Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
With no mention of his prior work on the issues of sovereignty or the production of humanity, Agamben makes a foray into complicating such matters by examining the theorization of "the animal" and its relation to the human in the work of Kojève (and Hegel) and Heidegger; what Agamben attempts to do is to collapse the figures of the animal and man (and, despite the sexist overtones of "man," I'll abide by his usage) into one another, implying that the state of animality is a performative, just as humanity is, and that there is strength to be drawn from the indeterminate passage between these states. His object of orientation throughout the essay is the "anthropological machine," that "optical machine constructed in a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape" facilitating his recognition of himself "in a non-man in order to be human" (26-27). The implications of the animal and man as performatives, while vaguely New Age-ish, is potentially profound, as Agamben finds in the articulation of the human (and its animality) a state of exception outside of the devastation of the "camp" (as expounded in Homo Sacer). Moreover, in his move away from Auschwitz, Agamben finds ahistorical potential for the state of exception; rather than the singularity of the camp, the performance of the animal becomes a constant performance of the human, and creates a system of suspension, an explicitly poststructural theory of the production of humanity.
Repository Citation
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. "On Agamben's The Open." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 2, 2004, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss2/10