Animacies

Animating AnimacyRecently, after reaching a threshold of "recovery" from a chronic illness-an illness that has affected me not only physically, but spatially, familially, economically, and socially, and set me on a long road of thinking about the marriage of bodies and chemicals-I found myself deeply suspicious of my own reassuring statements to my anxious friends that I was feeling more alive again.Surely I had been no less alive when I was more sick, except under the accountings of an intuitive and immediately problematic notion of "liveliness" and other kinds of "freedom" and "agency."I felt unsettled not only for reasons of disability politics-for "lifely wellness" colludes with a logic that troublingly naturalizes illness's morbidity-but also because I realized that in the most containing and altered moments of illness, as often occurs with those who are severely ill, I came to know an incredible wakefulness, one that I was now paradoxically losing and could only try to commit to memory.1In light of this observation, I began to reconsider the precise conditions of the application of "life" and "death," the working ontologies and hierarchicalized bodies of interest.If the continued rethinking of life and death's proper boundaries yields surprising redefinitions, then there are consequences for the "stuff," the "matter," of contemporary biopolitics-including important and influential concepts such as Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the "living dead," and Giorgio Agamben's "bare life."2This book puts pressure on such biopolitical factors,

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