Polis-Dwellers

This chapter offers an account of the bios of the human animal in light of Aristotle’s treatment of the lives of non-human animal collectives. This discussion is anchored in Aristotle’s claim that the regime (the politeia) is the way of life of the city, and it is argued that proper attention to the zoological lens informing Aristotle’s Politics requires us to view the relation between human being and polis as an intensified form of the relation between any animal and its proper habitat. Its intensity is due precisely to the forms of intimacy and estrangement made possible by the possession of language. The Politics’s sustained meditation on how to ensure the longevity of a city’s bios—its political ecology—must, then, be read as a necessary complement to its account of human nature, its anthropology.

Land-Dwellers and Water-Dwellers

This chapter charts in detail Aristotle’s discussion of animal way of life and character in the History of Animals. In particular it explores that character of animal politicality as it emerges out of Aristotle’s description of more general forms of animal intimacy and the lack thereof in the History of Animals Books 7 and 8, with particular focus on the model of power that emerges from Aristotle’s account of the bios and genesis of bees. It argues that Aristotle’s investigation of human political life must include a study of those features of human life that tie it to the larger class of living beings. Those features comprise an intensification of animal intimacy, which Aristotle conceives as forming a spectrum from the radical antagonism of solitary carnivores to the sharing of a common task indicative of political animals.

Shared Life and Politics

This chapter tracks the role of shared life in Aristotle’s account of the political bond, including its formation, maintenance, and the factors that bring about its dissolution. Here suzēn forms a spectrum, from the familial bond of those who cannot live without one another to the reciprocal affection of chosen friends, and includes both the impulse to live together that exists by merit of the kind of animal the human is (a political animal) and the exercise of the capacity for choice when it is directed to other human beings. Its inclusion of both human impulse and choice indicates that a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of shared life requires one to locate human political life within the context of Aristotle’s broader study of political animality.

Introduction

The introduction summarizes the main theses of the book, describes the broader conceptual terrain to which it contributes, and locates the stakes of its central claims within the context of several central concerns of contemporary critical theory. It thus demonstrates the importance of the study of the concept of shared life for our understanding of Aristotle’s approach to animal life more generally and political animality in particular; corrects for an influential but infelicitous formulation of the relationship between the two ancient Greek words for life (zōē and bios); and highlights the relevance of the political valence of life that emerges from Aristotle’s thought once we set aside this formulation.

Coda

The coda summarizes the argument of the volume and explores the political valence of life in current scholarship. Recently, the scholarly tendency has been to query the political valence of life through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of the zōē/bios distinction in Aristotle, taking as established a connection he suggests between zōē and bare life. The present study has argued that this formulation fundamentally misconstrues the political valence of zōē and bios in Aristotle’s thought and has aimed to open aspects of Aristotle’s thinking that come to light if we set aside Agamben’s construction. The coda also explores the debt owed to Aristotle by contemporary notions of power, politics, and the affective bonds that shape human political community.

Natal Longing and the Maternal Bond

This chapter explores the complex and dual figure of the mother in Aristotle’s work, focusing on the agency granted to the mother in Aristotle’s account of the active nature of loving in the ethics and its contrast to the limited causal efficacy granted the female in the development of the embryo in Generation of Animals. Defined both by the embodied act of embodying and by the conventions of the name—that is, understood both in the sense of one who has given birth and of one who is called mother, a position that could be occupied by someone other than the one giving birth—the mother tracks across human and animal worlds, across “biological” and symbolic concerns, and, in Aristotle, across ethico-political and zoological texts. What emerges from Aristotle’s comments about the maternal bond is a model of reflexive generativity, of a union between generator and generated, which resonates not only the with highest pinnacle of human friendship—the friend who is another self—but also the perpetual self-actualization of a mind that thinks itself.

The Commodification of Life

This chapter traces the connection between Aristotle’s conception of property, his insistence on private ownership, and his eugenics legislation. For Aristotle, the ownership of property arises from a natal scene: the first “possession” is the sustenance one receives upon birth, which Aristotle explicitly casts not as a product of maternal labor but as a gift of nature. In so doing, the chapter argues, he both sets the stage for a hierarchy of life justified by appeal to the “natural” and sows the seeds for the very commodification of life that he will elsewhere diagnose as a function of the moral failure to discern how to live well and the evils of interest. This is especially clear in his account of the natural slave, a being whose bios has its end not in its own living but in the living of another.

Friendship and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Ethics

This chapter is a detailed exposition of the role of the concept of shared life in Aristotle’s thinking about the nature of friendship in both his Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. At its most vivid, the concept of shared life illuminates the nature of the highest forms of human friendship by designating the intimacy that arises from the sharing of one’s most cherished actions. Moreover, in his handling of two interlinked questions—whether the virtuous person needs friends and whether it is possible to be a friend to oneself—the concept of shared life emerges as essential to Aristotle’s investigation of the political conditions necessary for the performance of noble deeds, deeds which provide the polis with its final cause.