A Dog’s Life: From the Biopolitical Animal to the Posthuman

This chapter looks at Foucault's last writings in the context of the recent pandemic of COVID-19. Foucault's last thought opens up to the theme of cynical life, that is, human life in the manner of the dog: that is, a human life and yet also an entirely animal life; parrhesia is the form of life marked by a radical immanence to the world, the time – to use Deleuze's distinction – of an ethical life and no longer a moral one. The time that opens with the pandemic is then the time of a humanimal life. In this sense, the biopolitical animal is really the posthuman, that is, the condition of a human being who is no longer anthropocentric, no longer a sovereign subject: the posthuman is the final farewell to the era of humanism (so it has nothing to do with the theme of transhumanism). The biopolitical animal is the human animal after the Anthropocene.