UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Reimer, Tim
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2008
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
The question of the animal has long haunted philosophic inquiry. Often relegated to the quiet comers of brief mention and quick footnotes, the question of the animal other can neither be cast away nor definitively settled. What is an animal? What sorts of creatures are to be placed within this immensely broad category of being? And what, perhaps most importantly, are the human consequences of creating and maintaining the category of animal?
This paper will explore how the concepts of human and animal have, historically, been separated and the vast ethical consequences of this separation. I will be concentrating on Giorgio Agamben's, The Open, in which Agamben argues that the conceptual bamers separating the two concepts are breaking down in modernity. He calls this foundational system of separations the anthropological machine. Agamben contends that our post-Darwinian modernity is increasingly characterized by animalistic and biological articulations of the human subject. Agamben sees the lines beginning to blur. As the lines blur human life is less characterized by those things which arise only out of a separation between the human and animal (i.e. ideas of progress, ethics, rights. .) and increasingly dominated by an emphasis on pure biological survival. For Agamben, the subject, in modernity, is no longer human in the traditional sense and is, instead, given over to an existence dominated by an ideology of pure survival, what Agamben calls bare life.
Agamben argues that bare life is the necessary consequences of blurring the lines between human and animal. This paper explores the possibility of an ethics beyond bare life in a modernity in which the human becomes animal again. I will be looking, specifically, at Friedrich Nietzsche's articulation of animality and his figure of Zarathustra as representative of an attempt to create an ethics born out of the recognition of and confrontation with human animality. Through this exploration of Agamben and Nietzsche's conceptions of human animality, I hope to open up the idea of human animality and, ultimately, to find a space to see creative potential within the human animal; that is, to navigate the ethically vacuous existence that is Agamben's bare life.
This paper will explore how the concepts of human and animal have, historically, been separated and the vast ethical consequences of this separation. I will be concentrating on Giorgio Agamben's, The Open, in which Agamben argues that the conceptual bamers separating the two concepts are breaking down in modernity. He calls this foundational system of separations the anthropological machine. Agamben contends that our post-Darwinian modernity is increasingly characterized by animalistic and biological articulations of the human subject. Agamben sees the lines beginning to blur. As the lines blur human life is less characterized by those things which arise only out of a separation between the human and animal (i.e. ideas of progress, ethics, rights. .) and increasingly dominated by an emphasis on pure biological survival. For Agamben, the subject, in modernity, is no longer human in the traditional sense and is, instead, given over to an existence dominated by an ideology of pure survival, what Agamben calls bare life.
Agamben argues that bare life is the necessary consequences of blurring the lines between human and animal. This paper explores the possibility of an ethics beyond bare life in a modernity in which the human becomes animal again. I will be looking, specifically, at Friedrich Nietzsche's articulation of animality and his figure of Zarathustra as representative of an attempt to create an ethics born out of the recognition of and confrontation with human animality. Through this exploration of Agamben and Nietzsche's conceptions of human animality, I hope to open up the idea of human animality and, ultimately, to find a space to see creative potential within the human animal; that is, to navigate the ethically vacuous existence that is Agamben's bare life.