Entwicklungsfähigkeit:

Giorgio Agamben and the Animal Question

In various interviews over the years, and more famously in the preface to his methodological treatise, The Signature of All Things, Agamben cites a peculiar tenet by Ludwig Feuerbach to define his relation to the authors who have marked his life and career: the methodological principle he follows, Agamben writes, is to identify in every work its “capacity for elaboration,” which Feuerbach defined as Entwicklungsfähigkeit (p. 8). In the preface to his Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie (Presentation, Development and Critique of Leibnitz’s Philosophy, originally published in 1837), Feuerbach, in fact, called the “essential” task of philosophy “immanent elaboration”: “the capacity for elaboration” (Entwicklungsfähigkeit), he wrote, is “the very mark of what philosophy is,” and elaboration means the “decipherment of the true meaning of a philosophy, the unveiling of what is positive in it, the presentation of its idea within the historically determined and finite conditions that have defined this idea.” Hence, “[t]he possibility of elaboration is the idea itself” (p. 3-4).

The source of elaboration for Agamben, as for Feuerbach, is what has been left “unsaid” in the original work and can thus be developed and resumed. This “germ” is the “potentiality” of a work that, while present, remains unstated and undeveloped, and is therefore left for others to unveil and elaborate in different ways. For Agamben as for Feuerbach, this germ, this potentiality, is what marks the true “idea” of a work. This essential element of a text can be taken in unforeseen (and perhaps undesired) directions by others and thereby transformed into something no longer attributable to the original author. Agamben frequently engages in this pursuit himself—to the point of making controversial “corrections” of other philosophers’ ideas. In so doing—that is, in radically redirecting other thinkers’ ideas to destinations they would not have foreseen—Agamben demonstrates his remarkable originality. For Feuerbach, this process of elaboration is the true task of philosophy: “Elaboration is difficult, whereas critique is easy. […] True critique lies in elaboration itself, because the latter is possible only through the separation of the essential from the accidental, of the necessary from the contingent, of the objective from the subjective” (p. 4).

Authors must be mindful of the unuttered in their own work as well. In The Signature of All Things, Agamben writes that archaeology “must retrace its own trajectory back to the point where something remains obscure and unthematized. Only a thought that does not conceal its own unsaid—but constantly takes it up and elaborates it—may eventually lay claim to originality” (p. 8). Each completed work contains something left unsaid that demands to be explored and expanded upon, perhaps by someone else. Similarly, in the preface to The Use of Bodies, Agamben paraphrases the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti and warns the reader that they will not find a “conclusion” in his work: “every work of poetry and of thought,” Agamben writes, “cannot be concluded but only abandoned (and perhaps continued by others)” (p. xiii). The “potentiality” of a work can never be exhausted, and its true philosophical “idea” lies precisely in this inexhaustible potential.

Agamben has also left some key issues undeveloped in his work, among the most important of which is the question of the animal. Agamben devoted The Open: Man and Animal (originally published in Italian in 2002 and in English translation in 2004) entirely to the analysis of (human) animality. Immediately upon publication, The Open became a major point of reference in academic debates surrounding animal exploitation and liberation. The Open made a particularly important contribution to the discussion because it introduced a new vocabulary and a new conceptuality into the lexica of many different fields, including, but not limited to, animal studies, political philosophy, and biopolitics. Despite the book’s substantial impact, however, Agamben abruptly abandoned the question at its center. Although The Open makes brief appearances in later points throughout his career, Agamben ultimately left the rich potential of its core argument largely unexplored. Indeed, Agamben’s entire oeuvre—especially the new conceptuality he proposed in his twenty-year-long project Homo Sacer—is a rich source of unsaid and unthematized issues concerning, or related to, the animal question that are begging to be explored further, a task this book takes up.

In the economy of Agamben’s oeuvre, The Open and the question of the animal play a very specific role: that of understanding and describing, on the one hand, the mechanisms through which human life is “humanized” (i.e., how the human animal becomes Man) and, on the other, how the human can be, and has been, de-humanized, “animalized,” and reduced to “bare life.” In a sense, The Open is a continuation of Remnants of Auschwitz, the book published four years before, in which Agamben had focused on the biopolitical apparatuses that manage and control life—exemplified by the extreme paradigm of the concentration camp—and on the “non-human” core that endures at the very heart of the human. The Open widens the perspective from the camp of Remnants of Auschwitz to the issue of humanization and animalization as such, and also paves the way for the new paradigms of liberation Agamben will propose in the later volumes of his Homo Sacer project. For Agamben, the question of the animal is, therefore, quintessentially metaphysical and quintessentially political—it is the metaphysico-political question, as I show in this book—and provides him with powerful analytical tools for his discourse on biopolitics.

This means, however, that the “animal” Agamben focuses on is not an animal (or animals) per se, but rather human animality, and that nonhuman animals, on the rare occasions on which they appear in The Open and in the rest of his work, are of no real import in and of themselves, but are merely instruments for pursuing his investigation of the human. Moreover, the animal for Agamben remains the Animal with capital “A,” or what Derrida called animot, a metaphysical category into which all nonhuman animals are typically confined—at the expense of their incredible diversity and heterogeneity—and against which Man is (erroneously) defined. (Similarly, for Agamben, man is Man with capital “M,” an ostensibly gender-neutral—i.e., gender-blind—category that, in truth, negates the existence of women and other genders. Gender blindness and species blindness follow the same patterns and originate from the same presuppositions.) Agamben never manages (or is never willing) to go beyond these two founding categories of the Western tradition. When he speaks of Man and Animal, he is referring to the Heideggerian “essences” which are defined in contradistinction to each other. This reductive line drawing between Man and Animal is one of the greatest limitations of Agamben’s thought on the animal question and the reason why, for many other, more engaged, thinkers, he is ultimately of little use for the practical cause of animal liberation.

Thinkers and activists involved in practices of animal advocacy and liberation will find another insurmountable obstacle in The Open and in Agamben’s philosophy in general: his messianic perspective. Though defined by Agamben as “the present as the exigency of fulfillment” (The Time That Remains, p. 76), messianism does not provide concrete, “practical” solutions to urgent problems, nor does it supply readers with an ethico-political agenda to which to adhere, a criticism which is often leveled at Agamben’s political philosophy as a whole. Reducing engagement to the identification of the tasks of the “coming philosophy,” many argue, seems to condemn his politics to a radical passivity. Indeed, for many critics, the religious language that marks Agamben’s messianic philosophy could even be said to constitute a smokescreen, if not an outright mystification of concrete issues, that forecloses, instead of paving the way to, liberatory practices. Moreover, Agamben’s rejection of all legal frameworks and of the question of rights (human, as well as animal) precludes any immediate, concrete intervention, and his ontologization of ethics at the expense of relationality and responsibility shrouds the plural dimension of action and the inviolability of the individual (human, as well as animal). In a word, no true politics of (animal) liberation can be found in Agamben’s work.

Despite this, the new conceptuality he proposed in The Open and in his work on biopolitics in general has helped create a space for inquiries he never pursued himself. In his work, Agamben provides important conceptual tools (such as bare life, the anthropological machine, the division zoē/bios, the emphasis on sovereignty and the state of exception, etc.) that call into question the anthropocentric context within which he himself remains captive. Though Agamben never manages (or seeks) to escape the dualisms of the Western tradition, in his discussion of the key concepts outlined above, he gestures or points towards their overcoming. Importantly, his work contributes to the questioning of a certain orthodoxy in animal ethics and animal studies and to the opening up of different possibilities of thought. As I argue in this book, though still firmly rooted in the anthropocentrism of the Western tradition, Agamben’s work points beyond the limits that he himself is unable or unwilling to cross.

Carlo Salzani is a Research Fellow at the Messerli Research Institute of Vienna, Austria, and a faculty member of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT). His research interests include biopolitics, posthumanism, and animal studies.

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