Jacques Derrida , L’animale che dunque sono, 2021

The animal with its diversity forces us to remember our origins and to start being human again. But what does it mean to be a human being? What distinguishes us from the animal? The history of Western thought is permeated by this powerful and often censored question: is it possible to establish a boundary between man and animal? The answer is contained in the term logos, the union of reason and speech, which adds something to the human living being that transforms him into a ‘speech animal’ and a ‘rational animal’. In reality, the difference between man and animal, conceived as an irrefutable truth, the unreasonableness of the animal in comparison with human reason, has for centuries been used by Western philosophy to justify and legitimise the sometimes ruthless prevarication of man over animal.