For current purposes, the essential philosophical question concerns the oscillations created between apparent or at least partial humanness and the elements of otherness indivisible from nonhuman conditions of existence. In many ways, this series of oscillations—They’re like us! They’re not like us!—exactly matches the same anxieties evident in social movements that expanded the range of legal status and rights regimes within the biological category of the human. Entities now clearly within that biolegal status were once excluded from it, shamefully, and even now there are mechanisms within
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