Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice. This is the fifth of his books published by Stanford; previous titles are Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), The Man Without Content (1999), The End of the Poem (1999), and Potentialities (1999).

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THE OPEN

Stanford University Press

Contents

Translator's Note..................................ix 1 Theriomorphous................................1 2 Acephalous....................................5 3 Snob..........................................9 4 Mysterium disiunctionis.......................13 5 Physiology of the Blessed.....................17 6 Cognitio experimentalis.......................21 7 Taxonomies....................................23 8 Without Rank..................................29 9 Anthropological Machine.......................33 10 Umwelt........................................39 11 Tick..........................................45 12 Poverty in World..............................49 13 The Open......................................57 14 Profound Boredom..............................63 15 World and Earth...............................71 16 Animalization.................................75 17 Anthropogenesis...............................79 18 Between.......................................81 19 Desoeuvrement.................................85 20 Outside of Being..............................89Notes..............................................93Index of Names.....................................101

Chapter One

In the last three hours of the day, God sits and plays with the Leviathan, as is written: "you made the Leviathan in order to play with it." -Talmud, Avodah Zarah

In the Ambrosian Library in Milan there is a Hebrew Bible from the thirteenth century that contains precious miniatures. The last two pages of the third codex are entirely illustrated with scenes of mystic and messianic inspiration. Page 135v depicts the vision of Ezekiel, though without representing the chariot. In the center are the seven heavens, the moon, the sun, and the stars, and in the corners, standing out from a blue background, are the four eschatological animals: the cock, the eagle, the ox, and the lion. The last page (136r) is divided into halves. The upper half represents the three primeval animals: the bird Ziz (in the form of a winged griffin), the ox Behemoth, and the great fish Leviathan, immersed in the sea and coiled upon itself. The scene that interests us in particular here is the last in every sense, since it concludes the codex as well as the history of humanity. It represents the messianic banquet of the righteous on the last day. Under the shade of paradisiacal trees and cheered by the music of two players, the righteous, with crowned heads, sit at a richly laid table. The idea that in the days of the Messiah the righteous, who for their entire lives have observed the prescriptions of the Torah, will feast on the meat of Leviathan and Behemoth without worrying whether their slaughter has been kosher or not is perfectly familiar to the rabbinic tradition. What is surprising, however, is one detail that we have not yet mentioned: beneath the crowns, the miniaturist has represented the righteous not with human faces, but with unmistakably animal heads. Here, not only do we recognize the eschatological animals in the three figures on the right-the eagle's fierce beak, the red head of the ox, and the lion's head-but the other two righteous ones in the image also display the grotesque features of an ass and the profile of a leopard. And in turn the two musicians have animal heads as well-in particular the more visible one on the right, who plays a kind of fiddle and shows an inspired monkey's face.

Why are the representatives of concluded humanity depicted with animal heads? Scholars who have addressed the question have not yet found a convincing explanation. According to Zofia Ameisenowa, who has dedicated a broad investigation to the subject, in which she attempts to apply the methods of the Warburgian school to Jewish materials, the images of the righteous with animal features are to be traced back to Gnostic-astrological representations of the theriomorphous decans, by way of the Gnostic doctrine in which the bodies of the righteous (or, better, the spiritual), ascending through the heavens after death, are transformed into stars and identified with the powers that govern each heaven.

According to the rabbinic tradition, however, the righteous in question are not dead at all; they are, on the contrary, the representatives of the remnant {resto; also "rest," "remainder"} of Israel, that is, of the righteous who are still alive at the moment of the Messiah's coming. As we read in the Apocalypse of Baruch 29:4, "And Behemoth will appear from its land, and the Leviathan will rise from the sea: the two monsters which I formed on the fifth day of creation and which I have kept until that time shall be nourishment for all who are left." Furthermore, the reason for the theriocephalous representation of the Gnostic archons and astrological decans is anything but settled for scholars, and it itself requires an explanation. In Manichean texts, each of the archons corresponds both to one part of the animal kingdom (bipeds, quadrupeds, birds, fish, reptiles) and, at the same time, to one of the "five natures" of the human body (bones, nerves, veins, flesh, skin), in such a way that the theriomorphous depiction of the archons refers directly back to the shadowy kinship between animal macrocosm and human microcosm. In the Talmud, on the other hand, the passage of the tractate in which the Leviathan is mentioned as the food at the messianic banquet of the righteous occurs after a series of Aggadoth that seem to allude to a different economy of relations between animal and human. Moreover, the idea that animal nature will also be transfigured in the messianic kingdom is implicit in the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 11:6 (which so pleased Ivan Karamazov), where we read that "the wolf shall live with the sheep, / and the leopard lie down with the kid; / the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, / and a little child shall lead them."

It is not impossible, therefore, that in attributing an animal head to the remnant of Israel, the artist of the manuscript in the Ambrosian intended to suggest that on the last day, the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature.

Chapter Two

Georges Bataille was so struck by the Gnostic effigies of animal-headed archons that he was able to see in the Cabinet des Mdailles of the Bibliothque Nationale that in 1930 he dedicated an article to them in his journal Documents. In Gnostic mythology, the archons are the demonic entities who create and govern the material world, in which the bright and spiritual elements are found mixed and imprisoned in those dark and bodily. The images that Bataille reproduced as evidence of the tendency of Gnostic "base materialism" to confuse human and bestial forms represent, according to his captions, "three archons with duck heads," one "panmorphous Iao," a "god with the legs of a man, the body of a serpent, and the head of a cock," and, finally, an "acephalous god topped with two animal heads." Six years later, the cover of the first issue of the journal Acphale, drawn by Andr Masson, showed a naked, headless human figure as the insignia of the "sacred conspiracy" which Bataille plotted with a small group of friends. Though man's evasion of his head ("Man has escaped from his head, as the condemned man from...