I add one more inhuman to Agamben’s list: Alfred Jarry author of Ubu Roi (1.18), who like Baudelaire was also a dandy of the provocateur type. In the words of his high-school friend C.G. Gens D’armes:

… When he opened the valve of his wit, he seemed to follow after the stream of his words without having any control over them. It was no longer a person speaking but a machine driven by some demon. His jerky voice, metallic and nasal, his abrupt puppet-like gestures, his fixed expression, his torrential and incoherent flow of language, his grotesque or brilliant images, this synchronism, which today we should compare to the movies or the phonograph -- all this astonished me, amused me, irritated me, and ended up upsetting me.¹

Jarry/automaton embodies the lack of intentionality and individuality founded by Beau Brummell and turns it into art in the traditional sense of the word. The artist as a machine anticipates dadaism and surrealism as well as late nineteenth century depth psychology. And not only this, understood as a dandy, the coldness and mechanical behavior of Jarry make him the direct predecessor of Andy Warhol, who sealed the fate of art as a commodity through his representations of, well, commodities.

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1. C. G. Gens d’Armes recalling a schoolyard initiation rite in which Jarry had to improvise a speech on a random topic. Quoted in Ubú Rey 18. ↩︎