Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Why Look At Animals?"
Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it.
Whoa. This guy is a profound dude. What the heck does it mean to be inside a language? And what would an animal inside a language look like? Are we supposed to be thinking of a linguistic hamster wheel here?
To say that animals are inside language is to say that animals have language and use it with more fluidity and less mess-ups than human beings do. How does this work? The key to it is that Agamben has a pretty large and loose definition of what constitutes language—Agamben thinks of "language" as any and all modes of communication.
And he's not just talking about apes using sign language. Not just the prairie dogs that have been shown to make different calls to one another depending on whether a human approaching their homes is armed with a weapon or not (true story!). Giorgio's talking about the fact that all nonhuman animals are presumed to have language, the ability to communicate.
The idea that it's only human beings who have language is just foolish. In fact, compared to animals, we're actually really bad at language. Our sign systems get us into trouble all the time. We have a hard time talking to each other—we have a bajillion different languages, not to mention a hilarious propensity to misuse autocorrect.
The implications of such claims for literary study and the study of human-animal narratives are profound. What would it mean to think about language and communication not as a human specialty but as something we share with the animals, something they might be even more at home in than we are? It might sound nutso, but it's an interesting idea to ponder.