Sorglose Nacht

0. “The animal is there before me, there close to me, there in front of me- I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also - something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself - it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.”

1. “Dressing oneself would be inseperable from all the other forms of what is proper to man, even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift and so on.”

2. “God destines the animals to an experience of the power of man, in order to see the power of man in action, in order to see the power of man at work, in order to see man take power over all the other living things … God gives Ish alone the freedom to name the animals … This ‘in order to see’ marks at the same time the infinite right of inspection of an all powerful God and the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language.”

3. “…nature (and animality within it) isn’t sad because it is mute… On the contrary, it is nature’s sadness or mourning that renders it mute and aphasic, that leaves it without words. For what, for so long now, has been making it sad…is in the first place the fact of receiving one’s name … seeing oneself given one’s proper name is something like being invaded by sadness.”