THE OPEN

Stanford University Press

Contents

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 prison," reads the programmatic text) does not necessarily entail a return to animality, the illustrations of issue 3-4 of the journal, in which the same naked figure from the first issue now bears a majestic bull's head, attest to an aporia which accompanies Bataille's entire project.

Indeed, one of the central issues of Kojve's lectures on Hegel, which Bataille attended at the cole des Hautes tudes, was the problem of the end of history and the figure that man and nature would assume in the posthistorical world, when the patient process of work and negation, by means of which the animal of the species Homo sapiens had become human, reached completion. In one of his characteristic gestures, Kojve dedicates to this problem only a footnote to the 1938-39 course.

The disappearance of Man at the end of History is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so called-that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or, in general, the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History-that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so called or of the free and historical Individual-means quite simply the cessation of Action in the strong sense of the term. Practically, this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man no longer changes himself essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his knowledge of the World and of himself. But all the rest can be preserved indefinitely; art, love, play, etc., etc.; in short, everything that makes Man happy.

The disagreement between Bataille and Kojve concerns just that "rest" {resto} that survives the death of man, who has become animal again at the end of history. What the pupil-who was, in fact, five years older than the teacher-could not accept at any cost was that "art, love, play," as well as laughter, ecstasy, luxury (which, wrapped in an aura of exceptionality, were at the center of Acphale's concerns, as well as those of the Collge de Sociologie two years later), ceased to be superhuman, negative, and sacred, in order simply to be given back to animal praxis. For the small group of forty-year-old initiates-who were not afraid to challenge the ridiculous by practicing "joy in the face of death" in the woods on the outskirts of Paris, nor later, in full European crisis, to play at being "sorcerer's apprentices" preaching the European peoples' return to the "old house of myth"-the acephalous being glimpsed for an instant in their privileged experiences might have been neither human nor divine, but in no case could it be animal.

Of course, at issue here was also the interpretation of Hegel, a terrain in which Kojve's authority was particularly threatening. If history is nothing but the patient dialectical work of negation, and man both the subject and the stakes in this negating action, then the completion of history necessarily entails the end of man, and the face of the wise man who, on the threshold of time, contemplates this end with satisfaction necessarily fades, as in the miniature in the Ambrosian, into an animal snout.

For this reason, in a letter to Kojve on December 6, 1937, Bataille has to wager on the idea of a "negativity with no use" {negativit senza impiego; also "unemployed negativity"}, that is, of a negativity that somehow survives the end of history and for which he can provide no proof other than his own life, "the open wound that is my life."

I grant (as a likely supposition) that from now on history is concluded (except for the epilogue). However, I picture things differently.... If action ("doing") is-as Hegel says-negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has "nothing more to do" disappears or remains in a state of "negativity with no use": personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this "negativity with no use" (I would not be able to define myself more precisely). I recognize that Hegel has foreseen such a possibility; at any rate he didn't situate it at the end of the process he described. I imagine that my life-or better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life-constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel's closed system.

The end of history involves, then, an "epilogue" in which human negativity is preserved as a "remnant" in the form of eroticism, laughter, joy in the face of death. In the uncertain light of this epilogue, the wise man, sovereign and self-conscious, sees not animal heads passing again before his eyes, but rather the acephalous figures of the hommes farouchement religieux, "lovers," or "sorcerer's apprentices." The epilogue, however, would prove to be fragile. In 1939, with the war by now inevitable, a declaration by the Collge de Sociologie betrays its impotence, denouncing the passivity and absence of reaction in the face of war as a form of massive "devirilization," in which men are transformed into a sort of "conscious sheep resigned to the slaughterhouse." Though in a sense different from the one Kojve had in mind, men had now truly become animals again.

Chapter Three

No animal can be a snob. -Alexandre Kojve

In 1968, on the occasion of the second edition of the Introduction, by which time his disciple-rival had been dead six years, Kojve returns to the problem of man's becoming animal. And once again, he does so in the form of a footnote added to the footnote in the first edition (if the text of the Introduction is essentially composed from the notes collected by Queneau, then the footnotes are the only part of the text surely from Kojve's hand). That first note, he observes, was ambiguous, because if we accept that at the end of history man "properly so called" must disappear, then we cannot coherently expect that "all the rest" (art, love, play) can remain indefinitely.

If Man becomes an animal again, his arts, his loves, and his play must also become purely "natural" again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play as young animals play, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot then say that all this "makes Man happy." One would have to say that post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens (which will live amidst abundance and complete security) will be content as a result of their artistic, erotic, and playful behavior, inasmuch as, by definition, they will be contented with it.

The definitive annihilation of man in the proper sense, however, must also entail the disappearance of human language, and its substitution by mimetic or sonic signals comparable to the language of bees. But in that case, Kojve argues, not only would philosophy-that is, the love of wisdom-disappear, but so would the very possibility of any wisdom as such.

At this point the note articulates a series of theses on the end of history and on the present state of the world, in which it is impossible to distinguish between absolute seriousness and an equally absolute irony. We thus learn that in the years immediately following the writing of the first note (1946), the author understood that the "Hegelo-Marxist end of history" was not a future event but something already completed. After the battle of Jena, the vanguard of humanity virtually reached the end of man's historical evolution. Everything that followed-including two world wars, Nazism, and the sovietization of Russia-represented nothing but a process of accelerated alignment of the rest of the world with the position of the most advanced European countries. Yet now, repeated trips to the United States and Russia, taken between 1948 and 1958 (by which time Kojve had become a high functionary in the French government), convinced him that, on the road toward reaching the posthistorical condition, "the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to become richer," while the United States has already reached the "final stage of Marxist 'communism.'" This then led him to the conclusion that

the "American way of life" was the type of life proper to the post-historical period, the current presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the future "eternal present" of all humanity. Thus, man's return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present.

In 1959, however, a trip to Japan brought about a further shift in perspective. In Japan, Kojve was able to see with his own eyes a society which, though living in a condition of posthistory, had nevertheless not ceased to be "human."

"Post-historical" Japanese civilization undertook ways diametrically opposed to the "American way." No doubt, there were no longer in Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the "European" or "historical" sense of these words. But Snobbery in its pure state created disciplines negating the "natural" or "animal" given which in effectiveness far surpassed those that arose, in Japan or elsewhere, from "historical" Action-that is, from warlike and revolutionary Struggles or from forced Work. To be sure, the peaks (equalled nowhere else) of specifically Japanese snobbery-the Noh theatre, the ceremony of tea, and the art of bouquets of flowers-were and still remain the exclusive prerogative of the nobles and the rich. But in spite of persistent economic and social inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values-that is, values completely empty of all "human" content in the "historical" sense. Thus, in the extreme, every Japanese is in principle capable of committing, from pure snobbery, a perfectly "gratuitous" suicide (the classical sword of the samurai can be replaced with an airplane or a torpedo), which has nothing to do with the risk of life in a Struggle waged for the sake of "historical" values that have social or political content. This seems to allow one to believe that the recently begun interaction between Japan and the Western World will finally lead not to a rebarbarization of the Japanese but to a "Japanization" of the Westerners (including the Russians).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE OPENby Giorgio Agamben Copyright © 2002 by Bollati Boringhieri. Excerpted by permission.
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