Raciality operates, as Denise Ferreira da Silva underscores in her work, as an a priori within the state’s biopolitical schemata in relation to who may be killed or left to die with impunity. 1 In the course of this chapter, I want to draw attention to yet another a priori that, in turn, inscribes and constitutes raciality in order to demarcate the fi gure of the killable other: the animal . As I discuss in the chapters that follow, the testimonies of the detainees, who have been captured and imprisoned by the US in the course of its war on terror, repeatedly refer to the manner in which they were categorized by their guards and torturers as non-human animals who could thus be tortured or killed with no ethical compunction. By bringing into focus the manner in which the state repeatedly marks its targeted human subject as non-human animal, I want to address the complex enmeshment of racism and speciesism in the context of the state’s biopolitical operations, specifi cally by revisiting Foucault’s theorization of the relation between racism and biopolitics in order to disclose what remains unspoken in his address of the biopolitical.