Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in A Biopolitical Frame, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2012, 152 pages, $ 20.00 paper, ISBN 9780226922416.

Cary Wolfe’s Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in A Biopolitical Frame is a novel and timely book that challenges the anthropocentric register of mainstream biopolitics.  It is an ambitious and generative interweaving of research, ranging from legal theorisations of animal ‘rights’ to neurophysiological accounts of behavioural plasticity.  In the book, Wolfe calls for a more differentiated biopolitical topology that is no longer pervaded by the ontological distinction between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal.’  He also attends to the homogenising tendencies of biopolitical terms such as ‘sovereignty,’ ‘species’ and ‘life,’ which can act to flatten and stifle emergent subjectivities, thereby delimiting the ethical and political purchase of our analyses.  Before the Law thus addresses and subjects to immanent critique, the broad nature of the strokes of conceptual analysis which have come to characterise many biopolitical endeavours.  Following the work of Shukin (2009) and other critical theorists operating at the nexus of literary theory, post-structuralist philosophy and animal studies, it demands that we take seriously and extend the biopolitical frame to an analytics of engagement with non-human animals in their full complexity and multiplicity.

Before the Law is split into eight sections and each one guides the reader through a rewarding journey into the tensions and productivities of the biopolitical terrain.  Towards the start of the book, Wolfe introduces the reader to a series of animal rights debates on-going between a number of legal theorists and philosophers.  For Wolfe, the question of whether or not animals should be afforded with rights is limited in its purview.  In drawing upon the work of Diamond and Derrida, Wolfe excavates the importance of a biopolitical perspective by noting that it does not “take for granted, much less endorse, our current legal structures for confronting such issues” (pages 17-18).  Wolfe then commences his critique of the homogenising nature of terms such as ‘sovereignty,’ which can act to obscure the specificities of biopolitical configurations.  Wolfe posits that it is these specificities that we must attend to if we are to realise the openings and instances during which life may burst “through power’s systematic operation in ways that are more and more difficult to anticipate” (pages 32-33).  It is here that Wolfe also notes that we must resist the tendency that inheres in much biopolitical theorising to presuppose who can be party to an ethical relationship.  Indeed, Wolfe critiques the work of Butler and Levinas for assuming in their work a particular type of agency that is based on a model of reciprocity.  It is these presuppositions that we must avoid if we are to extend the biopolitical frame to engage with non-human animals in their complex multiplicities.

Throughout this book, Wolfe compellingly unsettles the notion that there can be any hard and fast line differentiating species.  He does not, however, merely concede with the recent work of Esposito (2011) that we must embrace the nonperspectival relationality of ‘life’ in its undifferentiated equivalence.  For Wolfe, Esposito’s position is tantamount to the embracing of a “molecular wash of singularities” (Wolfe, page 59) and is “unworkable both philosophically and pragmatically” (page 58), not least because the act of suspending the immunity that “protects me from the other” might be “nothing short of life-threatening” (Derrida in Wolfe, page 92).  Wolfe thus confronts the ‘affirmative’ biopolitical trajectory as projected in Esposito’s Bios and rather calls for the radicalisation of biopolitical thought through a pragmatics of encounter that attends to the specificities of the transversal relations which underpin biopolitical dispositifs.  There is a clear Foucauldian inflection that inheres in Before the Law and indeed, it is Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, as opposed to the “formal symmetry between sovereignty and bare life of the sort we find in Agamben,” (page 33) that allows Wolfe to “cut across species lines and knit together bodies of whatever kind” (page 102).   In advancing this Foucauldian proposition, Wolfe draws on a range of literatures including the work of the feminist philosopher Duestscher, who, in a related vein, highlights the ways in which in public debates, the fetus is often figured as either ‘bios’ or ‘zoe’ and yet, rather problematically, such a sweeping analysis neglects to consider the intricacies and paradoxes of “the interconnections between biopower and women’s reproducitivty” (page 47).

In order to attend to the specificities of the transversal relations that stem from an understanding of biopolitics as a “relation of bodies, forces, technologies and dispositifs” (page 33), Wolfe engages with the term ‘framing’ as instituting a form of what counts and what doesn’t.  This is not ‘framing’ in the Heideggerian sense of ‘bringing forth’ the world in a manner that disrupts ‘proper’ relations to ‘Being,’ but more broadly, it refers to an attentiveness towards the ways in which violence and immunitary protection fall within a “newly expanded community of the living” (page 52), where bios and zoe operate within rather than between particular biopolitical domains.  Indeed, through adopting this more nuanced biopolitical topology, Wolfe evocatively illustrates and is able to attend to a range of jarring biopolitical juxtapositions.  He highlights, for example, the ways in which 99 per cent of the animals in the United States killed for food each year are excluded from the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act and yet, at the same time, Great Apes have been afforded rights by the Spanish Parliament, while pet care expenditures in the United States grew to a staggering $45.5 billion in 2009.  These rich and vibrant examples clearly suggest that there can no longer be any straightforward division between the domains of the ‘human’ and  ‘animal,’ or ‘bios’ and ‘zoe.’  For Wolfe, the significance of teasing out and engaging this more nuanced biopolitical topology in its full complexity, is that it leads to the opening up of direct political challenges, while reiterating the sobering realisation that “we are all, after all, potentially animals before the law” (page 105).

In advocating an engagement with the particularities of specific biopolitical configurations, Before the Law presents a powerful rejoinder to a number of broader biopolitical critiques which have suggested that biopolitical theoretic is lacking in the “ballast, or any ballast at all, in  navigating the struggles that are upon us” (Campbell, 2011: 1).  Furthermore, it also opposes the division between the ‘affirmative’ and the ‘thanatopolitical,’ which appears to have engendered something of a conceptual impasse in biopolitical thought.  Whilst, for example, Wolfe gestures towards Esposito’s critique of the arbitrary closures as enacted by law, he postulates that what Esposito fails to recognise, is that the quality of ‘openness’ typically rests on that of the ‘closed.’  Indeed, although the law is engaged in the production and enactment of arbitrary decisions, it is in this very arbitrariness, Wolfe argues, that we are able to open ourselves to alterity in the future.  This postulation, which is cognate with the work of critical legal scholars such as Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2007), is deployed by Wolfe in order to critique Esposito’s favouring of the Deleuzian imperative of the ‘impersonal.’  The ‘impersonal,’ which seeks to dismantle the division between the self and other, is unethical for Wolfe for the simple reason that in its abstracted capacity, it fails to recognise that it is through selectivity and partiality that we are able to call forth the need to be more responsible.  Wolfe raises some thought provoking points here, but one wonders whether if we were to interpret Esposito in a less literal manner, as calling for the deepening of the contradiction between the protection and the negation of life, with the ‘impersonal’ being merely a utopian ideal that generates the momentum required to deepen this contradiction, then perhaps Esposito’s and Wolfe’s biopolitical endeavours are not as dissimilar as they may initially appear.

Having both outlined the significance of biopolitical thought and subjected it to immanent critique, it is towards the end of Before the Law that Wolfe’s postulations take on their most compelling form.  Drawing on accounts of behavioural plasticity, Wolfe unsettles the Lacanian idea that humans are capable of ‘responding,’ while animals can only ‘react.’  Of particular interest in the latter section of this book is Wolfe’s engagement with the “scandal of the cephalopods” (page 72).  Here, Wolfe draws on the work the of the Burghardt, who has demonstrated the ways in which octopuses may exhibit distinct personality traits and are able to solve complex problems such as removing the lid from a jar; problems that they would unlikely encounter outside of captivity.  What Wolfe therefore presents us with is a complex terrain in which “‘the presubjective conditions that give rise to human subjectivity’ cannot be restricted to humans alone” (Calarco, in Wolfe page 74).  This raises a number of important implications, not least the realisation that some of the prevailing affective and ethical preconditions that lead to legal affordances, are, at present, limited and exclusionary.  In reaching these kinds of provocations, Before the Law mobilises a geographical imagination that separates, while simultaneously bridging, the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of law.  This geographical imagination is clearly very productive, but one also wonders whether we might push this analysis even further.  More specifically, rather than attending to the affective complexities of the more-than-human worlds that exist prior to the incisions made by law, and then assessing the implications of these incisions, we might look instead to law as being something that is always already in excess of itself.  In other words, through an explicit engagement with the ways in which law and life co-constitute themselves in generative terms, we might be able to provide even more space yet, for thinking seriously about the intricacies of legal praxis in a more affirmative manner.

In short, through its engagement with a “newly expanded community of the living” (page 52) and in its calling for finer grained and more differentiated biopolitical analyses, Before the Law reasserts the significance of biopolitics in enabling us to challenge the complexities of the joint subjugation of humans and animals.  Not only does this book confront the “cruel irony” of the strange silence surrounding the relationship between biopolitics and non-human animals (Wolfe, 2012: 1), but in its advocating of an attentive pragmatics of encounter, it aspires to move beyond the dualistic politics ‘of’ or ‘over’ life, that is inherent to much contemporary biopolitical theorising.

In this regard, Before the Law is relevant to a wide ranging, interdisciplinary audience and provides an important platform upon which to develop conceptually rigorous and empirically rich research, that seeks to foster an ethics of care and foreground the ways in which “human and nonhuman lives are deeply woven together” (page 48).  This is not merely in the Latourian sense of attending to the complexities of the assemblages within which we live, but rather, in examining the particularities of how things matter and for whom.  Whether our research interests lie in the emergence of synthetic meat, or, in the increasing rise in zoonotic diseases, the challenge posed by Wolfe’s radicalisation of biopolitical theoretic therefore lies in its teasing out of the paradoxes and specificities of the ambivalent dimensions of biopolitical life.  During a time when some are postulating that biopolitics is at its most violent, and others are attending to what is alleged, for example, to be a remarkable shrinkage in the quality of life between humans and certain animals (page 53), it clear that this is a challenge to which we must rise. 

References

Campbell T (2011) Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos A (2007) Absent Environments: Theorising Environmental Law and the City. New York and London: Routledge.

Shukin N (2009) Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wolfe C (2012) “Animal Dasein,” https://web.duke.edu/philartslit/Sawyer/Wolfe%20-%20Animal%20Dasein.pdf (accessed 15/03/13).