ABSTRACT
If we take Agamben’s distinction between zoè, the reduction to bare life, and bios, the cladding of life with culture and rights, at heart, we could and maybe should introduce a new concept besides biopolitics: zoöpolitics. Foucault’s idea of biopolitics is directed at the care for and control over the life of the population. It is the new power leading to the welfare state, as opposed to the old sovereignty, which was based on the power to take life, and Foucault calls it thanatopolitics. After outlining the dialectics between thanatopolitics, biopolitics and zoöpolitics, this paper will focus on urbanism and war, where they can be seen at work in a raw form. Urbanism (here always used in the sense of urban design and planning) as a discipline is a paradigm, if not the paradigm of biopolitics. The thanatopolitics that warfare constitutes is returning today in urban warfare, subsumed under the neologism of urbicide. The architecture of military occupation in Israel will be taken as a paradigm for the zoöpolitical urbanism that might await us. As our nation–states increasingly want to exclude the ‘surplus humanity’ of refugees and the poor by reducing them to bare life, and the ecological disasters (including pandemics) sharpen the dualization of society into haves and have-nots, the rise of zoöpolitics and an architecture of confinement, control and exclusion, seems inevitable.
