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Rating: 
Summary: erudition as art as thought as action
Review: A magisterial meditation on the question of the "human" -- used as an adjective. This short book is Agamben's 'Duino Elegies': thalassically poetic and swirling with thought that hovers, indifferent to the gravity of common sense. The title refers to Heidegger's term for the possibility of Dasein but Agamben is not doing a pro-Heidegger critique here. The Italian is thinking against the German: Agamben mentions that Heidegger was in fact the harshest separator of man and animal in modern thought, denying animals the very possibility of ever seeing the OFFEN (Open) that is (supposedly) available to man alone. But forget Heidegger--the book's not about him. Agamben questions the very ground of Western thought that made it possible for Marty to make such an inhumane declaration at all. Agamben's meditation begins with a medieval illustration that depicts the world after the end of the world (post-judgment) in which all the Saved are shown with various animal heads. Agamben wants to know what to make of this strange, unexplained overlapping of man and animal.
And so he weaves a series of tales -- each only a few pages long and Kafkaesque in their brevity, mysteriousness, and flash of insight -- of how the idea that man and animal are two separate categories of being came to be. He weaves by unraveling the secret codes, the invisible knots that have held, and still hold, the most basic assumptions that drive Western thought, beginning with theology / philosophy and now, the bio-sciences. I was startled to learn how seemingly silly hair-splitting arguments of the theologians concerning the resurrected body could be so consequential later in the modern age in the formulation (and separation) of man and animal. An example: Would the intestines of the resurrected be full or empty? If full, then what to do about the problem of excrement in the Kingdom of God? If empty, is it because they are no longer needed? And if that is the case, what have them at all? Etc.
(BTW, it was decided that there would be no animals in Heaven.) Agamben continues here what he began in his earlier works -- namely the meaning and consequence of NAKED or RAW LIFE, devoid of any qualifiers, such as "human" such that a "human" being becomes just a living thing.
Agamben states that his purpose is to expose and figure out a way to stop what he calls the 'anthropological machine' whose rise and history made possible the most "logical" outcome of such thinking: The Holocaust. But Agamben does not limt the phenomenon of the Holocaust only to what happened to the Jews --he extends it the entire spectrum of modern political thinking that permits the stripping of human beings of humanity. (See HOMO SACER.) Having said all that, I must confess, one cannot possibly do justice to this book by summarizing Agamben's little molecules of thought, so compact and phosphorescent are they.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book
Review: This is a pathbreaking book that explores the unstable frontier between what we consider human and what we still define as animal. This book paves the way for other attempts to discuss this crucial difference which has been relatively unexplored. Agamben achieves a genealogy of the anthropological machine (as he calls it) from the Hebrew Bible to Heidegger and Foucault. I wonder why he didn't explore another barrier that this book also leaves open: the difference between human and machine, which usually accompanies the problematization of the diad animal-human (think about Junger's organische konstruktion and
Spengler Der Mensch und die Technik). This is an intelligent and well written book although I wish it would have been longer. Why not an essay on Aristotle's zoon politikon or on Nietszche's blond beast? I guess I will have to wait for his next book.
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