Priest of Nature: Humanity, Animality, and an Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's 'The Open'

What is man's relationship to his own animality? This question, more than man between angels and beasts or man as body and soul, has defined the modern political crisis. And this question has founded the modern political crisis that threatens to annihilate all that's human in the world. This stark reality - perhaps overwrought - was first seriously approached, indirectly, in the work of Alexandre Kojeve. 

Drawing on dialectical materialism of Hegel and Marx, Kojeve believed humanity was fast approaching its own end. This apocalypse did not mean an end of the species, so much as the end of history. Since the Battle of Jena, the human political question had come to a halt. The major questions had dissipated, the substance of revolution had evaporated. Even the Russian and Chinese Revolutions were nothing more than efforts towards Americanization, with projects to electrify the country side and impose Fordist industrial uniformity. The human would end, and with it all art and philosophy as decisive acts of wisdom. Instead, Kojeve posited that Homo sapiens would continue without reflection. Capitalism and Communism were two sides of the same coin, destined towards mutual recognition and synthesis (whether through FDR's New Deal and Lenin's NEP). The result was government over animal life and consumption, an economy of comfort. Human life would continue, but without decisive and meaningful action. Politics would simply be about the best management. Human art would resemble the songs of birds and the webs of spiders. The only alternative towards this Americanization of bestial consumption was Japanese snobbery. High culture and rituals refined to the point of extreme precision and difficult, yet without meaning, such was the possibility of a man freed from his animality. But what becomes of it? Here Agamben criticizes Kojeve's misunderstanding of this modern form of governance:

"Kojeve, however, privileges the aspect of negation and death in the relation between man and the anthropophorous [man-appearing] animal, and he seems not to see the process by which, on the contrary, man (or the State for him) in modernity begins to care for his own animal life, and by which natural life becomes the stakes in what Foucault called biopower. Perhaps the body of the anthropophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought, and the aporias of the philosophy of our time coincide with the aporias of this body that is irreducibly drawn and divided between animality and humanity" (12)

In other-words, Kojeve's Hegelianism fails to see how man comes fully alive, not disappearing, through this entire dialectical co-incision of man and animal. Humanity does not disappear, but wax even stronger as it asserts greater domination over his own animality. Dialecticals do not find resolution through sublation, but only intensifies towards greater efforts of integration. Hence why Japanese Zen Buddhists of the Kyoto School criticize Hegel's Christianity as a stumbling block towards full dialectical fulfillment. Nishida, like Kojeve, appeals to the fecund nothingness of pure potency towards which dialectical fulfillment leads (beyond the tension of Creator-creature). Agamben's conjecture is that this sublation always has additional layers, and the nothingness of death does not arrive. Instead, self-care becomes the dominant paradigm. The aporia in this dialectic - life between organic life and life lived - drives modern politics forward in its effort to master Nature. The regime of comfort does not see the end of man for the smooth-brained comfort of the wise ape, but simultaneously the effort to make all things fit for Humanity. History may have ended, but it has only done so at the victory of an increasingly perverse form of Humanism.

The inhumanity of Humanism originates from the fracture between the two beings of man. The first is man as a biological organism, the mindless and repetitive functions of the body (the heart beating, the lungs expanding/collapsing, the cells dividing). The second is man's external interaction with the world, both his sensory and intellectual apprehension.  But what is the thing that holds these two things together? Life itself becomes *the thing*, yet it is precisely life because it is not anything, but an inappropriable and undefined potentiality. But unlike Descartes, and much of modern philosophy, the key point of examination is now how these two relate, but separate. The core issue is not to find where the soul is in the body (eg Descartes' pineal gland), but how the "person" is set aside in the consciousness removing medical acts of anesthesia and surgery. The inverse - the subsumption of animality - was present in Medieval thought experiments about the bodies of the blessed. How could a Human body remain distinct Human when so many of its functions were impure? Would intestines continue to excrete filth? Would genitals continue to reproduce? The general solution, found in Thomas, was that these organs remain without use. And this question then provokes thought about why God created these fallen organs in the first place. Medieval Christian Paradise and Modern Atheistic Posthistory both draw the mind back to origins. And this coinhering of beginning and end - between organic life and life lived - reveals the collapse that has become increasingly normative:

"When the difference vanishes and the two terms collapse upon each other - as seems to be happening today - the difference between being and the nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name. Perhaps concentration and extermination camps are also an experiment of this sort, an extreme monstrous attempt to decide between the human and inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin" (22)

The split has created the demand for a forced conjunction to determine precisely what is Human apart from what is strictly animal. The death-camp was an experiment to determine precisely where the line ran, to fix the moment of conversion from beast to man. This thought experiment, which formed the basis of Human taxonomy, became increasingly confused as Humanity seemed to have no formal significance whatsoever. Linnaeus, doubtful that man was any different from an ape, was simply the creature which could recognize itself as a creature. Such a disposition was more harshly unveiled in the Renaissance Humanism of Pico della Mirandola, which struggled with what man was in the hierarchy of being. Neither an angel nor a beast, man was capable of both. Thus to be a human was to be an empty mirror, a chameleon capable of change. The conjunction of Man with his own animal body was to recognize that he had nothing; he had no rank or place in the order of things, but capable of fluctuation as spirit or simian.

The core element of this self-knowledge, of a directed intellect, was man's relationship with language. It was language which set Man apart from the Apes, which lacked this capacity. The animals are silent. However, Agamben claims (contrary to Chomskyite fascism) that language is a historical phenomenon, not inherent in biology. Thus a fictive *moment* must be understood to distinguish Man prior to speech (Homo alalus, Man speechless) and Humanized Man. But this conceptualization involves a coinhering dialectic, for the humanization of the animal presupposes the animalization of man and vice versa. Every animal may become a man, every man may become an animal. The plasticity of Man's potentiality thus results precisely in regimes to fully regulate the animal so as to extract the Human or remove the animal. The death-camp with the Jew, as much as the operating table with the comatose, represents this process of animalizing the Human, the production of bare-life. Thus every effort to master Nature-Animal as Human is simultaneously an attempt to master the Human as Nature-Animal. 

This operation explains the drive, from the Renaissance onwards, to master the natural world as a speechless lump that could, through work, be humanized. But at the same time, it also opened the darkened possibility of man's reversion into animality. This caesura mobilizes both industrial exploitation of the environment (a favorite topic for quasi-Marxist Left academics) as well as eco-crusaders. Jane Goodall's mission to prove that the Apes are like Man mirrors the Nazi doctor's efforts to prove that the Jews are not like Man. In antiquity, this apparatus operated through the phenomena of the slave and the barbarians. What was in human form was not-human, at the same time questions arose of whether what was not-human (the satyr, the centaur, the dwarf, etc.) was in fact human. The truth of Green politics and Environmental movements is revealed at its most inhumane.

For Agamben, whether it's the ancient apparatus of designating the body of the slave from the citizen, or it's the modern apparatus of designating the body of the comatose from the Human (deserving of Rights), both unveil the categorical nothingness that is Man:

"Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which - like a 'missing link' which is always lacking because it is already virtually present - the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and exclusded from itself - only a bare life." (37-38)

Whether it's the process of humanizing the animals or animalizing the humans, they both result in the extraction of this empty middle term: bare life. This remnant can't be saved, the locus of damnation that the Anthropophorous machine (whichever way it moves) utilizes as it constructs Babel. Again, this applies as much to Green politics as industrial capitalism. The latter's drive to exploit the Earth as fundamentally inhuman was part of the process of humanization (hence the fascination with automata). The former's drive to animalize humanity in a flattened ontology. Is it any surprise that this double-movement was contained in the movement in an age of movements: National Socialism? Agamben, as are many leftists, are wont to criticize fascism and nazism with fairly uncritical vehemence. And my purpose is not to litigate the historiographical aporia on what precisely National Socialism was and did, and where it came from. However, Agamben's purpose can be simplified to recognize that the same regime which could effectively manage an industrial war operation (which liquidated undesirables - Jews or no - as much as it produced munitions) was also concerned to preserve animals and their environment. NSDAP could meld together its left and right wings (which, from time to time, faced purges and struggle) under Hitler as a symbol of this anthropophorous technique. The Fuhrer became the deciding factor, the enfleshed imperative - the living word - that determine the rising and falling of souls. In this way, the Fuhrer principle was the anti-Messianic expectant hope for many ancient Jews who saw the whole Gentile world brought under the heel of Torah. It was a cataclysmic determination: man would finally have his rank.

The alternative to this destructive drive is suspension of the machine, to cease the production of bare life. Heidegger began the process to reverse this through recognition of the split between the animals and humanity resides in its experience of the world. While the stone and all inanimate objects were worldless and humans were world-building, animals were poor in world. Instinct drives the animal, often in ways that defy any rational reflection. A spider creates a web in such a manner to perfectly fit the body of the fly, as well as allow the spider able motion, but it does so without intention or desire. And what sort of world does a tick experience, whose sensory abilities flow only to its natural progression to feed and reproduce (eerily described by environmental scientist Jakob von Uexkull)? However, in so doing, an animal remains entirely open for the entirety of experience, of full capture. Such was visible in the bee feeding on nectar, which continue to suck even as an experimenter removed its abdomen. It is the mystical imagery of a moth drawn to a flame, completely enchanted in its full submersion into its world. The experience of this light disinhibits the moth to fullness of its instinct. Yet, like this image of self-immolation, what was it that the animal was opened to? The animal is given (by its own internal instinct) to full immersion without significance, only opacity. The poverty of the animal is a openness without revelation.

But how is this open if this world remains fundamentally invisible in its opacity? Thus Heidegger, according to Agamben, is caught in a paradox:

"The animal is at once open and not open - or, better, it is neither one nor the other: it is open in a nondisconcealment that, on the one hand, captivates and dislocates it in its disinhibitor with unmatched vehemence, and, on the other, does not in any way disconceal as a being that thing that holds it so taken and absorbed. Heidegger seems here to oscillate between two opposite poles, which in some ways recall the paradoxes of mystical knowledge - or, rather, non knowledge. On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other, it is closed in total opacity. Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and  binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge." (59)

This paradoxical relationship between profound ignorance and self-consciousness of knowing is revealed again in camera obscura through boredom. Heidegger describes the experience of one stuck at a train station. The next train is in four hours. He could read, but the words become meaningless and heavy. He goes for a walk, he counts the trees, he analyzes the board of trivial facts about arrivals and departures. He checks his watch, it's only been ten minutes. Extreme boredom is the closest man comes to the animal's full enrapture: he becomes fully rooted to a world that he can neither contemplate nor understand. It is simply before him, opaque and alien, enrapturing precisely in that is unwanted. Nothing is possible. But that's precisely the moment of true potentiality. The moment when the world becomes invisible in its opacity, a simply formless given, that the mind is opened to pure possibility. When all concrete possibilities suspend (the bored man can't read, can't concentrate, can't care) then pure possibility is possible, what Heidegger called "the originally possibilitization" [die ursprungliche Ermoglichung] (66). In this pure possibility, the potential to act and not act simultaneously emerges. It's this capacity to realize what will not be realized is precisely the moment of anthropogenesis, where Man can deactivate his relationship with his dishibitor. Man's freedom is in his self-awareness of being-here:

"Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human" (70)

 It's precisely in this self-awareness of its undisclosed animality that humanitas is manifest. What is animal is neither reconciled nor removed, but left alone. However, Hedegger condemns metaphysics as prioritizing animalitas. In the current epoch, where all historical tasks have faded, the only thing left is the anti-politics of economization. The totalitarian movements of the Fascists and the Communists were not the last gasp of nationalism or imperialism, but their twilight. Politics had become the care of the animal body, to provide material safety through access to money, supplies, and medicine. Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism were not revolutions, as much as "movements" to reclaim (or build) a state. That's why German Nazis and Italian Fascists preserved the prior constitutional state (even if in a state-of-exception). Lebensraum was not a question of politics, but policy. It was the health of the German people, not a question of man's relation to the world, that was at stake. It's also why the Russian Revolution toppled the Empire for a modern state (a process already underway since the activation of the Duma). Lenin praised Ford as the only true Marxist in America and sought to bring about a revolution that mirrored the cartelization of the US toward material expansion. It was a process of Americanization, defined as the Kojevean end of history. And these efforts are thus no different than the Social Democracies of the West, which have only increasingly engaged the anti-politics of welfare-warfare from the turn-of-the-century onwards. The only thing that matters is the economy, and such marks out the emptiness of life hence. It is worth quoting Agamben extensively:

"Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity - who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity [inoperosita] - and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanity's last historical task -if indeed it makes sense here to speak of a 'task.'

The traditional historical potentialities - poetry, religion, philosophy - which from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historic-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden - and the 'total management' - of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate.

It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by de-ciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. To be sure, such a humanity, from Heidegger's perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus closes itself to its own openness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man." (76-77)

All animals are humanized through welfare, all humans are animalized through warfare, driven together in the absolute confusion of both. All that's left is bare-life. This crisis is manifest in the constant LARP of both Left and Right. The desire to return to the guillotines of revolutionary Paris or the crusades of the medieval knight all reveal the utter emptiness of modern life. These are significations without reality, gestures towards the absolute boredom that modernity finds itself enthralled to. But rather than find a way out, it buries deeper. Third-positionism is the norm: the coinherence of capitalism and communism into a tertium quid. It's why fringe critics on both Left and Right are half right. The Nazis won World War 2, as much as the Communists won. The New Deal bureaucracy baptized unreconstructed Nazis (viz. Gladio) as much as it did make deals with Communists. The CIA empowered right-wing military juntas, as much as it built up left-wing parties abroad. The strategy-of-tension simply reflects a paradigmatic consolidation. As Kojeve noted rightly, the conflict between Capitalism and Communism was superficial and its end was in its synthesis. Either the Anglo world would absorb socialism or the Slavic world would absorb capitalism, but posthistory had already dawned. And thus, in Heidegger's analysis, the pure potency that marks out Humanity (an openness to opacity) was traded. Instead, man sought to bury into every secret of its biological reality. In opening what was ultimately closed (ie there's nothing below the empirical of Dasein), man closed his only opening.

Is there escape? Heidegger gestured towards one:

"man, the shepherd of being, appropriates his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery, but is thought as such, as pure abandonment" (80)

This alternative is explored in the messianic philosophy of Walter Benjamin. In a critical appraisal of Gnostic cosmology, Benjamin utilized Pauline paradox: at the precise moment that creation was concealed as damned, it was saved. While Gnostics like Marcion saw redemption as what was heavenly leaving behind the hell-world of the Demiurge, Benjamin saw this evacuation as precisely the moment when Nature could be Nature. It was the "saved night" of unredeemable redemption. The transcendental and immanent are not resolved in commingling, but saved as the moment of their permanent disjuncture. The result is not a mastery of Nature, which had been abandoned to itself, but mastery of the relationship between Nature-Animality and Humanity:

The anthropological machine no longer articulates nature and man in order to produce the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman. The machine is, so to speak, stopped; it is 'at a standstill,' and, in the reciprocal suspension of the two terms, something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor man settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in the mastered relation, in the saved night."

Agamben would, in other works, elaborate the name for this disjuncture as form-of-life. But here it's important to see what has been posited. Rather than the metaphysical operation which sought to think humanity from its animality (Heidegger's critique), humanity (or its truth) becomes possible through a suspension. Animality is not a puzzle to solve, it's not conundrum to master (either through humanizing nature or animalizing man). Rather Nature's limit is cognized without being understood, unveiled in its veiledness. 

Such was manifest, for Benjamin, in the experience of sex. In erotic entanglement, the opacity of man's sexuality is revealed. There's no higher meaning, no power or potency, merely the scandal of nudity. Agamben explicates Titian's Nymph and Shepherd - perhaps his last work - in this vein. The shepherd and nymph turn from each other in disinterest, with the former ceasing from his song and the latter's gaze turned away seductively towards the viewer. A darkened background sprawls out infinite, speared with the harsh visage of a lightning-struck tree. An image of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, its fruit eaten, the lovers have lost their innocence. They now know what would end the mystery. But it's precisely in ending the erotic enchantment that something new emerges. Conversant with each other's body, the lovers can embrace in forgiveness. Eroticism finds an end in the imaginative potential of love. Each one no longer seeking for a mystery behind the persona, but receiving each other as they are. Human nature - with its mythologized copulative extinction - is fulfilled. The moth does not fly into the flame. The reditus never consummates. The Many do not fold back into the One. Instead, the "dialectic at a standstill" resolves as Man's contemplation of all things as things. The metaphysical depth resolves in their opacity. The mystery is to be made use of towards a new politics. Justice becomes possible.

Such is the "economy of the mystery" that opens up a new relation, the eschatological immanence of the Sabbath.  The created world is precisely saved in its being left alone, animality finding redemption in its being left as animals. The vision here is not to resume, once again, a Humanizing machine to redeem the world. Rather, the world is seen as redeemed. The Pauline "groaning of creation" that awaits the sons of God finds fulfillment here. The messianic banquet - the wedding feast of the Lamb - is an end of history that establishes the politics of the New Jerusalem. The King ceases to govern, he can take his seat and reign. The Kingship of Christ finds its impotential here, as Man as a divine word can make use of the creation God had made. Pure potentiality leaves all things open as God has laid them open. Like the Kabbalistic imagery of the saints seated at the messianic banquet having animal heads, the new politics will not engage the same political metaphysics that had ended with the posthistorical totalitarian Social Democracy. Man becomes the priest - the naming of the name of all things unveiled as they simply are. Thus marks out the life everlasting.