Jamming the Anthropological Machine

Agamben

INTRODUCTION

Giorgio Agamben arrived at his recent work on the question of the animal through a rather circuitous route. Similar to Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, much of Agamben’s early focus was on the question of thinking through the remains of human propriety in the wake of the decentering of human subjectivity. In his writings from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Agamben elaborates a complicated and provocative account of being human that seeks, again like Heidegger and Levinas, to be genuinely postmetaphysical and posthumanist. However, as this project develops over the decades, it seems to become increasingly clear to Agamben that the aim of trying to specify what constitutes being human is, at bottom, an ontologically bankrupt and politically pernicious project. Indeed, by the time that Agamben takes up the question of the animal explicitly in his 2002 book L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale (The Open: Man and Animal), the aim of seeking a postmetaphysical definition of the human is all but abandoned, and reliance on the human-animal distinction that serves as the foundation for Western political and metaphysical thought becomes, on Agamben’s reading, the chief obstacle for a postmetaphysical concept of relation and community. My aim in this chapter is to track the itinerary of the formation and eventual abandonment of the human-animal distinction in Agamben’s work and to examine the critical and theoretical upshot of this question as it emerges in his most recent texts on the question of the animal.

ON THE BORDERS OF LANGUAGE AND DEATH

Agamben’s work has a point of departure that is heavily indebted to Heidegger. Not only does he follow Heidegger’s view that the Western metaphysical tradition is nihilistic, he also accepts the premise that the ground of this nihilism is to be found in a specific interpretation of human subjectivity that has been dominant in this tradition. And yet, Agamben insists that Heidegger’s thought contains within it serious limitations that render impossible his desire to think beyond the confines of the metaphysical tradition. In particular, Agamben suggests that what binds Heidegger’s thought irreducibly to the metaphysical tradition he seeks to delimit is an inability to think the ground of, or opening to, human being and language in nonnegative terms. Consequently, in his efforts to challenge the limitations of Heidegger’s project and the metaphysical tradition, many of Agamben’s early texts are focused on trying to think the ground of the human beyond the negativity characteristic of Heidegger’s approach and the metaphysical tradition. Agamben’s overarching aim in these works is to “find an experience of speech that no longer presupposes any negative foundation.”¹ He finds this nonnegative, or affirmative, ground of being human in the concept of “infancy” (from infari and infans, the being who does not speak), which in turn opens onto a conception of the human as a fundamentally ethical and political being.

One of the recurring quotations in Agamben’s writings derives from book 1, part 2, of Aristotle’s Politics. In this passage, we encounter one of the earliest efforts in the metaphysical tradition to articulate the relationship between human language and social and political life:

Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.²

Aristotle here posits an inextricable link between human speech and politics and suggests that the ability to make articulate judgments about ethical and social matters is essential to the constitution of a polis. But what interests Agamben in this passage is what remains unsaid. In particular, what is it about human beings that makes them capable of speech and different from animals in this regard? Why is the space of transition between animal voice and human speech left unthought by Aristotle?

In his early book Language and Death, Agamben presents a series of novel arguments aimed at demonstrating that these questions go largely unanswered throughout the history of the metaphysical tradition. And in those places where the questions are addressed, the ground of human language and social life remains mired in obscurity and negativity. Thus, the link posited by Aristotle between human speech and political life is maintained by metaphysics, but the ground of this relation never receives a rigorous formulation. And it is precisely the failure to think through the ground of and relation between human speech and politics that, according to Agamben, ensures the nihilistic consequences of metaphysics.

The difficulty here lies with specifying the precise nature of the “space” of transition between animal voice (understood as instinctual code) and human language (understood as articulate, creative, recursive speech). Agamben argues that the dominant means of doing so in the metaphysical tradition has been to treat the space of transition as ineffable, as a mystical site in which the human encounters a mysterious “Voice.” The Voice guarantees the passage from animality to humanity, ensuring that the seeming a-poria between voice and language is transformed into a eu-poria. This Voice, which has the negative characteristics of being no-longer-animal-code and not-yet-articulate-human-speech, appears in varying modes throughout the metaphysical tradition running from medieval thought through modernity and Hegelian philosophy. Whatever variations one might find in this complex history, one thing remains essentially the same for Agamben: the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the human in language are always thought by the metaphysical tradition in nonpositive terms, that is, as ineffable, mystical, negative, and so forth. This remains the case even with Heidegger, who is typically taken to be the postmetaphysical thinker par excellence. Despite the fact that Heidegger seeks to eliminate the idea of any link between animality and human essence (and thereby eliminates the problem of explaining the leap from voice to language), he remains trapped within a thematic of the Voice and negativity (primarily in the form of the all-too-mystical and “silent” Voice of conscience) when trying to articulate the uniquely human experience of and opening to language and finitude.

As a consequence, neither Heidegger nor the rest of the metaphysical tradition are able to think human sociality—which, as Aristotle suggests, is tied intimately to the capacity for language—in positive terms. The negative link between language and politics, between the opening to language and the finite opening to alterity (culture, history, and so on), remains the unthought ground upon which metaphysics proceeds. And it is here that Agamben locates the nihilism specific to the tradition. It is a nihilism not in the Nietzschean sense of a declining culture or in the Heideggerian sense of a forgetting of the gift of Being but rather a nihilism stemming from the oblivion and covering over of the political and social “habits” of the human. The nihilism of metaphysics coincides, then, with what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe call the “retreat of the political,” the withdrawal of the thought of what gives rise to politics. Agamben argues that it is only through a “liquidation” of metaphysical mysticism and negativity that thought can begin to find the words for the essential link between speech and politics. In so doing, thought has to learn to dwell in the infancy of the human, a task that Agamben takes up in Infancy and History.³

Agamben approaches the concept of infancy in Infancy and History through an examination of modern theories of human subjectivity in which the link between subjectivity and politics posited by Aristotle and classical metaphysics is largely eclipsed in favor of an epistemological and mathematical approach to understanding the specificity and exceptionalism of the human. Thus the possibility of uncovering the traces of sociality at the heart of the human are here even more obscured. In modern thinkers such as Descartes and Kant (and their successors such as Husserl), the site of subjectivity is sought in a quasi-solipsistic, pre-social, prelinguistic site uncontaminated by and discontinuous with historical or social forces. This approach leads, in turn, to the consequent difficulty of trying to determine the precise nature of intersubjectivity and how the human subject is inserted in and relates to historical, cultural, and biological forces. Against such modern conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, Agamben, following his Heideggerian and poststructuralist counterparts, argues that there is no such uncontaminated space of subjectivity. The subject is always already inserted into and shot through with alterity in the forms of social, linguistic, biological, and historicocultural forces.

Agamben develops this argument through recourse to Émile Benveniste’s linguistic theory. Benveniste demonstrates that there is no psychological or physical substance to the “I” or subject, which is to say, the “I” has no material referent. The “I” refers instead to the act of discourse in which it is uttered, and it is only and in and through the utterance of “I” that the “I” has any reality at all. What Benveniste’s theory amounts to, in brief, is the notion that the subject who says “I” emerges only in language and has no existence or reality outside of language. Thus, the quintessential aim of modern epistemology—the aim of locating the ground of the subject and of epistemology outside the play of language, culture, and history—is, from Benveniste’s perspective a priori impossible. If language is absent, there can be no self, and where there is a self, there is always already language.⁴

For those theorists who wish to salvage something of agency and subjectivity from this apparent linguistic reductionism and idealism, there is a desire to uncover something of the subject that exceeds language. For if the “I” is simply coextensive with language, then there is no break between the human subject and its linguistic milieu, and thus no human history, culture, or alterity. Stated otherwise, were the human “I” and language fully identical, the human would be in language like “water in water.” Georges Bataille uses this phrase to describe the animal’s relation to the world, suggesting that animality as such is characterized by its complete immanence in its instinctual and natural surroundings.⁵ As we have seen, Heidegger makes a similar point in arguing that the animal is intimately bound with its environment. Are human beings tied to language in a similarly intimate way, such that it would be impossible to mark a sharp break between human beings and animals? The putative break with animal instinct comes, according to much of the Western philosophical tradition, with the acquisition of language. It is because animals lack language that they are unable to break with their environmental and instinctual milieu, or, for Heidegger, the lack of language is indicative of the animal’s constitutional lack of finite transcendence. But these standard answers only lead to a dead end because if language is tied intimately to the constitution of the human subject, then there is the risk that the subject is either determined by language (in the sense that language is received from outside the subject and thus structures and determines its “agency” from without) or completely identical with language (in the sense that language is innate, thereby rendering human language identical with animal codes). Either understanding of the relation between language and the human renders the prospect of distinguishing human beings from animals rather difficult.

Although Agamben follows his predecessors in assuming that there is a break between the human and the animal with respect to language, he does not assume that animals are without language altogether. Rather, the break between human beings and animals is found within language itself. The human is situated at a site within language where language itself is split, and the “fate” of the human, according to Agamben, is to traverse and move constantly back and forth between this split. The split in language that Agamben has in mind here is the same one we saw in examining Language and Death: the split between animal code and articulate human speech, or to use Benveniste’s terms, the split between the semiotic and the semantic. Although animal codes have often been thought not to be strictly linguistic, Agamben (following Benveniste and contemporary semiotic theory) insists that animal communication is fully linguistic. From this perspective, the difference between human beings and animals has nothing to do with animals’ lacking language. Animals, like human beings, are linguistic beings through and through. The difference between animals and human beings with respect to language is that animals are identical with, and fully immersed in, the language they speak. Animals are in language in the same way that they are in their surrounding environment: like “water in water.” In Agamben’s words,

It is not language in general that marks out the human from other living beings—according to the Western metaphysical tradition that sees man as zoon logon echon (an animal endowed with speech)—but the split between language and speech, between semiotic and semantic (in Benveniste’s sense), between sign system and discourse. Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language…. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it.⁶

Consequently, to suggest that human nature is distinguished by its “having language” fails to articulate what is uniquely human. According to Agamben’s line of argument, what is unique to human beings is that they are actually deprived of language (in the form of articulate speech) and are forced to receive it from outside of themselves. Infancy is the name given to this situation of human beings existing fundamentally in language but without discourse. There is no point at which the human being is in discourse like the animal is in language. And it is this state of being fundamentally deprived of language, this state of infancy, that opens human beings to alterity in the forms of culture, history, and politics.

As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, the overarching thrust of Agamben’s early writings is to find a way to think the relational structures of deprivation and infancy in nonnegative, nonnihilistic terms, for he believes that contemporary nihilism stems from the tendency of Western metaphysics to think the ground of human being in negative and mystical terms. As persuasive as this thesis is in many respects, it is necessary to examine the assumptions upon which it is based before accepting it uncritically. First, Agamben follows Heidegger in assuming that historicity (that is, the opening to history) is uniquely human and that, as such, history and everything that follows from it (culture, politics, and so on) is found only among human beings. That this assumption can be contested on empirical grounds is even more obvious today than it was during the time in which Agamben was writing Infancy and History (the late 1970s). Indeed, Agamben himself seems to be aware that his remarks on human infancy are complicated by empirical evidence available at the time that suggests a parallel infancy among animals; for it is not at all the case that all animal species are “always and totally” in language. In his remarks on ethologist William Thorpe, Agamben calls attention to the fact that in certain bird species, the acquisition of their “code” is actually partially learned and is not wholly innate, and this is true of the languages of other animal species as well. Furthermore, if we look for signs of “historicity” among nonhuman beings in sites other than language (and that we restrict ourselves to language understood in a literal and reductive manner in examining the issue of historicity is another problematic aspect of the Western logocentric tradition), it is clear that the characteristics and behaviors accompanying historicity (culture, politics) are to be found among a wide range of animal species.⁷ The second assumption, which follows from Agamben’s first, is that political thought can and should be restricted to human beings. For not only is there no politics among nonhuman animals according to Agamben (a point that follows logically from the argument he makes in Infancy and History and one that is explicitly made in multiple texts), but it is unclear what, if any role animals play in human political life. Agamben’s early work is structured throughout in such a way as to place human beings at the center of politics and to leave all other beings in abeyance. As I shall argue below, the writings of his middle period continue this trend. But his most recent writings, which will be the focus of the last portion of the chapter, might be to taken to suggest, if one follows the reading of them that I shall propose, that the above assumptions about animal historicity and politics and the more basic thesis of human-animal dualism and discontinuity that underlies them must be abandoned.

Let us return, then, to the development of the human-animal distinction and the question of the animal in Agamben’s texts. During the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, Agamben turns from the issue of articulating the ethicopolitical preconditions of discursive speech to sketching in the contours of an actual politics and concept of community befitting these preconditions. Yet even as he seeks to develop a radically nonessentialist conception of community based on “whatever singularities” and beings devoid of any propriety,⁸ Agamben continues in the insistence characteristic of his earlier writings that the site of politics marks a sharp break of human beings from animality. In his 1995 essay “The Face,” Agamben uses the motif of exposition to name the site of corelation prior to language between persons, a site he argues that is open only to human beings:

Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human beings, on the other hand, separate images from things and give them a name precisely because they want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their very own appearance. Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History.⁹

This passage contains all of the dogmatic elements we have seen in Heidegger’s and Levinas’s discourse on animals: a simple human-animal distinction; lack of attention to existing empirical knowledge about animals (here the inattention concerns the empirically false claim that animals as such “are not interested in mirrors”);¹⁰ and the invariant concern to determine the supposedly unique human relation to the word and history—as if what constitutes the ground of a supposedly unique mode of human existence is the sole (or even primary) thing at stake for philosophical thought.

Variations on these anthropocentric themes abound in Agamben’s writings from this period, whether the concept being developed is potentiality, the irreparable, or political refugees. And if one turns to Agamben’s texts from this period in the hopes of deepening the antihumanist critique of human subjectivity, the writings are invaluable for undercutting any kind of simplistic neohumanism. But, much like Heidegger and Levinas, Agamben seems unable to connect his critique of humanism with the problem of anthropocentrism. His writings exhibit a remarkable critical vigilance toward any effort to develop a dogmatic neohumanism but do not manifest the same vigilance toward anthropocentric determinations of animal life.

Since the mid-1990s, Agamben’s work has begun to shift increasingly toward the task of thinking through the links tying sovereignty, law, and the State to the isolation of what he calls bare life within human beings. In the development of this project, the question of the animal has begun increasingly to impose itself on Agamben’s thought from within. Thus, in 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;¹¹ and in a sequel to 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.¹² Although these texts fall far short of providing a full analysis of the place of animals within modern biopolitics or the functioning of the human-animal distinction within the logic of sovereignty, the necessity for developing such an account seems to be glimpsed here by Agamben.

THE RUPTURE OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM

One of Agamben’s more recent works, The Open: Man and Animal—which will serve as the primary focus for the remainder of this chapter—partially remedies these deficiencies by exploring the question of the animal at more length.¹³ 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 antihumanism characteristic of the texts from Agamben I have discussed thus far. 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 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 posthumanist politics can emerge without grappling with the logic and consequences of this division. More is at issue here, however, than contesting humanism.

I will examine this last point momentarily, but before doing so, it is important to note that addressing this question alone—namely, the question of how the human-animal distinction functions in determining what it means to be human—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 the ontology of animal life on its own terms and the ethicopolitical relations that obtain between those beings called “human” and “animal.”

Although Agamben, like his predecessors in the Continental tradition, has been slow to address the question of the animal from this broader perspective, there are at least two reasons why it must inevitably be engaged in this enlarged form if we are to develop a genuinely posthumanist approach to politics. As is clear from the arguments made in the first two chapters, the posthumanist 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 (for example, 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. But 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 so 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 presubjective conditions that give rise to human subjectivity (whether figured as ek-stasis [Heidegger], exposure [Nancy], ex-appropriation [Derrida], or exposition [Agamben]) cannot easily be restricted to human beings. And this is the first reason why antihumanism ultimately opens onto the larger issue of nonhuman animals—for the subjective being of many nonhuman animals, too, is constituted by differential structures of exposure that render standard accounts of the human-animal distinction suspect. At this level of presubjective and prepersonal 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, posthumanism is confronted with the necessity of returning to first philosophy with the task of creating a nonanthropocentric ontology of life-death, a topic upon which I briefly touched in the discussion of Deleuze and Guattari in chapter 1.

The second chief reason that posthumanists like Agamben must account for the place of animals within their project arises at the ethicopolitical level. While it is clear that most posthumanist 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 posthumanists is that nihilism and the major political catastrophes of our age are linked in a profound way with the very humanism typically offered by neohumanists as a solution to these issues. For posthumanists, 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 posthumanist philosophers seems to be that a less destructive and more sustainable form of politics can be developed beginning from a kind of relational ontology. 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 also possible and even necessary to read 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 in a presubjective 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. As I argued in the previous section, the obvious problem here is that the ethical obligations and responsibilities incurred in exposure do not necessarily arise from the Other human alone, for nonhuman animals and other nonhuman beings also have the potential to interrupt and oblige as well. Consequently, a posthumanist politics that begins from a thought of exposure must come to terms with responsibilities potentially arising from beyond the sphere of the human and must engage the possibility that existing forms of politics are unable to accommodate this enlarged scope of consideration.

It is only in recent years that posthumanist philosophers 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 proceed in this more inclusive manner primarily because, following thinkers such as Heidegger and Benveniste, he was working with an overly narrow interhuman and protolinguistic 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 nonhuman 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 work 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 directly addressing the larger issue of anthropocentrism that had previously been held 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 [that is, 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 is an illustration representing two moments realized in the postapocalyptic 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.”¹⁴ 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, on the one hand, and so-called nonhuman animals, on the other. 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 nonhuman life can take on a new form and economy that avoids similar disastrous consequences for nonhuman life. It will be useful to keep both of these prongs of Agamben’s argument in mind as I 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 “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 first 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 number of authors and discourses, ranging from the philosophy of Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève to the taxonomic studies of Carl 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 premodern. 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 nonhuman 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 premodern 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 the barbarian. 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 break between human and all other nonhuman 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 nonhuman animals but rather recognizing that deciding what constitutes “the human” and “the animal” is never simply a neutral scientific or ontological matter. Indeed, one of the chief merits of The Open is that it helps us to see that the locus and stakes of the human-animal distinction are almost always deeply political and ethical. For not only does the distinction create the opening for the exploitation of nonhuman 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 “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, contemporary biopolitics, whether it manifests itself in totalitarian or democratic form, contains within it the virtual possibility of concentration camps and other violent 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. Such a distinction would only redraw the lines of the “object” of biopolitics and further define the scope of its reach. Thus, instead of drawing a new human-animal distinction, Agamben 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 premodern 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 premodern 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.¹⁵ Despite the enormous empirical 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 (animal) life from properly political (human) 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 Walter 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, democracy, and sovereignty, but creating an altogether different form of political life.

Agamben’s work faces two important challenges at this level. On the one hand, neohumanists will (justifiably) wonder whether Agamben’s “coming community” and rejection of the humanist tradition in favor of a nonsovereign and nonjuridical 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 nonessentialist 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.

I should say that I find neither of these critical perspectives particularly persuasive and that I believe Agamben offers us overwhelmingly persuasive accounts of the limits of current forms of democracy and humanism. Furthermore, it should be noted that 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 his work must acknowledge that in terms of the kinds of questions posed by neohumanists and deconstructionists, much remains to be worked out at both the theoretical and concrete political level in Agamben’s project. And if the scope of this discussion were limited to an anthropocentric politics, I would argue that the questions and criticisms raised by neohumanists and deconstructionists are very difficult 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 a politics that genuinely respect animal life can be accomplished within the confines of the traditions they use.

On this political terrain, neohumanist 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 (as is sometimes done), 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 F.B.I. 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 nonhuman life (an expansion of neohumanism 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 nonhuman 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?¹⁶

Thus, when we consider the ethicopolitical status of animal life, the necessity for working toward a form of politics beyond the present humanist, democratic, and juridical orders becomes clear. Even Jacques Derrida—who, as I shall show in the following chapter, 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.¹⁷

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 a kind of performative anthropocentrism in his texts. In what follows, I argue that if Agamben and other posthumanist 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 halt the anthropological machine and create a posthumanist politics that is no longer governed by its “lethal and bloody” logic?

One of Agamben’s key theses in 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 Heidegger’s thought, 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 a human being 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 (namely, Benommenheit, captivation) to other beings, Agamben suggests that his thinking follows in lockstep with the logic of the anthropological machine. And Heidegger’s political writings—especially the texts 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, as ek-sistence), or the task of thinking through the redemption of Being (that is, 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 nonhuman 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 his work—he finds his inspiration in Walter Benjamin’s writings. Agamben is particularly interested in Benjamin’s notions of the “saved night” (O, 81–82) and the “dialectic at a standstill,” (O, 83) inasmuch as both notions offer 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 concepts seem to offer an idea 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 independent 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 viewed as having 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—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 nonhuman 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 that these Benjaminian themes provide the impetus and direction 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 nonhuman world beyond the dominant logic and terms provided by the Western metaphysical tradition. And the overarching task of The Open, at least as I have tried to argue here, is precisely to open up this possibility. In brief, Agamben’s task 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 human and animal 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 naïvet锹⁸ 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 his work 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 concept 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 nonbinary and nonhierarchical 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 nonhuman life. Such a project, as humble and painstaking as it is, perhaps lacks the pathos characteristic of the sharp rupture with previous political structures hinted at in 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. In the following chapter, I turn to the writings of Jacques Derrida for further assistance in thinking through the ontological, ethical, and political dimensions of such a project.