Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty KELLY OLIVER
To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean … to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man. (Agamben, The Open 92) In The Open, Giorgio Agamben diagnoses the history of both science and philosophy as part of what he calls the “anthropological machine” through which the human is created with and against the animal. On his analysis, early forms of this “machine” operated by humanizing animals such that some ‘people’ were considered animals in human form, for example barbarians and slaves. Modern versions of the machine operate by animalizing humans such that some ‘people’ were/are considered less than human, for example Jews during the Holocaust and more recently perhaps Iraqi detainees. Agamben describes both sides of the anthropological machine: If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here [the machine of earlier times] the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form. (37) The human-animal divide, then, is not only political but also sets up the very possibility of politics. Who is included in human society and who is not is a consequence of the politics of “humanity,” which engenders the polis itself. In this regard, politics itself is the product of the anthropological machine, which is inherently lethal to some forms of (human) life. Although
PhaenEx 2, no. 2 (fall/winter 2007): 1-23 © 2007 Kelly Oliver