Das Offene

In this dense essay, built up from individual reflections, Giorgio Agamben continues his questioning of the concept of life, as it most recently took place in Homo sacer and Was von Auschwitz bleibt: In dialogue with Georges Bataille, Carl von Linné, Ernst Haeckel, Jakob von Uexküll, and above all Martin Heidegger, among others, Agamben locates the boundary between animal and human in man himself. Only when man suspends his animality does the world open up to him. The relationship of man to animality and of mankind to the animal thus becomes the "decisive political conflict" in our cultural sphere.