Zoographies by Calarco Matthew;

Author:Calarco, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

THE RUPTURE OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM

One of Agamben’s more recent works, The Open: Man and Animal—which will serve as the primary focus for the remainder of this chapter—partially remedies these deficiencies by exploring the question of the animal at more length.13 In fact, in this text the issue of the human-animal distinction is granted a preeminent status among the problems facing contemporary political thought. Early in this text, Agamben writes,

What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.

(O, 16)

Such remarks are indicative of the steadfast commitment to antihumanism characteristic of the texts from Agamben I have discussed thus far. For him there is little point in pursuing a politics and ethics based on human rights when the full impact of the critique of humanism has not been measured and allowed to transform our ideas of community and being-with others. Inasmuch as humanism is founded on a separation of the humanitas and animalitas within the human, no genuinely posthumanist politics can emerge without grappling with the logic and consequences of this division. More is at issue here, however, than contesting humanism.

I will examine this last point momentarily, but before doing so, it is important to note that addressing this question alone—namely, the question of how the human-animal distinction functions in determining what it means to be human—will not suffice to call anthropocentrism into question. This is especially true where, as is the case in much of Agamben’s writings, one limits the analysis to the manner in which this distinction is played out “within man.” If this were all Agamben sought to do in The Open, there would be little to distinguish this book from the previous volumes in the Homo Sacer series, which analyze the separation of zoē and bios within human life only to leave the question of animal life and politics suspended. It seems, then, that if one is to address the philosophical and political question of the animal in any meaningful way, it will be necessary at the very least to work through both the ontology of animal life on its own terms and the ethicopolitical relations that obtain between those beings called “human” and “animal.”

Although Agamben, like his predecessors in the Continental tradition, has been slow to address the question of the animal from this broader perspective, there are at least two reasons why it must inevitably be engaged in this enlarged form if we are to develop a genuinely posthumanist approach to politics. As is clear from the arguments made in the first two chapters, the posthumanist critique of humanism is to be understood not as a misanthropic or dismissive rejection of the accomplishments of Enlightenment modernism but as a critical investigation of human subjectivity, of

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