Dead liveness/living deadness: Thresholds of non-human life and death in biocapitalism

Abstract

The opening of a post-genomic age and the possibility of patenting life itself have changed the relationship between biopolitics and capitalism and contributed to the emergence of a new phase of capitalist accumulation, currently known as biocapitalism, the full integration of life and capital into complex architectures of control and ownership. In this paper, we combine Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the threshold and bios/ zoē with Nicole Shukin’s idea of rendering to address the connection between life and death in biocapitalism, through a specific focus on the commercialisation of the semen of the Piedmontese bulls. We show how death, rather than merely life, is productive in biocapitalism. Further, in proposing an analysis of some of the ways in which, social and biological, animal life gets incorporated (i.e. owned and sold), we contribute to recent debates in geography on more-than-human understanding of capital accumulation.