More gorgeous prose from Giorgio Agamben. This is on our (conceptual) internal division between animal and human. It's from his fourth chapter of The Open, which starts with Aristotle and ends with this three pages later.
The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human … passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible.
It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate of places.
But if this is true, if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man—and of “humanism”—that must be posed in a new way.
In our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element.
We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation.
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 … And perhaps, even the luminous sphere of our relationship with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man & Animal, 15-16 emphasis added.
I wish he would avoid using the male universal, but still. How could someone who took seminars with Heidegger come out writing so beautifully?
One of the things I appreciate and respect about Agamben is that there aren't any quick fixes, no insights for us to congratulate ourselves about and move on. Instead, there's a meditation on where we stand in a historical process, where what we think (indeed what can be thought, the historical horizons and inheritances within which we think) is part of that historical process.
Caesura:
- (in Greek and Latin verse) a break between words within a metrical foot.
- (in modern verse) a pause near the middle of a line.
- any interruption or break.
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