Contemporary Extinctions and Multispecies Thanatopolitics

João Aldeia
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Abstract

Contrary to what Foucault argued, modern biopolitics is inherently thanatopolitical, i.e., it is a politics of life premised on a politics of death. This becomes clear when non-human elements are given greater relevance than Foucault afforded them. Since the reproduction of life results from interdependencies between species and abiotic elements, multispecies relations are at the core of ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’. In modernity, biopolitical interventions in what Foucault defines as the milieu are intended to foster the lives of (certain) human populations, while they are also premised on killing non-human species. This occurs whether these species are needed to make humans live (e.g., as food) or whether they oppose the goal of fostering the lives of human populations (e.g., as pests or weeds). The ongoing proliferation and acceleration of the extinction of non-human species is one of the extreme manifestations of this thanatopolitical drive of biopolitics, showing that biopolitics promotes death to the point of eliminating entities and relationships on which the reproduction of life depends, which makes it increasingly difficult to keep intervening with the goal to ‘make live’.
当代物种灭绝与多物种灭绝政治
与福柯的论点相反,现代生物政治学本质上是一种非政治学,即它是一种以死亡政治为前提的生命政治。当非人类因素被赋予比福柯所赋予的更大的相关性时,这一点就变得很清楚了。由于生命的繁衍源于物种与非生物要素之间的相互依存关系,多物种关系是 "促进生命或禁止生命以至于死亡的权力 "的核心。在现代性中,对福柯所定义的环境进行生物政治干预的目的是促进(某些)人类群体的生命,同时也以杀戮非人类物种为前提。无论这些物种是人类赖以生存的必需品(如作为食物),还是与促进人类生活的目标相悖(如作为害虫或杂草),都会发生这种情况。非人类物种的不断增加和加速灭绝是生物政治的这种 "比政治 "驱动力的极端表现之一,表明生物政治促进死亡,以至于消灭了生命繁衍所依赖的实体和关系,这使得以 "使人类生存 "为目标的干预变得越来越困难。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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