An Anguished Self-Subjection: Man and Animal in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man

Abstract

Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity--who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity--and who grope everywhere, and at cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Giorgio Agamben Open WERNER HERZOG'S INTEREST IN ANIMALS goes hand in hand with his interest in a Western civilizational project that entails crossing and displacing borders on every level, from most geographic to most corporeal and psychological. Some animals are merely present in a scene; early in Fitzcarraldo, for instance, its eponymous hero--a European in early-twentieth-century Peru--plays on a gramophone a recording of his beloved Enrico Caruso for an audience that includes a pig. Others insist in his films as metaphors: monkeys on raft as frenetic materialization of conquistador Aguirre's final insanity. Still others merge with characters: subtly in German immigrant Stroszek, who kills himself on a Wisconsin ski lift because he cannot bear to be treated like an animal anymore or, literally in case of vampire Nosferatu, a kindred spirit to bats and wolves. But, in every film, Herzog is centrally concerned with what Agamben calls anthropological machine running at heart of that civilizational project, which functions to decide on difference between man and animal. This decision entails separation but also proximity, hierarchy but also genetic homology, particularly in context of a contemporary (social) Darwinian Weltanschauung and its extension of technocratic biopower into whole of animal (and natural) realm--a context in which, as Agamben succinctly puts it, The total humanization of animal coincides with a total animalization of human (The Open 77). In space of this chiasmus, things in their closed forms reveal a non-self-identity or determinate negation that indexes crisis of historical reflection and purpose to which Agamben refers in epigraph. He suggests depth of this crisis when he sees locus of decision on this chiasmic space as also in it--to shift into a political register, decision presupposes state of exception on which it also bears or which it also brings into existence. Sovereign is expressed as a law that annuls itself in being reduced to a tactic (let us say, of a war on terror), but it also finds its legitimacy in subject--homo sacer--to whom it is applied by not applying, by virtue of its suspension. At two limits of order in question here, he writes, the sovereign and homo sacer [bare life] present two symmetrical figures that have same structure and are correlative: sovereign is one with respect to whom all men are potentially homini sacri, and homo sacer is one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns (Homo Sacer 84). If sovereign who takes law into his own hands is correlative with subject on whom this law bears, it is only because subject's personal sovereignty--its essence or identity--has become an illusion. If homo sacer is foreclosed from and for sake of sovereign as its vanishing other, so too sovereignty is foreclosed to homini sacri, felt in a phantasmal law as at once a prohibition (a ban), a withdrawal of protection (an abandoning), and a giving over (in abandon) to its arbitrariness. Agamben writes, Everywhere on men live today in ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely as 'zero point' of their own content, and that include men within them in form of a of abandonment (Homo Sacer 51). Agamben is not speaking here only of sovereign power at its extreme limits. This pure relation at zero point of law and tradition in fact more persuasively describes citizen in extra-territoriality of its globalization, everywhere on earth caught in a dual process of homogenization and polarization that alters terms of identity on political, economic, social, and psychic levels. …