The Open by Giorgio Agamben

Author:Giorgio Agamben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

It is at this point that Heidegger inquires about the character of openness proper to captivation, and thus at the same time begins to carve out something like a negative image of the relationship between man and his world. To what is the bee open? What does the animal meet when it enters into relation with its disinhibitor?

Continuing to play on the compound forms of the verb nehmen, he writes that here we do not have an apprehending {vernehmen), but only an instinctive behaving (benehmen), insofar as the "very possibility of apprehending something as something is withheld [genommen] from the animal, and it is withheld from it not merely here and now, but withheld in the sense that it is 'not given at all.'"6 If the animal is captivated, it is because this possibility has been radically taken away from it:

captivation [Benommenheit] of the animal therefore signifies: essential withholding [Genommenheit] of every apprehending of something as something. And consequently: insofar as withholding is a being-taken [Hingenommenheit] by... , the captivation of the animal characterizes the specific manner of being in which the animal relates itself to something else even while the possibility is withheld from it—or is taken away [benommen] from the animal, as we might also say—of comporting and relating itself to something else as such and such at all, as something present at hand, as a being. And it is precisely because this possibility—apprehending as something that to which it relates—is withheld from it that the animal can be so utterly taken by something else.7

After having thus introduced being into the animal's environment negatively—through its withholding—Heidegger, in some of the densest pages of the course, seeks to define more precisely the particular ontological status of that to which the animal refers in its captivation.

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