What Is Living and What Is Dead in Political Vitalism?

Abstract

Does vitalism inherently imply a specific politics, and if so, what is it? In this chapter, I aim to offer at least some possible answers to this question by examining historical and contemporary discussions around the politics of vitalism. In so doing, I offer an account of what vitalism is as a set of scientific and philosophical ideas about the nature of life and its status as an object of study. It is precisely because vitalism is concerned with the question of life that it implies political considerations from the get-go. However, some of the more problematic political consequences of what has often been referred to (sometimes erroneously or confusedly) as vitalism stem, I argue, from the attribution of vital powers to the non-living. This infusion of vitality into everything may seem egalitarian in its apparent levelling out of differences between forests, objects, spirits, the dead, and whole societies. Yet if everything is living, then the specificity of the living, the living itself, disappears. Whatever equality may or may not be purchased from this perspective, then, I argue that it can no longer properly be called vitalist.