Cyborg as a Destroyer of G. Agamben’s Anthropological Machine

I THE LEGACY OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND MERLEAUPONTY'S TURN TO EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY Even as posthumanists seek to dismantle the legacy of human exceptionalism, a queasy reluctance among philosophers prevents full acknowledgement of our kinship with the rest of animalia. Heidegger's declaration that animals are 'poor in world' and his description of an abyss yawning between humans and all other animals established the best known and most influential position in this regard. (1) Even though Derrida challenged what he saw as Heidegger's dogmatic humanism and violent commentary on animals, (2) he could not acknowledge the biological continuism which evolutionary science, genomics, and microbiology make obvious. (3) Matthew Calarco takes 'Derrida's insistence on maintaining the human-animal distinction to be one of the most dogmatic and puzzling moments in all of his writings' (4) and wonders 'why he would use this language of ruptures and abysses when the largest bodies of empirical knowledge we have concerning human beings and animals strongly contest such language'. (5) Similar to Derrida, Giorgio Agamben decries what he calls 'the anthropological machine' but never moves beyond it. He urges us to work on the divisions of animal from human and suggests that 'even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal'. (6) Only Cary Wolfe, Matthew Calarco, Donna Haraway, and Kelly Oliver among prominent recent animal theorists are moving away from abyssal distinctions between humans and other animals, Haraway the most decisively. (7) Yet more than fifty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had already gone far beyond Heidegger to seriously explore the philosophical consequences of evolutionary biology and ethology--the scientific studies of actual animals--and to anticipate the radical breakthroughs of the past several decades in studies of animal sentience, tool use, communication, and culture. Merleau-Ponty laid the theoretical groundwork for an understanding of human animality that is congruent with evolutionary biology and ethology. (8) In this essay I will briefly describe Heidegger's resistance to thinking of humans as animals within an evolutionary perspective, in order to demonstrate how Merleau-Ponty took a radically different direction through a thoughtful engagement with evolutionary science and ethology that affirms both biological continuity and the distinctive qualities of our species. At stake in these debates is the question of whether cultural theory can accept the legitimacy of modern science as an access to knowledge about the natural world, or whether we are trapped in a solipsistic bubble. Calarco thinks that persistent anthropocentrism is one of the chief blind spots in contemporary Continental philosophy, claiming that it is always 'one version or another of the human that falsely occupies the space of the universal and that functions to exclude what is considered nonhuman (which, of course, includes the immense majority of human beings themselves, along with all else deemed to be nonhuman) from ethical and political consideration'. (9) And as Derrida argued in his Geschlecht essays and also in The Animal That Therefore I Am, a central problem remains the failure of theorists to seriously pay attention to the life sciences, particularly the experimental studies of other animals. (10) He himself never got around to doing this, and neither have most participants in recent critical animal studies debates indebted to Derrida's work. (11) What makes Merleau-Ponty's philosophy unique and radical in this regard is his lifelong engagement with the sciences of his own era, including Gestalt psychology and cognitive neuroscience for his work on embodiment in The Phenomenology of Perception, and in his later writings, quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, embryology, and ethology. Close examination of empirical animal research in his late Nature lectures led to the beginnings of an understanding of a 'strange kinship' between humans and animals over evolutionary time, and the human-animality intertwining that defines our species' distinctive way of participating in the Brute being of the world's flesh. …

The Death of Difference in Light in August Avak Hasratian Readers of Faulkner have long agreed that the human community, as defined by kinship relations, is a central preoccupation of such novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury.1 These same readers have far greater difficulty making sense of Light in August, where kinship is conspicuously absent.2 That absence indeed structures the novel, much as an over-inscription of kinship relations organizes the rest of Faulkner's fiction. Light in August begins with what might strike us as the very embodiment of kinship, a pregnant mother—and the unclear parenthood of Lena Grove herself (her parents are dead and unidentified) and of her child has induced critics to search for what went missing.3 But does the novel's lack of kinship imply that kinship is indeed there to be discovered? To answer this question in the affirmative is to fall into the trap of reading the novel as an allegory of race, gender, and the communities formed by the elaboration of such categories. Light in August refuses to take for granted a definition of the human within which such differences can be made. In so doing, I argue, the novel radically questions the human itself. Anthropology traditionally provides the terms for the differences that constitute human communities, and these are the very terms that Light in August consistently rejects. In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben mounts an argument against what he calls "the anthropological machine" that I find particularly helpful in understanding this novel's resistance to forms of human difference.4 Agamben accuses anthropology of reinforcing a nature-culture binary as the one thing all human communities have in common, thus the basis for drawing comparisons among them. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, to take one influential example, Claude Lévi-Strauss "allow[s] the natural to be isolated from the cultural" so that we can understand "the conflicting features of [these] two mutually exclusive orders."5 To his way of thinking, it is only "natural" for "the great apes" to engage in incestuous activity, where incest among human beings is subject to a taboo or cultural "rule" (8). The ape therefore serves both as a link [End Page 55] between nature and culture and as a way of denying any "illusory continuity between the two orders" (8). What is a natural instinct for the ape is therefore a cultural imperative for the human and consequently what makes us human rather than animal. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, "culture can and must, under pain of not existing, firmly declare 'Me first,' and tell nature, 'You go no further'" (31). By this circular process, he calls on the animal to define the human. Agamben targets this strategy on the grounds that it denies the instinctual and natural basis of the human so as to disavow our fundamental connection to and dependence on biological life. The modern tendency to understand the instinctive, species-wide aspects of culture as nature is responsible for dehumanizing the biological component of human existence in two related ways. The first form of dehumanization introduces divisions within the species-body. Agamben sees the nature-culture binary as the basis on which we have considered such living beings as "the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner" less than human (Open, 37). Acting as a form of power, "the anthropological machine" distinguishes acceptably human bodies from such alien bodies as the sexual deviant, the primitive, or "the Jew" (37). By introducing the difference between nature and culture into biological life itself, the machine not only induces some living bodies to remain outside and excluded from culture; it also takes other bodies and sets them outside the human community on grounds that they muddy the boundary between human and animal. The nature-culture binary also dehumanizes life by introducing this same division within the individual body itself. Agamben describes what he calls "the physiology of the blessed" as the modern tendency of man to dwell inside consciousness, or spirit, and, from that viewpoint, regard things, including his own flesh, as if they were outside and posed a threat to the purity...

This paper closely reads what constitutes the “non-human” vis-à-vis animality in Bram Stoker’s often overlooked short stories, namely The Squaw and The Burial of the Rats. The Squaw is a tale about an American who murders a kitten in cold blood, and in turn, the mother grotesquely avenges her kitten. The anxiety of interspecies relationship is evident in this text, and I argue that this anxiety allows what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (a system which excludes animals from the zone of livable human life) to operate. The same can be said in The Burial of the Rats where the inability to articulate a boundary between animality and humanity becomes the same thing that pervasively haunts the characters in the story. Here, the vermin and the humans become “relationally entangled” as Donna Haraway puts it and I argue that the notion of entanglement here is precisely what makes the “anthropological machine” gothic in the stories. I also suggest that what makes the representations of animals horrific is the possibility that the caesura between man and animal is non-existent.

In this article, I shall outline a thought experiment aimed at reversing the relationship between bíos and zoē established by the anthropological machine. Giorgio Agamben resorts to the notion of “anthropological machine” to define the mechanism that produces the qualified life of human beings (bíos), through the inclusive exclusion of their biological life (zoē). My experiment does not render the exclusionary logic of the anthropological machine inoperative, but reverses the hierarchy it establishes between bíos and zoē. The result is what I shall call the machine of biologism, or simply the biological machine. If the anthropological machine establishes its perimeters of exclusion/inclusion on the grounds of bíos, the biological machine resorts to zoē. Thus, the biological machine does not operate according to the anthropological difference, which deems the human being as essentially not an animal, but according to what I shall define as the biological difference.

This article takes a genealogical approach to the material origin of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘anthropological machine’, analyzing the dispositif by which the ontological and axiological dualism between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ first took place in archaic societies. Using some key concepts of René Girard’s anthropology, it is possible to argue that this dualism is rooted in the violent practice of victimage sacrifice. In other words, I claim that the anthropological machine is originally performed by a sacrificial dispositif. Though in modern society the human/animal dichotomy is performed by other dispositifs, the trace of this origin remains in the form of what Gianfranco Mormino calls sacrificial survivals. An analysis of the survival of the violent parameter of equality demonstrates that making a conceptual shift to equality as equal vulnerability is the key to creating a break with the long-lasting effects of the sacrificial dispositif. Continental and feminist approaches to animal studies reflect deeply on vulnerability since it appears to be a promising dimension with which to ground human-animal relations in non-violent ways. If we link these attempts with the Girardian context, it is possible to understand their radical potential for creating socio-political change.

In The Open: Man and Animal (2002), Giorgio Agamben argues that the distinction between organism and matter, non-human animal and human is the result of continuous disjunction by what he calls ‘the modern anthropological machine’. Ecofeminist theories by Donna Haraway and others try to empower the non-human and to wipe out the changing lines of demarcation produced by the anthropological machine. Concepts of multispecies kin- and partnership can be developed by speculative fabulation in stories focussing on non-human animals. These narratives can be considered liminal zones of exception, in which Agamben’s anthropological machine explores the boundaries of the human. This article discusses two such stories in transatlantic perspective, ‘Green Tea’ (1869), a tale by Irish gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, in which a cleric falls victim to a furious monkey, and ‘Circumstance’ (1860), an American frontier story by Harriet Prescott Spofford, in which a panther called the Indian Devil attacks a woman in the wilderness. Both stories can be read as early comments on the viability of interspecies alignments and entanglements. Synthesising the central conflicts of Victorian secularisation in a common semiosphere, the monkey in ‘Green Tea’ remains an anthropocentric phantasmagoria, while ‘Circumstance’ develops an ecocentric trajectory.

Although a relatively small, yet growing group of scholars have been lamenting the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the scope of criminology for over thirty years now, animals have been historically present in criminological theorizing, legal practices, and research. However, this presence has not been of the form advocated for by scholars who variously identify themselves as non-speciesist criminologists, green criminologists, or ecological criminologists, who have been arguing largely for recognition of harms perpetrated against animals, or ‘zoological crime’. Instead, the longer history of animals in criminology is as offenders or as prototypes of criminality. In this article, we are concerned with the production – vis-à-vis the anthropological machine – of the ‘stupid’ animal and subhuman within criminology and criminal justice. Guided by the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, we trace the animal through criminological thought from the premodern period to Lombroso to contemporary criminological scholarship illustrating how the animal has been (ab)used to shore up the classifications between humans, between humans and animals, and the intelligent and the stupid. We also examine how historically through criminal trials of animals and the feebleminded, criminal justice has played an active role in buttressing these classifications and acting on these classifications to produce bare life, that is, life without form or value.

This chapter reads Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) in the context of Donna Haraway’s call for canine stories that ‘teach us to pay attention to significant otherness’ in the Anthropocene. Analysing the manuscript drafts and published version of Flush, this chapter shows how Woolf’s engagement with Darwin is more sustained, extensive and subversive than previously recognised. Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) is shown to be a previously unacknowledged intertext, with Woolf’s modernist innovations drawing on and refashioning his ideas around canine ethics, language, reason and imagination. Reading Woolf alongside Darwin, this chapter argues, enables us to see where her novel pushes beyond Victorian evolutionary theory and confronts what Giorgio Agamben has described as the ‘anthropological machine’. Instead, Flush teaches us to pay attention to significant otherness by imagining different kinds of canine agency and by blurring the boundaries between human and animal, embracing evolutionary theory’s radical levelling of species.

Confucianism is a kind of humanism. Confucian humanism presupposes, however, a divisive act that separates human and nonhuman. This paper shows that the split between the human and the nonhuman is central to Mencius’ moral psychology, and it argues that Confucianism is an anthropological machine in the sense of the term used by Giorgio Agamben. I consider the main points of early Daoist critique of Confucian humanism. A comparative analysis of Herman Melville's novella ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ reveals the limitation of the moral will in Mencius. Finally, I refer to an incident that recently captured the imagination of Chinese netizens, and shows the contested influence of Confucian humanism in contemporary China.

This article outlines three interlocking and mutually reinforcing registers in Giorgio Agamben’s work: the law, the apparatus, and the anthropological machine. While Agamben is clear that rules render inoperative laws and counter-apparatuses suspend the functioning of apparatuses, that which neutralizes the anthropological machine remains undisclosed. To explore this messianic opening, the author moves beyond Agamben and posits the possibility of a shift from an anthropological machine to a phytological machine. Whereas the former functions through the production of binary oppositions that divide life from its form, the latter yields to the internally generative potentiality of lifeforms. In conclusion, the article proposes an alternative reading of several of Agamben’s key examples, including his references to Tiananmen Square, as manifestations of a phytological machine emerging from within the composting of anthropological divisions.

As Martin Puchner has noted, ‘our understanding of the human depends on our conceptions of [nonhuman] animals’ (2007, p. 21). But more than this, humans have long since relied upon the animal in order to produce ideas around the exceptionalism of their own species. In this respect, Puchner draws on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘anthropological machine’ to address the repeated, almost automatic act of drawing the distinction between the human and the animal, an act through which the two categories are produced. Some animals are separated out from all the others and given a special name, ‘human’, which is then placed in opposition to a second category, defined by the exclusion from the human realm: ‘animal’. (2007, p. 23)

‘‘The anthropocentric primate. A species discursive reading of the story ‘The monkey that would not kill.’’’ In children’s literature nonhuman primates are often represented either as ferocious beasts or as curios and charmful vicarious children. In this article I demonstrate how these different constructions interestingly coexist in the popular story ‘‘The monkey that would not kill’’, written by the Scottish evangelist and professor of the natural sciences Henry Drummond in 1891. My study anchors the figuration of the monstrous ape historically in a Christian discourse and the figuration of the childlike ape in a zoological discourse, and link them to the literary genres of horror and comedy, respectively. Both of the figurations are anthropocentric in their reductive ways of representing the ape as strange enemy or subordinate ‘‘friend’’: they confirm the hierarchic dualism between man and ape. My reading also points out the excessive passion that characterizes the meeting between the species in the story, as a kind of leakage from the dualism. In light of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘‘anthropological machine’’, I conclude the article reflecting on the human shepherd’s energetic attempts to kill the animal not only as an act of domination, but also as bearing witness to the obsession with ‘‘experimenting’’ with other primates, in order to consolidate a human species identity.

The state of exception, generally understood to be a temporary suspension of the law is typically, as philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes, ‘state power’s immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts’, brought into play, for example, in civil war, world wars, and the post-9/11 establishment by the Bush Administration of the detention centre at Guantânamo Bay, Cuba. Agamben suggests that the state of exception, since it involves suspending the entire juridical order, ‘defines law’s threshold or limit’ (Agamben, State 4). The terms of the state of exception apply to many species of animals who live permanently beyond the threshold of human law. Agamben foregrounds the human-animal distinction perpetuated in much of Western philosophy through his term ‘anthropological machine’: Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/ animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside. (Agamben, The Open 37)

On the Impossibility of Saying "I":Epistemological paradigms and poetic paradigms in the work of Furio Jesi Giorgio Agamben (bio) Translated by Kevin Attell Inversive Waw I have before me a translation of the Haggadah read during the Jewish seder, the ritual meal celebrated in the first two evenings of Pesach. Every gesture and every word of the participants, just like every element of the meal—from the matzot, the unleavened bread that recalls the sudden flight that left no time for the bread to rise, to the maror, the bitter herbs symbolizing slavery—in some way evoke an aspect, detail, or event from the day that Yahweh freed the chosen people from Egypt, the fourteenth day of Nissan, exactly 400 years after the birth of Isaac. But the festival of Pesach does not only look back to the past. According to rabbinic teaching "in Nissan they were redeemed and in Nissan they will be redeemed"; the festival also looks forward to the messianic redemption. And if it is true that for the Jews messianic time always means a conversion of past and future (which Scholem, playing upon a category of the Hebrew verb, will speak of as the "time of the inversive waw"), then the time of this festival—of every festival—entails a transformation of time in which complete and incomplete, past and future exchange roles. This is perhaps why, in April 1922, Walter Benjamin—who did not have a religious upbringing but for his whole life worked on an interpretation of messianic time—told Scholem of his desire to attend, in the home of Moses Marx, a seder "celebrated according to strict Jewish ritual." The Anthropological Machine Even though Jesi, for reasons we can perhaps guess, dealt with Jewish materials only marginally in his work on mythology, the question of the festival—of the time of the festival—is nevertheless of absolutely central importance to him. Indeed, in the two essays that introduce and conclude the collection La festa (1977) the festival is presented as the preeminent question for anthropology: specifically, the question of the possibility—or impossibility—of the festival, of its knowability or unknowability. Here, in a survey of the anti-festive tradition of the [End Page 1047] modern period, from Proust to Musil, not only does the festival appear as something to which we no longer have access—in Keréyni's words, something "dead, grotesque even, like the movements of dancers for those who have gone deaf and can no longer hear music"—but in the end it emerges unexpectedly in the ethnographic observation of the festival of "others" as the ethnologist's "need for a gnoseological insight into one's own "I" and its relationship with one's peers." The festive is here no longer something real, something that from its proper place—among primitives, others—comes to meet the ethnologist halfway so that he may recognize himself in them; it is, rather, the situation into which the ethnologist places the others so that he may find in them a solidarity with his peers and, at the same time, free himself from his own "I." It is not by chance that these are precisely the two texts in which Jesi fully elaborates his most characteristic epistemological paradigm: the "mythological machine." Just as there cannot be, for the scholar of myth, a substance of myth but only a machine that produces mythologies and generates the tenacious illusion of hiding myth within its own opaque walls, neither is there for the anthropologist a "universal man" who is true and real in and for himself—beyond or before the "I" of others, peers, or strangers—who would find in the festival his privileged epiphany, where "at its maximum concentration, humanness paradoxically coincides with the peak of otherness." On Writing Novels For Jesi, the mythological and anthropological machines are not merely epistemological paradigms. Two plans for the preface to the collection La macchina mitologica (1979) that were recovered among Jesi's unpublished papers tell us about the particular way in which he thought of his model and about the vital significance it had for him. Indeed, the machine is not a neutral paradigm situated between the...

Observando as formulações assumidas pela distinção humano/animal ao longo da história da filosofia, Giorgio Agamben (2004) concluiu que qualquer conceito de humanidade deveria tanto excluir como incluir a natureza animal. Denominou esse dispositivo metafísico de “máquina antropológica”, o processo histórico que produz separações e reconciliações entre humanidade e animalidade (tais como as relações entre corpo e alma, por exemplo). No interior dessa máquina haveria uma zona de indeterminação onde é possível perceber a tensão entre gente e bicho, onde o movimento de separação é suspenso e a própria máquina exibe sua engrenagem capenga. Seria possível flagrar esse momento? Seria possível visitar esse lugar? A premissa dessa pesquisa é que a câmera fotográfica, como máquina antropológica, tem seu papel antropogênico particularmente visível quando os seres humanos são fotografados acompanhados de cães. Valendo-se de obras como os pintores Velasquez e Rembrandt e fotógrafos como Robert Capa e William Wegman o presente ensaio visa justificar essa premissa.