KELLY OLIVER

Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

"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 Agamben’s analysis could be extended to include a diagnosis of the dangers to animal life, in The Open, he is primarily concerned with the dangers to human life.1 Agamben argues that the dichotomy between man and animal is a division within the category of the human itself. In both the earlier and the modern versions, humanity is divided into more and less human types, which in turn becomes justification for slavery and genocide. The question, then, for Agamben is not one of human rights, but rather how the category of the “human” is produced and maintained against the category of the animal, which functions as both constitutive outside and inside such that some “people” are rendered non- or sub-human. In other words, how do we come to treat some people like animals? Extending the scope of Agamben’s interrogation, we might also ask, how do we come to treat animals like animals? Or, in other words, how does animality justify enslavement and cruelty? In addition to Agamben’s investigation into how the category of humanity is produced through the anthropological machine, we must also investigate how the category of animality becomes beholden and subservient to humanity. In this essay, I critically engage Agamben’s analysis of the man-animal dichotomy and the anthropological machine that produces it. In the first sections, I delineate the ways in which Agamben moves with and against Heidegger. Agamben maintains that Heidegger’s comparative pedagogy in his lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to precisely the closedness of the animal. Yet, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal or even open up man to the possibility of encountering animals as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. It is the space of the animal or not-quite-human within the concept of humanity that for Agamben presents the greatest danger. Agamben suggests that the only way to stop the anthropological machine is through a “Shabbat” of both man and animal. In this essay, I argue that Agamben’s return to religious metaphors and the discourse of religion as a supposed counter-balance to the science and philosophy through which the machine operates, at best displaces the binary man-animal with the binary religion-science, and at worst returns us to a discourse at least as violent as the one from which he is trying to escape. As an alternative, I look to Merleau-Ponty’s reanimation of science in his Nature Lectures. In the conclusion, I suggest that perhaps we need both Agamben’s diagnosis of the politics of science and Merleau-Ponty’s creative re-enactment of science if there is any hope of stopping the anthropological machine''.