PHIL4205 - "The Open" by Giorio Agamben

Today's discussion centered around Giorgio Agamben's The Open which explored the production of the concept of man through a number of strategic divisions, or caesure, of human and non-human beings. The arguement followed several obscure historical examples ranging from biblical to schorlary references to themes of escotology arranged in a number of lightly brushed commentary. Professor Jowette enouraged us to look for the continuity between all of the short passages contained in The Open suggesting that there was a common thread connecting them together - a challenge which I have yet to fully come to terms with.

The difficulty I found was that Agamben does state really clearly in plain terms what he means. One rare occassions, usually at the end of a passage, he leaves us with a striking statement which is not explored in further depth - we are to understand his meaning from the examples leading up to the appearence of the statement. Often, we are compelled to follow a series of propositions, all of which center around the human preoccupation with categorizing/defining what can be called animal and consequently what must be man. I do not gather the sense that Agamben means to simply survey the historical record of these instances of "framing" the animal in language and narrative simply for proof of its historical validity. What I believe is at work in Agamben's writing is something much more profound which makes an attempt to seperate man from the imposition of logic on being - which is neither human nor animal but exists as a link between the two that remains nameless and tends to change with the contingencies of any historical context. In looking at eschotological themes, what is concieve of as the totality of historical progress or the end of logical contradictions, not only are the distinctions present in the production of man disolved but in the space this leaves behind an openness to what he calls the "bare being" that is neither the sole possession of human or non-human.

At the begining of the text, Agamben argues that man has long been at odds with his animal origin. From the depictions in Genesis, we see a version of man who has turned away from the paradise of nature - now aware of his nakedness in the world he seeks to cover himself with leafs and then the skin of animals. By the process of naming the species of animals, as Aquaintus suggests, Adam conducts an experiment where man forms himself out of the ordered animal. Agamben provides further examples where the production of "man", defined as a being distinct from "animal", has been a significant preoccupation in a variety of cultures and historical contexts. Man, as seperate from animal, is a being that is able to know itself. But this knowledge, as Agamben indicates, has been a negative knowledge forged only in his relation to animal.

Although I am likely wrong in my assessment of the details of Agamben's arguement and what he means by "bare being" or role that logic has plays in escotological narratives, he nonetheless wants us to consider the machine(s) work to produce these distinctions in order that "we might, eventually, be able to stop them" (p.38). The end goal, still unclear to me, maybe is not such a weighty arguement - perhaps he is posing the possibility for another form of logic that is not so human centric wherein man does not inflict violence to the animal within himself.

It may better serve Agamben's ideas if, for a moment, we take time to understand what he means by the "anthropology machine". Two major philosophers in particular, whose theories were mentioned by Agamben in The Open, have aided particularly in my understanding of what he refers to as the "anthropology machine".

Hegel's theory of dialectics has often been perhaps the best know arguement for historical change (tilling the soil for Darwin and other historicist thinkers to come). According to the interpretations of Hegel by Kojeve, the ultimate progress of history is dependent on the tension brough about by a "negation" of animality. According to this understanding, history emerges out of the remains left in the clash between these two opposing factors. So long as man resist nature, he maintains himself as master over it. But Hegel's view of dialectics points to the final completion of this process - a point of posthistory wherein all of the contradictions have been worked out and man, as he is know through the resistence to nature, is no longer the antagonist. Kojeve notes that Hegel's meaning of posthistory is not to suggest that man ceases to exist but that he exists as animals are in their orientation to the world. From this model we see that the "machine" is a mere process, affected by its determination towards its particular end. For Kojeve, we need not ask "where is history leading to?" for this is already a factor in play in the present. The exclusion of animality provides the basis for the machine - and in the end, through an ironic dialectical twist, the master becomes the slave.

The Foucault notion of "biopower" offers another perspective of the machine in operation. Particularly in the modern world, this distinction of man from non-human is a difficult gesture to isolate - for it is the principle strategy through which social institutions have their basis. The machine itself has produced a variety of narratives to provide the answer to the question of man - most notably metaphysics and its notion of man as composed of body and soul. Through culture, religion, and political association these various narratives are used to manage all manner of beings based on their physicallity. It is in this management, that the full scope of biopower is revealed for in controlling the movement of bodies we have in a sense harnessed their power - not in excerting force but in the constant seizures divisions and caesurae that is all encompassing.

This anthropological machine has obscured our view of "bare life" and set in place a force of division that is neither human nor non-human in nature, the possibility of a posthistorical man lays bare all that is uncharacteristically man. I shall explore this concept in depth at another time.