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February 11, 2006
Is this Agamben's story?
Western metaphysics has predicated what it is to be human through an oppositional distinction with animals.
Humanity is not animal. Animals are non-humans. You can be beastly to humans, and that is inhumane. The opposition has been part of a technological worldview wherein we should master nature, because nature otherwise dominates us. What is distinctively human is this mastery over nature. We should tend and keep animals, and when we have an animal side to ourselves, we should oppose that. Humanity, in this tradition, grows in controlling "the animal other" within ourselves and our world. Call this dimension of Western metaphysics, its mastery of animals.
In The Open Agamben says that this anthopological machine has a classic and modern variants. He says:
On the one hand, we have the anthropological machine of the moderns. As we have seen, it functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is by animalizing the human, by isolating the [In] nonhuman within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape-man ....... [In] The machine of earlier times .... the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an an outside, and the no-man is produced by the humanization of an anaimal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form. (p.37).
If we do away with the mastery of animals then what is it to open up our lives to animals? That means have a non-technological relationship to animals in the Heideggerian tradition to which Agamben belongs.
What does it mean to have a non-technological relationship to animals?
We could say that our sense of humanity is partly based on a deepening of our moral relations with animals in that being meaningfully human is enriched through relationships with animals based on a shared life with animals. That means animals (eg., dogs) eing integrated into the life of the household and communicated a great deal, in their own manner, with the family members. This is not to make animals human--it is respect the differences between dogs and humans difference between animal and human life and to form a richer and more meaningful world with animals and ourselves based on these differences.
Is this what the affirmative side of Agamben refers to ?
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Gary, I think that this has a lot to do with the "affirmative side" of Agamben . . . . This is a footnote, but it's interesting to me that Agamben's take on the question of "the animal" seems to have shifted significantly over the course of his writings. I'm not quite sure what this means for his political philosophy, but it feels significant. Anyway, as recently as The Coming Community Agamben took (what I read as, at least) the traditional Heideggerian line on "the animal" -- he (Agamben) said something along the lines of, "for the animal there is no 'as such,'" which for him is the equivalent of Heidegger's assertion of the "worldlessness" of the animal. (The being's "as such" is for Agamben what its "disclosure" is for Heidegger; in fact the being's "as such" is nothing other than the being's disclosure qua being in the medium of language.) This seemed like a significant weakness of The Coming Community, a "weakness" not only in its somewhat retro anthropocentrism but more importantly in the sense of a weak link or fracture that indicates an even deeper problem lurking underneath. Anyway, I haven't pursued that deeper problem much, nor have I pursued the significance of (what seems to me to be, anyway) Agamben's reversal of that anthropocentrism in The Open, but that significance has to be there.