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.

[...]

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

There is politics because man separates himself from his own bare life

There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 8

The state of exception

Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (The University of Chicago Press, 2005) p. 87

The Western experience of time is split between eternity and continuous linear time . The dividing point through which the two relate is the instant as a discrete, elusive point. Against this conception, which dooms any attempt to master time, there must be opposed one whereby the true site of pleasure, as man's primary dimension, is neither precise, continuous time nor eternity, but history. Contrary to what Hegel stated, is is only as the source and site of happiness that history can have a meaning for man. For history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man's servitude to continuous linear time, but man's liberation from it. [...] Just as the full, discontinuous, finite and complete time of pleasure must be set against the empty, continuous and infinite time of vulgar historicism, so the chronological time of pseudo-history must be opposed by the cairological time of authentic history.

True historical materialism does not pursue an empty mirage of continuous progress along infinte linear time, but is ready at any moment to stop time, because it holds the memory that man's original home is pleasure. It is this time which is experienced in authentic revolutions, which [...] have always been lived as a halting of time and an interruption of chronology. But a revolution from which there springs not a new chronology, but a qualitative alteration of time would have the weightiest consequence and would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration.

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) pp. 114-115

Only process as a whole has meaning, never the precise fleeting now; but since this process is really no more than a simple succesion of now in terms of before and after, and the history of salvation has meanwhile become pure chronology, a semblance of meaning can be saved only by introducing the idea – albeit one lacking any rational foundation – of a continuous, infinite progress.

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) p. 106

But the two times, past and future, how can they be, since the past is no more and the future is not yet? On the other hand, if the present were always present and never flowed away into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. But if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past, how can we say that it is? For it is, only because it will cease to be.

St. Augustine, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (Verso, 2007) p. 104