Vid gränslinjen, där något börjar snarare än slutar…
21 november 2007
”Our sentimentality towards animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them.”
Jean Baudrillard
”[I]f the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man – and of ’humanism’ – that must be posed in a new way. In our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation. What is man, if he is always the place – and, at the same time, the result – of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way – within man – has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. And perhaps even the most luminous sphere of ur relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.”
Giorgio Agamben – The Open – Man and Animal
26 november 2007 at 7:04
You’ve keyed into a very important question here, one that troubles me constantly. I am beginning to think that we alleviate our consciences over the way in which we slaughter them by keeping a select few as pets.
I will link to your blog. We seem to have some similar interests. http://strategicfailure.blogspot.com.
26 november 2007 at 11:45
crawjo: Thank you! Looking forward to reading your blog!
The Swedish title of this post contains a heideggerian reference (actually to “Building, dwelling, thinking”): at the border, where something begins (its presencing) rather than ends (quoted from memory). For me, this is more about the nature of man than about animals. That is, the Agamben quote should be viewed in his very close relation to Heidegger. The openness of man, the possibility of making him into almost anything (and therefore also into almost nothing) is an important experience to be drawn from history. But the question that Baudrillard raises is an important one: our sentimentality towards the victims of history, of what use it is? What does it do to our view of history? What does it do to our view of action? Where does it place us – or rather, if we are dependant on the animalistic, what does our sentimentality make us dependant upon?
27 november 2007 at 3:37
This possibility of making man into almost anything reminds me of something I read in Arendt a week or two ago, about how after Darwinists stopped looking for the missing link between man and ape, they “started instead their practical efforts to change man into what the Darwinists thought an ape is.” I think we can read totalitarianism precisely as an experiment in exploring the “openness” of man.
I agree with Baudrillard that sentimentality is of little use, other than as a medicine for our own troubled minds.
30 november 2007 at 0:33
This s really interesting. I’ve been meaning to get around to Arendt for a long time now, but I guess this proves that Agamben owes here a lot more than people seem to say (everybody mentions Heidegger and Benjamin, but very seldom Arendt or Debord – wonder why?).
Sentimentality is food for (reactive, passive) thought. But how are we to mourn those who are dead and gone? Is there a “tradition of the surpressed” as Benjamin says, or should we only look to the future and try to forget the (obviuosly lost) struggles of the past?