What will be the face of the post-historical man? At the end of history, will we rediscover the animal, as presented by the last dialecticians and ancient messianism? Will anthropomorphic animality and bestial humanity constitute our mobile post-historical horizon?

Giorgio Agamben, engaging with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and the philosophical reflections of Martin Heidegger, and starting from the philosophies of the conjunction of man-animal, explores the "practical and political mystery" of the disjunction of the human from the animal.

For the Italian philosopher, "the decisive political conflict, which underlies every other conflict, is, in our culture, that between animality and humanity" and therefore "to work on these divisions, to wonder how – in man – man was separated from the non-human and the animal from the human, is a matter more urgent and pressing than positioning ourselves regarding the great issues, the so-called human values, and what we call human rights".

Thus, he delves into the concept of life from a different perspective and examines the critical threshold that produces the human, the anthropological machine that decides and reassembles every time the conflict between man and animal.