David Wills > Quotes

“The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.”
― David Wills, The Animal That Therefore I Am

“As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called “animal” offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.”
― David Wills, The Animal That Therefore I Am

“Being after, being alongside, being near [près] would appear as different modes of being, indeed of being-with.”
― David Wills, The Animal That Therefore I Am

“Alternately and/or all at once, the Socratic pharmakon petrifies and vivifies, anesthetizes and sensitizes, appeases and anguishes.”
― David Wills, The Animal That Therefore I Am

“God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn’t yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say “I am that I am” without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. This powerful yet deprived “in order to see” that is God’s, the first stroke of time, before time, God’s exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy.”
― David Wills, The Animal That Therefore I Am