1. "There is a line to be drawn there between the barbarian and the foreigner. For the Greeks, the barbarians were those who didn't speak their language, and therefore inferior. Such a mark of difference and hierarchy is to be found throughout history. The Slavic name for Germans, still in use in some languages, is 'nemets', 'nemtsy', which means 'mute' - those that cannot speak Slavic. The foreigner is a threshold between human and animal because they can't speak properly, they can't communicate. Since Agamben explicitly marks this as the pre-modern anthropological machine, they are not just dumb animals with human form:

Up until the eighteenth century, language—which would become man’s identifying characteristic par excellence—jumps across orders and classes, for it is suspected that even birds can talk. With such a view of language, it is easy to see how an Other who can articulate, but not speak properly, is both animal and human".