1

This article was originally published in Phnomenologische Forschungen 2004, Hrsg. von Ernst Wolfgang Orth und Karl-Heinz Lembeck c Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg. Susanna Lindberg:

Heideggers animal

Why does the question of the animal pursue so many readers of Heidegger1 ? In the following, I would like to show how the living beings swift apparition at the margins of Heideggers thinking also gives a glimpse of his understanding of two other major phenomenal registers that he hardly treats otherwise, namely the sensibility and the fleshly condition of living with. One need not interpret Heideggers approach of the question of the animal as being primarily motivated by a desire to define man by demarcating him against his postulated animal origins. On the contrary, such an approach is typical of a great metaphysical tradition that Heidegger precisely claims to leave behind. Heidegger defines the Dasein by a strong contradistinction from the metaphysical rational animal, and states that the Dasein seizes the human existence in an entirely different way, without the support of any kind of a concept of animal. Thats why I rather examine the possibility that the question of the animal opens out to the sphere of what we could regard as Heideggers philosophy of nature. Of course, this proposition requires immediately several precisions. First of all, such an expression doesnt come form Heidegger himself. He would never construct a philosophy, because
1 Some pathmarks: Giorgio Agamben: Louvert. De lhomme et de lanimal, Payot & Rivages, Paris, 2002; Ingrid Auriol: Situation de lanimal et statut de lanimalit. Heidegger Studies vol 17, 2001; Renaud Barbaras: Pulsion et perception, in Alter n 9 / 2001; Christian Ciocan: La vie et la corporalit dans tre et temps de Martin Heidegger, parts I-II, in Studia phenomenologica 1 (2001), 1-2 & 3-4; Franoise Dastur: Pour une zoologie privative, ou comment ne pas parler de lanimal, in Alter 3 / 1995; Gilles Deleuze et Flix Guattari: Capitalisme et schizofrnie, part II, Mille plateaux, Minuit, Paris, 1980; Jacques Derrida: De lesprit. Heidegger et la question. Galile, Paris, 1987; Jacques Derrida: Lanimal que donc je suis, in Marie-Louise Mallet (dir.): Lanimal autobiographique, Paris, Galile, 1999; Elisabeth de Fontanay: Le silence des btes. La philosophie lpreuve de lanimalit, Paris, Fayard, 1998; Didier Franck: Ltre et le vivant, in Philosophie (Minuit), n 16, 1987; Michel Haar: Le chant de la terre, LHerne, Paris, 1987; David Farrell Krell: Daimon Life. Heidegger and Life-philosophy, Indiana Univ. Press, Indiana, 1992. Peter Sloterdijk: Rgles pour un parc humain, Mille et une nuits, 2000; Peter Sloterdijk: La domestication de ltre, Mille et une nuits, 2000.

2 his very understanding of the task of thinking excludes all subordinate philosophies attached to regional ontologies. And he would never fix an interpretation of the nature, because for him the word nature stands for an entire vision of Being he fights on all fronts. Thats why its better to speak of a question of the animal instead of a philosophy of nature. Secondly, Heidegger remains, with all proper reserves, a thinker of a human world, and he doesnt give much attention to the non-human nature, whether we call it life, animality, or other. It wouldnt be inexact to say that Heidegger eludes the question of the natural being, and this inattention is essentially connected with certain other important omissions, such as space, body and the other Dasein. These questions hang on the border of Heideggers thinking without penetrating into it. He hardly remarks them but when he does, he does pose singularly significant limit conditions to their understanding, and thats where Heideggers look on, say, the animal, gives to think, gives what ought to be though. And first of all, think the limits of Heideggers enterprise. As several thinkers have already pointed out, Heideggers claim that we only have a privative access to the animal world gives the animal a position that is not only marginal but also critical: it is one of the aporetic critical border phenomena that permit us to circumscribe the Thinking of Being. This being said, let us consider the question of the animal as a deconstruction of what is traditionally called a philosophy of nature. In several respects, the question of the animal is capable of de-centering the most common acceptations of a philosophy of nature. First of all, if one opens out a philosophy of nature starting from an animal being, one takes up a position against the most usual type of a philosophy of nature, which is based on physics. Heidegger regularly fights the modern scientific world view precisely because it is based on physics, which is for its part interpreted in a mathematical frame, which paradoxically turns out to be a subjectivist point of view on the world: the metaphysical subjects world view. Nature is the object of physics, and yet physics reaches nature only at the point of its own extreme negativity. For physics, nature is the limit of the possible experience, the point where something must be given, but the givenness itself cannot be explained by the experience it makes possible (as Heidegger might explain Kants thing in itself). In order to penetrate further into this point, where a gap remains between mathematics and the givenness of Being, Heidegger would then turn towards a certain idea of life, hereby following in a very critical manner an idealist-romantic tradition. The figure of the living being would then open up what I present here as a kind of a philosophy of nature, instead of founding a philosophy of life or an ontology of life. For Heidegger takes position against all interpretations of Being as life, should it be the human existence or the being itself (the first position is largely explained already in Being and Time2 , the second in connection with readings of philosophers such as Hegel or Nietzsche, for whom
2 Heidegger: Sein und Zeit, 10, p. 50. (Max Niemayer, Tbingen, 1984 (1927).)

3 we have no other representation of being but life, which ends by dispersing in pure vapor 3). But what would be the specificity of nature when it is interpreted in a privileged manner as the animal realm? When Nature denotes a singular infinity, the animal realm names a finite plurality of countless different animal species: Heidegger, an assiduous reader of Uexkll, is well aware of this, even though he generally uses the singular word animal. The plurality of the animal realm has nothing to do with the multiplicity of its primary elements (such as the cells or the DNA molecules) and Heidegger refers as little to chemistry or, say, to molecular biology as to physics or mathematics. The essence of nature doesnt reside in what is normally presented as being its smallest constituents or minimal laws, but in organized beings. Being animal, such an organized being is not inanimate (like the stone) nor deprived of senses (like the plant) but something that moves and senses by itself. The animal realm is a finite and plural realm whose inhabitants are not simply seen, but they see and have a sort of a horizon. More precisely, the animal has a kind of an access to its environment (Zugang zu seiner Umwelt). Thus, to a certain extent at least, the animal seems capable of meeting man and, in this sense, the phenomenologist in Heidegger looks at nature where nature looks back at him: at the animals face. Here we reach two essential limits of Heideggers animal, two points where a certain lingering indecision becomes the definition of the animal. What is the animals relation to truth, when it has an opening which is not an opening of a world capable of seizing the things as such? What is the animals place in the political or ethical community, if it lives with us but doesnt co-exist with us4 ? For, in the end, we wont know to what extent the animal sees us and addresses us, and thats why it remains, as Heidegger says, secret5 . These questions require still another reading of Heideggers texts on the animal. The animals way According to Heidegger, a living being principally an animal, incidentally also a plant has its own way of being, which cannot be reduced to the being of things nor to the being of the Dasein: life is neither categorical nor existential6 .

3 [] das Sein wir haben keine andere Vorstellung davon als leben (cit. in Heidegger: Wozu Dichter, p. 275 (257), in Heidegger: Holzwege (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1980 (1950)), also in Heidegger: Aletheia, p. 265, in Heidegger: Vortrge und Aufstze (Gnther Neske, Stuttgart, 1994 (1954)). [Sein als] der letzte rauch einer verdunsteten Realitt (Gtzendmmerung, cit. in Heidegger: Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, p. 27 (Max Niemayer, Tbingen, 1978 (1953))). 4 Heidegger: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 308 (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1992 (1983) (Vorlesung 1929-1930). (Tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995, the original page numbers are indicated in the translation.) 5 Heidegger: Parmenides, p. 238 (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1982 (Vorlesung 1942 / 1943)). 6 Sein und Zeit, 10, p. 50.

4 The character of being thanks to which the living being (zoon) can appear as such is life: fysis or zoe7 . However, this statement rather opens new directions of interrogation than concludes any. Heidegger speaks little of life, and when he does, he generally aims at dismissing it as an insufficient interpretation of being. What is more, the words fysis and zoe are by no means synonymous, but indicate a fundamental tension between an originary interpretation of Being and a later, metaphysical interpretation of Being. On the other hand, when life isnt considered as a global interpretation of Being but in a more restrictive manner as the character of being of the animal, it also remains ambiguous, because it is always attained in a privative manner : indirectly or by analogy. Generally, the animality is what the Dasein must leave in order to be what it is8 . This is, after all, a rather traditional gesture, even if Heidegger points more than usual at the extraordinary difficulty of this separation. So a famous passage of The letter on humanism: Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other they are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. However, it might also seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer namely in an essential distance that, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our eksistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast.9 In only one text, namely The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the living being is at the center of Heideggers interrogation. But even here, his approach remains comparative, and the access to the animal remains practically privative. Heidegger says that the animal is what is between the inanimate thing and man, following the principle the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming10 . In his analysis, he doesnt much enlarge on the animals relationship to the stone, which would be a truly worldless natural being. Instead, he examines largely the animals relationship to the tool which is after all a human artifact belonging to a human world. So, if we attain the animals way of being by a comparison with the tools or mans way of being, we still know the
7 Heidegger: Brief ber den Humanismus, in Heidegger: Wegmarken, p. 320 (154) (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1978 (1967)). (Tr. ed. William McNeill, Pathmarks, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.) 8 Sein und Zeit, p. 50. 9 Vermutlich ist fr uns von allem Seienden, das ist, das Lebe-Wesen am schwersten zu denken, weil es uns einerseits in gewisser Weise am nchsten verwandt und andererseits doch zugleich durch einen Abgrund von unserem ek-sistenten Wesen geschieden ist. Dagegen mchte es scheinen, als sei das Wesen des Gttlichen uns nher als das Befremdende der Lebe-Wesen, nher nmlich in einer Wesensferne, die als Ferne unserem eksistenten Wesen gleichwohl vertrauter ist als die kaum auszudenkende abgrndige leibliche Verwandtschaft mit dem Tier. Brief ber den humanismus, in Wegmarken, p. 323 (157). English translation Frank A. Capuzzi, Letter on Humanism, in Pathmarks, p. 248. 10 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 263.

5 animal mainly by its privation of humanity and hardly at all as such. Now Heidegger persists in thinking that the privative way is the only possible way to the essence of the animality: he might be right and the thinkers discontempt might structure the question of the animal. But in order to decide about this question, we must see how far Heidegger can bring us. So, according to Heidegger, what is the animals ownmost character of being? What constitutes the living character of the living beings: not Being as life but the living beings life? The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics answers: a specific way of having a world without having it11 , or the so-called poorness in world (Weltarmut). The world is not what the living being is but what it has. The living beings being, that is to say its life, is its effort to appropriate what in this sense might belong to it and be its own (eigen). Only it doesnt: the thing the living being seeks to appropriate, its world, is precisely that of which it is poor. The world doesnt belong to the living being but, on the contrary, refuses itself to him and retires out of its reach. In other words, the world is always characterised by a factuality which implies a closedness, a rejection and even an evasion outside of the reach of whoever tries to seize it. Thats why neither the animal nor man simply has the world but both of them miss it, each in a different way. And because they miss it they are constituted by a lack, which pulls them outside of themselves, puts them to movement towards their limits, towards an ex-stase or, as we might still put it, each ones being is a kind of a transcendence12 . Henceforth everything depends on the particular character of this transcendence. In each case, the lack that constitutes their being is not a simple need which could be appeased by a satisfaction (such an appetite is extinguished in its satisfaction, and thats why it cannot determine a character of being). Instead, Heidegger characterises the lack as a poverty, which is a privative relation to whatever could be own in the sense of eigen. Living means: lacking the ownmost thing, in other words, lacking the world. And this remains true even though living also means: being immerged in the world. Living means: being poor of the world being poor of what is yet given so abundanly (the world is given abundantly in the sense that it is all there). Precisely: being-in-the-world means lackingthe-world. The living being is a point of negativity, where a lack of the world reigns in the midst of the world where the world feels itself thanks to the animal: thanks to a fold constituted by a lack of the world. In truth, both the living being and the world are born on the border of this point of negativity, on the strange borderline on which the living being and the world constantly synthetise each other. Of course, this remains very abstract. In order to understand the poverty characteristic of the living being as such, we must follow Heideggers privative logic and
11 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 293, 12 Cf. Vom Wesen des Grundes, in Wegmarken, p. 161 (59).

6 contradistinguish the animals poverty from the human one. For even if the poverty is the animals ownmost distinctive feature, the truest nature of the poverty is accessible only in man, says Heidegger. Only mans existence permits us to see what it really means that the poverty is not a simple lack but a deprivation as a mood of existence, a preeminent kind of having in which we seem not to have13. Heideggers understanding of the human poverty is crystallized in his later readings of Hlderlin, whose words for this affective state are deprivation and distress (Not, Dftigkeit). Here I only need to remind that the article Wozu Dichter? which contains another important analysis of the animal also begins with the hlderlinian motif of distress: und wozu Dichter in dftiger Zeit14 , why the poet in the time of distress? What does Hlderlin call distress and deprivation? According to Heidegger, it is the distress of the worldnight, which is characterised by the default of the divinity. The true poverty is this poverty-of-the-divinity, the depart of the divine which leaves man dispossessed. The poet is the one that articulates this dispossession as such, and so the dispossession is essentially his deprivation of the word, his distress for the lack of the word to articulate the divine name pointing at the sense of being. Such a word, the poets logos, is capable of founding mans ownmost site of existence, his fatherland and, thus, of clearing the opening of the truth15 . And, says Heidegger, such a distress only makes sense because there is an originary generosity16 , an originary giving or, as Heidegger will say later, an Ereignis which gives time, being, and the possibility of saying the sense of Being. No-one will be surprised to learn that this poverty, the poets distress, is inaccessible to the animal. In an absolutely classical manner, Heideggers animal remains excluded form the possibility of the logos and of the truth it makes possible. However, in passing we can note that as far as the instant of deprivation is this instant of the missing word, the poets distress is not entirely foreign to the living beings condition. Indeed, for Hlderlin, the departed divinities are above all Dionysos and Christ, two divinities of life, and more precisely two divinities having transgressed the simple living condition in order to give life a sense. It is in a pre-eminent way their departure that constitutes our time as the time of dispossession of the sense of life, the time of the nudity of the simple life, or what Agamben calls naked life17 . Heidegger, too, permits us to say that as far as we are the
13 Dieses eigentliche Armsein im Sinne der Existenz des Menschen ist zwar auch ein Entbehren, und mu es sein, aber so, da aus dem Entbehren eine eigentmliche Kraft der Durchsichtigkeit und inneren Freiheit fr das Dasein geschpft wird. Armsein im sinne der Armmtigkeit ist nicht eine bloe Gleichgltigkeit gegen den Besitz, sondern gerade jenes ausgezeichnete Haben, als htten wir nicht. (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 288.) 14 Wozu Dichter?, in Holzwege, p. 265 (249). 15 Cf. Der Mensch ist der Hirt des Seins. [] Er gewinnt die wesenhafte Armut des Hirten, dessen Wrde darin beruht, vom Sein selbst in die Wahrnis seiner Wahrheit gerufen zu sein. (Brief ber den Humanismus, p. 338-339 (172-173)). 16 Heidegger: Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung, p. 132-133 (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1996 (1944)). 17 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Seuil, Paris, 1997.

7 inhabitants of the Modern Era, we have forgotten the departure of the living gods, and our condition remains the senseless life and the simple animal being. We would live in a poor, improper world with no opening of truth. Such an analysis, developed not only by Agamben but already by Foucault and in another way by Sloterdijk, is not exactly a critique of the human animality but an effort to understand the naked life as the center of the politics. My aim, however, is to maintain a clearer difference between the human animality (his bestiality or his extreme dispossession) and the animality strictly speaking. I also think this is what Heidegger is aiming at when he criticises Rilke of humanising the animal18 . Heideggers judgement of Rilke is certainly unfair, as has often been pointed out, nevetherless his own idea is perfectly clair: the animal shouldnt be regarded as a human leftover (what remains of the animal rationale when the rationale has been omitted), but it should be met as such, respecting its peculiar secret. For man, the deepest dispossession is always correlative of an originary generosity: a possibility of the word (even if it is reserved), a formation of a world (even if it remains in gestation). For the animal, this is not possible. Precisely, the world never appears to the animal as a possibility (of saying, building, inhabiting, briefly: of appropriating). Its poverty is not correlative of a possible propriation but it is definitely excluded of any relation of possession to the world. The animal only has a limited, inalterable access to its world, that it can touch but not question. Heidegger says: The animal has a specific relationship to a circumscribed domain with respect to its sources of nourishment, its prey, its enemies and its sexual mates. [] But throughout the course of its life the animal also maintains itself in a specific element, whether it is water or air or both, in such a way that the element belonging to it goes unnoticed by the animal [] Thus certain things are accessible to the animal in a way which is not arbitrary and within limits which are not arbitrary either. The animals way of being, which we call life, is not without access to what is around it and about it, to that amongst which it appears as a living being. [] Throughout the course of its life the animal is confined to its environmental world, immured as it were within a fixed sphere that is incapable of further expansion or contraction.19

18 Parmenides, p. 239. 19 Das Tier hat als Tier bestimmte Beziehungen zu je seiner Nahrung und Beute, zu seinen Feinden, zu seinem Geschlechtspartner. [] Das Tier hat nicht nur eine bestimmete Beziehung zu seinem Nahrungs-, Beute-, Feindes- und Geschlechtskreis, sondern es hlt sich zugleich in der Dauer seines Lebens je in einem bestimmten medium auf, sei es im Wasser oder in der Luft oder in beidem, so zwar, da das ihm zugehrige Medium ihm unmerklich ist [] So ist dem Tier mancherlei und nicht beliebiges und in beliebigen Grenzen zugnglich. Seine Art zu Sein, die wir das Leben nennen, ist nicht zugangslos zu dem, was auch noch neben ihm ist, worunter es als seiendes Lebewesen vorkommt. [] Das Tier ist in seinem Umwelt in der Dauer seines Lebens wie in einem Rohr, das sich nicht erweitert und verengt, eingesperrt. (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 292.)

8 The animals poverty is not a dispossession of a world that it would have put in question. On the contrary, it is poor in the sense that it cannot question but remains confined and immured in its own sphere of life. Certainly the animal is constituted as a movement towards something it doesnt have: surely it is a drive (Trieb) stemming from a lack. But the aim (Wozu) of the animals drive is merely its own being: if the human poverty is the desolation of the world, the animal poverty ends up by being a hollowness of the self. The drive that determines the animal life as such is a movement. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger deploys a long analysis which aims at describing the specific character of the animal drive. Right from the start, he dismisses two classical interpretations of the animal movement, namely the mechanism and the vitalism, which both explain the animal life by an exterior principle. For Heidegger, the animal movement is a self-movement: essentially a capability of sustaining oneself thanks to its environment. Heidegger describes it by distinguishing it form the artefacts (poioumena), on the one hand, and from man as a fabricant-creator (tekhnites), on the other hand. The animal is capable (Fhig), whereas the tool is useful (Dienlich)20, and man, as Being and Time has established, is an ability to be (Seinknnen). Because the tool is useful for [something else], one could call it heterotelic, whereas man, even for Heidegger, is capable of a teleological action. The animals are neither heterotelic nor teleologic but what we could call autotelic beings: they have no other telos but their own being, but their being is, indeed, an end (Wozu), in relation to which the animals become capable of various actions. Heidegger acknowledges that Capability implies this intrinsically into itself.21 The animal beings intrinsic movement back towards itself shouldnt be understood as an Iness (Selbstheit), but the capability still has a self-like character. Heidegger explains that this self-likeness has nothing to do with a self-consciousness or any other form of a selfness, but it is just a relation to oneself where the animal belongs to itself (gehrt sich) and its being is a being proper to itself (sich-zu-eigen-sein)22 . The animal has no authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) such as the one that pushes the Dasein towards its possibilities: but it relates itself to its proper being (Eigentum) and this gives it a proper character (Eigentmlichkeit) determining its reality. Such an auto-movement, where the living being is its own end, so that its movement is its activity of auto-appropriation, must be understood against Heideggers readings of Aristotle: here I refer to his article of 1939, Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis. Aristoteles, Physik, B.1. In this text we also find a description of fysei onta, of natural beings. According to Heidegger, Aristotles fysei onta are kinomena, moving things or mobiles, and their mobility must be understood as a manner of Being, which is here interpreted as a
20 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 52. 21 Fhigsein darin liegt dieses sich in sich selbst. (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 339.) 22 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 340.

9 kind of a presencing (Anwesung)23 . The being of the animals, like of the other natural things, is their movement of coming to be, of coming to presence, of showing themselves such as they are. Their being is a kind of a creative tautology where being is its own becoming: where being is a transitive verb which equals its own presencing. Heidegger understands the kinesis characteristic of the natural beings being in the framework of Aristotles Physics24 . The kinesis as being is not a movement from a place to another but the movement as transformation. Heidegger depicts it as a movement on place towards the proper place of each thing, for it is a change (Umschlag) thanks to which a being goes towards itself: something determined by fysis not only stays with itself in its movedness but precisely goes back into itself25 . This interpretation of the proper movement of a natural being as an Umschlag has several interesting consequences. First, via negativa, we see that the movement which determines the living being in its being follows none of the two most usual interpretations: it is neither entelecheia nor psykhe. To be more precise, Heideggers interpretation of metabole as Umschlag aims at getting beyond entelechia and psykhe in order to articulate their essence. So, the natural beings coming to be is its entelecheia on the condition that the entelecheia be understood as an en-telei-eksei, having-itself-in-its-end (Sich im Ende-Haben)26 . In other words, the entelecheia shouldnt be seen just as the realisation of possibilities that were previously virtual and that become gradually actual, because such a processus actually doesnt permit the apparition of anything new. Instead, the things entelechia is the thing seen form its end: the appropriation of what it has become or, so to say, its history or its biography. Furthermore, if Heidegger ends by examining the natural beings ownmost movement in terms of the The Physics instead of On the Soul, its because the principle of the psykhe has gradually lead to spiritualist and vitalist hypostases, on the one hand, or to a simple principle of autonomy, which reduces living to its quasi-digestive functions of maintaining-oneself and sustaining-oneself27 . When the psykhe is referred to the Umschlag, it is on the contrary opened towards changes brought up by experiences. So, the animal is a moving thing whose ownmost movement is a kinesis understood as Umschlag. The word Umschlag is a truly thinking word that designs several things: 1. a sudden change and a turn; 2. an envelop; 3. a stroke which evokes the action of striking and the impression that results form such a movement (like when one strikes money). The Umschlag designs an entire movement of formation (Bildung) or, as Philippe Lacoue23 Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis. Aristoteles, Physik, B.1, p. 259 (331)., in Wegmarken. (Tr. Thomas Sheehan, On the Essence and Concept of fysis in Aristotles Physics B, I, in Pathmarks: the original page numbers are indicated in the translation). 24 Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis. Aristoteles, Physik, B.1, p. 240 (312). 25 [] was dergestalt durch die fysis bestimmt ist, bleibt in seiner Bewegtheit nicht nur bei ihm selbst, sondern es geht, indem es gem der Bewegtheit (des Umschlagens) sich entbreitet, gerade in es selbst zurck. Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis. Aristoteles, Physik, B.1, p. 252 (324). 26 Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis. Aristoteles, Physik, B.1, p. 282 (354). 27 Cf. also Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, p. 206-207 (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1988 (1980) (Vorlesung 1930-1931)).

10 Labarthe might say, of onto-typo-logy28 , only applied on particular beings and not on being itself. The Umschlag is the entire movement of impressing a form on a being whose ownmost being is not a passive material but a capacity of transformation. Now, supposing that the constituting movement of the fysei ontas and hence of the animals is this Umschlag, what strikes the creature and what is the form it acquires in this way? Heidegger underlines very clearly that the stroke that draws the form of the living being doesnt come form an exterior will. Such would be the case of artefacts, products of a human tekhne that imposes an exterior telos on the thing understood as a simple hyle. Thats why, in Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis as well as in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Heidegger distinguishes very clearly between the natural beings and the artefacts: only the first have the principle of their movement in themselves. But the strokes that give form to the animal dont come from the inside, either, as if the animal were just a realisation of a program like when one thinks that the entelechie is just a realisation of pre-determined possibilities. The strokes that form the animal are the points where the animal hits the exterior world: not an exterior rational will but simply the presence of its relatively contingent environment. The animal touches its environment, and simultaneously its environment touches it in return: the Umschlag is this twofold touch or stroke which forms the animal, as if it built its envelop. In other words, the stroke that forms the animal is an experience, such as the one Rilke named a risk (Wagnis) and which consists in exposing oneself to a danger and bringing oneself into play29 . Since it touches its environment, the animal turns back onto itself. The animals kinesis and the resulting animal way is its drive towards this turning point and its retreat back towards itself. The animals ownmost movement, its specific kinesis or its coming-tobe is this way outwards and inwards, and the animals form is the track drawn by this movement. Let us examine more closely this movement through which the animals form is constituted, so to say, by an external and an internal surface. In its movement outwards, the animal touches its environment. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Heidegger names the kind of a being that can touch the animal its disinhibitor (Enthemmung). Less than a sign, the disinhibitor is nevertheless what makes sense to the animal. The disinhibitor breaks the animals originarily closed and inhibited way of being by opening its environment, even if the animals comportment towards this openness rests a simple stupefied captivation (Benommenheit) (below, I will return to the question of the specific sense of the animals captivation). Following Jakob von Uexkll, Heidegger considers that an animals disinhibitors constitute its environment. The environment is not a space in which the animal might meet various disinhibitors, but the whole of its disinhibitors are its environment and, as such, the points that form its outline or the circle in which the animal moves. An animals life is its
28 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typographie, in Agacinski, Derrida et al., Mimesis des articulations, Paris, Flammarion, 1975. 29 Wozu Dichter?, p. 275-276 (257-258).

11 incessant relation with an environment unfolded by its disinhibitors: its prey and its predators, its sexual partners and its nesting places. The circle of these beings determines the animals ownmost finitude or, rather, its limitation (for it doesnt open towards possibilities but stops on the verge of various realities). There is no common world, but each animal has its own living circle, and even if such circles can be superposed, they cannot communicate. The disinhibitor also engages a movement inwards: it returns the animal onto itself and starts the constitution of the animals proper character (Eigentmlichkeit). When an animal meets its particular disinhibitors, they regulate it in return and draw its form. This is how the animals figure (Gestalt) is determined by the way it surrounds itself by its disinhibitors30 . This is of course a kind of a circle: the animal is regulated by what it is capable of, and it becomes capable of what regulates it. Yet the circle is not vicious, since the relation between the disinhibitors and the regulated form of the animal is characterised by a temporal gap during which something happens, and a slowness during which something grows. When the animal moves within a circle of its disinhibitors, it neither simply adapts itself nor does it create its world. The disinhibitors dont appear quite as freely and definitely as the strokes of destiny who form mans being, but they still permit that a certain hasard or chance for the least a presence or an absence of such and such possible disinhibitor modifies the animals development. The animal lives by taking its place, and it takes its place by keeping its disinhibitors open: this is what Heidegger calls the opening drawing of an environment. When the animal surrounds itself and draws the outline of its environment, it engages itself in a fight: living is precisely a fight for this environment (Leben ist gerade das Ringen um diesen Umring31 ). A fight implies a pain (Schmertz), and following an entire romantic tradition Heidegger says: everything that lives is painful [] everything that lives is capable, that is to say good. But what is good is painfully good.32 But what is pain? Pain tears and draws. It is the tearing. But it doesnt split in parts. It cuts and tears apart, but so that it simultaneously keeps together and collects everything. [] Pain is the dif-ference itself.33 In other words, the pain is the opening of the fundamental trait of a world: in Die Sprache it is a human world, but it acts in an analogical manner in the animals case, where the opening of a world hurts, because it demands a fight in order to keep the environment open, and because at the same time it draws the form of the animal: engraves and impresses its figure. Only the animals figure, as well as its environment, shouldnt be understood in a spatial or, rather, in a static sense, as if the trait were an exterior outline. The animal takes its place and acquires its figure above all in a temporal manner, and
30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 371. 31 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 371. 32 Heidegger: Die Sprache im Gedicht, p. 62, in Heidegger: Unterwegs zur Sprache (Gnther Neske, Stuttgart, 1993 (1959)). 33 Die Sprache, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 27.

12 thats why the best description of the animal figuration is what Heidegger, in Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis, calls the rythme, rythmos34 . The rythme is the articulation, the impression, the constitution of the figure of a living being understod primarily in a temporal manner. Rythme is the rythme of steps opening a path, the track left by the chances and the hasards of a singular life. Rythme is the form understood as a movement, or should I say as the biography of a living being. And understood in this way, the living being is above all a capacity of transformation.

The animal senses Heideggers animal is incapable of truth, and yet it prawls round about it. What is exactly its relation to truth? What does it see? Does it see us? One might have the impression that the animal penetrates into the opening (das Offene) as which aletheia happens35 . Also certain commentators of Heidegger in particular Michel Haar have thought that the animal dwells on the Earth of the Geviert and nests in the crypt of the fysis kryptesthai filei: in other words, the animal would belong to the retreat characteristic of the truth36 . However, I think that Heideggers animal never really penetrates into the opening of truth nor does it dwell in it. At most, it traverses the opening, not by crossing it (like a hare running across a field) but by piercing instantly the truths dimension (like an arrow coming from another dimension). We can walk on the Earth, just like the peasant who is its sole genuine inhabitant: not the animal. In return, man cannot enter into the animals environment. So to say, it remains an inhabitable wilderness in comparision with the habitable Earth. The animal and its environment remain absolutely secret for man. In order to circumscribe the animals peculiar secrecy, Heidegger quotes poetic descriptions of the animal face that he finds in Rilkes and Trakls works: they have been lucky enough to surprise a glimpse of an animal face (Antlitz37 ) that seems to be gazing upon the clearing. Why precisely a face? Because it looks: it is not only seen, but it sees and seems to pierce the truths opening, somewhat like Rilkes animal, who sees the opening with all eyes38 . The point is not that all animals would have a face to look nor eyes to see, but that in a way or another, any animal as such has an active relation to its surroundings. The animal is secret: not

34 Vom Wesen und Begriff der fysis, p. 265 (337). 35 The opening, das Offene, being the name Heidegger gives to the most originary truth, cf. p. ex. Parmenides, GA 54. 36 Michel Haar, Le Chant de la terre, p. 126-127. 37 Face, Antlitz, is the word generally used by these poets and analysed by Heidegger. Cf. Parmenides, p. 228. In Unterwegs zur Sprache, Heidegger presents the animal figure (Tiergesicht) as the prefiguration of the savages face (Antlitz des Wilds), op. cit. p. 44. 38 Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene (Rilke, Die Duineser Elegien, Die achte Elegie), also cited in Parmenides, p. 227.

13 because of its appearance nor because of its appearing but because something appears to it, and we cannot know what39 . Heidegger practically defines the animal as what cannot have any relation to the truth and criticises Rilke violently for attributing an opening to the animal. Instead of the truths opening (das Offene), the animal lives notwithstanding in a certain openness (Offenheit) which is determined by the way the animal is captivated (benommen) by its environment: The captivation of the animal therefore signifies, in the first place, essentially having every apprehending of something as something withheld form it. And furthermore: in having this withheld form it, the animal is precisely taken by things. Thus animal captivation characterizes the specific manner of being in which the animal relates itself to something else even while the possibility is withheld form it [] of comporting and relating itself to something else as such and such at all, as something present at hand, as a being. And it is precisely because this possibility apprehending as something that to which it relates is withheld from it, that the animal can find itself so utterly taken by something else. But this captivation shouldnt be interpreted as a kind of a rigid fixation on the part of the animal as if it were somehow spellbound. Rather this captivation makes possible and prescribes an appropriate leeway for its behaviour, i. e., a purely instinctual redirecting of the animals driven activity in accordance with certain instincts in each case.40 The captivation implies at least that the animal has points of contact with the world, and they are neither truthbound openings nor simple mechanical juxtapositions. Furthermore, the animal is the tracing of such contacts. I propose to interpret Heideggers idea of captivation as a deepening of a principle of senses, such as it is presented in Aristotles On the Soul. According to On the Soul, the sensitive soul is the distinctive feature of the animal, in difference of the plant soul (who only digests) and the human soul (who also thinks). The first characteristic of an animal is sensation [] the first essential
39 Because the face is where one sees the reserve of the other, it is what most disquiets us: as Bernhard Waldenfels would say, Das fremde zeigt sich, indem es sich uns entzieht. (Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phnomenologie des Fremden 1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am main, 1997, p. 42.) 40 Benommenheit des Tieres besagt also einmal: wesenhafte Genommenheit jeglichen Vernehmens von etwas als etwas, sodann: bei solcher Genommenheit gerade eine Hingenommenheit durch Benommenheit des Tieres kennzeichnet also einmal die Seinsart, gem der dem Tier in seinem Sichbeziehen auf anderes die Mglichkeit genommen ist oder, wie wir sprachlich auch sagen, benommen ist, sich dazu, zu diesem anderen, als dem und dem berhaupt, als einem Vorhandenen, als einem Seienden, zu verhalten und sich darauf zu beziehen. Und gerade weil dem Tier diese Mglichkeit, das, worauf es sich bezieht, als etwas zu vernehmen, genommen ist, gerade deshalb kann es in dieser schlechthinnigen Weise hingenommen sein von dem anderen. Solche Benommenheit darf nun aber nicht als eine starre Fixiertheit, gleichsam als eine Verhextheit des Tieres ausgelegt werden, sondern diese Benommenheit ermglicht und zeichnet einen eigenen Spielraum des Benehmens vor, d. h. eine rein triebhafte Umsteuerung der Getriebenheit in die jeweiligen Triebe. (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 360-361.)

14 factor of sensation, which we all share, is a sense of touch.41 Understanding the captivation as an openness characteristic of the senses explains not only Heideggers conception of the animal but also his vision on the senses question that he hardly elaborates anywhere42 . Of course, it is necessary to precise further the supposition that in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger seeks to understand what is a sense organ and how does a sensation make sense. For evidently Heidegger doesnt focus on senses in the current restricted acceptation (sight, taste, smell) but rather analyses the organs in general. But given that he examines the organs as being ways of touching the world and of being captivated by it, one can consider that he envisages any organ as being essentially a sense organ. It remains to be determined what, then, is the scope of the sensibility. According to Heidegger, the origin of the animals contact with the world is its drive or capacity. The organs have no independent character but are entirely possessed by the animals capacities (or, as Heidegger puts it: the organism doesnt see because it has eyes, but it has eyes because it can see43 ). The capacities dont follow any predetermined plan but produce their own rule, in the two senses of regulating the animals surroundings and the animal itself44 . When it comes to the animals surroundings, the rule determines what kind of disinhibitors make sense to this animal and eventually provoque its activity, in other words, how its environment opens to it. And because the disinhibitors can incite the animal to act, they determine the animals behaviour45 . Heidegger defines behaviour precisely as a non-reflective retention or absorption by which the animal remains with itself: the captivation is the animals being-with-itself46 . This is how the captivation opens a twofold dimension of sense. The sense is first the point of contact between the animal and its world: we will soon see how this point spreads out as a whole dimension of the sensation. Secondly the sense is what makes sense to the animal in the movement where the sensing capacity bends back on itself and,
41 Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 2, 413 b. (tr. W. S. Hett, Harvard University Press, Cambridge / London 1995 (1936). 42 In his article Pulsion and perception, Renaud Barbaras severely ciriticises Heidegger for having excluded the animal from the sphere of the perception (e. g. p. 15). Now, for Heidegger, the perception, Vernehmen, points already at the direction of the reason, Vernunft (cf. e. g. Sein und Zeit, 7 B, p. 34), and most of his analyses on appearing end by treating various guises of logos (speech, sign, art work, and even the thing). He gives another name captivation, Benommenheit to the animals relation to its environment precisely in order to avoid the postulation of an animal reason. However, unlike Barbaras, I dont think that such an exclusion of the logos reduces the captivation to a mere point of discharge with no internal difference: the captivation is not a rigid, quasi-mechanical fixation but an incessant activity of redirecting the senses. 43 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 319. 44 Das Fhige dagegen untersteht nicht einen Vorschrift, sondern es ist selbst regelmitbringend und regelnd. (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 333.) 45 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 345. 46 Das Benehmen und seine Weisen sind keine Strahlen, die auslaufen nach und das Tier in Bahnen vorlaufen lassen, sondern das Benehmen ist gerade ein Ein-behalten und Ein-nehmen, und zwar ohne Reflexion. [] Wir kennzeichnen das spezifisch tierische Bei-sich-sein [] diese Eingenommenheit des Tieres in sich, darin alles und jedes Benehmen mglich ist, als Benommenheit. (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 347.)

15 in a certain narrow frame, becomes capable of modifying itself. Thus the sensation and the action are inseparable. Let us have a closer look on the point of contact between the animal and its world. We already know that the animals capacities are all rooted in its specific way of being: its poverty-in-world which constitutes the animal as a drive towards the world. Hence its capacities are different ways of seeking and exploring its environment: this is how it is essentially capable of being in its environment. If the capacities dont follow any predetermined plan but produce their own rule, it is precisely because the animals senses dont just endure their environment but actively respond to it. Heideggers animal neither adapts itself to definitely given surroundings nor does it create its world. The relation between its drives and the particular character of its factual environment is a response in the sense that its sensations are a synthetic activity that goes on unceasingly between the animal and its environment. Thus the animals contact point with its environment is really no point but the entire spacing of such a synthesis. Heidegger describes the point of contact between the animal and its environment as being stunning, dizzy, numb. The very point of sensation is numb, because it is an immediate contact with an immediate presence. It lacks the protecting distance opened in the reduplication, that characterises the representation and the reflexion, as well as Heideggers as such. But even numb, the captivation is a relation to the environment and what is more, a relation of openness for (Offenheit)47 . The animal has a kind of an openness, that is neither open nor closed, and that is therefore not an opening (das Offene)48 , but which nevertheless leaves it sensible to its surrondings. The animals sensation is benumbing in the sense that it confirms the presence of a being without recognising it as a being. Instead, there is another kind of a reduplication, a confirmation of the fact of the contact, thanks to which the animal senses that it is sensing. Heidegger stresses that the animals contact with its environment is not just an opening towards the world but a return back onto the animal, and the captivation is precisely this return path, which forms the animal. The return path not only in-forms the animal of its surroundings but straightly forms the animal itself, in other words, the captivation is at the same time the animals contact with the world and the worlds contact with the animal. In this movement, the animals sensation makes sense to it and litterarily becomes its sense, finally its sense organ. Man has an opening, that is to say, he relates himself (verhaltet sich) to the truth. The animal has no relation nor opening, it only behaves itself (benimmt sich) in contact with an openness. What is the animals openess? A pure sensation without reflexion, a regard without words and without images? Or, as Kant might put it, an intuition without concept: a
47 Das Tier steht als solches nicht in einer Offenbarkeit von Seiendem. [] Allein, dieses Nichthaben von Offenbarkeit des Seienden ist als Genommenheit der Offenbarkeit zugleich eine hingenommenheit durch Wir mssen sagen da die Benommenheit und das Benehmen eine Offenheit zeigen fr (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 361.) 48 Parmenides, p. 237.

16 blind glance? I think that Heideggers fierce critique of Rilke also implies a fundamental, even if limited accord with the latters understanding of the animals opening. Heidegger agrees with Rilke as far as the Creature of the Eighth Elegy sees an entire horizon of being, and not just disparate things. The animals sensation is not entirely dispersed but it opens a sort of a horizon: it stands within an openness constitutive of an environment. The disagreement turns on the exact character of the horizon. According to Heidegger, Rilkes opening names his interpretation of being as nature and nature as life, which Rilke would understand in the ancient sense of fysis and zoe49 . Rilkes nature would be the great il-limited whole of everything, the dimension of the risked beings multiple mutual relation50 , finally the risky balance of the pure relation51 . Such would be the world as a co-presence of beings, as the primary space Rilke calls Weltinnenraum52 into which the Creature looks with all eyes and where it vanishes, free, like in pure light. Why does Heidegger turn against this conception of the animal opening, which seems so close to his own conception of the animal senses, that are riveted to the world? First, Heidegger considers that Rilkes interior space of the world is is the horizon of the animal rationale, not of the true, secret animal. Rilkes interior space of the world would be the common, general space and not a particular environment, like the one described originally by Uexkll. What is more, Heidegger takes fairly preposterously the pure space (of eternally blossoming flowers) practically in the sense of the modern natural sciences. But notwithstanding the fairness of heideggers reading of Rilke, his point is clear concerning the animal. Heideggers animal cannot run into a common world but it is captivated by determinate things corresponding to its capacities. These things are not situated in a general space: they open up the animals environment and are its sole extension. Secondly, Heidegger observes that Rilkes Creature stares in pure space because nothing stops its regard, nothing is uncanny or unaccustomed, nothing makes it turn back towards itself. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the animals regard is not free but riveted to a quite limited set of things. Furthermore, the thing that captivates the animal isnt just its liberation but also its hindernis. And because the animals environment is its limitation it must turn painfully back towards itself. The point of contact is also the uncanny border which returns the animal back onto its own being. Rilkes animal seems to run into a pure space, and its regard on the world is instantaneous: it would never turn back on itself. Heideggers animal is, on the contrary, constituted by this return on itself: this propriety which means that it senses that it senses, that is has experiences and, this opens it for its
49 In dem hier gebrauchten Wort Natur schwingt noch der Anklang an das frhere wort fysis, das auch der zoe gleichgesetzt wird, was wir mit Leben bersetzen. (Wozu Dichter?, p. 274.) 50 Das Offene ist das groe Ganze alles dessen, was entschrnkt ist. Es lt die in den reinen Bezug gewagten Wesen als die Gezogenen ziehen, so das sie vielfltig zueinander, ohne auf Schranken zu stoen, weiterziehen. (Wozu Dichter? p. 280.) 51 Wozu Dichter? p. 278. 52 Parmenides, p. 232.

17 primary temporality. The animals temporality is by no means constituted by its relation to its death: it is just the slight retard of the animal in relation to itself: the drawing of the trace of the animals experience. Such would be Heideggers conception of the animal sensation. For him, the animal senses are the points at which it is captivated by its environment. These are no simple contact points, which would truly nail the animal into the pure instant, where the animal would perish. Instead, the sensation opens up a whole dimension of active syntesis, thanks to which the animal opens up its singular place and time. The animals being is conditionned by the animals experience: a sensible experience understood as the openness of the sensible conditions of the experience (space and time), and not as a distribution of five (or any number of) senses. The conditions of the animals sensible experience are not the abstract space and time (that Rilkes animal is supposed to meet with an instantaneous regard), but the openness of the animals ownmost, particular place and duration. Heideggers animal takes place actively precisely by opening a spatiotemporal dimension which is its own, particular environment: a determinate place and a determinate time, which condition its determinate senses. This is not a truths opening but it is a true openness, a manner of seeing the world. The animals openness is its ownmost sensible experience, a true experience to which we have no access because no words correspond to it. The animals openness is its secret that Heidegger wanted to protect: a true secret precisely because another beings sensible experience is what we never can share.

Living with the animal Two points of indecision determined Heideggers relation to the animal: the first one concerned its relation to the truth, the second one its place in the ethical community, given that it lives with us but doesnt co-exist with us, as Heidegger says in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: Let us consider the case of domestic animals as a striking example. [] We keep domestic pets in the house with us, they live with us. But we dont live with them if living means: being in an animal kind of way. Yet we are with them nonetherless. But this being-with is not a co-existing, because a dog does not exist but merely lives. Through this being with animals we enable them to move within our world. We say that the dog is lying underneath the table or is running up the stairs, and so on. Yet when we consider the dog itself does it comport itself toward the table as table, toward the stairs as stairs? All the same, it goes up the stairs with us. It feeds with us and yet, we dont really feed. It eats with us and yet it doesnt really eat.

18 Nevertheless, it is with us! A going along with, a transposedness, and yet not (ein Mitgehen, eine Versteztheit, und doch nicht).53 Of course, questioning the animals place in the ethical community doesnt mean looking for an animal politics or an environmental ethics: these questions are certainly very important, but they demand factual political decisions that dont belong to the scope of Heideggers undertaking. Instead, one can examine Heideggers originary ethics54 and try to understand what is the living with that determines our relation to foreign species. It is not a co-existing (Mitsein) that determines the human existence in any finite community and, beyond that, between finite communities. The living with is a co-existing that is not a co-existing; and when a living being moves within our world, it has a world without having it. The animality as such is this movement on and beyond the threshold of existing and having a world: and the living with conditions and questions the borders of any coexistence as such. For Heidegger, the co-existence is determined by the logos (or speech), whatever be its mode of appearing. It can be the non-proper gossiping (uneigentliche Gerede), the poets word that calls the divine name, or the thinkers word in translation. In each case, the logos opens a dimension of truth and constitutes man as a capacity to hear and to say. The animal, says Heidegger, has no relation to the as such that constitutes truth, and thats why it has no logos55 . Quoting Aristotle, Heidegger specifies that the animal only has vocal utterances, phon, or noises, which have no sense nor, consequently, a possibility of sharing a sense56 (Sinn und Mitteilung). Given that the hearing is according to Heidegger the very condition of possibility of speech57 , can the animals noise, its squeal, speak to us: call us, touch us, be adressed to us? Hegel, for instance, calls the animals vocal faculty a marvel where the animal subjectivity, its souls movement, is expressed and presented by itself as a free vibration: this would even be a moment of transition between the sensitive and the thinking soul58 . From Heideggers point of view, the animal might well express itself and its sentiments in its voice, yet it could not be heard by man because the essence of the speech is not the autoexpression but a possibility to share a sense. Man doesnt hear what the animal says to him (and we arent in the world of the fables). The situation would be different if the animals squeal appeared to man as a silence. For as Heidegger says in Die Sprache, there is an originary silence which calls and names, and such a silence is the very contrary of a senseless squealing: it is language itself understood as a calling to name.
53 54 55 56 57 58

Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 308, tr. slightly modified. Heidegger names the originary ethics or arche-ethics in Brief ber den Humanismus, p. 353 (187). Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 360-361. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, p. 444. Sein und Zeit, p. 163. Hegel, Enzyklopedie II, 351 & Zusatz (Werke 9, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main,1986).

19 So to say, a silence is filled with a promise of sense, it is a petrified wave of pain of a language about to burst out. But the pain Heidegger is describing here cannot be any individual pain (nor joy, for that matter), for any expression of an individual sensation is doomed to remain a senseless cry and a shout59 . The petrified wave of pain is the distress provoked by the drawing of the dif-ference that articulates Being itself60 : only a distress concerning the sense of Being can momentarily suspend the everyday speech while listening to the silence of the essential word. Such a movement draws man up towards gods, not down towards the animals, for the gods give sense whereas the animals only make noise. Whatever the thinkers tender feelings towards a singular animal that crosses his path, in the ontological sense the animal squeal doesnt move man. Thats why man and the animal live in the same world but they dont co-exist, in other words, their relation is not an ethical one in the sense of Heideggers originary ethics. But what if, exceptionnally, mans co-existence with the animal didnt depend on logos but on a more elementary look on the aforementionned face of the animal? Such an approach would ressemble Levinas ethical posture, where the ethical injunction comes form a face capable of calling before any actual words and which, maybe, doesnt require any words. I pose this question notwithstanding the fundamental discord between Heideggers and Levinas understanding of the ethical situation, because, occasionally, even Heidegger has been stopped by a sad face of an animal. So, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he evokes the ancient motif of the silent melancoly of the animals 61 . In a text on Trakl, Die Sprache im Gedicht, he develops the motif of an animal face that stares from a blue and holy dimension62 , and associates it with the motif of a stones violent silence (that promises a word). Now, the sense-promising pain, contained on a petrified face, is the living beings pain, which is due to its burning look on the world: it is the pain of its regard (Anschauen)63 . Such a pain of the living being is reciprocal: because of the reciprocity of the pain, the living being can dis-cover and really let be the living being that each time is present with it64 . Are we entiteld to deduce that Heidegger might know of a kind of a compassion (Mitleid) that would bind together creatures that can feel pain (and pleasure)? Couldnt such a community of pain explain our almost unthinkable abyssal fleshly kinship with the animal? And could such a community of bodily life be the world that is opened at the moment of a face-to-face between man and the animal, when the living with opens to
59 (And if we associate the pain to the form of each species, the animal voice can become an expression of this form, that is to say, a typical sound emitted by such and such species, for instance the song of a lark. It is not simply an individual sound but it carries no signification either.) 60 Die Sprache, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 26-31 61 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 396. 62 Die Sprache im Gedicht in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 44-45. 63 Die Sprache im Gedicht in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 62. 64 kraft der Gegenwendigkeit des Schmerzes kann das Lebende sein Mitanwesendes in seiner jeweiligen Art verbergend entbergen, wahr-haft sein lassen. Die Sprache im Gedicht in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 62.

20 a being-present-with (Mitanwesen) which would be more fundamental than the coexisting (Mitsein), that man and animal cannot share? No. The living beings face looks with burning eyes only when it ceases to be animal and becomes a savages face, already a human face, in reality the face of the animal rationale that the poet is here supposed to name as his forefather65 . Only then, only when the animal is really a man, he has seeing eyes and, a possibility of being-there-with. So to say, the eloquent animal face is nothing but an animal figure engraved on a forefathers tombstone, a stone that remains silent so violently, as Trakl says. In sum, the animal never calls us nor does it present itself in front of man. Its fundamentally because the animals cannot speak, that we know nothing about the affects of the animals, but must just deduce them from their behaviour. Besides, according to Heidegger, the animal doesnt enter in an ethical relation with another animal either: The one animal is never there for the other simply as a living creature, but is only there for it either as sexual partner or as prey in either case, only in some form of away (weg). Behaviour as such is always intrinsically a form of elimination (Beseitigen)66 . The differents species worlds are closed one for another like spheres that can be transposed but not crossed. The animal world is equally closed to man, even though man because of his particular, questionning way of existing has an urge to follow the animal into its strange world. In order to describe this reciprocal exclusion of the animals and mans worlds, Heidegger introduces two words: mitgehen and versetzen. Mitgehen says literally to go with, and it means to accompany, to follow. In this sense, man can follow another man into his world, when he tries to understand him, listen to his words, go along the way the other one has opened. Following is a fundamental mood of co-existing and it is based on a possibility of sharing a sense. Thats of course why man cannot follow the animal that runs into its own environment: its trail has no trait of words. Instead, man can try to transpose himself to the animal. This transposition, Versetzen, evokes literally changing places, moving to another, obviously false place. Heidegger says that we can be transposed to the animals world without following it into its world, and similarly there is something in the animal that simultaneously demands and refuses a transposition. Why can the transposition be saved and yet the following must be forbidden?67 Following (Mitgehen) is the fundamental mood of co-existing (Mitsein). But one can follow only into a possible world, whereas the animals world is merely its environment and as such definitively closed to man and vice versa. Thats why man can only transpose (Versetzen) himself on the animals environment: he can imagine himself in the place of the animal, he can project himself into the other living beings experience, but this movement remains necessarily a simulation, an imitation, a weak effort of figuring out what
65 Die Sprache im Gedicht in Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 45. 66 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 364. 67 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 308.

21 the other might feel, see and desire68 . The animal experience is a sensation, and one can only imagine another sensation, one cannot share it. The transposition is mans sole access to the animals world, and yet it is doomed to fail: the transposition is necessarily a simulation, a game of the imagination which is necessarily accompanied with a certainty of its own illusory or insufficient character. For Heidegger, this possibility of transposing oneself in an other creatures place is no sign of a particular richness of imagination, but of a poverty of access to another living world. Without words, the passage between two experiences is but an illusion. Actually, this implies that a nietzschean-like compassion (Mitleid) is our only possible relation to the animals experience. It is a weak relation, where one is moved and touched by another creatures experience, of which one simultaneously knows that it is impossible for him to experience it. One only has an image, a pure wordless image, an animal face or cry, of such an alien experience: this is the image beyond logos that determines the sphere of living-with. Thus Heidegger presents the relation between man and the animal as being not only poor but actually weak. But isnt this because Heidegger examines the question form the sole point of view of the truth? So to say, he only wants to know what the animal knows, and what we know of it. But perhaps our community with the animal, the living with, cannot be explained form the point of view of the truth, because it defines a sphere of an originary justice, which cannot be explained with truth but which, on the contrary, is the condition of any apparition of truth? Lets put it in another way. Heidegger says that our fleshly kinship with the animal is unthinkable. We have seen that it is unthinkable in the sense that it is unspeakable. Precisely, no words pass between ourselves and the animal, but our relation to it is just a relation of transposition: simulation, imagination and image. Yet something does invite man to share the animals experience and to represent it. What is this unthinkable something between man and the animal? Unthinkable and unspeakable things are not just unknowable but sometimes also things that it is forbidden to say: they are taboos, things that are nameless because they are unholy and impure. Heidegger knows of such things: for him, the danger goes with the salvation and the unholiness with the sacred, and nothing guarantees a decision for the one or for the other69 . But Heidegger doesnt push on the analysis of the unholiness, and for such questions, we would better consult Bataille and behind him, Hegel himself. For a thinker like Hegel, life is a modality of Being of beings, and its logic is to persist in being: living is living on and having to live. An interpretation of living as having to live resembles the logic of the will to power that Heidegger fights as being the summum of the metaphysics. Nevertheless, let us see how the implications of an idealist logic of life might
68 According to Renaud Barbaras, Merleau-Ponty would understand the relations between the species following a similar logic of a generalised mimesis, cf. Merleau-Ponty et la nature, a text published on the Internet on < www.ac-toulouse.fr/philosophie/forma/barbaras.htm >, page 8 of 10. 69 P. ex. Brief ber den Humanismus, p. 355 (189).

22 modify Heideggers understanding of life as poverty-in-world. The living beings poverty-inworld means its drive towards its limits, where it touches and senses its world (which also consists in its sexual partners, prey and enemies) and, thus, the living being is an opening towards its world. Now when one interprets life as having to live, one doesnt interpret it as a simple will to survive which closes the living being on itself. On the contrary, the exterior world becomes the very condition of possibility of the living being, because only it can give what the living being needs in order to sustain itself. If Heideggers animal goes up until its limit, Hegels animal has to venture a little bit further into the surrounding world: it has to transgress its own living world and break into another. To simplify excessively, in order to live on, the living being must eat other living beings (or eventually get eaten). In other words, the cercles of living beings are not closed and impenetrable, and never mind if one can sense or feel another, if the very existence of another living being is at stake at the point where a living cercle can and must destroy and consume another. The life and the death of a living being depends on other living beings, the plurality of living beings is no more a simple fact but the very condition of life. On this very limit where living beings give and take one anothers life, Hegel speaks of the pain that accompanies necessarily all life. Hunger is a pain, its satisfaction causes another pain; and when the pain inflicted to another living being arouses guilt, inflicting pain becomes an evil act, that explains why on all levels, according to Hegel, life is an existing contradiction70 . Heidegger, too, describes the drawing of the cercle of life as being a combat and a painful experience, but he would never take something as elementary as hunger for an ontological factor. Heideggers animal doesnt know of its death, and when the Dasein sustains his body he butchers the beast but doesnt murder it. For similar reasons, Levinass ethical world is possible precisely because it is possible to evit murder. Hegel, on the contrary, situates the origin of the evil in the simple act of sustaining ones life: in the living-with that is more primitive than any co-existence. Bataille has shown better than anybody else how such a logic operates on the foundation of a primitive community, in particular in his description of the cult of the bear. There surely is no way of eviting killing another living being, but the origin of the humanity resides in the moment when such an act becomes a taboo: at that moment the animal is no more simply butchered but it is sacrifced. And what can be sacrificed is taboo: sacred because it is the sign of nameless bliss and shame of eating its flesh, its life. I think that Hegel and Bataille permit us to seize better the sense of the living with, that Heidegger names but leaves into a marginal position. Living with is not a simple supplement to a more essential question of the human co-existence, but its essential fundament. The originary justice consists in mans efforts to regulate his relations to the living world. Heidegger knows and complains about an actual situation which submits not only of man but even of the living being as such to the technique71 . From his point of
70 G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, p. 481 (Werke 6, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1986.) 71 Wozu Dichter?, p. 289.

23 view, this means above all that the technical rationality covers the living beings ownmost secret character: its inaccessible experience, unknowable sensation, impenetrable environment: what is unthinkable in the sense of beyond the reach of the words revealing character. With Hegel or Bataille we see that there is another secret but constitutive relation, that the technical dispositif simultaneously enforces and hides: the fleshly deed where life destroys life in order to live on, the blissful forbidden act of killing a living being. For Heidegger, such an act remains necessarily on the level of simple ontical considerations, because the Dasein is never guilty of a fleshly act but only in debt of its existence. But if living with is a constitutive part of our being-in-the-world, we might not be able to push aside the question of the animal as easily as the Dasein does72 .

72 I thank The Academy of Finland for the funding that has enabled the preparation of this article.