It will be seen how this fundamental attunement,11 and everything bound up with it, is to be set off over against what we claimed as the essence of animality, over against captivation. This contrast will become all the more decisive for us insofar as captivation, as precisely the essence of animality, apparently finds itself in the closest proximity to what we identified as a characteristic element of profound boredom and described as the enchantment-enchainment [Gebanntheit] of Dasein within beings in their totality. Certainly it will be seen that this closest proximity of both essential constitutions is merely deceptive, and that an abyss lies between them which cannot be bridged by any mediation whatsoever. Yet in that case the total divergence of these two theses will suddenly become very clear to us, and thereby the essence of world.12
Captivation appears here as a sort of fundamental Stimmung in which the animal does not open itself, as does Dasein, in a world, yet is nevertheless ecstatically drawn outside of itself in an exposure which disrupts it in its every fiber. And the understanding of the human world is possible only through the experience of the “closest proximity”—even if deceptive—to this exposure without disconcealment. Perhaps it is not the case that being and the human world have been presupposed in order then to reach the animal by means of subtraction—that is, by a “destructive observation”; perhaps the contrary is also, and even more, true, that is, that the openness of the human world (insofar as it is also and primarily an openness to the essential conflict between disconcealment and concealment) can be achieved only by means of an operation enacted upon the not-open of the animal world. And the place of this operation—in which human openness in a world and animal openness toward its disinhibitor seem for a moment to meet—is boredom.
11. Agamben here translates Heidegger’s Stimmung as stato d’animo or “state of mind.” Stimmung—which is related to Stimme (“voice”) and stimmen (“to tune [an instrument],” “to be in tune,” “to accord”)—also carries the meanings of “(musical) pitch,” “(musical) key,” “disposition,” “feeling.” Macquarrie and Robinson translate it as “mood.” I have retained McNeill and Walker’s “attunement.” Agamben also occasionally refers to it as an “emotional tonality.”
12. Ibid., 282; original, 409.