Agamben and the Animal [1 ed.] 1527582035, 9781527582033

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Agamben and the Animal

Agamben and the Animal By

Carlo Salzani

Agamben and the Animal By Carlo Salzani This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Carlo Salzani All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8203-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8203-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Pointing Beyond Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Indistinction: Beyond Human and Animal Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 Outside of Being: Potentiality Beyond Anthropocentrism Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 33 The Human as Signature: Beyond Human Nature Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 47 Beyond Species and Persons: Towards a New Ethology Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 71 Beyond the Open: Boredom and Shame Conclusion ............................................................................................... 101 The Virus is the Open: Beyond Agamben Works Cited ............................................................................................. 107 Index ........................................................................................................ 125

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Early versions of Chapters One, Two, and Three have already been published as follows: x Chapter One: “Beyond Human and Animal: Giorgio Agamben and Life as Potential.” In Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, edited by Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, 97-113. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. x Chapter Two: “Outside of Being: Agamben’s Potential Beyond Anthropocentrism.” In Etica & Politica / Ethics and Politics, special issue on L’ontologia del soggetto agambeniano, edited by Carlo Crosato, XXII.3 (2020), 71-86. x Chapter Three (in Italian): “L’umano come segnatura.” In I quaderni di poesia 7, special issue on Lo scrigno delle segnature: lingua e poesia in Giorgio Agamben, edited by Jacopo D'Alonzo and Lucia Dell'Aia. Amsterdam: Istituto Italiano di Cultura (2019), 37-51. All texts were reworked for the present publication. I want to thank all those who contributed to the writing of this book by inviting me to write the above-mentioned texts, by reading, commenting, and discussing with me some of the chapters or sections, by offering critiques and suggesting improvements and modifications, by reviewing the texts for the previous publications, or by supporting my project in any other way: in no particular order, thanks to Ermanno Castanò, Felice Cimatti, Carlo Crosato, Jacopo D’Alonzo, Lucia Dell’Aja, Ilit Farber, Adam Kotsko, and Kristof Vanhoutte. A very special thanks to Zipporah Weisberg, who not only copyedited the final manuscript but also offered invaluable criticisms, comments, and advice. Thank also to the anonymous reviewers of the published texts and to the colleagues of The Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT) and of the unit of Ethics and Human-Animal Studies at the Messerli Research Institute of Vienna, in particular Herwig Grimm, its director, and Martin Huth, who welcomed me first as guest scholar and then as postdoctoral research fellow.

INTRODUCTION POINTING BEYOND

1. Entwicklungsfähigkeit In various interviews over the years, and more famously in the preface to his methodological treatise, The Signature of All Things, Agamben cites a peculiar tenet by Ludwig Feuerbach to define his relation to the authors who have marked his life and career: the methodological principle he follows, Agamben writes, is to identify in every work its “capacity for elaboration,” which Feuerbach defined as Entwicklungsfähigkeit (Agamben 2009a, 8). In the preface to his Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie (Presentation, Development and Critique of Leibnitz’s Philosophy, originally published in 1837), Feuerbach in fact called the “essential” task of philosophy “immanent elaboration”: “the capacity for elaboration” (Entwicklungsfähigkeit), he wrote, is “the very mark of what philosophy is,” and elaboration means the “decipherment of the true meaning of a philosophy, the unveiling of what is positive in it, the presentation of its idea within the historically determined and finite conditions that have defined this idea.” Hence, “[t]he possibility of elaboration is the idea itself” (Feuerbach 1969, 3-4, emphases in the original). The source of elaboration for Agamben, as for Feuerbach, is what has been left “unsaid” in the original work: “the germ, what has been left unsaid and can thus be developed, resumed” (Andreotti and De Melis 2006, 2). This “germ” is the “potentiality” of a work that, while present, remains unstated and undeveloped, and is therefore left for others to unveil and elaborate in different ways. For Agamben as for Feuerbach, this germ, this potentiality, is what marks the true “idea” of a work (Agamben 2009a, 7-8). This essential element of a text can be taken in unforeseen (and perhaps undesired) directions by others and thereby transformed into something no longer attributable to the original author. Agamben frequently engages in this pursuit himself—to the point of making controversial ‘corrections’ of other philosophers’ ideas. In so doing—that is, in radically redirecting other thinkers’ ideas to destinations they would

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Introduction

not have foreseen—Agamben demonstrates his remarkable originality. For Feuerbach, this process of elaboration is the true task of philosophy: “Elaboration is difficult, whereas critique is easy. […] True critique lies in elaboration itself, because the latter is possible only through the separation of the essential from the accidental, of the necessary from the contingent, of the objective from the subjective” (Feuerbach 1969, 4). Authors must be mindful of the unuttered in their own work as well. In The Signature of All Things, Agamben writes that archaeology “must retrace its own trajectory back to the point where something remains obscure and unthematized. Only a thought that does not conceal its own unsaid—but constantly takes it up and elaborates it—may eventually lay claim to originality” (2009a, 8). Each completed work contains something left unsaid that demands to be explored and expanded upon, perhaps by someone else. In the preface to the 1989 French translation of Infancy and History (also included in the English translation), Agamben reinforces this point: Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks. The absent work, although it is unplaceable in any precise chronology, thereby constitutes the written works as prolegomena or paralipomena of a non-existent text; or, in a more general sense, as parerga which find their true meaning only in the context of an illegible ergon. To take Montaigne’s fine image, these are the frieze of grotesques around an unpainted portrait, or, in the spirit of the pseudo-Platonic letter, the counterfeit of a book which cannot be written. (1993c, 3)

Similarly, in the preface to The Use of Bodies, which was written twentyfive years later, Agamben paraphrases the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and warns the reader that they will not find a “conclusion” in his work: “every work of poetry and of thought,” Agamben writes, “cannot be concluded but only abandoned (and perhaps continued by others)” (2016, xiii). The “potentiality” of a work can never be exhausted, and its true philosophical “idea” lies precisely in this inexhaustible potential. Agamben has also left some key issues undeveloped in his work, among the most important of which is the question of the animal. Agamben devoted The Open: Man and Animal (originally published in Italian in 2002 and in English translation in 2004) entirely to the analysis of (human) animality. Immediately upon publication The Open became a major point of reference in academic debates surrounding animal exploitation and liberation. The Open made a particularly important

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contribution to the discussion because it introduced a new vocabulary and a new conceptuality into the lexicon of many different fields, including but not limited to animal studies, political philosophy, and biopolitics. Despite the book’s substantial impact, however, Agamben abruptly abandoned the question at its center. Although The Open makes brief appearances in later points throughout his career, Agamben ultimately left the rich potential of its core argument largely unexplored. Indeed, Agamben’s entire oeuvre— especially the new conceptuality he proposed in his twenty-year-long project Homo Sacer—is a rich source of unsaid and unthematized issues concerning or related to the animal question that are begging to be explored further, a task this book takes up.

2. Man and Animal In the economy of Agamben’s oeuvre, The Open and the question of the animal play a very specific role: that of understanding and describing, on the one hand, the mechanisms through which human life is “humanized” (i.e., how the human animal becomes Man) and, on the other, how the human can be and has been de-humanized, “animalized,” and reduced to “bare life.” In a sense, The Open is a continuation of Remnants of Auschwitz, the book, published four years before, in which Agamben had focused on the biopolitical apparatuses that manage and control life— exemplified by the extreme paradigm of the concentration camp—and on the “non-human” core that endures at the very heart of the human. The Open widens the perspective from the camp of Remnants of Auschwitz to the issue of humanization and animalization as such, and also paves the way for the new paradigms of liberation Agamben will propose in the later volumes of his Homo Sacer project. For Agamben, the question of the animal is therefore quintessentially metaphysical and quintessentially political—it is the metaphysico-political question, as I will show in the proceeding chapters of this book—and provides him with powerful analytical tools for his discourse on biopolitics. This means, however, that the “animal” Agamben focuses on is not an animal (or animals) per se but rather human animality, and that nonhuman animals, on the rare occasions they appear in The Open and in the rest of his work, are of no real import in and of themselves but are merely instruments for pursuing his investigation of the human. Moreover, the animal for Agamben remains the Animal with capital “A,” or what Derrida (2008) called animot, a metaphysical category into which all nonhuman animals are typically confined—at the expense of their incredible diversity and heterogeneity—and against which Man is (erroneously) defined.

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Introduction

(Similarly, for Agamben man is Man with capital “M,” an ostensibly gender-neutral—i.e., gender-blind—category that, in truth, negates the existence of women and other genders. Gender blindness and species blindness follow the same patterns and originate from the same presuppositions.) Agamben never manages (or is never willing) to go beyond these two founding categories of the Western tradition. When he speaks of Man and Animal, he is referring to the Heideggerian “essences” which are defined in contradistinction to each other. This reductive line drawing between Man and Animal is one of the greatest limitations of Agamben’s thought on the animal question and the reason why, for many other, more engaged, thinkers, he is ultimately of little use for the practical cause of animal liberation. 1 Thinkers and activists involved in practices of animal advocacy and liberation will find another insurmountable obstacle in The Open and in Agamben’s philosophy in general: his messianic perspective. Though defined by Agamben as “the present as the exigency of fulfillment” (2005, 76), messianism does not provide concrete, “practical” solutions to urgent problems, nor does it supply readers with an ethico-political agenda to adhere to, a criticism which is often leveled at Agamben’s political philosophy as a whole. Reducing engagement to the identification of the tasks of the “coming philosophy,” many argue, seems to condemn his politics to a radical passivity. And for many critics, the religious language that marks Agamben’s messianic philosophy could even be said to constitute a smokescreen, if not an outright mystification of concrete issues, that forecloses instead of paving the way to liberatory practices (cf. e.g., Oliver 2009, 238-44). Moreover, Agamben’s rejection of all legal frameworks and of the question of rights (human as well as animal) precludes any immediate, concrete intervention, and his ontologization of ethics at the expense of relationality and responsibility shrouds the plural dimension of action and the inviolability of the individual (human as well as animal). In a word, no true politics of (animal) liberation can be found in Agamben’s work. 2 And yet, the new conceptuality he proposed in The Open and in his work on biopolitics in general has helped create a space for inquiries he 1

Speaking of Agamben, many critics would agree with the uncharitable judgment of the continental tradition that Peter Singer delivered in his preface to a book on animal philosophy: “How much of this philosophical impetus that gave rise to a practical challenge to the way we think about nonhuman animals came from writers in the philosophical traditions of Continental Europe […]? The Answer is, as far as I can judge, none” (Singer 2004, xii). 2 I thank Zipporah Weisberg for her clarifying comments on these points.

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never pursued himself (Calarco 2015, 54-55). In his work Agamben provides important conceptual tools (e.g., bare life, the anthropological machine, the division ]RƝ/bios, the emphasis on sovereignty and the state of exception, etc.) that call into question the anthropocentric context within which he himself remains captive. Though Agamben never manages (or seeks) to escape the dualisms of the Western tradition, in his discussion of the key concepts outlined above he gestures or points towards their overcoming. Importantly, his work contributes to the questioning of a certain orthodoxy in animal ethics and animal studies and to the opening up of different possibilities of thought. As I argue in this book, though still firmly rooted in the anthropocentrism of the Western tradition, Agamben’s work points beyond the limits that he himself is unable or unwilling to cross. 3

3. Pointing Beyond I am “borrowing” the title of this book, Agamben and the Animal, from the 2018 homonymous book (in Italian) by Ermanno Castanò, but the aim and methodology of my book bears no resemblance to Castanò’s. Castanò rereads the entirety of Agamben’s oeuvre in order to explore instances throughout his works when he discusses the Aristotelian paradox of the zoon logon echon and the politikon zoon, that is, the simultaneous coincidence and division of humanity and animality in the human. Castanò writes that this paradox lies at the heart of Agamben’s project as a sort or ur-division that paradigmatically illuminates and clarifies all other divisions and the structure of Western metaphysics itself. Therefore, Castanò argues, the question of the animal is fundamental and even foundational (albeit often implicitly so) to Agamben’s whole philosophical project. This thesis is also fundamental to my own enquiries, but I will proceed differently than Castanò: following the Feuerbachian principle of Entwicklungsfähigkeit, in each chapter I will archaeologically retrace and highlight the anthropocentric limits that constrain Agamben in some relevant aspects of his philosophy, while simultaneously looking for the capacity for elaboration that lies within them. In the end, I will not develop these points beyond the limits of Agamben’s philosophy (a task I leave to others), but I will try to emphasize their Entwicklungsfähigkeit and to identify some directions in which they might be taken. 3

The words Agamben heard from Heidegger at one of the seminars the German philosopher held at Le Thor in the late 1960s also apply to Agamben himself: “You can see my limit; I can’t” (qtd. in Agamben 1995, 59).

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Introduction

In Chapter One, I start with the many criticisms that The Open has received—mostly but not only from the animal studies camp—and, though mostly acknowledging their validity, I try to mitigate them by situating the book in the context of Agamben’s whole career. This leads me to an archeological itinerary that emphasizes the lingering anthropocentrism of Agamben’s early books and the necessity of a rethinking of (human) animality that his “biopolitical turn” of the early 1990s led him to—a turn which culminated in The Open. I then read The Open from the perspective of potentiality to emphasize the central category that marks Agamben’s position on the animal question: a fundamental indistinction that points beyond the human/animal dualism. Chapter Two expands on the issue of potentiality which is analyzed at the end of Chapter One, retraces its many definitions in Agamben’s oeuvre, and shows how its Heideggerian origins led Agamben to restrict it to humans only: only humans are potential—that is, free—beings, while nonhuman animals are prisoners of the limited possibilities of their species. The concept of infancy, so important in the first phase of Agamben’s career and a sort of forebear of potentiality, is paradigmatic in this sense, since, not only is it linked to language, but it also becomes a fundamental apparatus of inclusion and exclusion. However, the notion of “outside of being” that concludes The Open deactivates the contraposition between potentiality and actuality (which are categories of Being) and thus also points beyond the anthropocentrism of Agamben’s concept of potentiality. Chapter Three shifts the focus to a methodological point in Agamben’s work, the question of the “signatures,” the macro-indicators devoid of fixed content that make certain kinds of discourse possible. By linking the theory of the signatures to the deconstruction of the concept of “human” that is carried out in The Open, I propose reading the “human” not as a concept but as a signature that makes a certain kind of politicophilosophical discourse possible. This becomes evident from the workings of the “anthropological machine,” which enables the recognition of the human through similarity and difference and thereby produces a series of paradigms of humanity and non-humanity. Just like the signatory machine of Western metaphysics, so too the anthropological machine is “flawed” and hence it must be stopped. The theory of signatures, therefore, supports and substantiates the project of the désoeuvrement of “human nature” that is proposed in The Open and developed through to The Use of Bodies. Chapter Four attempts to elaborate the insights proposed by Agamben in a short 2005 text, “Special Being.” This text does not focus on animals or animality, but rather briefly deconstructs the apparatus of “species” in

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Western culture, and thus provides the archaeological tools for a critique and deactivation of human “specialness” (i.e., exceptionality). The chapter retraces the critique of “species” in Agamben’s career, showing how it is to be considered a fundamental biopolitical concept that must be deactivated and rendered inoperative. The same holds for the category of “persona,” which “Special Being” links to the critique of the species and is central to Agamben’s critique of the law from the very beginning. At the end of the chapter, I propose an alternative to the excluding logic of species and persona that is founded on the concept of ethos, a concept which accompanies Agamben throughout his career and can be developed, in line with some contemporary trends of thought, into a new, inclusive, and interspecies ethology. Finally, Chapter Five identifies in the dualisms of the (concept of) the Open, which Agamben derives from Heidegger, the greatest barrier for developing a more constructive notion of animality. The concept of the Open is intrinsically dualist insofar as it presupposes a closedness, and thus a contrast and a contraposition between two homogeneous “essences,” Man and Animal. It presupposes separation and exclusion, and the elevation of the human over the rest of the living beings, and therefore remains inherently anthropocentric. The concept of boredom, which both Heidegger and Agamben place at the center of their elaboration of the Open, is paradigmatic of this dualism and of the paradoxes it generates, since it shows simultaneously the closeness and the distance between humans and nonhumans, emphasizing the divide between them precisely by showing what brings them near to each other. Only humans are said to be able to feel boredom (boredom is one of the many traits that traditionally separate Man and Animal), but on the other hand boredom dehumanizes the human subject and brings her closer to an (ostensibly) animal-like stupor. To try to overcome the troubling dualisms that are inherent to the Open, I propose abandoning the paradoxes of boredom and calling instead upon another category that is central to Agamben’s philosophy: namely, shame. Shame, as it was elaborated by Primo Levi in the face of the horrors of the death camp—as a way of seeing that produces a shift in perception and can lead to critique and resistance—can also interrupt the complacency of human exceptionality and cross the abyss of the Open. In the end, the conclusion to which I come in this book is the need to go beyond Agamben and towards a different and better understanding and politics of human-animal relations. But this “going beyond” finds firm roots in the space cleared and created by Agamben himself and is (also) the ripe fruit of seeds planted in his own work.

CHAPTER ONE INDISTINCTION: BEYOND HUMAN AND ANIMAL

1. Deferral The Open does not explicitly belong to Agamben’s celebrated series Homo Sacer, although, as Adam Kotsko (2020, 105) remarks, in the final volume of the series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben refers to it more than to other, ignored volumes, making it almost an “honorary member.” The Open has become nonetheless one of Agamben’s most popular works, and not only in the field of animal studies, where, however, as very often happens with Agamben’s work, it polarized the readers: on the one hand, his archaeology of the human-animal divide, his theorization of the “anthropological machine,” and his call for the dissolution of the metaphysical difference separating human and nonhuman animals have been hailed by some as major contributions to the field and have become part of its fundamental theoretical toolbox; on the other hand, critics have emphasized Agamben’s lingering anthropocentrism and his lack of a sincere and concrete commitment to bringing human domination of animals and animal suffering to an end. There is truth to both of these perspectives. Because this chapter is mainly devoted to defending the first position—that there is much to be gleaned from Agamben’s treatment of the animal question—it is important to address some of the criticisms leveled against him at the outset. To begin with, Andrew Benjamin (2010, 120, 125) contests Agamben’s view of the separation between human and animal as a zone of indistinction and a state of exception and talks rather of “porosity” and “negotiation,” which are more attuned to a “relational ontology.” But the main criticism to The Open is that nonhuman animals are absent from the book and from Agamben’s reflections on animality: The Open, Dominick LaCapra writes, “has virtually nothing specific to say about other-than-human animals or their lives” (2009, 168; cf. also Gustafsson 2013, 16). Matthew Calarco notes that The Open focuses “entirely and exclusively on the effects of the anthropological machine on human beings and never explore>s@ the impact

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Chapter One

the machine has on various forms of animal life” (2008, 102, emphasis in the original). For Fayaz Chagani (2018), this inattention amounts to a “deferral” or “suspension” of the question of the animal outside the human and is therefore indicative of a “performative anthropocentrism” (Calarco 2008, 98; Chagani 2018). In fact, the only animal mentioned in The Open, Chagani notes (2018), is the tick, whose relationship with its environment is meant to stand in for that of all animals. Overall, Agamben is guilty of the “flattening” of all animal individuals into the macro-category “Animal,” a move typical to traditional anthropocentrism and humanism (cf. Wolfe 2013: 27).1 In The Open animals remain a mere figure of the limit of the human. Moreover, insofar as animals are included only by way of exclusion (since they are not mentioned in the discussion of animality), Agamben “reproduces the very logic he seeks to undermine” (Chagani 2018). For Leonardo Caffo and Ernesto Sferrazza Papa, Agamben “does not talk about animals; he uses them”: in his discourse, animality is merely a “political-ontological operator” used to problematize the categories of humanity and inhumanity (2015, 135), or, in LaCapra’s words, it only functions as an “abstracted philosophical topos” (2009, 166). In the end, Agamben’s critique of traditional humanism does not really question anthropocentrism as such but only aims at renegotiating a certain form of anthropocentrism: a “local or weak anthropocentrism.” That is, Agamben’s redemptive proposal in fact seeks to horizontalize hierarchies within the human, leaving, however, untouched humans’ power relations with the other living beings (Caffo and Sferrazza Papa 2015, 137-38). This seems confirmed by the fact that, as Krzysztof Ziarek points out, after its deactivation the anthropological machine might stop working, but the terms constituting it would remain unchanged, thereby prolonging human domination over animals (2008, 197; cf. also Chrulew 2012, 58). For Cary Wolfe, this means that within Agamben’s system the “political” (or biopolitical) dimension of the plight of living, breathing nonhuman animals in contemporary society remains unthought, or even “unthinkable” (2013, 27). Finally, an important criticism of Agamben’s work is that, in his analysis of the human/animal dichotomy, he completely elides the position of women. As Kelly Oliver remarks (2009, 230-31), the binaries man/animal 1

Actually, other animals are also briefly mentioned in The Open, for example the bisected bee in the experiment described by Uexküll and also mentioned by Heidegger (2004, 52-53) or the lark that cannot see the Open (2004, 58-59), but the point Chagani wants to make is that the tick takes a paradigmatic and central place. That insects become the “paradigmatic” animals is a (telling) point that Kelly Oliver (2009, 197-98) also remarks in Heidegger’s work.

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and man/woman are virtually inseparable in the history of Western thought, whereby femininity has always been linked to animality as a lessthat-human or sub-human category not fully qualifying as human (or, better, “Man”)—and the violence women have been, and are being, subjected to is very similar to the violence against nonhuman animals (cf. also Wadiwel 2004). That is why Emma Jones (2007, 36) argues that the anthropological machine is also intrinsically an “andrological machine” and the logic of the division man/animal is complicit with that of the division man/woman. The stopping of one machine cannot therefore be accomplished without the stopping of the other, an issue Agamben never contemplated anywhere in his work.2 These criticisms are well-founded and difficult to counter. However, it appears that Agamben’s critics mostly read The Open as a stand-alone book, isolating it from his corpus of writings, and approach it from theoretical perspectives extraneous to it, such as posthumanism, antispeciesism, or animal rights theory. Agamben’s interest in writing this book lies elsewhere (cf. Attell 2015, 168; Colebrook and Maxwell 2016, 103) and, to really assess and appreciate it, one needs to situate it within his unique philosophical project. From this perspective, Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell argue that “there is a sense in which all of Agamben’s work concerns animality” (even though his work differs from contemporary vitalisms and materialisms in that “it still grants language supreme importance”) (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016, 103, 35), which is also the central claim of the already-mentioned book by Ermanno Castanò (2018). This chapter will adopt this latter perspective and put forward the argument that The Open and the animal question are pivotal to the comprehension of Agamben’s entire philosophical project. The rift dividing human and animal represents and constitutes in fact the main structure of Western metaphysics, which always presupposes an unknowable and unnameable substrate (from time to time physis, animal “voice,” nature, natural life, animality…) that supports a knowable and nameable “substance” (nomos, logos, culture, politics, humanity). This presuppositional structure always leads to the subjection and dominion of one part over the other and to the deadly production of “bare life.” The 2

I will not engage with or “elaborate” Agamben’s gender insensitivity in this chapter or the book as a whole because it is not so much an entwicklungsfähig point as a point of weakness in his work. I will try nonetheless to draw attention to it whenever it comes up, for example in his preference for the (not so) neutral or universal term “Man” over the (truly neutral and universal) term “human.” While drawing attention to it here, I will not “correct” Agamben’s heteronormative and patriarchal vocabulary in my analysis of his works.

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Chapter One

overcoming of this structure is what Agamben calls “form-of-life,”3 a life of “potential,” that 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. In what follows, I will first analyze Agamben’s “early” work (produced prior to his so-called “biopolitical turn”) to highlight his lingering anthropocentrism. Next, I will read The Open as a constitutive part of his Homo Sacer project as a whole. Finally, I will conclude with a brief overview of the link between indistinction and potentiality in his work.

2. Lingering Anthropocentrism It can be and has been argued (Calarco 2008, 79; Prozorov 2014, 151) that a certain discontinuity characterizes Agamben’s thought in regard to animality and anthropocentrism, which is analogous (and related, as we will see) to the discontinuity between his so-called pre-political and biopolitical phases: whereas from the 1970s to the early 1990s his (Heideggerian) critique of humanism (as per Heidegger’s critique) never questioned anthropocentrism as such, his “biopolitical turn” of the mid1990s led him to see the traditional human-animal divide as ultimately untenable. His early phase can be characterized as the quest for a “postmetaphysical definition of the human” (Calarco 2008, 79), which was articulated within the traditional (and metaphysical) formula “unlike the (other) animals, man is/has/can…”—as, for example, in his first book, The Man Without Content, where Agamben rehearses (in passing) the Western metaphysical vulgata that nonhuman animals are subordinate to necessity and only human beings are free and capable of free action (1999a: 69, 7980; admittedly, he was only quoting Aristotle and Marx, but since he does so uncritically, he implicitly endorses their position). It is however in his third book, Infancy and History, where the metaphysical divide is the basis of his argument: what opens up the human to the experience of history and culture, Agamben argues here, is, as for the whole Western tradition, language; but, unlike this tradition, Agamben does not hold that language separates human and nonhuman animals because the former possess it and the latter don’t. Quite the opposite: “Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language,” whereas “man” (sic) “is not the ‘animal possessing language’, but instead the animal deprived of language and obliged, 3

This concept presents its own anthropocentric limits, which will be analyzed in Chapter Two.

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5

therefore, to receive it from outside himself” (1993c, 52, 57). Man must learn language, must receive it from the outside, and is therefore split in his nature (“the split between language and speech, between semiotic and semantic”) (1993c, 52).4 This founding split is what distinguishes animal “voice” (animal vocalizations and communication) from human language, which allows for human historicity and culture; Agamben names it, etymologically, infancy (from the Latin in- that negates the verb fari, to speak). Agamben seems to be attuned to the recent findings in animal cognition when affirming that animal communication is fully linguistic and that animals are linguistic beings, but he is empirically wrong when categorically denying some forms of language acquisition at least in some animal species (cf. Calarco 2008, 85-86; Watkin 2014b, 262).5 And he is certainly wrong when extracting “man” from the evolutionary continuum and singling him out as deprived of language. The point he wants to make, however, is that animals communicate immediately, that is, without the mediation of the sign, and that as such animal language is one with nature, just like the chirp of the cricket or the braying of the donkey (cf. 1993c, 3); human language is instead conceptualized as a lack—a lack that, in a move typical of the whole Western tradition, is then turned into the very condition of the possibility of freedom.6 “Experimentum linguae,” the preface added to the 1989 French translation (and also to the 1993 English translation) of Infancy and History adds a fundamental point, which will return also at the very incipit of Homo Sacer: Agamben quotes the famous (and central for his whole project) passage from Aristotle’s Politics (1253a 10-18) about the difference 4 “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 1993c, 51-52). 5 In a “gloss” (1993c, 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 that proves the rule. 6 The founding myth in this sense is that of Epimetheus, who, according to Plato (Protagoras 320d–322a), gave all natural gifts to nonhuman animals at the expense of human beings, and forced his brother Prometheus to steal fire (arts and technology) from the gods and give it to humans, thereby making them free. As 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 analyzed and demystified this myth in a number of books (cf. for example 2014, 84-112).

6

Chapter One

between animal “voice,” which is merely an expression of pleasure and pain, and human speech, which is able to indicate “what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is right and what is wrong” (Agamben 1993c, 7-8). This difference is what opens up for humans the space of ethics and politics (beside the already mentioned historicity and culture). And it is central to the seminars collected four years later in Language and Death, where Aristotle’s passage is again quoted and commented on (cf. 1991, 87) and “voice” becomes the mark of the very workings of Western metaphysics: here the voice epitomizes the negative structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it constitutes the “ground >fondamento@, but in the sense that it goes to the ground >va a fondo@ and disappears in order for being and language to take place” (1991, 35). For human language (and all that comes with it) to emerge, the argument goes, the animal voice (and animality with it) must disappear and become a negative “ground” or foundation. Animal voice is therefore the very place of negativity that marks our entire tradition with a negative presupposition: the structure of Western metaphysics is for Agamben that of a caesura, of a separation between an unknowable and unnameable substrate which “goes to the ground” in order for a knowable and namable “substance” to emerge. The suppression of the animal (voice) is therefore the condition of possibility for the emergence of the human (language), and this dichotomous structure will recur in many founding paradigms throughout Agamben’s career, as in the couplets physis/nomos, nature/culture, silence/witness, zoé/bios, etc. More precisely, the suppression of the animal constitutes and establishes this very structure: the book and its title are in fact based on a quotation from Heidegger’s essay “The Nature of Language” according to which “Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do this. But neither can they speak” (1971b, 107; qtd. in Agamben 1991, xi). Language, negativity, and anthropogenesis are tightly intertwined—in a deadly embrace. That is why, for Castanò (2018), the question of the animal is central to, and foundational for, Agamben’s whole philosophy, not just the limited and partial intervention of The Open. And this is also why, as Prozorov argues (2014, 151-52), the discontinuity between his anthropocentric and non- (or less) anthropocentric phases should not be overstated: the overcoming of Western metaphysical negativity, which starts with the exclusion of the animal (voice), has always constituted the core of his soteriology. That is, to make the divide between human and animal (or between voice and logos, etc.) inoperative has always been (though perhaps only implicitly) the main item on Agamben’s agenda. The negative structure of Western metaphysics is what makes it so deadly and

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so doomed, and the overcoming of the division has always been the goal of his messianic philosophy. The primacy of language itself, so fundamental to anthropocentrism’s self-image and self-justification, is for Agamben not so much a troubling presupposition as the key philosophical problem to address, as he concisely shows in a short, poetic text, The End of Thought (La fine del pensiero, 1982):7 here Agamben reaffirms traditional human exceptionalism in his thesis that only human beings are not one with their animal voice (properly speaking, there is no human voice) and that this is precisely the origin of thought; but, he argues, this disunity calls for a recomposition, for a healing of the fracture, whereby the fulfillment of thought would therefore mean simultaneously the end of thought.8 By the same token, and in a very consistent way throughout his entire career, Agamben sees in poetry the messianic désoeuvrement of the communicative and informative function of language (of the caesura between semiotic and semantic) and thus the fulfillment (and the end) of language itself.9 Agamben’s “biopolitical turn” of the early 1990s will move the focus from language to life, have important repercussions on his anthropocentrism, and bring the question of the animal explicitly to the foreground. But the structure of Agamben’s analysis and, most of all, his proposed path out of the deadly metaphysical tangle of the West, will remain the same.

3. Animal Again The whole Homo Sacer project rests on the Foucauldian biopolitical premise that “For millennia >…@ man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question” (Foucault 1978, 143, qtd. in Agamben 1998, 3). This means that 7 This

short text was initially published in a bilingual edition (Italian-French) in the same year the first Italian edition of Language and Death appeared (1982). It was subsequently included as the “Epilogue” in its 2008 Italian reissue, but it is not included in the English translation. 8 For an overview of this topic in Agamben’s later work, and especially in The Use of Bodies (2016), see Cimatti 2015. 9 This long itinerary of désoeuvrement culminates 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

Chapter One

(human) animality takes a radically new political role, since political life becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the (animal) life of the body. And it also means therefore that, in modernity, the ontological abyss10 separating humans and animals has narrowed to a babbling brook, or, in Chagani’s words (2018), that, “inasmuch as the ‘total management’ of biological life has become the ‘last historical task’ >…@, humanity has already become animal again.” Under biopolitics, Wolfe rightly remarks, the human/animal distinction becomes a “discursive resource, not a zoological designation” (2013, 10), a “floating signifier in a second-order operation, one that can be deployed as needed to supplement the first-order political work” of managing life (2003, 7). The animal question, therefore, necessarily imposes itself on biopolitical thought “from within” (Calarco 2008, 87), and that is precisely what happened to Agamben’s philosophy— even though this recalibration never removed the human from the center of his thought (cf. Colebrook and Maxwell 2016, 167). The continuity in his thought11 is however marked by the fact that Agamben begins Homo Sacer with the very passage from Aristotle’s Politics (1253a 10-18) that was so central to Infancy and History and Language and Death: now the “going to the ground” and the disappearance of animal voice is related to (and made to coincide with) the exclusion of mere (animal) life from political life that constitutes the very foundation of the polis and of Western politics (cf. Agamben 1998, 7-8). Here, however, the Heideggerian logic of the Ab-Grund that structured Agamben’s previous readings of the voice is subsumed in, and effectively replaced by, the Schmittian logic of the exception12: the “going to the ground” of voice 10 The

term “abyss” is used by Heidegger to characterize the human/animal divide, and (the notion that there is a metaphysical abyss separating humans and animals) epitomizes the view of the whole Western tradition (cf. e.g., Heidegger 1995b, 264 and passim). 11 Adam Kotsko (2020) contests placing excessive emphasis on continuity, and compellingly shows how Agamben’s biopolitical turn did indeed constitute a rupture and an evolution in his career. I would nonetheless insist on a moderate sense of continuity and consistency throughout the different phases of Agamben’s work. 12 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. I have analyzed the passage from the Heideggerian to the Schmittian logic in Homo Sacer in Salzani (2015a).

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and life is here an exclusion that simultaneously includes them, an “inclusive exclusion,” which is for Agamben the very “logic of sovereignty” at the base of Western metaphysics. The exclusion of animal voice and animal life (i.e., of animality as such) is what allows for the birth of the human polis, but also of humanity as such, and thus coincides with what Agamben will later identify as the process of “anthropogenesis.”13 Politics remains here a prerogative of humanity and a mark of its difference from animality. As Prozorov notes (2014, 152-53), the distinction between zoƝ and bios makes sense only for human life, and the same holds for the notion of “bare life,” which is precisely the product of the inclusive exclusion of zoƝ from bios and is thus “species-specific” (Shukin 2009, 10). It is true that in Homo Sacer the “werewolf” is made to represent bare life as the outside of sovereign protection, and thus as a zone of indistinction between human and animal (cf. Agamben 1998, 104111), but as a stand-in for the homo sacer the werewolf is still human— albeit reduced to an animal. The true paradigm of bare life is in fact the Muselmann, whose animalization is so horrific precisely because it exposes humans as humans “in their constitutive capacity not to arrive at their (supposedly) essential humanity” (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016, 44). The relentless de-humanization of the Muselmann is never a complete degradation into an animal, whose a priori exclusion is precisely what founds the human as such, and that is why in Remnants of Auschwitz (1999b) animals enter only figuratively, as the “lice” to which Hitler compared the Jews, or the “stray dogs” to which the guards compared the Muselmann (Prozorov 2014, 153). Nevertheless, Castanò (2018, 194-97) proposes here an interesting thesis: he sees Remnants of Auschwitz, which is labeled as “volume III” of the Homo Sacer series, as a sort of threshold between the pars destruens of the volumes I and II of the project and the pars construens of volume IV. By showing the workings of the “anthropological machine” in all its deadly purity, Auschwitz represents the apex of metaphysics and as such unveils the nature of the originary metaphysical rift. The book would thereby be a preparatory work that opens up a space for the messianic proposal of The Open. What changes in The Open is indeed not only the fact that the animal question is here tackled directly and explicitly as a problem (or rather as the very problem founding Western metaphysics14), but also that the 13 As Kelly Oliver argues (2007, 1), “the human-animal divide, then, is not only political but also sets up the very possibility of politics.” 14 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

10

Chapter One

messianic way out is identified in the de-position of the human-animal divide itself, that is, in the overcoming of the very anthropocentrism that has structured not only the Western tradition but also Agamben’s thought so far. The shift is minimal but important: the issue is here, again, that of investigating the “practical and political mystery of separation” (Agamben 2004, 16) that shaped Agamben’s previous analyses of metaphysics. The Aristotelian passage around which this investigation is construed this time is not the (logocentric) one about the voice, but a passage from De Anima (413a, 20—413b, 8) in which Aristotle identifies and defines “nutritive life” as separated from, and articulated with, the other levels of life. Nutritive life is identified as the “foundation” of any form of life, but, as we know by now, as such it must “go to the ground” and disappear in an inclusive exclusion (2004, 14). This apparatus is what structures the workings of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine,” which from time to time “construes” the human by separating its vegetative and animal parts as the excluded-included foundation of its superior and proper “human” part. The first half of the book is devoted to an archaeological description of the workings of the anthropological machine aimed at showing how its final product is, every time, “neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life” (2004, 38). In fact, the collapsing of the difference between animal and human in biopolitical modernity—when the “total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man” (2004, 77)— and the consequent “running idle” of the anthropological machine, is no “salvation” from its deadly workings; rather, it signifies on the contrary the universalization of the state of exception that the machine always produces—even when it is working “well.” The only salvation, the only way out, is therefore to stop the machine itself. The second part of The Open is constituted by a series of chapters that propose a vigorous reading of Heidegger’s take on animality, in particular of the 1929-30 lecture course later published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. These chapters reiterate Agamben’s Heideggerian understanding of Western metaphysics; however, they ultimately show how Heidegger’s Dasein is also predicated on the inclusive exclusion of the animal’s particular mode of relation (Calarco 2008, 99) and thus that, despite Heidegger’s uncompromising rejection of humanism, his take on animality is the culmination and the ultimate expression of the anthropological machine of humanism. Ziarek, in turn, accuses Agamben separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.”

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of misreading Heidegger’s core intention: Heidegger decisively refuses to inscribe Dasein and the human into the horizon of living beings—and thus of animality—as the humanist tradition has done for centuries (where anthropos has always been understood as zoon + x), and, by framing once again the definition of the human around the concepts of “life” and “living being,” Agamben would remain humanist and fully metaphysical (2008, 189-90, 198; on this point see Chapter Five). Agamben’s reading of Heidegger here is in fact biopolitical—a stance that Heidegger himself would never have taken—and cannot but turn Heidegger’s hyperanthropocentric anti-humanism on its head. Be that as it may, in a move typical of his modus operandi, Agamben turns at the end from Heidegger to Benjamin in order to find a messianic circumvention of the deadlock of metaphysics.15 Benjamin provides him with the possibility of thinking humanity and animality beyond the dominant logic of traditional metaphysical categories and also beyond the traditional oikonomia of “salvation.” The way out is not the Heideggerian exacerbation of the human-animal divide, but rather its de-position, in a messianic “jamming” of the metaphysical apparatus of humanism: 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. (2004, 92)

Only this deposition—beyond any possible reconciliation (Abbott 2011, 94, 96), and unlike the deconstructive multiplying of differences—can undermine the logic of inclusive exclusion. Only the deposition of this logic will overcome the presuppositional structure of metaphysics that relates two terms (bios and zoƝ, language and voice, human and animal, actual and potential, etc.) by positing one as the submerged and negative foundation of the other. Despite all the unquestionable limits of his discourse, this is definitely Agamben’s most important contribution to the contemporary debate on animality.

15 Leland de la Durantaye (2009, 331) has cleverly called this recurring path Benjamin ex machina, “where at the end of an essay or work the contradictions uncovered or problems posed are, if not resolved, placed in a new—and more hopeful—light thanks to insights culled from Benjamin’s thought.”

12

Chapter One

4. Indistinction and Potentiality Matthew Calarco (2015) has proposed a very useful tripartite categorization of contemporary animal philosophy into what he calls the “identity approach,” the “difference approach,” and the “indistinction approach.” The first approach (which represents the first, and perhaps the largest, wave of the animal liberation and animal rights movement and is epitomized by the philosophies of Peter Singer and Tom Regan) focuses on evolutionary history and the fundamental similarities between human and (some) nonhuman animals and argues for “treating likes alike”; the second approach (epitomized by Derrida’s deconstruction) emphasizes instead radical singularity and difference and pursues an increased differentiation that would acknowledge and respect animal singularity and difference; finally, the “indistinction approach” (represented, among others, by philosophers such as Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Val Plumwood) rather tends to deflate the emphasis on human uniqueness and destabilize the human/animal distinction with the aim of pursuing ways of life in which both human and nonhuman animals could flourish. According to Calarco, Agamben is a major influence on this third approach,16 not least because what biopolitics first and foremost makes clear is that the traditional human/animal distinction has already completely and irreparably collapsed (cf. also Calarco 2020, 30). In this final section I want to elaborate Agamben’s indistinction approach through the concept of potentiality. This is actually the topic of the next chapter, but here I want to anticipate part of the argument (at the risk of some inevitable repetitions) and show already how the deposition of the human/animal distinction can be profitably linked to the emphasis on potentiality and developed into an anthropodecentric opening to different forms of life. In The Open, “outside of being” is the title of the last chapter of the book and is the phrase Agamben uses to identify the messianic overcoming of the anthropological machine (and of metaphysics as a whole). This concept is an evolution that goes far beyond that of “whatever being” Agamben proposed in The Coming Community (1993b), which, insofar as it was modeled on the experience of language, was restricted to humanity (Prozorov 2014, 171). And it also goes beyond the Heideggerian concept of potentiality that Agamben embraced early on and that has otherwise constituted the core of his philosophical proposal. If potentiality can be said to be the “central term of his philosophy” (de la Durantaye 2009, 3), it 16

Independently from Calarco and from the animal question, William Watkin (2014b) has placed this central trait of Agamben’s philosophy under the label not of “indistinction” but of “indifference.”

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must be pointed out that it also underwent an evolution parallel to, and intertwined with, that of his critique of humanism. Potentiality is the mode in which Heidegger’s Dasein exists, and as such it informed Agamben’s philosophy from the very beginning, if only implicitly at first. If the term entered Agamben’s vocabulary only in the mid 1980s, it nevertheless already comprises the logical structure of the experience of infancy, which is in fact not the actuality but the potentiality of speech (cf. Prozorov 2014, 71-72). And it already marked, in Heideggerian fashion, human exceptionality: if only human beings have infancy, it is because only humans have the potentiality not to speak, that is, to remain in in-fancy. This is, for Agamben, the very essence of potentiality—not only the potentiality to do or be something, but also the potentiality not to do or be something—and it is what accords humans a freedom denied to nonhuman animals. The link between infancy and potentiality is made explicit in “The Idea of Infancy,” a text Agamben wrote in the mid-1980s and which appears in the Idea of Prose. Here Agamben takes the axolotl, a neotenic salamander that is native to Mexico, as a paradigm of infancy and as a key to interpreting human evolution: the axolotl is characterized by neoteny, that is, the retention of larval (or infantile) traits in adulthood, that according to some theories also played a pivotal role in human evolution. Human beings, it is argued, evolved not from individual adults, but from the young of primates who had acquired, like the axolotl, the capacity for reproduction. What interests Agamben is that this “eternal child” is “so little specialized and so totipotent that it rejects any specific destiny and any determined environment”; unlike the other animals, who “develop only the infinitely repeatable possibilities fixed in the genetic code” and thus “attend only to the Law,” humans—and only humans, though many other animal species display neotenic traits and behaviors—are “able to pay attention precisely to what has not been written, to somatic possibilities that are arbitrary and uncodified” and are thus “free from any genetic prescription” (1995, 95, emphasis added). Prozorov (2014, 73) rightly notes how paradoxical it is that the example Agamben chooses to illustrate the exclusively human phenomenon of infancy is a nonhuman animal17: the axolotl is seen as the exception among animals (though this is empirically untrue), while this exceptionality is considered the rule for human beings. Or, in Chrulew’s words, “Agamben’s anti-biologism here relies, in fact, on a biologism of animals” 17 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 behavior and opens it up to a new, possible use (Agamben 2007a, 85).

Chapter One

14

(2012, 56).18 This exceptionalist pattern returns in a seminal 1986 lecture, published only in 1999 as “On Potentiality”: Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality. (1999d, 182, emphasis in the original)

Human exceptionality consists in the potential not to adhere to the species’ limited set of possibilities, and this “not to” is what bestows on humans an exceptional freedom. After all, this is a very traditional and unoriginal argument, which Agamben merely adopts from the Western philosophical tradition, and which he uncritically repeats without giving it much thought, even after the publication of The Open.19 In The Open, however, this argumentative line reproduces Heidegger’s position on the human-animal divide (or rather “abyss”), which Agamben reads precisely as the culmination of the metaphysical tradition. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics Heidegger famously adopted Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt as the species-specific, spatiotemporal, subjective frame of reference of animal life, which ultimately restricts animality to a limited set of possibilities—what Heidegger referred to as “disinhibitors.” “Captivation” (Benommenheit) is how Heidegger characterized the animal’s limited and deterministic relation with its disinhibitors. For Heidegger, it is the impossibility of escaping the limits of its captivation that constitutes the animal’s “poverty in world.” The Dasein in profound boredom can experience instead “the disconcealing of the originary possibilitization (that is, pure potentiality) in the suspension and withholding of all concrete and specific possibilities” (Agamben 2004, 67). This is how Agamben formulates Heidegger’s thesis:

18 This

point will be taken up and expanded in Chapter Two. 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 (in the sense of the Aristotelian energeia), and is thus, in his essence, inoperative, that is, a potential being, open to all possibilities. 19

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What appears for the first time as such in the deactivation >…@ of possibility, then, is the very origin of potentiality—and with it, of Dasein, that is, the being which exists in the form of potentiality-for-being >poteressere@. But precisely for this reason, this potentiality or originary possibilitization constitutively has the form of a potential-not-to >potenzadi-non@, of an impotentiality, insofar as it is able to >può@ only in beginning from a being able not to >poter non@, that is, from a deactivation of single, specific, factical possibilities. (Agamben 2004, 67)

But if, therefore, the human is “simply an animal that has learned to become bored” (Agamben 2004, 70) and has become human through a suspension of animality’s captivation, then this whole construction does nothing but replicate the inclusive exclusion of animality that lies at the very core of Western metaphysics. Excluding animal life from potentialities and freedom represents the basic workings of the anthropological machine. To be “outside of being” means engendering indistinction, that is, deactivating and de-positioning this anthropocentric edifice and all its historical declinations, from the “Open” to language, law, history, nature, biology, genetic code, and biological or historical destiny. It means letting both humans and animals “be outside of being, saved precisely in their being unsavable” (Agamben 2004, 92). If Agamben’s biopolitical project started from the thesis that “>t@his biopolitical body that is bare life must itself >…@ be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life” (Agamben 1998, 188), then this body is the animal body unmarked by any historical and metaphysical signature—first and foremost the signature “human.” And bare life becomes thus a life of pure potentiality insofar as it is completely unmarked—indistinct—and finally free from any distinction and determination. Admittedly Agamben never pursued this bigger project, but he certainly opened up the field when finally “abandoning” the Homo Sacer project for others to continue and “develop” (cf. Agamben 2016, xiii). The Entwicklungsfähigkeit of his understanding of “the animal,” what needs to be taken up and fleshed out, is a deeper and more comprehensive appraisal of animality, and this is the task he has assigned to the coming philosophy. ʠ Grass. Agamben concluded the essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” with an uplifting image of Bartleby the scrivener (a “reversal” in respect to traditional interpretations), where life is returned to pure (im)potentiality: “There is sky and there is grass. And the creature knows perfectly well ‘where it is’” (1999d, 271). But between sky and grass, Agamben choses grass. His recent autobiography, Self-portrait in the Studio (Autoritratto

16

Chapter One

nello studio), ends in fact with these words: “But if I had to tell now in what I finally invested my hopes and my faith, I could only confess in an undertone: not in the sky—in grass. >…@ Grass, grass is God. In grass—in God—are all those I have loved. For the grass and in grass and like grass I have lived and I will live” (2017, 166-67). Like Deleuze and Guattari, who counterposed the transcendent, metaphysical tree—firmly rooted, vertical and sky-bound—to anti-metaphysical, horizontal, earth-bound grass (1987, 7-8), Agamben choses grass as the final image of life as pure immanence, of a life finally released even from the ultimate signature of “animality” and returned to pure potential.

CHAPTER TWO OUTSIDE OF BEING: POTENTIALITY BEYOND ANTHROPOCENTRISM

1. Potentiality and Anthropocentrism It has long been noted, especially by his Anglophone readers, that Agamben’s central and distinguishing preoccupation, which is present throughout all of his works, is the issue of “potentiality.”1 He attests to this himself when, in the opening of “On Potentiality,” he writes: “Following Wittgenstein’s suggestion, according to which philosophical problems become clearer if they are formulated as questions concerning the meaning of words, I could state the subject of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb ‘can’ [potere]. What do I mean when I say: ‘I can, I cannot’?” (Agamben 1999d, 177). This point, as Leland de la Durantaye notes (2000, 4), is extended into a general definition of philosophy as such in “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” where Agamben remarks: “in its deepest intention, philosophy is a firm assertion of potentiality, the construction of an experience of the possible as such” (1999d, 249). At first glance, this declaration seems to collide with another of Agamben’s famous statements, which he made two years after “On Potentiality” was delivered as a conference paper (1987) and four years before the original publication of “Bartleby” (1993). In “Experimentum Linguae,” the 1989 preface to the French edition of Infancy and History, Agamben explains: 1

The Italian term Agamben uses is potenza, which is the common translation of the Aristotelian įȪȞĮȝȚȢ (dynamis). In Agamben Anglophone scholarship, a sort of “norm” has been established by Daniel Heller-Roazen’s early translations to render potenza as “potentiality”; in Agamben’s use, however, at times the connotation of the term approaches that of “potency” and “power” in a productive ambiguity often lost in English translations. In his more recent translations, Adam Kotsko often refers to the term “potential,” which is how dynamis is counterposed against “act” in Aristotle (like “potentiality” and “actuality”). Here I will use all these terms according to the existing translations, though the productive polysemy of the Italian potenza must always be kept in mind.

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Chapter Two If for every author there exists a question which defines the motivum of his thought, then the precise scope of these questions coincides with the terrain towards which all my work is orientated. In both my written and unwritten books, I have stubbornly pursued only one train of thought: what is the meaning of “there is language”; what is the meaning of “I speak”? (Agamben 1993c, 5)

This apparent conflict has led to different emphases in the interpretations of Agamben’s philosophy, whereby de la Durantaye, for example, singles out potentiality as his central idea (2009, 4ff.), while Alex Murray, among others, argues that for Agamben language is paramount (2010, 11). This conflict, however, as has also been noted, is only apparent. In fact, as Daniel Heller-Roazen has pointed out, the originality of Agamben’s project consists precisely in “conceiv>ing] the existence of language as the existence of potentiality,” which means that the reflection on language must therefore be a reflection on the mode of existence of potentiality (Heller-Roazen 1999, 13; emphasis in the original). Or, as de la Durantaye puts it, the two declarations quoted above are, in their deepest intuition, the same; they are “different facets of a single question,” and the “experimentum linguae [is in fact] an experience of pure potentiality” (2000, 5). Agamben clearly elucidates this point in “Experimentum Linguae”: The double articulation of language and speech seems, therefore, to constitute the specific structure of human language. Only from this can be derived the true meaning of that opposition of dynamis and energeia, of potency and act, which Aristotle's thought has bequeathed to philosophy and Western science. Potency—or knowledge—is the specifically human faculty of connectedness as lack; and language, in its split between language and speech, structurally contains this connectedness, is nothing other than this connectedness. (1993c, 7)

The ontological split between dynamis and energeia, between potential and act, thus rests on the specific structure of human language and its double articulation in langue and parole, in a potential langue that, in each single instance, can (or can decide not to) actualize itself in a concrete and particular parole. Therefore, Agamben concludes, “the only possible answer” to the question of potentiality, to the question about “the grammar of the verb ‘to be able’ […] is an experience of language” (Agamben 1993c, 7; cf. Colebrook and Maxwell 2016, 37-41). This point will mark Agamben’s philosophy in all its phases, and in The Sacrament of Language—the volume of the Homo Sacer series especially devoted to language—it takes the following form: “man is not limited to acquiring

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language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language” (2011a, 68, emphasis in the original). This claim indicates that Agamben’s reflection on potentiality is intrinsically logocentric. As is well known, the cornerstone of Agamben’s ontology of potentiality is his reading of Book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, to which he returns time and again, from “On Potentiality” to What is Real? (2018b) and beyond, in a double movement of building on and distancing himself from Aristotle. In turn, Agamben’s interpretation owes much to Heidegger’s 1931 lecture course on Aristotle’s Book Theta (1995a): like Heidegger and against Aristotle, Agamben emphasizes the ontological precedence of potentiality over actuality, but, unlike Heidegger, who based his interpretation on the notion of “ownmost potentiality-for-being” [eigensten Seinkönnen], Agamben’s many interpretations dwell on the “potentiality not to” or “impotentiality” as the essential and intrinsic peculiarity of the concept. This point has been well explained and interpreted in Agamben scholarship and there is no need to linger on it here. What I want to emphasize instead is that, together with the centrality of the question of potential for Western ontology, Aristotle and Heidegger have also bequeathed to Agamben a logocentric and anthropocentric vantage point that confines his project within the hackneyed framework of human exceptionalism, thereby undermining its originality. In Agamben, as in Aristotle, Heidegger, and the whole Western tradition, human freedom is always defined against animal unfreedom. One frequently encounters formulations such as, “uniquely among living beings, man…” (2011a, 68), in which nonhuman animals are depicted as lacking that which human beings uniquely possess. The basic formulation, which I have already cited in chapter One, is already reproduced in “On Potentiality”: Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality. (1999d, 182, emphasis in the original)

Human potenza (in the sense of potential/potentiality, but also in the sense of potency and power) is ultimately what constitutes human freedom (and the lack of it is, by implication, what constitutes nonhuman unfreedom). Agamben continues: the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to

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Chapter Two have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is […] to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil. (1999d, 182-83)

And this is why freedom is an exclusively human phenomenon. In line with the exceptionalist tradition stretching from Aristotle to Heidegger and beyond, Agamben’s notion of potential is marked by logos/language and freedom, the possession of which definitively separates human from nonhuman animals. This anthropocentric logocentrism is already apparent in the Italian title of the 1987 conference paper that the English translation “On Potentiality” does not retain: the original title is in fact “La potenza del pensiero,” that is, the potential of thought, of an exclusively human logos. This link between potentiality and logos, whereby potentiality in general is conflated with the potentiality of thought in particular, had already been established in the “Threshold” which opens Idea of Prose. Here Damascius, the last scholarch of the School or Athens, finds in the wax writing tablet the perfect paradigm of “absolute” and “pure” potentiality: the potentiality of thought (1995, 34).2 This link also marks the various figures of Agamben’s soteriology (all identified, along the lines of Heidegger’s Dasein, by potentiality), from the “whatever singularity” of The Coming Community, construed upon the experimentum linguae and “condemned” to be their own (im)potentiality (1993b, 44, 82-83), to the “form-of-life” of the Homo Sacer project, intrinsically bound to “thought” as the “experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence” (2000, 9). As intrinsically bound to logos, moreover, the potentiality of both whatever singularity and form-of-life is pitched against what Agamben calls “biological destiny” or “biological vocation” (1993b, 43; 2000, 4): biology, as for the whole Western tradition, is here reduced to necessity (instead of being seen as condition of possibility3), to a prison from which only logos can grant an escape. 2

The image of the writing tablet with nothing actually written on it to symbolize the potentiality of the intellect comes of course from Aristotle’s De anima (3.4, 430a1). 3 Against the metaphysical tradition, freedom can rather be thought of as the freedom to be what one is, i.e., the fullest expression of one’s species and individual character. In other words, freedom can be understood as the ability to fulfill one’s species-specific (and individual) entelechy, something that occurs precisely when the defining limits of one’s species-specific and individual nature are reached. This is as true for human as it is for nonhuman animals. I owe this insight to Zipporah Weisberg. Relevant here, though exceeding the scope of this

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Lacking logos, nonhuman animals are forever confined to the Aristotelian category aloga zoa.4 Biology, in this tradition, is not a neutral science but rather a powerful dispositif, an apparatus aimed at marking division lines by reducing nonhuman animals to their “animality,” by literally “animalizing” them, in order for the freedom of humans to emerge. Therefore, as Agamben writes in “Form-of-Life,” “human beings—as beings of power [potenza] who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves—are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness” (2000, 4, emphases added). Humans are the only beings, as the later essay “The Work of Man” argues, who have no pre-established (in the sense of biologically determined) “work,” no necessary energeia as “a proper nature and essence,” and are thus open and “free” for happiness and politics (2007b, 1-10). This (all-too traditional) demonization of biology as unfreedom finds its clearest expression in the chapter “The Idea of Infancy” in Idea of Prose, where Agamben writes: Animals are not concerned with possibilities of their soma that are not inscribed in the germen: contrary to what might be thought, they pay no attention whatsoever to that which is mortal (the soma is, in each individual, that which in any case is doomed to die), and they develop only the infinitely repeatable possibilities fixed in the genetic code. They attend only to the Law—only to what is written. (1995, 95)

Only human beings are “in the condition of being able [poter] to pay attention precisely to what has not been written, to somatic possibilities that are arbitrary and uncodified,” truly free from “any genetic prescription” (1995, 95). Only human beings, as the only truly potential beings, are truly free.

2. The Apparatus of Infancy “The Idea of Infancy” can be taken as paradigmatic for the anthropocentric bias of Agamben’s understanding of potential(ity) not only because it more explicitly and more clearly exposes the workings of the dichotomy between biology/necessity/unfreedom and logos/potentiality/freedom, but chapter or this book, is the capability approach championed by, among others, Martha Nussbaum (e.g., 2000; 2006). 4 In these formulations, biology recalls the notion of “fate” as deployed by Walter Benjamin in the early 1920s. Cf. Benjamin (1996).

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also because it constitutes in a sense a sort of turning point in the evolution of the concept of potentiality in Agamben’s philosophy. As, among others, de la Durantaye (2000, 22-23) has pointed out, during the 1980s the concept and the terminology of infancy progressively fade out and are replaced by the vocabulary of potentiality; “infancy,” therefore, would be a sort of forebear of potentiality, and “The Idea of Infancy” (originally published in 1985) stages the passage from one concept to the other. In the early phase of Agamben’s reflection, infancy had taken central stage as the transcendental experience through which the human animal becomes “Man.” The eponymous first essay of Infancy and History identifies in infancy (where etymologically the prefix in- negates the Latin verb fari, to speak) not the subjective and psychological state chronologically preceding language and that ceases to exist once the in-fant acquires language, but rather the transcendental gap separating langue and parole— in the later vocabulary: the potentiality of speech and its actualization— that forces the human animal into speech as subjectivation and always persists beside language as its (im)possibility. Again, this argument is construed upon the disavowal of animality: 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 […], between sign system and discourse. Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. In them la voix sacrée de la terre ingénue (the sacred voice of the unknowing earth)—which Mallarmé, hearing the chirp of a cricket, sets against the human voice as une and nondecomposée (one and indivisible)—knows no breaks or interruptions. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say I. (1993c, 51-52)

As noted above, it is important for Agamben to point out that infancy in his usage is not the human developmental stage—the child. To make this distinction clear, in “On Potentiality” (written only two years after the publication of Idea of Prose) he will characterize, with Aristotle, the potentiality of the child as “generic potentiality,” that which necessitates an alteration and a becoming to develop into actuality (e.g., the child learning to read and write), while he characterizes “true” potentiality as the “existing potentiality,” the potentiality of a poet, someone who can already read and write and need only put those abilities into use (viz., by writing

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poems) (1999d, 179; cf. Faulkner 2010).5 However, the first connotation of “infancy” keeps finding its way into Agamben’s discussions of the concept, some of which are based on a sentimentalized view of childhood. As a result, Agamben inadvertently contaminates his notion of infancy with a troubling and irreconcilable ambiguity (Faulkner 2010), which, in turn, probably contributes to his abandonment of the term altogether. These incompatible conceptions of infancy appear in “The Idea of Infancy” where, on the one hand, infancy denotes “pure potentiality,” but, on the other, also clearly refers to the physical and psychological phase in human development which is chronologically tied to language learning. The ambiguous paradigm of infancy in “The Idea of Infancy,” as we have already seen in the previous chapter, is the axolotl, a neotenic salamander native to Mexico that Agamben uses as a key to interpret the process of anthropogenesis. Like the axolotl, who retains larval (or infantile) traits in adulthood, perhaps “man did not evolve from individual adults but from the young of a primate which, like the axolotl, had prematurely acquired the capacity for reproduction” (Agamben 1995, 96). This “eternal infancy” of man would explain human potentiality: the human being is “so completely abandoned to its own state of infancy, and so little specialized and so totipotent that it rejects any specific destiny and any determined environment in order to hold onto its immaturity and helplessness” (1995, 96). Here Agamben makes use of the theory of neoteny as a key feature of human evolution first proposed in the 1920s and still discussed today in evolutionary debates. As we have already seen, the term “neoteny” (extended youth) was coined in 1884 by the German zoologist Julius Kollmann (1834-1918) precisely to describe the axolotl, but it was also applied to human evolution and popularized by the Dutch anatomist Louis (Lodewijk) Bolk (1866-1930) in the 1920s in a series of papers which culminated in the 1926 pamphlet Das Problem der Menschwerdung (The Problem of Hominization). It is in this text that one finds Bolk’s famous definition that Agamben also quotes (without

5 In “Bartleby” (1999d, 246-47) Agamben uses Avicenna’s metaphor of writing to illustrate the various levels of potentiality: “There is a potentiality (which he calls material) that resembles the condition of a child who may certainly one day learn to write but does not yet know anything about writing. Then there is a potentiality (which he calls possible) that belongs to the child who has begun to write with pen and ink and knows how to form the first letters. And there is, finally, a complete or perfect potentiality that belongs to the scribe who is in full possession of the art of writing in the moment in which he does not write (potential scriptoris perfecti in arte sua, cum non scripserit).”

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quotation marks6): “man, in his bodily development, is a primate fetus that has become sexually mature” (1926, 8).7 The evolutionary advantages of neoteny rest on the fact that, by slowing down growth and extending the childhood phase, the organism indefinitely prolongs the phase of learning that guarantees heightened receptiveness, mental flexibility, and plasticity of behavior (i.e., its potentiality), and it is obvious why this hypothesis was and is able to evoke so much fascination, especially among philosophers such as Agamben. It is highly paradoxical, however, as we have already seen (Prozorov 2014, 73), that the example Agamben chooses to use to illustrate the exclusively human phenomenon of infancy belongs to the animal realm. In fact, the phenomenon of retarded development is common in nature (Gould 1996, 148), and the risk that the proponents of this hypothesis run, including Agamben, is to build upon it a teleological construct that sees neoteny as the peak of a pyramid culminating in the human species (Mazzeo 2014, 120). As contemporary supporters of the neoteny hypothesis remark, humans also present peramorphic (i.e., non-pedomorphic, non-neotenic) traits, such as large noses and long legs, so only some juvenile traits are retained while others are relinquished; neoteny is thus not an all-or-nothing phenomenon and does not explain hominization as such (Gould 1977, 36465). More disturbingly, the supporters of the neoteny hypothesis, such as American biologist and zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, must distance themselves from the ideological distortions that Bolk enfolded into it: in line with some racial theories of the 1920s, Bolk used neoteny to “rank” human races from the (supposedly) least neotenic (black Africans) to the most neotenic (white Western Europeans), whereby the degree of neoteny present in a particular group was said to determine and/or reflect their 6 Agamben often “forgets” to properly acknowledge all his sources, but rather than being sloppiness or intellectual dishonesty, this practice corresponds to what Walter Benjamin called “the art of citing without quotation marks” (1999b, 458). This “art” is fundamental for Agamben’s intellectual project and is explicitly acknowledged by Agamben himself (e.g., 2005, 138-145). As de la Durantaye writes, “[t]o cite without quotation marks is to offer the idea without the imprimatur of an author or authority. This requires of the idea that it stand or fall on its own merits and not find automatic support from its lineage” (2009, 146). 7 Agamben has remained fascinated by this hypothesis and by Bolk’s pamphlet, which he continues to refer to (uncritically, beyond what he wrote in “The Idea of Infancy”), including in relatively recent publications, such as his autobiography Autoritratto nello studio (2017a, 128-30), The Fire and the Tale (2017b, 52), and Creation and Anarchy (2019b, 26). For a discussion of these theses, see Dickinson (2011, 142-46).

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position on the racial hierarchy (black Africans were deemed inferior— more apish, “less human”—and white Europeans were regarded as superior) (1926, 38; 1929, 25-27). Gould underlines Bolk’s racism and intellectual dishonesty in ranking white Europeans at the top, since, from a purely anatomical point of view, Asians and not Western Europeans are the most neotenic, and women are more neotenic than men (Gould 1977, 358-59; 1996, 149-50).8 The neoteny hypothesis, moreover, was not an epiphenomenon of the “racist” 1920s, but has remained operational until recently: for example, in the 1970s, precisely when Agamben was developing his theory of infancy, the German-born British psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck (1971, 1973) proposed again a neotenic argument to justify the relegation of black people to an inferior status to whites (cf. Gould 1996, 150). Finally, neoteny in animals is also one of the major features of domestication, which is the biopolitical apparatus par excellence9: juvenile behaviors and characteristics are selected in order to more easily domesticate a species, since young animals are less aggressive and more easily manageable. Neoteny—and infancy with it—is therefore just another component of what Agamben will later call the “anthropological machine,” another tool with which to mark out divisions and separations along racist, sexist, and speciesist lines. The later notion of potentiality will divest itself of many of the ambiguities of infancy, but it will retain nonetheless a logocentric and anthropocentric bias, which strongly limits its efficacy in biopolitical discourses. Though Agamben from the very beginning freely (albeit cursorily) acknowledges the intrinsic violence of 8

In Gould’s objection, however, the apparatus of infancy is still at work: constructing Asians as neotenic (i.e., child-like) is a (racist, orientalist) way of ranking them according to racial features. I thank Dinesh Wadiwel for this clarification. 9 The complex of techniques and knowledge (or power-knowledge) deployed to achieve the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations that characterizes biopower is what defines, first and foremost (both chronologically and conceptually), the human domestication of animals, which can therefore be considered the ur-form of biopower, or, as Wadiwel writes (2015, 94), the “spiritual home” (the nomos) of biopolitics. This is already evident in the Foucauldian paradigm of “pastoral power”: the image of the good shepherd caring for its flock and tending to all its needs from birth to death not only unveils the essence of biopower (where “care” is a function of domination), but also clearly spells out the material and historical origins of this form of power. That traditional biopolitical thinkers from Foucault to Agamben and beyond did not focus on these origins is due again to the anthropocentric bias of this tradition. On this point see, among many others, Wadiwel (2015, especially chapter 2) and Mackintosh (2017).

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human potenza (as potential, potency, and power)—as at the end of Language and Death, where he blames the violence of human action on its lack of (biological) foundation (1991, 105-6),10 or in “Experimentum Linguae,” where he blames the violence of human action on the original split in language (1993c, 7)11—he will have to take a much more radical step to evade the Scylla and Charybdis of logocentrism and anthropocentrism that keep threatening to engulf his soteriological proposal.

3. Outside of Being As we have seen in the previous chapter, Agamben’s “biopolitical turn” of the early 1990s forced him to reconsider his anthropocentric bias and to distance himself (at least partially) from his previous logocentrism, since in biopolitics political life becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the (animal) life of the body, and (human) animality thus takes on a radically new political role. In biopolitics, the Heideggerian “abyss” separating human and nonhuman animals—precisely via the concept of potentiality—

10 “Violence

is not something like an originary biological fact that man is forced to assume and regulate in his own praxis through sacrificial institutions; rather it is the very ungroundedness of human action (which the sacrificial mythologeme hopes to cure) that constitutes the violent character (that is, contra naturam, according to the Latin meaning of the word) of sacrifice. All human action, inasmuch as it is not naturally grounded but must construct its own foundation, is, according to the sacrificial mythologeme, violent. And it is this sacred violence that sacrifice presupposes in order to repeat it and regulate it within its own structure. The unnaturalness of human violence—without common measure with respect to natural violence—is a historical product of man, and as such it is implicit in the very conception of the relation between nature and culture, between living being and logos, where man grounds his own humanity. The foundation of violence is the violence of the foundation” (Agamben 1991, 105-6). 11 “The double articulation of language and speech seems, therefore, to constitute the specific structure of human language. Only from this can be derived the true meaning of that opposition of dynamis and energeia, of potency and act, which Aristotle's thought has bequeathed to philosophy and Western science. Potency— or knowledge—is the specifically human faculty of connectedness as lack; and language, in its split between language and speech, structurally contains this connectedness, is nothing other than this connectedness. Man does not merely know nor merely speak; he is neither Homo sapiens nor Homo loquens, but Homo sapiens loquendi, and this entwinement constitutes the way in which the West has understood itself and laid the foundation for both its knowledge and its skills. The unprecedented violence of human power has its deepest roots in this structure of language” (Agamben 1993c, 7)

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becomes more and more untenable, which requires Agamben to rethink or refashion the concept of potentiality itself. Agamben’s reevaluation of potentiality begins in Homo Sacer with the chapter “Potentiality and Law,” where he notes that the Aristotelian analysis of potentiality provides Western philosophy with nothing less than the “paradigm of sovereignty”: For the sovereign ban, which applies to the exception in no longer applying, corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains itself in relation to actuality precisely through its ability not to be. Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recognoscens) other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself. (1998, 46, emphasis in the original)

In this sense, “potentiality and actuality are simply the two faces of the sovereign self-grounding of Being” (1998, 47); they build up the ontological structure that characterizes Western metaphysics. Heidegger (1995a) had already claimed that the Aristotelian subjection of potentiality to actuality had marked the entire history of metaphysics by determining its fundamental ontology. But Agamben takes a step further here: it is not the subjection of one to the other, but rather the very split of Being into potentiality and actuality that constitutes the structure of metaphysics. Therefore, when he calls here for a radical rethinking of the relation between potentiality and actuality, and for a new ontology of potentiality, Agamben points precisely “beyond this relation” (1998, 44): one must think the existence of potentiality without any relation to Being in the form of actuality—not even in the extreme form of the ban and the potentiality not to be, and of actuality as the fulfillment and manifestation of potentiality—and think the existence of potentiality even without any relation to being in the form of the gift of the self and of letting be. This, however, implies nothing less than thinking ontology and politics beyond every figure of relation, beyond even the limit relation that is the sovereign ban. (1998, 47)

Since, as we have seen, the opposition of potential and act originates from the double articulation of language into langue and parole, language itself is caught in the same sovereign logic:

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Chapter Two Language as the pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from every concrete instance of speech, divides the linguistic from the nonlinguistic and allows for the opening of areas of meaningful speech in which certain terms correspond to certain denotations. Language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself. The particular structure of law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to “speak the law,” ius dicere. (1998, 21)

This anthropocentric logocentrism of human potentiality comes increasingly under fire in Agamben’s biopolitical critique precisely because it ultimately constitutes the ontological frame of Western metaphysics from which his soteriology seeks a messianic way out. Just as the critique of operativity points to a new ontology of potentiality beyond the sovereign split/relation between potentiality and actuality, so the critique of language points to a new “use” beyond its communicative and signifying—that is, sovereign— structure (cf. Salzani 2015b). The parabola that began in Infancy and History and Language and Death with the analysis of human language in contraposition to animal “voice”—where Agamben argued that there is no “human voice” in the sense that “the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey” (1993c, 3)—ends in the conclusion of The Sacrament of Language: 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. (2011a, 71)

What William Watkin calls “Agamben’s turn against language” (2014b, 249) is evident in Agamben’s later emphasis on the fact that language is but a historical contingency emanating from a now-exhausted metaphysical tradition, that language is, ultimately, a “signature” (Watking 2014b, 249) of Western metaphysical anthropocentrism (and humanism). As we have seen in the previous chapter, it can be and has been argued (Castanò 2018; also e.g., Prozorov 2014 and Colebrook and Maxwell 2016) that the overcoming of the metaphysical split between dynamis and energeia and between langue and parole (as well as between voice and logos and all the other dichotomies generated by this split), which endows Western ontology with its deadly negativity, has always been the goal of

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Agamben’s messianic philosophy. Therefore, a substantial continuity should be seen beneath the superficial “turn” that biopolitics impressed upon Agamben’s thought, and the apparent discontinuity between his anthropocentric/logocentric and non- (or less) anthropocentric/logocentric phases should not be exaggerated. However, it is only in The Open that an explicit “way out” from the negative deadlock of anthropocentric metaphysics is concretely named: if “potentiality and actuality are simply the two faces of the sovereign self-grounding of Being” (1998, 47), then Being is the name itself of Western metaphysics, and the only way out is “Outside of Being.” This is of course the title of the last chapter of The Open, and it is here that a proper anti-metaphysical and post-anthropocentric strategy should be sought. In his reading of Heidegger in The Open, Agamben basically rehearses his own anthropocentric theory of potentiality. It is important here to repeat, and insist on, the point made in the previous chapter: in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995b) Heidegger adopted Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt as the species-specific, spatio-temporal, subjective reference frame of animal life, which ultimately cages animality within a limited set of possibilities, determined by what Uexküll called “carriers of significance” and Heidegger re-named “disinhibitors.” Heidegger called “captivation” (Benommenheit) the animal’s limited and deterministic relation with its disinhibitors, and it is the impossibility of escaping the limits of its captivation that constitutes the animal’s “poverty in world.” Dasein, to the contrary, experiences in profound boredom “the disconcealing of the originary possibilitization (that is, pure potentiality) in the suspension and withholding of all concrete and specific possibilities” (Agamben 2004: 67). Here it is worth repeating Agamben’s central formulation. For Heidegger, [w]hat appears for the first time as such in the deactivation >…@ of possibility, then, is the very origin of potentiality—and with it, of Dasein, that is, the being which exists in the form of potentiality-for-being >poteressere@. But precisely for this reason, this potentiality or originary possibilitization constitutively has the form of a potential-not-to >potenzadi-non@, of an impotentiality, insofar as it is able to >può@ only in beginning from a being able not to >poter non@, that is, from a deactivation of single, specific, factical possibilities. (Agamben 2004: 67)

As we have seen, this is also the framework of Agamben’s own theory of potentiality before The Open, but in the latter it is presented as the culmination of the metaphysical tradition: excluding animal life from potentialities and freedom represents the core function of the

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anthropological machine. Agamben’s trademark call for a désoeuvrement of metaphysical machines and apparatuses implies here a deposition of his own anthropocentric philosophy of potentiality. Instead of “listening,” with Heidegger, to Being’s self-disclosure in language, Agamben evokes an exit from Being itself based on the very deposition of language and/as logos. The chapter “Outside of Being” opens in fact with an epigraph taken from Furio Jesi’s Esoterismo e linguaggio mitologico (Esotericism and Mythological Language, 2003): “Esotericism means: the articulation of modalities of non-knowledge.” What interests Agamben here, as he makes clear in an essay on Jesi originally published in 1999, is the self-expropriation and self-abolition Jesi identified in Rilke’s esotericism as “modalities of non-knowledge” (Agamben 2019c). “Outside of Being” revolves in fact around a definitive “farewell to the logos and to its own history” (2004, 90), what Agamben calls ignoscenza, a neologism he coins from the Latin verb ignoscere, which is at the root of “ignorance” (Italian: ignoranza), but that in Latin means “to forgive.” The English translator chooses to render it as “aknowledge,” pointing out, however, that it should best be understood as a sort of “forgetful forgiveness” (2004, 99n3). The désoeuvrement of the anthropological machine as a farewell to logos and a-knowledge, Agamben writes, “means in this sense not simply to let something be, but to leave something outside of being, to render it unsavable” (2004, 91). “[O]nly with man can there be something like [B]eing, and beings become accessible and manifest” (2004, 91), so bidding farewell to the logos and its permanent state of exception means to take leave of Being and knowledge: The zone of nonknowledge—or of a-knowledge—that is at issue here— Agamben writes—is beyond both knowing and not knowing, beyond both disconcealing and concealing, beyond both being and the nothing. But what is thus left to be outside of being is not thereby negated or taken away; it is not, for this reason, inexistent. It is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings. (2004, 91-92)

It is admittedly not very clear what this exit from Being would concretely involve—hence the criticisms, like those by Krzysztof Ziarek (2008) or Matthew Chrulew (2012), that the power relations between humans and animals in Agamben’s scheme would ultimately remain unchanged. The jamming of the anthropological machine and the “deposition” of the human-animal divide would not destroy the terms of the dichotomy—this is precisely the point of Agamben’s notion of désoeuvrement—but would de-activate their functions and thereby open them to a new “use,” which

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cannot however be foreseen and foreordained. So one cannot tell in advance what a new “use” of humanity and animality would or could look like. The important point, however, is that the old use—the discourse of Being and/as anthropocentrism—would be deposed: the animal, Agamben writes, insofar as it “knows neither beings nor nonbeings, neither open nor closed, is outside of being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness. To let the animal be would then mean: to let it be outside of being” (2004, 91). Likewise, to let “Man” be outside of Being would involve the deposition of anthropocentrism itself.12 What all of this means for a philosophy of potentiality is sketched out or hinted at in the epilogue to The Use of Bodies, the final volume of the Homo Sacer project, titled “Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential.” The concept of destituent potential (potenza destituente) is the attempt to fulfill the task Agamben had set for himself twenty years earlier in the chapter “Potentiality and Law” in Homo Sacer (which is in fact extensively quoted in “Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential”: 2016, 267-68): the task of thinking potential beyond any relation to act and actuality. To this end, in The Use of Bodies Agamben resorts to the notion of “contact” as developed by Giorgio Colli: the “metaphysical interstice” or the moment in which two entities are separated only by a void of representation. “In contact,” Colli wrote, “two points are in contact in the limited sense that between them there is nothing: contact is the indication of a representative nothing, which nevertheless is a certain nothing, because what it is not (its representative outline) gives it a spatio-temporal arrangement” (Colli qtd. in Agamben 2016, 237). So, for Agamben, destituent potential is a potential that is capable of always deposing ontological-political relations in order to cause a contact […] to appear between their elements. Contact is not a point of tangency nor a quid or a substance in which two elements communicate: it is defined only by an absence of representation, only by a caesura. Where a relation is rendered destitute and interrupted, its elements are in this sense in contact, because the absence of every relation is exhibited between them. (Agamben 2016, 272)

12

“Outside of Being” is an exit from and not a return to a supposedly primitive animality. The phrase does not denote, therefore, as Simone Gustafsson believes (2013, 14-15), “animality [as] the necessity that serves as the counterpoint to human potentiality,” but rather the overcoming of the very dichotomy and contraposition that constitute the building blocks of Western metaphysics (and its concept of Being)—that is, a “farewell to ontology—a letting go of being” (Pick 2006).

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A life no longer divided from itself and finally appearing in its free and intact form (2016, 272-73) would be, as Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell propose (2016, 103), “mere life” as “a life that is perfect potentiality because it need not act in order to be what it is—as the zone of a new ethics beyond humanism and recognition.” Whether this is enough for a philosophy of potential to genuinely overcome anthropocentrism remains an open question. Ultimately, the frame of Agamben’s thought has remained consistent throughout his long and rich career, and all successive recalibrations have never removed the human from the center of his work (cf. Colebrook and Maxwell 2016: 167). That is to say, Agamben did not really follow up on the anthropodecentrism he advocates in “Outside of Being” and soon “relapsed” into his more traditional (and more anthropocentric) vocabulary and categories. By “abandoning” his work for others to continue (2016, xiii), however, Agamben has assigned a clear task to the coming philosophy, that of carrying out his demand to bid farewell to anthropocentrism and ferry philosophy beyond the dire straits of metaphysics at its end: outside of Being.

CHAPTER THREE THE HUMAN AS SIGNATURE: BEYOND HUMAN NATURE

1. In his debate with Chomsky, held in Eindhoven in November 1971 and titled On Human Nature (2006), Foucault, right from the start, declares himself suspicious of the very concept “human nature.” To explain his reluctance to avow the concept in question, he points out that every science uses different concepts at different levels of elaboration and with different functions, some of which define the scientific practice itself and differentiate it from other practices, delimit its field, and define the totality of its tasks. The notion of “life” as deployed historically by the field of biology is one example of this. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the concept of life was of little import in the study of nature, where living beings were instead classified in a complex hierarchy, and where what mattered most was to establish that their position therein was permanent and irrefutable. With the “invention” of biology, however, the description and analysis of living beings occur in a field of relations and processes called the “science of life.” This does not mean, Foucault insists, that the study of life establishes itself as a “biological science” or that the concept of life is responsible for the organization of biological knowledge. Rather, in Foucault’s estimation, the birth of biology was the product of a series of new concepts in scientific discourse which created the notion of life that allowed us to name, delimit, and situate this type of discourse. In Foucault’s words: “the notion of life is not a scientific concept; it has been an epistemological indicator of which the classifying, delimiting, and other functions had an effect on scientific discussions, and not on what they were talking about” (Chomsky and Foucault 2006, 6). The concept of “human nature” belongs to the same typology: In the history of knowledge, the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of an epistemological indicator to designate certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history. I would find it difficult to see in this a scientific concept. (Chomsky and Foucault 2006, 7)

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Against Chomsky, who insists that, although our concept of human nature is indeed limited, there exists nonetheless an immutable biological element, a foundation on which the exercise of our faculties rests, Foucault restates that it is very difficult to define human nature, and the terms in which this definition is from time to time formulated are always borrowed from our civilization, from our society, and from our culture (2006, 43). This means that, as Foucault had already stated in his 1967 interview with Paolo Caruso, the so-called “human sciences” do not lead to the discovery of “man”—“the truth of man, his nature, his birth, his destiny”—but actually deal with systems, structures, combinations, and forms. “[I]f we want to seriously discuss human sciences,” he concludes, “we must first of all destroy all those mindnumbing delusions that make up the idea according to which we have to look for man” (2001, 644). Chercher l’homme (Foucault’s language is as gender-blind as Agamben’s1) is not a “scientific” project since the human is but a certain semantic configuration that is historically and culturally contingent. This semantic configuration is what four decades later Agamben will call a “signature.” 2. In The Order of Things, Foucault had defined man “only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that […] will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (1989a, xxv). Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist: what existed were human beings, but not “man” as a clearly defined and proper object of knowledge. Man, or better, as Deleuze will say (1988a, 124-130), the “Man-form,” originates from the (historical and contingent) relationship that, on the threshold of modernity, is established between a series of “forces” that are internal and external to it; and only the ensemble of these forces, always precarious and unstable, will constitute the Man-form (Deleuze 1988a, 127). Moreover, from the very beginning this form has a dual character inasmuch as it is simultaneously the subject and the object of knowledge: it is an object in relation to a knowledge that is known by a subject that knows. The modern age, Foucault argues, begins not when objective and “scientific” methods are applied to the study of man, but rather when it was decided to understand “man” as a being that acquires knowledge of what makes knowledge itself possible. Foucault calls this new epistemological subject “empirico-transcendental doublet,” a “paradoxical figure in which the 1

As in the other chapters, I will not “correct” Foucault’s or Agamben’s gender blindness, but I think it is important not to let it pass unnoted.

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empirical contents of knowledge necessarily release, of themselves, the conditions that have made them possible” (Foucault 1989a, 351). This doublet, this “form,” belongs to a well-determined and contingent historical episteme. As a figure of the modern episteme, and therefore as historically determined, man cannot be considered—as it is in the a-historical humanism of Kant or the biologism of Chomsky—an unchangeable substratum, a biological foundation that as such constitutes a metaphysical destiny. An aspect of Foucault’s analysis that is particularly important for the argument about Agamben’s signatures and that I want to put forward in this chapter is: as empirico-transcendental doublet, man is never contemporary to his own origin; he is, on the contrary, “the being without origin, who has ‘neither country nor date’, whose birth is never accessible because it never took ‘place’” (1989a, 361). Thus, man defines himself in relation to an already-defined historicity: when he tries to define himself as a living being, he can uncover his own beginning only against the background of a life which itself began long before him; when he attempts to re-apprehend himself as a labouring being, he cannot bring even the most rudimentary forms of such a being to light except within a human time and space which have been previously institutionalized, and previously subjugated by society; and when he attempts to define his essence as a speaking subject, prior to any effectively constituted language, all he ever finds is the previously unfolded possibility of language, and not the stumbling sound, the first word upon the basis of which all languages and even language itself became possible. It is always against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect on what may serve for him as origin. (1989a, 359-60)

For man, therefore, the origin is not the beginning, but rather the way in which he articulates himself, historically and contingently, upon something “already existing,” upon all those forces, as Deleuze would say, which determine and constitute him as a historical “form.” This definition comes very close to the discourse that Agamben will articulate, decades later, on the signatures. 3. It is precisely from the analysis of the signatures carried out by Foucault in The Order of Things that Agamben develops his own “theory of the signatures” in The Signature of All Things. Foucault argues that the Renaissance episteme is founded on the concept of “resemblance,” and the signatures play the role of indicators that allow for the recognition of similarities. Knowledge, which is the knowledge of similarities, is based

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on the identification and deciphering of the signatures. “There are no resemblances without signatures,” Foucault writes (and Agamben quotes); “The world of similarity can only be a world of signs” (Foucault 1989a, 29; Agamben 2009a, 57). The topic of human nature and of the “invention” of man on the threshold of modernity, which is analyzed thoroughly in the second to last chapter of The Order of Things, flows nonetheless as a sort of undercurrent beneath every page of the book, secretly sustaining and fostering the argument. Even in the sections focusing on the Renaissance episteme this topic constitutes the pivot around which the archeological research revolves. According to the theory of similarity, all similarities converge on a focal point, from which they then radiate out again into the world, and this privileged point is man, who proportionally relates to the rest of creation: Upright between the surfaces of the universe, he stands in relation to the firmament (his face is to his body what the face of heaven is to the ether; his pulse beats in his veins as the stars circle the sky according to their own fixed paths; the seven orifices in his head are to his face what the seven planets are to the sky); but he is also the fulcrum upon which all these relations turn, so that we find them again, their similarity unimpaired, in the analogy of the human animal to the earth it inhabits: his flesh is a glebe, his bones are rocks, his veins great rivers, his bladder is the sea, and his seven principal organs are the metals hidden in the shafts of mines. Man’s body is always the possible half of a universal atlas. (1989a, 24-25)

The space of similarities is a space of irradiation: man is the focus and point of reference of universal similarities, and, in turn, he retransmits the similarities he receives from the world. Even the human, therefore, is traversed by signatures. In “Theory of Signatures,” Agamben does not dwell on these statements, or on the question of human nature, but rather attempts to construct a theory of signatures that goes beyond the Renaissance episteme and, once generalized and “ontologized,” constitutes (a posteriori) the methodological bulwark of his whole philosophical project. I think, however, that it is possible and opportune, starting from Agamben’s perspective on signatures, to bring the two themes together by accepting Foucault’s definition of human nature as “epistemological indicator” and linking it to the theses proposed by Agamben in The Open. If, as Agamben argues, “[a]ll research in the human sciences […] necessarily has to do with signatures” (2009a, 76), then it will also be possible to analyze at this level the concept of the “human,” which many contemporary critics have called into question. Assuming that “what at first appears to be a concept is later revealed to be

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a signature (or vice versa)” (2009a, 76), the thesis I want to put forward in this chapter is that, in Western culture (and particularly in the past two centuries), the “concept” of the human is actually nothing but a signature that sets up and gives shape to certain types of political-philosophical discourse. 4. Six years before putting forward his theory of signatures in The Signature of All Things, Agamben deconstructs the concept “human” (i.e., Homo) in The Open. Paraphrasing Furio Jesi’s notion of the “mythological machine,” Agamben argues that Homo “is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (2004, 26). What interests me in particular here is how this machine works. According to Agamben, it is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo is a constitutively “anthropomorphous” animal (that is, “resembling man,” according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human. (2004, 26-27)

The anthropological machine “recognizes” the Man-form through the apparatus of similarity, which, in turn, is based on “the taste of the epoch” (2004, 26) and is therefore historically determined. The human is the signature that allows for the recognition of the similarities that build up the Man-form and that can only be identified and deciphered on the basis of this “indicator.” This signature marks the human animal in its interior, traverses it, and severs from within the human its animal life. As a result: 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 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. (2004, 15-16)

Similarity works therefore through an apparatus of inclusion and exclusion and produces a sort of state of exception in which the outside is but the exclusion of the inside and vice versa. (Incidentally, Agamben never establishes a link between signatures and apparatuses, and in “Theory of Signatures” the term “apparatus” [dispositivo] never appears. And yet the analogy between the two concepts is evident, as per the following definition of apparatus [in “What is an Apparatus?”] that Agamben

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proposed two years before introducing his concept of signature: “I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” [2009b, 14]. The signature can thus be defined as a certain type of apparatus.) What is important is that in this mechanism Agamben explicitly defines the human as “already presupposed every time” (2004, 37), that is, as the signature that, a priori (but in the sense of Foucault’s “historical a priori” [1989a, xiii and passim]), allows for the recognition. According to Agamben, the anthropological machine presents two “models”: an ancient and a modern. The former produces the “inside” through the exclusion of an “outside,” that is, through the humanization of the animal that produces from time to time, according to “the taste of the epoch,” the slave, the barbarian, or the stranger as figures of an animal in human form. The latter works symmetrically by excluding as not human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, and producing from time to time the Jew, the néomort, and the overcomatose (2004, 37). The signature “human” allows us to identify and decipher these historical figures in what Agamben bluntly defines as “a fundamental metaphysico-political operation” (2004, 21). The determining of the border between the human and the animal is not in fact simply one question among many, but rather, as I have already argued in the previous chapters, it is the founding gesture of metaphysics, the fundamental operation in which anthropogenesis occurs. In short, it is the main question of first philosophy: the overcoming of animal physis in the direction of human history “is not an event that has been completed once and for all, but an occurrence that is always under way, that every time and in each individual decides between the human and the animal, between nature and history, between life and death” (2004, 79). But first philosophy, as Agamben will write in “Theory of Signatures,” is the science of signatures, the “archaeology of every knowledge, which explores the signatures that pertain to beings by virtue of the very fact of existing, thus predisposing them to the interpretation of specific knowledges” (2009a, 66). If pure being, On haplǀs, “is the archi-signator that imprints its transcendental marks on existent entities,” then the human is the metaphysical-political signature that marks and decides on the life of living beings. 5. But how do signatures actually work? William Watkin (2014b) proposes re-reading Agamben’s whole philosophical project using the a posteriori methodology presented in the three essays of The Signature of

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All Things as the interpretive grid. I will therefore use here the framework proposed by Watkin to support my thesis. Signatures, Watkin writes, constitute the starting point of Agamben’s philosophical archaeology: they are very large-scale concepts that have been in place for a long period of time, crossing various discursive and disciplinary boundaries and sanctioning and organizing human behavior. Signatures have a historical moment of arising, an archƝ, when they become active in sanctioning knowledge systems (2014b, xiv). (In the case of the human, this could be the immutable Platonic idea in the hyperuranion, or, more likely, the determining Aristotelian definition of zoon logon echon.) Signatures are actualized in a large number of different discourses among epochs, places, and peoples, but they maintain a certain consistency by sharing a series of terms which become operative precisely thanks to their dependence on signatures: the paradigms. Therefore signatures “describe the mode of the distribution of paradigms through time and across discourses” (Watkin 2014b, 4), and as such they are not signs but rather “what makes the sign intelligible” (Agamben 2009a, 42). They constitute therefore the “exposition of intelligibility” (Watkin 2014b, 18). An important point on which Watkin insists is that the signatures do not have a “content” of their own but simply constitute the “economy of placement” of paradigms (2014b, 40): they determine the modalities in which signs become paradigms according to the demands of their placement and their signatory logic. They present a stability and durability in time, but not a well-defined meaning, and as such they can be used in a multitude of different ways. Therefore, as Sophie Fuggle adds, signatures constitute “a movement rather than a static, fixed identity or term,” and it is precisely this “universalizing” movement that empties them of all historical content (2009, 86, 96). Agamben clarifies this point when he links the signatures to the énoncé (statement), or better the fonction énonciative, which constitutes the theorical kernel of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1989b): the statement corresponds to the signature insofar as, like the signature, it expresses the efficacy of a semantic construction within a particular socio-historical context—that is, the socio-historical conditions that make it possible. Statements, like signatures, do not present a specific content or meaning but constitute the condition of possibility of meaning; they allow the sign to come to expression by structuring it in an operative sense in a particular historical moment and context. This also means that, as Fuggle again emphasizes, the statement “demonstrates the impossibility of the existence of ‘unmarked’ signs” (2009, 86)—a point to which I will return later.

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If “human” is a signature, this means it is not a “concept” with precise content (a-historical and immutable)—“neither a clearly defined species nor a substance”—but is what makes effective the various knowledges that historically position and discipline the life of the human animal in relation to the other living beings and to itself. It is the “economy of placement” that establishes where the line of inclusion and exclusion is drawn and that determines the life and death of the living beings. 6. In this “economy of placement” Watkin identifies a dialectics: the archeological analysis typically ends up revealing that the signature is always dominated by an economy composed by a founding element and a series of successive elements which actualize the foundation. The founding element, Watkin continues, is called the “common,” whereas the “founded” elements are called the “proper;” the first element corresponds to the signature and the others to the paradigms (2014b, xi). The “common” remains meaningless as founding element if it does not found anything, hence its need for the “proper”; the “proper,” in turn, is nothing but an arbitrary multiplicity if the elements characterizing it do not maintain an overall consistency, a foundation that guarantees their legitimacy and identity. Every concept in the history of the West is therefore bifurcated: one part is always the founding “common” part, while the other part is always the “proper” part which actualizes the foundation; neither part has any meaning without the other, but both must nevertheless always position themselves in radical oppositional difference towards each other (2014b, xii). Signatures exist only insofar as they are able to produce a coherent set of paradigms that can be named, and are therefore, in a sense, secondary with respect to the paradigms that they found; in turn, paradigms are such only insofar as they have been sanctioned by the operativity of the signature and must therefore each time fabricate a foundation. This dialectics creates a sort of vicious circle and shows therefore that the “machine” of Western metaphysics, on which it rests, is “faulty” (2014b, xii): the archaeological analysis will always lead to identifying a moment in which the oppositional distinctions of the system become confused, or better, Watkin argues, “indifferent” (2014b, xvi), in which common and proper, signature and paradigm, become indeterminate. The archaeology of signatures will therefore always lead to revealing as historically contingent what presents itself as logically necessary. In the case of the signature “human,” the machine incessantly produces (according to “the taste of the epoch”) a series of paradigmatic differentiations, which Agamben illustrates with the examples of the slave,

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the barbarian, and the stranger for the anthropological machine of the ancients, and the Jew, the néomort, and the overcomatose for the machine of the moderns—to which we can add women, children, the disabled, the abnormal, etc., who are always considered incomplete or “minor” gradations of the standard “Man,” and the famous paradigms of exclusion proposed by Agamben himself, the homo sacer and the Muselmann. To the same paradigmatic series also belong the various criteria of exclusion that, since at least the Aristotelian privation of logos, differentiate human and nonhuman animals. It is these paradigmatic differentiations that in fact substantiate the signature “human,” but at the same time must presuppose it (Agamben 2004, 37) as their foundation. This vicious circle means that the machine (the anthropological one, to be sure, but also the metaphysical machine of the West) does not produce what it should, or produces it only as a contingent and ultimately very fragile “fiction.” The two types of anthropological machine, Agamben writes in The Open, 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 nonman, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space 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. 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. (2004, 37-38)

7. In “Theory of Signatures,” as an example of “concepts that in actuality are signatures,” Agamben proposes secularization (2009a, 76). Fuggle (2009, 86), in turn, proposes “sovereignty” as the central signature for the whole Agambenian project, to which Roberto Esposito (2007), independently from Agamben—in a project in many ways related to the thesis that I am proposing here, and that I will explore in more depth in Chapter Four—adds the “person” as the central apparatus of Western biopolitics. Watkin, in a more rigorous and articulated way, argues instead that the signatory element that marks the whole of the Homo Sacer project is “life.” Against arguments more loyal to Foucauldian orthodoxy, which see in life a “recent invention” (cf. e.g., Tarizzo 2017), Agamben, Watkin argues, analyzes life starting from Greek thought, before proceeding to the establishment of modern democracies and, finally, turning his attention to the horrors of the concentration camps, in such a way that what matters is

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not so much the definition of the term “life” as the discursive formation that it enables. Insofar as it not a concept but a signature, life remains semantically constant in time (the same term is used) but allows for the possibility of saying different things in different epochs, through the double intelligibility of sanctioned use (what can be said) and contextual framework (how a thing can be said in such a way that it can be understood) (Watkin 2014b, 183-84). More important, insofar as it is not determined by a meaning but instead by its efficacy, life presents a decisive political operativity (2014b, 184). Its moment of arising is the Greek division into two constitutive parts, zoƝ and bios—which is not a historical fact, an origin: the fact that this division is not philologically irreproachable, as is often suggested as a criticism of Agamben’s entire philosophical system (cf. e.g., Dubreuil 2006; Derrida 2009, 315-17; Finlayson 2010), is for Watkin ultimately irrelevant and indeed directly indicative of the signatory and not conceptual nature of life (2014a, 158). What matters is its operativity, what this division enables us to say and do, and which, for Agamben, allows us to re-read our past but above all our present. What this division also allows us to bring to light is the logic of the inclusive exclusion: life is neither zoƝ nor bios, neither biological life nor politically qualified life, but that operative modality thanks to which a “proper” (politically qualified life) is founded—viz., through a process of exclusion, which creates, at the same time, a “common” that appears as its foundation (biological life). That is why, as we read in The Open, in Western culture life is never properly defined, although it plays a decisive strategic function in many different and diverse fields, from philosophy to theology, from politics to medicine. The following appears therefore as a definition of signature ante litteram: “everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided” (2004, 13; emphasis in the original). At least since Aristotle, philosophy has striven to find the foundation through which life (and, by extension, “to live”) belongs to a certain being: among the various senses of the term “to live,” one must be separated from the others and settle to the bottom, becoming the principle by which life can be attributed to a certain being. In other words, what has been separated and divided […] is precisely what—in a sort of divide et impera—allows the construction of the unity of life as the hierarchical articulation of a series of functional faculties and oppositions. (2004, 14)

This is precisely how signatures work, and from time to time the anthropological machine is inserted into this other “machine” and adopts

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and replicates the latter’s function. But both mechanisms, which are intrinsically “faulty,” ultimately produce nothing but a new paradigm of exclusion: bare life. 8. Bare life, however, is precisely what reveals the moment of inoperativity hidden at the heart of the signatory (and political) machine of the West: it is neither zoƝ nor bios and as such suspends in a sense their division, presenting thereby an opportunity to trace the archƝ of the signature and to attempt to suspend its efficacy (Watkin 2014a, 158). In bare life the oppositional divisions and distinctions supporting the whole politicosignatory construction become unstable and indistinct: “we cannot rely on their separation, their difference or their dialectical copresence” (Watkin 2014b, 185). And this is exactly the point of Agamben’s entire philosophical archaeology: to identify as contingent the concepts that control the intelligibility of our culture, and then to attempt to suspend their efficacy by making inoperative their logical presupposition, that is, the separation between common and proper. “Theory of Signatures” opens and closes with an important reference to Paracelsus: the science of signatures in Paracelsus’ theory, we read in the first page of the essay, “like all knowledge, is a consequence of sin, insofar as Adam, in Eden, was absolutely unmarked (unbezeichnet), and would have remained so had he not ‘fallen into nature,’ which leaves nothing unmarked” (2009a, 33). And the last sentence of the essay reads: “Whether a philosophical inquiry is possible that reaches beyond signatures toward the Non-marked that, according to Paracelsus, coincides with the paradisiacal state and final perfection is, as they say, another story, for others to write” (2009a, 80). And yet, both Watkin (2014b, xxii) and, among others, Sergei Prozorov (2014), rightly note that it is precisely this “other story” that Agamben has always—and more explicitly in the project Homo Sacer—wanted to write: the kernel of his philosophical project is none other than the quest for a passage that leads to the Non-marked, to a final désoeuvrement of all signatures, “whereby phoné and logos, zoe and bios, Master and Slave, man and animal become indistinct” (Prozorov 2014, 174). The idea of a form-of-life (despite the limits I have highlighted in the previous chapter), that is, of a life not marked by the division between zoƝ and bios and by the signature “life” in general (or by any other signature), means precisely this: the messianic goal of the de-activation of all signatures in view of that saved and unsavable life that concludes The Open. Both models of the anthropological machine are faulty and cannot

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be “repaired”; the point is then to “understand […] how they work so that we might, eventually, be able to stop them” (Agamben 2004, 38). But 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. (Agamben 2004, 92)

The following paragraph, which is the very last of the book, quotes “without quotation marks” the famous conclusion of The Order of Things, in which Foucault predicts the disappearance of man “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (1989a, 422). What the wave of history will erase is the signature “human,” and what will remain on the sand will not be a new (or rediscovered) humanitas or a new (or rediscovered) animalitas, but a way of being human (or simply living) that is no longer defined by its difference from (its own) animality or from other living beings. ʠ In “Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential,” the epilogue of The Use of Bodies, Agamben presents once again the structure of the signatures— which is that of the exception—as foundational for the whole of Western thought: “something is divided, excluded, and pushed to the bottom, and precisely through this exclusion, it is included as archè and foundation” (2016, 264). The strategy to deactivate this apparatus cannot however be limited to unveiling the contingency of the foundation/signature, and neither to the privileging of another element to oppose to it: “it is not a question of thinking, as it has for the most part done up to now, new and more effective articulations of the two elements, playing the two halves of the machine off against one another” (2016, 265-66). That is, the “machine” cannot be stopped from within, by differentiating and valorizing, for example, one particular modality or element (a “creative” life, etc.). Translating this dynamic into the terms of a certain contemporary debate, Watkin argues that “difference” cannot be played as such against “identity,” because both terms are co-implicated in the machinery of Western metaphysics as much (and specifically) as the proper and the common. The philosophy of difference fully falls within the signatory apparatus of metaphysics (2014b, xiv). Therefore, Agamben can identify in deconstruction “an interpretative practice that suspends signatures and makes them idle, in such a way that there is never any access to the realized event of meaning” (2009a, 78),

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and this also enables us to re-read the impasse against which Derrida clashes in his—otherwise important—deconstruction of the human and the animal. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida deconstructs the entire Western anthropocentric edifice, thereby destabilizing the humananimal distinction and the myriad ethical problems that result from it. And yet, in the final analysis, he carefully avoids calling into question the meaning of this differentiation: “Everything I’ll say,” he writes, “will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply” (2008, 29). And he repeats and emphasizes this point, to make it very clear: he will not frontally attack the thesis of the “abyssal rupture” between human and animal, because doing it “would be worse than sleepwalking, it would simply be too asinine [bête]” (2008, 30). The strategy of deconstruction rests on illuminating irreducible and insurmountable difference and consists of multiplying differences, not reducing them. Derrida affirms therefore his “attention to difference, to differences, to heterogeneities and abyssal ruptures as against the homogeneous and the continuous.” And asserts that, “I have thus never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal” (2008, 30). But in this infinite play of differences, the signature “human,” although turning idle, remains fully operative, and along this path we will never be able to call into question—and even less to deactivate—the deadly machine that keeps producing bare life (in particular that of nonhuman animals). ʠ Both in “What Is a Paradigm?” and “Theory of Signatures,” Agamben mentions Warburg’s Pathosformel, in the first case as a sort of “paradigm of paradigm” and in the second as signatures (2009a, 29-30 and 56-57). And the “paradigmatic” Pathosformel is, for Agamben, panel 46 of Warburg’s atlas Mnemosyne devoted to the “Nymph.” In the short book he devoted to this subject one year before publishing The Signature of All Things, and which is titled Nymphs, Agamben cites a work by Paracelsus, De nymphis, sylphis, pygmeis et salamandris et caeteris spiritibus, which describes beings who, “even if they resemble humans in every respect, […] were not fathered by Adam; they belong to a second branch of creation: ‘they are more like men than like beasts, but are neither” (Agamben 2013b, 41). What defines these “elemental spirits” is that they do not have a soul and hence are neither men nor animals (since they possess reason and language), nor are they properly spirits (since they have a body). More than animal and less than human, hybrids of body and spirit, they are purely and absolutely “creatures.” Created by God among the

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The following statement is particularly relevant to my argument: “As nonhuman men,” Agamben writes, “the elemental spirits described by Paracelsus constitute the ideal archetype of every separation of man from itself” (2013b, 44). It is this “practical and political mystery of separation” that Agamben invites us to think about, both in The Open (2004, 16) and in “Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential” (2016, 272), so that we can learn to deactivate the signature “human,” and it is therefore the nymph and the other elemental spirits that I also want to take as final paradigm of the désoeuvrement of the human.

CHAPTER FOUR BEYOND SPECIES AND PERSON: TOWARDS A NEW ETHOLOGY

References to animals in Agamben’s work rarely exceed the Heideggerian framework and vocabulary of the Open, a concept Agamben explores in detail in his book, The Open: Man and Animal. However, a trace of a different perspective—or, better, a trace from which a different perspective can perhaps be developed—can be found in a short and more personal text, “Special Being,” from the 2005 collection Profanations. This text does not focus on animals or animality, but rather (briefly, evocatively, and almost cursorily) deconstructs, as it were, the apparatus of “species” in Western culture, and thereby provides some helpful archaeological tools for a critique and deactivation of human exceptionality, that is, human “specialness.”1 In “Special Being” Agamben’s critique is merely destruens; the link to the discourse(s) known as “antispeciesism” is the product of my own willingness to develop its Entwicklungsfähigkeit. However, Agamben’s critique is explicit and can be traced back to the central thesis of The Open, according to which homo sapiens “is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; [but] is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (Agamben 2004, 26). In “Special Being,” Agamben deconstructs, together with the apparatus of the species, the apparatus of the “person,” a concept which constitutes an important theoretical focus not only in political philosophy and biopolitics, but also in antispeciesist discourses. The theoretical link between Agamben’s critique of human specialness and antispeciesism is, therefore, not 1 Though in this critique of the apparatus of the species I will adopt at times the vocabulary of speciesism, I basically follow Matthew Calarco’s criticism of the concept (2015; 2020): as Agamben (who is an important source for Calarco’s argument) also shows in The Open, the criteria of inclusion and exclusion do not follow species lines but cut through the human species itself. As a better concept Calarco proposes thus “anthropocentrism,” since the real issue has always been what really qualifies and counts as properly “human.”

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completely arbitrary and whimsical, though it is not unambiguous and therefore must be explored and developed a posteriori. In what follows, I will retrace Agamben’s analyses of the concepts “species” and “person” with the aim of fulfilling the embryonic potentiality in Agamben’s thought for a positive anthropodecentrism encapsuled in a new concept of ethology.

1. The Invention of the Species 1.1. The brief archaeology of the term species that is proposed in “Special Being” begins, in typical Agambenian fashion, with an analysis of the status of the image (especially when reflected in a mirror) in medieval philosophy. The image, Agamben writes, is not a substance but rather an accident and, as such, “exists not in itself but in something other than itself” (Agamben 2007a, 55). Being “insubstantial,” the image does not possess any “continuous reality” and cannot be determined according to the category of “quantity”; rather, it is only a “species,” that is, an aspect of a substance; it is never a thing, but merely a “kind of thing,” una specie di cosa.2 The essence of the image is to be a species, that is, visibility or appearance (Agamben 2007a, 57). The term “species” derives from the root spac- which means “to see,” “to look at” (in Latin, specere) and is also the source of a whole family of related words such as speculum (mirror), spectrum (image, ghost), perspicuus (transparent, clearly seen), speciosus (beautiful, giving itself to be seen), specimen (example, sign), and spectaculum (spectacle)—and obviously also “special” and “specific.” Species was used in Latin to translate the Greek eidos, which analogously derives from the aorist of the verb horáǀ (‫ݸ‬ȡȐȦ) meaning “to watch.” The species is, therefore, the exterior or outward form of something, the appearance, what can be seen: “The species of each thing is its visibility, that is, its pure intelligibility” (Agamben 2007a, 57). Between the thing and its species an interval exists, which creates a tension whereby the thing desires to come into appearance, to become visible, to communicate itself. However, this desire can also tend to collapse the interval and make the thing coincide with its species, and this is “the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus”: “The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and 2

In Italian the term specie has a wider spectrum of use than the English species. The English translator must therefore resort at times to terms such as “aspect” or “kind” to convey the intended meaning, but in so doing inadvertently undermines the archeological game Agamben is playing.

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classification” (Agamben 2007a, 59). Human beings, Agamben’s thesis goes, have come to believe they are “the masters of [their] own species” and that they “coincide with it,” but as a result of this, they have sacrificed their “specialness”: “special being” is, in fact, the being that “coincides with its own becoming visible, with its own revelation,” which is not a substance but a mere accident, not an object of ownership or appropriation. A being “is special when, without resembling any other, it resembles all the others,” that is, when it dwells in the indifference of what belongs to common nature and what is proper. When visibility and communicability are constituted into an autonomous sphere, the special is transformed into mere “spectacle” (Agamben 2007a, 57, 59-60). Agamben also points to some other uses of the term species, such as zoological classifications that were eventually popularized by Darwin, and in the context of commerce where “species” came to mean “commodities” (particularly in the sense of drugs and spices) and, later, money (espèces). According to Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero (2009, 4), these various meanings illustrate the “deep complicity that obtains between classification, animation and monetary valuation,” whereby the classification of living beings entails (and coincides with) a (monetary) valuation. Besides the substantialization of the mere accident of the species, the original sin and the most implacable apparatus of our culture is that humans value themselves as masters not only of their own species, but also of all others. 1.2. The genealogy of the term species—a term which hails from medieval Latin—appears in Agamben’s work from the 1970s onwards. In Stanzas, for example, Agamben discusses the status of the image as species in relation to its reflection in a mirror and to Aquinas’ polemic against Averroes’ “possible intellect” (Agamben 1993a, 83-84; cf. also 126). This discussion will later resurface whenever Agamben refers to the medieval theory of the image, as for example in the essays “Nudity” and “The Glorious Body” in Nudities (Agamben 2011b, 83, 93). The critique of the substantialization of the species is then already central to the concept of “whatever being” in The Coming Community, which, as singularity, is indifferent to the universality of the species and the particularity of the individual, and presents not a substantial but rather a “generative” ontology (e.g., Agamben 1993b, 18, 27-28). This is precisely the formulation that will return in “Special Being” with an explicit reference to the “whatever being” (Agamben 2007a, 58). However, as we have seen in the previous chapters, the beginning of Agamben’s career is marked by an all-too traditional anthropocentrism. In

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addition to the examples already mentioned, Agamben’s discussion of the concept of Gattungswesen in his early books is relevant here. This concept, usually translated as “species-being,” originated with Ludwig Feuerbach (though it already appeared in Hegel’s Encyclopedia to refer to the natural component of human life; cf. Whyte 2016, 74), but was eventually taken up and developed by Marx. In the introduction to The Essence of Christianity, tellingly titled “The Essential Nature of Man,” Feuerbach argued that there is an “essence” (Wesen) of humanity as distinct from that of other animals, and that this essence resides in its consciousness of itself as a species (Gattung). Whereas “[t]he brute is […] conscious of himself as an individual […] but not as a species,” for the human being “his own species, his own nature, is an object of thought” (Feuerbach 1989, 1-2). Hence, while animals are only particular beings, humans are universal beings. Marx borrowed this concept in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he wrote: Man is a species being [Gattungswesen], not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but—and this is only another way of expressing it—but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being. (Marx 1988, 75)

In the Theses on Feuerbach elaborated the following year, however, Marx criticized Feuerbach: he argued that in The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach “regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude” and entirely disregards human praxis (Marx 1998, 569). Feuerbach’s mistake is to essentialize an abstract concept of humanity into something eternal and immutable, forgetting the historical and social conditions in which this essence unfolds. For Marx, the true essence of humanity, its “species-being,” is instead its unique capacity for material production, or praxis, which, in turn, is where the uniquely human capacities for freedom and consciousness manifest themselves (cf. also Held 2009; Czank 2012). Agamben devotes an entire section of his first book, The Man Without Content, to the analysis of Marx’s Gattungswesen. In the context of a markedly Arendtian discussion of poiesis and praxis, Agamben emphasizes the fact that Marx’s Gattung (which he translates as genus [genere] and not as species) does not mean “natural species” and does not refer to a common naturalistic character that serves as an invisible foundation from which individual differences stem; rather, what defines humanity as Gattungswesen and differentiates it from the other animals is not a set of latent, innate characteristics but praxis: “The whole character

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of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character” (Marx 1988, 76). This means for Agamben that, in a proper hermeneutical circle, “man posits himself, in the productive act, as the origin and nature of man” (Agamben 1999a, 82). This self-positing is also the foundation of history, which, as destiny of Man, again differentiates him from the other animals. What matters to Agamben here is to place Marx within the Western metaphysics of “will” that he is criticizing. However, the same formulation returns eight years later in the essay “Time and History,” which appears in Infancy and History: if here he chastises Marx for not elaborating a theory of time adequate to his idea of history, Agamben certainly embraces Marx’s concept of a humanity positing itself and its own universal and historical essence through praxis. Here, history is precisely what separates humans from nonhumans and is a product of human praxis: “Man is not a historical being because he falls into time, but precisely the opposite; it is only because he is a historical being that he can fall into time, temporalizing himself” (Agamben 1993c, 99, emphasis in the original). 1.3. In a sense, it can be argued (as Langman and Albanese [2015] do) that Foucault’s thesis of the modern “invention” of man3 in The Order of Things, and especially his analyses of biopolitics in his works from the late 1970s, can be read analogously with, and as a historicization of, Marx’s concept of Gattungswesen: it is in modernity, and specifically as a result of the new biopolitical episteme, that the human begins to regard itself as a conscious object of investigation, to see itself as “species.” In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault writes that it is only with modernity that man learns “what it meant to be a living species in a living world,” and that what he calls the “threshold of modernity” is reached “when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies” (Foucault 1978, 142, 143). Two years later, in the 1977-1978 course at the Collège de France titled Security, Territory, Population, Foucault will mark the crossing of this threshold with the (popular) redefinition of human from le genre humaine (the human genus, which is usually translated into English as “humankind”) to l’espèce humaine, the human “species” (Foucault 2007, 75). The first to describe the species in biological terms, as Foucault points out in a note, was the English naturalist John Ray, who, in his 1686 Historia plantarum, 3 As in the other chapters, for the sake of coherence I will not “correct” either Foucault’s or Agamben’s gender blindness which leads them to the (still very common) habit of using the term “man” instead of “human being” to represent the neutral and universal.

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defined the species as a “set of individuals who, through reproduction, engender other individuals similar to themselves” (qtd. in Foucault 2007, 85-86n34). But, as noted above, it is with the Darwinian revolution that this terminology became fixed and was brought into the vernacular. This means that species is, by definition, a biopolitical concept— perhaps the biopolitical concept per excellence. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2009, 11) note that, whereas genre, “genus,” derives from the Latin gens and evokes the juridical-cultural concept of peoples belonging together, especially with respect to law and custom, espèce is a biological notion and marks the fact that the “belonging together” of the people derives now from shared biological properties. The move from genus to species reveals and names a transformation of the very understanding of the human (and other species) and of the way power is exercised over them. Agamben makes the same point in Remnants of Auschwitz with regard to the title of Robert Antelme’s memoir about his experience as a prisoner at Dachau: Antelme titled his memoir L'espèce humaine, the human species, preferring espèce to genre precisely because what was at issue in the camp was “an ‘almost biological’ claim to belong to the human species, the final sentiment of belonging to a species.” He explains further that, “‘the negation of our quality as men provokes an almost biological claim of belonging to the human species’” (Agamben 1999b, 58). The issue was not a declaration of moral or political solidarity, but rather of biological belonging, which in modernity becomes, for Agamben, the primary and only norm (Agamben 1999b, 69). The emphasis on biological belonging is accompanied, as already noted, by valuation and hierarchical classification. In Remnants of Auschwitz (1999b, 84), Agamben refers to Foucault’s 1975-1976 lecture course titled Society Must Be Defended to explain the paradox of a biopower that, despite having as its objective “to make live,” can continue to kill—and, moreover, does so in the obscene modalities and proportions of the Nazi enterprise. Foucault singled out racism as the apparatus through which power can introduce a break between what can live and what must die and can thus continue to exercise the sovereign right to kill: “In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable” (Foucault 2003, 255). This point smooths out the difference between sovereignty and biopolitics, since Foucault freely admits that with biopower “racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. As a result, the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point” (2003, 254; cf. Salzani 2021a). Richard Twine (2015, 85) reads Foucault’s reference to racism generally as a “dominant approach to

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difference, one which is to an extent applicable to the naturalization of gender, class, race and species hierarchy.” It is not coincidental that Richard D. Ryder (2010) coined the term “speciesism” as a calque of racism (and sexism): the biopolitical apparatus of species is what inherently construes biological difference in terms of a (post-)sovereign right to kill. 1.4. Agamben’s “correction” of Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics through Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty appears to be particularly fruitful with regard to the animal question and species hierarchies. The various forms of power that Foucault identified as progressively developing in modernity (disciplinary power, anatomo-politics, biopolitics, security state…) remain, for Agamben, mere sub-categories of an overarching sovereign power that always has life as its primary object and is therefore always already biopower. The concept of species can be taken as paradigmatic of this thesis: changes in power relations between the human species and all other animal species may transform but never alter the essence of the basic relationship, which is one of sovereignty (cf. e.g., Wadiwel 2015). Indeed, as Anat Pick (2011, 15) emphasizes, “animals constitute an exemplary ‘state of exception’ of species sovereignty.” The human exceptionalism that supports Western culture is essentially a theory (and a praxis) of sovereignty, whereby one species decides on the state of exception that it itself constitutes, it decides to be exceptional—that is to say, “special”: human exceptionalism, speciesism, even humanism tout court, are ultimately all forms of decisionism (cf. Rossello 2017)4 and sovereignty is, as such, paradigmatically anthropocentric (cf. Wendt and Duvall 2008). Agamben explicitly emphasizes the sovereign structure of human exceptionalism (though he never uses the term) in The Open, where the anthropological machine is described in terms of the sovereign mechanism of inclusive exclusion: “Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion)” (Agamben 2004, 37). In this mechanism, the decision about the human is always already presupposed; as a result, “the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in 4

This decision, as Matthew Abbott shows (2014, 116-17), corresponds to a denial of (humans’ own) animality; it is a decision to deny the very aspect that supports the law’s exceptionality. Moreover, as Kevin Attell writes (2015, 201), what this denial in turn assumes is the generality of animals, against which human exceptionality can emerge.

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which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside” (Agamben 2004, 37). The biopolitical apparatus of the “species,” which founds modern human exceptionalism, works precisely like the sovereign exception, where the signature “human” functions as the “primary archetype” or “arch-a priori” (Castanò 2018, 207). What allows for the sovereign decision and division is language, the ability to name and define. Colby Dickinson emphasizes the language component in the analogy between the sovereign decision and the decision that governs the boundary between human and animal: “the animal who can decide that it is not an animal like all the others is sovereign over the other animals, simply, as it were, by declaring it to be so” (Dickinson 2011, 16). Important, Dickinson again underlines, is that “the space that affords us to make such a decision is actually empty, devoid of the ‘special’ content we often assume it has. The only content it seemingly contains consists in our decision to be different, to be in fact sovereign” (Dickinson 2011, 16-17). Humans betray their “specialness,” as Agamben will argue in “Special Being,” precisely when they attempt to assign it a specific “content” and substantialize their species into an identity. Indeed, what makes humans into a “species”—including in the sense of Marx’s Gattungswesen—is, as Kevin Attell (2015, 185-86) writes, simply the adjective politikon that Aristotle added, as a specification, to the noun zoon: politikon, as Agamben himself argues in an important passage of Homo Sacer (1998, 2), “is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather a specific difference that determines the genus zoon.” Against the essentialization of human “specialness”/exceptionality that characterizes Western culture and culminates in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, Agamben states that the “specific difference” of the human being, that difference that makes a “species,” is merely its bios, its peculiar form of communal life based on language. This position is intrinsically anti-Heideggerian and anti-exceptionalist, since it re-inserts the human into the genus zoon, bridging the Heideggerian abyss that Western culture had opened between human and nonhuman animals, and deactivating the biopolitical apparatus of the species that, through this abyss, asserts human sovereign power over creation.5 Agamben’s position remains problematic 5 In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Heidegger famously denounced as metaphysical (and therefore problematic) the traditional definition of the human as an animal to which a specific quality x is added in order to distinguish and separate it from the other animals: the formula anthropos = zǀon + x is what he called the structure of the homo animalis. Thus “[m]etaphysics thinks of the human being on the basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas” (Heidegger 1998,

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and all-too traditionalist in many ways since, yet again, it restricts the politikà, with everything that this implies, to humans only. However, it certainly does show the emptiness and inconsistency of the apparatus of the concept of species and of the human exceptionalism upon which it rests.

2. Beneath the Mask 2.1. Towards the conclusion of “Special Being,” Agamben briefly mentions another apparatus that greatly helped Western culture transform the species into a principle of identity: the person. Here, the critique of this apparatus does not go beyond a cursory remark—“The person is the containment [cattura] of the species, anchoring it in a substance in order to identify it” (Agamben 2007a, 59)—but this critique is omnipresent (albeit if only subtly) in Agamben’s oeuvre, and it could even be argued that it lies at the very foundation of his philosophical-political project. Agamben said so himself on several occasions, as for example in a 2016 interview with Antonio Gnoli: he recounted that in 1963 or 1964, as a young student visiting Paris, he discovered the works of Simone Weil and decided to write his dissertation (completed in 1965)6 on Weil’s political thought. What struck him in particular was Weil’s essay “La personne et le sacré” (translated into English as “Human Personality”7), where he found a critique of personhood and of law that would later become one of his main research themes. The critique of law he “never abandoned since the first volume of Homo Sacer,” he concluded, “has perhaps in Weil’s essay its ultimate root” (Gnoli 2016). Agamben repeats this declaration (with the very same words) in his 2017 autobiography, Autoritratto nello studio (Self-portrait in the Studio 2017, 51), where he also repeats that Weil’s essay led him to Marcel Mauss’ 1938 famous lecture on the notion of 246-47). When in The Open Agamben defines the human as “simply an animal that has learned to become bored” (Agamben 2004, 70), Krzysztof Ziarek (2008, 19698) argues that he falls back into metaphysics. 6 This dissertation was never published and must be considered lost, and thus constitutes, in Adam Kotsko’s words, “one of the great mysteries of Agamben philology.” When Kotsko explicitly asked him about it, Agamben claimed that the university archive lost it and he did not find other copies among his late mother’s belongings (Kotsko 2020, 209n1). 7 The essay, originally written in London in 1943, was published posthumously in 1950, first with the title “La personnalité humaine, le juste et l’injuste,” and later as “La personne et le sacré.” It was translated into English first as “The Fallacy of Human Rights” and then as “Human Personality.”

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“person” (1985), from which he subsequently quoted regularly (more often than not “without quotation marks”). If Weil (1986) rejects the notion of person as bearer of rights as well as the emphasis on Personalism—which was in vogue at the time of her writing, having developed as a counterforce to the de-humanization of entire populations under Fascism and Nazism—in the name of an impersonal “sacredness” of human life, Mauss proposes an exhaustive archeology of the concept of “person” in Western culture that emphasizes its juridical and theological origins. The Latin term persona means in fact “mask,” and in Roman Law it simply denoted the capacity of being a subject of rights within a legal framework. The term itself seems to be of Etruscan origin (Mauss 1985, 15) and initially indicated, both in Etruria and in Rome, the masks of the ancestors that patrician families kept in the aula of the family house. The wax mask molded upon the face of the dead ancestor was called imago and identified the (patrician) family group within society, which is to say, it denoted the family’s social identity (Mauss 1986, 16). The “artificiality” and social character of this identity— persona, writes Agamben in “Special Being,” is pure visibility, pure appearance, and as such is “eminently ‘special’” (2007a, 59)—led the term to be adopted as a designation for the fixed theatrical characters in tragedy and comedy, and thus the stereotyped masks the actors wore (the Greeks called these masks prosopa because they were placed over the face). And the “theatricality” of the public, relational aspect of life, of the “role” one plays in family and society (one’s bios), intimately connects theater and politics.8 This is also why in Rome the slave has no juridical personality (servus non habet personam): “He does not own his body, nor has he ancestors, name, cognomen, or personal belongings” (Mauss 1985, 17). The slave, like nonhuman animals and inanimate things, is not a “person.” (As stipulated in Roman Law, which forms the basis of the Napoleonic Code and therefore of modern European legal systems, there are only personae, res, and actiones.) Since the introduction of Roman Law, the boundaries of the juridical person progressively expanded until they finally coincided with those of the moral and natural person, also thanks to the influence of Stoic ethics and its strong voluntarist and personal character (Mauss 1985, 18). But it was with Christianity that the term “person” ultimately came to identify the individual as a metaphysical entity, a rational substance, indivisible and individual (Mauss 1985, 20). It was, in particular, the fateful decision of Boethius (477-524) to translate 8

In Pulcinella (2019a, 60), Agamben remarks that the mask also links the theater to the realm of the dead: the stage is a sort of gate through which the dead re-enter the world of the living.

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the Greek term hypostasis (the essential substance of the individuum, but also the three “persons” of the Trinity, who share a single essence) with persona that sealed the destiny of the term. Agamben refers to these developments—citing Mauss “without quotation marks”—as early as the essay “Comedy” that opens The End of the Poem (but was originally published in 1978; cf. Agamben 1999c, 1822) and as late as the essay “Identity Without the Person” in Nudities (2011b, 46-47), in Karman (2018a, 76-77), and in the book on Pulcinella (2019a, 52-55) (cf. also DeCaroli 2007, 59-60). In “Comedy,” Agamben already makes an important point that will also be fundamental for Pulcinella and is central for the argument I want to make in this chapter: Boethius, he writes, was still perfectly aware of the theatrical origin of the notion of person (obviously he could not have been aware of the modern concept of person as inalienable subject of knowledge and morality) and saw, in medieval fashion, the human creature as divided into an innocent nature and a worldly “persona” which is the carrier of guilt. Only in Adam before the Fall (and then in Christ) did nature and person coincide, and only after the “last day” and the resurrection of the flesh will they coincide again, whereas sinful human life on earth, precisely like the performance of an actor on the stage, is irremediably divided. Worldly life is therefore a comoedia or tragoedia mondana, whereby the relationship between the “actor” and her mask, between natural innocence and personal responsibility, is what determines the comic or tragic character of the fabula humana: the tragic attitude of the actor is to fully identify with her own mask, while the comic actor refuses this identification and retains a distance. A tragedy is the collapsing of natural innocence onto personal guilt, whereas comedy— and this is the point Agamben wants to make about Dante’s Divine Comedy—is the distance between the two that the creature manages to salvage in her journey from guilt to redemption (1999c, 19-22). In seeing himself as a comic character, Dante, as the first “person” of modern literature, chooses to dwell in the gap between nature and mask. It is not in the persona that redemption must be sought—as Western modernity attempted, in particular after World War II, including important sections of the animal liberation movements—but in the gap. 2.2. In Agamben’s work, these ideas, though important and even foundational, are only sketched out and never developed into a full and elaborated critique of the concept of person. This is, however, exactly what Roberto Esposito has done, in particular in Third Person (2012) and Persons and Things (2015). Like Agamben, Esposito takes as his starting point Weil’s essay “La personne et le sacré” and her critique of

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Personalism as the solution for the ideology and practice of dehumanization that were engineered by the various iterations of fascism in Europe: in response to the reduction of the human to their mere biology, Personalism counterposed the magnification of the person over the biological substratum. Against this position, which is prevalent today more than ever, Esposito counters that it is precisely the dispositif of the person that creates and enlarges the gap between humanity and rights and prevents the implementation of something like “human rights” (2010, 124; 2012, 5).9 The problem for Esposito lies in the separation and splitting of the biological substratum on the one hand, and the “dignified” personal identity on the other that recourse to the concept of person always entails. This apparatus always implies, and is grounded upon, the depersonalization of those who do not qualify as persons. As was already very clear in Rome (where this juridical apparatus was invented), for the “happy few” to enjoy the status of person (in Rome, the patres), there has to be an unhappy multitude expelled from personhood (slaves, women, children, foreigners, nonhumans, etc.). In other words, the very definition of person “emerges in negative fashion from the presumed difference with respect to those men and women who were not persons or who were only persons in part and temporarily, ones always exposed to the risk of falling into the domain of thing” (2010, 125-26). It is by pushing others outside the privileged circle of personhood that one becomes a person (since “No one is born a person”; 2010, 126). This splitting not only creates divisions within the social body (the personalized few versus the animalized many) but withing the individual itself: the personal part (i.e., the spiritual, moral, rational “excess”; 2012, 71) versus the animal substratum, or, in Agamben’s vocabulary, bios vs zoƝ. Moreover, for Esposito, as for Agamben, this division creates a hierarchy between the two parts, whereby the animal/animalized part is subordinate to and dominated by the personal one (2010, 128).10 Esposito cites Jacques Maritain, one of the “fathers” of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, who explicitly posed the question of 9 “[T]he failure of human rights is not to be conceptually traced to the limited extension of the ideology of the person but rather to its expansion; not to the fact that we have yet to enter fully into its regime of meaning, but to the fact that we have never really moved out of it” (Esposito 2012, 5). 10 “Being something other than the mask that it wore, the individual was always exposed to a possible depersonalization, defined as capitis diminutio, which could go as far as the complete loss of personal identity. The category of person, we might say, is what made one part of the human race subject to another, but this was also the case for each and every individual” (Esposito 2015, 30-31).

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personhood in terms of sovereignty: personhood is qualified as the sovereignty that each human being exercises over his or her animal being (2012, 12, 72-73, 89). Personhood, just like species(ism), is a theory and a praxis of sovereignty. Though his thought remains within the boundaries of traditional anthropocentrism, both in Third Person and Persons and Things Esposito also briefly analyzes Peter Singer’s take on personhood as the paradigm of an important trend in animal activism that advocates for the extension of personhood to some categories of nonhuman animals. Since personhood is merely the recognition of a subject’s legal status within a juridical framework, the argument goes, and also since not all legal persons are human beings (corporations, legal entities, but recently also natural entities and even robots have been granted legal personhood11), there exist within the legal framework the premises and the possibility to extend personhood to some nonhuman species.12 Singer is perhaps the extreme (and therefore paradigmatic) case, since he goes well beyond the popular slogan “persons not things” by arguing for the extension of the legal protections of personhood to some categories of nonhuman animals, while explicitly proposing stripping personhood from those humans who do not yet, or no longer, qualify as persons.13 For Esposito, Singer’s position is paradigmatic insofar as it shows how “personalization and depersonalization are nothing but different flows of the same process, one that is ancient in origin but whose effects are far from being exhausted” (2012, 99; cf. also 2015, 5211

In 2012, for example, an agreement was signed between the New Zealand government and the Whanganui River MƗori Trust to grant legal personhood to the river Whanganui, which is revered by the local MƗori people. In 2017, Saudi Arabia (in a move to promote the country as a place to develop artificial intelligence) granted citizenship to a robot named Sophia. This obviously caused a massive outcry (especially among feminists), since a robot was granted more rights than many human beings (especially women) have in the country. 12 An example of this trend is the litigation strategy championed by Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project that seeks habeas corpus writs on behalf of apes, elephants, and cetaceans who live in permanent confinement. Cf. Wise (2000) and, for a more philosophical and very vocal representative of this position, Francione (2008; 2020). 13 Singer came under heavy criticism, especially (but not only) in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, for advocating euthanasia for those who are not yet or are no longer persons (e.g., infants, the senile, or severely mentally disabled people) and whose lives are therefore not “worthy being lived”—an expression reminiscent of the Nazi phrase Lebensunwertes Leben. See Singer (1993, especially 175-217), and for the criticisms, the appendix “On Being Silenced in Germany” (337-59).

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56). The personalization of some individuals (including some nonhuman animals) will always be accompanied by the depersonalization of others, and the solution cannot therefore lie in “expanding the circle” of personhood and rights (cf. Singer 2011).14 2.3. In the essay “Identity without the Person,” Agamben shows how the methods of biometric identification, which originated in the nineteenth century with Alphonse Bertillon in France and Francis Galton in England, completely changed the meaning of “identity”: when one’s identity is no longer linked to social recognition—to one’s persona—but becomes a function of biological data, identity is reduced to bare life, to “a purely biological datum,” something with which one cannot in any way identify oneself. “Human beings,” Agamben writes, “removed the mask that for centuries had been the basis of their recognizability in order to consign their identity to something that belongs to them in an intimate and exclusive way but with which they can in no way identify” (2011b, 50). This identity is no longer personal, because it has nothing to do with the social persona, and this also makes the construction of a personal ethics more difficult: until a new foundation for ethics is found, Agamben argues, “it makes sense to expect a general collapse of the personal ethical principles that have governed Western ethics for centuries” (2011b, 52).15 14 Calarco (2015) has called this “extensionist” position the “identity paradigm,” which advocates for the “equal treatment of equals,” since (some) nonhuman animals are “like us” (they feel pain, love, possess forms of rationality, etc.). This position has been criticized by many, including Derrida (1991; 2004), because it replicates the exclusionary model that defines humanity via the exclusion of animality and merely wants to “expand” the circle of inclusion to some categories. Both Calarco and Derrida (among others), however, refuse to condemn the theorists and especially the activists committed to this cause because their work is critical to alleviating the suffering of so many nonhuman animals and to sensitize society to their plight. I also want to underline my support of activists who, due to the sheer power and ubiquity of speciesist ideology, must resort to extensionist arguments and campaigns to have an impact. The question could be posed in terms of tactics and strategy: on a tactical, day-to-day, and “practical” level, extensionist work is valuable, even necessary, but on a strategic level it is ultimately selfdefeating because it does not aim at changing the ontological framework that makes some individuals killable. 15 In January 2004, Agamben famously cancelled a lecture course he was scheduled to give at New York University to protest against the new security measures adopted by the US government which required the filing of all foreigners’ fingerprints. He explained his reasons in an article which was widely disseminated in many languages, “No to Biopolitical Tattooing” (Eng. 2008),

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At the same time, however, Agamben acknowledges that this new identity also betrays “a more or less unconfessed desire for happiness”: “the will to be freed from the weight of the person, from the moral as much as the juridical responsibility that it carries along with it,” since the person, as he had already argued many years before in “Comedy,” is the “bearer of the guilt” and entails an originary split between innocent nature and guilty mask (2011b, 52). Biometrical identification is of course the wrong way to overcome this division—it is tragic, we could argue, insofar as, just like in tragedy, it collapses the distinction between nature and mask, thereby rendering both guilty. Thus, it is a new “figure of the human” that must be sought “beyond both personal identity and identity without the person”: perhaps, Agamben concludes, “what we must search for is simply the figure of the living being, for that face beyond the mask just as much as it is beyond the biometric facies” (2011b, 54). Although the language Agamben uses still carries clear traces of anthropocentrism—it is a new “figure of the human” that we must seek, which can be found in the Levinasian “face” beyond the mask—this push beyond personalism entails an opening to more-than-human life, an opening that in several contemporary philosophical proposals takes the form of the “impersonal.” The sacredness of the impersonal is what Simone Weil offered as an alternative to the personalist emphasis on the persona as bearer of rights, and in his autobiography Agamben favorably refers to Weil’s elaboration (2017, 52-53). It was again Esposito who, in the wake of Weil’s work—and by way of a genealogy that moves through Benveniste’s pronouns, Kojève’s animal, Blanchot’s neuter, and Foucault’s outside, until arriving at Deleuze’s theory of becoming— proposed a counter-philosophy of the impersonal that reverses the relation between rights and obligations.16 However, while Agamben’s “form-oflife” could also be considered impersonal (because it is pre-individual; cf. which, however, caused no little stir because Agamben compared this measure to the tattooing of Auschwitz’s deportees (cf. De Boever 2016, 43-49). Similarly, in July 2021 Agamben compared the Green Pass (or rather, the lack thereof), which restricts access to certain facilities and activities to people vaccinated against COVID-19, to the yellow star that identified the Jews in Nazi Germany. Both, he argued, create a division within the social body and a group of “second class citizens” (cf. Agamben 2021c; for a criticism of the Nazi analogy evoked here, see Salzani 2021b). 16 Despite giving a positive evaluation of Weil’s argument about the impersonal in his autobiography, Agamben also notes that she unwittingly falls back into the trap of “rights” when she proposes substituting them with symmetrically opposed concepts such as “obligations” and “consent” (Agamben 2017, 52).

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Abbott 2014, 23-24),17 his project seems to differ from that of Esposito: as Colebrook and Maxwell argue, Agamben focuses less on the impersonal than on thresholds and indistinction; not on impersonal life but on singular life, “a life that each time is poised between being recognized and remaining silent and unto itself” (Colebrook and Maxwell 2016, 73-74). Singularity dwells in the threshold between, and indistinction of, human and animal, person and bare life, speech and voice, bios and zoƝ. On this threshold is precisely where Pulcinella also dwells. In “Identity Without the Person,” just like in “Comedy” thirty years before, Agamben had already situated the crux of the question in the gap between the actor and her mask, which in Roman paintings and mosaics was represented as a mute dialogue in which the actor stared at the mask in his hand. In the modern age, Italian commedia dell’arte broke this dialogue by having the actor look not at his mask but rather at the public, thereby accentuating the distance between man and persona (Agamben 2011b, 48). Pulcinella goes a step further: he does not and cannot take off his mask, simply because there is no face behind it. Pulcinella entirely coincides with the mask, and this fact deactivates and deposes the “false dialectic between face and mask” and the very question of personhood as such (2019a, 55). “Having abdicated all substantial individuality, having remorselessly dropped all personality in order to be wholly and forever only a mask and a name— this is anything but a superficial undertaking for Pulcinella, even if he is able to do it without exertion and without having to make a decision. He is just as he is, without ever having chosen to be it” (2019a, 53-54). The coincidence of mask and face in Pulcinella disavows and overcomes the divisions between nature and person and innocence and guilt which have plagued Western politics and ethics for centuries, and disables the whole exclusionary apparatus constructed upon it.18 It is here, in this coincidence, that, perhaps, a new, non-exclusionary (and thus also non-anthropocentric) ethics could be based: Pulcinella’s teaching: I am not to blame for the features of my body, my nose, my belly, my hump. I am innocent of all of it. Ethics begins right after this, but not somewhere else: given this—my?—body, what is ethical is the 17

In The Highest Poverty, for example, Agamben explicitly counterposes the Franciscan form-of-life to the concept of “person” that founds instead the traditional economy of salvation (2013a, 143). 18 The coincidence of mask and face in Pulcinella is not the same as the identification of the tragic actor with his mask, which collapses the distinction between innocent nature and personal guilt; rather, it is the deactivation of the very division between the two and therefore also of the dialectic of innocence and guilt.

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way in which I live the affection that I receive from being in relation to it, how I renounce or make mine this nose, this belly, the hump. In a word: how I smile at them. (2019a, 115, emphasis in the original)

3. Towards a New Ethology 3.1. After the deposition of the false dialectics between singularity and species, between face and person, between innocence and guilt, an ethics emerges. “Special Being” provides no hints about what avenues the deposition of the apparatuses of species and person could open up, but if we read in “Special Being” the explicit reference to the “whatever being” of the Coming Community (2007a, 58), together with the call for a new, immanent ethics as communicated in the above quotation from Pulcinella, we can attempt to form a possible answer via a concept that is not only central to the essence of the “whatever being,” but also traverses, though often only in muted tones, the whole of Agamben’s career: ethos. The emphasis on ethos, a concept that Agamben borrows from Heidegger, mostly marks his work of the 1980s but remains thereafter a stable and recurrent point of reference, which is seldom redefined or reelaborated on and is rather assumed to be a given and taken for granted. An analysis of ethos in Heidegger exceeds the scope of this chapter,19 but a short explanation can be distilled from a cursory reading of the “Letter on ‘Humanism.’” Here Heidegger at a certain point contrasts ancient Greek thought to modern “science” (including philosophy) and the Greek notion of ethos (਷șȠȢ) to modern ethics, whereby the latter is said to have lost the deeper and more “originary” understanding of the world and Dasein. The originary meaning of ethos, Heidegger writes, is “abode, dwelling place”: The word names the open region [den offenen Bezirk] in which the human being dwells. The open region [Das Offene] of his abode allows what pertains to the essence of the human being, and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear. The abode of the human being contains and preserves the advent of what belongs to the human being in his essence. (1998, 269)

19

Ethos is one of the central concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy, though it receives different emphasis and has different connotations in difference phases of his thought. For a few examples of the rich literature on this topic, see Ziarek (1995); Resta (1998); Aurenque (2001); McNeill (2007); Brook (2009).

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Heidegger cites a famous fragment from Heraclitus (frag. 119) that reads: “Ɲthos anthropoi daimon,” which is usually translated as: “A man’s character is his daimon” (meaning his fate). According to his interpretation of ethos, “The (familiar) abode for humans is the open region for the presenting of god (the unfamiliar one)” (1998, 271). This means for Heidegger that the very essence of humans in their habitual dwelling is to be exposed in the open to what is unfamiliar. This reading of ethos has important consequences for Agamben’s own interpretation: if “ethics” derives from and is based upon this originary meaning of ethos, then an “originary” ethics is immediately an ontology: “that thinking which thinks the truth of being as the primordial element of the human being, as one who eksists, is in itself originary ethics. However, this thinking is not ethics in the first instance because it is ontology” (Heidegger 1998, 271). Ethics is thus understood as ethos, in terms of our concrete ways of being and dwelling in the world, a “pre-theoretical and pre-philosophical dimension of worldly dwelling that exceeds, and indeed is prior to, the traditional theory/practice distinction” (McNeill 2007, xiii). This will also be Agamben’s position, which he repeatedly proposes throughout his whole career, but most clearly articulates in two texts first published in 1982: Language and Death and the essay “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis” (which expands on the argument of the eighth and last day of Language and Death; cf. Agamben 1999d, 116-37). Already in the introduction of Language and Death, Agamben, following Heidegger, defines ethos as “humanity’s proper dwelling place” and establishes it as the ultimate horizon of the critique of the negative foundation of Western metaphysics that the book will perform (1991, xiii). In the second half of the eighth day this premise is finally picked up and developed as a sort of conclusion. The concept of the Absolute is the result of Western philosophy’s attempt to think its “proper place,” Agamben argues. The Absolute, however, is always thought of as a process, “an exit from itself that must cross over negativity and scission in order to return to its own place” (1991, 92), and is thus marked by a fundamental negativity. Through an articulated etymological analysis Agamben shows that the Latin term at the origin of Absolute, ab-solutus, ultimately derives from the reflexive group *se (*swe) that in Indo-European languages denotes what is “proper” and from which ethos also derives: “To think the Absolute signifies, thus, to think that which, through a process of ‘absolution,’ has been led back to its ownmost property, to itself, to its own solitude, as to its own custom” (1991, 92). At this point Agamben also cites Heraclitus’ fragment 119 but proposes a different translation than Heidegger’s: daimon is not, for

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Agamben, simply a divine figure (standing for what is unfamiliar). According to its etymology from the Greek verb daiomai (to lacerate, to divide), he translates it rather as “the lacerator, he who cuts and divides.” With this in mind, Agamben translates the fragment thus: “Ethos, the habitual dwelling place of man, is that which lacerates and divides” (1991, 93). This means that what is proper is, for the Western metaphysical tradition, always split and threatened by negativity—“the daimon itself as ethos, the scission itself as the appearance (Erscheinung) of the Absolute” (1991, 94)—the very negativity that is at the heart of the split between phǀnƝ (voice) and logos that guides the readings of the whole seminar.20 Negativity means not only division but also exclusion, and presents in nuce the logic of the exception that Agamben will later develop in his Homo Sacer project. Agamben remains here within the boundaries of the anthropocentrism of Western metaphysics: ethos, the humans’ “proper place,” expresses this intrinsic division and is another way of saying that humans, unlike the other animals, are not consigned to the constraining cage of an undivided an unchanging existence, but are rather “condemned” to an openness that marks their freedom and their exceptionality. This is Heidegger’s position, which is nothing new in the framework of Western tradition (what is “proper” to Man has always been used to mark his exceptionality). Agamben’s whole analysis of this negative foundation, however, aims at underlining the necessity of its overcoming, which alone could make “possible for man to experience an ethos that is no longer simply a sigetics” (1991, 96).21 If human ethos is marked by the negativity of the division between phǀnƝ and logos that founds, as we have seen in the previous chapters, the division between human and nonhuman animals, and thus human exceptionality as such, then from the very beginning Agamben’s goal is to overcome this division and invent a “recomposed” ethos, which would therefore not only not be founded on negativity, but 20 The premise of the whole book is that “humans appear as both mortal and speaking beings. They possess the ‘faculty’ for language (zoon logon echon) and the ‘faculty’ for death (Fähigkeit des Todes, in the words of Hegel)” (Agamben 1991, xii), and this marks them with a fundamental negativity. What is implied here is that nonhuman animals do not possess these two “faculties,” which is a basic (and fallacious) premise of traditional human exceptionalism. There is ample evidence that at least some animals have language abilities and a concept of death (e.g., Susana Monsó 2019; 2020). 21 “Sigetics,” the foundation in silence (in Greek sigan means to be silent), is a term belonging to mysticism and negative theology then importantly adopted by Heidegger in his reflections on language, especially in Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (see Heidegger 2012).

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also not on anthropocentric presuppositions either. The last sentences of the book (and of the essay “*Se”) point towards this new horizon: The ethos, humanity’s own, is not something unspeakable or sacer that must remain unsaid in all praxis and human speech. Neither is it nothingness, whose nullity serves as the basis for the arbitrariness and violence of social action. Rather, it is social praxis itself, human speech itself, which have become transparent to themselves. (1991, 106)

The direction in which Agamben points remains basically anthropocentric— what he aims at is a “completed foundation of humanity in itself” (1991, 106, emphasis added)—but can be easily reoriented towards nonanthropocentric goals. This notion of ethos already presents the potential to be developed beyond the human-animal divide towards a new, nonexclusive, and non-anthropocentric form-of-life. 3.2. This notion of ethos remains nonetheless extremely logocentric, insofar as it is firmly grounded in language. “Experimentum Linguae” (originally published in 1989) situates ethos in the (exclusively human) division between phǀnƝ and logos: “Only because man finds himself cast into language without the vehicle of a voice, and only because the experimentum linguae lures him, grammarless, into that void and that aphonia, do an ethos and a community of any kind become possible” (Agamben 1993c, 9). For Agamben, there is no ethos and no community, it would seem, without (human) language, which automatically precludes nonhuman animals from that ethos and community. “[H]uman life, as ethos, as ethical way,” is indeed cast as the only “correct expression for the existence of language” (1993c, 9-10); ethos is thus reserved for humans only. The same holds for The Coming Community (originally published the following year), whose “subject,” the “whatever being,” is grounded in the experimentum linguae. Here however ethos is also linked to the notion of “use,” which will become progressively central to the pars construens of Agamben’s project and which could also help disengage it from its logocentrism. In a departure from its originally quasi-spatial denotation (“the habitual dwelling place”), ethos is here redefined as a modality of existence, namely as a “usage”: “the manner in which [the whatever being] passes from the common to the proper and from the proper to the common is called usage—or rather, ethos” (Agamben 1993b, 20). The whatever being is the form of subjectivity that Agamben places at the center of his idea of community. The introduction of the whatever being is aimed at deposing the exclusionary logic of traditional politics—and thus also of the

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traditional notion of subjectivity—and of all the traditional dichotomies such as universal/particular and common/proper. The whatever being is therefore not a “person,” since it rejects any contamination by the law and its criteria of inclusion and exclusion, though its logocentrism still confers a speciesist character on it. Its modality of existence as ethos is evocatively linked to a famous phrase from a letter Hölderlin wrote to his friend Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff on December 4, 1801: the “free use of the proper,” which, Hölderlin added, is “the most difficult task” (1993b, 25, 28-29).22 Ethos as a modality of use (rather than of possession23) of one’s self, of one’s existence, is what should free us and become “our second, happier, nature” (1993b, 29). In the later, more “political” phase of Agamben’s philosophy, these Heideggerian suggestions find an important echo in Foucault’s own interest in the Greek concept of ethos. In the last years of his life, Foucault focused his attention on the “care of the self,” which led him back to Greek philosophy and to a reformulation of the meaning of ethics, its genealogy, and its relationship to politics24 that find interesting correspondences with Heidegger’s own notion of ethos (cf. McNeill 2007, 53-76). Agamben merged, as it were, Heidegger and Foucault’s respective insights to form his own understanding of ethos. Specifically, he added to the Heideggerian emphasis on “habitual dwelling” the Foucauldian denotation of “esthetics of existence” (cf. Raulff 2004, 613-14). Far from referring to an aestheticization of life (of which Agamben has been also 22

This is again a suggestion coming from Heidegger, who made the letter to Böhlendorff one of the hinges around which his whole interpretation of Hölderlin revolves: he cited it in all three lecture courses he gave on the German poet and devoted in particular the entirety of part three, “The Search for the Free Use of One’s Own,” of his 1941-1942 course on Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance” to it (see Heidegger 2018, 105-31). I’ve briefly analyzed the letter, Heidegger’s reading, and the import of the letter for Agamben in Salzani (2016). On the letter see also Agamben’s most recent book La follia di Hölderlin (Hölderlin’s Folly, 2021b, 26-27). 23 The sphere of ethos is opened only by and through the interruption of traditional, “possessive” subjectivity and is often linked by Agamben to the interruption of “gesture.” As he writes in Infancy and History (and repeats, with the same words, in Means Without End), “gesture opens the sphere of ethos as the most fitting sphere of the human” (1993c, 140; see also 2000, 57). This structure in turn can be linked to the theorization of the “lazzo” (gag, jest) as gesture and interruption of the “character” in his later work, Pulcinella (cf. e.g., 2019a, 65). 24 Cf. e.g., the 1983 interview “Politics and Ethics” (Foucault 1984, 373-90) and the 1984 interview “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” (Foucault 1997, 281-302).

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accused; cf. Geulen 2009, 119-22), ethos is to be understood, as he writes in The Highest Poverty (2013a, 33), as a “definition of life itself in relation to a never-ending practice.” All of these different denotations of ethos finally coalesce in the “modal ontology” that Agamben proposes in The Use of Bodies, the final volume of his Homo Sacer project. Modal ontology is the proper ontology of the “form-of-life,” the new subjectivity that should arise from the deposition of traditional Western ontology. The elaboration of this modal ontology is very complex and a proper exposition cannot be taken up here. Suffice it to say, however, that a modal ontology focuses not on essences but rather on modalities of being, and therefore a substance ultimately amounts to its modifications, its ethos. This means, for Agamben, that modal ontology is situated on the “threshold of indifference between ontology and ethics.” A modal ontology, that is, “is no longer an ontology but an ethics (on the condition that we add that the ethics of modes is no longer an ethics but an ontology)” (2016, 174). An ontology cum ethics is the aspect of his (essentially anthropocentric) elaboration that can be redirected towards an anthropodecentric horizon: it is perhaps precisely this ontologisation of ethics—which has been the object of so much criticism (cf. e.g., Mills 2008)—that offers a way to overcome the anthropocentric impasse of Western (animal) ethics, which still rests on the concept of the juridical persona and on a theory of rights and duties. What the deposition of the false dialectics between singularity and species, face and person, and innocence and guilt should lead to, therefore, is a new ontology of modes, of ethos, that can, in turn, be named a new ethology. Pulcinella, and in particular his body, can be taken again as a final example: Pulcinella’s body is no longer, as in Western metaphysics, the animal presupposed to the human. He breaks the false articulation between the simply living being and the human, between the body and logos. The anthropological machine of the West is jammed. This is why his body—at once cheerful and deformed, neither fully human nor truly animal—is so difficult to define. Pulcinella is nothing other than the delight that a body receives from its being in contact with itself and with other bodies— nothing other than a certain use of bodies. (Agamben 2019a, 117, emphasis in the original)

3.3. The new ethology that could be developed by turning Agamben’s modal ontology in an interspecies direction resonates with some interesting developments in contemporary animal philosophy and ethology. However, the reworking of Agamben’s philosophy would also have to be

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accompanied by the elimination of some deeply ingrained assumptions that limit the scope of ethology to the field of “animal behavior.” Modern ethology was in fact first established between the 1930s and the 1950s as an autonomous “scientific” discipline of (nonhuman) animal behavior (a branch of biology and zoology). Unfortunately, it adopted the traditional dichotomy between reason (humans’ domain) and instinct (animals’ domain). For the “true science” of the time, bridging the divide (or, rather, the Heideggerian “abyss”) between human reason and animal instinct was an anthropomorphic heresy. The “fathers” of modern ethology, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, sadly complied with the orthodoxy, consigning the new discipline to the arid and mechanistic straitjacket of behaviorism (see Despret 2016, 39-40). The term “ethology” took its contemporary meaning as “biological science of animal behavior” only in the early twentieth century and evolves in a curious manner throughout the past four centuries (see e.g., Jaynes 1969). In the nineteenth-century in France, Isidore Geoffroy-SaintHilaire used the term almost in the sense of what we today call “ecology,” and in England John Stuart Mill, in the second volume of his System of Logic (1843), proposed ethology as a new “science of character formation.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, however, ethology referred to the “study of character,” which at the time was considered equivalent to the “science of ethics” (see e.g., Moreno and Muñoz-Delgado 2007), and it is this earlier definition that becomes interesting today for the creation of a new interspecies ethology. Deleuze is the twentieth-century philosopher who has tried to recover this earlier meaning—and is therefore a major inspiration for contemporary thinkers working in this direction. In his 1980-1981 lecture course at Vincennes on Spinoza25 and in his 1981 book on Spinoza’s ethics, Deleuze approaches ethology as an ontological problem and equates ethology with ethics. Approaching ethology as a philosophical problem is a way for Deleuze to overcome morality’s (which, on Deleuze’s definition, is not to be conflated with ethics) obsession with laws, rules, infringements, and punishments (that is, how beings ought to behave), and to consider instead how beings actually do behave according to the capacities that inhere to them and are expressed by them. Spinoza’s Ethics is central to this operation insofar as it has nothing to do with morality: Spinoza, Deleuze, writes, “conceives [ethics] as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this 25

Transcripts of Deleuze’s lectures are freely available in numerous languages online at .

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plane of immanence” (Deleuze 1988b, 125). Ethology “define[s] bodies, animals, or humans by the affects they are capable of” and not “by the abstract notions of genus and species” (which, for Deleuze, imply a “morality”: they dictate how beings ought to be) (1988b, 124, 27). The example Deleuze proposes to sustain his statements is Uexkull’s tick, which is paradigmatically defined only by three affects, and which plays an important role both in Heidegger and Agamben’s thought (Deleuze 1988b, 124).26 For the same reasons, Spinoza also plays a central role in Agamben’s “modal ontology” (see Agamben 2016, 168-62),27 which can therefore be brought together with Deleuze’s Spinozian ethology in the redefinition and invention of a new interspecies ethology. On the other hand, contemporary “scientific” ethology has experienced a true revolution in the past three or four decades that has broken up the anthropocentric cage of the reason/instinct dichotomy: this “liberation”— thanks to pioneers such as Jane Goodal, Barbara Smuts, Marc Bekoff, and Frans de Waal, among others—both opened up the discipline to a fruitful (and much more “scientific”) comparative approach (including human ethology), and helped debunk tired, ingrained prejudices about human exceptionality. This scientific ethology has become a fundamental building block for supporting the claims of animal ethics and animal philosophy, but has also paved the way for a new philosophical ethology that, in the wake of Deleuze and others (including an unwitting Agamben), seeks a novel, inclusive, and interspecies ethos that involves all beings sharing and co-shaping the same ecological niche. Authors such as Dominique Lestel (2001), Vinciane Despret (2016), Roberto Marchesini (2016), and Mathew Calarco (2020) each try to imagine new ethological practices and new relational modalities thanks to which, in Calarco’s words, “we might […] turn from the standard project of revising or extending extant normative frameworks and instead undertake the work of fundamentally transforming our individual, social, and environmental worlds” (2020, 36). It is towards this new ethology, beyond the apparatuses of species and person and their exclusionary logic, that the coming philosophy should progress.

26

On Deleuze and ethology see in particular Cullen (2020) and, partially, Duff (2014). For an explicit “application” of Deleuze’s theory to an interspecies ethology, see Cimatti (2021). 27 On Agamben and Spinoza see Bernstein (2017).

CHAPTER FIVE BEYOND THE OPEN: BOREDOM AND SHAME

1. Trapped in the Open 1.1. In his Negative Dialectics (2004, 124), Adorno attacks the conceptuality of the Open as an “empty thesis” that, moreover, occurs “rarely without an invidious [hämische] side glance at the animal.” Admittedly, Adorno is criticizing the philosophical anthropology of Scheler and Gehlen here, but one can also assume that he is making an implicit reference to Heidegger and his uncharitable “side glance” at animality. The Open indeed presupposes a “closedness,” and thus a contrast, a contraposition, whereby the animal does not usually come out well and is banished to the not-open. But even when, as in Rilke, it is the animal that inhabits it, the Open always presupposes a dualism and a dichotomy between two homogenous and separate “essences”: the Human (or, rather, Man) and the Animal. It presupposes separation and exclusion, the “extraction” of the human from, and elevation over, all other living beings, and therefore remains inherently anthropocentric. The conceptuality of the Open is ultimately also what restrains and confines Agamben’s position on animality within the iron cage of the anthropocentric tradition: despite rejecting, in his methodology, The Signature of All Things (2009a, 19-20, 31), the “dichotomous principle dominating Western logic” in favor of a “bipolar analogical model,” Agamben maintains—or, as LaCapra argues (2009, 166), even requires—a radical divide between human and animal. In this final chapter I will explore the limits of the Heideggerian framework Agamben adopts and try to sketch a possible way out using categories that remain internal to Agamben’s own system. The conceptuality of the Open clearly carries a strong psychological valence, that is, a defiance of closure and closedness, and with this valence it entered the poetic and philosophic jargon way before Rilke and Heidegger. More than a century before Rilke’s elegies, Hölderlin evoked the Open in his famous elegy Bread and Wine (1801):

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Here, the experience of the Open is imagined as the search for what is “proper” (ein Eigenes) and in this acceptation it constitutes a building block of what Heidegger and Agamben will call ethos (cf. Chapter Four). With this in mind, Adrian Del Caro argues (like Agamben) that the Open expresses “humanity’s potential” and founds a veritable ontology of the human (1993, 386). In Hölderlin, however, this openness is not counterposed to animal closedness but rather projected towards the divine (Göttliches Feuer)—another feature that will profoundly mark Heidegger’s reading— while the dualisms open/closed and proper/improper only implicitly concern nature and nonhuman animals. This ontology of the Open was further embellished by Nietzsche, who endowed it with Dionysian qualities and counterposed it to Apollonian closure (Del Caro 1993, 383, 390). And it was probably through Nietzsche that it entered Rilke’s poetic world (Baer 2014, 126).2 In fact, Rilke’s notion that consciousness and reflection are at once the basis of human existence and the source of humans’ alienation from nature is clearly Nietzschean (and Romantic). Consciousness and signification—or as Blanchot, in his reading of Rilke, puts it: “consciousness closed upon itself, inhabited by images” (1982, 134)—perform a “cut” between humanity and the world, between subject and object, between interior and exterior, and ultimately between presence and absence. Thus, the Open becomes for Rilke that unalienated dimension that precedes and exceeds this cut and its dualisms. As a result of this cut, Rilke famously wrote in his Eighth Duino Elegy, “our eyes are turned backward” and only the “natural” Kreatur (which is named an “animal” only from the fifth verse) “looks out into the Open” “with all its eyes” (Rilke 2009, 49).3 As per the

1

This English translation over-emphasizes the spatial dimension of the Open. A better translation could be: “So come! that we may look upon the Open / that we may seek what is proper, distant as it may be.” 2 Heidegger also constantly emphasizes the generative link between Nietzsche’s and Rilke’s respective conceptions of the Open (cf. e.g., 1971a, 95; 1992, 155, 158). 3 It is worth noting that for all theorists of the Open—Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger—the relation to the Open is an (all-too human) “seeing” (schauen in

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dualist tradition, Rilke counterposes “unnatural” human beings to “natural” animal beings and “extracts” the humans, just as Heidegger will, from nature. This contraposition explicitly takes the form of a negation: the nonopen to which humans are condemned is determined by a series of negations whereby everything is closed off by what it is not, every A is defined by a not-A (Smith 1979, 15), as by an obstacle that blocks the “view” of the Open. And this is expressed in the Eighth Elegy by an extraordinary quadruple negative: Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag, den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen unendlich aufgehen. Immer ist es Welt und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht. [Never, not for a single day, do we have before us that pure space into which flowers endlessly open. Always there is World and never Nowhere without the No] (Rilke 2009, 49)

The human “World” (Immer ist es Welt) is inherently marked by a series of temporal (never) and spatial (Nowhere) negations, doubled, as it were, onto themselves (without the No); it is therefore counterposed to the “natural,” nonhuman Open as “pure space” (reinen Raum), pure positivity and full, infinite affirmation (Komar 2010, 91). (This is indeed the very opposite of Heidegger’s notion of the Open, which is precisely what characterizes the human world: only human beings can have a world— unlike animals and stones, humans alone are “world-forming”—because only human beings have access to—can “see”—the Open). Human “fate” is to always face the obstacle of a negation: Dieses heißt Schicksal: gegenüber sein und nichts als das und immer gegenüber. [That is what fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite and nothing else, forever.] (Rilke 2009, 51)

On the contrary, free of concepts, desires, expectations, and projections, only animals live a “pure,” immediate, unmediated, fully immanent life. That this conception is merely specular to, and as anthropocentric as, Heidegger’s is confirmed by Rilke’s understanding of animals’ relation to

Hölderlin, sehen in Rilke, sehen and erblicken in Heidegger). Other living beings would privilege other senses.

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death: the animal for Rilke—as for Heidegger—is “Frei von Tod,” free from death: … das freie Tier hat seinen Untergang stets hinter sich und vor sich Gott, und wenn es geht, so gehts in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen. [… the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.] (Rilke 2009, 49)

Animals, Heidegger will say, do not die, they merely perish.4 The cut that severs human beings from the natural world requires a double vocabulary for the same actions, a redoubling of cognate but allegedly different verbs. Moreover, Rilke’s lament for human “alienation” from the natural world, as Terry Llewellyn remarks (1996, 138), is a long-standing lament: it dates back at least to Plato’s simile of the cave and culminates in the Romantics’ concept of nature. Utterly romantic are also the examples of “glimpses” into the Open that, as Rilke explores in the following verses, some special categories of beings can experience—the child, the lovers, the dying man—even if only for a fleeting moment (cf. Llewellyn 1996, 142-43; Gruettner 2001, 94-95). It is true that, after the “pessimistic” (Llewellyn 1996, 132) description of the Eighth Elegy, in the Ninth and Tenth Elegies Rilke pleads for a recomposition that would unify the opposites and mend the “wound” of human separateness. Humans, Rilke proposes, must learn to inhabit the Open and “return” to the earth, to the here and now, to an earthly and immanent rather than angelic and transcendent existence. However, critics usually agree that this “return” is not a demise but rather a “triumph of human consciousness” (Komar 2010, 94; see also Komar 2004, and 4 Heidegger writes, for example, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995b, 267): “Is the death of the animal a dying or a way of coming to an end? Because captivation belongs to the essence of the animal, the animal cannot die in the sense in which dying is ascribed to human beings but can only come to an end.” And in “The Thing” (1971a, 176): “The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself.” On this topic I want to refer again to Susana Monsó’s works on the “concept of death” in animals (e.g., 2019; 2020).

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Gruettner 2001, 95-96), a triumph in particular of the unifying power of the poetic word (i.e., of language), whereby humans “surpass” the animal model and ultimately confirm their “ontological preeminence over the animals” (Llewellyn 1996, 138, 144).5 The Open is, even in Rilke’s apparently benign formulation, inherently constructed around the “invidious side glance at the animal.” 1.2. In a sense, Heidegger is therefore right when he accuses Rilke of seeking an “animalization” of the human (and a corresponding “hominization” of the animal; 1992, 152). In his readings of Rilke’s Eighth Elegy in the 1942-1943 lecture curse on Parmenides and in the 1946 address “What Are Poets For?” (delivered for the twentieth anniversary of Rilke’s death), Heidegger’s criticism is unforgiving: Rilke does not understand the true meaning of the Open (which, Heidegger seems to imply, only Hölderlin captures6) and any relation of Rilke’s Open to the true (Hölderlinian-Heideggerian) Open is merely apparent. They are “verbally the same, but in what the words name they are so different that no oppositional formulation could suffice to indicate the gap between them” (Heidegger 1992, 152). For Heidegger, Rilke’s Open is merely the constant, unlimited and unrestrained “progression of beings” that remains bound to the ontic dimension, “chained to the ground,” and “never arrives at the free of Being” (1992, 152). Open as limitless, infinite, the “original whole of reality,” and as such “free”; but this freedom is merely an absence of obstacles (1992, 157). It is freedom from consciousness, from conceptual determinacy, from the subject-object divide, even from death; it is merely freedom from 5 Ulrich Baer (2014, 129-30) points to an interesting formulation in the Tenth Elegy, where Rilke, to describe the beckoning “real” (wirklich) humans should aspire to, writes: “Kinder spielen, und Liebende halten einander,—abseits, / ernst, im ärmlichen Gras, und Hunde haben Natur” (“Children are playing, and lovers are holding hands, to the side, / solemnly in the meager grass, and dogs are doing what is natural.” Rilke 2009, 62). The unusual formulation “Hunde haben Natur” reduces nature to what dogs “have” (what they naturally do, what is natural for them—copulation? urination? defecation?), a description that allegedly contrasts with the uplifting conclusions of most critics and has therefore been ignored or dismissed. That nature is what dogs have, however, does not overcome the dualisms of the Open and is not what the re-composition of the salvific poetic word aims at. 6 The title of the 1946 address, Wozu Dichter?, comes from a famous verse from Hölderlin’s elegy Bread and Wine, “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?,” where Hölderlin also defines the Open as the search for the “proper.” Cf. e.g., Phillips (2011), 350.

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what blocks the view into the Open. As Heidegger writes in “What Are Poets For?”: In Rilke's language, “open” means something that does not block off [sperrt]. It does not block off because it does not set bounds [beschränkt]. It does not set bounds because it is in itself without all bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded. (1971a, 104)

A “trivial” (Phillips 2011, 349) openness indeed, since the true Open concerns instead, for Heidegger, the essence of aletheia, of the “unconcealement” that is the truth of Being (1992, 148). The ability to “see” into this essence is what confers true freedom: “We name it [the Open] ‘the free’ and its essence ‘freedom’” (1992, 148). But what grants this ability is the “word” (1992, 155): it is, as ever, language. Language played no role in Rilke’s concept of the Open but is inseparable from Heidegger’s (Phillips 2011, 351): only thanks to the “word” can human beings access things as what they are, in their unconcealedness (aletheia), “as such” (as Heidegger argued three years earlier in the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; see next section); only thanks to language can they have a “world,” a Da, and thus the Open becomes the linguistic essence that determines the Da, the world, the freedom of the Da-sein (Phillips 2011, 351-52; Russon and Jacobson, 345). As in the whole of Western tradition, at least since Aristotle, the Word is thus what excludes nonhuman animals from the Open, and thus from freedom and from having a “world”: “The sign of this essential exclusion [dieses wesenhaften Ausschlusses],” Heidegger writes, “is that no animal or plant ‘has the word’” (Heidegger 1992, 160). The Word is what creates the “abyss” (Heidegger 1995b, 264; 1998, 248) that essentially separates humans and non-humans and that determines what, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger calls animal “poverty.” Heidegger’s protests notwithstanding (1995b, 192ff.), this “poverty,” just like the notion of the Open itself, is a psychologically potent concept: “poverty,” along with the related notions of “deprivation” and “captivation,”7 are all clearly negatively marked terms and serve the purpose of defining the human ex negativo.8 Heidegger explicitly rejects the notion of hierarchy 7

Benommen, the term that Heidegger uses in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics to designate animal poverty of world and which is usually translated as “captivated,” always has a negative connotation in German: it means numb, torpid, stunned. 8 Despite Heidegger’s protestations to the contrary, in Of Spirit Derrida makes the (quite obvious) point that words such as “poverty” and “deprivation” inevitably

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between human and nonhuman animals, but this rejection, as Kelly Oliver remarks (2009, 197), responds to a precise demand: a hierarchy implies a certain continuity and a certain commonality, a difference in degree that would allow a form of comparison, whereas Heidegger insists that the difference between Dasein and the other creatures concerns their essence, and thus no true comparison is possible. Dasein is a “historical being,” which makes him essentially different from a mere “living being” (Heidegger 1992, 160). Perhaps Heidegger does not deny evolution on an ontic level (he also, rather ironically, uses biology and zoology to prove his point about animal poverty; cf. Oliver 2009, 200-1), but on an “ontological” level he is profoundly anti-Darwinian. In the lecture course on Parmenides, he calls the naturalist background of Rilke’s poetry (i.e., Darwinism) the “biologism of the nineteenth century,” a true “modern biological metaphysics,” which is the “metaphysics of the complete oblivion of Being” (1992, 152, 156). And in the “Letter on Humanism,” he famously states that the essence of Dasein is much closer to the essence of “divinity” than to the “scarcely conceivable, abyssal bodily kinship with the beast” (1998, 248).9 This essentialist and ultimately theological view is what acritically reproduces and rehearses traditional Western dualism. There is in fact an explicit rejection of any critical (ethological?) approach: “What the lark ‘sees,’” Heidegger writes, “and how it sees, and what it is we here call ‘seeing’ on the basis of our observation that the lark has eyes, these questions remain to be asked” (1992, 160). Heidegger does not ask these questions, he is not interested in them, and implicitly forecloses this kind of questioning, which anyway would not undermine the a priori assumption that the lark does not see the Open. Derrida (2008, 146) indeed hit the mark when he noted that, despite all his criticisms of Cartesianism (the Dasein is not the cogito, which arguably epitomizes Western metaphysics), in his view of nature and nonhuman animals Heidegger remains profoundly Cartesian: he remains acritically imply evaluation and hierarchization (1989, 56). Moreover, despite Heidegger’s attempts to avoid traditional anthropocentrism, the fact that he defines animal poverty as the lack of world that only Dasein has a claim to shows that he still takes the human as the “measure of all things” (1989, 49). This, in turn, reveals “a certain anthropocentric or even humanist teleology” (1989, 55). 9 As Simone Gustafsson writes (2013, 12), referring in particular to Michel Haar’s elucidation of Heidegger’s ontology (e.g. Haar 1993a; 1993b), “Heidegger wants to show the impossibility of an original and fundamental implication or entanglement of human Dasein in living beings, to destroy the idea of an animal lineage.”

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loyal to and reinforces in his own work the standard, uninterrogated assumptions about the decisive ontological divisions between humanity and animality (cf. Attell 2015, 195). In short, in and beyond his understanding of the Open, Heidegger remains captive to Cartesian metaphysics and human/animal dualism. 1.3. As I have already emphasized, Agamben’s important contribution in The Open is to show that Heidegger’s position fully complies with the deadly logic of the anthropological machine of the West and remains therefore internal to its metaphysics of animality. The core of Heidegger’s analysis of the human-animal divide is in fact the inclusive exclusion, the ban-structure that characterizes and determines the Western sovereign structure and ultimately the whole of Western metaphysics: animality is captured (and thus “sovereignly” subjugated) via its very exclusion, through which the Dasein’s ek-sistence is construed. The result, as we know, is a state of exception, a zone of indistinction between the two opposite terms that can only produce bare life (cf. e.g., Santner 2006, 10; Attell 2015, 205-6). And long before The Open, indeed as early as the early 1980s, the negativity that Agamben identified in Heidegger’s philosophy (as a sort of paradigm, with Hegel’s, of Western philosophy) was the deadly “rupture” that Agamben’s whole philosophical project, both before and after his “political” turn, consistently tries to overcome. In Language and Death (1991, 57), it is precisely Rilke’s quadruple negative, “never Nowhere without the No,” that epitomizes for Agamben this negativity that must be overcome even in Heidegger’s project.10 Moreover, in The Open Agamben performs a profoundly antiHeideggerian operation when he re-inserts the human within the evolutionary continuum: as more orthodox Heideggerians have duly noted (cf. e.g., Colony 2007; Ziarek 2008; Gustafsson 2013), against Heidegger’s emphasis on the ontological abyss separating human and nonhuman animals, Agamben postulates animality (or the living being) as the substrate on which the operation of anthropogenesis is performed, and thus as the origin of the openness proper to the human. In Agamben’s reading of Heidegger, human openness becomes a modification of an earlier state of animal captivation, the result of an “operation” (anthropogenesis) through which the captivated animal becomes the open human: 10 Sergei Prozorov (2014, 166) remarks that the alternative to Heideggerian negativity that Agamben identifies in The Open in Benjamin’s “saved night” is also conceived in terms of the concealed and the opaque (that is, not-open), but salvation (of the animal) is here presented precisely as a remaining “in the night,” which, as “saved,” deactivates however the open/close, positive/negative dichotomy.

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Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human. (Agamben 2004, 70)

This thesis—and in particular its incipit: “Dasein is simply an animal…”— could not be less Heideggerian. In Heidegger’s construction, the animal cannot possibly be posited as what is given before the abyss separating it from the human: this abyss is ontological, “essential,” insurmountable, and unbridgeable. Within this frame, the displeased Heideggerians (correctly) argue, no genealogy can be postulated: animality “may never be framed as the origin for the openness of the world itself” (Colony 2007, 14), hence Heidegger’s text “does not support” Agamben’s reading (Gustafsson 2013, 16), and Agamben falls fully back into the metaphysics of the homo animalis (Ziarek 2008, 196-98).11 And yet Agamben never questions the conceptuality of the Open and its dualisms. Not in Language and Death, the epilogue of which, despite pointing towards an overcoming of negativity, still maintains the dualism between animal voice and human language. Not in The Open, in which Agamben ultimately embraces Heidegger’s insistence on animality as what is concealed about and from humanity, and seems at times even to agree with Heidegger’s challenge to Darwinism (for example, when dismissing biology as a miserable “fate” to be escaped) (Oliver 2009, 232). And not after The Open, when the many unquestioned presuppositions determining the dualistic underpinnings of the Open remain fully operative in his writings. One recent example will suffice here. In May 2021, Agamben published an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and then on his webpage at his publisher Quodlibet titled “The Face and Death” (“Il volto e la morte”; Agamben 2021d). Harshly criticizing the compulsory use of protective masks to fight the COVID-19 pandemics, he rehearsed the standard arguments that only humans have a face and that the face is what make us humans. Only humans, he argued (repeating an old argument he first proposed in the 1991 essay “The Face,” then collected in Means Without Ends; cf. Agamben 2000, 91-107), make the face the place of their truth (only humans recognize themselves in mirrors) and of their politics: “If there is no animal politics,” Agamben writes, “this is because animals, who are always already in the Open, do not problematize their 11

Paul Colilli (2015, 179) argues moreover that Agamben’s emphasis on the suspension of activity—on disactivating one’s operativity in one’s environment and, ultimately, existing outside of being—brings him much closer to Rilke than to Heidegger.

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exposition, they just dwell in it without caring about it.” This is why only Man “transforms the animal environment into a World, into the field of an incessant political dialectics.” And because Man is “the animal who recognizes himself in his own face,” he “is also the only animal who celebrates the cult of the dead” (Agamben 2021d). Besides the strange, new, un-Heideggerian formulation that animals “are always already in the Open” (which is reminiscent of the formulation in Infancy and History that animals are “always and totally language”; 1993c, 52), all these statements are mere unquestioned presuppositions, which for the most part can be easily falsified.12 But the point is that no falsification would change the ultimately unquestioned ontological difference between humans and animals, because this difference is what determines the framework of the Open and validates all these presuppositions. The Open is these presuppositions, and this is why Donna Haraway (2008, 334n16) writes that Agamben, in the end, is “no help at all for figuring out how to get to another kind of opening.” To enable another kind of opening, an opening that is no caesura or “wound” (Pick 2006), poets and philosophers should abandon the Open, enter the antiHeideggerian13 contact zone of “mortal entanglements” (Haraway 2008, 226), and start learning some basic ethology.

12

The thesis that animals have no face cannot obviously be falsified because it is but a postulate: face is what humans have; humans are those beings possessing a face. No observation, discussion or demonstration can change that. That only humans recognize themselves in mirrors, however, has been widely proved wrong: since Gordon Gallup developed the mirror self-recognition test (MSR) in 1970, the great apes, dolphins, orcas, some elephants and even magpies have passed the MSR test (though this is a very contested field). Apropos of the “cult of death,” I’ve already mentioned some recent studies on the “concept of death” in animals. As for animal and politics, I shall limit myself to point to the by-now classic Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal (2007; first edition 1982). 13 The Heideggerian abyss can never become a contact zone and every true contact across the divide is ontologically impossible: in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger famously argued that, though we share a space with many animals (e.g., our pets), we cannot live with them, since “this being-with is not an existing-with, because a dog does not exist but merely lives” (1995b, 210)—a position Agamben seems to share, or at least does nothing to disprove (cf. Oliver 2009, 232). But this is a mere, anti-evolutionist and falsifiable presupposition, since from an elementary evolutionist perspective co-evolution is a basic fact, whereby identities and subjectivities are continually co-shaped by interspecies encounters (cf. Haraway 2008, 205 and passim).

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2. Boredom, or The Paradoxes of the Human-Animal Divide 2.1. The presuppositional nature of the Open emerges in full clarity when we analyze the concept that both Heidegger and Agamben put at the center of it and hence of their reflections on animality, namely boredom. Boredom is central for both thinkers because it simultaneously shows the closeness and the distance between humans and nonhumans, because it emphasizes the divide between them precisely by showing what brings them near to each other. As Philipp Wüschner writes (2011, 184), in boredom “what brings [humans and animals] together is what separates them,” and this constitutes the paradox of boredom and the reason why practically all literature on this subject comes up against the animal question (Wüschner 2011, 183). This paradox, however, rests on longstanding and ingrained presuppositions that should be falsified and abandoned if we want to figure out “how to get to another kind of opening.” The philosophical reflections on boredom rest on two main axioms that express its paradoxical nature: on the one hand, only human beings are (said to be) able to truly feel boredom, but, on the other, boredom “dehumanizes” the human subject and brings her close to animal stupor. In the Western tradition, boredom is in fact one of the many (almost “magical”) qualities that are “proper” only to human beings, differentiating them from nonhuman animals and turning them into the “exception.”14 And many authoritative sources are invoked to support this thesis: Helvétius (qtd. in Grimm 1813, 211), for example, claimed (perhaps ironically) that “it is boredom that accounts for our superiority over animals,” and Goethe (1998, 120) echoed him stating that “if monkeys could reach the point of being bored, they could turn into human beings.” In his Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia, the poet Giacomo Leopardi wondered why “All animals can rest at ease, / While all things round them seem to please, / But if I lie down to rest, / I am by tedium oppressed?” (2015, 202-3, translation modified), and Nietzsche (1997, 63), inspired by Leopardi (cf. Lemm 2009,88), opened the second of his Untimely Meditations by observing that the “animal, which is quite unhistorical, and dwells within a horizon reduced almost to a point, […] 14

Derrida (2008, 5) aptly notes that “[t]he list of ‘what is proper to man’ always forms a configuration, from the first moment. For that very reason, it can never be limited to a single trait and it is never closed; structurally speaking it can attract a nonfinite number of other concepts, beginning with the concept of a concept.”

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lives […] without boredom [Ueberdruss] and dissimulation.” In the twentieth century, Erich Fromm (2002, 23) restated that “[m]an is the only animal that can be bored, that can feel evicted from paradise”—and the list continues. What makes boredom a human “privilege” is its temporality, best expressed by the German term for it, Langeweile, literally “a long while”: in boredom, time seems to drag on and hang heavily on us. Animals, however, (allegedly) live only in the present, they know no history, no time, no death, and so cannot get bored (cf. e.g., Wüschner 2011, 184-85; Bellebaum 1990, 73, 202). Moreover, boredom is said to rest on a “purely intellectual foundation”: it presupposes subjectivity and self-awareness, a search for meaning in the world and in oneself, and nonhuman animals are—a priori—denied all these features (cf. e.g., Toohey 2011, 88, 106; Svendsen 2005, 32). Hence, as Lars Svendsen concludes, “[a]nimals can be understimulated, but hardly bored” (2005, 32). On the other hand, however, boredom is inhuman and dehumanizing precisely because it robs human life of meaning (Svendsen 2005, 33). This thesis presents an authoritative lineage as well: already in the Middle Ages, for example, the Franciscan scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus took a donkey as a symbol for acedia (the ancestor of modern boredom) and named it “animal melancholicum frigidum […] et siccum” (qtd. in Bellebaum 1990, 41), and centuries later Dostoevsky called boredom a “bestial and indefinable affliction” (qtd. in Svendsen 2005, 44-45). The loss of meaning in boredom reduces human life to something analogous to an existence that is purely animal. Any attempt to question these theses—a dog can at times look bored; animals in zoos definitely look bored—is accused of anthropomorphism (Svendsen 2005, 128), a capital sin in “science.”15 But in order for the dichotomy (a true inclusive exclusion) to work, the animal must be “animalized,” that is, it must be reduced to the Cartesian passive receptor of stimuli that knows no time, no death, no self-awareness, no meaning, has no subjectivity, and thus cannot know boredom. These are however mere presuppositions, and therefore the paradox of boredom is based on mere assumptions and preconceptions. 2.2. The presuppositional nature of this paradox is at most evident in Heidegger’s celebrated analysis of boredom. As Agamben, among others, correctly remarks (2004, 61-62, 67-68), the link between animality and 15

There is some very interesting literature on the “heuristic” (de Waal 2000) or “critical” (Burghardt 1990, 2007) potential of anthropomorphism, but an analysis of this issue far exceeds the scope of this chapter or this book.

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boredom is far from coincidental in Heidegger’s 1929-1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, where he explores his views on animality in detail. As is well known, the course is divided into two main parts, the first develops an analysis of boredom as the “fundamental attunement” (Grundstimmung) of Dasein, and the second constructs an analysis of animality in relation to the question of “world.” The “thematic unity” (Bassanese 1992) of the two parts consists precisely in the question “What is a World?” that leads Heidegger’s inquiry: in a nutshell, the “loss of world” that characterizes deep boredom could seem to resemble the “poverty of world” that constitutes for Heidegger the essence of animality, though in truth the suspension of all ontic possibilities in boredom is precisely (and paradoxically) what gives Dasein access to the truth of Being (to a World), and thus is what most differentiates Dasein from nonhuman animals. This is why boredom can become for Agamben the “metaphysical operator in which the passage from poverty in world to world, from animal environment to human world, is realized” (Agamben 2004, 68). Monica Bassanese (1992, 64) has even identified a “structural” correspondence between the two parts of Heidegger’s course. In the first part, Heidegger identifies three different forms of boredom: to be bored “by something” (“something bores me”), to be bored “with something” (“I bore myself”), and finally “profound boredom” (“it is boing for one”). The first two forms can be said to correspond to the “animalizing” boredom of the Western tradition that reduces human beings to “brutes,” whereas the third form is a sort of “existential boredom” (Martin Doehlemann qtd. in Toohey 2011, 5) that can awaken Dasein to the truth of Being. For Bassanese, these three forms of boredom correspond in the second part to the (in)famous tripartite division of beings according to their relation to the world: the first form would correspond to the “absence of world” (Weltlosigkeit) of the stone (of inanimate objects), the second to the “poverty of world” (Weltarmut) of the animal, and the third to the possibility for the human being to become weltbildend, “world-forming.” In the first two forms of boredom, the experience of time is reduced to a “now-time” (Boss 2009, 98), which corresponds quite literally to the animal’s a-historicity and exile into the present.16 But a more profound 16 Heidegger writes: “Not only does time in its standing not release us, it precisely summons us, it sets us in place. When, letting ourselves go along with being there and part of things, we are thus set in place by the standing ‘now’ that is our own, albeit relinquished and empty self, then we are bored. […] This standing ‘now’ which thus sets us in place (summons us) is what bores us” (Heidegger 1995b, 126).

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analogy between the “inauthentic” everyday life of contemporary man (epitomized by the inauthentic relation to time and world in the first two forms of boredom) and animal “captivation” exists (Bassanese 1992, 7172). And this is a point Heidegger makes at the very inception of his inquiry: when discussing the task of the course in the preliminary appraisal, he argues that the contemporary city dweller has long since forgotten the fundamental attunement of philosophizing, “homesickness,” and calls them therefore die Affe der Zivilisation, the “ape of civilization” (1995b, 5). The contemporary city dweller is lost in the “animal sphere” of his everyday life (Bassanese 1992, 81; cf. also Kuperus 2007, 17-18), a point Heidegger will restate time and again (as for example in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” where he writes: “Expelled from the truth of being, the human being everywhere circles around himself as the animal rationale”; 1998, 260). This analogy, as Agamben again poignantly notes (2004, 52), is also reflected in the peculiar terminology Heidegger uses in the lecture course: the world of the animal is here constructed, with a typically Heideggerian etymological game, around a vocabulary derived from the verb nehmen: the mode of being proper to the animal is “captivation” (Benommenheit), in which the animal is “stunned” and “blocked” by (benommen), and absorbed within (eingenommen), the circle of its disinhibitors, so that it can never truly act or comport itself (sich verhalten), but can only “behave” (sich benehmen); likewise, human beings in the mode of everyday forgetfulness of Being are “taken [hingenommen] by things, if not altogether lost in them, and often even captivated [benommen] by them” (Heidegger 1995b, 101). This apparent affinity between boredom and animal captivation, however, only serves to cast in even sharper relief the contrast between the human condition and the animal condition. At the end of the course, Heidegger delivers his verdict: It will be revealed how this fundamental attunement [i.e., profound boredom], and everything bound up with it, is to be set off over against what we claimed as the essence of animality, over against captivation. This contrast will become all the more decisive for us insofar as captivation, as precisely the essence of animality, apparently belongs in the closest proximity to what we identified as a characteristic feature of profound boredom and described as the entrancement of Dasein within beings as a whole. Certainly it will be seen that this closest proximity of both determinations of essence is merely deceptive, that an abyss lies between them which cannot be bridged by any mediation whatsoever. (1995b, 282)

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In profound boredom, Dasein is delivered over to beings’ complete refusal of themselves (all things lose all meaning and we are thrown upon ourselves), just like the animal, in its captivation, is exposed to the poverty of world, that is, to the refusal of a “world.” However, in the complete suspension of profound boredom, the Dasein finds something like an opening to the world “as such”—and can thus have a “world,” which “means the manifestness of beings as such as a whole” (Heidegger 1995b, 301)—whereas animal captivation is precisely the impossibility of transcending the pragmatic relation to beings towards an apprehending of beings “as such”17: the “poverty in world” of the animal is the lack of the “as-such-structure” (als-Struktur).18 So, for Wüschner (2011, 188), in profound boredom human beings do not sink back to animality, but rather to their “unbearable” difference from the animal. Unlike animals, human beings can always redeem themselves from their “imprisonment” and embrace the “task” that is constituted by their “true essence.”19 Agamben ultimately concludes that in this analysis Heidegger does not manage to “escape the metaphysical primacy of animalitas” (2004, 73) and instead blindly follows the logic of the anthropological machine, since human openness (in and through boredom) remains dependent on animal closedness. But, for his part, Agamben never questions the paradox of 17 Since the “as-such-structure” depends on and derives from the fundamental attunement of the Dasein, the animal’s “poverty in world” corresponds to its “poverty in mood” or lack of attunement (Kuperus 2007, 5). It is attunements that open up a world. 18 To exemplify the animal captivation within the circle of its “drives” (Triebe), Heidegger (1995b, 242) recounts an experiment (that he takes from Uexküll) where the abdomen of a bee was cut away while she was sucking honey, and the bee simply carried on regardless, even while the honey flowed out of her body. Gerard Kuperus (2007, 26n27) wonders, however, whether human beings in their everyday existence are radically distinct from this instinctual behavior, and mentions the practice of “stomach stapling,” which consists in reducing the size of a human stomach in order to treat obesity; is the human drive to eat so different from that of the bee? Wüschner (2011, 187) also notes that the bee’s insatiable drive presents the very same structure of the worst human addictions (those that never become boring): in the information society we suck information like honey, without ever having our fill. 19 Kuperus (2007, 18) here remarks the difference in the terminology: whereas the animal is “benommen” in its captivation, human beings are “gefangen,” imprisoned (Heidegger 1995b, 278); “While our everyday existence is in general perhaps not so different from this animal existence, Heidegger’s language already suggests that human beings have the possibility to escape the captivation of their everyday existence, while animals do not have such a possibility in their ‘being taken.’” Cf. also McNeill (2007, 50).

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boredom and its “metaphysical” status, going so far as to turn it into the very operator of anthropogenesis. He essentially accepts Heidegger’s analysis with all its unquestioned dualisms and dichotomies, albeit while giving it a more “evolutionary” turn by reinserting the human into a (sort of) continuum with the animal, whereby homo = animal + tedium. The paradoxical dualism of boredom (which is the dualism of the Open) remains fully operative in Agamben.20 The only solution to this paradox is to show the inconsistency of its presuppositions and thus to abandon it altogether. 2.3. Philosophers have given boredom a “metaphysical” status, and that is why nonhuman animals are not “allowed” to participate in or experience it. This metaphysical status, especially in Heidegger and Agamben, tends moreover to appear as fully a-historical, as an intrinsic and atemporal component of the human condition and hence as a distinctive “quality” proper to humans alone. For some recent literature on the subject, however, boredom has a history (also attested to by its vocabulary21) and is more precisely a typically modern phenomenon: modernization, especially since the late eighteenth century, shattered the traditional forms of human experience and produced new psychological and social forms that needed new forms of expression—one of which was boredom. The “disenchantment” of the world, the fragmentation of traditional values and forms of existence, the mechanization and emptying of time by technological industrialization, and the literal bombardment of people with new stimuli are all joint causes of an emptying out of experience that is a mark of modernity. This does not mean that boredom did not exist before, but rather that modernity increased and “democratized” it at an unprecedented scale. Not all scholars of course embrace this “modernist” theory, but even the sceptics (e.g., Svendsen 2005; Toohey 2011) agree 20

Twelve years after the publication of The Open, Agamben will repeat the very same argument in the second “Intermezzo” of The Use of Bodies (2016, 184-87), without questioning, again, the dualisms of boredom and the Open. Dasein, he reiterates, “is an animal that has grasped its animality and has made of this the possibility of the human being. But the human being is void, because it is only a suspension of animality” (2016, 186). 21 The English term boredom is very recent and dates from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The cognate terms that form the constellations of boredom in other languages (tedium vitae, acedia, ennui, spleen, melancholy, Langeweile, etc.) all present a history and a precise development in time, duly emphasized by the specialistic literature, and which peaks in modernity. For a historical approach to the vocabulary of boredom see in particular Meyer Spacks (1995), Goodstein (2005), and the introduction of Dalle Pezze and Salzani (2009).

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that the “poverty of experience” that characterizes modernity is a determinant factor for the peculiar wave of boredom that has swept over the world since the Industrial Revolution. But if we historicize boredom and consider it on a phenomenological rather than metaphysical level, then it becomes difficult to use it as yet another apparatus of inclusion and exclusion, as yet another cog in the anthropological machine. On a phenomenological level, as both “modernists” and sceptics agree, boredom is the result of understimulation and environmental deprivation, which can affect humans and nonhumans alike. If we bracket the presupposition that only humans are essentially and a priori “attuned,”22 then simple empirical observation will lead us to abandon the paradox of boredom. The animal welfare scholar Françoise Wemelsfelder (e.g., 1985; 1990; 2005; see also Beckoff 2008, 169ff.), among others, has conducted extensive empirical research on animal boredom and reached a simple conclusion: any environmental deprivation that prevents a living being with some level of awareness from fulfilling their natural behaviors and adapting to their environment in a normal way produces an emotive state that can be called boredom23—as any visit to a zoo can easily demonstrate. In order to maintain the paradox of boredom we must postulate a priori a dualism that is increasingly difficult to justify—though it is so ingrained in our culture and way of thinking that even someone like Peter Toohey (2011, 106 and passim), who freely admits to the trans-specific nature of boredom, falls back into the old dualist pattern when he postulates a difference between “simple boredom,” common to humans and nonhumans, and “metaphysical boredom,” which is the burden and privilege of humans alone. Today, only ideological blinders can lead us to deny animal boredom. If this category is rarely used for animals in factory farms (in their case, other categories appear much more urgent and imperative, though understimulation and environmental deprivation are defining features of these places), the zoo is perhaps paradigmatic here: the modern zoo is literally designed to combat animal boredom, which is today the main 22 For Heidegger (1995b, 68), “attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement.” 23 Of course, a Heideggerian philosopher would retort that this is merely the boredom that affects the inauthentic life of the “ape of civilization” (and, perhaps she could concede, also some nonhuman animals) and not the profound boredom that allows Dasein access to the world “as such.” But this difference works only if we presuppose a dualism that can be neither phenomenologically observed nor verified or demonstrated but must be assumed a priori.

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enemy of the zookeeper fighting the unbearable (and very costly) monotony of their animal charges’ lives in captivity.24 But if the problem is captivity, a philosopher could retort, then the dualism still holds: nonhuman animals experience boredom in captivity, that is, only when “humanized” and put into a human setting, whereas human beings experience boredom also in their “free” existence. The observations of a famous zoo director, however, can help dispel this final myth. Drawing from his experience as a zookeeper, in his 1969 best-seller, The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris argued that contemporary human behavior presents all the typical pathologies of animals in captivity: “The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo” (1996, 7). And it is precisely in this zoo that Heidegger’s Affe der Zivilisation lives. Among these pathologies, Morris writes, boredom is preeminent: The zoo world, like a gigantic parent, protects its inmates: food, drink, shelter, hygiene and medical care are provided; the basic problems of survival are reduced to a minimum. There is time to spare. How this time is used in a non-human zoo varies, of course, from species to species. Some animals quietly relax and doze in the sun; others find prolonged inactivity increasingly difficult to accept. If you are an inmate of a human zoo, you inevitably belong to this second category. Having an essentially exploratory, inventive brain, you will not be able to relax for very long. You will be driven on and on to more and more elaborate activities. You will investigate, organize and create and, in the end, you will have plunged yourself deeper still into an even more captive zoo world. (Morris 1996, 8)

Far from digging a metaphysical abyss between humans and nonhumans, boredom seems to be the product of a series of determinate conditions of existence and coexistence, conditions of substantial captivity that the human animals have created for themselves, ending up constructing a whole zoo around them. Despite the pressure, Morris writes, the benefits for humans are of course enormous. Moreover, the human animal cannot possibly escape from her zoo and avoid her boredom, since these features have become our second nature, “a basic part of our biological inheritance,” and there is no longer anything “artificial or unnatural about them” (1996, 9). Rather than an animal that has learned to become bored, the human is therefore the animal that has transformed the world (her own and that of other species) into a zoo, and an especially boring one at that. 24 I

have explored the paradox of the bored animal in the zoo in Salzani (2021c).

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3. Like a Dog, or The Shame of Being Human 3.1. The presuppositional nature of the Open ultimately prevents Agamben from remaining true to his quest for a community without presuppositions that he invokes in The Coming Community (originally published in 1990) and that informs his whole political philosophy of the following three decades. Any community based on the Open essentially rests on the presupposition of the animal’s inclusive exclusion that in turn sustains human exceptionality and human sovereignty over the nonhuman world. And boredom is paradigmatic of all the paradoxes that this dualism generates. By way of conclusion, I want to briefly explore now a different concept that plays an important role in Agamben’s reflections and that I believe is extremely entwicklungsfähig for a thought aimed at going beyond the Open and its paradoxes: namely shame. Shame emerges at different phases of Agamben’s thought with a certain regularity and consistency and belongs to a constellation, the Kafkan-Benjaminian constellation of “hybrid ecologies” (Haacke 2013), that I will here oppose—as an “antidote,” as it were25—to the Heideggerian dualistic constellation of the Open. Confronted with the exclusionary structure of human exceptionality and sovereignty, I will argue, shame is what can be developed into a bridge to cross the Heideggerian abyss and get to a “different kind of opening.” However, shame must first be wrested from the Heideggerian ontologisation of “moods” to which Agamben ultimately also confined it. The most extensive analysis of shame in Agamben’s oeuvre is in fact the third chapter of Remnants of Auschwitz, which bears the title “Shame, or On the Subject.” Here Agamben, analogously to Heidegger’s reading of boredom as the Grundstimmung of the Dasein, attempts to interpret shame not only as “the most proper emotive tonality of subjectivity” but as the very “hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness” (Agamben 1999b, 110, 128), as the Grundstimmung of being human, as it were. Thereby, like Heidegger, Agamben falls into the anthropocentric pattern according to which this Grundstimmung is what differentiates the human from the other living beings (though this point remains implicit). Heidegger is not the starting point of Agamben’s analysis, but he clearly offers the model that Agamben will later adopt. In his 1942-1943 lecture 25 Agamben has famously and repeatedly (though also enigmatically) stated that in his philosophical education Benjamin has worked as an antidote to Heidegger (Marongiu 1999, ii; Leitgeb and Vismann 2001, 18; Andreotti and De Melis 2006, 2), and here I want to develop the Benjaminian antidote into a means to overcoming Agamben’s lingering and persistent Heideggerianism.

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course on Parmenides, Heidegger analyzes the term aidos (ĮੁįȫȢ), which he translates into German as Scheu and is rendered in the English translation of the course as “awe,” but semantically also includes respect, reverence, modesty, and shame. This term, Heidegger writes, “is not meant to denote a ‘subjective’ feeling or a ‘lived experience’ of the human ‘subject,’” but is rather what “determines ਕȜȒșİȚĮ, the unconcealed in its unconcealedness, in which the whole essence of man stands together with all human faculties” (1992, 74). Shame, Agamben claims, “is thus a kind of ontological sentiment that has its characteristic place in the encounter between man and Being” (1999b, 106). For his analysis Agamben then adopts the (Heideggerian) definition given by Levinas in On Escape (1935), according to which shame, like other negative bodily experiences, “is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself,” and thus essentially means “to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed” but is at the same time “what is most intimate in us” (1999b, 104-5).26 This describes, according to Agamben, the ontological structure of shame: a double movement of subjectification and desubjectification in which “the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification” (1999b, 106). And this is for Agamben the subject tout court, the very structure of subjectivity, always split, as he will later formulate in The Open, between the human (the subject) and an animal remainder, here named the “inhuman.”27 Hence Agamben’s new definition of shame: [shame] is nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposite senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty. (1999b, 107)

This ontologisation of shame attracted substantial criticism, since it reduces a social emotion to an (essentially asocial) auto-affection, which 26

The Levinasian genealogy and this very definition of shame will return sixteen year later in The Use of Bodies, where Agamben writes that these negative bodily experiences “are founded on a double movement, in which the subject finds himself, on the one hand, irremissibly consigned to his body and, on the other, just as inexorably incapable of assuming it” (2016, 84). The same formulation also returns in the essay “The Inappropriable” of Creation and Anarchy (2019b). 27 In “Idea of Shame” of Idea of Prose, originally published in 1985 (thirteen years before Remnants of Auschwitz), Agamben already described shame—without the Levinasian genealogy—as “the index of an unheard of, frightening proximity of man with himself” (1995, 84).

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“diverts attention from social interaction and ethicopolitical issues” (LaCapra 2007, 159) and is unable to account for the relational dimension of subjectivity (Mills 2008, 102, 104; cf. also Mesnard and Kahan 2001, 60-76). Lisa Guenther (2012), in particular, opposes to Agamben’s autoaffective account the phenomenological analysis of shame proposed by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, according to which shame is precisely that feeling of “exposure” to the gaze of others revealing the being-forothers that is constitutive of subjectivity: rather than being a double movement of subjectification and desubjectification, shame is precisely what “intersubjectifies” (2012, 61).28 There is another problem with Agamben’s account: its logocentrism. Shame for Agamben is essentially a linguistic issue, since it is what expresses “the relation (or rather, non-relation) between the living being and the speaking being” (Agamben 1999b, 130). The analysis of shame in Remnants of Auschwitz is related to the question of testimony (to which I will return later) and what Agamben tries to articulate in the shame of the survivors is the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of testimony. Subjectification means entering into language and saying “I,” which is always accompanied however by an insurmountable resistance and the impossibility of appropriating language (desubjectification). This is, in Agamben’s view, the human subject, which means that subjectivity is speaking, subjectivity is language. Not surprisingly, Agamben recalls here the analysis of the Voice that he conducted in Language and Death and that epitomizes the exclusionary logic of human subjectivity (1999b, 12930). This analysis of shame remains anthropocentric. 3.2. The anthropocentrism of Agamben’s concept of shame also emerges from the place that he assigns to it, which is the face. The external manifestation of shame is blushing, the reddening of the face, and this also relates it to language, since the face, as Agamben writes in the homonymous essay, is “the passion of language” (2000, 92; cf. also “Nudity,” 2011b, 88). The intrinsic relation between shame and face reinscribes human exceptionalism, since nonhuman animals, for Agamben as for most Western philosophers, do not have faces (and do not blush). Moreover, nudity, the archetypical event of shame, is again something exclusively human. In his essay “Nudity” (2011b), Agamben does not 28 Eric Santner basically accepts Agamben’s account but adds that “[w]hat is impossible to assume is not an intimacy that is already constituted but one that is, if I may put it that way, ex-cited into existence by the very summons that ostensibly turns us toward it” (2006, 24). Subjectivity is thus constituted for Santner by a summoning (by power) that simultaneously subjectivizes and desubjectivizes us.

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dwell on shame but merely emphasizes that nudity without shame was a prelapsarian condition: in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were naked like animals and, like animals, did not feel shame at their nudity. It is only with the Fall that they became aware of their nudity, and the nostalgia for nudity without shame (the nudity of animals but also that of children, reenacted in the ritual of Christian baptism) expresses the yearning for a redeemed humanity (2011b, 72). It is interesting that shame at his own nudity is precisely what led Derrida to reflect on animality: surprised by the gaze of his cat on his naked body in the bathroom, he felt ashamed, but also, reflectively, ashamed for being ashamed, since the shame for one’s nudity before beings that are not aware of their own is itself shameful (Derrida 2008, 4). In Derrida, the link between shame and nudity is complemented by a link to “technicity,” since clothing derives from technics; thus shame, nudity, and technicity should be thought of as the same “subject.” And this subject is human difference: Man “would be a man only to the extent that he was able to be naked, that is to say, to be ashamed, to know himself to be ashamed because he is no longer naked. And knowing himself would mean knowing himself to be ashamed” (2008, 5). This particular shame did lead Derrida to a powerful questioning of Western philosophy with regards to animality, but the philosopher’s gaze all too quickly moved back from the cat to his own nudity (“shame trumped curiosity”), and that is why, for Donna Haraway, (this kind of) “shame is not an adequate response to our inheritance of multi-species histories” (2008, 22-23). The exclusively human character of shame is so ingrained in our culture that not even Darwin, despite affirming the continuity between the emotional lives of humans and other animals, came to question it. If in The Descent of Man he could still write that “[t]here can, I think, be no doubt that a dog feels shame” (2009a, 42; cf. Williams 2012, 29-30), one year later (1872), in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he started his chapter on blushing (chapter XIII, “Self-Attention—Shame— Shyness—Modesty: Blushing”) by stating that “blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush” (2009b, 328). As with boredom, blushing and shame, the traditional argument goes, need a level of self-consciousness and self-awareness (what Darwin calls “selfattention”) that cannot be found in nonhuman animals. Yet, contemporary ethologists have argued that not even these self-reflexive emotions can be sacrificed to the altar of what Frans de Waal calls the “‘only humans have X’-religion” (2019, 123). Agamben’s ontological solipsism notwithstanding,

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shame is a social emotion with determinate evolutive features, and it would therefore go against a reasonable principle of parsimony to deny this emotion to other social animals with similar or analogous neurological and social characteristics (see e.g., Masson and McCarthy 1996, chapter 9; de Waal 1996, 105-11; 2019, chapter 4; Bekoff 2013, 86ff.). So, perhaps, (some) nonhuman animal could feel shame and even blush (Masson and McCarthy 1996). But this is not the point I want to make about shame. Debunking the presuppositions of the Open and of the “‘only humans have X’-religion” is certainly important as pars destruens of a possible change, but a further step is necessary to “get to another kind of opening,” and perhaps shame could be the ethico-political “operator” of this step. Derrida seems to be pointing in this direction, i.e., towards ascribing ethico-political value to shame, when he writes: “The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there” (2008, 29). The thinking provoked by his own shame is ultimately what made him question the exclusion of nonhuman animals and the violence towards them. An ethico-political value of shame can also be found in Agamben. 3.3. Brendan Moran (2018, 106 and passim) identifies two different kinds of shame in Agamben: besides—or, better, mingled with—shame as ontological auto-affection there also emerges another shame, to which Agamben assigns an active and overtly political function. And this is a function that far precedes the Heideggerian ontologisation of moods that is found in Remnants of Auschwitz. Already in the 1978 essay “Comedy,” Agamben shows how “Dante’s theory of shame,” developed in canto 31 of the Purgatorio, revolves around the purifying potential of shame that liberates one from tragic guilt (1999c, 19), which is also the function assigned to Kafka’s theory of shame (to which I will come back in a moment) in Agamben’s 1985 text “Idea of Shame” (1995, 85). In the essay “In this Exile” from Means Without End (originally published in 1996), Agamben cites a brief reflection on shame from a letter Marx sent in 1843 to the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, in which, objecting to the latter’s remark that no revolution has ever come out of shame, Marx stated that “shame already is a revolution” (Agamben 2000, 132).29 Though he was 29

The passage of Marx’s letter reads: “This, too, is a revelation, although a perverted one. It is a truth that at least teaches us to recognize the hollowness of our patriotism, the unnatural character of our government, and to turn our faces away in shame. Smiling, you look at me and ask, ‘What is gained thereby? No revolution results from shame.’ I answer, ‘Shame already is a revolution.’ Shame actually is the victory of the French Revolution over German patriotism by which

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referring to a “national shame” concerning one country with respect to another (namely the Germans’ shame with respect to the French), Marx identified in shame not only an antidote to self-deception but also a “protopolitical affect” loaded with revolutionary potential (O’Donnell 2017, 13; Snoek 2012, 93).30 Marx’s insight works for Agamben as a springboard to open up shame to a universal dimension, which he names “the shame of being human, a shame that in some way or other has tainted every human being.” This concept comes from Primo Levi and names “the shame of the camps, the shame of the fact that what should not have happened did happen,” but shame extends beyond the unthinkable horror of the camp to embrace all the meanness, pettiness, stupidity, and vulgarity of existence. For those who feel it, this “silent shame of being human” constitutes, Agamben concludes, “the beginning of a revolution and of an exodus of which it is barely able to discern the end” (Agamben 2000, 132). Levi’s phrase “the shame of being human” was also important for Deleuze and Guattari, who cite it in What is Philosophy and extend it, like Agamben, to the stupidity and cruelty of existence, where they conclude: “This feeling of shame is one of philosophy's most powerful motifs. We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them” (1996, 107-8). This is precisely the point: this shame does not involve personal guilt or responsibility (we have done nothing), but it is an affective reaction before—i.e., when we are faced with—the horrors humanity has created and can create and which also sully and taint our own sense of being human. It is not the shame of being seen (as in Sartre), but rather, as Aislinn O’Donnell emphasizes (2017, 14), shame as a way of seeing that produces a rupture— a disruption of the complacency of our everyday lives—and a shift in perception, which can lead to critique, refusal, and resistance. A much-quoted passage from Levi’s The Truce expresses this kind of shame. At the sight of the horrible conditions of the surviving inmates, the first Russian soldiers who arrived at Auschwitz after the Germans had departed reacted with shame: They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound the Revolution was conquered in 1813. Shame is a type of anger, introverted anger. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring” (Marx 1967, 204). 30 In a more recent piece, “The Assistants,” collected in Profanations, Agamben also writes: “that shame […] secretly has something to do with glory, is a profound messianic theme” (2007a, 34).

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their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that this will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence. (Levi 2000, 187–188)

Levi quotes his own passage at the beginning of the chapter on shame in his much later book The Drowned and The Saved (published in 1986, one year before his death): forty years after writing these words (The Truce was published only in 1963, but was originally written in 1947) he is compelled to go back to them, to go back to this shame that is so powerful that he cannot come to terms with it and must devote an entire chapter to this insurmountable and ineliminable feeling. At the end of the chapter, he calls this shame “the shame of the world,” the shame one feels before “those who faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see and not feel touched by it: this is what the majority of Germans did during the twelve Hitlerian years, deluding themselves that not seeing was a way of not knowing, and that not knowing relieved them of their share of complicity of connivance. But we were denied the screen of willed ignorance” (Levi 1988, 65). Quoting John Donne’s famous verse “no man is an island,” Levi concludes: The just among us, neither more nor less numerous than any other social group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them, in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. […] It would prove that man, the human species—we, in short—were potentially able to construct an infinite enormity of pain; and that pain is the only force that is created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act. (Levi 1988, 66)

Agamben (1999b, 87-88) quotes the passage from The Truce at the very beginning of his chapter on shame in Remnants of Auschwitz but dismisses Levi’s later reflections in The Drowned and the Saved because they seem to equate shame with guilt and even become “puerile.”31 After an overview of the literature on the shame of the survivors, in Remnants of 31 For a critique of Agamben’s dismissal of Levi’s later reflections, see chapter two of Hutchinson (2008).

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Auschwitz Agamben proceeds to his Heideggerian analysis of shame as ontological auto-affection, while completely casting aside the specific meaning and profound implications of Levi’s notion of shame. In what can only be said to be a gaping omission, in Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben neither addresses the shame of being human nor the shame of the world. 3.4. In “In This Exile” Agamben does not specify the origin of Levi’s phrase “the shame of being human,” and in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1996, 225n17) vaguely (and incorrectly) refer to The Drowned and the Saved. But the phrase has a different origin: it is the very last sentence of a brief article, “Translating Kafka,” that Levi published on June 5th, 1985, in the Italian newspaper La Stampa about his translation of Kafka’s The Trial. In 1982 Levi was asked to translate Kafka’s novel for a new series conceived by the publisher Giulio Einaudi, “Writers translated by writers,” and the book was then published the following year. Reflecting on this work two years later, Levi is keen to underline the difference between Kafka and himself as writers, but finally acknowledges an important commonality: “The famous, much analyzed phrase that seals the book like a tombstone (‘… it was as if the shame of it should outlive him’),” he writes, “does not seem at all enigmatic to me.” Levi can perfectly understand this shame because he has felt it himself: I sense, in this shame, an element that I am familiar with: Josef K., at the end of his anguished journey, feels ashamed that this secret, corrupt tribunal exists, pervading everything around it; even the prison chaplain and the precociously dissolute girls who importune the painter Titorelli belong to it. In the end it is a human, not a divine, tribunal: it is made of men and by men, and Josef, with the knife already planted in his heart, is ashamed of being a man. (Levi 2015, 2349)32

The last sentence of Kafka’s novel constitutes for Agamben the paradigm of the ethico-political value of shame, and he in fact returns to it whenever he broaches the subject. In “The Idea of Shame,” this is expressed with a reference to “use”: “Kafka seeks to teach men the use of the only good left to them: not to liberate oneself from shame, but liberate shame” (1995, 85); in “In this Exile” it is seen as a final, revolutionary gesture: “At the 32 Levi uses the neutral universal “man” (vergogna di essere un uomo) in the singular. When quoting him in “In this Exile,” Agamben transforms it into a plural, “men” (vergogna di essere uomini), which his translators re-transform into a singular, correcting moreover Levi’s and Agamben’s gender blindness and rendering the phrase as “shame of being human.” Deleuze and Guattari translate literally (and gender-blindly) “la honte d’être un homme.”

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moment when the executioners’ knives are about to penetrate his flesh, Joseph K. with one last leap succeeds in getting hold of the shame that will survive him” (2000, 133); and in Remnants of Auschwitz, shame emerges as “a new ethical material” that, like “a mute apostrophe,” flies “through time to reach us” (1999b, 104). Joseph K.’s last words are however preceded by the equally famous exclamation “like a dog!” It is precisely the link between Joseph K.’s shame at dying like a dog and Levi’s phrase that can be developed into a powerful antidote to the dualisms of the Open. In his 1924 essay on Kafka, Walter Benjamin writes that exploring shame is Kafka’s “strongest gesture,” especially when the type of shame in question is, as in Levi, the “shame one feels for others” (Benjamin 1999a, 808). In a famous letter to Gershom Scholem from June 12, 1938, Benjamin also writes that “[b]eing an animal presumably meant to [Kafka] only to have renounced human form and human wisdom owing to a kind of shame” (Benjamin and Scholem 1989, 225).33 The shame of dying like a dog is not only the shame of being debased to the level of an animal and of losing the privilege of human exceptionality (for Heidegger, we should remember, death is a human privilege; dogs merely perish), but also the shame of the human form, of being human if humans inflict such violence on other humans—and also on nonhuman animals. It is perhaps also the shame for/before the fact that dogs (= nonhuman animals) die intolerable deaths at the hands of humans (cf. Moran 2018, 104-5). Thus, the shame of being human can also be extended to include the shame at our subordination to the dictates of the myth of human exceptionalism, the shame at our subordination to the myth that violence towards nonhuman animals is necessary and inevitable. There is no trace of such a shame in The Open, which constitutes nonetheless a sort of continuation of the analysis carried out in Remnants of Auschwitz of the division between the human and the inhuman and the de-humanization of the camp (and could therefore have profited from the previous critique). And, more surprisingly, there is no trace of Kafka in The Open, which is something that has always struck me as odd since my first reading of this book. This is indeed remarkable in a philosopher that not only knows Kafka very well, but that has even made the Prague author—and in particular his insights on shame—a pillar of his philosophical soteriology. But The Open is trapped within the Heideggerian dualistic structure of the Open and cannot possibly accommodate the 33

On the philosophical-political potentialities of shame in Benjamin’s readings of Kafka (with important references to Agamben’s interpretation), see in particular Part I of Moran (2018, 1-124) and also Moran (2009).

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disturbances of and messiness around human identities that characterize Kafka’s world. Kafka’s creatures (human and nonhuman alike) disrupt mythic humanity, and their shame at mythic identification is what constitutes their powerful ethico-political charge (cf. Moran 2018, 16162). They, moreover, embody evident if not always clear ethical demands emanating from what Benjamin calls “the forgotten” (cf. Abbott 214, 115). It is precisely Kafka’s “hybrid ecologies” (Haacke 2013) and his shame of being human that could have helped Agamben overcome these mythic dualisms, and in particular one specific quality that Benjamin identifies in Kafka: attentiveness. A famous passage from Benjamin’s essay on Kafka reads: Even if Kafka did not pray—and this we do not know—he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called “the natural prayer of the soul”: attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all creatures, as saints include them in their prayers. (Benjamin 1999, 812)

This attentiveness that includes all creatures interrupts the complacency of our everyday lives, leading to a shift in our perception—bringing to shame—and brings us to something very similar to what Agamben calls “testimony.” As Benjamin writes in “The Storyteller,” his 1936 essay on Nikolai Leskov: “the righteous man is the advocate [der Fürsprech] for all creatures” (2002, 158), and this advocacy constitutes precisely the act of “speaking for the inhuman” that Agamben calls testimony. The “protagonist” of Remnants of Auschwitz, the Muselmann, is figured as the threshold between the human and the inhuman, and as such calls into question and confutes any ethics based upon this distinction. However, the distinction between human and inhuman has precisely the form of shame—“the relation (or, rather, non-relation) between the living being and the speaking being has the form of shame, of being reciprocally consigned to something that cannot be assumed by a subject” (Agamben 1999b, 130)—and this shame is what allows for testimony. Testimony arises from the impossibility of a coincidence between living being and speaking being, and simultaneously from the necessity of giving a voice to the voiceless. Moreover, “human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman” (1999b, 121), insofar as they are called to ethical responsibility and testimony by the flush of shame (cf. Mills 2008, 93, 102). The human, Agamben writes, “is nothing other than the agent of the inhuman, the one who lends the inhuman a voice” (1999b, 120). Here Agamben speaks of course of the inhuman part of the human being, of human “bare life,” and not of nonhuman animals, but the Entwicklungsfähigkeit of these concepts for an interspecies ethics is

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blatant and conspicuous, and the fact that Agamben did not pursue this obvious line of questioning is certainly a sign of a lack of that “attentiveness” that was so important for Benjamin.34 Testimony of the inhuman—the advocacy for all creatures—propelled by the shame of being human is what can overcome the presuppositional dualisms of the Open and ferry the human over the abyss of ontological and essential differences and towards an interspecific being-with-and-for-others, towards another kind of opening that humans themselves urgently need.35

34 Deleuze and Guattari appear (even if slightly) more attentive when they link the shame of being human, the responsibility not for the victims but before them, to their concept of “becoming animal.” After stating that this feeling of shame is one of philosophy's most powerful motifs, they write: “And there is no way to escape the ignoble but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves): thought itself is sometimes closer to an animal that dies than to a living, even democratic, human being” (1996, 108). 35 The context of Levi’s phrase and of Agamben’s theory of testimony, i.e., the Nazi concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews, could be developed into a constructive critique of the widespread (and widely criticized) analogy between the treatment of the concentration camp inmates and that of nonhuman animals in contemporary factory farms or experimentation facilities. This analogy, I would argue, only works in relation to the shame of being human that is elicited by the extreme violence and cruelty that characterize the two contexts, which remain nonetheless highly distinct. This argument, however, exceeds the scope of this book and cannot be explored here.

CONCLUSION THE VIRUS IS THE OPEN: BEYOND AGAMBEN

The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in China in late 2019 and quickly spread around the rest of the world in early 2020 has been, among many other things, a proverbial wake-up call to the global community to critically examine our fundamental assumptions and practices, particularly with respect to human beings’ behavior on this earth. In short, the virus has pierced the veil behind which we have been hiding for so long and has forced us to confront the colossal civilizational crisis our complacency has engineered. We are being forced to reckon with the economic, political, and social disasters wrought by forty years of neoliberal global capitalism, including the privatization of basic services such as education and healthcare, and the widening of the gap between rich and poor, to name a few. Also, and above all, we have been compelled to come to terms with the devastating consequences of the relentless anthropization of the natural world (of which the COVID-19 pandemic, like many other recent zoonotic epidemics, is very likely an effect), most notably, the ecological catastrophe currently wreaking havoc across the planet. The pandemic has also presented us with an opportunity to reflect on the wisdom of continuing to engage in the mass incarceration, torture, and murder of billions of animals around the globe to meet the ever-growing demand for animal flesh, which is not only an environmental travesty, but an ethical one. Despite the urgency of addressing these issues, however, Agamben has remained preoccupied with something else altogether: from the very beginning of the pandemic, Agamben has focused exclusively on the extensive imposition of the state of exception by governments around the world, the curtailment of individual freedoms, and the reduction of politics to the mere preservation of biological life. In a number of short texts published on the website of his Italian publisher Quodlibet,1 and in (very vocal) public interviews and interventions, Agamben has sharpened the 1

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tone of his (already harsh) critique of contemporary politics, dismissing all health prevention measures as part and parcel of a new “religion of health,” explicitly branding all reductions of individual liberties as dictatorial, totalitarian, and fascist, and reducing vaccination programs against the virus to a means to force people to obtain the electronic vaccination certificate (in Europe, the “Green Pass”) and thereby unwittingly submit to yet greater and more elaborate and sophisticated forms of control over their lives.2 Admittedly, the COVID-19 pandemic is a biopolitical dream (or nightmare) come true (Sarasin 2020); alarmingly, it fits into the categories Agamben elaborated in his project Homo Sacer, a project which earned him world-renown as an extraordinary intellectual force. However, his extension of the concepts he so successfully employed to criticize the so-called “War on Terror”3 to the new “War on the Virus” has not been received with the same enthusiasm as his original analysis. Agamben’s interventions into discourses and practices surrounding the pandemic have, in fact, been very harshly censured: he has been accused of paranoia, denialism, conspiracy thinking, and mere raving; but the harshest charge has been that he is wholly disengaged from reality and retreating into voluntary exile in the ivory tower of his theoretical constructions.4 Of particular concern in Agamben’s crusade against the “War on the Virus” is his insistence on repeating his mantra that modern biopolitics entails the “progressive animalization of man,”5 by which he means the 2 Agamben collected some of his critical commentaries on the pandemic in two slim volumes published in 2020, A che punto siamo? (Translated into English as Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic as Politics; 2021a) and Quando la casa brucia (2020). 3 The project Homo Sacer is of course a critique of Western politics and philosophy as a whole, but it developed an almost prophetic allure during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which were marked by George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” Agamben’s works seemed then to have unveiled the paradigmatic essence of his epoch. On the prophetic relevance of Agamben’s project, see e.g., Kotsko (2020, 112ff.). 4 These criticisms are too numerous to be even hinted at through some examples. I have analyzed some of them in Salzani (2021b; 2021d). 5 Agamben (e.g., 1998, 3; also 2008) attributes this expression to Foucault, and more specifically to the presentation of Foucault’s 1977-1978 course Security, Territory, Population as collected in the third volume of Dits et écrits, but the expression is not to be found there or anywhere in his oeuvre. Jeffrey Nealon (2016, 156-57n26) shows that Agamben in fact quotes from the French translation of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982, trans. 1984), who refer to a Q&A session at Stanford,

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lamentable loss of (supposedly) key distinguishing features of human life, such as the capacity to form “authentic” politics, an “authentic” concept of death, the face, etc. While deploring the inglorious end of the “bourgeois democracies” he has built a career criticizing, he also deplores the demise (the animalization) of the very concept of Man that he deconstructed in The Open.6 In short, he remains trapped within the traditional categories and the traditional dualisms that his own powerful analyses could and should have led him to overcome, and this prevents him from understanding and focusing on the major philosophical implications of the pandemic and on the real intellectual crisis it has provoked: the crisis of the dualism through which humanity has always defined itself in contradistinction to the rest of the animal world. The virus belies not only the pretentious illusion of human omnipotence (for many months it forced us—the beings who have the unfortunate distinction of having invented the zoo and the factory farm—into the “cage” of lockdowns), but also traditional taxonomies (the virus is neither living nor not-living, neither subject nor object, neither animal nor thing) and with them the very category of Animal itself. As Felice Cimatti argues (2021), what the virus unveils and makes clear is that the old categories are by now meaningless and that living beings cannot be defined any longer upon binary oppositions, such as Human vs Animal. What the virus shows us is that all living beings, human and nonhuman alike, are (and have always been) post-animals. “Animal,” Cimatti argues, is itself a category of the anthropocentric dualism of the West: animal means all that is not human, and for this reason this very category must be discarded. It is no use to insist on an inclusive use of the term (“humans are also animals”) or to “supplement” it with further specifications (as in adding the adjective “human” or “nonhuman” or “more-than-human”) because the term is too loaded with tradition and preconceptions. This is what the “post-” means: the need to get rid of this very concept and of the dualism that it entails and perpetuates.7 where Foucault allegedly used this expression. It is interesting to note that in his translation of Homo Sacer Daniel Heller-Roazen renders the Italian “animalizzazione” as “bestialization,” whereas Dreyfus, Rabinow and their French translator (Fabienne Durand Bogaert) translate it as “animalisation/animalization.” 6 This quasi-“nostalgia” for a lost “authenticity” is a general point of his critique of biopolitics. Cf. e.g., De Boever (2016, 48-49). 7 As Cimatti has already argued in Unbecoming Human (2020), in the Western tradition the Animal has always been positioned in diametrical opposition to the Human, as representing all that is not Human, and is therefore functional to the definition of the Human. On the concept of post-animal see also my article “From

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Cimatti adopts a markedly Deleuzian theoretical framework that conceives of the virus as a paradigm of “becoming”: the virus is nothing but the contagion that replicates and propagates its genetic material, it is neither subject nor object but pure “transitivity” (2021, 15), and as such, as for Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus,8 it is life itself. This means that, far from being an exception, viruses and contagion are the rule, the norm; they thrive on incessant and unstoppable movement, on ceaseless contact and encounters between—and continual infection of— bodies, species, and ecosystems. Ontology itself, Cimatti writes, is therefore “viral” (2021, 24): the world is not an ensemble of isolated entities which successively establish relations and connections; the world is nothing but encounter, permeability, change, and innovation, even within the human itself: a significant amount of the human genome is in fact of viral origin.9 The virus is life itself as “absolute immanence.” Post-Human to Post-Animal: Posthumanism and the ‘Animal Turn’” (2017)— which is the source of Cimatti’s definition. 8 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 241-42) famously wrote: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. […] The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. […] These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself. This is a far cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which the only differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the same species, and small modifications across generations. For us, on the other hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Universe does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion.” 9 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 10-11) again wrote: “We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says, transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures, fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous

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Cimatti’s Deleuzian ontology is just one possible and recent approach to fulfilling a compelling need that the SARS-CoV-2 has made only more urgent: to overcome the dualisms that sustain the illusion of human exceptionality and our very idea of humanity. Cimatti’s viral ontology draws from many other sources, such as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Multinaturalism, to which many other inputs could then be added, as for example Donna Haraway’s concept of “infectious” companion species.10 But one does not need to embrace Deleuze’s or Haraway’s philosophies (which are very problematic, especially from the perspective of animal advocacy11) or fluid ontologies12 and the teleology of the “post-.”13 There are of course many other philosophical options. The point I want to make through the example of Cimatti’s recent work is that the COVID-19 pandemic is just the last call to fulfill one precise philosophical demand: to dismantle the old (and yet so resilient) dualistic order, to overcome the old dualistic categories, and to those of ‘the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle Ages.’ Transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.” 10 Haraway’s mantra is in fact that “[t]o be animal is to become-with bacteria (and, no doubt, viruses and many other sorts of critters; a basic aspect of sympoiesis is its expandable set of players),” and that “[c]ompanion species infect each other all the time. Bodily ethical and political obligations are infectious, or they should be” (2016, 65, 115). 11 Haraway (2008, 27-30 and passim), for example, is very critical of Deleuze and Guattari’s haughty and patronizing attitude towards the nonhuman world, which serves as little more than a pretext for their critique of capitalism and Oedipal, paranoiac subjectivity. Personally, I strongly disagree with the ethical stance that accompanies Haraway’s otherwise compelling ontology, since she never manages (or rather refuses) to tackle the question of human domination over nonhuman animals. This issue cannot be taken up here, but for some intelligent criticisms see for example Weisberg (2009) and Wadiwel (2015, chapter 6). 12 The big problem of the complete fluidification of ontologies is that ontological integrity is precisely what is most brutally violated by biotechnology and genetic engineering (with animals being the primary victims). The playful collapsing of ontological boundaries shatters any notion of a coherent subject, of a subject that can stand in negative relation to the technological rationality of our time. On this point see e.g., Weisberg (2015). 13 The emphasis on historical development and overcoming (the terminological construction of the “post-”) ultimately retains a teleological form that is still all too “humanist.” See e.g., Grusin (2015) and Weisberg (2014).

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to go beyond ontological constructions such as the Open that still try to maintain and defend the by-now dilapidated humanistic fortress. This means, in the end, while certainly acknowledging, treasuring, elaborating and developing the important insights he provides in his imposing oeuvre, also to go beyond Agamben.

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INDEX

acedia, 82, 86 Actor-Network Theory, 105 Adorno, Theodor W., 71 Negative Dialectics, 71 Agamben, works: “Assistants, The” (“Gli assistenti”), 94n30 Autoritratto nello studio, 16, 24n7, 55 “Bartleby, or On Contingency” (“Bartleby o della contingenza”), 15, 17, 23n5 “Comedy” (“Comedia”), 57, 61, 62, 93 Coming Community, The (La comunità che viene), 12, 20, 49, 63, 66, 89 Creation and Anarchy (Creazione e anarchia), 24n7, 90n26 End of the Poem, The (Categorie Italiane), 57 The End of Thought (La fine del pensiero), 7 “Experimentum Linguae,” 5, 17-18, 26, 66 “Face, The” (“Il volto”), 79, 91 “Face and Death, The” (“Il volto e la morte”), 79 Fire and the Tale, The, 24n7 Follia di Hölderlin, La, 67n22 “Form-of-Life” (“Forma-divita”), 21 “Glorious Body, The” (“Il corpo glorioso”), 49 Highest Poverty, The (Altissima povertà), 62n17, 68 Homo Sacer, 5-6, 8, 8n12, 9, 27, 31, 54, 103n5

Idea of Prose (Idea della prosa), 13, 20, 21, 22, 90n27 “The Idea of Infancy” (“Idea dell’infanzia”), 13, 21-23, 24n7 “Idea of Shame” (“Idea della vergogna”), 90n27, 93, 96 “Identity Without the Person” (“Identità senza persona”), 57, 60, 62 “In this Exile” (“In questo esilio”), 93, 96-97, 96n32 “Inappropriable, The” (“L’inappropriabile”), 90n26 Infancy and History (Infanzia e storia), x, 4, 5, 8, 18, 22, 28, 51, 67n23, 80 Karman, 57 Language and Death (Il linguaggio e la morte), 6, 7n7, 8, 25, 28, 64, 78, 79, 91 Man Without Content, The (L’uomo senza contenuto), 4, 50 Means Without End (Mezzi senza fine), 67n23, 79, 93 “No to Biopolitical Tattooing,” 60-61n15 Nudities (Nudità), 49, 57 “Nudity” (“Nudità”), 49, 91-92 Nymphs (Ninfe), 45 “On Potentiality” (“La potenza del pensiero”), 14, 17, 19, 20, 22 Open, The (L’aperto), x-xi, xii, xiv, 1-3, 2n1, 4, 6, 9-12, 14, 29, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 47n1, 53, 55n5, 76, 78,

Index

126 78n10, 79, 86n20, 90, 97, 103 Profanations (Profanazioni), 47, 94n30 Pulcinella, 56n8, 57, 63, 67n23 Quando la casa brucia, 102n2 Remnants of Auschwitz (Quel che resta di Auschwitz), xi, 9, 52, 89, 90n27, 91, 93, 9596, 97, 98 Sacrament of Language, The (Il sacramento del linguaggio), 7n9, 18-19, 28 “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis” (“*Se. L’Assoluto e l‘‘Ereignis’”), 64, 66 Signature of All Things, The (Signatura rerum), ix, x, 35, 37, 38-39, 45, 71 “Special Being” (“L’essere speciale”), xiv, xv, 47, 4849, 54, 55, 56, 63 Stanzas (Stanze), 49 “Theory of Signatures” (“Teoria delle signature”), 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 45 “Time and History” (“Tempo e storia”), 51 “Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential” (“Per una teoria della potenza destituente”), 31, 44, 46 Use of Bodies, The (L’uso dei corpi), x, xiv, 1, 7n8, 31, 44, 68, 86n20, 90n26 “What is an Apparatus?” (“Che cos’è un dispositivo?”), 3738 “What is a Paradigm?” (“Che cos’è un paradigma?”), 45 What is Real? (Che cos’è reale?), 19 Where Are We Now? (A che punto siamo?), 102n2

“Work of Man, The” (“L’opera dell’uomo”), 14n19, 21 Alighieri, Dante, 14n19, 57 Divine Comedy, 57 Purgatorio, 93 anatomo-politics, 53 andrological machine, 3 animal advocacy, xii, 59, 105 cognition, 5 ethics, xiii, 68, 70 human, xi, 22, 36, 37, 40, 88 language, 5 liberation, x, xii, 12, 57 nonhuman, xi, xiin1, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 26, 41, 45, 54, 56, 59, 65, 66, 72, 76, 78, 81, 86, 88, 91, 93, 97 post-, 103 poverty, 14, 29, 76-77, 85n17 question of, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 53, 81 rationale, 84 studies, xi, xiii, xiv, 1 voice, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 28 animal rights theory, 3, 12 animality, xiii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 29, 30, 44, 47, 71, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 92 human, x, xi, xiv, 8, 26, 44 animalization, xi, 9, 10, 21, 38, 58, 75, 82, 102-103 animot, xi Antelme, Robert, 52 L'espèce humaine, 52 anthropization, 101 anthropocentrism, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 26, 28, 31, 32, 47n1, 49, 59, 61, 65, 77n8, 91 local, 2 performative, 2 weak, 2

Agamben and the Animal anthropodecentrism, 32, 48 anthropogenesis, 6, 9, 23, 38, 78, 86 anthropological machine, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 12, 15, 25, 29, 30, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 53, 68, 78, 85, 87 anthropology philosophical, 71 anthropomorphism, 37, 69, 82, 82n15 antispeciesism, 3, 47 ape, 37, 59n12, 80n12 of civilization, 84, 87n23 apparatus (dispositivo), xi, xiv, 10, 11, 21, 25, 29, 37-38, 41, 44, 47, 47n1, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 62, 63, 70, 87 archaeology, x, 1, 38, 39, 40, 43, 48 archƝ, 39, 43 Arendt, Hannah, 50 Aristotle, 4, 6, 7, 17n1, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26n11, 42, 54, 76 De Anima, 10, 20n2 Metaphysics, 19 Politics, 5, 8 Auschwitz, 9, 61n15, 94 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 49 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 23n5 axolotl, 13, 23 ban / ban-structure, 27, 78 barbarian, 38, 41 Bartholomeus Anglicus, 82 beast, 45, 77 becoming animal, 99n34 bee, 2n1, 85n18 Bekoff, Marc, 70 behaviorism, 69 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 21n4, 24n6, 78n10, 89, 89n25, 97, 97n33, 98, 99 ex machina, 11n15 “Franz Kafka,” 97, 98 “Storyteller, The,” 98 Benveniste, Émile, 5n4, 61

127

Bertillon, Alphonse, 60 biologism, 13, 35, 77 biology, 15, 20-21, 21n4, 22, 33, 58, 69, 77, 79 biopolitical turn, xiv, 4, 7, 8n11, 26 biopolitics, xi, xii, 8, 12, 25n9, 26, 28, 41, 47, 51, 52, 53, 102, 103n6 biopower, 25n9, 52, 53 bios, xiii, 6, 9, 11, 42, 43, 54, 56, 58, 62 Blanchot, Maurice, 61, 72 blushing, 91, 92, 93 Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius), 56, 57 Böhlendorff, Casimir Ulrich, 67, 67n22 Bolk, Louis (Lodewijk), 23, 24, 24n7, 25 Das Problem der Menschwerdung, 23 boredom, xv, 14, 29, 81-88, 89, 92 Braidotti, Rosi, 12 Bush, George W., 102n3 camp, xi, xv, 41, 52, 94, 97, 99n35 capability approach, 21n3 captivation (Benommenheit), 14, 15, 29, 74n4, 75n7-8, 76, 78, 79, 84, 85 captivity, 88 Cartesianism, 77-78, 82 cat, 13n17, 92 Chomsky, Noam, 33-34, 35 On Human Nature, 33 Christ, 57 Christianity, 56 Colli, Giorgio, 31 comedy, 56, 57 commedia dell’arte, 62 consciousness, 50, 72, 74, 75, 89 contagion, 104, 104n101 COVID-19, 61n15, 79, 101, 102, 105 cricket, 5, 22, 28

128 culture, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7n9, 26n10, 28, 34, 42, 43, 48, 49, 87, 92 Western, xv, 37, 42, 47, 53, 54, 55, 56 Damascius, 20 Darwin, Charles, 49, 92 Descent of Man, The, 92 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The, 92 Darwinism, 52, 77, 79 Dasein, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 29, 63, 77, 77n9, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 85n17, 86n20, 87n22, 89 de Waal, Frans, 70, 92 Chimpanzee Politics, 80n12 death, 6, 38, 40, 46, 65n20, 74, 74n4, 75, 82, 97 concept of, 65n20, 74n4, 80n12, 103 cult of, 80n12 decisionism, 53 deconstruction, 11, 12, 44-45 Deleuze, Gilles, 12, 16, 34, 35, 61, 69-70, 70n26, 94, 96, 96n32, 99n34, 104, 104n8-9, 105, 105n11 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 61 Thousand Plateaus, A, 104 What is Philosophy?, 94, 96 Derrida, Jacques, xi, 5n6, 12, 45, 60n14, 76-77n8, 77, 81n14, 92, 93 Animal That Therefore I Am, The, 45 animot, xi Of Spirit, 76-77n8 désoeuvrement, xiv, 7, 7n9, 29, 30, 43, 46 Despret, Vinciane, 70 divinity, 77 dog, 9, 75n5, 80n13, 82, 92, 97 dolphin, 80n12 domestication, 25, 25n9 Donne, John, 95

Index donkey, 5, 28, 82 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 82 dualism, xiii, xiv, xv, 71, 72, 75n5, 77, 78, 79, 86, 86n20, 87, 87n23, 88, 89, 97, 98, 99, 103, 105 dynamis, 17n1, 18, 26n11, 28 ecology, 69 hybrid, 89, 98 Eden, 43, 92 elephant, 59n12, 80n12 empirico-transcendental doublet, 34, 34 energeia, 14n19, 18, 21, 26n11, 28 Entwicklungsfähigkeit, ix, xiii, 3n2, 15, 47, 89, 98 epidemic, 101, 104n8 Epimetheus, 5n6 Esposito, Roberto, 41, 57-59, 61, 62 Persons and Things, 57 Third Person, 57 esthetics of existence, 67 ethics, 6, 32, 60, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69, 98 animal, xiii, 68, 70 immanent, 63 interspecies, 98 ontologisation of, xii, 64, 68 Stoic, 56 Western, 62, 68 ethology, 48, 63-70, 80 interspecies, xv ethos, xv, 63-68, 70, 72 evolution, 5, 12, 13, 23, 24, 77, 78, 80n71, 86 exception, 5n5, 8, 13, 29, 41, 44, 65, 81, 104 sovereign, 54 state of, xiii, 1, 8n12, 10, 28, 30, 37, 53, 78, 101 exceptionalism/exceptionality, xv, 7, 13, 14, 19, 20, 47, 53-54, 55, 65, 65n20, 70, 89, 91, 97, 105

Agamben and the Animal exclusion, xiv, xv, 2, 6, 8, 8n12, 9, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47n1, 53, 54, 60n14, 65, 67, 71, 76, 78, 87, 93 inclusive, 9, 10, 11, 15, 28, 42, 53, 78, 82, 89 experimentum linguae, 18, 20, 66 Eysenck, Hans Jürgen, 25 face, 36, 61, 62, 63, 68, 79, 80, 80n70, 91, 103 factory farm, 87, 99n35, 103 Fascism, 56, 58, 102 Feuerbach, Ludwig, ix-x, xiii, 50 Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie, ix Essence of Christianity, The, 50 form-of-life, 4, 20, 43, 61, 62n17 66, 68 Foucault, Michel, 7, 25n9, 33-36, 38, 39, 44, 51-53, 61, 67, 1023n5 Archaeology of Knowledge, 39 Dits et écrits, 102n5 “Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, The,” 67n24 On Human Nature, 33 Order of Things, The, 34, 35, 36, 44, 51 “Politics and Ethics,” 67n24 Security, Territory, Population, 51, 102n5 Society Must Be Defended, 52 Will to Knowledge, The, 51 Franciscans, 62n17 freedom, 5, 13, 14, 15, 19-20, 20n3, 21, 22, 29, 50, 65, 75, 76, 101 Fromm, Erich, 82 Gallup, Gordon, 80n12 mirror self-recognition test (MSR), 80n12 Galton, Francis, 60 Gattungswesen, 50, 51, 54

129

Gehlen, Arnold, 71 gender, xii, 53 blindness, xii, 3n2, 34, 34n1, 51n3, 96n32 genetic code, 5n5, 13, 15, 21 Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, Isidore, 69 gesture, 67n23, 96, 97 Giacometti, Alberto, x God, 16, 45, 64, 74 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 81 Goodal, Jane, 70 Gould, Stephen Jay, 24, 25 Guattari, Félix, 16, 96n32, 99n34, 104n8-9, 105n11 Thousand Plateaus, A, 104 What is Philosophy?, 94, 96 guilt, 57, 61, 62, 62n18, 63, 68, 94, 95 tragic, 61, 62n18, 93 happiness, 21, 61 Haraway, Donna J., 12, 80, 92, 105, 105n10-11 health, 102 religion of, 102 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 65n20, 78 Encyclopedia, 50 Heidegger, Martin, xii, xiiin3, xiv, xv, 2n1, 4, 8, 8n10, 8n12, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 47, 54, 63-64, 65, 65n21, 67, 67n22, 69, 70, 71, 72, 72n2-3, 73, 74, 74n4, 75-79, 80, 80n13, 81, 82-86, 87n22-23, 88, 89-90, 93, 96, 97 Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 13, 19 Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 65n21 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, The, 10, 14, 29, 74n4, 76, 76n7, 80n13, 83 Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” 67n22

130 “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” 54n5, 63, 84 “Nature of Language, The,” 6 Parmenides, 75, 77, 90 “Thing, The,” 74n4 “What Are Poets For?,” 75, 76 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 81 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 64-65 history, 4, 15, 38, 51, 82 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 72n3, 75 Bread and Wine, 71-72, 75n6 letter to Böhlendorff, 67, 67n22 homo, 37, 86 animalis, 54n5, 79 sapiens, 26n11, 47 homo sacer (concept), 9, 41 Homo Sacer (project), xi, 1, 4, 7, 9, 15, 19, 20, 31, 41, 43, 65, 68, 102, 102n3 humanism, 2, 4, 10, 11, 13, 28, 32, 35, 53 humanity, xiii, xiv, 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 12, 26n10, 30, 50, 51, 58, 60n14, 64, 66, 72, 78, 79, 92, 94, 98, 103, 105 humanization, xi, 10, 38 hypostasis, 57 identity, 39, 40, 44, 48, 54, 55, 6061 approach, 12, 60n14 biological, 60 personal, 58, 58n10, 60, 61 social, 56 immanence, 16, 70 absolute, 104 impersonal, the, 61-62 impotentiality, 14, 15, 19, 20, 29 infancy, xiv, 5, 13, 21-26 infection, 104 inoperative/inoperativity, 6, 11, 14n19, 43, 44 insect, 2n1, 7n9, 28 Jacob, Francois, 104n9

Index Jesi, Furio, 30, 37 Esoterismo e linguaggio mitologico, 30 Jew, 9, 38, 41, 61n15, 99n35 Kafka, Franz, 89, 93, 96, 97-98 Trial, The, 96 Kant, Immanuel, 35 Kojève, Alexandre, 61 Kollmann, Julius, 23 language, xiv, 3, 4-6, 7, 7n9, 11, 12, 15, 18-19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 26n11, 27-28, 30, 35, 45, 54, 65n20-21, 66, 75, 76, 79, 80, 91 lark, 2n1, 77 Latour, Bruno, 105 law, xv, 8n12, 13, 15, 21, 28, 52, 53n4, 55, 67, 69 Roman, 56 Leopardi, Giacomo, 81 Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia, 81 Leskov, Nikolai, 98 Lestel, Dominique, 70 Levi, Primo, xv, 94-96, 97, 99n35 Drowned and the Saved, The, 95 “Translating Kafka,” 96 Truce, The, 94-95 Levinas, Emmanuel, 61, 90, 90n2627 On Escape, 90 lice, 9 life, xi, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 31, 33, 38, 40, 41-43, 51, 53, 54, 62, 68, 104 aestheticization of, 67 animal, 2, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 26, 29, 37, 41, 61 bare, xi, xiii, 3, 9, 10, 15, 41, 43, 45, 60, 62, 78, 98 biological, 8, 42, 101 everyday, 84 human, xi, 9, 10, 41, 50, 56, 57, 66, 82, 103 immanent, 73

Agamben and the Animal in captivity, 88 mere, 31 natural, 3 nutritive, 10 political, 8, 26, 42 Linnaeus, Carl, 37 Systema Naturae, 37 lion, 7n9, 28, 94n29 logocentrism, 20, 26, 28, 66, 67, 91 logos, 3, 6, 20, 21, 22, 26n10, 28, 30, 41, 43, 65, 66, 68 Lorenz, Konrad, 69 machine andrological, 3 anthropological, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 25, 29, 30, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43-44, 45, 47, 53, 68, 78, 85, 87 mythological, 37 signatory, xiv, 40, 43 magpie, 80n12 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 22 Marchesini, Roberto, 5n6, 70 Maritain, Jacques, 58-59 Marx, Karl, 4, 50-51, 54, 93-94 Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, 50 Theses on Feuerbach, 50 materialism, 3 Mauss, Marcel, 55-56, 57 messianism, xii, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 28, 43, 94n30 metaphysics, 10, 11, 12, 32, 38, 55n5 animal, 78 biological, 77 Cartesian, 78 of the homo animalis, 79 of the oblivion of Being, 77 Western, xiii, xiv, 3, 6, 8n12, 9, 10, 15, 27, 28, 29, 31n12, 40, 44, 51, 64, 65, 68, 77 Mill, John Stuart, 69 System of Logic, 69

131

modernity, 8, 10, 51, 52, 53, 57, 86, 87 threshold of, 34, 36, 51 monkey, 81, 92 Montaigne, Michel de, x morality, 57, 69-70 Morris, Desmond, 88 Human Zoo, The, 88 Multinaturalism, 105 Muselmann, 9, 41, 98 mysticism, 65n21 nature, 3, 5, 5n6, 6, 15, 24, 26n10, 33, 38, 43, 57, 61, 62, 72, 73, 74, 75n5, 77, 104n8 human, xiv, 5, 19, 33-34, 36, 50 Nazism, 52, 56, 59n13, 61n15, 99n35 necessity, 4, 20, 22, 31n12 negativity, 6, 28, 64, 65, 65n20, 78, 78n10, 79 néomort, 38, 41 neoteny, 13, 23-25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72, 72n2, 81 Untimely Meditations, 81 nomos, 3, 6, 25 Nonhuman Rights Project, 59n12 nudity, 91-92 Nussbaum, Martha, 21n3 ontology, 27, 31n12, 54, 64, 72, 77n9, 105n11-12 generative, 49 modal, 66, 68, 70 potential/of potentiality, 19, 27, 28 relational, 1 viral, 104-5 Western, 19, 28, 66 Open, the (das Offene), 2n1, 15, 47, 63-64, 71-99, 106 orca, 80n12 overcomatose, 38, 41 pandemic, 79, 101-6

132 Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim), 43, 45, 46 paradigm, xi, xiv, 2n1, 6, 9, 13, 13n17, 20, 23, 25n9, 27, 39-41, 43, 45, 46, 59, 96, 104 Pathosformel, 45 person/personhood, xv, 41, 47, 48, 55-63, 67, 68, 70 Personalism, 56, 58, 61 pet, 80n13 phǀnƝ, 65, 66 physis, 3, 6, 38 Plato, 74, 5n6 Protagoras, 5n6 Plumwood, Val, 12 poiesis, 50 polis, 8, 9 politics, xii, xv, 3, 6, 7, 9n13, 21, 27, 42, 56, 66, 67, 101, 102, 103 animal, 79, 80n12 Western, 8, 62, 102n3 post-animal, 103, 103n7 posthumanism, 3 potential/potentiality, ix, x, xiv, 4, 11, 12-16, 17-32, 72, 95 destituent, 31 poverty animal, 14, 29, 76, 76n7, 77, 77n8 of experience, 87 of world, 14, 29, 76n7, 83, 85, 85n17 power, 2, 17n1, 19-20, 21, 26, 26n11, 52, 53, 91n28 disciplinary, 53 pastoral, 25n9 sovereign, 53, 54 power-knowledge, 25n9 praxis, 26n10, 50, 51, 53, 59, 66 Prometheus, 5n6 Pulcinella, 57, 62-63, 68 race, 24, 52, 53, 58n10 racism, 25, 52-53 Ray, John, 51 Historia plantarum, 51

Index Regan, Tom, 12 religion of health, 102 ‘only humans have X’-, 92, 93 revolution, 70, 93-94 Darwinian, 52 French, 93 Industrial, 87 rights, 56, 58, 59n11, 60, 61, 61n16, 68 animal, xii, 3, 12 human, xii, 10n14, 58, 58n9 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 30, 71-75, 76, 77, 78, 79n11 Duino Elegies, 72 robot, 59, 59n11 Romanticism, 72, 74 Ruge, Arnold, 93 Ryder, Richard D., 53 SARS-CoV-2, 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91, 94 Being and Nothingness, 91 Scheler, Max, 71 Schmitt, Carl, 8n12, 53 Scholem, Gershom, 97 secularization, 41 self-awareness, 82, 92 self-consciousness, 92 sexism, 25, 53 shame, xv, 89-99 of being human, 94, 96, 96n32, 97, 98, 99, 99n34-35 of the world, 95, 96 sigetics, 65, 65n21 signature, xiv, 15, 16, 28, 33-46, 54 Singer, Peter, xiin1, 12, 59-60 slave, 38, 40, 56, 58 Smuts, Barbara, 70 sovereignty, xiii, 9, 27, 41, 52, 53, 59, 89, 90 species, 53 species, xiv-xv, 14, 20n3, 25, 37, 40, 47-55, 59, 63, 68, 70, 88, 104, 104n8-9 animal, 5, 13

Agamben and the Animal blindness, xii companion, 105, 105n10 human, 24, 95 speciesism, 25, 47n33, 53, 60n14, 67 speech, 5, 5n4, 6, 13, 18, 22, 26n11, 28, 62, 66 Spinoza, Baruch, 69, 70 Ethics, 69 State modern, 52 Stoicism, 56 stranger, 38, 41 subject, xv, 5n6, 34, 35, 57, 59, 66, 72, 81, 90-91, 92, 98, 103, 105n12 of rights, 56 subjectivity, 66-67, 68, 80n13, 82, 89, 90-91, 105n11 testimony, 91, 98-99 theology, 33, 42, 56, 77 negative, 65n21 Thorpe, William Homan, 5n5 tick, 2, 2n1, 70 Tinbergen, Nikolaas (“Niko”), 69 tradition, xiin1, 6, 21, 103 anthropocentric, 71 Aristotelian, 14n19 dualist, 73 exceptionalist, 20 humanist, 11 metaphysical, 5n4, 14, 20n3, 22, 28, 29, 65 Western, xii, xiii, 4, 5, 5n4, 8n10, 10, 14, 19, 20, 22, 65, 76, 81, 83, 103n7 tragedy, 56, 57, 61 Trinity, 57 turn against language, 28 biopolitical, xiv, 4, 7, 8n11, 26, 78

133

Uexküll, Jakob von, 2n1, 14, 19, 85n18 Umwelt, 14, 29 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 58 use, 13n17, 31, 67, 67n22, 96 of bodies, 68 violence, 3, 25-26, 26n10-11, 66, 93, 97, 99n35 virus, 101-6 vitalism, 3 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 105 voice, 10, 11, 22, 62, 65, 66, 91, 98 animal, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 28, 79 human, 7, 22, 28 war on Terror, 102 on the Virus, 102 World War II, 57 Warburg, Aby, 45 Mnemosyne, 45 werewolf, 9 Weil, Simone, 55, 56, 58, 61, 61n16 “personne et le sacré, La” (“Human Personality”), 55, 58 whatever being/singularity, 12, 20, 49, 63, 66, 67 Wise, Steven, 59n12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 17 woman, xii, 2-3, 25, 41, 58, 59n11 zoƝ, xiii, 9, 11, 42, 43, 58, 62 zoo, 82, 87-88, 103 human, 88 zoology, 69, 77 zoon, 11, 54 aloga zoa, 21 logon echon, xiii, 5n4, 22, 39, 65n20 politikon, xiii, 54