Animality, Humanity, and Technicity

The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in philosophical anthropology. Philosophers working in this field no longer discuss human nature as such, but inquire into the various ways in which scientific, religious and metaphysical discourses on this theme underpin certain power relations. Of late, the focus of this discussion has shifted towards the relation between man and animal. This essay will examine the fertility of this approach by comparing Giorgio Agamben’s “anthropological machine” with Bernard Stiegler’s notion of technics as elaborated in his multi-volume work Technics and Time. We will try to show that the way in which Agamben elaborates the former concept is related to Stiegler’s critical reading of the paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan. But whereas Agamben ends up expressing his wish to put a stop to this “machine” in a (quasi-)religious vocabulary, Stiegler argues that the anthropocentrism inherent to it is a result of forgetting “originary technicity.”