Why Them, and Not Us?

What is unthinkable, about the animal, is that it could live by simply living. To construct oneself through the anthropologic machine means, as we have just seen, turning the ‘environment’ into a ‘world’. In the ‘environment’ what is perceived is always already an action – think of the seagull's reckless confidence, jumping down from its nest on a high cliff, towards the void and the sea below. Between eyes and wings, to use this example, there is no thought-interval, and therefore neither hesitation nor fear. This means that there is no mental space – so infinitely wide a space for us humans – separating a plan from its realisation, the space that distances the eye from the hand and that, for the human, never stops widening, since Homo sapiens precisely means that the hand is always farther away from the eyes. The ‘environment’ cannot even be considered as the ‘house’ of the animal, since that would imply a hostile outdoors. We often consider the den or the nest as a kind of animal home. In truth, that is an incorrect – and anthropocentric – conception. It is the human who needs to feel at home somewhere, even if just within the nomad's tent. That is because the human is the animal without an ‘environment’, forever lost in the ‘world’. There can be the necessity of a home only because one is lost in a ‘world’. On the contrary, the animal lives in an ‘environment’ that, as dangerous as it might be, is ‘predictable’ – as when the gazelle's hooves ‘announce’ the savannah, the seagull's wings ‘announce’ the sky, or the tick's mouth ‘announces’ the warm and smelly skin of the dog.