The Open. Man and animal

In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines the ways in which, throughout the history of Western culture, man has been distinguished from animal, and in his inquiry discovers that the human arises not from the conjunction of a natural, living body and a divine or rational element, but rather through the workings of the "anthropological machine" which produces man by means of a strategic, practico-political separation of humanity from animality.