Solidarity Between Species

Living with Animals Exposed to Pandemic Viruses

Frédéric Keck author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Publishing:14th Mar '25

£55.00

This title is due to be published on 14th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Solidarity Between Species cover

This book examines how the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a biopolitical crisis, taking into account a fact often overlooked by commentators: Covid-19 is a zoonosis, i.e. a disease transmissible between animal species. The Sars-Cov2 virus causing this respiratory disease circulated in bats before passing to humans under as yet mysterious conditions, and it was transmitted from humans to other species, notably mink and deer.

Building on Michel Foucault’s revival of the term ‘biopolitics’ and related notions (disciplinary power, pastoral power, cynegetic power), this book traces a set of public health measures taken over the last two centuries to control epidemics. It underlines how the need to conserve virus strains in order to identify and anticipate their mutations has given rise to cryopolitics, i.e. a set of techniques aimed at suspending the living in order to defer death. The book then questions the emancipatory scope of this cryopolitics by examining interspecies solidarity built by the warning signals sent by animals to humans about coming threats, be they pandemics, natural disasters or climate change. By blurring the boundaries between the wild and the domestic resulting from the process of domestication, the politics of zoonoses relies on sentinels who preserve the memory of signs from the past to prepare living beings for future threats by involving them in a common ideal.

ISBN: 9781509566877

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

224 pages