"On the basis of the work of Jakob von Uexküll and other zoologists, extremely perceptive pages are dedicated to the description and analysis of the relationship of the animal with its environment (Umwelt). The animal is poor in world (weltarm), because it remains a prisoner of the immediate relationship with a series of elements (Heidegger calls “disinhibitors” what Uexküll defined as “bearers of significance”) that their receptive organs have selected in the environment. The relationship with these disinhibitors is so strict and totalizing that the animal is literally “stunned” and “captured” in them. As a representative example of this stunning, Heidegger refers to the experiment in which a bee is placed in a laboratory in front of a glass full of honey. If, after it has begun to suck, one removes the bee’s abdomen, it tranquilly continues to suck, while one sees honey flowing out where the abdomen has been cut off. The bee is so absorbed in its disinhibitor that it can never place itself before it to perceive it as something that exists objectively in and for itself. Certainly, with respect to the rock, which is absolutely deprived of world, the animal is in some way open to its disinhibitors, and yet can never see them as such. “The animal,” writes Heidegger, “can never apprehend something as something” (p. 360/248). For this reason the animal remains enclosed in the circle of its environment and can never open itself into a world.
The philosophical problem of the course is that of the boundary—that is to say, of the extreme separation and vertiginous proximity—between the animal and the human. In what way is something like a world opened for the human being? The passage from the environment to the world is not, in reality, simply the passage from a closure to an opening. The animal in fact not only does not see the open, beings in their unveiled being, but nor does it perceive its own nonopenness, its own being captured and stunned in its own disinhibitors. The skylark that soars in the air “does not see the open,” but neither is it in a position to relate to its own closure. “The animal,” writes Heidegger, “is excluded from the essential domain of the conflict between unconcealedness and concealedness” (pp. 237–238/159–160). The openness of the world begins in the human being precisely from the perception of a non-openness.
In the course, the metaphysical operator in which the passage from the animal’s poverty in world to the human world is brought about is in fact “profound boredom” (tiefe Langeweile), in which precisely the closure of the animal environment is experienced as such. In stunning, the animal was in an immediate relation with its disinhibitor, exposed and unconscious in it in such a way that it could never be revealed as such. That of which the animal is incapable is precisely suspending and deactivating its relation with the circle of its specific disinhibitors. The experience of profound boredom, which Heidegger describes in detail, is a sort of parodic taking to extremes of the animal stunning. In boredom—just like the animal in its disinhibitor—we are “absorbed” and “stunned” in things; but these latter, in contrast with what happens in the animal, refuse themselves to us to the same extent in which we are enclosed in them. “Dasein thus finds itself delivered over to beings’ telling refusal of themselves as a whole” (p. 210/139). In a state of profound boredom, the human being is consigned to something that refuses itself, exactly as the animal, in its stunning, is exposed in a non-revelation. But, differently from the animal, the human being, while remaining in boredom, suspends the immediate relationship with the environment: the human being is an animal that becomes bored and thus perceives for the first time as such—that is, as a being—the disinhibitor that refuses itself to it.
This means, therefore, that the world does not open up onto a new or ulterior space, fuller and more luminous, conquered beyond the limits of the animal environment and without relation with it. On the contrary, it has been opened only through a suspension and deactivation of the animal relationship with the disinhibitor. The open and the free space of being do not name something radically other with respect to the non-open of the animal: they are only a grasping of a dis-unveiling, the suspension and the capture of the skylark-notseeing- the-open. The openness that is in question in the world is essentially the openness to a closure, and the one who looks into the open sees only a closing up, sees only a non-seeing.
For this reason—that is to say, insofar as the world has been opened only through the interruption and nullification of the relationship of the living being with its disinhibitor—being is from the very beginning traversed by the nothing, and the world is constitutively marked by negativity and disorientation.
One can comprehend what landscape is only if one understands that it represents, with respect to the animal environment and the human world, an ulterior stage. When we look at a landscape, we certainly see the open and contemplate the world, with all the elements that make it up (the ancient sources list among these the woods, the hills, the lakes, the villas, the headlands, springs, streams, canals, flocks and shepherds, people on foot or in a boat, those hunting or harvesting . . . ); but these things, which are already no longer parts of an animal environment, are now, so to speak, deactivated one by one on the level of being and perceived as a whole in a new dimension. We see them as perfectly and clearly as ever, and yet we already do not see them, lost—happily, immemorially lost—in the landscape. Being, en état de paysage, is suspended and rendered inoperative, and the world, having become perfectly inappropriable, goes, so to speak, beyond being and nothing. No longer animal nor human, to the one who contemplates the landscape is only landscape. That person no longer seeks to comprehend, only looks. If the world is the inoperativity of the animal environment, landscape is, so to speak, inoperativity of inoperativity, deactivated being. Neither animal disinhibitors nor beings, the elements that form the landscape are ontologically neutral. And negativity, which inhered in the world in the form of the nothing and non-openness— because it comes from the animal closure, of which it was only a suspension—is now dismissed.
Insofar as it has in this sense gone beyond being, landscape is the outstanding form of use. In it, use-of-oneself and use of the world correspond without remainder. Justice, as a state of the world as inappropriable, is here the decisive experience. Landscape is a dwelling in the inappropriable as form-of-life, as justice. For this reason, if in the world the human being was necessarily thrown and disoriented, in landscape he is finally at home. Pays! paese! (“country,” from pagus, “village”) is according to the etymologists originally the greeting that is exchanged by those who recognize each other as being from the same village. Landscape is the house of Being."
- Girogio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy, The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism
**Agamben states in one of his lectures to
the European Graduate School that to think about the experience of animals and
their difference with Man, is merely a though experiment to better understand Man.
“We really know nothing about animals of course.”
