Animals and the Totalitarian State
The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a seminar and discussion with Dinesh Wadiwel on animals and the totalitarian state.
There has been a growing interest in political models of representation, citizenship and deliberation that are expansive enough to include animals as constituents. Often in these accounts, the State is imagined as being capacious enough to accommodate the interests of animals. However, the ideal of the liberal democratic State is contradictory in this context, as from the standpoint of animals themselves the State is distinctly illiberal. In this paper, I want to propose that rather than assume the ideal of the liberal democratic state, animal advocates should understand the State as totalitarian in form. This would align strongly with work in critical race and settler colonial studies, as well as radical feminist theorisation and left theory, which has always seen the State as non-neutral, as a force of ill-legitimate domination, and often ill-equipped in its current form to support transformative justice goals.
Dinesh Wadiwel is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a background in social and political theory. He is author of The War against Animals (Brill 2015) and Animals and Capital (Edinburgh University Press 2023), and co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew, of Foucault and Animals (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Dinesh is also a disability rights researcher and was part of a team who produced two reports for the Australia Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.
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