraway, Dominique Lestel, Jocelyn Porcher and Vinciane Despret.