This chapter explores the way in which Nancy seeks to elaborate a non-anthropocentric politics that nevertheless acknowledges a distinctive human capacity for language. It sets up what is at stake for such a politics via a brief sketch of the way in which Alain Badiou treats the difference between the human animal and the immortal subject. Whereas Badiou's appeal to the human capacity for thought seems to relegate his concern for the animal, Nancy's appeal to the capacity for language widens politics beyond the human and, far from providing a basis for human exceptionalism, is the means by which Nancy argues for an equal dignity between human and non-human beings. The assertion of equality in Nancy's politics of all beings is not complete, however, without an appeal to a secularised version of Christian love not simply for all people but for all beings, human and non-human.

Badiou, the Zoon Politikon and ‘Animal Humanism’

For Badiou, the decisive distinction in political anthropology is not between the human and the animal, but between the human animal and the immortal. To understand what is at stake in this all-important difference, and where it becomes problematic, we need to begin with his reading of Aristotle, both in his published work and in the augmented accounts given in his seminars at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In the seminar ‘Qu'est-ce que vivre?’ (‘What is it to live?’) from 2003–4, Badiou frames his discussion of Aristotle in terms of the passage from a ‘two’ to a ‘three’, the passage that marks the distinction expressed in Logics of Worlds between democratic materialism (for which there are only two elements: bodies and languages), and Badiou's own materialist dialectics (for which there are three: bodies, languages and truths).

He frames the distinction between the human animal and the immortal in relation to two quotations from Aristotle. The first situates Aristotle firmly as the philosopher of ‘life’ and therefore also of the animal as a living being.