What is a human being, and where lies the boundary that, once crossed, transforms an animal into a human? In the essay *The Open* (2002), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) continues the reflections on "bare life" begun in his *Homo Sacer* series, focusing his inquiry on the problematic "and" that both connects and separates the animal and the human. Amidst the Hegelian-Kojèvian "end of history"—where the state’s primary concern shifts to biological life, and humans are "animalized" while creatures are "anthropomorphized"—the human being remains the one to whom, unlike the animal, Being can be revealed as "the Open," or the ancient Greek *aletheia* ("unconcealment" or truth). Drawing on the works of Heidegger, von Uexküll, and Benjamin, Agamben directs our attention to this elusive caesura between the human and the animal—manifest in Benjamin’s "rescued night"—which permeates the human interior and serves as a key to understanding humanism in the wake of the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries.