Read Yourself! The Griffn Condition on the Day before the Last Day

In his introduction to Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679), a skilled scholar of Greek and Latin, unexpectedly rendered a well-known Latin maxim, nosce ipsum (know yourself), as an English imperative: read yourself! The printer used italic font to set off the Latin and its English translation typographically. In other words, this imperative, “to read,”mattered optically.1 Some 350 years later, in his critical study of biopolitical readingmachines,TheOpen:Man and Animal (2004), Giorgio Agamben evocatively returned to this imperative of Hobbes and implicated it with the optical machines of the time.2 According to Agamben, such optical machines induced Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), a generation after Leviathan, to view the species Homo as merely a diffraction of an ape and to relegate Homo to the order of the primate (to, 27). Click, it’s an ape; click, it’s a human. As a medieval historian unfamiliar with the kinds of early modern optical machines to which Agamben alludes, I sought out an