On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben's The Open

2 3diacritics / summer 2003 THE SUSPENDED SUBSTANTIVE ON ANIMALS AND MEN IN GIORGIO AGAMBENʼS THE OPEN LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE Giorgio Agamben. THE OPEN: MAN AND ANIMAL. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. [O] Trans. of Lʼ aperto: Lʼ uomo e lʼanimale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. [A] With a title as enigmatic as The Open, the reader might well wonder, “the open what?” Is the titleʼs adjective to stand alone? Does it need no substantive to support it? This unfamiliar title is not what one might fi rst guess—it is not an awkward translation from the workʼs original title. No substantive follows in the original, and none is meant to. The idea that gives Agambenʼs book its title is that of an openness which is uncondi- tioned—and perhaps unconditional, an openness which is unspecifi ed—and perhaps unspecifi able. If the answer to the question “the open what?” can be answered with no substan- tive, might we ask in what this opening occurs? Between what more substantive things has an indefi nable space been opened? The fi rst answer to the question can be found in the workʼs subtitle—Man and Animal. The open space in question is that which separates and distinguishes man from animal. Philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, zoologists, chemists, taxonomists—and many others—have had no small diffi culty in agreeing upon the matter. Philosophers have traditionally had a low opinion of animals [cf. de Fontenay]. Descartes had especially little respect for the minds of animals and infl uentially classi- fi ed them as automata mechanica. As Agamben notes, the great naturalist and taxono- mist Linnaeus responded to this assertion with the laconic rejoinder: “Descartes obvi- ously never saw an ape” [cf. O 23/A 30; translation modifi ed]. Philosophers have been more eager than taxonomists to put distance between themselves and the animals—and for this reason have been particularly interested in studying what separates man from animal. The last great philosophical attempt in this regard is that of Martin Heidegger. Despite his preference for the primordial, his openness to the woods and the wilder- ness, his opinion of animals ʼfaculties was not much higher than that of Descartes. In his view, animals live in an environment in which they are receptive to various stimuli, but where they have nothing approximating what we call a “world”—animals are, as he claims, “poor in world” (weltarm)—or even “without world” (weltlos). They live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees. They can never take a step away from the immediacy of their perception and for this reason cannot be said to pos- sess a “world” in the sense that man, in Heideggerʼs view, does. As mentioned above, the title The Open is, for all its strangeness, not the result of diacritics 33.2: 3–9 Derek Young muse 4 an awkward translation from Agambenʼs Italian. Its strangeness stems, nevertheless, in large part from a translation. Or, to be more precise, from two translations. The fi rst of these is from the German. The German in question is a special one—that of the pro- foundly idiosyncratic technical vocabulary that Heidegger fashioned for his philosoph- ical purposes. For Heidegger, “the open” is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. “The open” is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a “world.” “The open” is what we fi nd ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment re- cedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a “world,” greater and less graspable than our restricted and fi nite representations. This experience of “the open” is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and what separates us from the animals. And this open moment lies at the origin of philosophy: the humbling—and potentially frightening—moment of wonder that spurred speculation into the fi ner and deeper reason for things. As was his wont, Heidegger introduces a special phrase to describe this experience of acceding to the open, “the world worlds,” “die Welt weltet” and in the very next sentence states that “the rock has no world. Plants and animals also have no world” [Holzwege 31].1 When the world, strangely enough, worlds, we fi nd that world open before us; we are standing, to adopt Heideggerʼs terms, in a “clearing,” a step away from both trees and forest. The world is no longer too much with us, and we suddenly see trees, forest, and ourselves in an uneasy and changing relation to one another. “The open” is a term amongst many in Heideggerʼs technical vocabulary—ulti- mately one that found little place in his later philosophy. It nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of that philosophy. This is most clearly visible, as Agamben points out, in Heideggerʼs lectures in Freiburg in the fall semester 1942–43. In the midst of the most bitter and brutal combat, Heidegger was lecturing on Parmenides. The course was dedicated in large part to the translation of a single word—but a cru- cial one—aletheia, “truth.” Heidegger suggested a number of ways of translating the term, but the fourth and fi nal way was as “das Offene und das Freie der Lichtung des Seins”—literally, “The open and the free in the clearing of being”—or, more simply, as “the open” [Parmenides 195]. In his woodland terminology, Lichtung, a clearing (as in a forest), is etymologically a “light-ing,” an opening and an illumination. The “open” then corresponds to originary truth: it is the open space in which truth in its original (Greek) meaning took place. It stands thus, for Heidegger, at the heart of philosophy: at the heart of its history and its essence. In these lectures, fi rst published in 1993,2 it seems that Heidegger arrived at his translation by sounding the concealed depths not only of ancient Greek, but also of modern German. This modern German was a poetic one—that of Rilke. As he intro- duces his translation of Parmenidesʼs term for truth, Heidegger is well aware that the unusual expression “the open” will lead his listeners to think of Rilkeʼs celebrated Duino Elegies (1923) and, in particular, to Rilkeʼs repeated use of the curious term 1. One might compare the curious phrase “the world worlds,” with an equally curious one which Heidegger coined for the opposite movement: “the de-worlding of the world [Entweltlic- hung der Welt]” [65]. 2. These lecture notes were published as volume 54 of Heidegger sʼ complete works. The Italian edition wrongly lists this volume as the forty-fourth (“XLIV”) in the series. Attell sʼ trans- lation repeats this error, reproducing the bibliographical material from the Italian edition while simply translating the Roman numeral (“44”). 5diacritics / summer 2003 in the eighth elegy (though neither Heidegger nor Agamben notes this, the term had a longer poetic history and had in fact been used by Hölderlin in one of his most famous poems, “Bread and Wine”: “So komm! dass wir das Offene schauen . . .”). Rilkeʼs el- egy begins: “With all its eyes the creature sees / the open” (“Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene”) [Rilke 2.224]. In his poem, we (mankind) are excluded from this glimpse of the open granted to all other creatures. Years earlier, on a visit to Parisʼs Jardin des Plantes, Rilkeʼs sensitive eye had been captured by a panther. For Rilkeʼs panther, captivity was the central fact of his existence. “It seems to him,” wrote Rilke of his great cat, that, “there are / a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world” [Rilke 1.469]. What interested Rilke was how impenetrable, how full of incommunicable will, strength, and silence the animal was; what awakened his poetic sensibilities was how closed off that animalʼs world was. The worldlessness of the animal proves in the later poem to be the fruit not of his nature but of his confi nement. In the eighth elegy, the un- named animal (“die Kreatur”) is accorded a different glimpse of the world: it sees that world in all its openness. It sees what fear of death and fear of life prevent humans, the smartest and saddest of creatures, from seeing: the world in all its intense and intercon- nected immediacy. Heidegger is quick to distance himself from this immediacy. Though, as he notes, he and Rilke are employing the same term, the same “wording” (Heidegger repeat- edly uses the term Wortlaut instead of the simpler Wort), “what is being named,” says Heidegger of his use of the term “the open,” “is so different that no opposition could hope to convey it,” as “oppositions—even the most extreme—demand that those things which are to be opposed to one another can be placed in the same realm” [Parmenides 226]. “The open” that Rilke praises and sees refl ected in the eyes of animals is, for Heidegger, mere blindness. This is a blindness of a particular sort: historical blindness. Rilkeʼs problem, his misapprehension of the deep meaning of the term “the open” and his consequent inconsequent use of it, following Heidegger, stems from his unthinking adoption of a traditional view of the relation of man to animal typical of a fundamen- tally unrefl ective modernity [cf. Heidegger, Parmenides 231, 235]. “The open,” Hei- deggerʼs translation of Greek truth, is a different one than that which Rilke famously invoked. It is deeper, richer—and it is that which distinguishes us from the animals. It is not the animals who see “the open”—they are open to nothing but stimuli. According to Heidegger, we alone see “the open.” This is the point at which Agamben takes his title and enters the discussion. Agam- ben neither laments Rilkeʼs historico-ontological naiveté, nor accuses Heidegger of in- sensitivity toward poetry or animals. His interest is fi xed upon another point—the open place where he feels that the two irreconcilable positions meet—the point at which the animalʼs unhindered openness, or receptivity, to stimuli in its environment and manʼs openness to the world in all its ungraspable immensity converge. One might ask whether these two types of openness, these two types of receptivity have anything in common, whether they bear the weight of comparison. For Heidegger, they clearly do not. Agambenʼs assumptions that they do leads him to conceive of another type of openness than either Rilke or Heidegger had conceived of, an openness of inactivity, of disengagement from oneʼs environment and, perhaps, oneʼs world.3 3. Neither Heidegger nor Agamben seems aware that Rilke appears to have borrowed his enigmatic term from a specifi c source: the German writer Alfred Schuler. Schuler enjoyed a cer- tain celebrity at the turn of the nineteenth century and belonged along with Ludwig Klages and others to the so called Munich Kosmiker. In 1917–18, Rilke heard a lecture by Schuler and met the author afterwards. He was so fascinated by what Schuler had to say that he returned when the lecture series, entitled “The Eternal City,” was repeated. The curious substantive “the open” is employed repeatedly by Schuler, alongside the term “open” in its linguistic variants. In the life 6 The openness that interests Agamben is then not one of daily immersion in im- mediate stimuli and short-term tasks, nor an exalting in the immensity and strange- ness of the world, but of a special sort of inactivity, which he uses another strange substantive to denote—the French term désœuvrement (“inoperativity”; inoperosità). Agamben dedicates signifi cant passages of The Open to the exegesis of this term—both at the beginning of the book, in his discussion of the debate which grew up around it between Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève, and, at the bookʼs end, where the penultimate chapter bears the title Désœuvrement (the title is left in French in both the Italian original and the English translation—though in both the original and the trans- lation the word is curiously misspelled). This is far from the fi rst time Agamben has confronted the idea. It is one that excited the intense interest of two writers Agamben feels close to, the late Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, who both wrote works centered around this term in Batailleʼs work, and its applications and absence of appli- cations beyond it [cf. Blanchot, Nancy]. In The Coming Community (1990), Agamben indirectly responded to Blanchotʼs and Nancyʼs speculations on désœuvrement, com- munity, communism, and identity in novel fashion. In his next work, Homo Sacer, he traced the termʼs genealogy as well as offering his own singular interpretation of it. Therein he writes that “the only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality [potenza] that is not exhausted (like individual action or collective action understood as the sum of individual actions) in a transitus de potentia ad actum” [62, 71]. For Bataille, the term meant a radical refutation of the utilitarian aims of modern society and modern philosophy (represented for him by Hegelʼs dialectic), a commitment to inactivity and excess, a refusal to contribute to the great work (the œuvre of dés-œuvre-ment) of history. For Agamben, it is this and more—désœuvrement is not about exhaustion or even excess but, curiously enough, of what he calls potentiality. It represents an energy that has not been exhausted, energy that cannot be exhausted in the passing of the potential to the actual (“transitus de po- tentia ad actum”). In the postface to a new Italian edition of The Coming Community, Agamben recenters his speculations in that work around the idea of inoperativeness, and suggests that the term might form a “paradigm for politics”: “Inoperativeness does not signify inertia, but rather katargesis—that is to say an operation in which the as if integrally replaces the that, in which formless life and lifeless form coincide in a form of life [Inoperosità non signifi ca inerzia, ma katargesis—cioè unʼoperazione in cui il come si sostituisce integralmente al che, in cui la vita senza forma e le forme senza vita coincidono in una forma di vita]”; “. . . not work, but inoperativeness [is] the paradigm of the coming politics [Non il lavoro, ma inoperosità [è] il paradigma della politica che viene]” [93]. Inoperativeness is not laziness or inactivity, but in Agambenʼs relating of the term to the Greek katargesis, it is the open space where formless life and lifeless form meet in a distinct life-form and form of living—and which life-form and form of living is rich with its own singular potentiality. This is “the open” that Agambenʼs title strives to name. In Agambenʼs fi rst work, a study of art and aesthetics in their progress from Plato to the present entitled The Man without Content (1970), the fi nal two chapters of the work occupy themselves with two divergent thinkers: the next-to-last chapter with Hei- degger, the last with Walter Benjamin. This fi rst work sets a precedent in this regard. Virtually all of Agambenʼs works present novel interpretations of Heideggerʼs thought; and virtually all of his works follow these novel interpretations of Heidegger with novel interpretations of Benjamin. Schuler calls for (“offenen Leben”), “there is no religion because life as such is the religious fact [Tatsache]”; “In the open life there is no possession, no property” [qtd. in Rilke 2: 267]. The political tone of Schuler sʼ conceptions of “the open” is close to Agamben sʼ, if not always close to Rilke sʼ. 7diacritics / summer 2003 Two years after the seminar on Parmenides, Heidegger was tried for his involve- ment with the Nazi party. In punishment for his active membership in the Nazi party, Heidegger was banned from university teaching from 1945 until 1950, at which time he offi cially retired. In his native Germany, this meant his retreating ever more profoundly into his hut in the Black Forest. More than twenty years later, at the invitation of the French poet René Char, who had played an active and courageous role in the French Resistance, Heidegger gave a series of unoffi cial seminars at Charʼs home in Le Thor (Provence). The young Giorgio Agamben was amongst the select few present for these seminars, and the experience, by his own description, changed his life. Hitherto, his in- terests had been largely literary, philological, and juridical. When asked in an interview for the French daily Libération about these seminars, he stated that it was then, for him, that, “philosophy fi rst became possible” (“la philosophie est devenue possible”). He continued: “That is the real interest of encounters—in life as in thought: they serve to make life possible (or, at times, impossible). In any event, that is what happened with my meeting Heidegger—and, at nearly the same time, with my coming into contact with Benjaminʼs thought. Every great work contains an element of darkness and poi- son—for which it does not always offer an antidote. Benjamin was for me the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger [cʼest bien cela lʼintérêt des rencontres, dans la vie comme dans la pensée: ils servent à nous rendre la vie possible (ou impossible, par- fois). En tout cas, cʼest ce que mʼest arrivé avec Heidegger et, presque dans les mêmes années, avec la pensée de Benjamin. Toute grande œuvre contient une part dʼombre et de poison, contre laquelle elle ne nous fournit pas toujours lʼantidote. Benjamin a été pour moi cet antidote, qui mʼa aidé à survivre à Heidegger]” [“Agamben, le chercheur dʼhomme” ii–iii]. It is perhaps this role as antidote which explains the curious and decisive role Ben- jaminʼs refl ections play in Agambenʼs works. From The Man without Content onwards, there is a recurrent pattern of a sort of Benjamin ex machina where at the end of an essay or work the contradictions uncovered are, if not resolved, placed in a new—and more hopeful—light thanks to a particular insight culled from Benjaminʼs thought. The Open is no exception in this regard. After six chapters of Heideggerian exegesis (chapters 12 through 17), Agamben turns abruptly to Benjamin. Just as the knot of Hei- deggerian reasoning has begun to tighten around man and animal, a new light is offered through a conception of the open taken from Benjaminʼs reference in a letter from 1923 to “the saved night.” The chapterʼs title is “Between” (“Tra”) and suggests a different form of the open glimpsed in this strangely redeemed night. This openness is what Benjamin elsewhere called the “dialectic at a standstill,” the “between” or “interval” between two terms or two coordinates—an unresolved opposition, a désœuvrement at the heart of a dialectic which had hitherto known no standstill [O 83, 85]. In a number of essays, Agamben speaks of an authorʼs having a single most person- al and intimate “gesture.”4 If we were to apply this principle to Agambenʼs own writing, we might fi nd such an intimate and defi ning gesture in the curious idea of a “division of division.” This gesture is best seen in a philological emendation which Agamben makes in his remarkable work on Saint Paulʼs Letter to the Romans. In glossing the suspension of the divisions that separate men (such as Jew/Gentile, circumcised/uncir- cumcised, married/single, and so forth) which is to characterize the messianic kingdom invoked by Saint Paul, Agamben directs his readerʼs attention to a curious passage in Benjaminʼs unfi nished fi nal work. There