2 - The Anthropologic Machine

Summary

[N]egativity is the human means of having language.

(Agamben 2006: 85)

The Tick and Boredom

The anthropologic procedure through which a still non-linguistic member of the species Homo sapiens (an infans) becomes fully human consists in the implantation, in his or her flesh, of a machinery (language) that, from that moment onwards, will produce separation and dualism. Hence, it engenders transcendence: ‘man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human’ (Agamben 2004: 26). For the human to live it does not suffice – as it does for von Uexkull's tick – to have an ‘environment’ within which resources for survival, or dangers to be avoided, can be found. The human must literally get out of itself: this is the process of self-recognition, that of always-again declaring oneself human. The Heideggerian couple ‘environment’/‘world’ illustrates this movement. The tick spends its entire existence in its environment, it lives and dies within its ‘invisible bubble’. The human, on the other hand, must see itself living in the environment, i.e., it needs to step out into the ‘world’ (the space between the environments, von Uexkull's ‘surroundings’), and to affirm its humanity from this eccentric position. It is only through this doubling that the human discovers and institutes itself as a human, a separation that takes it outside of itself, therefore instantiating the schism between a here-and-now corporeality and a transcendent gaze – beyond and outside the body – that allows (or condemns) that incarnation to declare itself human. Agamben, by highlighting the fact of having a language, is telling us that, on the one hand, the human is not its language while, on the other, that it is possible – although this is a task that exceeds the reach of our thought – to imagine a human without a language. To have something implies the possibility of losing it, of being able to do without it. But this thought is also unthinkable in principle, because human thought is linguistic and literally made of linguistic entities (Cimatti 2000). It is therefore unthinkable because, if we need language to think human thoughts, it is impossible to think without language. Yet this does not exclude the existence of a vital field, independent from language. It is a field to be lived, not thought.