Animals in an Earthborn Democracy?

The animal question in politics is as old as politics itself. It is a question that drives my own work, where I consistently confront an absence of animals viewed on their own terms, in and for themselves, in conceptions of political life. Animals are often part of the story, but as mystical and allegorical figures, sacrificial bodies, and constitutive limits of the civil state. Modern liberal democracies take on the latter position of marking animals as the exit from politics, largely writing them (and nature more generally) out of the narrative altogether.