The open

Revised edition with new cover of one of Giorgio Agamben's main books

The book begins with ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts and continues on to 20th-century thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, and Alexandre Kojève, examining how the distinction between man and animal was constructed by the logical assumptions of Western thought. Furthermore, it investigates the profound implications that the distinction between man and animal had on seemingly disparate disciplines such as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics.

Agamben's writing in this work is characterized not only by the conciseness of its theoretical formulations, but also by the great economy of its use of words. This condenses its stylistic beauty, on the one hand, and its theoretical complexity, on the other.

In The Open , there are no out-of-place statements, only the intention to formulate in a concise manner, and without any excess, what needs to be said to sustain the order of the discourse in a cutting and rigorous way.