Giorgio Agamben - The Open: Man and Animal
01.07.2023
Reading this to prepare myself for a competency interview. Quite short, will finish quickly.
So far, this is mainly reinforcing my need to read Hegel. But I do after all have Phenomenology of Spirit, so I might get to that not too long form now. Likely will not have time to get to this before I have to submit my bibliography, but note to self: check out the concept of biopower.
For anyone undertaking a genealogical study of the concept of “life” in our culture, one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such. And yet, this thing that remains indeterminate gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of caesurae and oppositions that invest it with a decisive strategic function in domains as apparently distant as philosophy, theology, politics, and—only later—medicine and biology. That is to say, everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided.
^ this goes hard as fuck
It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within is man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place.
^ fucking highlighting every other sentence in this book but LITERALLY LITERALLY. This is approaching what I talk about with autoanthropogensis and also how being divided from humanity is the most human thing and in fact the basis for humanity.
Highlighted the ENITRE cognitio experimentalis chapter because #LITERALLY... what I've been saying!!! The constructed designation between man and animal and its political significance...
The cahpter on Linnaeus and taxonomy... man.
Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human.
LITERALLY THIS LITERALLY THIS. THIS CHAPTER EXPLODES ME. So this is the dialectical machine mentioned in the Kafka essay... Agamben is just wow. He gets me!
02.07.2023
Parallels between the idea Agamben writes of as human nature between animal and divine and of Nietzsche's conception as humanity as an intermediary stage before the superman?
Everything in this book is just so—sometimes one reads something which totally shakes apart one's worldview, and sometimes one reads something which so well articulates the thoughts which have been swirling around unformed inside one's head for a long time. The Open is for me very much the latter. I'm still trying to wrap my head a bit around the difference between the man/animal and human/inhuman machines, but I think I'm getting there. Of course, I can't help but wonder how this connects to decidedly technological departures from humanity. I think we see it paralleled with Agamben's human/inhuman machine in Crimes of the Future with the self-made plastic eaters and with those who have evolved into plastic eaters. Much to think about! At any rate, the focus on language as what distinguishes man and thus retroactively separates him... exactly!
All these German words are giving me brain damage. Nevertheless the concept of Umwelt and Umgebung is quite interesting, particularly the idea that the Umgebung. Very unfortunate, however, the essentialization thereof and its ties to Nazism. Given just a little bit more freedom, it could provide a very interesting framework indeed and it is detestable how it has been tied to vital space as [a people's] essential dimension
.
As a side note, I think Uexküll's thought that no animal can enter into relation with an object as such
and instead only with its carriers of significance actually provides a quite interesting framework for how one views interpersonal relations. This is quite a tangent and not at all the focus here, but I believe it's why interactivity is such an important part of love. Going into insane person territory, I think looking at Cronenberg's Crash through this lense is fascinating. The protagonists are unsatisfied in their car crash fetish except through when it kills them because it the only way in which can they can enter into relation with the cars, being acted upon by them as just as much as they act upon them. There is an overlap in what is signifcant (totality, and therefore destruction), and therefore in death a brief relation.
Have read the (first?) Heidegger chapter and am left wondering why the Hell he wrote like that.
Hibernation and boredom???
Hiedegger was cringe as fuck bro The self-assertion of essence, however, is never a rigid insistence upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the provenance of one’s own being...
what the hell is this. Grow some fucking artistic sense of self or get the hell out.
The link between the end of history and the Spectacle... hm! Starting to understand the concept of the end of history more now, although probably not in the way Hegel would have wanted me to.
And likewise technology is the mastery not of nature but mastery of the relation between nature and humanity.
^^ kind of a banger thank you Walter Benjamin. That being said I have NO fucking clue what the hell the Benjamin quote about sex a little later on is trying to say. What DID he mean by that.
To be sure, in their fulfillment the lovers learn something of each other that they should not have known—they have lost their mystery—and yet have not become any less impenetrable. But in this mutual disenchantment from their secret, they enter, just as in Benjamin’s aphorism, a new and more blessed life, one that is neither animal nor human. It is not nature that is reached in their fulfillment, but rather (as symbolized by the animal that rears up the Tree of Life and of Knowledge) a higher stage beyond both nature and knowledge, beyond concealment and disconcealment. These lovers have initiated each other into their own lack of mystery as their most intimate secret; they mutually forgive each other and expose their vanitas. Bare or clothed, they are no longer either concealed or unconcealed—but rather, inapparent {inapparenti}.
NEVERMIND. I GET IT NOW. Much to think about, especially in connection with Crimes of the Future and how within it, "surgery" is sex. After all, this reaches beyond even "bare or clothed" to the insides of a person. It is extreme "lack of mystery". I am thinking way harder than I will probably need to for a 15-minute interview, but...
Putting the whole last two paragraphs of the book here because !! WOW !!
However, it is not here a question of trying to trace the no longer human or animal contours of a new creation that would run the risk of being equally as mythological as the other. As we have seen, in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the two terms of the operation was also what was at stake in it. 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.
And if one day, according to a now-classic image, the “face in the sand” that the sciences of man have formed on the shore of our history should finally be erased, what will appear in its place will not be a new mandylion or “Veronica” of a regained humanity or animality. The righteous with animal heads in the miniature in the Ambrosian do not represent a new declension of the man-animal relation so much as a figure of the “great ignorance” which lets both of them be outside of being, saved precisely in their being unsavable. 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. Once again, the solution of the mysterium coniunctionis by which the human has been produced passes through an unprecedented inquiry into the practico-political mystery of separation.
This book is much of my struggle with relating to humanity articulated. There IS no clear demarcation between human and animal, and to do so will always create animal-men and man-animals. Such a knowledge ultimately separates us from ourselves.
I do think analysis on technology as a means of departure from humanity could be an interesting supplement here, but it does seem to be somewhat beyond the scope of this book. But there are other writings on it!