For the last fifty years, following the paradigms of ecology of infectious diseases and “One Health”, virologists have collected samples from non-human animals to anticipate spillover events causing pandemics among humans. This daily work of monitoring, moving between farms, markets, borders and laboratories, has introduced animals in human communities as sentinels perceiving early warning signals, by contrast with spectacular killings of suspicious animals which redraw the boundaries between humans and animals. This talk will ask what kind of biopolitics emerges from such a surveillance of animals for pandemic preparedness. Discussing thinkers such as Chamayou, Mbembe, Descola and Povinelli, it will test the hypothesis that modernity is a shift not only from sovereign power to biopolitics, but also from cynegetic power to cryopolitics. If the subject of cryopolitics is not populations but collection, what kind of emancipation can be conceived for this new form of biopolitics?
Frédéric Keck is an anthropologist and historian of philosophy at the Collège de France. He has been Director of the Research Department of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and Director of the Social Anthropology Laboratory of the Collège de France. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research on health crises linked to animal diseases: BSE (or mad cow disease), SARS, avian and swine influenza, Covid-19. His work focuses more generally on 'biopolitics' applied to humans and animals, and the political measures taken to avoid or contain health and ecological disasters.
Professor Keck was nominated for the Sarton Chair by the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences (collega proximus: prof. Dr. Raf Vanderstraeten).
The lecture will be followed by a reception.