Zoopolitics

Patrick Llored, Matthew Chrulew, Brett Buchanan

SubStance, Volume 43, Number 2, 2014 (Issue 134), pp. 115-123 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2014.0018

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Zoopolitics1
Patrick Llored

We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Der-

rida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political
modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the
animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human
[le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rational animal,
in opposition to the animal that would be neither political nor rational.
It must, however, be noted right away that despite what might be called
the animalistic tropism of Derridean deconstruction, it does not include
a thesis maintaining the continuity between human and animal. If it is
unquestionable that deconstruction refrains from making animality play
a secondary or peripheral role in reflection on the political, and if it is also
true that animality is in no way, with Derrida, the pretext for an inquiry
concerning what distinguishes, in actually quite a traditional way, human
from animal, then animality can no longer be for him the concept that it has
always been, at heart, beckoning toward the establishment and institution
of a border between the two, but rather one that comes to blur, to rework
and accordingly to complexify the limits between them.
Thus nothing would be more mistaken than to think that the phar-
macological blurring of borders would lead to an indistinction between
the different forms of manifestation of animality as they are embodied in
human and beast. Deconstruction is in no way a naturalism that would
establish a zone of continuity between all living beings, precisely because
it makes animality a problematic concept that aims to deepen and multiply
as much as possible the borders between human and animal, by carrying
this gesture rightly to its ultimate consequences. It rests on the radical
refusal of a single indivisible limit between the human and the animal ac-
cording to the Western metaphysical tradition that has sanctioned it. Der-
rida calls into question the existence of a single limit between the human
and the animal to show that there are many that do not necessarily pass
through the humanity-animality distinction. The belief that there could
be a single and indivisible limit between human and nonhuman living
beings is the most violent prejudice in the field of animal philosophy. All
animal life is the outcome of a multitude of differences that are in no way
reducible to a homogenous category that would include a certain number
of characteristics shared by all animals, or that they would otherwise lack;
this violent reduction of forms of animal life to the category of animal is a

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2014

SubStance #134, Vol. 43, no. 2, 2014 115
116 Patrick Llored

metaphysical illusion that aims only to institute the caesura between the
two living beings. Might we go so far as to say that the belief in this limit is
precisely what is at the origin of the concepts of human and animal? That
every idea of a limit creates a dualism between two realities thought of as
totally opposed? That the limit is the institution par excellence of violence?
The refusal of all metaphysical dualism leads Derrida to elaborate a
set of concepts aiming to emphasize the radical difference, the abyss that
opens between living beings, without settling there comfortably but by
making sure to disarticulate the play of differences, to desediment it, to
dismantle it so as to understand what it hides and represses. Unquestion-
ably, in this large-scale philosophical operation there is a total upheaval of
perspective that radically transforms the question of nonhuman life as it
has been thought in the humanist tradition but also the anti-humanist—a
conceptual revolution that finds its ultimate clarification in the concept
of “différance,” which structures deconstruction and which gives it its
primary meaning in close relation with the problem of animality, as Der-
rida writes:
What is universalizable about differance with regard to differences is
that it allows one to think the process of differentiation beyond every
kind of limit: whether it is a matter of cultural, national, linguistic, or
even human limits. There is differance (with an “a”) as soon as there is
a living trace, a relation of life/death or presence/absence. This became
linked for me very early on with the immense problematic of animality.
There is differance (with an “a”) as soon as there is something living
[du vivant], as soon as there is something of a trace [de la trace], across
and despite all the limits that the strongest philosophical or cultural
tradition thought it could recognize between “man” and “animal.”
(Derrida and Roudinesco 21)
The concept of zoopolitics that we are going to define makes sense
only in relation to that difference which aims to think together, although
discontinuously, the analogical relationship between human and animal,
so as to avoid two pitfalls that are, respectively, the reduction of sover-
eignty to bestiality, and the reduction of the latter to an outline of political
life, insofar as these two options are bound to a form of anthropocentrism:
We should never be content to say, in spite of temptations, something
like: the social, the political, and in them the value or exercise of sover-
eignty are merely disguised manifestations of animal force, or conflicts
of pure force, the truth of which is given to us by zoology, that is to say
at bottom bestiality or barbarity or inhuman cruelty. […] We could also
invert the sense of the analogy and recognize, on the contrary, not that
political man is still animal but that the animal is already political, and
exhibit, as is easy to do, in many examples of what are called animal
societies, the appearance of refined, complicated organizations, with
hierarchical structures, attributes of authority and power, phenomena
of symbolic credit, so many things that are so often attributed to and
so naively reserved for so-called human culture, in opposition to nature.
(B&S I 14-15)

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Derridean deconstruction rests on the refusal to reduce the political,

the social and especially what it calls the “value of sovereignty” to a mani-
festation of animal force, for which zoology would give the interpretive
truth. On the contrary, it is by avoiding all biologism that one can acquire
the means to think this profound analogy between zoological animality
and political sovereignty, since no naturalistic or biological interpretation
is able to explain the concept or value of sovereignty. Derridean zoopolitics
aims to recognize the radical specificity of modern politics by uncovering
the violence proper to sovereignty as not being of the “animal” or “bes-
tial” type—that is to say, as irreducible to any biological model. Recipro-
cally, animality or bestiality can no longer find any meaning through a
political interpretation. One would only in this way condone an inverse
anthropocentrism under the pretense of recognizing a political dignity
in animality itself. Neither of these two anthropocentric models can be
defended, in the eyes of Derrida, who always emphasizes the porosity that
exists between “nature” and “culture”—the fragility of this limit aiming
to establish a superficial difference between “nature” and “animality”
on one hand, and between “culture” and “sovereignty” on the other. It is
really rather important to problematize the analogy between these two
concepts, or these two series of concepts, that are not complementary, but
that demand to be thought according to a logic of the supplement—that is,
according to a pharmacological interpretation from which this Derridean
animal philosophy derives, in our view, all its originality.

The Pharmacological Analogy

between the Beast and the Sovereign as Zoopolitical Empire
In the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida does not merely
analyze in detail the political bestiary of the major thinkers of modern
politics, but seeks also to show that one can not understand the major
issues and the major political problems of today (relating to the state,
the republic, war, peace, law, right, etc.) without taking into account the
figure of the animal as it takes shape among the thinkers of sovereignty
(Grotius, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Rousseau, etc.). This is so much the case
that one may well consider the philosophies of political sovereignty as
essentially philosophies of animality in politics, stemming from what the
political makes of the animal—whether it be, in the end, a real animal or a
fabled one. Derrida thus brings to light an analogy, which literally obsesses
the political, linking the human and the animal. The major question that
Derrida then asks is why Western philosophy has always thought the
political by inscribing it in a problematic that gives an ambivalent place
to the animal, and why it has always sought at the same time to make the
political the proper of the human:

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118 Patrick Llored

this insistent “analogy,” this multiple and overdetermined analogy

that, as we shall see, through so many figures, now brings man close to
the animal, inscribing them both in a relation of proportion, and now
brings man and animal close in order to oppose them: heterogeneity,
disproportion between the authentic homo politicus and the apparently
political animal, the sovereign and the strongest animal, etc. Of course,
the word “analogy” designates for us the place of a question rather than
that of an answer. However one understands the word, an analogy is
always a reason, a logos, a reasoning. or even a calculus that moves back
up toward a relation of production, or resemblance, or comparability
in which identity and difference coexist. (B&S I 14)
It is precisely this “multiple and overdetermined analogy” that
needs to be deconstructed in order to reveal what it arbitrarily conceals,
and by which it makes possible the denial of the violence perpetrated
against the animal. More precisely, this analogy is worth deconstructing
since it contains within itself a reason (in the sense of calculation) allow-
ing it to establish a comparison between human and animal, and more
precisely between the sovereign and the animal, from whence will emerge
the determination of a proper of the human capable of drawing a border
between these two living beings. The analogy thus always functions in
a self-interested way—that is to say, for the sole benefit of the human or
the sovereign. It is, says Derrida, the commonplace of modern political
thought.
What emerges from the deconstruction of this analogy between the
beast and the sovereign in Derridean philosophy, which is, principally,
an animal ethic? How does its deconstructive interpretation enable one to
understand the originality of the concept of zoopolitics as it is thought by
Derrida? The main suggestion that he advances is that the major concept of
modern politics—namely that of sovereignty—is actually inseparable from
a metaphysical thesis regarding animality—the animality of the human
just as well as that of the animal, the one unable to be elaborated without
the other. However, this thesis is far from being unequivocal, since its
meaning is elaborated, so to speak, under a pharmacological regime—that
is, through reciprocal contamination of the concepts of sovereignty and
animality. Despite the fact that sovereignty is conceived and produced on
the basis of a violent exclusion of its field and its mode of existence, animal-
ity comes precisely to contaminate the concept itself, which would like to
be pure and autonomous, in the manner of the Platonic logos, but which
paradoxically cannot exist outside of this contamination. This permanent
contamination of sovereignty by animality explains why sovereignty as
we know it today still cannot survive in a pharmacological regime without
referring to animality or, more essentially still, without grappling with
this reference to a nonhuman living being that serves, simultaneously and
inseparably, as both anti-model and absolute model. In other words, for

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sovereignty there has never been any other reference for taking place and
instituting itself than that which beckons toward animality.
It’s as though the danger of sovereignty’s contamination by animality
were giving rise to a paradoxical relationship of one toward the other. This
contaminating structure, in which sovereignty is led to think its relation
to animality makes nonhuman living beings a veritable virus within this
concept, is deconstructed from within according to an autoimmunitary
process described thus by Derrida:
The forces that are thus inhibited continue to maintain a certain disorder,
some potential incoherence, and some heterogeneity in the organization
of the theses. They introduce parasitism into it, and clandestinity, ven-
triloquism, and, above all, a general tone of denial, which one can learn
to perceive by exercising one’s ear or one’s eye on it. (On the Name 121)
Whence the massive and paradoxical thesis that Derrida defends,
according to which zoopolitics has always placed the animal in its stra-
tegic centre, but in the manner of a residue, without which it could not
exist. In the pharmacological optic of Derridean inspiration in which we
place ourselves, zoopolitics signifies the impossibility of excluding the
animal on which it depends, and from which proceeds the extreme vio-
lence turned against what sovereignty, as the foundation of zoopolitics,
is capable neither of digesting, nor therefore of thinking:
among all the questions that we shall have to unfold […] there would,
then, be this figuration of man as “political animal” or “political be-
ing,” but also a double and contradictory figuration (and figuration is
always the beginning of a fabulation or an affabulation), the double and
contradictory figuration of political man as on the one hand superior, in
his very sovereignty, to the beast that he masters, enslaves, dominates,
domesticates, or kills, so that his sovereignty consists in raising himself
above the animal and appropriating it, having its life at his disposal,
but on the other hand (contradictorily) a figuration of the political man,
and especially of the sovereign state as animality, or even as bestiality
(we shall also distinguish between these two values), either a normal
bestiality or a monstrous bestiality itself mythological and fabulous.
Political man as superior to animality and political man as animality.
(B&S I 26)
There is therefore at the heart of sovereignty a constant viral threat
that makes it at once a force thinking of itself as superior to animality, a
force that only exists by keeping the animal at a distance in the name of
a proper of the human, which is actually an exclusion of the animal from
the community of the living; and an intrinsic autoimmunitary force, which
contaminates its own organization since it cannot avoid thinking of itself
as animality or bestiality in order to exist. Sovereignty is therefore doubly
haunted by the problem of animality, first since it appropriates the life
of the animal in the very name of this sovereignty, as incarnation and as
privilege of a proper of the human that is established in this distancing

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from the beast; and second since it cannot think of itself other than as
animality or even bestiality—that is, as the institution having a monopoly
on physical and symbolic violence against all the living beings that it
subjects and whose lives it constantly appropriates. For sovereignty to
exist, it must appropriate the lives of nonhuman living beings: this could
well be the sole definition of zoopolitics.
Sovereignty is deeply shaped by this political pharmacology, made
up of both a control over animality in all its forms and of an identifica-
tion with it. It is in the name of this animality that inhabits and haunts
it—an animality seen as the other side of humanity against which it is
invented and constituted, from which it must absolutely distinguish and
differentiate itself—but also in the name of an animality understood as
the reign of pure force, withheld from any law that would serve as its
model, that sovereignty legitimizes itself, giving itself a right, a positive
right, that gathers and focuses within itself this double and ambivalent
origin. Such is the logic of the pharmakon that feeds in depth and to the
smallest detail this zoopolitics, which secretes from itself—following a
principle of self-contamination—a legitimate and legal violence that it
will always claim is not the pure reign of brute force—all while working
unconsciously to inscribe it in the form of a trace in its very functioning.
This is why there is a violence intrinsic to sovereignty, based on this
domination of all animals, whose lives it appropriates by killing them,
and on the monopoly on violence maintained, organized and legalized
by the mere fact of its existence. Current law, more than ever, is caught in
this logic that defines zoopolitical modernity, in which the animal and the
beast are involved both in the mode of exclusion (whence their political
sacrifice) and of inclusion (whence their carnivorous sacrifice that diffuses
into the unconscious of the subjects themselves).

The Sick Animals of Sovereignty

The very logic of sovereignty requires placing the sovereign outside
the law, this law that it has itself established; it requires that the sovereign
be in a position outside the law in order to exercise its power, by making
its existence somehow subjected to a logic of exception. This results in the
identification of the sovereign with the beast, and this feeds its obsession
for it. The sovereign, as a living being that by its very nature exists outside
the law, will paradoxically, and according to a political pharmacology
that characterizes zoopolitics, move closer to the beast that is fantasized
as a living being unable to inscribe its existence in the framework of the
law, as if it escaped the very idea of law. The ultimate consequence of
this, and perhaps the most fundamental of all for the question of the
animal, is that the invention of political sovereignty will produce three

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forms of absolute power that exist only in a position of exteriority with

respect to the law, and that derive their existence in connection with this
position of exception: the sovereign, God, and the animal, thought here
as the bestialization of the very being of the living being excluded from
the political community. Sovereignty, divinity, and bestiality thus form
a triadic structure with paradoxical effects, which determine the place
given to the animal in current politics and law.
If as a result sovereignty, as the central political structure defining
zoopolitical modernity, is conceived as constituting the proper of the hu-
man, then it cannot but contaminate the animals themselves that it subjects
to its power by expelling them from its own political body, according to
a logic resembling an autoimmunitary phenomenon, which is another
essential feature of Derridean zoopolitics, brought to light, for example,
and in a symptomatic way, in the conventionalist political thought of the
English philosopher Hobbes, who founded and elaborated his concept of
sovereignty in close relation with the question of animality:
On the one hand, this conventionalist (and not naturalistic) theory makes
prosthstatic sovereignty proper to man. And this artificial prosthesis
of the sovereign state is always a protection. The prosthesis protects.
Protection is its essential purpose, the essential function of the state. On
the other hand, this protectionist prosthstatic posits the absolute indivis-
ibility of sovereignty (indivisibility is an analytic part of the concept
of sovereignty: divisible or sharable sovereignty is not sovereignty).
Third, finally, the convention, the thesis, the prosthesis, the contract at
the origin of sovereignty excludes God just as much—and this will be
the important point for us here—as it excludes the beast. (B&S I 45-6)
Derrida links here the three points that are at the origin of the politi-
cal sacrifice of the animal: the invention of sovereignty as proper to the
human; the indivisibility of sovereignty in the sense that it is not shareable
with any other living being except the human—or rather, the one whom
it would be necessary to call the sovereign subject, and whose invention
relies upon a close connection with the idea of a proper of the human;
and finally, the exclusion of the beast from the contract that the humans
are supposed to have enacted between them. “Prosthetic” sovereignty
as political prosthesis is thought to fall within this human privilege, al-
lowing it to protect itself from violence. Accordingly, at the foundation of
this protective prosthesis is an explicit reference to animality, assumed to
be lacking any political prosthesis. By protecting the human, prosthetic
sovereignty opposes the animal, thought as a living being lacking any
capacity for self-protection or what might take its place. In the name of
what is thus required for the proper of the human—here, of a prosthetic
nature—the animal in our societies is seen as subject to contractual or
conventional sovereign power, whose logocentrism (indeed carnophal-

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122 Patrick Llored

logocentrism) is brought to light in a striking formulation of Hobbes that

offers a distillation of the entire political conception of animality from
which zoopolitics stems:
To make covenants with brute beasts is impossible because, not under-
standing our speech, they understand not, nor accept of, any translation
of right, nor can translate any right to another; and without mutual
acceptation, there is no covenant. (Hobbes 85)
“Without mutual acceptance, there is no covenant”: this formula is
the key to all of zoopolitical modernity, and emphasizes the importance
that it grants to the concept of “convention” or “contract”—concepts
that have excluded the animal from all political community. Indeed, in
the name of what is required for the proper of the human, the animal
is excluded from the city to become an apolitical living being, unable
to respond, although at the very most able to react, according to this
traditional distinction at the origin of the very idea of contract; because
only the living being able to respond can become subject to the political,
in the eyes of sovereignty. In this logic, to respond means to assume its
responsibilities and to act in the manner of a being who has rights and
duties. Can the animal respond? The stakes of such a question are high,
because it implies a radical overhaul of the very concept of animality,
and therefore a re-evaluation of the relationship between sovereignty
and animality. If, indeed, the concept of political sovereignty is closely
dependent on that of animality, is it then possible to deconstruct it without
this negative operation leading to a radical redefinition of the concept
of animality? Deconstruction must make this question of animality the
condition under which it is possible to rethink the relation between the
political and the living, by carrying out a double movement that would
seek to undermine the concept of sovereignty by uncovering the complex
links that it maintains with that of animality, and then elaborating a new
conception of animality. It is this last task that Derrida outlines when he
invites “reinscribing this différance between reaction and response, and
hence this historicity of ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, within
another thinking of life, of the living, within another relation of the liv-
ing to their ipseity, to their autos, to their own autokinesis and reactional
automaticity, to death, to technics, or to the mechanical” (The Animal 126).
This is nothing less than rethinking the difference between these two
zoopolitical concepts of “reaction” and “response” in an entirely differ-
ent way than has been done thus far by anthropocentric philosophy—the
very same that essentially invented the figure of the animal based on and
with a view toward a violence seldom achieved in the history of the West.
Université Jean Moulin Lyon III
translated by Matthew Chrulew and Brett Buchanan

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Note
1. Translated from the chapter “Troisième concept: zoopolitique,” from Jacques Derrida:
Politique et éthique de l’animalité (Mons: Les Editions Sils Maria, 2013). Translation pub-
lished here by permission of Patrick Llored and Les Editions Sils Maria.

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques and Elizabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff
Fort. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
—-. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
—-. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette
Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2009.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994.

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