God, man, animal
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 18, 2024
When Nietzsche, almost one hundred and fifty years ago, formulated his diagnosis on the death of God, he thought that this unprecedented event would radically change the existence of men on earth. “Where are we moving now? — he wrote — Aren’t we rushing into a continuous fall? [...] Is there any up or down left? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing?”. And Kirillov, the character in Demons, whose words Nietzsche had carefully meditated upon, thought of the death of God with the same heartfelt pathos and had drawn as a necessary consequence from it the emancipation of a will with no more limits and, altogether, the non-sense and suicide: “If there is no God, then I am God... If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will... I am bound to shoot myself, because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself”.
It is a fact that one should not tire of reflecting upon that a century and a half later this pathos now seems to have completely disappeared. Men placidly survived the death of God and continue to live without fuss, so to say, as if nothing had happened. As if nothing — exactly — had happened. Nihilism, which European intellectuals at first greeted as the most disquieting of the guests, has become a tepid and indifferent daily condition, with which, contrarily to what Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Heidegger thought, it is possible to peacefully live with, continuing to search for money and work, to get married and divorced, to travel and go on holiday. Now man wanders thoughtlessly into a no one’s land, beyond not only the divine and the human, but also (without offending those who cynically theorise a return of men to the nature from which they come) the animal.
Certainly everyone will agree that all this makes no sense, that without the divine we no longer know how to think of the human and the animal, but this simply means that everything and nothing are now possible. Nothing: that is, that at the limit, there is no longer the world, but the language remains (this is, if one carefully thinks about that, the only meaning of the term “nothing” — that language destroys, as it is doing, the world, believing it can survive it). Everything: perhaps also — and this is decisive for us — the appearance of a new figura — new, that is, archaic and, at the same time, very close, so close that we are not able to see it. Whose? And of what? Of the divine, the human, the animal?
We always thought of the living being as within this triad, both prestigious and uncertain, always playing them off against each other or with each other. Hasn’t the time perhaps come to remember when the living being was not yet a god, nor a man, nor an animal, but simply a soul, i.e., a life?
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 18, 2024
When Nietzsche, almost one hundred and fifty years ago, formulated his diagnosis on the death of God, he thought that this unprecedented event would radically change the existence of men on earth. “Where are we moving now? — he wrote — Aren’t we rushing into a continuous fall? [...] Is there any up or down left? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing?”. And Kirillov, the character in Demons, whose words Nietzsche had carefully meditated upon, thought of the death of God with the same heartfelt pathos and had drawn as a necessary consequence from it the emancipation of a will with no more limits and, altogether, the non-sense and suicide: “If there is no God, then I am God... If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will... I am bound to shoot myself, because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself”.
It is a fact that one should not tire of reflecting upon that a century and a half later this pathos now seems to have completely disappeared. Men placidly survived the death of God and continue to live without fuss, so to say, as if nothing had happened. As if nothing — exactly — had happened. Nihilism, which European intellectuals at first greeted as the most disquieting of the guests, has become a tepid and indifferent daily condition, with which, contrarily to what Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Heidegger thought, it is possible to peacefully live with, continuing to search for money and work, to get married and divorced, to travel and go on holiday. Now man wanders thoughtlessly into a no one’s land, beyond not only the divine and the human, but also (without offending those who cynically theorise a return of men to the nature from which they come) the animal.
Certainly everyone will agree that all this makes no sense, that without the divine we no longer know how to think of the human and the animal, but this simply means that everything and nothing are now possible. Nothing: that is, that at the limit, there is no longer the world, but the language remains (this is, if one carefully thinks about that, the only meaning of the term “nothing” — that language destroys, as it is doing, the world, believing it can survive it). Everything: perhaps also — and this is decisive for us — the appearance of a new figura — new, that is, archaic and, at the same time, very close, so close that we are not able to see it. Whose? And of what? Of the divine, the human, the animal?
We always thought of the living being as within this triad, both prestigious and uncertain, always playing them off against each other or with each other. Hasn’t the time perhaps come to remember when the living being was not yet a god, nor a man, nor an animal, but simply a soul, i.e., a life?
(English translation by I, Robot)
Odilon Redon, I am still the great Isis! Nobody has ever yet lifted my veil! My fruit is the Sun!, 1896. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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