The Animal-to-Come: Zoo-Politics in Deconstruction

Robert Briggs' book "The Animal-to-Come: Reforming Political Thought through the Question of the Animal" offers a reinterpretation of concepts of institution, culture, and power in the service of thinking animal politics beyond a biopolitical framework. It provides an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing human-animal distinctions as forms of institutional difference and engages with established Continental thinkers and recently translated work in philosophical ethology. Briggs reformulates the animal-to-come as a means for reflecting on and further developing the question of the animal in contemporary humanities inquiry.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Offers a reinterpretation of concepts of institution, culture and power in the service of thinking animal politics beyond a biopolitical framework.
Provides an interdisciplinary approach to analysing human-animal distinctions as forms of institutional (rather than ontological) difference.
Includes analyses of animal behaviours and practices revealing new potentialities in human-animal interactions.
Engages with both established Continental thinkers, Derrida, Foucault, Arendt, and recently translated work by key figures in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Dominique Lestel and Vinciane Despret.
Reformulates the animal-to-come as a means for reflecting on and further developing the question of the animal in contemporary humanities inquiry.
Reads Derrida's deconstructive interrogation of the human-animal distinction in the context of his quasi-messianic logic of the future-to-come.
What happens to political thought if we take the problematic nature of the human animal distinction as a given, not as something to be demonstrated?
What sorts of animal-existential possibilities are derived by tracking not the animal but the animal-to-come through the inherited traditions and institutions that continue to shape prevailing concepts of culture and politics?
Robert Briggs lays out an original interpretation of Derrida's that which takes the question of the animal beyond the critique of political and philosophical anthropocentrism.
Eschewing approaches grounded in animal vulnerability, Briggs reviews theories of power, politics and culture in terms of their capacity to enable novel images of zoopolitics.
Along the way he engages with recently translated work by key figures in the emerging field of philosophical ethology, including Dominique Lestel and Vinciane Despret.

Dimension: 216 x 138 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474493956