Animals are not others. Let us be clear about this: Unbecoming Human is neither exclusively nor mainly about nonhuman animals – like cats and jellyfish. The book you are holding deals with our animality, with human animality. Unbecoming Human attempts to delineate the still-unknown features of human animality. That is to say, all those inhuman characters that must be cut off by the apparatus (the ‘anthropologic machine’, as Agamben defines it) through which we become human, for otherwise we could neither become, nor define ourselves as, human. The double process of de-animalisation on the one hand and linguisticisation on the other, which we all must go through (for otherwise we could not be defined as properly human), produces a peculiar entity: the human psychological subject. The subject – which, as we will see, is nothing but a body referring to itself as an ‘I’ – speaks, and only in virtue of this is it indeed a subject. For this reason, animality concerns language: on the one hand language engenders the ‘subject’, on the other animality is animal (i.e., nonhuman) precisely because it is not traversed by language.

The purpose of this book, then, is that of describing the difficult – if not impossible – relationship established between Homo sapiens and other animals (and animality in general) from different points of view: those of philosophy, science, art, literature, cinema, and psychoanalysis. This relationship is impossible more than it is difficult because, ultimately, Homo sapiens simply means ‘the living being that is not an animal’ or ‘the living being that continuously expels its own animality’. However, since every individual of the species Homo sapiens is, clearly, an animal – a vertebrate and a mammal, to be precise – to be human also means to be something intrinsically contradictory. It follows, therefore, that Unbecoming Human will also deal with nonhuman animals, but only insofar as this will help in drawing the contours of human animality. When we speak of animality, therefore, we should certainly think about animals, but also – and perhaps mainly – about all those circumstances wherein something eludes the grasp of thoughts and words.