ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by questioning the understanding of life-as-animation whether understood as cellular or extra-cellular, biology or politics. This questioning on how animal life becomes an object of technical and political interventions, and how these transform the ideas "life itself" understood as animation, are exemplified in this article with an empirical example of gene banking work and related global politics. Cryopreservation is a technique that gave the breeders a high level of control over the temporal and spatial dimensions of the reproductive powers of their animals. Frozen life is a form of life at absolute rest, arrested life at the level of cellular processes. The arrested life stored in national gene banks was largely removed from the international machinery of animal production for conservation purposes and for enacting a sedimentary politics of "nativity" securing potentially vital economics embodied in nations' nonhuman genetics. Only the most efficient biologically and economically viable gametes are selected for the gene bank.
