animality
text by JOHN JEFFERSON SELVE
As I read Jean-Christophe Bailly’s sumptuous book Le Versant Animal, I have before me the sad and famous photograph of one of Zimbabwe’s last white rhinoceroses. As if suffering a sudden twinge of conscience, man has now set a round-the-clock guard on the animal, lest it be killed for its horn. At stake is life’s immediacy to itself. At stake, too, is a position toward the world and its perception, a position that is being artfully obscured. Today, man is poor in world, just as Heidegger once said “the animal is poor in world.” The (Westernized) human being is no longer capable of hearing or seeing. The tragedy here is playing out as a lacuna of thought. There is a whole literature devoted to raising the alarm, but in the current emergency it is laughable, a mere semaphore.
Facts and figures in hand,…