the divine machine

We live our lives surrounded by animals, we eat them, keep them as pets, they terrify, fascinate, and amuse us. We are very close to animals, biologically speaking we are animals, yet they are nevertheless inaccessible to us, aliens in our human universe. Thus the otherness that we sense in animals is contrasted with a strange feeling of closeness; for, inasmuch as we define and are defined by, master and yet are inexorably bound up in the animal kingdom, we are caught in a dichotomous, irresolvable dialectic with it. This dialectic, what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine,” is essential to our self-definition as human beings, and thus it provides the basis upon which meaning is constructed and the human universe founded. It is this fundamental connectedness to something so indefinable, so utterly without meaning to us, that adds instability, inexplicability and mystery to our world. “seeing oneself seen naked under a gaze that is vacant to the extent of being bottomless, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and im-passive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret. Wholly other, like the (every) other that is (every bit) other found in such intolerable proximity that I do not as yet feel I am justified or qualified to call it my fellow, even less my brother.” (Derrida, p.381) Animals, plants, nature as a whole, appear to us as an abyss, a secret to which we have given name, system, and science, yet whose fundamental nature we cannot understand. Thus man, the giver of names, is an isolated creature, and it is in this isolation that we find the freedom to create, to generate meaning. Through this freedom we build our world, an intelligible, definable, systematic world, out of the irregularities of nature. Human beings obey order, we live by codes, and we are comfortable with ourselves only inasmuch as we belong to these codes. Thus one can imagine that the experience of mankind if we were stripped of all our creations, our religions, societies, sciences and beliefs, would be similar to that of Derrida standing naked in front of his cat. Forced to face the animal universe without his self-defining shell of humanity, man feels ashamed and afraid. In facing the vast, immutable presence of the natural world, inaccessible and yet vital to us, we experience our own weakness (and our own pride in having masked this weakness in the proliferating richness of our creation, which, however miraculous, is nevertheless, when broken down into its constituent parts, nothing but a bizarre permutation of nature) as shame. The animal world, seeing humanity stripped down, seems to reproach the feebleness of our attempts to define it, and the names we give to it seem only to reflect back to us our despair in the inadequacy of our efforts. Nature as God, the divine, immutable, incomprehensible presence, reproaches us for only being like God, unable to cross the divide, to shut down the machine with one, final, all-encapsulating metaphor, a perfect word, the perfect system. What Agamben says about the end of history takes on a different nature in light of this idea. If humanity could complete itself, if we could shut down the machine, end the dialectic by removing the barrier between man and animal, if we could live in a tautology governed by a perfect system, a complete mechanization of man, of animal, of nature, if we could remove the abyss, then surely we would have achieved redemption from our own weakness, our shame and confusion. We would become like people living after the apocalypse, man-animals, we would be naked and unashamed because we would have no need to cloak ourselves in meanings, no need of self definition outside of nature. But this then raises the question, if we ended history by the sheer force of our technology, which in its perfection takes away all necessity, all struggle, all interaction with the other that is nature, then what would we be? Meaningless, divine, divinely meaningless, or just bored?