Jamming the Anthropological Machine

(Draft Copy--please do not cite)

Matthew Calarco

Forthcoming in Steven DeCaroli and Matthew Calarco, eds.,

Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2006)

Copyright Matthew Calarco, 2006

The Politics of Anthropocentrism

In a recent discussion with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek voices a number of concerns in regard to the conciliatory and reformist tendencies of contemporary Leftist and postmodernist politics that are worth considering. Žižek’s worry is that today’s postmodern Left, despite its commitment to “radicalizing” democracy, has renounced the aim of seeking any genuinely radical change in the political and economic structure of society. In effect, the Left has, from Žižek’s perspective, accepted global capitalism and liberal democracy as “the only game in town.” In outlining the limitations of this approach, Žižek asks rhetorically: “Who still seriously questions capitalism, state and political democracy?”[1]

The work of Giorgio Agamben certainly constitutes one possible affirmative response to this question. Agamben’s texts, from the earliest to the most recent, have provided some of the most persuasive, uncompromising, and rigorous arguments to be found in contemporary political theory in favor of a non-capitalist, non-Statal, non-juridical, and non-sovereign politics. This thought of the political has been worked out in elaborate detail over the course of the past two decades by way of a series of critical confrontations with a number of key theorists (Heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt, Kojève, Foucault, Arendt, Derrida), and the creation and development of a series of political paradigms and concepts (infancy, exposure, potentiality, whatever singularity, bare life, homo sacer, form-of-life). It is not my intention in this essay to enter into the debate over the merits of Agamben’s larger project for a reinvigorated Leftist politics, although I should acknowledge at the outset that I take his arguments concerning the limits of democracy, the State, and sovereignty to be decisive in many respects. Instead, and in line with Žižek’s concerns about the future orientation of radical Leftist politics, my concern here is to examine Agamben’s thought from a somewhat oblique perspective: the perspective of the question of the animal.[2] How do non-human animals figure in Agamben’s thought? Do animals have a place within a post-essentialist politics? And how do the limits of the humanist philosophical and political project (limits which Agamben has done much to uncover) allow us to rethink the ontology and politics of the human-animal distinction, as well as our ethical relations to human and non-human life? Such questions concerning non-human animals, as I shall attempt to argue in this essay, help to highlight a key advance and limit in Agamben’s recent writings, and, at the same time, provide additional reasons for adopting the kind of critical and skeptical perspective toward dominant trends in Leftist politics put forward by Agamben and other radical political theorists.

These questions concerning animal life could in a certain sense be seen as misplaced, even violent, impositions on Agamben’s texts—a demand to answer questions he has never claimed any particular competence or desire to address. Indeed, the main focus of nearly all of Agamben’s published writings thus far has been avowedly anthropocentric. Despite his unflinching and far-reaching criticisms of metaphysical humanism, it is clear that he has never shown a sustained interest in exploring the anthropocentric dimensions and consequences of this metaphysical project. To the contrary, much of his work (especially those texts published prior to and including The Coming Community) can be read as a contribution to and deepening of the anthropocentrism underlying the metaphysical tradition. Where one might expect a radically post-humanist thinker such as Agamben to challenge the oppositional and reductionistic determinations of animal life characteristic of Western metaphysics, he has (in line with the majority of Continental philosophers) remained largely content to occupy the human side of the human/animal binary in order to complicate and rethink the political consequences of essentialist definitions of the human.

It is from this perspective that we can begin better to understand the narrowly anthropocentric approach of a number of Agamben’s writings, including, for example: the distinction between human in-fancy and animal codes in Infancy and History and The Idea of Prose; the outlining of a non-essentialist notion of human finitude and the dogmatic endorsing of the Hegelian conception of animal death in Language and Death; and the neo-Heideggerian denial of exposure (and related concepts such as exposition and potentiality) among animals in Means without End, The Coming Community, and “On Potentiality.” What these texts demonstrate is a certain wariness on Agamben’s part toward the neo-humanist project of trying to determine a more precise or enlarged conception of human essence; they do not, however, exhibit the same vigilance toward reductionistic determinations of animal life, wherein the multiplicity and singularity of those beings called “animal” are summarily brought under the rubric of “The animal.”

And yet, as his work has shifted to the task of thinking through the links tying sovereignty, law, and the State to the isolation of bare life within human beings, the question of the animal has begun increasingly to impose itself on Agamben’s thought from within. Thus, in the first volume of Homo Sacer we find the logic of the sovereign ban illustrated with the literary motif of the werewolf, a being that is neither human nor animal but rather situated at the margins of the human and the animal, and thus marking the constitutive outside of sovereign protection; and in the third volume of Homo Sacer, Remnants of Auschwitz, we are confronted with the image of the “Muselmann” (the singular human being at stake in Agamben’s post-Auschwitz ethics) who wanders through the Nazi concentration camps like a “stray dog,” simultaneously captured inside and outside the force of law. Although these texts fall far short of providing a full analysis of the place of animals within biopolitics, or the functioning of the human-animal distinction within the logic of sovereignty, the necessity for developing such an account is surely recognized here.

One of Agamben’s most recent works, The Open: Man and Animal—a book which will serve as the primary focus for the remainder of this essay—partially remedies these deficiencies by exploring the question of the animal at more length. In fact, in this text the issue of the human-animal distinction is granted a preeminent status among the problems facing contemporary political thought. Early in this text, Agamben writes:

What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. (O, 16)

Such remarks are indicative of the steadfast commitment to anti-humanism that characterizes all of Agamben’s writings. For him there is little point in pursuing a politics and ethics based on human rights when the full impact of the critique of humanism has not been measured and been allowed to transform our ideas of community and being-with others. Inasmuch as humanism is founded on a separation of the humanitas and animalitas within the human, no genuinely post-humanist politics can emerge without grappling with the logic and consequences of this division.

I will return momentarily and at more length to Agamben’s discussion of the human-animal distinction, but before doing so, it is important to note that addressing this question—viz., the question of how the human/animal distinction functions in determining what it means to be human—alone will not suffice to call anthropocentrism into question. This is especially true where, as is the case in much of Agamben’s writings, one limits the analysis to the manner in which this distinction is played out “within man.” If this were all Agamben sought to do in The Open, there would be little to distinguish this book from the previous volumes in the Homo Sacer series, which analyze the separation of zoē and bios within human life only to leave the question of animal life and politics suspended. It seems, then, that if one is to address the philosophical and political question of the animal in any meaningful way, it will be necessary at the very least to work through both (a) the ontology of animal life on its own terms, and (b) the ethico-political relations that obtain between those beings called “human” and “animal.”

Although Agamben, like much of anti- and post-humanist philosophy, has been slow to address the question of the animal from this broader perspective, there are at least two reasons why the question must inevitably be engaged in this enlarged form by thinkers who wish to formulate a genuinely post-humanist approach to politics. In the most general terms, the post-humanist critique of humanism is to be understood not as a misanthropic or dismissive rejection of the accomplishments of Enlightenment modernism, but as a critical investigation of human subjectivity, of the material (e.g., economic, historical, linguistic, and social) forces at work in the formation of human subjects. Specific to the post-Nietzschean and post-Heideggerian critique of humanism (a lineage to which Agamben clearly belongs) is a probing of the conditions of possibility that render subjects open to material forces as such. What does it mean to say that one comes to be a subject only in and through language or history? And how must a subject be structured such that it can be affected and transformed by material forces outside of itself? In offering answers to such questions, it quickly becomes clear that the pre-subjective conditions that give rise to human subjectivity (these conditions go by various names in different thinkers, e.g., Heidegger’s Da-sein, Nancy’s and Levinas’s exposure, Derrida’s ex-appropriation, Agamben’s exposition) cannot easily be restricted to human beings. And this is the first reason why anti-humanism ultimately opens onto the larger issue of non-human animals—for the subjective being of many non-human animals, too, is constituted by differential structures of exposure that render standard accounts of the human/animal distinction suspect. At this level of pre-subjective and pre-personal singularities, there are no clear-cut criteria for distinguishing animal modes of exposure from human modes; what we encounter, rather, are complex networks of relations, affects, and becomings into which both human beings and animals are thrown. As such, post-humanism is confronted with the necessity of returning to first philosophy with the task of creating a non-anthropocentric ontology of life, something like the ethology we find in Jakob von Uexküll or Deleuze and Guattari.

The second chief reason that post-humanists must account for the place of animals within their project arises at the ethico-political level. While it is clear that post-humanist philosophers do not accept in toto standard philosophical theories of value, there can be little doubt that the critique of humanism is motivated by a kind of ethical and political imperative. The assumption by many post-humanists is that nihilism and the major political catastrophes of our age are linked in a profound way with the very humanism typically offered by neo-humanists as a solution to these issues. For post-humanists, then, overcoming these problems would require something other than a humanist politics based on a naïve account of human subjectivity. The shared intuition and hope of most post-humanist philosophers seems to be that a less destructive and more sustainable form of politics can be developed beginning from a thought of the relational ontology mentioned above. Here we might take Levinas’s project as an example of this approach. Although Levinas is usually approached as a purely ethical thinker, it is perhaps more appropriate to view his work in political terms, that is, as responding to a political problem. The great danger for Levinas arises when politics becomes unmoored from its ethical grounding and forgets its justification and calling as a response to the face of the Other. By recalling politics to its ethical foundations—which Levinas locates at the level of “sensibility” in a pre-subjective exposure to the Other human—he hopes to reinvigorate and radicalize existing forms of politics (such as liberal democracy) that take general human welfare into account but often forget the irreducibly singular human beings who constitute a political body. Of course, the problem here is that the ethical obligations and responsibilities incurred in exposure do not necessarily arise from the Other human alone, for non-human animals and other non-human beings also have the potential to interrupt and oblige as well. Consequently, a post-humanist politics that begins from a thought of exposure must come to terms with responsibilities potentially arising from beyond the sphere of the human.

It is only in recent years that philosophers in the Continental tradition have begun to think through the question of the animal in this more inclusive manner. I would suggest that Agamben’s early work was unable to take such issues into account primarily because, following thinkers such as Heidegger and Benveniste, he was working with an overly narrow interhuman and proto-linguistic theory of the grounds of human subjectivity. At the same time, although his work was never explicitly opposed to an expanded notion of ethics and politics that would encompass non-human life, he failed to outline in a sufficient manner what form such an ethics and politics might take.

In a certain sense, then, Agamben’s The Open marks a rupture in the itinerary of his thought. If his thinking began primarily as a response to the nihilistic tendencies of humanism and human-based politics, his most recent work indicates that these concerns lead necessarily in some sense to addressing directly the larger issue of anthropocentrism which had been held previously in abeyance. And this direction is explicitly announced at the very outset of The Open, in the section entitled “Theriomorphous” (meaning, literally, having the form of an animal). Taking his point of departure from an illustration found in a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, which depicts the messianic banquet of the righteous on the last day, Agamben pauses to consider a curious detail about the portrait. The righteous represented in the illustration—who are enjoying their feast on the meat of the Leviathan and Behemoth with no concern for whether the slaughter was kosher, since they inhabit a space and time that is outside the law—are depicted as having human bodies and animal heads. “Why,” Agamben wonders, “are the representatives of concluded humanity depicted with animal heads?” (O, 2).

Following certain interpretations of both the rabbinic and Talmudic traditions, Agamben suggests that the illustration can be read as announcing a double consequence encountered on the “last day” of humanity. He writes:

It is not impossible . . . that in attributing an animal head to the remnant of Israel [i.e., those who are remaining, the righteous who remain alive during the time of the Messiah’s coming], the artist of the manuscript in the Ambrosian intended to suggest that on the last day, the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature. (O, 3)

What we have here, then, is an illustration representing two moments realized in the post-apocalyptic time of the “end of man” and the “end of history.” On the one hand—and this theme will be familiar to readers of Agamben’s other writings—we encounter human beings who are reconciled with their animal natures and who no longer suffer the effects of the biopolitical separation of bare life and political life. To think through a human form-of-life that does not divide zoē from bios—such would be the task of the politics of the coming community, a task and a politics that, as Agamben tells us, remain “largely to be invented” (HS, 11). On the other hand—and this is where a certain rupture can be marked in Agamben’s own thought—we are given to think a transmutation in the relations between human beings and animals, where this difference is understood not simply as a division that occurs within human beings, but rather as a differential relation between human beings and so-called non-human animals. Although Agamben does not specify the precise dimensions of this transformed relation (any more than he specifies the exact form of the politics of the coming community), it is clear given the context that his reading of the illustration is pointing us toward a less violent conception of human-animal relations. Thus, just as Agamben’s thought of the coming community is an effort to come to grips with and avert the political failures of our age, his reworking of the human-animal distinction appears to be aimed at creating a space in which human interactions with non-human life can take on a new form and economy that avoids similar disastrous consequences for non-human life. It will be useful to keep both of these prongs of Agamben’s argument in mind as we turn to an investigation of the political and ontological obstacles blocking access to the realization of this kind of alternative mode of being-with other animals.

Humanism and the Anthropological Machine

Agamben gives the name of “anthropological machine” (a concept he borrows from the Italian scholar of myth, Furio Jesi) to the mechanism underlying our current means of determining the human-animal distinction. This machine can best be understood as the symbolic and material mechanisms at work in various scientific and philosophical discourses that classify and distinguish humans and animals through a dual process of inclusion and exclusion. The opening chapters of The Open provide the reader with a fascinating overview of some of the historical variations on the anthropological machine at work in a variety of authors and discourses, ranging from the philosophy of Bataille and Kojève, to the taxonomic studies of Linnaeus and post-Darwinian paleontology. For the purposes of the argument I am developing here, it will suffice to recall the general structure of the machine and why Agamben argues that it is necessary to stop its functioning.

Agamben makes a distinction between two key variations on the anthropological machine: the modern and pre-modern. The modern anthropological machine is post-Darwinian. It seeks to understand, following the principles of natural science, the emergence of the fully constituted human being from out of the order of the human animal (the latter, of course, is in many ways indistinguishable from certain non-human animals, especially so-called “higher primates”). In order to mark this transition, it is necessary to determine and isolate the animal aspects of the human animal and exclude them from humanity proper. Agamben describes this process as involving an “animalization” of certain modes of human life, an attempt to separate out—within human beings themselves—what precisely is animal on the one hand and human on the other. This variation on the anthropological machine gives rise to the search by nineteenth-century paleontologists for the “missing link” that provides the biological transition from speechless ape to speaking human. But it also opens the way for the totalitarian and democratic experiments on and around human nature that function by excluding animal life from human life within human beings. Agamben suggests that:

. . . it is enough to move our field of research ahead a few decades, and instead of this innocuous paleontological find we will have the Jew, that is, the non-man produced within the man, or the néomort and the overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body itself. (O, 37)

The pre-modern form of the anthropological machine, which runs from Aristotle up through Linnaeus, functions in a similar but inverted form. Rather than animalizing certain aspects of the human, animal life is itself humanized. Human beings who take an essentially animal form are used to mark the constitutive outside of humanity proper: the infant savage, the wolf-man, the werewolf, the slave or barbarian, etc. Here, the beings situated at the limits of humanity suffer similar consequences to those “animalized” beings caught within the working of the modern anthropological machine.

As Agamben suggests, the structure or machine that delimits the contours of the human is perfectly ironic and empty. It does not function by uncovering a uniquely human trait that demarcates a clean ontological break between human and non-human animals—for, as Agamben himself acknowledges, no such trait or group of traits is to be found. This much we know from current debates in evolutionary biology and animal ethics. And here it is not so much a matter of subscribing to a watered-down, quasi-Darwinian continuism that would blur any and all distinctions one might wish to make between and among human and non-human animals, but rather recognizing that deciding what constitutes “the human” and “the animal” is not simply a scientific or ontological matter. The locus and stakes of the human-animal distinction are also deeply political and ethical. For not only does the distinction create the opening for the exploitation of non-human animals and others considered not fully human (this is the point that is forcefully made by animal ethicists), but it also creates the conditions for contemporary biopolitics, in which more and more of the so-called “biological” and “animal” aspects of human life are brought under the purview of the State and the juridical order.

As Agamben has argued in Homo Sacer and elsewhere, biopolitics, whether it manifests itself in totalitarian or democratic form, contains within it the virtual possibility of concentration camps and other violent and nihilistic means of producing and controlling bare life. It comes as no surprise, then, that he does not seek to articulate a more precise, more empirical, or less dogmatic determination of the human-animal distinction; rather, he insists that the distinction must be abolished altogether, and along with it the anthropological machine that produces the distinction. Recalling the political consequences that have followed from the modern and pre-modern separation of “human” and “animal” within human existence, Agamben characterizes the task for thought in the following terms:

. . . it is not so much a matter of asking which of the two machines [i.e., the modern or pre-modern anthropological machine] . . . is better or more effective—or, rather, less lethal and bloody—as it is of understanding how they work so that we might, eventually, be able to stop them. (O, 38)

Now, the critic of Agamben’s argument is likely to see a slippery slope fallacy here. Why is it a necessary or even virtual possibility that every time a human-animal distinction is made that there will be negative (“lethal and bloody”) political consequences for certain human beings? Isn’t the promise of democratic humanism and Enlightenment modernism (the very traditions Agamben would have us leave behind) their foundational commitment to reform, their perfectibility and inclusiveness? Isn’t it precisely humanism that guards against the worst excesses of totalitarianism and human rights abuses?

The reader who takes up a careful study of Agamben’s work from this angle, seeking answers to such questions, will be well positioned to grasp its novelty. The overarching thesis of Agamben’s work over the past decade is that there is in fact an “inner solidarity” between democracy and totalitarianism, not at an empirical level, but at a historical and philosophical level (HS, 10). Despite the enormous differences between these two political systems, they are nevertheless united in their investment in the politics of the anthropological machine, and in seeking to separate bare life from properly political life. Even if democratic regimes maintain safeguards designed to prevent many of the totalitarian excesses perpetrated against bare life (and Agamben’s references to Karen Quinlan and others make it clear that democracies are actually far from successful in such matters), they continue unwittingly to create the conditions of possibility for such consequences. This hidden implication of democracy comes to the fore especially in those instances where the rule of law is suspended, for example, in the declarations of sovereign exception to the law or in the refugee crisis that accompanies the decline of nation-States. Such states of exception are, Agamben argues (following Benjamin), becoming more and more the rule in contemporary political life—and the examples one might adduce in support of this thesis are indeed becoming increasingly and troublingly commonplace. It is considerations of this kind that lead Agamben to the conclusion that the genuine political task facing us today is not the reform, radicalization, or expansion of humanism and democracy, but creating an altogether different form of political life.

Agamben’s work faces two important challenges at this level. On the one hand, neo-humanists will (justifiably) wonder whether Agamben’s “coming community” and rejection of the humanist tradition in favor of a non-sovereign and non-juridical politics will be better able than current democracies to guard against the injustices he condemns. On the other hand, theorists of a more deconstructionist and Levinasian orientation will likely see Agamben’s project as being constituted by a false dilemma between humanist democracy and a non-essentialist thought of community. Although such theorists would share Agamben’s concerns about the problematic virtual possibilities of democratic politics and its ontology, they would be less sanguine about completely rejecting the democratic heritage. For them, the chief political task would consist in filtering through our democratic inheritance to unlock its radical possibilities, insisting on democracy’s commitment to perfectibility so as to expand democracy’s scope and to open democratic politics to its Other. This would bring democracy and its humanist commitments into relation with another thought of being-with-Others that is similar to Agamben’s coming community.

As I noted at the outset of this essay, I believe Agamben offers us some of the most persuasive accounts of the limits of these forms of current political thinking. And there are moments throughout his work where he gives instances of how his alternative thought of politics can be actualized in concrete circumstances. But even the most charitable reading of Agamben’s work must acknowledge that, in terms of the kinds of questions posed by neo-humanists or deconstructionists, much remains to be worked out at both the theoretical and concrete political level, should he wish to engage in such a debate. And if the scope of this discussion were limited to an anthropocentric politics, I would argue that the questions and criticisms raised by neo-humanists and deconstructionists are impossible to circumvent. Humanism, democracy, and human rights are complicated and rich historical constructs, with the intrinsic potential for extensive and remarkably progressive reforms.

And yet, if the question of the animal were taken seriously here, and the political discussion were moved to that level as well, the stakes of the debate would change considerably. Who among those activists and theorists working in defense of animals seriously believes that humanism, democracy, and human rights are the sine qua non of ethics and politics? Even those theorists who employ the logic of these discourses in an extensionist manner so as to bring animals within the sphere of moral and political considerability do not seem to believe that an ethics and politics that genuinely respect animal life can be accomplished within the confines of the traditions they use.

On this political terrain, neo-humanist arguments concerning the merits of the democratic tradition have little if any weight. Even if one were to inscribe animal rights within a democratic liberatory narrative of expansion and perfectibility, such gestures can only appear tragicomic in light of the massive institutionalized abuse of animals that contemporary democracies not only tolerate but encourage on a daily basis. And in many democracies, the support of animal abuse goes much further. Currently, militant animal activists in the United States who engage in economic sabotage and property destruction in the name of stopping the worst forms of animal abuse are not just criticized (and in many cases without sound justification), but are placed at the top of the list of “domestic terrorists” by the FBI and subject to outrageously unjust penalties and prison sentences. In view of the magnitude of such problems, animal activists are currently embroiled in a protracted debate over the merits of a reformist (welfarist) versus a stricter and more radical rightist (incrementalist) approach to animal issues, and over which approach is more effective in the contemporary political and legal contexts. However, the real question seems to me to lie elsewhere—precisely in the decision to be made between the project of radicalizing existing politics to accommodate non-human life (neo-humanism and deconstruction) and that of working toward the kind of coming politics advocated by Agamben that would allow for an entirely new economy of human/animal relations. While Agamben’s thought is sometimes pejoratively labeled by critics as utopian inasmuch as it seeks a complete change in our political thinking and practices without offering the concrete means of achieving such change, from the perspective of the question of the animal, the tables can easily be turned on the critics. Anyone who argues that existing forms of politics can be reformed or radicalized so as to do justice to the multiplicity of forms of non-human life is clearly the unrealistic and utopian thinker, for what signs or sources of hope do we have that humanism and democracy (both of which are grounded in an agent-centered conception of subjectivity) can be radicalized or reformed so as to include and give direct consideration to beings beyond the human?[3]

Thus, when we consider the ethico-political status of animal life, the necessity for working toward a form of politics beyond the present humanist, democratic, and juridical orders becomes clear beyond any shadow of a doubt. Even Jacques Derrida—who has always taken a nuanced and generally respectful stance toward humanism and the law, refusing either fully to endorse or reject them—has acknowledged the limits of legislation in this regard. Concerning political and ethical relations between human beings and animals, he argues:

A transformation is . . . necessary and inevitable, for reasons that are both conscious and unconscious. Slow, laborious, sometimes gradual, sometimes accelerated, the mutation of relations between humans and animals will not necessarily or solely take the form of a charter, a declaration of rights, or a tribunal governed by a legislator. I do not believe in the miracle of legislation. Besides, there is already a law, more or less empirical, and that’s better than nothing. But it does not prevent the slaughtering, or the “techno-scientific” pathologies of the market or of industrial production.[4]

The point that I wish to make here is that, were sufficient attention given to the question of the animal by Agamben, his arguments aimed at the limitations of the logic of sovereignty and our current political and juridical models would become significantly more powerful and persuasive. That Agamben chooses to avoid this approach is indicative of what could be called a “performative anthropocentrism” in his texts. In the following section, I argue that if Agamben and other post-humanist approaches to politics are unable overcome this kind of anthropocentrism, the logic of the anthropological machine will reassert itself in places where we least expect it.

* * *

Let us return, then, to Agamben’s main question: How best to jam the anthropological machine and create a post-humanist politics that is no longer governed by its “lethal and bloody” logic?

One of the key theses of Agamben’s The Open is that Heidegger’s thinking—despite its uncompromisingly critical relation to humanism—does little more than replicate the inner logic of the anthropological machine. The majority of the second half of The Open is taken up with a lengthy and intricate reading of Heidegger, in which Agamben attempts to demonstrate how Heidegger’s scattered remarks on the difference between human Dasein and animal life implicitly obeys the inclusionary/exclusionary logic of the anthropological machine. Focusing primarily on Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Parmenides lecture courses, Agamben’s reading of these texts stresses the proximity of human Dasein with animal life, as well as the essential continuity that binds human and animal in their shared “captivation” by beings in their respective environments. As Agamben understands the matter, human Dasein differs from its animal other only by the very smallest of differences. What allows human Dasein to emerge in its singularity, along with the world relation and political possibilities concomitant with the emergence of Dasein, is simply that human animals have the unique capacity to grasp, or catch sight of, their being-captivated, a possibility that is (presumably) blocked off for animal life:

. . . man, in the experience of profound boredom, has risked himself in the suspension of his relationship with the environment as a living being. . . . [He is able] to remember captivation an instant before a world disclosed itself. . . . Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human. (O, 70)

In this “brief instant” before world opens, in the moment at which the human animal awakens from its captivation to its captivation, human Dasein is thrust into the “space” or opening of the ontological difference. This is a topos that, while typically hidden, comes explicitly to the fore in certain moods such as anxiety and boredom, moods where the tight grip of captivation that binds human beings to other beings in its world gives way to the malaise and uncanniness of the indifference of other beings.

Inasmuch as Heidegger’s account of the emergence of human Dasein is predicated on the capture and exclusion of the animal’s particular mode of relation (viz., Benommenheit, captivation) to other beings, Agamben suggests that his thinking follows in lockstep with the logic of the anthropological machine. And Heidegger’s political thought—especially that of the early-to-mid 1930s—provides an even clearer example of how the anthropological machine is at play throughout his writings, inasmuch as Heidegger there seeks to “ground” political life in the unique world relation of human Dasein, a world that is explicitly contrasted with the “worldless” realm of animal life in An Introduction to Metaphysics.

It is arguable whether Heidegger ever gave up the aim of uncovering a new political or historical task for human beings. If he did in fact recognize the error of doing so along nationalistic lines, it is unclear whether he gave up hope in uncovering some other “ground” for reorienting human existence. At the very least, we can be certain that Heidegger’s thinking remains beholden to the logic of the anthropological machine from beginning to end. Heidegger never renounces the task of determining the proper of the human (as Da-sein, ek-sistence, etc.), and of thinking through the redemption of nature (i.e., the letting be of beings in their Being) that would occur were this human propriety to be assumed as such.

Heidegger’s inability to think the relation between human and non-human life beyond or outside the logic of anthropological machine is what leads Agamben to look elsewhere for an alternative thought of the political. Not surprisingly—for this is a common gesture in Agamben’s texts—he finds his inspiration in Walter Benjamin’s writings. Agamben is particularly interested in Benjamin’s notions of the “saved night” and the “dialectic at a standstill,” inasmuch as both notions offer us an alternative image of the relation between nature and the human that does not rely on a rigid conceptual separation of the two realms. Such notions seem to offer a thought of the human and the animal that places the anthropological machine “completely out of play” (O, 81). For Benjamin, the “saved night” refers to a natural world that is sufficient in itself, a world that has value independently of the role it might play as a dwelling place for human beings or as the stage where human history is acted out. When the natural world is granted inherent value as it is in itself—as irreparable and unsavable, as not in need of being redeemed by human beings or serving human ends—it is at this point that the dialectic between human and animal comes to a “standstill.” On Agamben’s reading, Benjamin seeks this standstill not because he is concerned with articulating another, more refined instance of the human/animal distinction, but rather because he seeks to abandon such conceptual work altogether. In the final analysis, Benjamin’s texts leave the so-called “human” and “non-human” to be as they are, that is, in their singular, irreparable manner. Such letting-be has no need, as it does in Heidegger, of passing through human logos or history in order to come to presence. Rather, Benjamin’s thought proposes for us the possibility of letting beings be outside of being.

It should come as no surprise to the reader that these Benjaminian themes provide the impetus and telos for Agamben’s reading of Western history as the unfolding and vicissitudes of the anthropological machine. Benjamin’s thought provides Agamben with the possibility of thinking about human beings and the non-human world beyond the dominant logic and terms provided by the Western metaphysical tradition. And the overarching task of The Open, at least as I understand it, is precisely to open up this possibility. In brief, Agamben’s task here is to provide readers with a philosophical concept, that is, with a conceptual monkey wrench that can be used to jam the anthropological machine—a machine that serves as the seemingly unsurpassable political and ontological horizon of our time. Agamben’s notions of life as “unsavable” or “irreparable” are just such concepts. They are meant to provide readers with a glimpse of a world not subject to strictly anthropocentric aims or the “hyperbolic naïveté”[5] of modern humanity and its human chauvinism. As Agamben suggests in The Coming Community, affirming life in its irreparableness and profanity is a form of Nietzschean life-affirmation. In this sense, the concept of unsavable life is offered as one way among others of assuming Zarathustra’s task of remaining “true to the earth” and its inhabitants.

Agamben himself admits that trying to think about a humanity that is absolutely exposed and irreparable is not an easy task (O, 90). Indeed, one could read the whole of Agamben’s writings as a series of efforts to articulate this one thought: what form such an irreparable humanity, and a politics befitting such a humanity, might take. Reading Agamben from this perspective would also provide insight into the critical texts in which he probes the dangers and limitations of existing models of biopolitics and sovereignty. Our current models of politics are all in one way or another beholden to an image of humanity that is predicated on excluding our irreparableness. The task for thought, then, would be to highlight this limitation, and to offer another, more affirmative and compelling concept and practice in its place.

With regard to human politics, Agamben seems to realize that such a thought is not to be achieved “all in one go.” Given the ubiquity of the anthropological machine in both symbolic and material structures, the critical and deconstructive gesture of jamming the anthropological machine is just as important as the positive project of articulating another non-binary and non-hierarchical concept of the human. With regard to rethinking animal life, the task is fraught with far more severe difficulties, if only for the simple fact that most of the theorists and philosophers working in this area have paid scant attention to the question of the animal. As I argued above, Agamben’s writings are no exception here, as they focus entirely and exclusively on the effects of the anthropological machine on human beings, and never explore the impact the machine has on various forms of animal life. Surely the latter type of analysis is needed if we are to begin to develop another mode of relation and community with non-human life. Such a project, as humble and painstaking as it is, perhaps lacks the pathos characteristic of Agamben’s messianic politics; but it is every bit as necessary if we wish to develop a notion of community that truly avoids the “lethal and bloody” logic of the anthropological machine.

For, after all, what will the righteous eat at the banquet on the “last day”? Will post-humanity dine on the flesh of animals whose lives have become irreparable and unsavable?

Notes