THE FICTION OF THE HUMAN BEING

The best illustration of the necessary illusion of sovereignty that permeates our spheres of political interaction can be made through recourse to the establishment of the human subject in relation to its own animality. This is a point that Agamben returns to again and again in order to demonstrate how sovereign power operates. In a prominent example, he enters a discussion in The Use of Bodies regarding the border between animality and humanity through an examination of Heidegger's thoughts on ‘the open’, or the space that is taken up as the centre of anthropogenetic activity (UB 183–6/OHS 1192–5). Here, the open, as the rightful site of our poverty of being, helps humanity to rethink possibility as a fundamental ontological category (UB 188/OHS 1197). Yet, contrary to Heidegger, who tries to envision the human being as the one who responds to the call of Being from within the ambiguity of the thrownness of Dasein, Agamben suggests rather that:

We can note in this context that Agamben's solution to the Heideggerian problem of the ‘anthropogenetic event’ is that we must not add anything to our animality (e.g. the typical definition of the human as above and beyond the animal, as sovereign over one's own animality, or as something like a ‘super-animal’ then). Humanity must not attempt to create any new form at all – the very thing the apparatuses in our world do through the presupposition and division of being – in order to access our ‘emancipation from the metaphysical definition of the human being’ (UB 183/OHS 1192).