"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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