CHAPTER TEN
	Stopping the Anthropological Machine Agamben’s Ticktocking Tick

To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean. . . to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.

—AGAMBEN, THE OPEN

In The Open, Giorgio Agamben diagnoses the history of both science and philosophy as part of what he calls the “anthropological machine” through which the human is created with and against the animal. In his analysis, early forms of this “machine” were operated by humanizing animals, thereby making some “men” considered to be animals in human form, for example, barbarians and slaves. Modern versions of the machine operate by animalizing humans, making some “people” considered to be less than human, for example, Jews during the Holocaust and, more recently perhaps, Iraqi detainees. Agamben describes both sides of the anthropological machine:

If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here [the machine of earlier times] the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form. (2004, 37)

The divide between human and animal is also political and sets up the very possibility of politics. Who is included in human society, and who is not is a consequence of the politics of “humanity,” which creates the polis itself. In this regard, politics itself is the product of the anthropological machine, which is inherently lethal to some forms of (human) life. Although Agamben’s analysis could be extended to include a diagnosis of the dangers to animal life, in The Open he is concerned primarily with the dangers to human life.¹

In this chapter, I examine Agamben’s analysis of the man/animal dichotomy and the anthropological machine that produces it. In the first sections, I delineate the ways in which Agamben moves with and against Heidegger. Agamben maintains that Heidegger’s comparative pedagogy in his lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to the closedness of the animal. Even so, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal or even open up man to the possibility of encountering animals as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. It is the space of the animal or not-quite-human in the concept of humanity that for Agamben presents the greatest danger. Agamben believes that the only way to stop the anthropological machine is through a “Shabbat” of both man and animal. Here I argue that Agamben’s return to religious metaphors and the discourse of religion as a supposed counterbalance to the science and philosophy through which the machine operates at best displaces the binary man/animal with the binary religion/science and at worst returns us to a discourse at least as violent as the one from which he is trying to escape.² As an alternative, I look to Merleau-Ponty’s reanimation of science in his Nature lectures. In the conclusion, I suggest that perhaps we need both Agamben’s diagnosis of the politics of science and Merleau-Ponty’s creative reenactment of science if there is any hope of stopping the anthropological machine.

As a prelude, I would like to consider two central problems with Agamben’s analysis of the man/animal dichotomy: First, he does not consider the function of woman in that binary, and second, he does not consider violence to animals. The place of animals in the anthropological machine is central to my analysis throughout the chapter. Agamben argues that the dichotomy between man and animal is a division within the category of human itself. In both the earlier and modern versions, humanity is divided into more and less human types, which justifies slavery and genocide. For Agamben, the question is not human rights but how the category of human is produced and maintained against the animal, which functions as both constitutive outside and inside, rendering some “men” either nonhuman or subhuman.

Some commentators have criticized Agamben for not considering how the binary of man and woman operates in relation to that of man and animal.³ As we have seen in our discussion of Derrida and sexual difference, these two binaries are virtually inseparable in the history of Western thought. In the words of Emma Jones, the anthropological machine also is an “andrological machine” (2007, 36). Jones argues that in order to stop the anthropological machine, we also have to stop the andrological machine. She concludes that “the deep complicity of this division [male/female] with the logic of the anthropological machine requires that we begin from a destabilization of these sexed unities, in order to free the life of the body from the management of ontology, which, Agamben suggests, is our most pressing task” (2007, 39). Certainly, if the two oppositional binaries are as closely linked as feminist philosophers insist, then stopping one will throw a wrench into the other. Agamben’s apparent blindness to the operations of woman in the anthropological machine point to the ways in which the distinction between man and human, one that he sometimes attempts to draw, continually risks falling back into the distinction between man and woman.⁴ Agamben’s concern is with why some men are treated like animals or subhumans. That is, in the category of human, there is a split between man and his others. We could add that within the category of human there also is a split between man and woman that makes woman continue to operate as subhuman. It is not just the figure of the refugee or the concentration camp victim that occupies what Agamben calls the “no-man’s land” between proper citizen and animal. Traditionally woman has played, and continues to play, this role. Agamben’s question, which he associates with modernity, is why some men or some people come to be treated like animals or as in between human and animal. This question could first and foremost be asked of female human beings: How did women come to be treated as in between man and beast?

Extending the scope of Agamben’s interrogation, we might ask the question from the other side: Why do we treat animals like animals? Or how does animality justify enslavement and cruelty? In addition to Agamben’s investigation into how the category of humanity is produced through the anthropological machine, we must also investigate how the category of animality becomes beholden and subservient to humanity. In the words of Dinesh Wadiwel,

Human violence represents not only a capacity for dehumanization alone, but is tied closely to the justification of violence against the non-human. This reflects not only the capacity for humans to harm each other, but draws attention to the sustained incarceration, torture and violence that is directed towards animals in slaughterhouses, experimental laboratories and factory farms. (Wadiwel 2004, par. 2)

This raises the question of whether the concentration camps that become, for Agamben, emblematic of our age were modeled on factory farms, slaughterhouses, and animal experimentation, or the other way around. Throughout his work, if Agamben is concerned with “machines” that produce the human or humanity through violence, can mechanized slaughter and the literal machines used to tag, milk, butcher, and package animals for human consumption be far from our thoughts? As Wadiwel observes, “The spiritual home of biopolitics is not the concentration camp but the slaughterhouse” (2004, par. 33). In regard to animals, Agamben’s metaphor of the anthropological machine becomes eerily real. And for all his faults in considering animals, even Immanuel Kant recognizes that how we treat animals is an indication of how we treat one another. Moreover, we can become accustomed to killing and abusing people by “practicing” on animals. Perhaps, then, as some provocateurs suggest, the concentration camp and the slaughterhouse are of a piece when it comes to biopolitics.⁵

Agamben’s “Deconstruction” of Heidegger

Although Agamben begins and ends his diagnosis of the anthropological machine in The Open with invocations of a messianic banquet, the centerpiece of his analysis is Heidegger. In a sense, Agamben follows Heidegger in challenging Darwinian theories of evolution in regard to the concepts of human and animal (by insisting that biology cannot be separated from the language we use to describe it). Even while challenging Heidegger’s distinction between animality and humanity or Dasein, Agamben embraces Heidegger’s insistence on animality as what is concealed about and from humanity. In some passages in The Open, Agamben seems to accept a Heideggerian abyss between man and animal, an abyss that Agamben suggests is not wide enough in Heidegger’s thought.⁶ As we know, Heidegger says that even our beloved dogs and cats live with us but don’t truly exist with us in the sense of encountering us. Dasein is open to Being and thereby to other beings as such, but animals are not.

Agamben’s relation to Heidegger is complicated in that he takes over the language of concealment and unconcealment at the same time that he “deconstructs” it.⁷ He takes it over in his own criticisms of technoscience, while in his critical engagement with Heidegger’s lectures, he maintains that the unique unconcealment at the heart of the clearing opened to Dasein turns out to be none other than the captivation of the animal. In other words, the animal is revealed to man as concealed; more precisely, it is man’s own animality that is revealed to him as concealed. Animality is the concealed within the unconcealment of Dasein. According to Agamben, the struggle between concealment and unconcealment is the struggle between man and animal itself (cf. 2004, 69–70). Man’s humanity is dependent on remaining open to the closedness of animality (particularly man’s own animality). In Agamben’s terminology, man suspends his animality in a zone of exception (2004, 79), and by effacing his own animality, he retains his privileged position in the dichotomy of man/animal. By closing himself to the closed environment of the animal, he opens himself to the world of the properly human. Humanity, then, is dependent on the exclusion of animality, which all the while operates as its constitutive outside (or, more accurately, outside within). Agamben describes the definitive boredom that Heidegger attributes to Dasein as an awakening from captivation to captivation so that Dasein sees itself as open to its own non-openness. “This resolute and anxious opening to a not-open, is the human” (Agamben 2004, 70). Following Agamben, we could say that animality with its world poverty is the mysterious beating heart concealed and revealed at the center of humanity with its world formation. Because of the structural connection between animality and humanity, Agamben contends that in the case of animals, it is impossible for Dasein to perform the activity essential to it, which is to leave beings alone. Man cannot let animals be (themselves), because as a human he depends on seeing animals as closed systems from whom he differs in his openness (as opposed to their closedness) (cf. 2004, 91).⁸

To Agamben, Heidegger’s comparative analysis of man and animal is another example of the anthropological machine in action: humanity is produced by excluding animality, against which it defines the human as precisely not-animal. In this way, the human becomes the exception, the exceptional animal who is not really an animal after all. In a sense, then, the human is both the telos and the missing link between animal and man. Agamben points out that both versions of the anthropological machine

are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which—like a “missing link” which is always lacking because it is already virtually present—the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every state of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. (2004, 37–38)

We could say that the notion of the human acts as a transcendental signifier produced through the various and multifarious instances of its own failure.⁹ The truly human is an empty ideal produced through the continual disavowal of the failure of Homo sapiens to escape its animality. The so-called abyss between man and animal is produced by abjecting animality from the concept of humanity. This way of thinking resonates with Agamben’s argument that the category human is ultimately empty because it is continually shifting. Agamben insists, however, that the “missing link” between animal and man has always been filled by either exotic ape-men and wolf-children or slaves and victims of genocide considered to be subhuman animals.

In The Open, even while Agamben points to the shifting and unstable significations of the term human, he is more concerned with the ways in which we do and do not maintain the space between animal and human, the so-called missing link. The greatest danger of the anthropological machine is that along with the categories human and animal, it produces a phantom third category between the two, which both connects and separates them and thereby constitutes and sustains them:

What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life. And faced with this extreme figure of the human and the inhuman, it is not so much a matter of asking which of the two machine (or of the two variants of the same 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. (2004, 37–38, italics in original)

A bare life is one produced by biological and medical science as a living body separated from its social, political, and even ecological context. It is an exceptional body (monstrous or sacred) whose fate can be determined outside systems of law or reason (see Agamben 1998). As such, the deadly killing power that it provokes seems virtually unstoppable. Thus, Agamben maintains that only by understanding how this logic works, that is, how the anthropological machine creates Homo sapiens, who are considered less than human, can we hope to stop it.¹⁰

The Ghost in the Machine

The philosophical inquiry that can break the machine is opposed to the scientific inquiry that fuels it. Agamben suggests that science collapses the distinction between man and animal in dangerous ways by reducing humanity to biology. By so doing, man is reduced to an animal determined by his own disinhibiting ring; his freedom becomes merely one effect of various physical causes revealed by biological and medical science to be predetermined after all. The mystery of the universe and life evaporates under the searing gaze of the scientist. Agamben seems nostalgic for a philosophical gaze that invests meaning in rather than disinvesting it from life. He claims that today philosophy has lost its relevance because it has become merely spectacle or a private affair, without relevance to public life and history. Even philosophy is becoming more scientific in its mode of inquiry, and so instead of enhancing the mystery of life through multiple interpretations, it tries to reveal all its secrets, thereby signaling the end of interpretation and the end of both philosophy and science.

Agamben’s criticisms of science and our technoscientific age revolve around the disappearance of the mysteries of biological life under the gaze of ever more powerful instruments. He argues that by closing ourselves to the mysteries of animality, we become like Heidegger’s animals caught in a disinhibiting ring of cause and effect or stimulus/response determined by our physiology (2004, 77). We are no longer open to the mysteries of life but instead toil under the impulse to disclose all of life’s secrets. Medical science and biology attempt to reveal human life to be determined by our DNA or chemical reactions in our brains, making us no different from other animals. If science succeeds in turning man into an animal whose every desire can be determined by chemical processes in his brain, then “neither man nor animal—and perhaps, not even the divine—would any longer be thinkable” (Agamben 2004, 22). When human life becomes just another form of animal life, we are in danger, Agamben warns us, of collapsing a distinction on which the very categories of ethics and politics are based:

When the difference vanished and the two terms collapse upon each other—as seems to be happening today—the difference between being and the nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name. Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort, an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin. (2004, 22)

Agamben argues that what was merely an “innocuous paleontological find,” the ape-man, becomes the Jew or others deemed subhuman (2004, 37). Given the oppositional and hierarchical nature of the man/animal dichotomy, however, in what sense is paleontology, or zoology or biology for that matter, ever innocuous? Although it may be harmless (even beneficial to man), is the subordination of animality to humanity ever innocuous to animals? In fact, doesn’t the animalization of man work to enslave or justify “extermination” only when animals are imagined as abject and disposable creatures subjected to the whims of man? The anthropological machine produces the human and the dangerous in-between space of sub- or nonhuman Homo sapiens only by producing the animal as deprived intellectually, morally, and politically. The machine must be stopped not only for the sake of man but also for the sake of animals. A possible wrench in the works could be to revalue animals and animality rather than accept and thereby perpetuate their status as denigrated. Justifying abusing or killing some “people” by arguing that they are animals or like animals is compelling only if we assume that animals deserve, or even require, abuse and slaughter. Using the argument that people are animals or like animals in order to treat them as inferiors likewise assumes that animals are inferior. A Nietzschean revaluation of the animal and animality may be one strategy to address the animalization of man as justifying slavery and genocide.

Another strategy would be to follow Derrida in trying to render obsolete the categories of man and animal by opening ourselves to diversities of both animal species and individual animals (Derrida 2008). As I contended earlier, following Derrida and examining how the anthropological machine produces humanity, we need to begin to see how it also produces the monstrous category animal, which erases the nearly infinite differences among species and herds them all into the same abject and inferior pen. The machine produces subhuman Homo sapiens, who supposedly therefore deserve their exploitation and enslavement, as well as other subhuman species, who therefore deserve their exploitation and enslavement. Furthermore, unlike the other subhumans, they can never appeal to human rights, and given the dichotomy that produces the categories human and animal, animal rights operate as an oxymoron. The anthropological machine may produce the human and the subhuman within the human, but it also produces a world filled with other living creatures and other “resources” that “exist” only for man. In this light, Heidegger’s insistence that animals live but do not exist (except for man), takes on a new twist.

The metaphor of machine—as in the anthropological machine—is central to Agamben’s analysis of the dependence of the category of human on the category of animal in the production of the very notion of humanity. Yet the category or notion of machine (in relation to the other two categories) is never questioned in The Open, which seems odd in an era dominated by technologies that simulate intelligence and life. How does the binary man/animal change when machines are thrown into the mix? Isn’t medical science replete with machine and computer metaphors to describe the human body, particularly the brain? Perhaps Agamben would see this as a continuation of Descartes’ conclusion that animals are types of machines. Still, in the computer age, it seems as urgent to investigate our investments in androids and bionic men as subcategories of man as it does to interrogate the man/animal divide as it creates the category human. At present, the category of the human is at the same time set off against the cyborg and also imagined as functioning like a machine. Like the animalization of humanity, the mechanization of life also can lead to the loss of meaning and the valorization not of bare life but of the efficiency, along with the exchangeability and disposability of the machine: the body as machine that can be turned on or off at will, the body as machine that can be assembled or disassembled. Since the advent of factory farming, mechanized slaughter, and meatpacking, animals have been subjected to automated processing; Agamben’s worry is that the human genome project, cloning, and transplantation will do the same to human bodies. It is significant that Agamben’s metaphors of machines of production are conceptually and literally assembling and dissembling animal bodies. Along with science and medicine, machine metaphors are seeping into philosophy, as evidenced by Agamben’s discourse of the anthropological machine and by that of Foucault, Deleuze, and others. Perhaps what Agamben prescribes as a “Shabbat” of the categories man and animal could be the awakening of an analysis of the categories living and machine.

What happens if we add the machine to the man/animal dichotomy? Perhaps we merely end up with Descartes’ machine-animal. Or perhaps we open the man/animal dualism to a third that transforms our thinking about both. For example, Adèle Thorens argues that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty come to radically different conclusions in their discussions of man and animal because whereas the third term in Heidegger’s comparative analysis is the stone (an inanimate object), the third term in Merleau-Ponty’s comparison is the machine and the science of cybernetics. By comparing both humans and animals to machines, Merleau-Ponty finds similarities because unlike machines, both man and animals have living bodies. Considering man in relation to machine forges an alliance between humans and animals as creatures, who, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, live rather than function: “the machine functions, the animal lives” (2003, 162). Moreover, perhaps reflecting on the metaphors of machinery that inflect our articulations of the man/animal binary also will help defuse “the anthropological machine.” Following Agamben’s example, we could diagnose the role of machine metaphors in creating the opposition between man and animal and /or in producing the notion of humanity. The most striking example might be Descartes’ animal-machines against which he defines man’s freedom and man’s soul. We could extend Agamben’s discursive analysis to the category machine as essential to the division between man and animal. This investigation might include the various transformations that the machine age, industrialization, and now artificial intelligence have produced in the philosophies of man versus animal. Within the confines of this chapter, I can only point in that direction.

The “Shabbat” of Man and Animal

Although Agamben says that a new mythology of man or animal will not stop the anthropological machine, in an odd turn he embraces religious discourse as an alternative to science (cf. 2004, 92). In a strange echo of Heidegger’s famous “only a God can save us now,” Agamben observes:

To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective or 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. . . . Perhaps there is still a way in which living beings can sit at the messianic banquet of the righteous without taking on a historical task and without setting the anthropological machine into action. (2004, 92)

For Agamben, both man and animal can be “outside of being” as more than bare life or biological automatons. As bare life, all creatures are unsavable (i.e., mortal and finite), unknowable, and without meaning, that is, uninterpretable. Agamben’s messianism, then, is perhaps more reminiscent of Derrida’s than Heidegger’s, particularly when he says that both man and animal might be “saved precisely in their being unsavable” (2004, 92).

Following Derrida, Leonard Lawlor describes an “irreligious” religion that replaces rather than sacrifices. He maintains that by naming the animals, we can save them: “Because of the emphasis on singularity, this structure is not a structure of sacrifice but a structure of saving by means of replacement” (2007, 111). He suggests that through the name, we can welcome animals and others by eating them symbolically rather than literally:

Only in this way, through the name, can we welcome, make a place for the animals, internalize them, even eat them. . . . But this replacement, which does not sacrifice, would be a way of eating the animals well. Here, through the specific internalization of the name (and not the flesh of the animals), we are able. . . to advocate a kind of vegetarianism that is compatible with a minimal carnivorism, but what I am really advocating is a kind of asceticism. (2007, 105)

This method of saving, however, seems to be the one that Agamben is opposing because it is a continuation of the urge to assimilate everything, to know everything, to bring everything under the auspices of either philosophy or science by naming. Naming as a way of respecting singularity and replacing literal sacrifice with symbolic sacrifice—and, it seems, literal saving with symbolic saving—is not the radical letting be of beings that Agamben proposes. We might say, so much the worse for Agamben. Although I am sympathetic to the sublimatory power of naming as a way to substitute symbolic violence for real violence, what attracts me to Derrida’s formulations of hyperbolic ethics is that as Agamben maintains, although not all can be saved, we nonetheless have an obligation to try to save them anyway. Although not all can be welcomed, we must decide to welcome strangers, even though this decision flies in the face of what protects us from the worst, which is the radical (metaphysical) undecidability of each singular being. We don’t know who or how to welcome and yet we must do so anyway. Even though we cannot name them, because in their singularity they are beyond the name, we must name them anyway. We must name and rename them in our attempts to let them speak or sign in their own names, as Derrida might say. In other words, we can hope for saving grace or forgiveness only by acknowledging that all cannot be saved without allowing this acknowledgment to become a justification for quietism or inaction.

Agamben discusses the etymology of the Latin verb ignoscere, which means “to forgive,” and not, as we might expect, “to not know” or “to be ignorant” (ignorare) (2004, 91). He suggests that not forgiving by not knowing is to leave something alone, “to render it unsavable” (91). Here he follows Heidegger in embracing a letting alone of beings so that their being might show through. Nonetheless, he criticizes Heidegger for describing Dasein in terms of its opposition to animality, which makes Dasein dependent on animality and prevents letting animals be in their own animality rather than in their animality as it exists for us.

There seems to be a tension, however, in Agamben’s insistence on the role of philosophical inquiry in stopping the machine, on the one hand, and the letting beings be “outside of being,” on the other. Is philosophical inquiry any less invasive and penetrating than science? (Heidegger, among others, repeatedly uses metaphors of penetration.) How does philosophical interpretation preserve the mystery of life any more than science does? Agamben’s turn to religious discourse appears to be an attempt to allow for mystery rather than to endorse the violent penetration of nature, especially of the human body, by science and medicine. Where does this Shabbat leave philosophy, and where does it leave science? Moreover, haven’t religion and religious discourse caused as much or more violence, enslavement, and genocide than science has? Indeed, haven’t philosophy, religion, and science all been put into the service of justifying the inhumane treatment of some subset of humanity? In the end, doesn’t Agamben’s own discourse replace the opposition between man and animal with the opposition between religion and science?

Judeo-Christian religion could be said to represent the view that man and animals are separated by an abyss, that the divine providence of man is guaranteed only by his metaphysical separation from animals. This is the older version of the anthropological machine as producing the human by extracting the animal. Western science, however, insists on the biological continuity between humans and animals, which Agamben identifies as the modern version of the anthropological machine that reduces humans to animals (or bare life) and thereby leaves them open to dissection and disposal. As we have seen, however, metaphysical separationism and biological continuism are two sides of the same coin or, in Agamben’s parlance, two versions of the anthropological machine.¹¹ Given the influence of religion on philosophy and science, we might discover that the opposition between science and religion has been behind the opposition between animal and man all along. In this case, revaluing religion over science may not give the binary a rest, after all. Is there a way to navigate between the extremes of religion and science?

Demystifying and Remystifying Science

As an alternative to reinstating religious discourse, consider reanimating and revitalizing science by recalling the wonder, even admiration, that motivates both science and philosophy at their best. Perhaps this wonder or mystery is also what motivates religion at its best. Indeed, the wonder that motivates the best of both religion and science is also the birth of philosophy. Agamben diagnoses one of the central problems with scientific discourse as the tendency to reduce life to bare life by emptying it of all mystery and therefore its meaning. Without mystery, life is more like a functioning machine than an assembly of living creatures. Without mystery, the meaning of life is reduced to determining which stimulus causes which reaction. Given the realities of our dependence on technoscience, rather than return to religion we might do better to look for the mysteries in science itself. In this section, I propose that reanimating and reinterpreting science are parts of Merleau-Ponty’s project in the Nature lectures.

Like Agamben, Merleau-Ponty injects meaning into every experiment from biology, zoology, or psychology that he discusses. Like Agamben, Merleau-Ponty criticizes natural sciences that treat living bodies as objects or specimens to be parsed into ever smaller units.¹² Unlike Agamben, Merleau-Ponty offers another conception of nature as dynamic and of all bodies as living responsive bodies rather than bare life or mere materiality. Against the tendency toward extolling bare life or the body in itself as evidenced in contemporary biological sciences, Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophy of life that revitalizes phenomenology and science. The body at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is not an object but dynamic life that cannot be understood through the lens of a microscope. Merleau-Ponty goes further by suggesting that science is always motivated by a mystery that exceeds it, the mystery of life. For example, in discussing the twenty-seven species of crab in the Barbave Islands and their twenty-seven different types of sexual display, Merleau-Ponty insists that we cannot reduce their behavior to the utility of reproduction because that would ignore the richness of their expression as “the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other” (2003, 188). He also states that “there is a mystery of the sensible. . . which entirely grounds our Einfühlung (empathy) with the world and the animals, and gives depth to Being” (2003, 312). In these passages, it is the relationships among animals and between human animals and other animals that spark the mystery of life. Merleau-Ponty goes so far as to assert that there is a natural magic that attracts scientists to the study of nature: “If these facts retain so much attention from scientists, it’s because something is in question with the observer, or because the facts seem to realize a natural magic,” which is the animal’s “mysterious” relationship with its milieu (2003, 185). By bringing up magic and mystery, Merleau-Ponty makes clear that he does not mean some type of vitalism or magical life force operating within organisms. Instead, he is referring to a scientific curiosity about life that always exceeds the mechanistic tendencies of the scientific method. By rediscovering that aspect of science, we can regain its mystery and even its magic.

Merleau-Ponty describes as the heart of science the interplay between mystery and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, sensible and miracle, visible and invisible. Through his creative and philosophical interpretations of science and specifically biology, unlike Heidegger and Agamben, Merleau-Ponty refuses to merely dismiss science and technology as dangerous. Rather, he attempts a reanimation and reinterpretation of science by continually navigating between vitalism and mechanism without giving up on the meaningfulness of science. For Merleau-Ponty, science is not simply or in principle opposed to philosophy; science and philosophy can engage in a reciprocal exchange that enlivens both. If empirical science needs an infusion of philosophy, perhaps philosophy too needs an injection of empirical life. Meaning lies somewhere between abstract philosophical categories and the so-called brute facts of empirical observation.

In a section of the Nature lectures entitled “The Phenomena of Mimicry: Living Beings and Magic,” Merleau-Ponty says, “To admit the existence of a sense organ is to allow for a miracle just as remarkable as allowing for a resemblance between the butterfly and its milieu” (2003, 186). He sees his discussion of mimicry and his attempts to reconcile inner agency with outer agency, and activity with passivity, as efforts “to make the ordinary and the extra ordinary communicate,” because “on the one hand there is a frenzied freedom of life, and on the other, an economy of life” (2003, 186). By choosing one pole over the other, scientists and philosophers find themselves caught up in classical binary oppositions that force us to choose between sides of life, between inner and outer, mind and body, activity and passivity, proximity and distance, identity and difference, continuity and separation, and animal and man.

Let’s return to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “strange kinship,” which brings these two sides together. “Strange kinship” allows us to be together with other embodied beings, not because we share an origin and evolution or a language and culture, but because our bodies relate to their environments and other bodies. He insists on the “lateral union of animality and humanity” insofar as they are necessarily given together (2003, 271). If humans and animals are laterally related as kin, then humanity neither emerges from animality nor is forever cut off from animality. The question of the origin of man or the origin of language cannot be answered in terms of evolution but remains a mystery because, according to Merleau-Ponty, quoting de Chardin, “man came silently into the world” (2003, 267).

Humans are not the ascent or descent of apes or other animal beings in the sense of a hierarchy of being. Instead, we are kin through the lateral relation of shared embodiment and the structures of perception and behavior accompanying it. This notion of kinship is not based on blood or generation but on what we might call the alternating dissonance and harmony of lifestyles on this planet that we share. We are alike through our embodiment, but we are strangers through the differences in our lifestyles. For Merleau-Ponty, what Agamben calls the hiatus between man and animal is not filled with some ape-man or missing link or is it empty and void. Rather, it is the space of the fold between two sides of the natural world or, as he says, the relationship between notes and melody. Although the notes and the melody are not identical, there would be no song without them; they are related but not the same.

What in the Nature lectures Merleau-Ponty calls the “intertwining” of animality and humanity becomes in The Visible and the Invisible (1968) the “intertwining” between the visible and the invisible, body and mind. As we saw in the previous chapter, what Merleau-Ponty calls in the later work the “thickness of flesh” and the permeability of skin makes “intercorporeity” possible (1968, 141). Both the thickness of the flesh and the permeability of the skin enable communication with the world and others (1968, 135). The thickness of the flesh guarantees relations, and the skin ensures that we can distinguish our experience from the other’s. Since the flesh and skin are not objects but are synergetic, we are never cut off from the other. The skin is a boundary but a permeable boundary. Flesh makes communication possible because as Merleau-Ponty says, it is the “reversible.” By reversible, he means that we are both sensing and sensible, both subject and object:

The body is both subject and object because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things. (1968, 123)

By virtue of the flesh, which we share with other living beings and the world, we can sense and be sensed by others and by ourselves. The reversibility of the tangible opens up an “intercorporeal being” which extends further than any one individual and forms the “transitivity from one body to another” (1968, 143). This transitivity extends between humans and animals because they also have flesh that connects them and skin that keeps them separate. Both connection and separation are necessary for relationships, and both are entailed by embodiment itself.

As we have seen, the continuity that Merleau-Ponty describes between animals and man is not that of Darwinian evolutionary science but that of configurations and styles of behavior repeated throughout the natural world. To continue the musical metaphor, they are a type of leitmotif. Or perhaps we should say styles of style that are repeated, in that all living creatures have lifestyles that resonate with their environment and their fellows.¹³ Both dissonance and harmony are parts of the melody of life. To emphasize one over the other, as Heidegger and Agamben do when they insist on separation over continuity, is to risk losing the richness of life that brings with it the mysteries that they also cherish. To “let beings be,” in Agamben’s sense of the unsaved and the unforgiven and of what we are ignorant, is not the same as celebrating the mysteries of life or the mysteries of philosophy and science. Returning philosophy to religion, as Agamben does, seems like a step backward on the journey away from scientific demystification and technological management of life, particularly in regard to the hierarchy between man and animal that produces the human at the center of God’s creation and justifies man’s inhumanity to man. Another tack might be to follow Merleau-Ponty’s revisioning of science as a creative endeavor motivated by the infinite mysteries of life and fulfilled by ongoing interpretations of the between, the chiasmus, and kinship that signal both the gap and intertwining between living creatures as a fold in life itself that is part of the mystery of life.

In conclusion, Agamben may be right that we need to suspend the animal within man. And we certainly need to break the anthropological machine that creates subhuman “peoples” who are enslaved, tortured, and murdered. But we also need to consider how this machine affects nonhuman animals and investigate the man/animal dichotomy from both sides and not just the side of humanity. Even in Agamben’s critical analysis of the man/animal split, he engages the category of animal from within the category of human in order to diagnose the ways in which some humans are exploited by others. With this complex form of what I am calling “animal pedagogy,” we learn something about the category human by exploiting its relation with the category animal. And with the exception of the tick whose pleasures and mysteries Agamben imagines, animals themselves are irrelevant to this analysis.

Still, Agamben’s final prescription of a Shabbat of both animal and man has profound consequences for animals as well as humans. If the category of the human has been used to justify all sorts of atrocities inflicted on humans by humans, it also has been used to justify all sorts of atrocities inflicted on animals by humans. Perhaps demonstrating, as Agamben does, the violence at the heart of the concept of humanity that justifies man’s inhumanity to man in terms of the exclusion of his own animality can also highlight the violence of considering animality a characteristic in need of exclusion. Moreover, Agamben’s insistence on framing the philosophies of humanity and the perpetuation of the man/animal dichotomy in terms of the politics of power shows how what appears to be “innocuous” scientific discovery becomes, or is part of, deadly political maneuvering.