Restraining Biopolitics: On Dino Buzzati’s Living Animals

Michel Foucault’s linking of man to a certain kind of animal that becomes available in modernity anchors my reading of Italian modernity and the birth of the biopolitical animal in the works of the Italian author, Dino Buzzati. In no twentieth-century Italian author more than Buzzati does one find the biopolitical animal thought more deeply within the modern project. His short stories and novels become in my reading seismographs for measuring when the Italian “biological threshold of modernity” has been crossed. Often these moments are linked to the collective murder of diverse species such that the biopolitical animal emerges only when and where other animals do not. Buzzati’s writings, in my reading, theorise the biopolitical event as the moment when a certain kind of animal wagers in favour of its own existence and against another’s life.