"An analysis of the Intoitus that opens the Systema leaves no doubts about the sense Linnaeus attributed to his maxim [see yesterday's post: 'know thyself' was attributed to Homo]: man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself. Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica, but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human."

-- Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, p 25-26

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"In truth, Linnaeus's genius consists not so much in the resoluteness with which he places man among the primates as in the irony with which he does not record---as he does with the other species---any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic name Homo, only the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum {know yourself}. Even in the tenth edition, when the complete denomination becomes Homo sapiens, all evidence suggests that the new epithet does not represent a description, but that it is only a simplification of that adage, which, moreover, maintains its position next to the term Homo. It is worth reflecting on this taxonomic anomaly, which assigns not a given, but rather an imperative as a specific difference."

-- Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, p 25

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"[...] Freud suggest that the relation to our own death is not representable, and that each time we try to represent our own death to ourselves, we continue to be there as spectators, observers, voyeurs, at a distance and subject to imagery, to imagination. We are alive enough to see ourselves and imagine ourselves dead, and therefore, I would add, buried or swallowed up or cremated alive. This is another way of saying, against Heidegger, that we never have any access to our own death as such, that we are incapable of it. Our death is impossible. Whence Freud concludes, and I quote: "Hence the psycho-analytic school could venture the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.""

-- Derrida, "The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II", Sixth Session, p 157

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