The book you are about to conclude, if you have made it this far, deals with animality – yet not, properly speaking, with animals. It mostly focuses on a single living being belonging to the species Homo sapiens, one who has always defined itself as different from all (other) animals. And yet it too is, clearly, an animal (it eats animals, and it can be eaten by other animals). The meaning of this book lies within this paradox of an animal that claims not to be an animal. And its not being an animal is so true that, even when admitting to being an animal (for today this sort of admission is very fashionable), it doesn't however stop being a very special animal. A cat doesn’t need to affirm its being a cat: it simply is a cat. A human being that has to state its animality is implicitly undermining what it is trying to claim. Between being and saying there is, precisely, language. The argument of this book is that ‘speaking’, more than just a means of communication, is a metaphysical machinery (what Agamben called an anthropological machine). The performance of language, as such a metaphysical machinery, severs the speaker from the world and from other speakers. For this reason, the problem of language is the real topic of this book: if speaking produces distance and separation (and the most metaphysically powerful linguistic sign is ‘no’), then the members of the species Homo sapiens are not animals, because language splits the voice that says ‘I’ from the body that produces that very voice. Language is a dualism-engendering machinery. If we are looking for human animality we should look for it in a human being who has ‘come to terms’ with language, i.e., with the radical dualism that language ever again reproduces. Human animality comes after language. In this sense, human animality is intrinsically posthuman. In an extraordinary passage in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari show how ‘becoming-animal’ encompasses all other possible forms of becoming.