239
Keywords
biopolitics, necropolitics, tropes, human-animal relations, sovereignty, multitude, flesh
Abstract
Biopolitics and necropolitics have used animals as a concept to illustrate a particular hu-
man biopolitical situation, much in the “tradition” of Aristotle’s provisional biopolitics. 
In the Western context, not only our understanding of politics but also tropology and the 
conceptual apparatus itself are haunted by this ancient legacy, which underlies a verti-
cal ontology tied to processes of spatialization and containment, a vertical ontology that 
enables an intelligibility of figurative translation. The article considers tropological sys-
tems as systems embedded in particular forms of governmentality, forms of the violent 
administration of life and death. To show how certain bodies are marked as animal or 
animal-like and used in the (metaphorical) processes of exclusion/inclusion, it focuses 
on Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on Carolus Linnaeus and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s anal-
ysis of metaphorics in the most recent (r)evolutionary theory, symbiogenesis, developed 
by Lynn Margulis. Moreover, to radically disturb the graduated ontological premises of 
traditional stylistics and tropology, we move beyond existing conceptualizations of the 
body and the sovereign, all of which are based on de-borderization, intersections, move-
ments, and transfigurations.
1
Tropološka žival: onkraj telesa in suverena
Ključne besede
biopolitika, nekropolitika, tropi, človeško-živalski odnosi, suverenost, multituda, meso
1 
This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy,” which is funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation 
Agency.
*  ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia
 vesna.liponik@zrc-sazu.si | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4511-3204
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 239–63
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.11
Vesna Liponik*
The Tropological Animal: Beyond the Body 
and the Sovereign
1

240
vesna liponik
Povzetek 
Biopolitika in nekropolitika uporabljata živali kot koncept, ki služi ponazoritvi nekega 
človeškega biopolitičnega stanja, sledeč »tradiciji« Aristotelove preliminarne biopoliti-
ke. V zahodnem kontekstu je naše razumevanje ne le politike, temveč tudi tropologi-
je in samega pojmovnega aparata še vedno bistveno zaznamovano z antično zapuščino 
in njeno vertikalno ontologijo, temeljno zvezano s procesi omejevanja in prostorskega 
razmeščanja, vertikalno ontologijo, ki omogoča jasnost figurativnega prevoda. V član-
ku tropološke sisteme obravnavamo kot sisteme, vgrajene v določene oblike vladnosti, 
oblike nasilnega upravljanja z življenjem in smrtjo. S pomočjo misli Giorgia Agambena o 
Carolusu Linnaeusu in analize metaforike Zakiyyah Iman Jackson v najnovejši (r)evolu-
cijski teoriji, simbiogenezi, ki jo je razvila Lynn Margulis, skušamo prikazati, kako so do-
ločena telesa, označena kot živalska ali živalim podobna, uporabljena v (metaforičnih) 
procesih izključevanja/vključevanja. Še več, da bi radikalno destabilizirali vertikalne on-
tološke premise tradicionalne tropologije in stilistike, se premikamo onkraj obstoječih 
konceptualizacij telesa in suverenosti, ki temeljijo na deborderizaciji, stičiščih, gibanjih 
in transfiguracijah.
∞
The Persistence of Smooth Violence
The prevailing view of the link between the animal question and biopolitics in 
the context of animal studies and critical animal studies focuses on the anal-
ysis of human-animal relations through biopolitical tools. Agamben’s concept 
of bare life and the conceptualization of the animal as the ultimate bare life, 
for example, have proven particularly useful. A notable example of a departure 
from this prevailing logic of addressing human-animal relations in the context 
of biopolitics and animal studies can be found in James Stanescu’s 2013 “Be -
yond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading 
Life” and Dinesh J. Wadiwelʼs 2015 The War Against Animals.
2
 The latter, while 
using an existing biopolitical framework and the concept of war to think about 
human-animal relations, acknowledges, like Stanescu, this crucial conceptual 
2 
James Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of 
Deading Life,” PhaenEx 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2013): 135–60, https://doi.org/10.22329/p.
v8i2.4090; Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, The War Against Animals (Leiden, the Netherlands: 
Brill, 2015).

241
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
flaw when thinking about human-animal relations in the context of biopolitics 
and beyond.
This may be a kind of filling in of conceptual gaps, a kind of “corrective,” for 
Foucault, Agamben and Mbembe. As they have largely used animals only as a 
“ground of thought,”
3
 a concept used to illustrate a particular human biopoliti-
cal condition, much in the “tradition” of Aristotleʼs preliminary biopolitics.
Wadiwel points out that the commonalities between the forms of violence used 
by humans against humans and those used by humans against animals pri-
marily concern shared techniques and logics of violent management of life and 
death, which “involves understanding the way in which developments in means 
for killing and containing animals flow to the human sphere, and vice versa,” 
while cautioning against using existing metaphors of human-on-human vio-
lence such as “slavery,” “colonialism,” “holocaust” or “genocide” in describ-
ing what we do to animals.
4
 Since “biopolitical theory was mostly developed 
around thinking through issues of human genocides, particularly the Nazi La-
ger,”
5
 Stanescu suggests thinking in part with and outside of biopolitics, when 
analyzing human-animal relations, particularly the factory farm.
6
My aim in this article, following what I have explained so far, is to consider tro-
pological systems as systems embedded in certain forms of governmentality, 
forms of violent management of life that are “smoothed in such a way that it 
does not appear as violence,” the result of this smoothed-out, seemingly blood-
less and opaque epistemic violence being a complete transformation of “an an-
imate sentient being into a ‘thing.’ ”
7
 This occurs as and through tropological 
modes of figurative speech, as a compilation of tropes. In this context, Wadiwel 
recalls the “absent referent” of Carol J. Adams, which arises from the process of 
3 
Joseph Pugliese, “Terminal Truths: Foucault’s Animals and the Mask of the Beast,” in 
Foucault and Animals, ed. Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel (Leiden, the 
Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 19
4 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 81.
5 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 136. See also, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, 
“Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani 
and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
6 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 136.
7 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 13.

242
vesna liponik
meat production, where the absent referent is a concrete person, a living ani-
mal. I will elaborate and develop this important aspect in the following lines.
In the spirit of a cognitive theory of metaphor that does not limit its stylistic anal-
ysis to the literary as the exclusive site of tropology, I will trace the internal caesu-
ra of humanity “through developments in the biological and evolutionary scienc-
es”
8
 with my first stop being Giorgio Agamben and his thoughts on Carolus Lin-
neaus and my second Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of metaphorics in the 
most recent (r)evolutionary theory, symbiogenesis, developed by Lynn Margulis.
The latter example in particular will show how our understanding and use of 
not only politics, but also rhetoric is still indebted to ancient residue. Since “im-
agining a new world, [. . .] demands the reimagining of the [. . .] body,”
9
 I will 
show at the end of this section that efforts have already been made to reconcep-
tualize, reinvent, and, more importantly, go beyond existing conceptualizations 
of the body and the sovereign in order to more accurately grasp present (and 
future) conditions. All based on de-borderization, crossings, movements and 
transfigurations.
“For man does not belong to every animal, but animal belongs to 
every man”
10
Aristotle has already been recognized by several authors (see, e.g., Roberto Es-
posito, Cary Wolfe, Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel)
11
 as the cornerstone not only of bi-
opolitics, but of what is characteristic of Western politics itself: “The grounds 
for the contest between humans and animals.”
12
 This simultaneously answers 
8 
Wadiwel, 76.
9 
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World 
(New York: New York University Press, 2020), 158.
10 
Aristotle, “Prior Analytics,” trans. A. J. Jenkinson, in Complete Works of Aristotle: The 
Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1984), 25a14–27.
11 
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other 
Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Wadiwel, War 
Against Animals.
12 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 65.

243
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
the question of why the animal question has from the beginning been primarily 
a political question and only secondarily an ethical one.
The word politics, originating from the ancient Greek polis, denoting both the 
administrative center of ancient city and its citizens, was defined as a space, to 
which neither plants nor animals, women nor slaves had access. Early in the 
“Politics” Aristotle sketches the figure of a man who is on one hand “both be-
yond the animal, yet absolutely captured by the animal: the human is an entity 
that extends beyond what it is, yet at the same time is what it is” and on the oth-
er hand introduces a vertical ontology, “a graduated scheme by which human 
animals may be distributed across varying positions along the long trajectory 
between the animal and the idealised human subject.”
13
 Somewhere in-between 
is the figure of the slave, or with Aristotle “indeed the use made of slaves and 
of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the 
needs of life,”
14
 that is sometimes also replaceable with animal: “For the ox,” 
writes Aristotle, “is the poor man’s slave.”
15
 And this status is biological, given 
by nature, “through a biological schema of classification.”
16
 It is worth noting 
that Aristotle was very interested in animals, as evidenced not only by his writ-
ings on politics, but also by his anatomical work on animals.
17
The point here is that for Aristotle, “ʻmanʼ is not a transcendent being, unre-
lated to the animal life; rather, ʻmanʼ is defined as an animal with a surplus 
ability over and above other animal life,”
18
 or, with Aristotle’s words from “Pri-
or Analytics”: “For man does not belong to every animal, but animal belongs 
to every man.”
19
 In “Prior Analytics,” Aristotle uses the example of animals or 
human-animal relations to illustrate a logical argument. It is no coincidence, 
then, that when Aristotle needs an example in “Prior Analytics,” it is an animal 
which, as “the first metaphor”
20
 is an example par excellence.
13 
Wadiwel, 68.
14 
Aristotle, “Politics,” trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised 
Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1984), 1254a24–1255a3.
15 
Aristotle, 1252b10–27.
16 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 70.
17 
Wadiwel, 68.
18 
Wadiwel, 66.
19 
Aristotle, “Prior Analytics,” 25a14–27.
20 
John Berger, “Why Look At Animals?,” in About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 7.

244
vesna liponik
Referring to the fact that violence against animals is constantly thought of in 
terms that refer to human violence against other humans, Wadiwel writes of our 
“absolute poverty of language,”
21
 but does not explain this further. One reason 
for this absolute poverty of language is a logic in which the animal is trapped, a 
logic in which the animal almost always stands as an example of something else, 
to illustrate a human condition (biopolitics and necropolitics are a perfect ex-
ample of this), that this human condition can be thought of at all. Which points 
all the more to the need to move away from the dominant concepts that original-
ly refer to violence against humans when thinking about violence against ani-
mals, to the need to work not only with what is supposedly our poverty, but also 
with what is really just another form of ongoing smooth violence, of speciesism, 
of making an animal handless, just because we need it to be handy.
This origin of the political in the ancient polis, which still haunts political theory 
in the West, as a “deficiency within the tradition of politics itself,”
22
 is also, ac-
cording to Wadiwel, why animals are still excluded from the question of the politi-
cal and, consequently from the biopolitical. But tropology and the conceptual ap-
paratus itself, are also haunted by the same measures, with a vertical ontology at 
its base, a vertical ontology that enables an intelligibility of figurative translation. 
Following Jovita Pristovšek, who states that “in the (Western) philosophical tra-
dition, aesthetics is the terrain on which subjectivity was/is formed—much less 
it is explicitly talked about that certain subjects are deformed in it,”
23
 that certain 
subjects must be deformed in it, in order for certain other subjects to be formed.
The Biopolitical Animal: Carolus Linneaus
In Systema naturae,
24
 Carolus Linnaeus places Homo in the order Anthropomor-
pha.
25
 In the introductory chapter of Systema, Linnaeus identifies the only dis-
21 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 81.
22 
Wadiwel, 66.
23 
Jovita Pristovšek, “Necro-Aesthetics, Deading Bodies, and Performativity of Flesh,” in Re-
Activating Critical Thinking in the Midst of Necropolitical Realities: For Radical Change, ed. 
Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2022), 293.
24 
Carolus Linnaeus, Systema naturae, sive regna tria naturae systematice proposita per 
classes, ordines, genera, & species (Leiden, the Netherlands: Johann Wilhelm de Groot for 
Theodor Haak, 1735).
25 
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 2002), 24.

245
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
tinguishing characteristic of human as the capacity to know himself, which con-
sequently means that “man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to 
be human.”
26
 Agamben derives from this one of his key ideas, that Homo sapi-
ens, which appears in this formulation in the tenth edition of Systema, “is nei-
ther a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is rather, a machine or device 
for producing the recognition of the human. [. . .] Homo is constitutively ʻanthro-
pomorphousʼ animal [. . .], who must recognize himself in a non-man in order 
to be human.”
27
Anthropogenesis, whose fundamental driving force is the dialectic of inclusion 
and exclusion, is thus, according to Agamben, the process by which the living 
being becomes human, and this becoming “results from the caesura and ar-
ticulation between human and animal. This caesura passes first of all within 
man.”
28
 Anthropogenesis is a crucial political conflict that precedes all others 
in Western culture, and biopolitics ultimately emerges from anthropogenesis. 
In this respect, following Stanescu, “the line drawn between the human animal 
and other animals is one of the, if not the most, important divisions in the bi-
opolitical terrain.”
29
And in this sense, to return to Linnaeus, there is another important aspect of his 
work that Agamben mentions only briefly in The Open: Man and Animal in the 
context of Linnaeus’s obsession with apes, but which is in fact crucial to under-
standing his work, even and especially in the context of biopolitics. In the same 
breath that Linnaeus revolutionized the continuity between man and animal in 
his work at that time, he had, on the other hand, already introduced a gradation 
within the human species, a tendency that was only reinforced by Georges Cuvi-
erʼs anatomical work in the nineteenth century.
30
Linnaeus’s logic closely resembles that of Aristotle. And the work of both shows 
that “raciality is not a derivation of ʻspeciesʼ but is homologous and contigu-
26 
Agamben, 26.
27 
Agamben, 26–27.
28 
Agamben, 79.
29 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 135.
30 
Matthew Senior, “Classify and Display: Human and Animal Species in Linnaeus and 
Cuvier,” in Animals, Animality and Literature, ed. Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, and Brian 
Massumi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 167.

246
vesna liponik
ous with biological constructions of species and evolution and, therefore, not 
simply a by-product of ʻspeciesismʼ but rather an interdependent, coterminous, 
co-articulator of ‘the animal question.’ ”
31
The Contained Animal: Protected Lives and Dead(ing) Referents
Stanescu, in his article “Beyond Biopolitics,” sets out “a genealogy of forms of 
life”
32
 from Agamben to Butler and Benjamin etc., adding to this the concept of 
life, “a deading life,” which he sees as an effective framework for thinking about 
human-animal relations in the factory farm context. One of the most important 
aspects of his concept of deading life is “a sense of life meant as pure produc-
tion, pure use-value,”
33
 and if Stanescu is referring here to the use of dead bod-
ies for profit in the meat processing industry, this is no less true of the discur-
sive, tropological level of the use of bodies previously designated as inhuman 
and thus designated as material for use, for it is only when living beings are 
rhetorically transformed into objects and things that we can dispose of them as 
inanimate objects and things, which means that they can be removed and not 
murdered or killed.
34
 In this sense, is it possible to answer in the affirmative the 
(rhetorical?) question, “Could metaphor itself be the undergarment to the garb 
of oppression?”
35
 posed by Carol J. Adams in her now classic work The Sexual 
Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory? A question that, ironical-
ly, is also formulated through metaphor and is even one of the key tropological 
meta-toposes of costume and clothing.
One of the key concepts that emerges in her work is the aforementioned “absent 
referent,” which refers to the person who is made into meat in the meat process-
ing industry. And since it is more difficult to kill a concrete person, a sentient 
being, than, say, an object or a quality or projection detached from that being, 
it is necessary to replace that concrete being with something, e.g. a fox must be 
31 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 156.
32 
Pristovšek, “Necro-Aesthetics,” 288.
33 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 151.
34 
James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1994), 51.
35 
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (London: 
Bloomsbury, 2015), 26.

247
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
replaced by a threat, a pest, so that it can be killed,
36
 a refugee by an animal that 
can be removed, deported or even killed with impunity as a potential threat, a 
pest, or as Syrian refugee Ahmad Shamieh says: “Politics treats me as if I were 
an animal.”
37
 And if Marina Gržinić, in her 2016 article “ ‘Afterwards’: Struggling 
with Bodies in the Dump of History” places the body of the refugee as “the body 
that centrally entangles materiality and power today in Europe,”
38
 it is this body, 
the body of the refugee, as a racialized body, marked by the signifier that “has 
historically been essential to producing classes of abject humans.”
39
Gržinić cites Joseph Pugliese,
40
 who states that the entanglement of “racism and 
speciesism” is of such proportion that “at every turn in the documentary histo-
ry of racism, the spectre of speciesism, the species is used to inscribe and rein-
scribe the racialized other,”
41
 and as Jackson points out, we must not overlook 
the role of enslavement and coloniality in the emergence of the discourses of 
nonhuman animals and animalized humans, seeing them as “forged through 
each other for the purposes of producing an idealized and teleological concep-
tion of ‘the human.’ ”
42
The key point regarding the absent referent is the way in which this referent, this 
particular body, is absent, because Adams’s absent referentʼs absence is an ab-
sence caused by death, by killing, more specifically butchering, so that the ab-
sent referent is actually a dead referent or more precisely, the dead(ing) referent, 
since this death occurs as deading, it is not so much an event, but a continuous 
process, that does not cease to reoccur after the act of slaughter.
36 
Vesna Liponik, “Antropomorfizacija: Kritična analiza (ne)tropa” (master’s thesis, Univer-
sity of Ljubljana, 2022), 14.
37 
Boštjan Videmšek, “Portret tedna: Ahmad Shamieh,” Delo, November 17 , 2017 , https://old.
delo.si/sobotna/portret-tedna-ahmad-shamieh.html.
38 
Marina Gržinić, “ ‘Afterwards’: Struggling with Bodies in the Dump of History,” in Body 
between Materiality and Power: Essays in Visual Studies, ed. Nasheli Jiménez del Val 
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), 163.
39 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 2.
40 
See Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of 
Torture, Black Sites, Drones (New York: Routledge, 2013).
41 
Gržinić, “ ‘ Afterwards,’ ” 182.
42 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 23.

248
vesna liponik
In this “graduated scheme”
43
 this “constant verticality”
44
 we have “protected 
lives,”
45
 at the apex of the vertical line, a group in which not only all the facul-
ties of human physiology, sentience, intelligence and language in general are 
implicit, but also of “maleness, adulthood (but not old age), bourgeois financial 
and social standing (including standard bourgeois-level education) [and] mem-
bership in the white race,”
46
 and on the other side—everything else, “the raw 
material for exploitation and for metaphoric borrowing.”
47
What we witness along this deadly verticality are “two co-supplementary move-
ments of the biopolitical, both inherently violent and imperialist.”
48
 One move 
renders someone as inhuman and therefore disposable, and the other as human 
and, therefore necessary to eliminate all traces of the inhuman.
49
 The latter is 
related to the “critical spatialization of the distance between human and ani-
mal through the use of both symbolic and physical bars,” that Pugliese in his 
text about the position of animality in Foucault’s discourse on madness, calls 
“crucial in enabling the operation of the biopolitical caesura and its systems of 
division.”
50
 He understands this spatialization as a result of colonial power in 
the classical period, which “in the context of the asylum, the zoo and the exhi-
bition grounds with their segregated and barred spaces—ensured that the sane, 
reasoning, white human subject ‘would not compromise itself by too close a re-
semblance.’ ”
51
 Which, again, just shows an awareness of the uncertainty of the 
human, of the fact that the “human” must always be reaffirmed and, delineated 
by all the (non-)human means at our disposal and that “the human is produced, 
and is the site of great struggles, violence, and hierarchy.”
52
This spatialization and containment, borderization, has two functions in Mbem-
beʼs work: first, it prevents mixing, uncontrolled crossing of boundaries, con-
43 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 68.
44 
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xi.
45 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 136.
46 
Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 50.
47 
Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, 26.
48 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 141.
49 
Stanescu, 141.
50 
Pugliese, “Terminal Truths,” 27.
51 
Pugliese, 27.
52 
Stanescu, “Beyond Biopolitics,” 137.

249
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
tamination of pure reason, miscegenation and, second, it allows unhindered 
identification and manipulation of the observed space, “which the observer iso-
lates from the surroundings by some principle, so that in this isolation he is able 
to have complete control over it.”
53
 The consequence of this way of seeing is a 
reactionary connotation (of the animal).
54
In this sense, we can return once again to Linnaeus, who loved apes so much 
that he built himself a zoo,
55
 a paradigmatic space of “optical asymmetry.”
56
 The 
zoo is an institution built on the foundations of imperialism and emerging capi-
talism in the 19th century. However, the history of animal zoos is no less the his-
tory of human zoos or so-called colonial exhibitions, or as Mbembe puts it, “life 
under the sign of race has always been equivalent to life in a zoo.”
57
Mbembe cites three key processes as the basis for constituting a zoo: abduction, 
capture, and caging. Animals are not there to be killed and for direct consump-
tion, but to live in a confined space, their lives dependent on the interventions 
of their keepers. They are not domesticated and a distance is created between 
humans and animals, and this distance is crucial for their relationship, for the 
zoo as such.
58
Symbiogenesis or Miscegenation of Beastly Bacteria
Lynn Margulisʼ symbiogenetic theory of evolution is, first, a counter-position 
to Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, and, second, a theory that challenges the 
very concept of individuality and subjectivity and also shows how we adapt to 
and cooperate with others (species). According to Margulis (1938–2011), sym-
biogenesis means “the origin of new tissues, organs, organisms, even species, 
with the formation of long-term or permanent symbiosis.”
59
 Through symbiosis, 
53 
Jure Detela, Orfični dokumenti: Teksti in fragmenti iz zapuščine, ed. Miklavž Komelj (Koper: 
Hyperion, 2011), 290. All English translations of Detela’s work are my own.
54 
Detela, Orfični dokumenti, 111.
55 
Agamben, The Open, 32.
56 
Olivier Razac, Ekran in živalski vrt: Spektakel in udomačevanje od kolonialnih razstav do Big 
Brotherja, trans. Sonja Dular (Ljubljana: Maska, 2007), 91.
57 
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2019), 167.
58 
Mbembe, 167.
59 
Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 6.

250
vesna liponik
bacteria gave rise to eukaryotic cells (those of protoctists, fungi, animals, and 
plants).
60
 Margulisʼ theory of evolution emphasizes that it is through coexist-
ence that more complex structures become possible, that none of us would be 
possible without the simple concept of cooperation, community, merging, and 
that life itself is first and foremost symbiotic.
Symbiogenesis is already widely used (as a metaphor) in philosophical discourse 
by such diverse authors as Donna J. Haraway and Graham Harman, building on 
the already widely accepted idea of symbiosis as a paradigm for understand-
ing (human) relations.
61
 Narratives of common origins of this kind, which even 
have their scientific, even natural foundations, find their special place of refer-
ence precisely in a period that is essentially characterized by the “crisis of the 
commons” and thus the “crisis of the community” and, lastly, the crisis of (also 
conceptual) excavations from these states. As Gržinić states in the afterword to 
the Slovenian translation of Mbembeʼs Critique de la raison nègre, it is charac-
teristic of the contemporary condition that “it is increasingly difficult for us to 
state with clarity the reasons for which we constitute the common world. These 
reasons are no longer obvious: instead of patiently reconstructing the reasons 
for living together, we are creating a situation in which it is important to search 
for the things that divide us.”
62
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, in her 2020 Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in 
an Antiblack World, has shown how Margulisʼs theory “emerged against a back-
drop of hierarchical racialization,”
63
 how not even the most “radical theorist of 
evolution” as Haraway called Margulis,
64
 is not only nonimmune to antiblack 
and colonialist histories that have always “informed evolutionary discourses on 
the origin of life itself and our ideas of cellular biology,”
65
 but also shows that this 
is still the case.
60 
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species 
(New York: Basic Books, 2002), 55–56.
61 
Donna J. Haraway wrote about symbiogenesis in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making 
Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), and Graham Harman in 
Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (London: Polity, 2016).
62 
Marina Gržinić, “Svet kot so-pripadanje,” afterword to Kritika črnskega uma, by Achille 
Mbembe, trans. Suzana Koncut (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2019), 282.
63 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 151.
64 
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 60.
65 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 122.

251
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
Margulis and Dorion Sagan, her son, an American science fiction writer with 
whom she later collaborated, “present their theory in highly racialised terms, 
even occasionally referring to symbiotic cells as ‘miscegenated.’ ”
66
 The term 
miscegenation was coined by a proslavery prosegregationist Civil War propa-
ganda pamphlet from 1863 titled “Miscegenenation: The Theory of the Blending 
of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The pamphlet was 
a hoax, but it nevertheless gained widespread circulation in the United States 
and popularized the term, which referred to fears of “race mixing” and the dis-
appearance of a “distinct white race” as technologies of antiblack politics.
67
Moreover, Margulis and Sagan “likened symbiogenesis to slavery,”
68
 and, in 
addition to that Margulis called her text about the most famous symbiogenetic 
bacteria Mixotricha paradoxa “The Beast with Five Genomes,”
69
 which has been 
symptomatically overlooked in the further implementation of the theory in oth-
er discourses.
Symbiogenetic theory employs the most basic repertoire of discourse on Af-
rica, particularly the slave narrative with “recursive investments in figurative  
[. . .] narratives that conceptualize blackness as trope, metaphor, symbol.”
70
As 
Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony observes, “Discourse on Africa is almost 
always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the an-
imal—to be exact, about the beast: its experience, its world, and its spectacle.”
71
66 
Jackson, 153. “The co-opting of strangers, the involvement and infolding of others [. . .] 
into ever more complex and miscegenous genomes. The acquisition of the reproducing 
other, of the microbe and its genome, is no mere sideshow. Attraction, merger, fusion, in-
corporation, cohabitation, recombination—both permanent and cyclical—and other for-
bidden couplings, are the main sources of Darwin’s missing variation.” Margulis, Acquiring 
Genomes, 205; emphasis added.
67 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 154.
68 
Jackson, 153. “In both merged and free-living forms the descendants of all four kinds of 
bacteria still live today. Some say the four types are mutually enslaved, trapped both in the 
plant and as the plant.” Margulis, Symbiotic planet, 34; emphasis added.
69 
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, “The Beast with Five Genomes,” Natural History 
Magazine, June 2001, https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/master.html?https://
www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/0601/0601_feature.html.
70 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 2.
71 
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.

252
vesna liponik
The first reason for the use of this “all-too-readily available metaphor and even 
metonymic link between race and species”
72
 as discussed above, is the persis-
tent logic of “the black body, held captive as a ‘resource for metaphor,’ ”
73
 but the 
second reason is, that the metaphor heavy ornament has traditionally and still 
is widely perceived; evolutionary biologists brighten up and color the dull sci-
entific discourse; this is especially important when dealing with a controversial 
new theory of evolution that has taken hold to erase the old theory, and thus the 
equally controversial topos of mixing, of miscegenation is excellent for the task.
Turning now to the words of the Slovenian poet Jure Detela and his problemati-
zation and rejection of substitutive metaphor, in light of the above we can read 
one of his passages in which he problematizes the use of metaphor in relation 
to non-human beings in a very different way. He states that he “never wanted 
to call plants, animals, streams, rocks, seas by names that reduce [sic] them to 
mere emblems and thus use [sic] them in metaphor as the Aristotelian logical 
form that confines and enslaves beings.”
74
From Sovereignty to Multitude
What is at work in these arbitrary distinctions between the human and the ani-
mal is a form of sovereignty tied to the biopolitical caesura, but not a sovereign-
ty as “a right or capacity to rule,”
75
 but as “a form of violence,”
76
 with Jacques 
Derrida, a form of stupidity, absurd and excessive,
77
 for “how else might we de-
scribe a claimed superiority by humans over animals (whether based on intel-
ligence, reason, communication, vocalisation, or politics)”
78
 if not as a kind of 
stupidity, “which in its very exercise confirms a right to stupidity inherent with-
in sovereignty itself.”
79
72 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 154.
73 
Jackson, 13.
74 
Detela, Orfični dokumenti, 189.
75 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 261.
76 
Wadiwel, 261.
77 
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennigton, 2 vols. (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2009).
78 
Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 257.
79 
Wadiwel, 257.

253
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
At the end of his book The War Against Animals, Wadiwel proposes a revision 
of the concept of sovereignty to think about animal sovereignties and radical-
ly reimagine our “fundamental political concepts.”
80
 He identifies coexistence 
and plurality as two crucial features of this new, reimagined sovereignty.
81
 He 
proposes a concept of truce, a mutual recognition and consideration of former 
enemies, and speculates whether it is possible to treat sovereignty as an assem-
bly.
82
 Wadiwel also adds veganism to the list, not as a form of biopolitics, but as 
a challenge to human sovereignty, a break with it.
83
Fahim Amir’s 2020 Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It) picks 
up where Wadiwel leaves off. Being and Swine “is a plea for politicizing the an-
imal question on the basis of a slightly ‘feralized’ Marxism,”
84
 which Amir calls 
“zombie Marxism.”
85
 Amir treats humans and animals as members of the same 
political species, “the swinish multitude,” or even the “mosquito,” or “termite” 
multitude, but most importantly he treats animals as political subjects, agents 
of their own liberation, showing that any community, any multitude, is always 
already multispecies, but inevitably shaped by class relations and colonialism. 
Through an analysis of the functioning of the links between society, history, 
economy, everyday culture and politics, without which neither nature nor the 
role of animals can be understood, he traces the flow of the material and discur-
sive techniques and logics of the violent management of life and death from the 
animal to the human sphere and vice versa.
Similar to Wadiwel, Amir attempts to rework and expand a familiar leftist po-
litical (and ontological) concept of the multitude to imagine the multitude as a 
form of transspecies alliance.
86
80 
Wadiwel, 294.
81 
Wadiwel, 21.
82 
Wadiwel, 294.
83 
Wadiwel, 279.
84 
Fahim Amir, Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It), trans. Geoffrey C. Howes 
and Corvin Russell (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2020), 18.
85 
Amir, 9.
86 
The term interspecies refers to interactions between species, preserving the distinctions 
between species and the concept of species itself, while the term transspecies aims to 
question the concept of species itself, attempting to think of relationships beyond species 
distinctions.

254
vesna liponik
In one of the chapters titled “Swinish Multitude,” he introduces a transspecies 
swine society in 19th-century New York, where people and pigs worked together 
to resist city authorities and their sanitary measures. He traces the origin of the 
term to the French Revolution. The term “swinish multitude” was coined by the 
political conservative Edmund Burke in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in 
France
87
 for pejorative purposes. Burke at that time was not aware of the extent 
to which the term would later be used. Burkeʼs swinish multitude is a “mon-
strous figure,” it is mobile and lawless and it abandons the order of things.
88
It is also important to note here that the swinish multitude refers both to people 
revolting like hogs and hogs revolting like humans and is therefore not only a 
term of “political radicalism in troubled times of social conflict,”
89
 but radically 
troubles the graduated ontological premises of traditional stylistics and tropol-
ogy. Transspecies multitude is thus also significantly shaped through tropology.
In this sense, another notable example in Amir’s book is his reworking of the 
pejorative comparison between man and animal, coined by Frederick Winslow 
Taylor.
In his most famous 1911 work, Principles of Scientific Management,
90
 Taylor used 
a number of parables to convey his idea of scientific rationalization of the work 
process. His favorite was the story of Schmidt, “a stocky Pennsylvania German 
who was a pig-iron loader at Bethlehem Steel. Schmidt loaded about 12 tons of 
the 92-pound iron pigs each day (and then ran home to work on his little dream 
house). Using Taylor’s principles, ‘scientific managers’ raised Schmidt’s output 
to 48 tons per day, and raised his daily wages from $1.15 to $1.85.”
91
87 
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell  (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1999).
88 
Amir, Being and Swine, 48.
89 
Amir, 49.
90 
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and 
Brothers, 1911).
91 
David A. Hounshell, “The Same Old Principles in the New Manufacturing,” Harvard 
Business Review, August 31, 2021, https://hbr.org/1988/11/the-same-old-principles-in-the-
new-manufacturing.

255
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
And, as Taylor points out, Schmidt was able to achieve this success not only be-
cause of his science, but also because he was “a high-priced man” who “does 
just what he’s told to do and no back talk.”
92
 Needless to say, “Taylor was known 
for his studied disregard for the worker.”
93
If Ford was inspired to set up the first assembly line factory after a visit to Chi-
cago slaughterhouses, which were already using the same processes but in re-
verse, Taylor saw the result of the rationalization of the work process, he is re-
sponsible for, in assembly line turning people into “trained gorillas.”
94
Amir returns to this image at the end of his book, first noting that “communism, 
as an unredeemed promise of humanity, will let the apes out of the zoos—phys-
ically and metaphorically.”
95
 He then refers to Marx’s writing about the relation-
ship between English and Irish workers. What is true of them is also true of the 
relationship between humans and animals: there can be no freedom while there 
is still unfreedom. And continues: “We may not yet be able to fully picture what 
this might mean, but there is no reason we should not begin to imagine it. To use 
words and images, emotions and deeds, to make reality stutter, as in the seem-
ingly utopian vision of—gorilla guerrillas in the mist.”
96
At the end of his work, Amir points to the temporality of multitude in the form of 
Taylor’s appropriated and subverted “trained gorillas,” which Michael Hardt and 
Antonio Negri, who are responsible for popularizing the concept, refer to in their 
work Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, multitude as a concept 
caught in the strange double movement of “always-already and not yet.”
97
Amir’s multitude means something like “quantity” which, in contrast to the 
“mass” or the “crowd,” does not mean a merging into a greater whole, at the 
same time, it refers neither to the “people” nor to the “population” as the object 
of biopolitical governance, it is positioned as the opposite of the state and, as 
92 
Hounshell.
93 
Hounshell.
94 
Amir, Being and Swine, 87.
95 
Amir, 173.
96 
Amir, 173.
97 
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire 
(New York: Penguin, 2004), 222.

256
vesna liponik
such, denotes the production of acts of resistance through “irreducible multi-
plicities.”
98
In this sense, his “definition” of multitude corresponds in part to multitude as 
understood by Hardt and Negri, with the important difference that while Hardt 
and Negri emphasize that multitude is also a concept that includes aspects of 
race, gender, and sexual difference, their multitude consists only of humans.
Hardt and Negriʼs multitude aims to go beyond the modern concepts like sov-
ereignty. They see the multitude not as of one political body that commands, 
but as a living flesh that governs itself. On the one hand, they stress that this is 
a new kind of body, a common body, a democratic body, but on the other hand, 
they foreground its fleshy elementary quality precisely as a departure from the 
tradition of the use of the concept of the body in political philosophy, following 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty argues that “the flesh is not matter, is not 
mind, is not substance,”
99
 it is common and is elemental and this elemental flesh 
of the multitude is “maddeningly elusive, since it cannot be entirely corralled 
into the hierarchical organs of a political body.”
100
 Hardt and Negri thus write a 
kind of monstrous anti-De Corpore, which is supposed to oppose all modern po-
litical debates about the body and to embrace a new relation between the com-
munal and the singular in the flesh of the multitude. But even if they dissociate 
the multitude from the concept of sovereignty, in a sense they still understand it 
as a productive biopolitical figure. So far so good, but let’s be clear the biopolit-
ical operates with the body, necropolitics on the other side with the flesh, guts.
Beyond: Political Flesh
In her text “ ‘Afterwards,’ ” Gržinić follows Alexander G. Weheliyeʼs proposal 
“that, in the time of necropolitics, we have to elaborate on ‘carnality,’ ‘flesh,’ or 
even ‘guts,’ as the viscus in the title of his book [Habeas Viscus]
101
 could be trans-
98 
Amir, Being and Swine, 57.
99 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso 
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139.
100 
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 192.
101 
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black 
Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

257
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
lated.”
102
 She thus suggests an even more precise distinction between “the body 
as a device of biopolitics” and the flesh, for which she proposes the term polit-
ical flesh, which has a “political relevance in the time of the necropolitical.”
103
Not coincidently, after this proposal Gržinić in her article exposes the connec-
tion between racism and speciesism, because each time we introduce flesh into 
the paradigm, we cannot avoid its carnal shadow, its dead(ing) referent, the an-
imal, being constantly reproduced in the process of neoliberal global capital’s 
racialization and precisely for that reason, as Gržinić states, “non-humanity is a 
category that offers the possibility of a new paradigm of politicisation.”
104
She then also draws a parallel to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, but with a slight-
ly different emphasis than Hardt and Negri, with flesh “as the source of knowl-
edge, to a point where the perceiver and the perceived cannot be disentangled.”
105
 
But even more importantly she invites us to think about the agency of a political 
flesh. This being a starting point for thinking of common revolt: the somatic pow-
er of a compartmentalized and contained political flesh, since “necro-aesthetics 
is somatic, all-bodily encompassing. [. . .] Necro-aesthetics produces a bodily re-
action, which implies a new way of perceiving and to attune our senses different-
ly: a relation through feeling, the whole body/knowledge.”
106
Jackson in the coda of her book Becoming Human, titled “Toward a Somatic The-
ory of Necropower” extends Mbembeʼs view of colonial racialization that pro-
duces and is produced by the spatialization of populations into “cells.” Her aim 
is to query “how social processes: the prison ‘cell,’ the political party ‘cell’ and 
the military ‘cell’—interact with somatic cellular processes, producing altera-
tions to the immediate cellular environment and cellular functioning in a man-
ner that we might also describe as necropolitical.”
107
102 
Gržinić, “ ‘ Afterwards,’ ” 181.
103 
Gržinić, 181.
104 
Gržinić, “Svet kot so-pripadanje,” 289.
105 
Gržinić, “ ‘ Afterwards,’ ” 182.
106 
Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz, “The Paradox of Necro-Aesthetics” (un-
published manuscript, 2021), quoted in Pristovšek, “Necro-Aesthetics,” 292.
107 
Jackson, Becoming Human, 205.

258
vesna liponik
In this sense and before the final stage of this trajectory that aimed to demon-
strate how humanist construction of the subject is premised on the abjection of 
non-human, on the abjection of the Black Body, on processes of containment 
and compartmentalization, I want to emphasize, when rethinking and reima-
gining the alternatives to the fundamental concepts, such as subjectivity and 
agency, we must not seek inclusion to the tradition of liberal humanism, but 
rather think of “decolonial desubjectivation as a politics for the 21st century.”
108
 
Key aspect of this decolonizing work being “seizing or really taking back the 
conceptualization of that bond [between human and non-human], reoccupy-
ing and deploying it in terms that continue to reject all settler binaries.”
109
 To 
rethink it with Mbembe in terms of “becoming” or “co-agency,” as a matter of 
movement, crossing and transfiguration, following the old African cognitive 
worlds, in which personhood was always a matter not of ontology but composi-
tion and assemblage of a multiplicity of vital beings.
110
 This being a base for the 
new collective subject that is “at the origin of new languages.”
111
Coda: Fast Forward
We have not yet fully grasped the anthropomorphic as a feature of modernity, 
but what lies ahead is the question of how to think about human-animal rela-
tions in the times of the anthropomachinic. According to Mbembe, “Humanity 
is in the process of leaving behind the grand divisions between the human, the 
animal, and the machine so typical of the discourse on modernity and on hu-
manism. Today’s human is now firmly wedded to its animal and its machine.”
112
Instead of a conclusion, I would like to pose a question and briefly outline some 
challenges that arise from the question of the animal as a question of the fu-
ture. The first would certainly be the challenge of the technological, the anthro-
pomachinic of the specular capitalism, with no slaves, where no revolt can take 
place, a time in which the “surface Negro” is substituted by a “depth Negro,” a 
108 
Gržinić, “Svet kot so-pripadanje,” 297.
109 
Robert Geroux, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Decolonizing Animal Studies”, in 
“Decolonizing Human-Animal Studies”, ed. Robert Geroux, special issue, Humanimalia 
10, no. 2 (2019): 1, https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9499.
110 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 107.
111 
Mbembe, 140–41.
112 
Mbembe, 179.

259
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
genus of subaltern humanity,
113
 and also a time in which the slaughterhouse, the 
“world laboratory of capitalist modernity” with Amir,
114
 is already starting to be 
replaced with the old biopolitical space with not-so-new purpose—a laborato-
ry, which Gržinić in the review of Amir’s book called “academic slow slaughter-
houses.”
115
 They are now literally becoming one, with their main product, in vit-
ro meat, the so-called clean or humane meat, already dangerously (mis)repre-
sented as a more sustainable, eco-friendly and cruelty free high-tech alternative 
to the factory farm and its central processing plant—the slaughterhouse.
As Robert G. W. Kirk observes “the nonhuman animal has contributed to the 
constitution of a certain type of laboratory alongside a certain type of poli-
tics,”
116
 with animals being a key component in the development of the labo-
ratory. Indeed, the laboratory system had long been prepared for this “new” 
challenge, for the laboratory system is already analogous to the slaughterhouse 
system, laboratory animals are bred and then used, slaughtered in the labora-
tory, they are “born to die and live exposed to death.”
117
 And if, for Latour, the 
laboratory represents a space “where the future reservoirs of political power 
are in the making,”
118
 then what we are witnessing now is exactly that, but also 
something else. This “new” form of animal agriculture is a proof of a brutal per-
sistence, not of the animal industrial complex, but of the animal agricultural 
complex, which today more than ever finds its basis in a specific form of non-di-
rect killing. Gržinić in her extended essay on Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe 
states that the occidental regime of Whiteness demands a development of ad-
113 
Mbembe, 178–79.
114 
Amir, Being and Swine, 72.
115 
Marina Gržinić, “From Oppression to Dystopia and Back to Colonialism: Review of Fahim 
Amir’s Book Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It) (2020),” Desde el margen 
4 (February 2021), http://desde-elmargen.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Being-and-
Swine-Book-review-byMarinaGrzinic.pdf.
116 
Robert G. W . Kirk, “The Birth of the Laboratory Animal: Biopolitics, Animal Experimentation, 
and Animal Wellbeing,” in Foucault and Animals, ed. Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph 
Wadiwel (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 193.
117 
Kirk, 217.
118 
Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed: 
Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, ed. Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay 
(London: Sage, 1983), 157.

260
vesna liponik
ditional methods to avoid direct killing, which is the most important approach 
today,
119
 and one may add, also the one that certainly has a future.
Since capitalism is not only an economic system, but also “an apparatus of cap-
ture and a regime of signs, a certain kind of compulsion, that is, a certain mode 
of organization and redistribution of power: the compulsion to put things in 
order as a precondition for extracting their inner value. It is the compulsion to 
categorize, to separate, to measure, and to name, to classify and establish equiv-
alences.”
120
 It is therefore expected that vertical ontology will not stop, but will 
find new ways for the persistence of (smooth tropological) violence.
References
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Lon-
don: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 1998.
. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2004.
Amir, Fahim. Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It). Translated by Geoffrey 
C. Howes and Corvin Russell. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2020.
Aristotle. “Politics.” Translated by B. Jowett. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Re-
vised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, 1252a1–1342b34. Prince -
ton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
. “Prior Analytics.” Translated by A. J. Jenkinson. In Complete Works of Aristotle: The 
Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1, 25a14–70b38. Prince -
ton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Berger, John. “Why Look At Animals?” In About Looking. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. 
3–28.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by L. G. Mitchell. Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Translated by Geoffrey Bennigton. 2 vols. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Detela, Jure. Orfični dokumenti: teksti in fragmenti iz zapuščine. Edited by Miklavž Komelj. 
Koper: Hyperion, 2011.
119 
Marina Gržinić, “Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe: Extended Essay on the Book,” Filozofski 
vestnik 42, no. 1 (2021): 244, https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.10.
120 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 158.

261
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. 
Posthumanities 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 
Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76. Edited by 
Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Pic-
ador, 2003.
Geroux, Robert. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Decolonizing Animal Studies.” In 
“Decolonizing Human-Animal Studies,” edited by Robert Geroux, 1–9. Special issue, 
Humanimalia 10, no. 2 (2019). https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9499.
Gržinić, Marina. “ ‘Afterwards’: Struggling with Bodies in the Dump of History.” In Body 
between Materiality and Power: Essays in Visual Studies, edited by Nasheli Jiménez 
del Val, 163–82. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016.
. “From Oppression to Dystopia and Back to Colonialism: Review of Fahim Amir’s 
Book Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It) (2020).” Desde el mar -
gen 4 (February 2021). http://desde-elmargen.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Be -
ing-and-Swine-Book-review-byMarinaGrzinic.pdf.
. “Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe: Extended Essay on the Book.” Filozofski vestnik 
42, no. 1 (2021): 221–43. https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.10.
. “Svet kot so-pripadanje.” Afterword to Kritika črnskega uma, by Achille Mbembe, 
277–97. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2019.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2016.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. 
New York: Penguin, 2004.
Harman, Graham. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. London: Polity, 2016.
Hounshell, David A. “The Same Old Principles in the New Manufacturing.” Harvard Busi-
ness Review, August 31, 2021. https://hbr.org/1988/11/the-same-old-principles-in-the-
new-manufacturing.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. 
New York: New York University Press, 2020.
Kirk, Robert G. W. “The Birth of the Laboratory Animal: Biopolitics, Animal Experimen-
tation, and Animal Wellbeing.” In Foucault and Animals, edited by Matthew Chrulew 
and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, 193–221. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2017.
Latour, Bruno. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In Science Observed: 
Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, edited by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Mi-
chael Mulkay, 141–70. London: Sage, 1983.
Linnaeus, Carolus. Systema naturae, sive regna tria naturae systematice proposita per 
classes, ordines, genera, & species. Leiden, the Netherlands: Johann Wilhelm de Groot 
for Theodor Haak, 1735.

262
vesna liponik
Liponik, Vesna. “Antropomorfizacija: Kritična analiza (ne)tropa.” Master’s thesis, Uni-
versity of Ljubljana, 2022.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. “The Beast with Five Genomes.” Natural History 
Magazine, June 2001. https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/master.htm-
l?https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/0601/0601_feature.html.
. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
, and Dorion Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species. New York: 
Basic Books, 2002.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2019.
. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated 
by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Paxson, James J. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1994.
Pristovšek, Jovita. “Necro-Aesthetics, Deading Bodies, and Performativity of Flesh.” In 
Re-Activating Critical Thinking in the Midst of Necropolitical Realities: For Radical 
Change, edited by Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek, 284–306. Newcastle upon 
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2022.
Pugliese, Joseph. State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Tor-
ture, Black Sites, Drones. New York: Routledge, 2013.
. “Terminal Truths: Foucault’s Animals and the Mask of the Beast.” In Foucault and 
Animals, edited by Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, 19–36. Human-An-
imal Studies 18. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Razac, Olivier. Ekran in živalski vrt: Spektakel in udomačevanje od kolonialnih razstav 
do Big Brotherja. Translated by Sonja Dular. Ljubljana: Maska, 2007. Originally pub -
lished as L ’écran et le zoo: Spectacle et domestication, des expositions coloniales à Loft 
Story (Paris: Denoël, 2002).
Senior, Matthew. “Classify and Display: Human and Animal Species in Linnaeus and Cu-
vier.” In Animals, Animality and Literature, edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, and 
Brian Massumi, 156–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Stanescu, James. “Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of 
Deading Life.” PhaenEx 8, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2013): 135–60. https://doi.org/10.22329/p.
v8i2.4090.
Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper 
and Brothers, 1911.
Videmšek, Boštjan. “Portret tedna: Ahmad Shamieh.” Delo, November 17, 2017. https://
old.delo.si/sobotna/portret-tedna-ahmad-shamieh.html.
Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. The War Against Animals. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

263
the tropological animal: beyond the body and the sovereign
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black 
Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2013.