Monday, October 31, 2005
(9:12 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Open: Introduction; Man and Overman
This is the inaugural post of The Weblog's reading group over Giorgio Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal. The week's tentative schedule, along with Amazon and Powell's links to the book itself, is available here. If members of other blogs would like to participate, they can alert me of their posts either by a trackback to this post (and/or another specific post they are responding to) or a personal e-mail to me. For all Weblog-based participants, it would be great if you would label your posts as I have done, prefixing your own title with the title of the book. On Friday, I will compile all of the posts here (as well as any from other blogs), just as I did for St. Paul Week and Sovereignty Week.Here begins my actual contribution: I have been taking a seminar on Nietzsche during the period when I have been reading the most Agamben, and I am continually struck by the relationships I see between the two figures, even though Agamben doesn't explicitly cite Nietzsche very often. This is especially true in the second essay of Genealogy of Morals (which is fast becoming the obsessive focus of my understanding of Nietzsche and of life as a whole), where many of Nietzsche's ideas about the origin of law and state strongly parallel ideas in Homo Sacer -- for instance, Nietzsche's claim that the ban is more originary than other discrete forms of punishment. Nietzsche's approach is more speculative and less "scholarly" than Agamben's, but as a classical scholar, Nietzsche would implicitly have been drawing on many of the same sources as Agamben. Then of course there is Agamben's very lengthy citation of (coincidentally?) Genealogy of Morals in Man without Content.
In any case, I found some of the same parallels in The Open. I am still doing the archeological work in Agamben's earlier works ("before he was cool"), so the exact intellectual genealogy is still up in the air as far as I can see. The level of rigor we're looking at here is therefore, "Wow, that sounds kind of the same -- I wonder if there's something to it?" At the very least, however, this will give me the opportunity to put some very central quotations from the Agamben out there:
Perhaps not only theology and philosophy but also politics, ethics, and jurisprudence are drawn and suspended in the difference between man and animal. The cognitive experiment at issue isn this difference ultimately concerns the nature of man--or, more precisely, the production and definition of this nature; it is an experiment de hominis natura. 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 and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin. (Agamben, The Open, pg 22)That is perhaps enough quoting: so, for Agamben, we see that there is an "anthropological machine" that operates on bare human life to produce the human. The operation of this machine has varied over time, and at the moment, the will to operate this machine seems to be waning. The most suitable goal, however, is to suspend the operation of this machine altogether. (This is a pattern in Agamben -- the goal is stoppage or exhaustion.)
Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human.... Homo is a constitutively "anthropomorphous" animal (that is, "resembling man"...), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human. (Ibid., 26-27)
If, in the [anthropological] machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal....
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 the ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulations 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 excluded from itself--only a bare life.
And faced with this extreme figure of the human and the inhuman, it is not so much a matter of asking which of the two machines (or of the two variants of the same machine) is better or more effective--or, rather, less lethal and bloody--as it is of understanding how they work so that we might, eventually, be able to stop them. (Ibid., 37-38)
In some respects, one would expect Nietzsche to be very different in his analysis and particularly in the ethos of his works, but I see definite and even surprising similarities. Obviously this is not the place to fully elaborate my understanding of Nietzsche, but I will venture to say that the production of "man" out of the difference between man and animal is central to Nietzsche's intellectual project and his deepest hopes are tied to a change in our relationship to that difference. First, there is the declaration at the very beginning of Zarathustra (part 1, Prologue, para. 4): "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping." The introspective bad conscious is a step along the route to the overman -- it is a terrible assault on the animal, but also opens up the possibility for humanity to become interesting (Genealogy of Morals, essay 2, section 16): "as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.--"
A promise of what? It's not clear -- the overman is obviously a polyvalent concept, and in any case, as a hope for the future, it must necessarily be allowed to remain surprising. Yet at the end of the second essay of Genealogy of Morals, he gives some indication of a direction that could be taken in the quest to undo the machinery whose operations he has laid out in such detail (Ibid., section 24):
We modern men are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture [Kaufmann's note: Selbsttierquälerei: Tierquälerei really means cruelty to animals or, literally, animal torture; hence Nietzsche's coinage suggests that this kind of self-torture involves mortification of the animal nature of man] of milenia: this is what we have practices longest, it is our distinctive art perhaps, and in any case our subtlety in which we have acquired a refined taste. Man has all too long had ann "evil eye" for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his "bad conscience." An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible--but who is strong enough for it?--that is, to wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short, all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world.(I didn't even remember that footnote when I was planning on using the passage in this post -- a little too perfect.) I don't know if this solution is the best one to the problem Nietzsche outlines -- but then, I don't think that Nietzsche knows either. The important thing to note here is that if you grant me the parallel between Nietzsche's diagnosis of "bad conscience" and something like Agamben's "anthropological machine," then Nietzsche seems to be in the business precisely of understanding how the machine works so that it can be stopped -- in this case, throwing a wrench into the works, turning the machine against itself.
[As in so many other things, Agamben -- and he's not the only one -- seems to be answering very specifically to what one might term the "Nietzschean call." I'm thinking in particular of Derrida's account of Nietzsche in Politics of Friendship, with the long footnotes on Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy's work on community -- Agamben would obviously be part of that general trajectory, even if the genealogy isn't as clear as in the case Nietzsche-Bataille-Nancy. A final question, too big and too off the topic: Are the philosophers of (Nietzsche's) future here? Has the Nietzschean impulse been substantially absorbed? Are the members of this latest generation of good Europeans among the "friends" whom Nietzsche was continually addressing, even if they aren't the only friends? (One of the members of my seminar, in response to another student's question about who these friends are, said indignantly, "I'll be his friend!"]
