‘Take Care of Stray Cats’: biopolitical life ethics and its cosmopolitical countermethod

Abstract

The current regime of biopolitics is characterized by its advanced capability of communicating life as a fact to be optimized through its biomedical and bio-capitalist apparatuses. Seoul Metropolitan Government’s launch of its new community platform, ‘Take Care of Stray Cats’, in 2014 was an attempt to apply this biopolitical optimization of life to the condition of the city’s stray cat lives. Indispensable for the success of this platform was the participation of individual cat lovers, who were then asked to work as citizen geo-taggers to convert the physical presences of stray cats into the markers on its map app so that other geo-tagged corporate and governmental apparatuses, such as veterinary clinics, cat shelters, and feeding and resting areas could communicate about their presences. So, some cat lovers’ petition against the platform that led to its early shutdown in 2015 has been criticized as revealing their ignorance of the ethical and communitarian rationale of the platform. This paper, on the other hand, focuses on a different ontology of life on which the cat lovers’ everyday caring practices were based and how its care for the cats’ responsiveness, rather than simple geo-taggable facts, evolved into their ontological politics as the countermethod to biopolitics.

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