Frédéric Keck : Solidarity Between Species – Living with Animals Exposed to Pandemic Viruses

Solidarity Between Species: Living with Animals Exposed to Pandemic Viruses from Frédéric Keck examines how the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a biopolitical crisis, while underlining a fact often overlooked: Covid-19 is a zoonosis, a disease transmissible between species. The virus circulated in bats before passing to humans under still-mysterious conditions, and later spread from humans to other animals such as mink and deer.

Building on Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics,” the book retraces two centuries of epidemic control measures and introduces the concept of cryopolitics, the conservation of virus strains to anticipate mutations. It questions the emancipatory potential of these practices by exploring interspecies solidarity, forged through animals acting as sentinels of future threats—from pandemics to natural disasters and climate change.

Join us for a discussion of this thought-provoking book, which explores how new forms of cooperation and political imagination emerge in the age of pandemic viruses.

Frédéric Keck is Research Director at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS and associate researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch

Register for the event here.