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Short abstract:

Following the metabolic animal work performed by genetically modified organisms, this talk proposes the notion of “necrovalue” to describe a specific mode of biovalue that is concerned with death itself.

Long abstract:

The relationship between nature and capital has been a longstanding concern in science and technology studies. While the production of a surplus out of vitality has been explored extensively under the banner of a politics of "life itself", the appropriation of death has rarely been taken up. Discussing two cases of genetically modified mosquitoes, I will argue that advances in synthetic biology not only produce novel knowledge about life processes, but also rework death on a molecular scale. Starting from the idea that both genetically modified organisms are produced to extinguish their own species, not only is the opposition between physis and techné erased, but the relationship between life and death is fundamentally reworked as well. I will show that these organisms obliterate the boundary between the truly alive and the already dead as it is through the technoscientific hijacking of the organism’s capacity to reproduce that a genetic “off switch” is passed on to its offspring which aims at eradicating the target species. Following this line of thought, I will argue that such life can be understood as performing a sort of “death work” that not only demonstrates the disposability of nonhuman life but also the emergence of what I call “necrovalue”—i.e., a specific mode of biovalue that is concerned with "death itself". Since the raison d’être of this engineered life is to reproduce into oblivion, reproduction here functions as a form of metabolic animal work that generates both surplus value of vitality and value through absence.