Bioethics and animal production: zootechnical necropolitics as a regime of governance

Abstract

The concept of zootechnical necropolitics is proposed as an analytical category to understand forms
of governing life and death within industrial animal production systems. Based on Achille Mbembe’s
necropolitical theory, in dialogue with authors such as Foucault and Agamben, intensive animal production
is analyzed as a laboratory of necropolitical rationality, in which life is sustained only insofar as it produces
economic value. The theoretical-conceptual method consists of a critical reconstruction of the historical,
epistemological, and political foundations of modern animal science. From this perspective, the concept
of “within the farm gate” is re-signified as a zone of exception that legitimizes confinement practices.
The theoretical results indicate that zootechnical necropolitics does not constitute an anomaly of the system,
but rather its normalized mode of operation, thereby revealing the convergence between technoscience,
economy, and institutional violence. By making this regime visible, the study contributes to the expansion
of critical bioethics and to the debate on post-productivist transition in countries of peripheral capitalism.