Abstract
The chapter argues that the animal question is pivotal to the comprehension of the whole philosophical project of Agamben. The rift dividing human and animal represents and constitutes the main structure of Western metaphysics, which always presupposes an unknowable and unnameable substrate supporting a knowable and nameable “substance.” This presuppositional structure always leads to the subjection and dominion of one part over the other and to the deadly production of a life stripped of its qualities and consigned to death. The overcoming of this structure in what Agamben calls “form of life,” a life of “potential,” would therefore deactivate the caesura dividing human and animal and open both to a new “use,” that is, to a new understanding and a new relationship.
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Notes
- 1.
That I write “man” and not “human being” is no oversight: the use of the neutral universal “man” instead of (the politically correct) “human being” is not only still very common and widespread in Italian academia and society at large, but also marks a certain “gender blindness” characteristic of Agamben’s writings.
- 2.
“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 a 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” (Agamben 1993a: 51–52).
- 3.
In a “gloss” (1993a: 56), Agamben cursorily cites the ethologist William Thorpe and his findings that in certain birds the “song” is not entirely written in the genetic code and must therefore be “learned,” but for him this is definitely the proverbial exception proving the rule.
- 4.
The founding myth in this sense is that of Epimetheus, who, according to Plato (Protagoras 320d–322a), gave all natural gifts to non-human animals forgetting human beings and forced his brother Prometheus to steal fire (= arts and technology) from the gods and give it to them, making thereby humans free. As, among others, Derrida notes, it is “paradoxically on the basis of a fault or failing in man that the latter will be made a subject who is master of nature and of the animal” (2008: 20). Roberto Marchesini has analysed and demystified this myth in a number of books (cf., e.g., 2014: 84–112).
- 5.
This short text was initially published in a bilingual edition (Italian-French) the same year of the first Italian edition of Language and Death (1982) and was then included as “Epilogue” in its 2008 Italian reissue, but is not included in the English translation.
- 6.
- 7.
This long itinerary of désœuvrement climaxes in the conclusion of The Sacrament of Language (2011: 71): “It is perhaps time to call into question the prestige that language has enjoyed and continues to enjoy in our culture, as a tool of incomparable potency, efficacy, and beauty. And yet, considered in itself, it is no more beautiful than birdsong, no more efficacious than the signals insects exchange, no more powerful than the roar with which the lion asserts his dominion.”
- 8.
The term “abyss” is obviously the one used by Heidegger (Abgrund) to characterize the human-animal divide and that epitomizes the view of the whole Western tradition (cf., e.g. Heidegger 1995: 264 and passim).
- 9.
In German Abgrund means simply “abyss,” but the term is construed by Heidegger as the absence (negative ab-) of a foundation (Grund): that its logic characterizes Western metaphysics means for Heidegger (and also for Agamben) that metaphysics lacks a positive foundation in Being. The logic of the exception is instead the inclusion of something via its exclusion, as in Carl Schmitt’s state of exception which includes the law by suspending (i.e. excluding) it.
- 10.
Agamben writes in fact (2004: 16): “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 ta positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.”
- 11.
An “antispeciesist” corollary to the anthropological machine appears a few years later in the short text “Special Being” of Profanations , where Agamben laments the hypostatization of the (human) species , where the term originally only means “appearance, aspect, or vision” (2007a: 56): “The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification is the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus [dispositivo]” (2007a: 59). Species is the apparatus used to establish an identity by distinguishing between one’s own appearance from that of other beings; self-recognition depends on a (fictitious because only imaginary, in the sense of depending on one’s image) separation between humans and non-humans.
- 12.
Derrida argues in fact that our “war” against the animal cannot be resolved through a deposition of the human-animal difference; rather, this difference—that he still calls, in Heideggerian fashion, a “rupture or abyss”—is necessary and to call it into question would be “asinine” [bête]. Derrida’s strategy consists instead in “multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply” (2008: 29–30; see also Chagani 2018).
- 13.
By the same token, in “In Praise of Profanation,” the cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse is taken as a paradigm of profanation, which deactivates the usual behaviour and opens it up to a new, possible use (Agamben 2007a: 85).
- 14.
For example, in another important essay from 2004, “The Work of Man,” he states again (admittedly citing Dante): “While the intelligence of the angels is perpetually in act without interruption (sine interpolatione) and that of the animals is inscribed naturally in each individual, human thought is constitutively exposed to the possibility of its own lack and inactivity: that is to say, it is, in the terms of the Aristotelian tradition, nous dunatos, intellectus possibilis” (2007b: 9). That is why man (sic) has no proper “work”, no opera, and is thus, in his essence, inoperative, that is, a potential being, open to all possibilities.
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Salzani, C. (2020). Beyond Human and Animal: Giorgio Agamben and Life as Potential. In: Cimatti, F., Salzani, C. (eds) Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9_5
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