ABSTRACT
The comic, light-hearted animal act of today is a vestige of other activities that humans have engaged in throughout history with and as animals to define themselves as humans: sacrifices, beast mummeries, divinations; metamorphoses, transmigrations, fables; hunting, zoos, circuses; dissections, ape projects, natural histories. In these various animal acts, whether chance encounters or structured performances, the human shares space and consciousness with the beast; deep identifications and violent denegations are acted out. According to the unpredictable logic of the event and according to the rhetoric of the text that records the event, zones of contact between the human and the animal are established, and continuums or gaps in the scale of nature are defined. The project of Western philosophy has always been to find what is exclusively human in the human animal: man is the rational, speaking, bipedal, tool-making, history-possessing, incest-prohibited, fire-discovering animal.
