For Heidegger, “the open” is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. “The open” is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a “world.” “The open” is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a “world,” greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of “the open” is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and what separates us from the animals. And this open moment lies at the origin of philosophy: the humbling—and potentially frightening—moment of wonder that spurred speculation into the finer and deeper reason for things. As was his wont, Heidegger introduces a special phrase to describe this experience of acceding to the open, “the world worlds,” “die Welt weltet” and in the very next sentence states that “the rock has no world. Plants and animals also have no world” [Holzwege 31].1 When the world, strangely enough, worlds, we find that world open before us; we are standing, to adopt Heideggerʼs terms, in a “clearing,” a step away from both trees and forest. The world is no longer too much with us, and we suddenly see trees, forest, and ourselves in an uneasy and changing relation to one another. “The open” is a term amongst many in Heideggerʼs technical vocabulary—ultimately one that found little place in his later philosophy. It nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of that philosophy. This is most clearly visible, as Agamben points out, in Heideggerʼs lectures in Freiburg in the fall semester 1942–43. In the midst of the most bitter and brutal combat, Heidegger was lecturing on Parmenides. The course was dedicated in large part to the translation of a single word—but a crucial one—aletheia, “truth.” Heidegger suggested a number of ways of translating the term, but the fourth and final way was as “das Offene und das Freie der Lichtung des Seins”—literally, “The open and the free in the clearing of being”—or, more simply, as “the open” [Parmenides 195]. In his woodland terminology, Lichtung, a clearing (as in a forest), is etymologically a “light-ing,” an opening and an illumination. The “open” then corresponds to originary truth: it is the open space in which truth in its original (Greek) meaning took place. It stands thus, for Heidegger, at the heart of philosophy: at the heart of its history and its essence. In these lectures, first published in 1993,2 it seems that Heidegger arrived at his translation by sounding the concealed depths not only of ancient Greek, but also of modern German. This modern German was a poetic one—that of Rilke. As he introduces his translation of Parmenidesʼs term for truth, Heidegger is well aware that the unusual expression “the open” will lead his listeners to think of Rilkeʼs celebrated Duino Elegies (1923) and, in particular, to Rilkeʼs repeated use of the curious term 1. One might compare the curious phrase “the world worlds,” with an equally curious one which Heidegger coined for the opposite movement: “the de-worlding of the world [Entweltlichung der Welt]” [65]. 2. These lecture notes were published as volume 54 of Heideggerʼs complete works. The Italian edition wrongly lists this volume as the forty-fourth (“XLIV”) in the series. Attellʼs translation repeats this error, reproducing the bibliographical material from the Italian edition while simply translating the Roman numeral (“44”). diacritics / summer 2003 5 in the eighth elegy (though neither Heidegger nor Agamben notes this, the term had a longer poetic history and had in fact been used by Hölderlin in one of his most famous poems, “Bread and Wine”: “So komm! dass wir das Offene schauen . . .”). Rilkeʼs elegy begins: “With all its eyes the creature sees / the open” (“Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene”) [Rilke 2.224]. In his poem, we (mankind) are excluded from this glimpse of the open granted to all other creatures. Years earlier, on a visit to Parisʼs Jardin des Plantes, Rilkeʼs sensitive eye had been captured by a panther. For Rilkeʼs panther, captivity was the central fact of his existence. “It seems to him,” wrote Rilke of his great cat, that, “there are / a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world” [Rilke 1.469]. What interested Rilke was how impenetrable, how full of incommunicable will, strength, and silence the animal was; what awakened his poetic sensibilities was how closed off that animalʼs world was. The worldlessness of the animal proves in the later poem to be the fruit not of his nature but of his confinement. In the eighth elegy, the unnamed animal (“die Kreatur”) is accorded a different glimpse of the world: it sees that world in all its openness. It sees what fear of death and fear of life prevent humans, the smartest and saddest of creatures, from seeing: the world in all its intense and interconnected immediacy. Heidegger is quick to distance himself from this immediacy. Though, as he notes, he and Rilke are employing the same term, the same “wording” (Heidegger repeatedly uses the term Wortlaut instead of the simpler Wort), “what is being named,” says Heidegger of his use of the term “the open,” “is so different that no opposition could hope to convey it,” as “oppositions—even the most extreme—demand that those things which are to be opposed to one another can be placed in the same realm” [Parmenides 226]. “The open” that Rilke praises and sees reflected in the eyes of animals is, for Heidegger, mere blindness. This is a blindness of a particular sort: historical blindness. Rilkeʼs problem, his misapprehension of the deep meaning of the term “the open” and his consequent inconsequent use of it, following Heidegger, stems from his unthinking adoption of a traditional view of the relation of man to animal typical of a fundamentally unreflective modernity [cf. Heidegger, Parmenides 231, 235]. “The open,” Heideggerʼs translation of Greek truth, is a different one than that which Rilke famously invoked. It is deeper, richer—and it is that which distinguishes us from the animals. It is not the animals who see “the open”—they are open to nothing but stimuli. According to Heidegger, we alone see “the open.” This is the point at which Agamben takes his title and enters the discussion. Agamben neither laments Rilkeʼs historico-ontological naiveté, nor accuses Heidegger of insensitivity toward poetry or animals. His interest is fixed upon another point—the open place where he feels that the two irreconcilable positions meet—the point at which the animalʼs unhindered openness, or receptivity, to stimuli in its environment and man's openness to the world in all its ungraspable immensity converge. One might ask whether these two types of openness, these two types of receptivity have anything in common, whether they bear the weight of comparison. For Heidegger, they clearly do not. Agambenʼs assumptions that they do leads him to conceive of another type of openness than either Rilke or Heidegger had conceived of, an openness of inactivity, of disengagement from oneʼs environment and, perhaps, oneʼs world.3

LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE