The Saint

In order to see the open, following both Rilke and Deleuze and Guattari, it is necessary to see the world for what it really is: an immanent fullness. Such a world is full, without gaps, without ‘ castration’ – it is free from the de-realising power of language. For Lacan, ‘castration’ is the distinctive trait of the symbolic, and it indicates that, at the centre of the human, lies a fundamental lack, a void. On the contrary, Nietzsche's Zarathustra is the no-longerhuman human (the human's becoming-animal) who is able to both see the world as it is (so bypassing the deforming screen of language/ castration) and – and most importantly – able to fully adhere to the world. Indeed, it is: ‘the kind of man [who] … conceives reality as it is: it is strong enough for that – it is not alienated from it, not at one remove from it, it is reality itself’ (Nietzsche 2007: 92). These are the stakes of animality: reality itself.

The problem is that we cannot find the animality of the human in other animals, because Homo sapiens exists only insofar as it separates itself from all other animals – a gesture that is repeated each time a word is spoken. There is no Homo sapiens without animalitas, and vice versa. Any human who attempts to regain contact with animality will not cease to be an individual of the species Homo sapiens. The condition of the ‘I’ cannot be abandoned through sheer force of will, or good intentions. The problem of the relationship between human beings and animals is here not an ethical, but a biological one. The first kind of problem can be solved – perhaps – with education, empathy and some form of renunciation. The latter cannot, because one's biological condition is beyond the power of the will. A good ‘I’, one who loves animals and only eats fruit and vegetables, does not for this reason stop being a subjectivity.