As I wind down for Xmas I've started trying to read again. I'm currently reading Giorgio Agamben's The Open. Man and Animal on biopolitics in connection with Maurice Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation. The biopolitics that I find interesting is the process whereby animals become human beings against a shaping or production of the human against a background of life defined as worthless and eliminable.

I was educated in the Hegelian-Marxist conception of this process---we become human through the dialectical work of negativity and, in doing so, we humanize the natural world. I've always been puzzled by the remnants or leftovers of this process (eg., the ecological world, being animal, the other as the non-human, and unreason).

Like Bataille I had little sympathy for Kojeve's uptopian conception of the end of history as human beings being in harmony with nature in which wars and injustice have disappeared, we become natural again and live a life of art, love, laughter and play. I could not accept that history had ended, except for the epilogue, and that we humans as animals were living in a post-historical time, constructing our ediifices as birds built their nests.

Why should we become human only through transcending the animal (the body presumably) and destroying the animal?