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From Renaissance Ferinity to the Biopolitics of the Animal-Man: Animality as Political Battlefield in the Anthropocene

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Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series ((PMAES))

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Abstract

How did the Italian philosophical-political tradition think animality, sometimes in the trail of the great Western political thought, sometimes opening the track itself? Focusing on the political philosophical discourse, this chapter highlights the pivotal importance that animal figures—mute yet powerful—have had in the devices of power for a long time, from Machiavelli to Vico up to positivism and sociobiology: both as a surplus exceeding the language on which humanist anthropology is based and as a mark of a power installed on the objectification of the body and its governability. Moving from this double ambivalent marker, animality becomes more and more a figure of immanence, in the trail of a Deleuzian reading of Foucault, which captures the material space of the multitude’s biopower.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term Anthropocene was coined by Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s. See also Will Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, and McNeill (2011) and Latour, Stengers, Tsing, and Bubandt (2018).

  2. 2.

    The main philosophical reference is still Deleuze; see also Braidotti (2002).

  3. 3.

    Already the Greeks considered banausic workers noncitizens ; Arendt (1958: 79ff) qualifies them as animal laborans.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Laura Bazzicalupo

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  1. Laura Bazzicalupo
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Calabria, Arcavacata di Rende, Italy

    Felice Cimatti

  2. Messerli Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

    Carlo Salzani

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Bazzicalupo, L. (2020). From Renaissance Ferinity to the Biopolitics of the Animal-Man: Animality as Political Battlefield in the Anthropocene. In: Cimatti, F., Salzani, C. (eds) Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9_13

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