Man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human

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 other species – any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic name Homo, onlt 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 doesnot 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.

An analysis of the Introitus that opens the Systema leaves no doubts about the sense Linnaeus attributed to his maxim: 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.

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Homo is a constitutively 'anthropomorphous' animal (that is, 'resembling man', according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human.

In mediaeval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simia dei (ape of God). In Linnaeus'soptical machine, whoever refuses to recogninze himself in the ape, becomes one.

Giorgio Agamben, 'Taxonomies' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016), pp. 82-83