Despite the life-centred view of organic activity that is found in the work of Henri Bergson, it was acknowledged, not least by Bergson himself, that the formulation of a positive concept of life was extremely problematic, requiring a reversal of the normal direction of utility-driven thought. As we saw in Chapter 2, Canguilhem and Foucault, in their analyses of the development of physiology and medicine, showed how the classification of species and life itself underwent rapid reconfiguration in terms of a new understanding or incorporation of error, disease and death into life. We then saw how this shift engendered a different attitude towards animal life, and the senses in which animality could serve as an opening onto or element of resistance in thought and life, such as biopolitical resistance. The key characteristic of life that offers itself up for study becomes less impetus or drive, and more deviation, anomaly and morbidity. But what about an even more extreme shift in understanding life in terms of ‘non-life’: life born of non-living processes, the possibilities of thinking life in terms of not simply mechanism, but rather information and crystallisation? What happens to our ability to relate to living organisms if we can reduce them to information systems (is this simply a modern equivalent of a Cartesian concept of animal automata)?

To approach these questions, this chapter will focus in further detail on the claims of Georges Canguilhem, introduced in Chapter 2, that productive (as opposed to reductive or derogatory) insights into organic processes have been gained through an engagement with ‘non-life’: death, disease and monstrosity. I will ask to what extent this perspective from non-life informs or transforms our understanding of animal life, and what kind of role remains for ‘positive’ concepts of life in the face of the predominance of pathological and exceptional modes of being in the development of philosophical and biological accounts of living processes. I will also examine the movement from thinking animality as mechanistic in nature (animal-machines) to a transformed view of mechanism in the phenomenon of the cybernetic organism, where the natural and the technological are newly fused and provoke a new thinking of the concept of the organic.