Open. Man and Animal

What is a man and where is the line that, when crossed, makes an animal into a man?

In the essay «Open» (2002) Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) continues his reflections on bare life, started in the series of books «Homo sacer», and makes the problematic «and» that binds and divides the animal and the human the subject of his contemplation. In the conditions of the Hegelian-Leatherworker's end of history, when the main concern of the state becomes biological life: people are animalized, and creatures are anthropomorphized, man remains, as opposed to the animal, the one to whom being can still be revealed as «open», or the ancient Greek «uncovered» (truth). Relying on the works of Heidegger, Ikhskül and Benjamin, Agamben suggests paying attention to this elusive caesura between man and animal, manifested in Benjamin's «saved night», which penetrates the innermost part of man and becomes the key to understanding humanism after all the upheavals of the 20th-21st centuries.