Cary Wolfe: SLSA Keynote 3

Factory farming not just ethically embarrassing sideline, but rather in fact constitutively political for biopolitics in its modern form.
exponential expansion and routinization of logics that extend from Chicago slaugherhouses to the death camps and back again
newly expanded community of the living regardless of whatever species
risk involved in factory farming
Pew Commission on industrial farming: factory farming produces cheap meat but it's only viable because it passes on health costs to the public
shifting the cost to the taxpayer
external costs: environmental degradation, pollution of air and water
antibiotic costs: NYT 80% of antibiotics in USA go to livestock on factory farms
certain kind of staph kills more people than AIDS
UK foot and mouth epidemic 2011
CA 1970s 9 million hens
Chickens, turkeys, ducks 2004 H5N1
Esposito: social systems haunted by need for security; threat created by protection (autoimmunity)
massive subsidies to prop up the entire system
can you really isolate all this from the political per se
or >> impoverished political
all relations of force imply a power relation (Foucault)
political analysis and critique have to be invented, but also modifying relations of force in reality
to bring out new schemas of politicization

...at this juncture however we must remember the ambivalent quality of Foucault's sense of biopolitics focused on the aleatory body
at the same moment at which the scale of factory farming is nightmarish, we contemplate human rights, and care for companion animals (US pet care 17bn in 1994 to 36 bn in 2005, 45.5bn in 2009).
 vets, dental cleaning, oncology: the capacity to make live in Foucault's words, outstrips what's available to many of the world's human population now...
pet health care insurance (271million dollar business)