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Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
Available online 15 September 2023
0962-6298/© 2023 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Full Length Article
More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power
Larissa Fleischmann
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Institute of Geosciences and Geography, Von-Seckendorff-Platz 4, 06120, Halle (Saale), Germany
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Abjection
Sovereign power
More-than-human political geographies
Animal geographies
Biopolitics
Necropolitics
Killing
Nonhuman resistance
Agamben
Kristeva
ABSTRACT
This article unravels the processes of abjection that render certain nonhumans as abject, devoid of value and
amenable to elimination and killing. It argues that these processes play a constitutive role in practices of state-
making and sovereign power. Abjection works towards the exclusion and rejection of certain parts of a supposed
socio-material order, which, for one reason or another, confuse dominant categorizations, trespass certain spatial
boundaries or challenge socially produced distinctions and hierarchies (Bataille, 1970 [1934]; Kristeva, 1982).
Abjected nonhumans thus regularly become the target of state-induced practices of elimination and culling – as is
the case, for instance, with species classied as ‘invasive’, as ‘pests’, as ‘biosecurity threat’ or as ‘disease res-
ervoirs’. Yet, abjection also points to the ability of nonhumans to unsettle, challenge and confuse dominant
boundaries and established orders. Abject beings inhabit “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) from which they challenge
and transcend sovereign impulses to order, govern and eliminate their existence. Taking cue from previous works
on abjection and sovereign power, on the one hand, and works on the role of nonhumans in political processes,
on the other, I argue that abjection and state-making are not only intertwined but also crucially played out in
relation to nonhuman forms of life and death. My wider conceptual aim is to illustrate what an engagement with
processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of more-than-human political geographies.
1. Introduction: killing abject life
In November 2020, the Danish government ordered the immediate
mass culling of 15 million minks and the subsequent disposal of their
dead bodies (cf. Green, 2022). Up to that date, the country had been the
world’s largest producer of mink skins and a global hub for the fur trade,
with China being a top export market for Danish fur (Danish Agriculture
& Food Council, 2021). Yet, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the gov-
ernment feared that the animals could become a constant reservoir of a
mutated virus strain, which had been detected on a handful of Danish
mink farms and which was suspected to threaten the effectiveness of
vaccines (The Local Dk, Nov 5, 2020). In response to the culling order,
mink farmers often unwillingly eradicated their entire livestock, even if
the animals on their farms had not shown any signs of a previous
infection with the Covid-19 virus strain. Most gassed their animals in
small boxes using carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide – the usual killing
technique in fur farming.
1
Their dead bodies were then discharged at a
mass dumping site on a military eld.
The case of the mink cull bears striking resemblances to the 2001
Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) crisis in the UK, which saw a similarly
excessive state-induced killing of potentially infected but most often
healthy farm animals (Convery et al., 2005; Donaldson & Wood, 2004).
As Braun (2013, p. 55) observes: “at such moments biosecurity reveals
itself as an excessively violent affair, as a thanatopolitics […]”, one that
raises questions on “the way in which animal life can be sacriced – and
is, by the millions – so that human life can persist”. Although death had
been inscribed into the lives of the minks from their birth as a farm
animal, the Danish culling regime disrupted the regular rhythms and
purposes of their ‘ordinary’ killing (cf. Convery et al., 2005). Previously,
their killing had constituted a regular act in the commodication process
and formed a central step in the value-creating transformation from
lively commodity to expansive fur. The culling order amidst the
Covid-19 pandemic, however, presented a rupture to this system of
economic production in which nonhumans are enrolled: it stripped the
minks of any economic value and turned their life and death into matters
of state control and intervention – in other words, it transformed the
minks from valued commodities into abject delement that must be cast
away. Their killing on mass thus constituted an ultimate act of
E-mail address: larissa.eischmann@geo.uni-halle.de.
1
Animal welfare activists and veterinarians have repeatedly emphasized the cruel effects of this killing technique on minks, which are semiaquatic species and are
thus capable of holding their breath for a long time. Gassing minks with carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide might thus lead to painful suffocation and prolonged
suffering (Hansen et al., 1991
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102949
Received 3 September 2021; Received in revised form 26 May 2023; Accepted 17 July 2023
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
2
devaluation in a wider process of abjection, with the only aim to restore
a supposedly healthy and puried socio-material order and to ‘clear up’
contaminations. In order to protect the lives of humans, those of the
potentially infected minks were thus rendered disposable by the state,
considered as abject life devoid of value. How can we explain this
excessive outburst of state-induced killing that eventually led to the
universal destruction of the farmed mink population in the country? And
what role did the abjection and killing of nonhumans play in the gov-
ernment’s wider attempt to demonstrate sovereign power and to seize
control amidst a perceived crisis?
This article unravels the processes of abjection
2
that render certain
nonhumans as devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing.
It argues that these processes play a constitutive role in practices of
state-making and sovereign power. Abjection puts not the act of killing
itself into question but rather, to speak in Haraway’s (2008, p. 80)
words, the process of “making killable”, the how and why of rendering
certain matters and beings killable through governmental intervention.
Through processes of abjection, species might become equated with
their excrements, construed as an abject and alien ‘threat’ to society
(Kornherr & Pütz, 2022). Those who are rendered abject thus frequently
become represented as “the lth, the snot, the vermin” (Bataille, 1970
[1934], p. 219).
3
What is central here is the question of how processes of abjection are
intertwined with sovereign power and the political: as Atchison and
Pilkinton (2022, p. 3) argue, abjection inicts a “moral politics of
neglect” that enables the state to execute governing practices that would
otherwise be deemed questionable and that work towards the exclusion
and violent erasure of, for instance, species classied as “invasive”
(Dobson et al., 2013; Everts, 2015; Robbins, 2004), as a “biosecurity” or
“health threat” (Cassidy, 2019; Enticott, 2008a; Green, 2022), as “feral”
(Johnston, 2021a; Nagy & Jonson, 2013), as a “nuisance” (Johnston,
2021b) or as “out of place” (Jerolmack, 2008; Srinivasan, 2013). All of
these different categories of abjected nonhumans might become subject
to sudden, often unpredictable or temporary xed outbursts of
state-induced violence with the aim to fully and once and for all exclude
and destruct all those who transgress social or spatial boundaries – a
form of making killable that differs from ordinary or everyday forms of
nonhuman killing and death. Processes of abjection thus reach their
climax when they turn into the systematic eradication of certain groups
of species or matters that, for one reason or another, do supposedly ‘not
t in’.
The main aim of this article is to discuss what abjected nonhumans
share in their wider function for the workings of the state. As Wadiwel
(2015, p. 28) suggests, techniques of control and violence towards
nonhumans “seem likely to have informed, and continue to be inter-
twined with, human practices of violence towards other humans”. The
point is therefore not to replace humans with nonhumans, but to open
up anthropocentric conceptions of state-making and sovereign power in
ways that account for our complex relations with other beings (cf.
Cadman, 2009; Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016). Taking cue from existing
works on abjection, on the one hand, and works on the role of animals
and other nonhumans in political processes, on the other, I aim to offer a
conceptual take on how processes of abjection work towards the
banishment of certain beings to a biopolitical threshold, a state of
indifference between life that is worth living and life that is potentially
expandable (Agamben, 1998; Minca, 2007). Taking abjected nonhu-
mans into account thus draws attention to forms of governing that target
both the management of life and the management of death (Cadman,
2009; Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016; Lopez & Gillespie, 2015; Rose &
Van Dooren, 2011).
Yet, processes of abjection also point to the ability of abjected non-
humans to cross boundaries and to confuse the dominant socio-material
order. As Kristeva (1982) argues: what is abject refuses to stay obedi-
ently in its place of banishment. Thus, abjection raises questions on the
political agency and revolting unruliness of nonhumans and their ability
to challenge authoritative forces of control and power (Dickinson,
2022). This article therefore also explores how abject beings inhabit
“unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) from which they challenge, resist and
transcend sovereign impulses to order, govern and eliminate their ex-
istence – and, by doing so, make themselves visible as agents in political
processes.
My wider conceptual aim is to illustrate what an engagement with
processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of more-than-human
political geographies (cf. Boyce, 2016; Fregonese, 2015; Minca, 2023).
During the past years, more-than-human and posthumanist approaches
have opened up new lines of inquiry for the subdiscipline and put
established ones under critical scrutiny. Taken together, works under
this line of thought demonstrate how animals, objects, technologies and
other matters constitute part and parcel of a more-than-human political
geography’s ontological eld, while they provoke a reformulation of
some of the key concepts of the subdiscipline, such as territorialisation
or borders.
This article contributes conceptually to these works by arguing that
processes of abjection and state-making are not only intertwined but
also crucially played out in relation to nonhuman forms of life (and
death) – thus suggesting that a closer consideration of ‘abjection’ is a
relevant avenue to explore for future empirical research in more-than-
human political geographies. As the political philosopher Giorgio
Agamben (1998, p. 164) suggests, the essence of sovereign power plays
out in the state’s ability to decide on what counts as life that is worth
living and what as life devoid of value; on what is treated as life that is
worth protecting and what is rendered disposable and threatened with
the possibility of death and elimination. A closer investigation into
processes of abjection is thus not only telling in regards to the powerful
spatial practices that continually (re)produce and implement this bio-
political threshold onto the lives of nonhumans and across species di-
vides (cf. Margulies, 2019). It also illustrates how this threshold position
comes with possibilities for nonhumans to resist and challenge the in-
tentions of sovereign power.
The article is structured as follows: in the subsequent second section,
I scrutinize how it contributes to a recent turn towards less charismatic
beings. In the third section, I then draw on Georges Bataille’s (1970
[1934]) and Julia Kristeva’s (1982) work on abjection in order to
rethink the concept and discuss its relevance for more-than-human po-
litical geographies. In the fourth section, I scrutinize how a more explicit
focus on processes of abjection contributes to a more-than-human
reconsideration of sovereign power, biopolitics and killing. The fth
section then pays closer attention to questions relating to the unruliness
and agency of abjected beings in political processes. Finally, I wrap up
with a concluding section, returning to the example of the abjected
minks in Denmark in order to illustrate how, even in their dead form,
they did not cease to challenge those in power.
2. A ‘turn’ towards abject nonhumans?
In the past decades, more-than-human approaches have vividly
illustrated how social and spatial processes are always a product of co-
fabrications shaped by humans and a multitude of nonhuman actors,
such as animals, plants, objects, and technologies (see for instance Asdal
et al., 2016; Braun, 2005; Eriksson & Bull, 2017; Greenhough, 2014;
Lorimer, 2010b; Panelli, 2010; Peters, 2014; Whatmore, 2006). Taken
together, such works have questioned dominant binary thinking,
actively challenging the divide between nature/culture, human/animal
and object/subject, thus, working towards a less anthropocentric
conception of human geography.
2
The original meaning of the term abjection derives from the Latin verb
abicio, meaning “to abandon”, “to cast away”, “to throw away”, or “to degrade”
(Charlton T. Lewis, 2021).
3
Translated from French by the author. French original: “La crasse, la morve,
la vermine”.
L. Fleischmann
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
3
More-than-human thinking has also led to a reformulation of some of
the key concepts of political geography by posing questions on the role
and agency of different nonhumans in political matters. Discussions
revolve around the question of how objects and materials, such as
cameras, wiretaps or oil pipelines extend and shape the performance of
state power (Barry, 2013; Darling, 2014; Dittmer, 2017; Meehan, 2014;
Meehan et al., 2013). Scholars also illustrate how nonhumans, such as
animals, vegetation or objects take part in struggles around border
control (Boyce, 2016; Squire, 2014; Sundberg, 2011). Others point to
the role of new technologies, such as drones, robots or algorithms, in
shaping the spatial arena of the political (Braun et al., 2010; Shaw, 2016;
Vincent J. Del Casino Jr et al., 2020). There have also been a number of
works seeking to integrate assemblage thinking into political geography
and critical geopolitics (Allen, 2011; Depledge, 2013; Dittmer, 2014;
Müller, 2015). Others take their cue from thinkers on New Materialism,
highlighting the political agency of technologies and other materials,
while decidedly criticizing a poststructuralist over-emphasis on lan-
guage and representation (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010). Furthermore,
political geography has been taken to unusual arenas by integrating
elements such as air (Adey, 2015) or water (Steinberg & Peters, 2015),
or by considering voluminous aspects of state-making and sovereignty
(Battaglia, 2020; Bill´
e, 2019).
Living nonhumans (or their remains and afterlives) are also consid-
ered as elements of networks of power and as entangled in asymmetrical
hierarchies with humans and other species (see Dickinson, 2022; Hov-
orka, 2018; Minor and Boyce, 2018; Squire, 2020). For instance,
scholars have scrutinized the contours of a political animal geography
(Hobson, 2007; Margulies and Karanth, 2018; Srinivasan, 2016;
Swann-Quinn, 2019). Others have introduced viruses, plants, microbes
and other vital and dead matter onto the scene of political geography
(Barker, 2010; Dobson et al., 2013; Greenhough, 2014; Head et al.,
2014; Ingram, 2013; Klinke, 2019; Theriault, 2017). And yet scholars
have disproportionally focussed on beings that elicit more sympathetic
feelings or positive associations and are thus ‘easier’ to relate with. If
living nonhumans are integrated into geographic inquiry, they are most
often animals – at the expense of other beings, which are considerably
less likely to become the focus of more-than-human research, such as
plants (cf. Head & Atchison, 2009; Margulies et al., 2019). In particular,
there is a tendency towards animal species that are, in one way or
another, valued and admired by humans, such as pets, zoo animals or
rare wild animals in need of protection (Moran, 2015, p. 636). Of
considerable inuence for setting the species agenda here is Donna
Haraway’s (2003) seminal work on “companion species”, which has
inspired scholars to delve into our close affective relationships with pet
animals, for instance, dogs and horses (Brown & Dilley, 2012; Power,
2008; Pütz, 2020; Urbanik & Morgan, 2013). Others observe a tendency
towards large terrestrial mammals – especially those that incite fasci-
nation or yearning – at the expense of smaller animals, aquatic species,
other vertebrates and invertebrates (Bull, 2014; Greenhough, 2014).
Most tellingly, a considerable number of scholars has engaged with el-
ephants, an animal species that might respond to romantic imaginations
of exotic nature (Barua, 2014; Lorimer, 2010a; Whatmore & Thorne,
2000). Bull (2014, p. 74) observes a tendency towards a geography of
nearby within animal studies, a tendency that privileges certain species
over others due to their perceived close spatial, emotional, behavioural
or taxonomic ties with humans, as he puts it: “Most often the animals
concerned have a recognisable ‘face’ and are generally benign”. And, in
his inspiring essay on Nonhuman Charisma, Jamie Lorimer (2007)
elaborates different modes of relating that determine whether a species
becomes subject to charismatic affection and sympathetic feelings.
However, there is a growing interest among more-than-human and
animal geographers in nonhumans that are not commonly valued as
charismatic and benign companions. As Bear (2020) argues in relation to
the broader eld of animal studies:
“the interdisciplinary eld of animal studies has recently taken what
might be termed an awkward turn. Having focused for much of the
past two decades on ostensibly ‘familiar subjects’ (Lorimer: 2014, p.
195) such as warm-blooded mammals, recent scholarship has turned
to beings that appear harder to engage or empathise with” (Bear,
2020, p. 5)
A number of works has looked at species of animals that incite af-
fective responses such as disgust, repulsion or abomination. For
instance, in their collection of essays entitled Unloved Others, Rose and
Van Dooren (2011, p. 1) focus on creatures “less visible, less beautiful,
less a part of our cultural lives”; on unloved and often disregarded others
that are regularly vilied by humans, such as soil organisms, vultures,
ticks, moths and ying foxes. In their edited volume Trash animals, Nagy
and Jonson (2013, p. 1) direct their attention to animal species that are
considered “worthless, threatening, dangerous, destructive, and ugly.
Varmints, vermin, pests, scavengers, nuisances and exotics or invasive
alien species”, species that are treated like trash and stripped of value.
Their intention is to challenge the very processes that link these forms of
life with ‘real’ trash.
Another line of inquiry raises awareness for beings that are
commonly assumed to be at a taxonomic distance to humans. In their
editorial to a special issue, Ginn et al. (2014, p. 113) are interested in
“creatures that bite, or sting, or – like giant isopods – fascinate but
repulse us, and in creatures that must die so that others may live:
awkward creatures, in other words, which tend not to t off-the-shelf
ethics”. Krieg (2020, p. 1) focusses on reptiles that, as she argues,
“represent a kind of alterity that is often deemed categorically different
from warm-blooded animals”. Others have directed their attention to
sh (Atchison, 2019; Bear & Eden, 2011) or invertebrates (Abrahamsson
& Bertoni, 2014; Bull, 2014; Lorimer, 2016). There are a number of
works that look at insect geographies (Bear, 2020; Beisel, 2010; Beisel
et al., 2013; Bingham, 2006; Vincent J Del Casino Jr, 2018). Plants and
vegetal forms of life are also more frequently considered in geographic
inquiries (Everts & Benediktsson, 2015; Head et al., 2014; Pitt, 2015).
Moreover, geographers have looked at organisms that confuse dominant
taxonomic boundaries, including mould (Schemann, 2020), yeast (Brice,
2014) or microbes (Eriksson & Bull, 2017; Lorimer, 2017).
It is in this context, that scholars have started to engage with the
spatial and political dimensions of abject nonhumans and their produc-
tion as threating and disposable ‘other’ (Atchison & Pilkinton, 2022;
Gesing, 2023; Kane, 2023; Kornherr & Pütz, 2022; Moran, 2015).
Exploring how lives are rendered abject, be they animals, plants or other
beings, can help to foreground the political nature of the often violent
relations with less charismatic nonhumans, thus opening up interesting
avenues for future research. The following section engages more thor-
oughly with the concepts of ‘the abject’ and ‘abjection’ by discussing
their potential for furthering the agenda of more-than-human political
geographies.
3. Rethinking ‘abjection’ for a more-than-human political
geography
There are two main thinkers whose works form the basis of current
conceptions of abjection. The rst is the writer and philosopher Georges
Bataille, a leading gure of French surrealism in the rst half of the 20th
century. In 1934, shortly after the Nazis’ rise to power in neighbouring
Germany, Bataille published a short essay entitled L’abjection et les for-
mes mis´
erables. This text formed part of a more general interest in the
subconscious as well as in social processes of exclusion and oppression –
recurring themes in many of his writings (Biles, 2014). Second, building
on but also departing from Bataille’s understanding of the term, the
French-Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva (1982) wrote the seminal
work The Powers of Horror– An Essay on Abjection, in which she focuses
more explicitly on the psychic dimensions of abjection, taking cue from
psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan. Her work inspired a whole line
L. Fleischmann
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
4
of scholars who subsequently engaged with expressions and modes of
abjection in various empirical and disciplinary contexts, such as in the
liberal arts (Arya, 2014; Seegert, 2014), in literature studies (Hennefeld
& Sammond, 2020), in feminist theory (Butler, 2011 [1993]; Covino,
2012) or in critical migration and border studies (Brun et al., 2017; Isin
& Rygiel, 2007; Papastergiadis, 2006; Tyler, 2009, 2013). Before
delving into the details, however, I would like to note that it is not my
intention to uncritically copy Kristeva’s or Bataille’s use of psychoana-
lytic terms and concepts nor is it in the scope of this article to do justice
to the substantial number of works that have criticized, worked with and
rened psychoanalytic theory in the eld of psychoanalytic geographies
(see for instance Callard, 2003; Kingsbury, 2004; Kingsbury & Pile,
2016; Philo & Parr, 2003). Nevertheless, I think that Kristeva’s and
Bataille’s works hold inspiring thoughts for the development of
more-than-human political geographies of abjection.
In his short essay, Bataille foregrounds the forces of exclusion that
work towards the production of ‘abject’ parts of society. He thus treats
the abject as a synonym for the “miserable population”, i.e. the part of
the population that is “excluded from life by a prohibition of contact
[and] represented from the outside with disgust as the dregs of the
people, populace and gutter”
4
(Bataille, 1970 [1934], p. 218). Abjected
parts of society thus come into being as mere products of social and
political processes of exclusion. Abjection, he goes on to argue, always
requires coercion. This coercion is established by the ruling elite through
a prohibition of contact (p. 219). Through this act of exclusion and the
prohibition of contact, the ruling elites “have deprived these under-
privileged of the possibility of being men”
5
(ibid.). Thus, abjected parts
cease to be valued as humans and instead become abject things, objec-
tied by the force of the ruling elite. As Sylv`
ere Lotringer (2014) com-
ments, with this conceptualisation, Bataille intended to describe the
imperative force that forms the basis of fascism. As Lotringer comments:
“[it] was essentially a reection (…) on fascism, on the forces on which
fascism relied, the imperative act that dened a certain fraction of the
population, even a fraction of the proletariat, as abject”. One might thus
argue that Bataille’s notion of ‘abject things’ bears resemblance with
what Hannah Arendt (2013 [1951]) later depicted as “the scum of the
earth” or Frantz Fanon (2007 [1961]) as “the wretched of the earth”.
Although Bataille does not explicitly refer to nonhumans in his essay on
abjection, Biles (2014) suggests that animals present recurring meta-
phors in many of his other writings.
Kristeva (1982, p. 3) also stresses the importance of acts of exclusion
and rejection for understanding abjection; acts that she regards as the
very foundation of an individual’s identity and which she originates in
the primordial breaking from the mother. Kristeva’s deep interest in the
term abjection, however, stems from the perception that it constitutes “a
crossroads”, “a bridge” that accounts for “all sorts of phenomena that
have to do simultaneously with disgust and fascination” (Lotringer,
2014). She therefore denes the abject as what “disturbs identity, sys-
tem, order. What does not respect borders, positions and rules. The
in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). On
the one hand, Kristeva’s abject provokes affective bodily responses such
as vomiting, nausea or spasms. She explicates this by referring to the
sentiments that we experience in relation to body uids, such as ex-
crements or saliva, but also lth, waste, sewage or food loathing. On the
other hand, she points to a contradictory feeling of attraction to the
abject, arguing that “many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims
– if not its submissive and willing ones” (p. 9). For Kristeva, the abject
thus holds a characteristic essence; a capacity to disturb order and to
cross boundaries: “We may call it a border, abjection is above all am-
biguity” (p. 9).
Scholars in political geography and related elds have worked with
and rened the works of Bataille and Kristeva mainly by illustrating how
state-induced processes of abjection hold a spatial dimension (Brun
et al., 2017; Isin & Rygiel, 2007; Moawad & Andres, 2023; Robinson,
2000; Russell, 2017). Abjection also materializes in spatial separations,
connements, territorialisations and acts of border-making – which all
work towards the spatial seclusion and invisibilisation of those who are
rendered abject (Isin & Rygiel, 2007). For instance, Dorn and Laws
(1994, p. 107) argue that “micro-geographies of abjection separate the
deviant body so that it will not pose a challenge to the established
norms”. Moawad and Andres (2023) outline how space contributes to
the seclusion and spatial separation of those deemed abject, while Isin
and Rygiel (2007) conceptualize “abject spaces”, which they dene as
follows:
“abject spaces are those in and through which increasingly dis-
tressed, displaced, and dispossessed peoples are condemned to the
status of strangers, outsiders, and aliens (e.g. refugees, unlawful
combatants, insurgents, and the conquered) and stripped of their
(existent and potential) citizenship […] in various emerging fron-
tiers, zones, and camps around the world” (Isin & Rygiel, 2007, p.
181)
Yet, so far, political geographers and scholars from related elds
have employed the concept of abjection mainly in order to grasp the
processes of exclusion and marginalisation directed towards groups of
humans who become deprived of fundamental rights, such as irregular
migrants or stateless persons (Brun et al., 2017; Isin & Rygiel, 2007;
Moawad & Andres, 2023; Papastergiadis, 2006; Tyler, 2013). They have
illustrated how certain fractions of the population become targets of
processes of abjection precisely because they confuse dominant binaries
between insider/outsider (Papastergiadis, 2006), citizen/non-citizen
(Brun et al., 2017) or male/female (Robinson, 2000; Russell, 2017).
As Brun et al. (2017) argue, processes of abjection are therefore pro-
cesses of boundary-making, which work towards the exclusion and
separation of deviant parts of the population, parts that cannot be in-
tegrated into a system from which they become expelled.
Taking cue from these works, I would suggest that abjection is a
relevant concept for exploring our violent relations with abjected non-
humans; relations that also materialize in spatial processes of exclusion
and marginalisation (Atchison & Pilkinton, 2022; Kornherr & Pütz,
2022). Although political geographers have so far engaged with the
concept mainly from an anthropocentric perspective, there are a number
of inspiring works in the liberal arts that have included animals and
other organisms in considerations on abjection (Biles, 2014; Johnson,
2014; May, 2014). In this disciplinary context, Kristeva has inspired a
whole strand of art works that has been labelled “abject art” (cf. Johnson,
2014). Creed and Horn explain this turn towards the abject in the arts as
follows: “contemporary art practices that explore animals and animality
do so as a means to challenge the notion that animals form humankind’s
abject other” (cited in Arya & Chare, 2016). In their arts collection
Concrete Jungle, which engages with abject nonhuman life in urban en-
vironments, Dion and Rockman (1996) also tellingly explain this ability
of animals to confront us with the abject:
“[Pests] such as the cockroach, rat and pigeon – are that dangerous
class of animals, who are rarely appreciated with the sentimental eye
we reserve for pets. Seen as emblems of decay and contamination
(…) these animals remind us that we too are animals, and therefore,
mortal. The cockroach and rat can shake the foundations of civili-
zation to the core and us to the marrow” (Dion & Rockman, 1996, p.
6)
This indicates how certain animals, such as rats or cockroaches,
might become a symbol of decay and contamination - phenomena that,
in a Kristevan sense, remind us of our own animality, challenging
boundaries between nature/culture, man/animal.
Processes of abjection thus work towards the exclusion and rejection
4
French original: “(…) ´
ecart´
ee de la vie par une prohibition de contact est
repr´
esent´
ee du dehors avec d´
egoût comme lie du peuple, populace et ruisseau”.
5
French original: “ils ont enlev´
e `
a ces desh´
erit´
es la possibilit´
e d’ˆ
etre des
hommes”.
L. Fleischmann
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
5
of both human and nonhuman parts of the socio-material order, which,
for one reason or another, confuse dominant categorizations, trespass
certain spatial boundaries or challenge socially produced distinctions
and hierarchies, for instance, between nature/culture, human/animal,
clean/unclean, native/foreign, healthy/diseased, inside/outside, pure/
impure. This builds on a history of works that have highlighted how
animals become framed as a problem when they are experienced as ‘out
of place’ or as ‘transgressive’ (Carter & Palmer, 2017; Philo, 1995).
Examples are pigeons that ‘invade’ the ordered urban spaces designed
exclusively for human use (Jerolmack, 2008) or street dogs that are
controlled as a ‘pest’, rather than being treated as a ‘pet’, if they are out
of human homes (Srinivasan, 2013). A focus on abjection, I would
suggest, holds the potential to add to these works in at least three ways.
First, it helps to foreground the political processes and violent
power-laden mechanisms with which the sovereign works towards the
elimination or banishment of such ‘matter out of place’. Precisely
because some nonhumans are perceived as ‘not tting in’ for a variety of
reasons, they become targets of state-induced processes of abjection,
which work towards their invisibilisation or eradication, so as to restore
the normalised and puried socio-material order of things. Second, in a
Kristevan sense, an analytical focus on abjection draws attention to the
affective and psychic dimensions of state practices targeting supposedly
transgressive or contaminating nonhumans. Thirdly, abjection points to
the capacity of ‘matter out of place’ to unsettle, challenge and confuse
dominant boundaries and established orders, actively resisting political
attempts to discipline and control their lives.
Summing up, I would suggest that a more-than-human inquiry into
processes of abjection opens up at least two interesting avenues for
future empirical research in the subdiscipline of political geography.
First, works should explore how abjected beings become the targets of
spatially relevant and state-induced processes of exclusion, invisibili-
sation and eradication – and hence objects of the disciplining practices
of sovereign power. Second, future studies could focus on how those
who are rendered abject constitute limit-gures and thus posses the
ability to transgress boundaries and to challenge the normalised socio-
material order, thus, exerting agency in political processes. I will turn
to each of these directions in more detail throughout the following two
sections.
4. More-than-human political geographies of killing, sovereign
power and biopolitics
A more-than-human reformulation of abjection raises questions on
the role of nonhumans in state-making and government practices. As I
suggested in the previous section, processes of abjection work towards
the violent exclusion and spatial separation of both humans and non-
humans. In their most severe form, they may turn into systematic
eradication; sudden outbursts of violence with the aim to fully and once
and for all exclude and destruct all those who ‘do not t in’ – as Atchison
and Pilkinton (2022) tellingly illustrate in relation to the invasive spe-
cies management by the Australian government in the aftermath of the
2019-20 bushres.
This opens up a fruitful link to works that have looked at how ani-
mals and other nonhumans are frequently affected by mass killing and
human-induced death (Brice, 2014; Cassidy, 2019; Crowley et al., 2018;
Gibbs, 2021; Lopez & Gillespie, 2015; Margulies, 2019; Perkins, 2020).
Such works respond to Philo’s (2017, p. 257) observation that the
“pervasive tone” in more-than-human geographies is predominantly
“rich, lively, indeed vital” and his subsequent call for a more systematic
exploration of “not what renders it lively, but what cuts away at that life,
to the point of, including, and maybe beyond death”. For instance, works
have drawn attention to the afterlives of commodied animals (Bersa-
glio & Margulies, 2022; Bezan & McKay, 2021; Gillespie, 2021). In this
context, Dickinson (2022, p. 4) makes the case for investigating “the
political agencies of dead animals and disembodied animal derivatives
or eshy tissues” while arguing that they co-constitute political
processes.
A focus on abjection, however, differs from accounts that have
looked at the “everyday” death of nonhumans (see for instance Shche-
glovitova, 2022). Rather than investigating ‘ordinary’ forms of death
and killing, such as in the context of factory farming or commodied
animals (Lopez & Gillespie, 2015), abjection draws attention to the
sudden, often unpredictable or temporary xed forms of state-induced
killing and violent death. What is crucial here is that, in the case of
abjected forms of life, the act of killing does not become a value-adding
activity in the ‘regular’ commodication process, in which nonhumans
and their derivatives are bound up. Instead, killing, presents an ultimate
act of devaluating abject lives with the aim to restore, secure or clear up
a certain socio-material order. Most drastically, such state-induced
outbursts of killing emerge in the context of animal diseases or zoono-
ses, such as during the 2001 FMD epidemic in the UK, when millions of
often healthy domesticated animals were culled on state orders and
within a short time frame (Donaldson & Wood, 2004) Although death
was already inscribed into their very existence as domesticated farm
animals to be slaughtered for human consumption, the FMD culling
regime presented a ssure in and disruption to the usual lifescapes on
British farms because, from the perspective of farmers, “death was in the
wrong place, at the wrong time and in the wrong scale” (Convery et al.,
2005, p. 107). In the context of abjected nonhumans, regimes of killing
unfold not only through singular events but can also emerge on a
recurring basis, as is the case with the badger cullings in the UK (Enti-
cott, 2008b). Abjection thus puts not the act of killing nonhumans itself
into question but rather the act of ‘making killable’; the how and why of
rendering certain species killable. To speak in Haraway’s (2008, p. 80)
words: “It is not killing that gets us into exterminsim, but making beings
killable”. Rather than accounting for all sorts of killing, the concept of
abjection puts a particular focus on extraordinary and state-induced
forms of ‘making killable’ and it might be here, where the political
relevance of nonhumans becomes most visible.
This connects with works in political geography that have directed
attention not only to the management and disciplining of biological life,
i.e. the power over life, but also to the management of killing and the
power over death (Coleman & Grove, 2009; Kaur, 2021; Leshem, 2015).
There are two main thinkers who have conceptualized the role of killing
and death for modern biopolitics: Achille Mbembe (2008) and his work
on necropolitics as well as Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2004) and his work
on sovereign power and the biopolitical threshold. These authors have
inspired political geographers who have built on, worked with, criti-
cized and rened their thoughts against different empirical backgrounds
and in different regional contexts (Hagmann & Korf, 2012; Kaur, 2021;
Leshem, 2015; Minca, 2007, 2015; Shewly, 2013). Works on the specic
topic of more-than-human and animal death have also referred to and
worked with the theoretical thoughts of Mbembe (Davies, 2018; Mar-
gulies, 2019; Sneegas, 2022; von Essen & Redmalm, 2023) and Agamben
(Chrulew, 2012; Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016; Wadiwel, 2015).
In his monograph Homo Sacer, Agamben (1998, p. 142) argues that
“in modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the
nonvalue of life as such”. In his understanding of biopolitics – which
departs from Foucault’s – it is the power to decide upon the value or the
nonvalue of life, and ultimately its killing, that is the fundamental
structure of power in Western modernity (p. 137). Central to his works is
the notion of a biopolitical threshold between life that is included in the
dominant order through means of protection, on the one hand, and life
that is excluded and rendered killable, on the other – what Agamben
calls ‘bare life’ (p. 64). Minca (2007) explains the relationship between
Agamben’s biopolitical threshold and the political as follows:
“It is this [biopolitical] threshold that denes the boundaries of the
political today, and that marks the original spatialisation of sover-
eign power. It is (with)in the inscription of this mobile conne
dening what is life – on the body of each and every individual – that
the modern state nds its ultimate task, concealing in this way its
L. Fleischmann
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
6
macabre autopoietic destiny” (Minca, 2007, p. 79; emphasis in
original)
In order to make his conception of a biopolitical threshold more
explicit, Agamben draws on a gure from archaic Roman law, that of
homo sacer, whom he regards as embodiment of bare life; an “interme-
diary between man and animal” (p. 165). Such homines sacri are
included in the form of their exclusion, what plays out as the funda-
mental capacity to be killed with impunity. They are stripped of their
political and social existence and have nothing left to lose except their
naked biological existence, their bare life that is constantly threatened
with the possibility of death. It is in the production of bare life that,
according to Agamben, human and nonhuman life collides (p. 104f).
Quite connectedly, in his conception of necropolitics, the postcolonial
thinker Mbembe (2008, p. 152) seeks to grasp how “the ultimate
expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the
capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”. He points to the
existence of death-worlds, i.e. the “new and unique forms of social ex-
istence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life
conferring on them the status of living dead” (p. 176f, emphasis in
original). Mbembe is thus interested in “contemporary forms of subju-
gation of life to the power of death” (ibid.), which he observes primarily
in the (post)colonial and racialized violence that is exerted on certain
groups of humans.
Processes of abjection, I would suggest, do precisely what Agamben
and Mbembe had in mind with their accounts on sovereign power:
abjection works towards the production of certain forms of life, be they
human or nonhuman, as stripped of value and excluded from efforts of
protection, conning them instead to a threshold existence as living
deads – while their governing can eventually ‘ip’ towards eradication
and killing. It is in this way that processes of abjection are intertwined
with sovereign power and biopolitics, thus, playing a constitutive role in
practices of state-making (Brun et al., 2017; Isin & Rygiel, 2007). A
more-than-human concern with killing and death, on the one hand, and
political geographies of sovereign power and biopolitics, on the other,
might thus be fruitfully combined in the study of abjection.
Abjection could therefore be an enabling analytical concept for
opening up anthropocentric conceptions of sovereign power towards
nonhumans. Neither Agamben
6
nor Mbembe explicitly account for
nonhumans as potential objects of sovereign power (Cadman, 2009;
Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016, p. 4). Yet, as Wadiwel (2015, p. 83) aptly
argues: “The control of life, the power to allow and disallow life, extends
to all living beings within the space of exception; in this sense, Agam-
ben’s analysis of the relation of life to sovereign power may be extended
to incorporate the life belonging to the non-human”. In a similar vein,
Saraiva (2018) regards fascism as “a totalitarian attempt to control every
dimension of life, an extreme case of biopolitics” (p. 1) He analyses “how
new strains of wheat and potatoes, new pig breeds, and articially
inseminated sheep contributed in signicant ways to materialize fascist
ideology” (p. 3). Thus, just as certain humans are conned to a threshold
existence between life and death, so are nonhuman forms of life bound
up in relationships of sovereign power and biopolitics – relationships
that materialize in spatial forms of exclusion, separation and killing (Isin
& Rygiel, 2007; Minca, 2015).
Such an opening towards nonhumans, I would argue, calls an im-
plicit nature/culture, human/animal dualism of existing works on bio-
politics and sovereign power into question. Works that take their cue
from Agamben and Mbembe often assume that sovereign power works
towards the abandonment of certain humans to an animal-like status,
stripped of any rights and excluded from efforts of protection (see also
Abrell, 2015). Thus, they equate animals with their bare biological ex-
istence as beings without any rights, supposedly located ‘outside’ the
law and radically excluded from the protection of the state. At the same
time, they assume that the ‘inside’ of state protection and the juridical
order is constituted by humans. However, as Margulies (2019) points
out in his inspiring piece on tiger conservation in India: at times, the
lives of certain nonhumans can be valued even more than those of
humans, as is the case for marginalized tea plantation workers whose life
is exposed to potential death by protected tigers. He puts this as follows:
“[…] as a formally recognized endangered species with strict laws
regarding their protection, tigers carry the law of the state in their very
being, (re)producing spaces in which differential valorizations of life
across the species divide are acted out.” (Margulies, 2019, p. 159). In
resonance with Margulies, I would argue that a focus on abjection il-
lustrates how the boundary between the ‘inside’ and ’outside’ of the
juridical order cannot be mapped neatly onto the human/animal,
nature/culture divide. This boundary is rather constantly negotiated in
relation to both humans as well as nonhumans: while certain beings
become politically valued and protected through the workings of the
state (like the tigers in India), the lives of others (such as the culled
minks in Denmark) are stripped of any value and rendered disposable.
The taking into account of abjected animals and other beings could
thus enable us to tell different and more complex stories about how
sovereign power and biopolitics play out and become challenged (cf.
Sundberg, 2011). The point here is neither to simply replace humans
with nonhumans nor to trivialize the cruelties that were and continue to
be directed towards humans who become conned to an outsider status
and reduced to their bare biological needs. Rather, the intention is to
open up anthropocentric conceptions of sovereign power in ways that
also enable us to account for our complex relations with other beings (cf.
Cadman, 2009; Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016).
A focus on processes of abjection might also hold potential for
coming to terms with another frequent criticisim at Agamben’s works:
his overestimation of sovereign power and his disregard of possibilities
for protest and resistance as well as for the agency of those who are
abandoned by the law (cf. Brun et al., 2017; Vandevoordt, 2020).
Agamben (1998, p. 109) assumes that “the relation of abandonment is so
ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it”. Kristeva
(1982), in contrast, regards a threshold existence as quite a powerful
position, one that possesses the capacity to disturb order and to cross
boundaries. As I illustrated in the previous section, a more-than-human
reformulation of abjection simultaneously draws attention to the ability
of abandoned nonhumans to remain unruly and to challenge the nor-
malised socio-material order – thus enabling a more explicit consider-
ation of the agency of those who are rendered abject through sovereign
attempts to govern and eliminate their existence (see also Isin & Rygiel,
2007, p. 185). In the following section, I turn to this unruliness of those
who are rendered abject in more detail.
5. More-than-human political geographies of revolting
unruliness
Nonhumans are not only the passive backdrops of state-making but
also hold agency in shaping political processes: they set in motion, resist,
obstruct or counteract governmental incentives to control and order
their existence (Dickinson, 2022; Hobson, 2007; Johnston, 2021c; Sri-
nivasan, 2016). Thus, a number of works in political geography have
pointed to the capacity of nonhumans to challenge and resist practices of
6
In 2004, Agamben published the book The Open: Man and Animal, in which
he reects on the acts of boundary-making (“caesura”) between (hu)man and
animal, divisions that he regards as the founding element of human existence.
He argues that this still ongoing and never complete “anthropogenesis”, this
coming into being as an ostensibly distinct species through a series of separa-
tions, forms the basis of Western politics: “In our culture, the decisive political
conict, which governs every other conict, is that between the animality and
the humanity of man” (Agamben, 2004, p. 80), while the former refers to the
sovereign abandonment of certain humans as bare life, an animal-like status.
Nevertheless, his accounts still focus on the human as the central gure of
thought, while he does not take the fate of other-than-human animals into
serious concern, thus limiting the potentials to overcome the anthropocentrism
of his works on sovereign power.
L. Fleischmann
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
7
state-making and power – for instance in the context of border-making
(see Boyce, 2016; Squire, 2014; Sundberg, 2011). For instance, Sund-
berg (2011, p. 2) “makes the case for addressing nonhumans as actors in
geopolitical processes such as boundary making and enforcement.” She
shows how endangered cat species in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands
challenged and altered the operational plans of the U.S. Border Patrol.
She therefore argues that political agency is always a “doing--
in-relation”, one that unfolds between a range of actors, including
humans, plants, animals and other natural elements (ibid, p. 331). Boyce
(2016) also stresses the role of nonhuman actors in resisting the in-
tentions of border enforcement technologies, arguing that “the climate,
topography and inhabitants of the border region (…) continuously
disrupt, frustrate, and constrain enforcement operations” (ibid. 257). He
thus concludes that, in the context of border enforcement, “the state
seeks to tame and digest a chaotic exterior that continuously withdraws
from its gaze” (ibid. 259). As Wadiwel (2018, p. 528) aptly puts it in the
context of the factory farming of chickens: “animals press against,
disrupt and leak value from even the most apparently complete and
relentless models of authoritarian subordination that we can devise”.
Putting an analytical focus on processes of abjection foregrounds the
possibilities for nonhumans to resist sovereign power and to challenge
biopolitical attempts to discipline and eliminate their existence. In the
rst place, those who are affected by processes of abjection become the
targets of sovereign power, biopolitics and killing precisely because they
share an ability to challenge and cross the boundaries of the dominant
socio-material order, for instance, between nature/culture, healthy/
diseased or native/foreign. What follows from this is that abjected
nonhumans are not only the passive backdrops of practices of sovereign
power and state-making but form co-constitutive agents therein. This
resonates with works that have pointed out how nonhumans resist and
shape the disciplining and often violent attempts to produce ‘safe’ and
‘biosecure’ spaces (Collard, 2012; Mather & Marshall, 2011; Sneegas,
2022). Indeed, efforts to ‘make life safe’ often respond to an ‘unruly’
(micro)biological world, which continuously refuses to be contained and
controlled, as Braun (2013) argues. Abjected forms of life might thus
articulate what Antonio Negri, departing from Foucault, had in mind
with his conception of ‘biopolitics’ and which Hinchliffe and Bingham
(2008, p. 1539) summarize as “those forces that are always already
resisting any such attempt to capture, control, manipulate, and manage
life”. The practices that seek to discipline or eliminate abjected forms of
life might mingle and mix up humans and nonhumans in surprising
ways, bringing about results that have not been predicted or fully
anticipated by those in power (cf. Hinchliffe, 2007, p. 111).
Previous works on abjection have also pointed to the agency of
abjected groups of humans (see also Isin & Rygiel, 2007, p. 185). For
instance, in her book Revolting Subjects, Tyler (2013) investigates pro-
cesses of social abjection in Britain. She alludes to the double meaning of
the word ‘revolting’, which can either refer to the expression of disgust
or to acts of protest and rebellion against those in power. Thus, Tyler
argues that abjection is both a fundamental component of sovereignty
and, at the same time, also a state of revolt. Biles (2014) points to the
ability of nonhumans to be similarly ‘revolting’. He suggests that the rat
functions a central ‘simulacrum’ or metaphor of the abject: “The rat is a
metaphor of abjection, a metaphor in its full, archaic sense – from the
Greek for carry, transfer, alter or change. The rat carries abjection like it
carries disease. It instigates transferences, alternations, through a logic
of contagion” (ibid., p. 118). As Biles thus goes on to argue, rats do not
stay passively in their despicable position, they also respond and strike
back: “The abject is revolting, in a double sense: repellent and in a state
of perpetual revolt. Abjection is the rat’s revolt” (ibid.).
This draws on Kristeva’s (1982, p. 2) understanding of abjection,
which stresses the ability of the abject to challenge authoritative forces:
“It [the abject] lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to
the […] rules of the game.” The abject thus possesses the capacity to
challenge the unconscious/conscious divide of the subject (p. 6). In her
understanding, the abject is located on the limit of primal repression,
constantly threatening to confront the subject with what it has sup-
pressed to the unconscious. First and foremost, these repressed rejections
and separations that threaten us are “our earliest attempts to release the
hold of maternal entity”, i.e. the parting from the mother. Second, the
abject confronts us with the inevitability of death and our mortal exis-
tence as living beings. Kristeva explicates this by drawing on the
repulsion felt in relation to excrements and other body uids: “These
body uids, this delement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly
and with difculty, on the part of death” (p. 3). In other words, expelled
body uids and excrements remind us that we die, successively with
each loss “until nothing remains” (ibid.). Its particular ability to remind
us of our mortal existence makes the corpse, in Kristeva’s eyes, the
utmost of abjection: “It is death infecting life” (p. 4).
A third repressed rejection and separation that the abject confronts us
with – and which might be most signicant for a more-than-human
political geography of abjection – are “those fragile states where man
strays on the territories of the animal” (pp. 12, emphasis in original).
According to Kristeva, abjection is thus the founding principle of the
nature-culture divide. Abjected nonhumans gnaw at the roots of our
very existence as an ostensibly superior species distinct to animals. They
shatter the founding exclusion of our own animality, which we have
repressed to the unconsciousness, while they remind us of the impossi-
bility to ever fully enforce this separation. Abjection thus “noties us of
the limits of the human universe” (p. 11). It is precisely this ability of the
abject to blur, cross and challenge the nature-culture and human-
nonhuman divide that illustrates the importance of animals and other
nonhuman forms of life for the study of abjection. Those animals and
beings that become targets of processes of abjection pose a constant
threat, one that reminds us to be in perpetual danger of being exposed as
a human animal.
Summing up, future works on more-than-human political geogra-
phies of abjection might explore how those who are rendered abject
exceed, confuse or challenge sovereign claims to eliminate or exclude
their existence – and thus possess a revolting unruliness, in the double
meaning of the term. Further empirical studies are needed in order to
explore how abjected nonhumans, despite their life being stripped of
value and rendered killable, strike back in a number of ways and, in a
Kristevan sense, remind us of our own origin, mortality and existence as
a human animal.
6. Concluding discussion: the affective power of abject life and
death?
To wrap up, I would like to return to the example of the Danish mink
cull, to which I referred in the introduction to this article. The minks in
Danish fur farms served as an apt opening to the discussion on abjection
and sovereign power, not because they present forms of life that are per
se abject but because they were systematically turned into abjected be-
ings through state-induced processes of abjection in the context of the
Covid-19 pandemic; processes that linked them with contamination and
disease and triggered affective responses by the Danish state. This
abjection of formerly economically valued farm animals eventually
culminated in the state-induced culling order which led to their death on
mass.
Yet, the case of the Danish mink cull also illustrates how the practices
that seek to discipline or eliminate abjected forms of life not always go
about as planned. They mingle and mix up humans and nonhumans in
unexpected ways, bringing about surprising results that have not been
predicted or fully anticipated by those in power: After their cruel deaths,
the abjected minks did not cease to challenge those in power. In fact, the
millions of mink corpses that were dumped and buried on a military eld
‘haunted’ the Danish government. Due to gases formed by their decaying
bodies, they were pushed back off the ground – an unforeseen turn of
events that was covered with horror by the national and international
media, which reported on returning “zombie minks” (Forbes, Nov 27,
2020; The Guardian, Nov 25, 2020). The media also called attention to
L. Fleischmann
Political Geography 107 (2023) 102949
8
worried local residents who felt disturbed and disgusted by the smells of
the animals’ decomposing bodies and feared that they might contami-
nate ground water in the area (The Independent, Dec 10, 2020).
Moreover, the posthumous reactions to the mink cull illustrate how
the fate of nonhumans can be enrolled by wider publics so as to contest
state-induced practices of violence and abjection and to bring about
political change (cf. Crowley, 2017). Ultimately, the returning zombie
minks caused a major public controversy that brought the ruling gov-
ernment in Denmark under an intense “mink crisis” (NBC News, Dec 2,
2020). Not only did the animals’ moving corpses spark criticisms at the
government for its lack of a legal basis for the culling order, which was
subsequently discussed as ‘illegal’ (The Guardian, Nov 10, 2020).
Growing forces within the Danish public also expressed their solidarity
with and care for the killed minks, thus actively challenging their
abjected status, while criticizing not only the processes that led to their
abjection and their destruction on mass, but also employing this case as a
more substantive critique at the fate of minks in factory farms. The
resulting media scandal eventually caused the resignation of the Danish
minister of agriculture, the passing of a legal amendment that would
authorize the mink cull in retrospect, as well as the articulation of a
formal apology by the Danish prime minister.
In a Kristevan reading, this posthumous turn of events raises question
on the affective power of abject lives – or, better, abject deaths. First,
their coming to public attention pointed to the cruel origin of ostensibly
prestigious fur coats in Danish factory farming; infrastructures that are
usually hidden from public sight. Second, the returning zombie minks
confronted the Danish public with their own mortality, since, as potential
carriers of a mutated Covid-19 strain, they challenged the divide be-
tween healthy/diseased and life/death. Third, the death of the abjected
minks served as a reminder that we are animals too and just as mortal as
minks: sooner or later we are also going to turn into corpses, becoming
decomposed until nothing remains. As Green (2021) aptly describes in
relation to the mink cull: “the existence of germs reminds people that
bodies are porous, and that the world is full of other living things that
can slip through bodily boundaries without being seen, felt or heard”.
Thus, posthumously, the abjected minks struck back in a number of
ways, causing affective responses that illustrate their agency in shaping
– or better disrupting – practices of state-making.
To conclude, my aim for this article was to discuss what an
engagement with processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of
more-than-human political geographies. I argued that a more-than-
human reformulation of abjection illustrates how not only humans but
also nonhumans become abjected, conned to a threshold existence.
This status comes with the ability to challenge boundaries in the
dominant socio-material order. At the same time, it subordinates beings
to biopolitical technologies of power that, in their most severe form,
result in state-induced mass killing and death. We might therefore ask
how abjection, sovereign power, and unruliness play out in relation to
both human and nonhuman life and death in order to better understand
how spatial and political formations become institutionalized or shifted.
Such a focus draws attention not only to more-than-human practices and
spaces of killing but also to the ability of abjected nonhumans to remain
unruly and to resist, obstruct and counteract the intentions of sovereign
power.
In sum, state-induced processes of abjection do not remain uncon-
tested. They can be challenged by humans and nonhumans in diverse
ways. Paying closer attention to processes of abjection in future
empirical research may thus hold potential to uncover the cruelties that
are associated with the expression of sovereign power in more-than-
human worlds, while working towards different alternatives. In reso-
nance with Judith Butler (2011 [1993], p. 16), we might thus ask: “What
challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic
hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualies as
bodies that matter, ways of living that count as ‘life’, lives worth pro-
tecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?” A focus on abjected
forms of life might ultimately point towards different alternatives; to
potential ways of relating with those who are frequently excluded; and
to the possibility of valuing those who are commonly treated as devoid
of value.
Declaration of competing interest
The author declares that she has no known competing nancial in-
terests or personal relationships that could have appeared to inuence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Jonathan Everts, Christoph Schemann and the
other contributors to the special issue ’Abject Lives’ for the fruitful
discussions that underpinned the writing of this paper. I would also like
to express my gratitude to Jared Margulies, Amy Walker, Matthias
Diehm, the three anonymous reviewers, as well as to the working group
in human geography headed by Uli Ermann at the University of Graz for
their valuable feedback and comments on earlier versions. The ideas for
this article derived from my research project funded by the German
Research Foundation (grant number 450048046).
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