The Open

The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is comingor has cometo a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has he maintained his privileged place as the master of, or first among, the animals? InThe Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the "human" has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojeve, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics.

Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona. 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).