The Open: Man and Animal
| Author | Giorgio Agamben (translated by Kevin Attell) |
|---|---|
| Published | 2002 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Agamben’s short book on how Western thought separates the human from the animal, which he calls the “anthropological machine”.
Published in Italian as L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale (Bollati Boringhieri, 2002) and in English by Stanford University Press (2004) in Kevin Attell’s translation. It is built from twenty short numbered sections with titles such as “Theriomorphous”, “Anthropological Machine”, “Umwelt”, “Tick” and “Poverty in World”.
Agamben reads medieval theology, Linnaeus’s taxonomy, Jakob von Uexküll’s studies of animal environments and Heidegger’s lectures on animals to argue that the line between human and animal is drawn inside the human, by a process he names the anthropological machine. The book is often read alongside his Homo Sacer series.
What it is: an in-print work of continental philosophy from a major university press. This is a copy of the published English edition.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
119 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.