Agambenâs Curio Cabinet, Animality, and the Zone of Indeterminacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As I have argued elsewhere, Agamben's thought remains mired in a transcendental way of thinking that falls under the Hegelian critique. In this essay, through a hermeneutical method that can be aptly characterized by the "curio cabinet” Agamben had earlier thematized in The Man Without Content, I intend to indicate where this occurs specifically with respect to his understanding of animality in The Open: Man and Animal, an understanding bound up with his well-known concept of "bare life.” Doing so will bring Agamben into contact with Hegel precisely at that point where they both meet from within the innermost thought of each: the zone of indeterminacy. But whereas, according to Hegel's argument, indeterminacy in the political sphere is an appropriate point of departure for deriving the structures of freedom, such indeterminacy cannot function in a similar manner for understanding the meaning of animality. By following a transcendental logic that always returns us to a humanity/animality indeterminacy, Agamben effectively hinders any further understanding of animality as well as of the mechanistic character of the "anthropological machine” he presupposes in the same gesture, a machine whose operation he wishes to halt but cannot. I will then suggest where a possible alternative better suited to satisfying Agamben's own goals might lie.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".