While the animal is retained within both the history of philosophy and the history of art both the nature of that relation and thus the conception of animality take on importantly different forms.1 Hence relationality and animality have a history that is neither continuous nor organised within a perpetual Sameness. While the animal has symbolic and representational presence, it is also be the case that the animal in question will have differing modes of presence. In a painting by Piero della Francesca of the Archangel Michael having just slain the devil, the Saint is presented having decapitated an animal (see Figure 6.1). While the animal is of course the appearance of the Devil, it is nonetheless unmistakeably animal. The Devil oscillates between ‘dragon’ and ‘snake’. Here, however, the devil has nothing other than a snake-like quality. Having slain it, St Michael stands with the animal's head in one hand while in the other he holds his falchion. Neither the animal's face nor its body have either traces or indications of being human. The reference therefore is to an intrinsic animality. The apparent nonchalance of St Michael's stance reinforces the position in which what obtains is not indifference but the enactment of a specific economy in respect to the animal. The dead animal operates in a domain in which its retention is structured by that economy. The human as the after-effect of the ‘word’ having become ‘flesh’ reinforces, in this presentation, the incorporated refusal of the animal. As such it is one of a number of forms of animal presence.
The ‘same’ biblical narrative occurs in Bartolomé Bermejo's painting St Michael Triumphant Over the Devil (1468) (see Figure 6.2). Nonetheless, in this instance the mode of presence is significantly different. Animality has a more complex register. While the devil in this work is a conglomeration of animals whose coordinated presence comprises its actual body, the body in question has a clear relation to the human. The reference therefore is no longer to an intrinsic animality. The proportion of the body, and this will include even the exaggerated mouth, is human. The second face beneath the dominant one has the structure of the human torso. The first of these faces has a mouth which despite its size has the same relation to nose, eyes and ears as would be found on the human face. In one of the source texts, namely, Revelation 12: 7–12, the animal is named twice. It is both ‘dragon’ and ‘snake’. The event – St Michael fighting the ‘devil’ – prompted art work. The prompt draws on the relationship between the words ‘dragon’ and ‘snake’. While the terms are synonymous on one level, the snake denotes a form of malign cleverness that is not there with the dragon. The dragon on the other hand may allow human qualities to have visual presence. While Piero della Francesca gives greater emphasis to the reference to the presence of evil in Genesis as opposed to the two images demanded by Revelation, the move from one iconic source to the other, a move that traverses while incorporating the two paintings, has, in this instance, a radically different registration in relation to the history of the animal.2
Figure 6.1 Piero della Francesca, Saint Michael (1454). The National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission. |
The works by Piero della Francesca (Figure 6.1) and Bartolomé Bermejo (Figure 6.2) warrant detailed investigation in their own right. Nonetheless what they establish is a genuine difference between images of animal presence. In regard to the first its particularity needs a setting. In this instance the animal's death saves humanity from the presence of evil. Human good, thus construed, takes as its ground the animal's death. This is of course no mere death. It is part of an economy that establishes human good. Hence what is involved is the figure of the animal. Moreover, once it is possible to argue that humanity comes to be what it is insofar as the human approximates to the image of God, then on the level of the image, what counts as being human incorporating the good proper to human being is given within and thus secured by the operation of this economy. Within such an economy human potentiality necessitates the death of the animal. Such is the logic in which the figure works.
Figure 6.2 Bartolomé Bermejo, St Michael Triumphant Over the Devil (1468). The National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission. |
There is, however, the other possibility that has already been noted. Bartolomé Bermejo's presentation of the devil opens in a different direction. Here the animal and human combine in the creation of the devil. Hence the animal has another significant presence within the history of art.3 A confluence of the human and the animal in the presentation of the devil opens a more complex form of presence within the image. It is one which distances a straightforward conception of the economy demanding the animal's death. Bartolomé Bermejo's is not an isolated case. Dürer's celebrated engraving of the Knight who, while on his travels, encountered both Death and the Devil presents the latter as the intersection of the human and the animal.4 As with Bermejo Dürer is able to acknowledge an already present possibility, namely human animality. Indeed, it can be argued that Dürer's devil is even more human than Bermejo's. As a possibility, the animal is there initially in order that it be overcome. And yet its already being there – the original being there of the animal allowing at the same time the inevitable inscription of human animality – opens another possibility. In Dürer's engraving the Knight moves past both Death and the Devil. The sense of direction, a directionality evoking the co-presence of the moral and the epistemological, gives centrality to the interplay of being human and a unidirectional path to be followed. Once followed the devil as the intersection of the human and the animal can then be excluded. That intersection is present both as a ‘truth’ about human being though equally as a warning. The truth is the insistent possibility that animality may take over. The warning is that counterposed to that which is proper to human being – being human therefore having a founding propriety – is the threat of the animal. As a threat it demands the animal's continual excision. (Once again, this is the presence of the animal as figure.) The warning therefore does not exist as a simple singularity if that means that it need only be given once. While St Michael (Figure 6.1) needed to kill the animal in order to secure that which is proper to human being, Bermejo's painting (Figure 6.2) and Dürer's engraving reinforces the necessity for a form of continuity. Indeed, what both works suggest is the need for vigilance against the threat of the animal. However, once continually present, that threat could always become a form of accommodation. In other words, what these two works stage is the possibility that the human and the animal – thus human and non-human animals – cannot be simply divided, as though the excision and thus difference had been decisively established. Rather than indifference there is an always already present relatedness. What both works demonstrate is that within the human, indeed constitutive of its very specificity, is a recalcitrant animality. To reiterate the point made above, this is precisely what arises from the works by Bermejo and Dürer. The animal, the animal with and within the human is already present. At the beginning therefore there is not just another potentiality; rather there is a significantly different sense of animal presence.
What these art works bring to the fore is a complex of concerns. In the first instance, it is the possibility that the animal is positioned as the other whose death reinforces and sustains human being. The economy sustaining this death (and its related conception of the animal) is as much bound up with the necessity for that death as it is with maintaining the animal's alterity. While there is one organisational logic at work within Piero della Francesco's painting, Bartolomé Bermejo's painting and Dürer's engraving suggest another. In the case of the latter two the animal cannot be given as simply the other to the human. Within this frame of reference integral to the human is its presence as animal. Animality is part of being human. It is therefore both the nature of that presence and thus its relation to the definitions of human being that are central. Consequently, the argument is that what is implicit within both Bermejo and Dürer is that being human is already to be with animals. Animality thus construed precludes the designation of neutrality. While it reiterates what has already emerged in the earlier analysis of Hegel what these works of art demand is a response to the question of how the presence of an already existing relation to animals is to be understood.
As a beginning there needs to be the recognition not just of an already present engagement with the animal but that the engagement is articulated in terms of the complex of concerns opened by these art works. What this complex includes, as has been noted, are two original and importantly different determinations. They should not be reduced to each other. Moreover, they already configure two of the dominant forms taken by the relationship between human and non-human animals. In the first instance this particular configuration involves an economy in which the animal's differentiation from the human, let alone human animality, is inextricably bound up with the necessity of the animal's death. The death may be literal, e.g. the dead snake in St Michael's hand. Equally, it could be a complete differentiation in which the animal is dead to ‘us’. That death may be the animal's silence – silence in the realm of ‘logos’ – though it could be the animal's having been incorporated. In every instance what is at work is a form of the founding without relation.
In the second there is the transcription of the animal's original presence in a way that obviates the possibility of an equation of the animal with the necessity of its death. As such the economy of death that figured in the first instance would have become inoperable. What this means is a division at the origin. Prior, therefore, to any concession, and it is a necessary concession, that there is a plurality of animals, the way the figure of the animal is present is such that the animal is already more than one; it is originally divided between these two possibilities. In addition, it is possible to argue that despite these clear divisions each one recalls the other. As such there will always have been more than one animal, the ‘animal’ allowing the term an almost pragmatically abstract quality is the more than one. Allowing for this set-up will provide the way into Giorgio Agamben's engagement with the question of the animal in his recent book The Open: Man and Animal.5
Central to Agamben's analysis of the animal and therefore of his way into the question of how to think a relation to the animal is the identification of what he describes as two ‘anthropological machines’. What is significant about this description is that instead of simply positing relations between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ Agamben is concerned to note the way that relation is produced historically. (The history in question is as much concerned with philosophy and theology as it is with art and literature.) These machines, he argues, stage the relationship between ‘man’ and ‘animal’. Moreover, for Agamben, a different mode of production operates in the ‘modern’ period than operated at an earlier stage. In regard to the ‘modern’ version he formulates its presence thus:
It functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is by animalising the human, by isolating the non-human in the human. (37)
This argument reappears, for Agamben, in relation to the Jew. Anti-Semitism draws upon the ‘anthropological machine’ repositioning the Jew in terms of what is described by Agamben as ‘the non-man produced within the man’. The earlier version of this machine – the machine producing the relation between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ – operates in a ‘symmetrical’ way. Within it, he argues:
the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of the animal. (37)
For Agamben this latter position encompasses both the homo ferus and the slave. Within the formulation of Agamben's argument the slave is ‘an animal in human form’. Prior to moving to the next stage of the argument, it needs to be noted that this earlier version of the anthropological machine, one that would have produced Dürer's ‘Devil’, is presented as bound up with what he describes as the ‘non-man’. While that result will always be a possibility – i.e. the production of the ‘non-man’ – what Dürer's engraving suggests is that this produced entity cannot be separated in any absolute sense from the insistent presence of human animality and thus the question of the animal. What emerges as a related question therefore is how the ineliminable trace of that animality is to be positioned even if a version of Agamben's ‘anthropological machine’ were to be accepted. In other words, to what extent could the production of the ‘non-man’ in the human not have been marked in advance by the process that produced it? That mark – what would count as an original inscription – would allow for another sense of opening insofar as it would refuse the structure central to Agamben's argument in which the separation of the ‘non-man’ within the ‘man’ is effected.6 From the beginning, equally at the beginning, there would be a mark. Its presence would undo, as a possibility, the divide, thus separation, within the human. It will be essential to return to this point. The decisive part of Agamben's argument is the move that he makes next.
The significant claim is that what allows both these machines to operate is that they construct a ‘zone of indifference’. This zone takes on the form of a caesura. The character of this zone, even its presence, is, however, the point to be contested. Agamben describes it as a ‘space of exception’, going on to argue that
like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human that should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesura and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life or a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself – only a bare life. (38)
The latter ‘bare life’ is of course one of the dominant themes within Agamben's philosophical project.7
The strength of Agamben's argument lies in the provocative supposition that what allows for the operation of this ‘anthropological machine’ is the construction at its interior of a zone of ‘indistinction’. In other words, within the machine there is a moment in which the division between animal and human is suspended, though it is a zone whose locus of operation is the machine itself. In Homo Sacer this position is presented once again in terms of the caesura. The point of absolute indecision is the Camp.8 The Camp for Agamben, what becomes in his formulation ‘the nomos of the modern’, is itself defined as the place of the exception. As such it is the place in which ‘the state of exception has become the rule’.9
If there is a problematic element within the position being developed by Agamben then it concerns the positing of a zone of indetermination, not just as a precondition for a becoming determinant, but as significantly as that zone having to be absolutely indeterminant.10 Indeed, what will be suggested in regard to Agamben's argument is that the contrary is the case. Rather than a caesura in which value is withdrawn there is a porous site in which the relationship between self and other, the human and its posited other, an alterity in which the animal would be inscribed, are present as a continual site of negotiation. Allowing for the presence of that site opens up the animal to include within it human animality. It may be therefore that Dürer's engraving is closer to the truth than had been thought hitherto. What needs to be added in addition is that any form of negotiation, even in relation to the deprivation of identity, occurs as a result of the complex determinations of power. The operation of power leaves its mark. This will be true without exception.
What is at issue therefore is the effect of this mark's retention. It is as though implicit within Agamben's overall argument is a form of utopianism in which harboured within the structure of the ‘homo sacer’ is a neutrality that would configure the human beyond the hold of identity. It would be a utopianism premised on the erasure of this founding mark, a mark that is already the inscription of particularity's possibility, though equally it is the mark of a form of memory, the form that already emerged in the earlier discussion of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and in which overcoming the particularity of being a Jew was itself predicated on having to forget the presence of an initial designation. (Such a forgetting founders the moment it becomes necessary as it has to assume the necessity of a remembering to forget.) The necessity of this mark, though equally the necessity, as noted above, for its erasure, works to establish limits.
Tracing the limits of Agamben's position will be developed in relation to the ‘Jew’ (to which it should be added immediately that while Agamben thinks that he is writing about Jews, what is actually at stake is the figure of the Jew). It is in relation to this figure that a fundamental aspect of the more general argument concerning the ‘exception’ begins to emerge. As such, it is essential to look in detail at one specific, and lengthy, formulation of this position in Homo Sacer. Within it Agamben argues the following:
The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term Holocaust was … an irresponsible historoigraphical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of the homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing constitutes … neither capital punishment nor sacrifice, but simply the actualisation of a mere ‘capacity to be killed’ inherent in the condition of the Jew as such. The truth … is that Jews were exterminated not as a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as ‘lice’ which is to say as ‘bare life’. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics.11
Fundamental to the formulation of this position is the identification of the Jew with ‘bare life’, i.e. as ‘life separated and excluded from itself’. It is essential to be precise here. ‘Bare life’ is the state of exception, thus it is neither animal nor human. In the strictest sense all determinations are withdrawn. What emerges is a state to be determined. Hence ‘bare life’ discloses a space in which what awaits is the actualisation of a potentiality, what is described in the text as the ‘mere capacity to be killed’.12 That capacity – as a potentiality – inheres in life without determination, i.e. in ‘bare life’. While this analysis may seem unproblematic, there is an insistent question that has to be asked in relation to this ‘capacity’. The question is as follows: who then are killed? The answer cannot be that is it is simply the Jew in virtue of the Jew's capacity to be killed. That would be true of all humans – indeed of biological life in general. The answer needs to incorporate particularity. To put the position more emphatically: could there be an answer to the question that did not incorporate the founding mark? If the answer were to be in the affirmative then it would sanction the possibility of a founding sense of particularity, a sense, that is, that would work against the identification of the Jew with the figure and thus, in this context, against the possible identification let alone subordination of the Jew to ‘bare life’.
In this instance the reason for pursuing the question of particularity can be located in what was noted above concerning the ‘anthropological machine’, the machine operated by ‘animalising the human’, which for Agamben amounts to the same thing as ‘isolating the non-human in the human’ (37). The animal, in terms of the possibility already at work in Dürer's engraving, namely the presence of the animal within the human, unfolds in this direction. What needs to be examined is not the consistency of Agamben's argumentation but the possibility either of a state that is anterior to the animal/human relation or one structured by an indifference at the interior. In other words, what needs to be questioned is the possibility of this conception of the exception. Inherent within it is a conception of particularity without identity.
In a more recent work Agamben has returned to the structure of the ‘state of exception’. In this context it comes to be described as
a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie, in which all legal determinations – and above all the very distinction between the public and the private – are deactivated.13
This state of affairs is produced. As with ‘bare life’, as formulated in the same work, it is ‘a product of the biopolitical machine and not something that pre-exists it’.14 Now, while it may be possible to argue that the after-effect of a system may be to produce ‘bare life’ and thus the deactivation of the characteristics of civil life – e.g. the suspension of legal subjectivity, the refusal of the distinction between the private and the public, ‘the isolation of the non-human in the human’ – what needs to be given is an account of the causality involved in the machine's operation. What produces ‘bare life’? Bare life does not just happen. Its occurrence has a history. The question of the production of ‘bare life’ is inextricably bound up with the one posed earlier: who are killed? Once the question can be answered beyond simple generality such that it will have become necessary to distinguish between potential victims and actual victims then the identification of the production of ‘bare life’ provides, at the same time, a ground of possible resistance that is other than universalism. Universality cannot account, philosophically or politically, for the difference between potential and actual victims. Highlighting causality may lead not just to a better understanding of the state of affairs described by Agamben; it may equally, as just indicated, begin to call into question the possibility of ‘bare life’ as the site of absolute indistinction.
At the outset there can be no argument against a description of what occurs at Guantánamo Bay, or even in Auschwitz in terms such that the inhabitants occupy spaces defined by the suspension of law (even if this entails a specific conception of law – law as statute – which has come to be suspended). The first point to note is that what matters with this suspension is not that it involves legislation that might be contestable. Rather, the interplay of the political and the body allows for such an occurrence. In other words, intrinsic to this set up is its possibility. Responding both to that possibility and to its actualisation is not to respond in the name of law (where, of course, law is once again equated with statute). Such a conception of law will have been suspended. The reality of Auschwitz, even though it should be conceded from the start that the simple evocation of this name is far from unproblematic, lies in the capacity for decisions linked to the elimination of certain groups.15 Elimination necessitates a form of suspension. While the enacting that characterises this procedure may involve the equation of Jews with lice, an equation in which the human came to be reduced to the ‘non-human in the human’, there is an actual sense of the specific at work. Movement has particularity – Jew to louse – as the work of a specific form of figural presence. (Movement is, of course, another staging of the general question of the relationship between the mark and singularity.) At Guantánamo Bay, the suspension of law equally involves movement. The identification of a range of individuals takes place such that the act of identification allows for the suspension and thus the creation of the exception. In both instances there is an allowing. How, on a philosophical level, is this allowing to be understood? The question has an urgency precisely because the defence of law and humanity will have already been countered by the reality of Guantánamo Bay, not because it is against the law to have acted in that way, but that acting in that way involved both the suspension of certain statutes (and thus the suspension of law) and the creation of other statutes such that the law is not seen to have been suspended in a direct way. Hence the necessity to establish a ground of contestation. Establishing that ground is a clear moment in which the philosophical takes up the political as its direct concern.
Accounting for what is allowed returns to the question of causality. Whatever quality ‘bare life’ may have it is produced. While the exercise of genuine political power – i.e. sovereignty – can be identified with the capacity to effect the movement that is the production of ‘bare life’, the movement in question is of necessity selective. To the extent that an explanation of the production of ‘bare life’ cannot be given beyond a general claim concerning the ‘anthropological machine’, what is removed, at the same time, is the possibility of accounting for particularity. Particularity will have been effaced by the machine's operation. Once such an account has to be given, i.e. an account that is attentive to the question of particularity, then rather than the suspension of the law and the creation of the zone of complete indetermination, what appears more likely is that the movement of production – the causality proper to ‘bare life’ – marks the presence of a matrix of concerns in which determinations always occur. The reason for holding to this description is that what has to endure is the necessity of being able to argue that what takes place – the reduction to ‘bare life’ – takes place, for example, in relation to Jews, or in relation to an already determined ‘enemy’ (so-called ‘Islamic militants’). In other words it takes place in relation to the production of the other as the enemy. Those identified, the victims who become ‘bare life’, are positioned in advance. Bareness therefore is always a determination as an after-effect. It operates by producing those who have already been identified as being subject to that process (i.e. to the process of subjectification). This determination means, and this is a crucial point, that sovereignty necessitates the capacity to discriminate. Discrimination occurs within a complex field of identities, identities that are attributed and constructed on the one hand, and, on the other, identities that may be regional and linked to versions of autonomy and affirmation. Sovereignty's capacity to position itself within such a complex is the definition of sovereign power though equally it indicates that ‘bareness’ is never completely bare. Discrimination will have always left its mark.
There is an original determination precisely because there is a need to link individuation and discrimination. The mark of the Jew, the accusation of being a ‘terrorist’, trace bodies that were thought to have been neutral and thus which may become ‘bare’. This mark produces the distinction between the marked and the unmarked,16 a distinction that is fundamental if a conception of the ‘enemy’ is to be maintained and, moreover, if such a conception is to have mobility. In this context mobility means that there will be different and thus new ‘enemies’. Not only therefore does this mark differentiate, given that it is produced by the law's suspension, it also accounts for why it is only in terms of particularity that the law can be suspended. The ‘state of emergency’ does not simply occur. It is inextricably bound up with the differing modes of figured presence that it produces. Identity, in the sense of its having been constructed, is only ever the result of a complex process. As such those implicated within a situation in which the law is suspended are always marked by the deprivation of the law that has been suspended. Once, through a process of production, the possibility of being a subject of right no longer pertains then accounting for a process of subjectification in which subject and right are separated will ground resistance. For resistance to be effective what needs to be understood is why that deprivation or separation has occurred. Part of that account demands paying attention to the specific. There cannot be a general account that remains untouched by particularity. What that means here is the particularity of the Jew as opposed to the apparent ubiquity of ‘bare life’.
At work here is a conception of identity in which there is a process of particularisation, particulars as constructs hence the work of figures. Only within such a complex can identities be continually produced. The interrelation between identity and production means that subjects – figures – are always the result of the system that produces them. For example, the production of the Jew as the ‘the non-man produced within the man’ both individuates and differentiates. In other words, the Jew figures within such a production while the other to the Jew (hence the reciprocal production of Jew as this other) is differentiated from this Jew. It is of course this Jew that is killed rather than ‘bare life’. It will always be this Jew who has died. Indeed any further positioning, for example the one that is called ‘bare life’, has to presuppose this initial movement. The additional element that has to be noted is that the production of this Jew, as with any further positioning based on it, is the effacing of a conception of difference (and related cultural practices) that has to assume its (difference's and thus relation's) ineliminability, a set-up in which the ineliminable other is never absolute but always specific. What is assumed in such a position is an always already present form of relatedness. Therefore, once it is essential to hold to this sense of relatedness – a relation of porosity and negotiation defining self/other and animal/human relations – then Agamben's ontology which refuses precisely this conception of founding differences would, as a consequence, need to cede its place to a differential or relational ontology.17 The positioning of the Jew as ‘the non-man produced within the man’ has to be understood therefore as the refusal of exactly this latter conception of the ontological. The limitation of Agamben's work therefore does not lie in the detail. Rather it is located in that which makes it possible.
The production of identity entails that particularity is never an isolated occurrence. The excluded bear the mark not just of exclusion – a mark that could be no mark at all – but also the link between their particularity and exclusion. Assuming an already present relatedness does not involve a return to the form of argumentation dominated by a concern with rights, as though rights functioned as ends in themselves. On the contrary, it assumes that within any relation lines of division are only ever porous and that relation necessitates that presence, modes of being present, are always to be negotiated. To insist on porosity and negotiation – within which affirmation remains a fundamental element – is therefore the counter move. Porosity indicates that what can never be at work is the centrality of the human understood as an original abstraction, or even the definition of animality that takes the already positioned human as the point of departure and within which the human emerges as existing without relation to the animal.
If there is a politics implicit in Agamben's project then it can be located in one of the final summations he provides in The Open. For Agamben the response necessary to the operation of what has been called the ‘anthropological machine’ – remembering that it is this machine that produces the animal as well as the Jew –
is to render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new – more effective and more authentic – articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that – within man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man. (92)
The significance of this passage emerges from its juxtaposition with one of Agamben's earliest formulations of singularity without identity, the singularity that will become ‘bare life’ on the one hand and Negri's recent discussion of Agamben's work on the other.18
The ‘emptiness’ alluded to above is captured in the possibility of the community of what Agamben identifies as ‘singularities’. While Agamben's description is of a state of affairs that the ‘State cannot tolerate’, it is this site of intolerance that defines the possibility of a community to come. At work here is the utopian impulse in Agamben's thought. The position is formulated in the following terms:
What the State cannot tolerate in any way is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition).19
The significance of this conception of community is clear. The position of the homo sacer will have been redeemed. It can be argued that it is precisely this aspect of Agamben's work that Negri identifies when he argues that Agamben
ethically and conceptually goes beyond the state of exception by going through it: just as primitive christianity and the communisms of the origins had gone through power and exploitation and destroyed them by emptying them … Agamben's analysis shows how immanence can be realist and revolutionary.20
‘Immanence’ is another way of describing the utopian impulse. For Negri this is the position that is opened up by Agamben's use of what Negri refers to as an ‘undifferentiated ontology’. It is this ontological configuration that characterises the ‘state of exception’. Within it, to deploy Negri's formulation, ‘each element is reassumed in the empty game of an equal negativity’. The accuracy of this description is not at issue. What it brings into play is a further elaboration of the ‘emptiness’. In Agamben's formulation what is at risk is a version of ‘ourselves’. And yet, what needs to be questioned is the ‘our’ of ‘ourselves’. Counterposed to a formulation of subjectification in terms of a community without identity, a ‘sacred’ community, there is the recovery of a positioning in which this ‘our’, thus ‘ourselves’, will have always been more than one. This is a site of an original relatedness. The origin in question is an ontological position and not a locus of ethical obligation. This relatedness is a relation to self as much as to the other and therefore equally to the other in ‘ourselves’. In addition, it identifies the network of relations that produce the self as an after-effect. The animal, and animality, have already formed part of this network. Relation, therefore, brings back into play what was identified at an earlier stage as the already present more than one. On one level this is the truth that was always there in Dürer's engraving, namely that what can never be separated is the human and the animal, an impossibility that opens up the already present relation of self/other and animal/human.
They would be fixed relations, and thus constrained to be thought philosophically in terms of the static rather than the dynamic, were it not for porous borders yielding sites of negotiation. These sites and the complex of borders that are brought into play are the loci – places within becoming – that comprise the histories of alterity as well as the complex continuity of the animal's ineliminable presence. Allowing both for relatedness and porosity would mean that all that could ever be at risk within such an allowing is the residual anthropocentrism that posits, in this instance, the suspension of human animality, suspension rather than its continual affirmation.
Human animality has one of its most insistent forms of presence in what Freud referred to as the ‘drives’. At the centre there are porous lines marking an impossible unity, an impossibility that refuses melancholia since the only element to have been lost would be a retrospective projection of either a founding unity or a produced neutrality. Both have to be worked through. Rather than the language of emptiness there needs to be the continual recognition of an ongoing incompletion. Activity and thus forms of practice take this founding sense of the incomplete as the point of departure. The porous is from the start that which cannot be completed. Doing so would stem the movement it maintains. Negotiation as the site of decisions and responsibility have to be maintained as sites of continuous activity and therefore of cultural practices. The extension becomes clear. All lines that divide involve a form of separation that can only ever be made absolute after the event. This is not to posit a type of equality or even sameness; it is rather to allow for continuities and differences. The question of the animal, allowing the continuity of movement between animal and animality, repeats the question of the other to the extent that what has to be maintained are already present senses of relatedness. Particularity only emerges within those relations, within their retention and affirmation, and not with their suspension.
1. One of the most important and sustained accounts of the relationship between philosophy and the animal is Elisabeth de Fontenay, Le Silence de bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l'animalité (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
2. The reference is Genesis 3: 1–13. It should be noted that in this context the ‘snake’ speaks and is thus unlike any other animal. Moreover, the snake is cast out because of his actions. In other words, if the casting out created the distinction between God and Satan, then it is an occurrence that takes place as a result of both the human and the animal (though in this instance it is the specific animal, the snake) having the very capacity in common that the philosophical tradition takes as dividing the human and the animal, namely language.
3. There are of course other possibilities. What could be contrasted with this depiction of the animal is the dog in Piero di Cosimo's A Satyr Mourning the Death of Nymph (1495–1500). Suspending symbolic registration for a moment what appears in this work is the dog as observer. Other animals occur in the background. Presented either as detached observers or simply occupying the same space, animals have neither a negative nor a positive presence within a logic of sacrifice. The question of their relation endures as posed. The possibilities posed by the remarkable painting will be taken up in Chapter 9.
4. There is an important secondary literature on this engraving. However, for the most part, it concentrates on the horse and the Knight. Even Panofsky only notes in passing the ‘personification’ of Death and the Devil. With regard to the latter see his The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 151–4.
5. G. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: University Press, 2004). All subsequent references are given in the body of the text.
6. Central to the argument developed here is the connection between the mark and an original sense of relatedness. Clearly this formulation draws on the work of Derrida. In this regard the central text is ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’, in Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), pp. 63–95. The ‘trace’, the ‘mark’ and the ‘trait’ are terms central to Derrida's mode of philosophical argumentation. The indebtedness here has its own limit. In this argument the mark and a primordial relatedness are part of the terminology of a differential or relational ontology. Hence the project has another direction.
7. The most sustained treatment of bare life is Agamben's work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). I have offered a critical engagement with this concept in my ‘Spacing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben’, in Andrew Norris (ed.), Work and Death: Essays on ‘Homo Sacer’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
8. This position is worked out in a number of places in Agamben's writings. See in particular Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 36–44.
9. Homo Sacer, p. 169.
10. It may be that Agamben has addressed this point in Homo Sacer in relation to his discussion of Badiou. With regard to that work there is the suggestion that there is a relation that persists within both the process of exclusion and the creation of the exception (25). However, if this is the case then it is incompatible with the later claim that it is a space ‘devoid of law’. More significantly it would assume a primordial relatedness and thus a potential undecidability within the decision which would undermine his arguments concerning ‘indetermination’.
11. Homo Sacer, p. 108.
12. Homo Sacer, p. 114.
13. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 50.
14. Homo Sacer, pp. 87–8.
15. See in this regard the exchange between Derrida and Lyotard after the later gave his paper ‘Discussions, ou: phraser “après Auschwitz”’ at the Colloque de Cerisy in 1980. The proceedings of the Colloque, containing Lyotard's paper, were published as Les fins de l'homme: A partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, eds Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1981). The exchange occurs on pp. 311–13.
16. The current practice of profiling at airports can be accounted for in these terms. In addition, it opens up the basis of understanding the significance both of disguise and produced identities. With regard to the latter the essential literary work is Arthur Miller, Focus (New York: Penguin, 2001).
17. For the conception of a differential ontology that informs this engagment with Agamben see my The Plural Event (London: Routledge, 1994).
18. Antonio Negri, ‘The Ripe Fruit of Redemption’. Online at: http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriagamben.htm.
19. G. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1993), p. 85.
20. Negri, ‘The Ripe Fruit of Redemption’.
