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6 - The Artistic Beast
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 132-151
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Summary
Nulla può essere unico e intero
che non sia stato lacerato?
[Can anything be unique and whole that hasn't been lacerated?] (Pasolini 2001: 849)The Animage and the Artist
The animal is the animot. The animal is always told, imagined and represented. Although some artefacts that – to a modern observer – might appear like artistic phenomena precede the emergence of Homo sapiens, the fact is that the accomplished humanity of the human essentially coincides with the appearance of visual representations of animal life (Tattersall 1998; Guthrie 2005). The human has become itself by painting the animal. Indeed, in art, ‘we recognize two key elements: (1) an extraction from direct instrumental communication; and (2) a duplicitous logic of representation: there is what it is or presents, and there is what it conveys only in some figurative form’ (Deacon 2006: 22). Without wholly adopting a Kantian standpoint we can say that art presupposes a somehow ‘disinterested’ gaze, that is to say that a visual representation of a buffalo (for example) has no explicit and clear biological purpose. The image, that is, is not directly linked to survival, unlike a fur pelt or an axe, products with a clear biological purpose. At the same time, as stressed by Terrence Deacon, the artistic gaze implies a doubling, between that which is shown and what this ‘means’. But this doubling, in turn, presupposes an even deeper and more radical separation between the representer and the represented, the subject and the object. The anonymous painter who, in a Pleistocene era cave, traced the contours of an animal's shape on the wall was also declaring him- or herself to be different from that animal. He or she was marking a difference by stating: I am not that buffalo. In this sense, a visual representation of an object – and art in general (both representational and non-representational) – attests to the cognitive distance separating the human from the rest of the natural world. I paint; therefore I am not an animal. According to Deacon, this cognitive peculiarity of human art forms is linked to art's role as a symbolic activity: indeed, ‘art seems to have a sort of cognitive complementarity to language’ (2006: 23).
Index
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 223-226
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Introduction: Animals Do Not Exist
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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Summary
Bien sûr, l’homme fut animal; et pourtant il ne l’est plus
[Of course, man was an animal; and yet he is no longer]
(Bimbenet 2011: 22)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.
Frontmatter
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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Coda
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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Although nature resolves everything into its constituent particles, she never annihilates anything.
(Lucretius 2001: 9, I, 216–17)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.
Unbecoming Human
- Philosophy of Animality after Deleuze
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi
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- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020
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Drawing on a wide range of texts – from philosophical ethology to classical texts, and from continental philosophy to literature – Cimatti creates a dialogue with Flaubert, Derrida, Temple Grandin, Heidegger as well as Malaparte and Landolfi explores what human animality looks like, with a particular focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze.
2 - The Anthropologic Machine
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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[N]egativity is the human means of having language.
(Agamben 2006: 85)The Tick and Boredom
The anthropologic procedure through which a still non-linguistic member of the species Homo sapiens (an infans) becomes fully human consists in the implantation, in his or her flesh, of a machinery (language) that, from that moment onwards, will produce separation and dualism. Hence, it engenders transcendence: ‘man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human’ (Agamben 2004: 26). For the human to live it does not suffice – as it does for von Uexkull's tick – to have an ‘environment’ within which resources for survival, or dangers to be avoided, can be found. The human must literally get out of itself: this is the process of self-recognition, that of always-again declaring oneself human. The Heideggerian couple ‘environment’/‘world’ illustrates this movement. The tick spends its entire existence in its environment, it lives and dies within its ‘invisible bubble’. The human, on the other hand, must see itself living in the environment, i.e., it needs to step out into the ‘world’ (the space between the environments, von Uexkull's ‘surroundings’), and to affirm its humanity from this eccentric position. It is only through this doubling that the human discovers and institutes itself as a human, a separation that takes it outside of itself, therefore instantiating the schism between a here-and-now corporeality and a transcendent gaze – beyond and outside the body – that allows (or condemns) that incarnation to declare itself human. Agamben, by highlighting the fact of having a language, is telling us that, on the one hand, the human is not its language while, on the other, that it is possible – although this is a task that exceeds the reach of our thought – to imagine a human without a language. To have something implies the possibility of losing it, of being able to do without it. But this thought is also unthinkable in principle, because human thought is linguistic and literally made of linguistic entities (Cimatti 2000). It is therefore unthinkable because, if we need language to think human thoughts, it is impossible to think without language. Yet this does not exclude the existence of a vital field, independent from language. It is a field to be lived, not thought.
Contents
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Book:
- Unbecoming Human
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp v-vi
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1 - Animal?
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 24-42
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Summary
A main cause of philosophical disease – a one-sided diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
(Wittgenstein 2009: I, § 593)The Missing Animal
A cat looks at us. We begin with a common animal, one that even a city dweller, not particularly fond of animals, might know. Like our aunt's cat, or the neighbours’ dog. When we step into its house, the cat might come to greet us, brushing its tail against our legs; or it may ignore us, resting in its preferred spot, its armchair, or under a bed. Either way, the cat's life will proceed. That is because the cat's life is different than ours, often so different to be beyond our imagination – yet a life nonetheless. This is the point: it is an unimaginable life. It cannot be imagined because an abyss separates it from ours. The cat, sure enough, eats, sleeps, plays, has sexual appetites, dreams (perhaps), and finally dies – just like us, and like any other living being. But these similarities are too generic, and cannot help us imagine what living a cat's life might really mean.
The problem is not simply that the cat incarnates a unique point of view on the world (Nagel 1974), for that is obvious, and the same separation of standpoints obtains between different human beings. In fact, what assurance can we have that the person next to us feels exactly what we are feeling? The cat effectively represents a completely different way of living, of perceiving and of thinking than that of the human (Cimatti 2002a). This book explores this absolute difference – a radical difference that has only rarely, in the history of philosophy and of science, been thoroughly thought through. This difference – and now we begin to understand the difficulty of properly articulating the problem – does not simply highlight a divergence between the cat's world and the human world. This framing of the problem, which is the traditional way of looking at things, presupposes two categories: on the one hand the human, on the other the animal, each time exemplified by a different species – in this case, the cat. Now, the problem is that the cat, like the human, does not exist. There is no cat, there is only this cat, this particular living body.
8 - Beyond the Apparatus
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 170-188
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‘In sum, the ideal would be to get rid of the symbolic.’
(Lacan, L’insu que sait de l’un béuve, unpublished)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.
Bibliography
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Book:
- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 207-222
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3 - Rage and Envy
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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- 26 September 2020
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Ora, se la vita è cosa più perfetta che il suo contrario, almeno nelle creature viventi; e se perciò la maggior copia di vita è maggiore perfezione; anche per questo modo seguita che la natura degli uccelli sia più perfetta. [Now, if life is something nearer perfection than its opposite, at least in living creatures, and if therefore abundance of life is greater perfection, in this respect too it follows that the nature of birds is more perfect.]
(Leopardi 1976: 185)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.
7 - Becoming-animal
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Unbecoming Human
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Summary
The animal is a transformation disguised as an object or being.
(Valery 2010: 160)The Indian and the Horse
We never seem to manage to consider animals, including and perhaps most of all those we hold captive in scientific laboratories (Hess 2008), as simple and real living beings. We look at them, but we cannot truly see them for what they are (animality is invisible, by definition; Homo sapiens is human precisely because it cannot see the animal).
In front of us, for example, there is a dog: consider the case of Princess Marie Bonaparte – Freud's psychoanalyst friend – and her famous Topsy, an exemplar of the Chow-Chow breed. Her beloved Topsy is actually nothing but a substitute, replacing her son and daughter who have left the family house. But Topsy is also a ‘talisman’, since it bars ‘the entrance of [her] room to a worse ill, and even to death’ (Bonaparte 1994: 79). Topsy, that is, is a symbol – it is other than itself, beyond itself. A living being that cannot just be the life it is, is nothing but a substitute bound to disappoint – such as when Topsy, after a period of sickness, prefers to run with Bonaparte’s youngest daughter, or even with the maid. Freud's reply, however, is surprising, because he does not merely restate the allegorical character of the animal, but takes it a step further: ‘Actually’, he writes, ‘the reasons why one might love an animal with such a singular intensity … are sympathy without ambivalence, the simplification of life, the beauty of a self-completed existence’ (Freud, unpublished; my translation). So far, however, the human's point of view is still privileged, and the dog plays a secondary and exemplary role. But there is more, Freud adds, for there is a ‘feeling of intimate kinship, of indubitable affinity’. Now, the dog is not merely a sign, it is once again a living being of flesh and blood, with its own intrinsic worth, and with whom it is possible to establish a somewhat egalitarian relationship: ‘often, while petting Jofi [Freud's dog] I caught myself humming a melody that I, an absolutely non-musical man, had to recognize as the aria of friendship from Don Juan’ (Freud, unpublished).
5 - Becoming-human
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Book:
- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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The ‘Rat Unit’ and the Maze
The animal, the animot, is the generic living being that lacks something – typically, language. To avoid misunderstandings and accusations, especially from some animalists, let me clarify this: the fact that nonhuman animals do not have a (human) language does not entail that other forms of communication are uncommon among them. The point is not that a mouse, for example, cannot speak English – for then we should ask ourselves why a human being cannot use a bat’s echolocation system. No, the problem is not what the animal – any animal – lacks, but rather what its ‘degree of power’ is (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). It is necessary to leave behind the comparative logic that always favours the human animal, and consider every individual body in itself, and not in relation to another. The identity machine establishes that something is an x by virtue of being a non-y; however, this means subordinating affirmation to negation. On the contrary, animality means that an affirmation does not oppose anything, nor does it differentiate itself from anything: it is pure affirmation, because ‘difference is affirmation’ (Deleuze 2001a: 55). The objective is that of seeing animality in itself, and not in relation to humanity. That a trout has no language is no more meaningful than the fact that a human mammal has no feathers.
Let us return, then, to the voiceless animal. According to the anthropocentric standpoint, this amounts to a lack. So, if the animal cannot talk, we are still unsatisfied: for even the quiet animal will not be left alone by us. That silence perturbs the loquacious living being: does it mean that animals have nothing to say to us, or are ignoring us? And so, we try to teach them to speak our language – as has been repeatedly attempted from the 1960s onwards (Wallman 1992; Lyn 2012). The goal of these experiments has never been clear: to demonstrate that animals can talk like humans, or that they cannot? Either way, clearly the object of interest was never their language (Despret 2002).
4 - To Be Seen
- Felice Cimatti
- Translated by Fabio Gironi, University College Dublin
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- Book:
- Unbecoming Human
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 26 September 2020
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- 31 March 2020, pp 87-109
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Dimmi, occhio di topo
schiacciato sul selciato, dimmi:
chi guardi?
[Tell me, squashed eye of a mouse
crushed on the cobblestones, tell me
who are you looking at?]
(‘Occhio di topo’, Marcoaldi 2006)The Wolves are Watching Us
I dreamed that it is night and I am lying in my bed… . Suddenly the window opens of its own accord and terrified I see that there are a number of white wolves sitting in the big walnut tree outside the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were white all over, and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs because they had big tails like foxes and their ears were prickled up like dogs watching something. Obviously fearful that the wolves were going to gobble me up I screamed and woke up… . The only action in the dream was the opening of the window, for the wolves were sitting quite still in the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the tree trunk, not moving at all, and looking right at me. It looked as if they turned their full attention on me – I think it was my first anxiety-dream. (Freud 2002: 227)
This is one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis, known as the Wolfman dream. Freud – after long years unsuccessfully trying to break through his patient's resistances – finally interpreted it as the disguised return of the primal scene: a sexual relation between the patient's parents, which he would have witnessed around one and a half years of age. The dream's analysis – developed by Freud in painstaking detail, down to the time of day when the alleged sexual act would have taken place (five o’clock in the afternoon) – is extraordinary, but here I am only interested in one aspect of this dream to which, paradoxically, Freud pays no particular attention: the animality of the wolves observing the dreamer. Freud's patient, Sergej Costantinovič Pankejeff, dreamt of some animals, either wolves or dogs. Though Freud talks of wolves, he never really considers them as such, but treats them as ‘symbols’ of something else (animals often appear in Freud's writings (see Stone 1992; Genosko 1993; Sauret 2005; Cimatti 2016), yet always as symbols).