While nine billion to 10 billion animals a year are killed for food in North America, Congress is currently considering a bill that would grant human rights to the great apes.

Cary Wolfe, chair and professor of English at Rice University, finds this modern juxtaposition deeply troubling, as he said in the lecture "Humans and Animals in a Biopolitical Frame," Sept. 27, part of the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture series in Cornell's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.

"Unprecedented ethical and legal protections are being extended to non-human animals, while billions of animals on factory farms and confined animal feeding operations experience an unbridled, mechanized system of exploitation and killing," he said.

For Wolfe, biopolitics means that the body is the object of political power -- and it is manipulated, controlled, enhanced, as well as policed in ways that are historically unprecedented. And he's interested in the extent to which these biopolitical mechanisms cut across species lines.

"To live under biopolitics is to live in a state in which we are all always [potential] animals before the law," Wolfe continued. "For biopolitics, the challenge is how to exploit the 'animality' of human populations as a political resource while at the same time controlling, directing or containing it."

He called it a "cruel irony" that biopolitical thought has had little to say about its affect on non-human beings, given the centrality of animalization to biopolitical thought.

Wolfe drew from the works of Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Derrida and others in examining questions addressed by animal studies, such as the grim fact that the assembly line mechanisms the Nazis employed in the death camps were inspired by Henry Ford's assembly lines, which he had based on the dismemberment of animal carcasses in the Chicago slaughterhouses of his youth.

"Is there a way to rethink the common fate of human beings and non-human beings as having a shared subjection to these technologies and mechanisms that take the body as a new kind of political resource, to be in some cases killed, and in other cases, maximized and manipulated?" Wolfe asked.

Although Wolfe is not currently active in the animal rights movement, he said he still considers himself an activist through his academic work on animal studies. He characterized the field as the latest incarnation of increasingly progressive cultural studies, on a continuum reaching back to the civil rights movement, through feminism to queer theory. But it's a very different kind of activism, he said in an interview, because "the essence of a liberal arts education is freeing students to have their own views about things that may not coincide with your own. So some people for that reason might not even call it activism."

Natalie Melas, chair of comparative literature, said in her introduction to the lecture that Wolfe is one of the few scholars who currently focuses on the big questions the humanities has traditionally addressed. "And the biggest one of all, perhaps, is the question of the human itself," she said.

Wolfe based his talk on his recently submitted book, "Before the Law: Humans and Animals in a Biopolitical Frame." His other works include "Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanist Theory," the edited collection "Zoontologies" and "What Is Posthumanism?" He is founding editor of the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.