Religija ir kultūra ISSN 1822-4539 eISSN 1822-4571

2017, vol. 20–21 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Relig.2017.12

The Human World as Augmented Reality: Transcendentalism and Anthropological Difference

Gaetano Chiurazzi

University of Turin, Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences
Turino universiteto Filosofijos ir ugdymo mokslų katedra
8 Via Verdi St., 10124 Turin, Italy
gaetano.chiurazzi@unito.it

Summary. In this paper, I discuss, first of all, the positions of Perter Singer and Jacques Derrida regarding the difference between humans and animals. Singer’s animalism seems to me grounded in a naturalist substantialism (since it aims at dissolving the abovementioned difference in a common genus, animality), whereas Derrida’s approach ends in a phenomenological primitivism (since it aims at grasping the gaze of the animal through an epoché of the human cultural world). The result is, on the one hand, an essentialist reduction to the One, and, on the other, the nominalist multiplication of the Many. As an alternative to both these perspectives, I share a certain “transcendentalist” approach, in which human difference appears as a capacity to form a world in the Heideggerian meaning, which increases natural reality. The symbol of this new capacity is the upright position, a certain elevation above nature, the sign of which is consciousness. I call this new capacity “diagonal,” since, like the diagonal of the square, it is irreducible to its side – to nature (the plane of immanence) –, as much as the human world of “augmented reality” is indeed irreducible to every flat ontology, that is, to an onticology.

Keywords: human, animal, anthropological difference, augmented reality.

Žmogaus pasaulis kaip tikrovės prieaugis: transcendentalizmas ir antropologinis skirtumas

Santrauka. Šiame straipsnyje pirmiausia apsvarstomos Peterio Singerio ir Jacques’o Derrida pozicijos dėl žmonių ir gyvūnų skirtumo. Singerio animalizmą straipsnio autorius laiko grindžiamu natūralistiniu substancializmu (nes minėtą skirtumą siekiama „ištirpinti“ bendroje rūšyje, gyvūniškume), o Derrida požiūrį mano esant artinantį prie fenomenologinio primityvizmo (nes siekiama sugriebti gyvūno žvilgsnį „suskliaudžiant“ žmogiškąjį kultūros pasaulį). Tad vienu atveju rezultatas yra esencialistinė redukcija į Vienį, o kitu – nominalistinis Daugio dauginimas. Kaip alternatyvą šioms dviem perspektyvoms straipsnio autorius siūlo „transcendentalinę“ prieigą, kai žmogiškasis skirtumas pasirodo kaip galia formuoti pasaulį (heidegeriška prasme), kuris tampa prieaugiu gamtinės tikrovės atžvilgiu. Šios naujos galios simbolis yra stačia stovėsena, tam tikras pakilimas virš gamtos, kurio ženklas yra sąmonė. Šią naują galią autorius vadina „įstrižaine“, nes, kaip įstrižainė neredukuojama į kvadrato kraštinę, ji neredukuojama ir į gamtą (imanencijos plotmę). Iš tikrųjų, žmogiškasis pasaulis kaip „tikrovės prieaugis“ yra neredukuojamas į jokią plokštumos ontologiją, t. y. į ontikologiją.

Pagrindiniai žodžiai: žmogus, gyvūnas, antropologinis skirtumas, tikrovės prieaugis.

Received: 14/12/2018. Accepted: 14/3/2019
Copyright © 2019 Gaetano Chiurazzi. Published by Vilnius University Press
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

1.

In the debate that, starting in the last century, concerns the critique of humanism, two tendencies can be identified: one that aims at reducing the differences between human beings and animals by effacing their specificity and flattening it into a generality that is, eventually, that of nature; and another one that, on the contrary, by opposing itself to every form of essentialism and naturalism, leads to a fragmentation of the real, to an extensional multitude of entities and individuals, but results in quite similar ethical and ontological consequences, namely in a radical egalitarianism. Two examples, in my opinion, illustrate these perspectives well: that of Peter Singer and that of Jacques Derrida.

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975; third edition 2002) aims to re-consider the belonging of the human being to the animal world and its relationships with different animal species in view of a deletion, or a reduction, of the boundaries among them. Beyond every superficial and individual difference, the equality of all living beings represents, according to Singer, a presupposition and a feasible project for an animalist ethics, whose goal is to affirm the right to equal respect of all animals. In this sense, animalist ethics is the antidote to every form of speciesism. The word “speciesism” is formed in analogy to other similar words, such as “racism”: it denotes “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of interests of members of one’s own species and against those members of other species” (Singer 2002: 6). Antispeciesism, therefore, as the position advocating the extension of rights from humans to animals, requires the overcoming of the specific differences that distinguish the human and the animal in favor of their nearest genus, which is of course that of animality itself.

Speciesism is generally legitimated on the basis of cognitive differences among living beings, such as intelligence, language, and the ability to reason. On the contrary, anti-speciesism presses for something in common. This is, as Jeremy Bentham emphasized, the capacity for suffering: “[t]he question is not, Can they [the animals] reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” Putting the question in this way, Bentham “points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration” (Singer 2002: 7). The basis of such a claim is physiology, i.e., a natural ground: in fact, only a living being with a nervous system can suffer. Suffering, however, is something completely private: indeed, how can I know that an animal, or even just another human being, suffers? This knowing is provided through analogical reasoning, which allows us to say that in circumstances similar to that in which we suffer, other humans, and even other living beings, would suffer.

This condition shows that the respect for other animals’ suffering ultimately depends on the capacity to extend one’s own feeling to other animal species, and thus by an analogical inference (a question that I consider of primary importance and to which I shall return later). This rational capacity is certainly rooted in the emotional capacity to imitate and recognize the other’s emotions, which is enabled by mirror neurons. It has been proved without a doubt that non-human animals also have mirror neurons and are therefore capable of a certain form of consciousness. The mirror neurons are a condition of social behavior and communication, that is, of culture: this means culture begins with a certain emotional perception of the self as distinct and yet, at the same time, tied to its own genus. Only human animals have this capability to a very high degree, to a metacognitive level – that is, to the level of being conscious of their consciousness, to reflexivity, to the level of language and conceptual abstraction. By invoking the universality of suffering as the basis of their ethical proposal, animalist ethics thus show a certain inconsistency between their biological ground, which should be common to all living beings, and the capacity for understanding this universal ground: animalist ethics are universal in their biological ground but inevitably human in their ethical condition. As it has been said, no animal is an animalist1: anti-speciesism, as a preferable ethical perspective, is proper to a particular species that is able to produce inferences, analogies, and thus to universalize – or, to say it in a more traditional way, which has logos. To break the barriers of the animal species, or to break barriers in general, is simply a movement of universalization: a capacity that, we can say, is typical of the human being. And here we can propose a claim that sounds clearly Kantian, referring not to knowledge, but to ethics: without human beings, there would be no antispeciesism at all.

2.

Since universalization depends on language, it really is the most interesting product of culture: a result of the capacity to abandon and abstract one’s own particularity, and in this way, as Johann Gottfried Herder said, to elevate to humanity. Humanity is a result of this elevation.

Contrary to this movement of elevation is the strategy Derrida follows in his book L’animal que donc je suis (“The Animal That Therefore I Am,” or, according to another meaning of the verb suis, “The Animal That Therefore I Follow”). According to Derrida, the human being is not something original, the center of the universe, so to say, but something that “comes after,” that goes after the animal, which is its preliminary, basic nature, and which therefore he follows. In order to show this primordial nature, Derrida makes reference to a very primitive condition: not that of a biologic substantiality, the nervous system – as in Singer’s animalism – but that of an acultural condition: nakedness.

Nakedness plays a very fundamental role in Derrida’s book. It seems to function as a reference to a condition where humans and animals are on the same level, where humans take off, literally, all that distinguishes them from the animal and makes them similar to the animal: their rationality, consciousness, ethics, mental and real habits. In a word: the humans shed their world. This strategy is very similar to the phenomenological method of reduction: actually, nakedness is the physical form of the phenomenological epoché, a “bracketing” of the world, of the clothes and habits with which we cover reality, so that a primitive gaze can be attained, a space of immanence, which is not one, as in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, of consciousness, but one of animality. In this primitive phenomenological gaze, even consciousness itself, actually, is left aside.

Derrida describes the experience of nakedness as a play of gazes in which the gaze of the animal cannot be reduced to that of the human. Or, in other words, the animal’s gaze is the gaze of the absolutely other that precedes me and which I follow, “something that perhaps philosophy forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself […]. The point of view of the absolute other […]” (Derrida 2008: 11).

This relation of gazes, as the early, primitive moment of animality that arises from the unconscious bottom of life, remains an asymmetrical play: the animal regards me and sees me naked but never in the same way I see it naked and see myself naked. The animal’s gaze represents that primitive phenomenological gaze that I can only grasp by “undressing myself,” by getting rid of my world, even of my own consciousness of being naked, since consciousness in general represents the passage from animality to humanity:

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 (Derrida 2008: 12).

The possibility that one has of calling himself by name is the possibility of the consciousness, of saying “I.” Before following this direction, however, I would like to spend a moment on some aspects of Singer’s and Derrida’s perspectives, which seem to me interesting from an ontological point of view.

In my opinion, Singer’s ethical egalitarianism and Derrida’s phenomenological primitivism end up outlining two ontologies: a substantialist ontology, aimed at identifying a substrate common to all the living beings, a unity on which to ground ethical egalitarianism, on the one hand; on the other, a radical nominalism, according to which there is nothing in common between the human and animal – namely that the genus encompassing them is only a word, which instead hides their differences and their irreducible multiplicity. For Derrida, the anti-speciesist theory is based on a re-proposal of the principal polemical target of deconstruction: identity. Actually, anti-speciesism, with its claim about a substantial unity between human and animal, does nothing but extend the field of identity, on which it tries to ground its egalitarian ethics. On the contrary, according to Derrida, every consideration of the animal has until now missed accounting for the deployments of differences, which characterize the field denoted by the word “animal.” Derrida therefore introduces the neologism “animot,” which sounds like the French plural “animaux,” written substituting the final suffix of the plural with the term “mot,” “word.” What we designate through the general word “animot” is only a name for a field where an irreducible plurality is in force, a field of differences in regard to which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a common substrate. Yet what can unite the great variety of the living world, from the amoeba to the human?

We are thus facing two different ontologies: an ontology of the one, we could say, on the one hand, and an ontology of the many, on the other. It is an ancient question – that of the opposition between monists and pluralists, which dates back to the Ancient Greek world and which has been re-proposed in several variations throughout the history of philosophy. What these philosophies have in common, however, is, in my opinion, the fact of reducing ontology to a plane of immanence. The one and the many, eventually, are on the same plane – a horizontal plane made of mono-dimensional lines – the plane of nature. To translate the question in mathematical terms: it is the plane of natural numbers, that is, of the numbers that can be counted and result in a serial, additive ontology, where the one is both a common factor of all the other numbers (such is animality for Singer) and the element that produces a multitude.

3.

We were, with Derrida, at the point where the gaze of the animal is taken in an asymmetrical relationship with the gaze of the human: the animal sees my nakedness, but not in the same way I see it naked and myself naked. What does this asymmetry mean? It is, as we said, a asymmetry introduced by consciousness, by the possibility of saying “I,” which belongs eminently to the human being endowed with mirror neurons that enable him not only to recognize his or her own feelings in others but to also have the “feel of feeling”: that reflexive metacognition that does not seem to belong to the animal due to the way they experience nakedness. Ultimately, the experience of nakedness is possible only for an animal that dresses. And the human, as a cultural animal, is the animal that dresses, precisely in the sense that humans transform themselves through clothes, habits, dispositions, and devices. To define this capacity of the human, I propose the acronym CMO, formed analogously to GMO, Genetically Modified Organism.2

Whereas a GMO is an organism whose genetic heritage is modified thorough technical manipulation, which makes it another organism, a CMO is an organism that modifies itself culturally, a “Culturally Modified Organism.” This distinction involves an important ontological difference between necessity and possibility: although an organism can undergo casual genetic variations, once its genetic heritage has been defined, it remains what it is for life. Its DNA remains always the same. However, on this alleged organic permanence, a great variety of further modifications are made possible by technical intervention in a broad sense, modifications that we can qualify as biotechnological, since they concern the bios, the qualified life, and not the zoé, the organic life: the so-called biotechnologies, which produce modifications of the organic body, should more appropriately be called “zootechnologies.”

A CMO is the instantiation of a possibility, the actualization of something that could have been different and thus could be different from how it is. This space of modifications is the space of that intentional transformability we call freedom, and that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in his famous discourse De Hominis Dignitate (a true manifesto of Italian Humanism in the fifteenth century), claimed to belong to the indeterminate nature of the human.3 By virtue of his indeterminate nature, the human is culturally modifiable; the symbols of this asymmetrical condition within the animal world are dressing and standing upright.

4.

Derrida himself attributes the asymmetry of the gaze between human and animal to the physical and properly human conquest of the upright position: “My hypothesis,” Derrida writes, “is that the criterion in force, the distinctive trait, is inseparable from the experience of holding oneself upright, of uprightness [droiture] as erection in general in the process of hominization” (Derrida 2008: 61). This movement of elevation describes symbolically the entrance into culture, which, as we have already quoted, is an “elevation to humanity”; more precisely, elevation is the proper feature of humanization, so that the locutions “elevation to humanity” and “humanity as elevation” in fact become equivalent.

The evolutionary process of elevation corresponds to the parting from naturalness, when the human animal becomes self-conscious and becomes able to say “I.” Recalling Kant’s Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View, Derrida says that the power of saying “I”

erects, it raises (erhebt) man infinetly (unendlich) above all the other beings living on earth (unendlich über alle andere auf Erden lebende Wesen). This infinite elevation identifies a subject in the strict sense, for immediately after Kant emphasizes the fact that “I” signifies the unity of a conscioussness that remains the same throughout all its modifications (Derrida 2008: 92).

The physical elevation of the human is a symbol of his transcendental elevation above the mere field of sensibility, a symbol of the unsubstantial continuity of experience: even from an evolutionary point of view, homo sapiens derives from homo erectus. Interpreting this elevation as a domination, Theodor W. Adorno ends up saying that every idealism is, in its ground, a fascism: “for an idealist system,” he says, “animals virtually play the same role as Jews did for a fascist system. Animals would be the Jews of idealists, who would be thus nothing as virtual fascists” (Derrida 2008: 109).

It is not surprising, therefore, that a philosophical counterproposal against transcendentalism assumes the form of immanentism, of a flat ontology, which is often tied to materialism and sensism. Against these philosophies, we could address the same objections Plato directed to Protagoras in Theaetetus. Protagoras’s thesis that “knowledge is sensation” (aisthesis) is quite analogous to the thesis affirming that humans are nothing but animals. But this, as Plato ironically objects to Protagoras, does not explain why Protagoras requests payments for his teaching: “while we were admiring him for a wisdom (εἰς φρόνησιν) more than mortal, he was in fact no wiser than a tadpole, to say nothing of any other human being” (Plato Theaet. 161c-d). The overcoming of this naturalistic sensism already leads in Plato to the elaboration of a new anthropology, which is sketched in the excursus about the “styles of life,” where the question is not about zoé, animal life, but about bios, qualified life. Against Protagoras, Plato aims to show that the human cannot be reduced to the unique dimension of sensation: insofar as he is able to transcend the immediacy of the hic et nunc, which is the power of dianoia, of thought, characterizing the philosopher’s life, he “takes wing, as Pindar says, ‘beyond the sky, beneath the earth,’ searching the heavens and measuring the plains” (Theaet. 173e-174a). This “idealistic claim,” far from being a way to level the real, or even worse, to dominate the human and the non-human, is a way to free them, since it increases their differences, and in so doing opens new dimensions, new possibilities: the human being does not dominate but forms a world.

5.

This is the thesis Heidegger presents in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. By commenting on this thesis, Derrida claims, rightly, that the problem of the difference between the human and the animal boils down, eventually, to the problem of saying what the world is. This question deals with the problem of the nakedness, and of the animal seeing me naked. It is this difference in the way of seeing that determines the difference between human and animal. This is neither a merely biological nor a metaphysical difference: both naturally naked, human and animal are different in that human, contrary to the animal, covers his nakedness with clothes, habits, that is, with behaviours, feelings, and ways of being that are not reducible to the biological sphere. They are, in fact, ethical, in the sense that ethics concerns ways of life (habitus in Latin), ways of being-in-the-world. As Derrida writes, the world is all that which

is meant by living, speaking, dying, being, […] as being-in-the-world or being-within-the-world, or being-with, being-before, being-behind, being-after, being and following, being followed or being following, there where I am, in one way or another, but unimpeachably, near what they call the animal (Derrida 2008: 11).

I call all these relations “pre-positive” because of their grammatical and ontological nature: something that is like a pro-thesis (this is the Greek word for pre-position) and that precedes every positivity, that is, every substance. They concern human behavior, namely what a human has to take off when he tries to become similar to an animal – when he strip naked. The condition of the animal and its point of view require “giving up” the human world.4 Heidegger, significantly, calls this inescapable relation between Dasein and world “habitare (to dwell). The use of this verb, a frequentative of habere, refers to the practical horizon that provides a backdrop for existential analytics.5 Dasein has a world: “to have” a world means that the relation with it is an ethical relation, made of ἕξεις – to use the Aristotelian word derived, like its Latin translation habitus, from ἕχειν, and which we translate as “permanent states” or “behaviours.” The human relates to the world according to specific behaviors as the modes of “being-in”: being-with, being-for, being-before, being-behind, being-after, all the relations I defined above as “pre-positive,” thereby hinting at their relational, connective, syntactical feature. These relations are not the object of vision: we cannot see them, they are not positive, like the table, the book or the sun, but are relations, syncategorems, which we can only understand and which precede every positivity, every being this or that “as such.” To have a world, then, does not mean to see this and that, but to understand the possible relations between this and that. Humans are world-forming because they work out these relations inside their vital environment, certainly more than the animal, which is, as Heidegger says, “world poor.”

6.

I would like at this point to sum up these remarks in a general theoretical framework. What is meaningful to me is the fact that the passage from animality to humanity is represented by the upright position, which also coincides with technical capacity and self-consciousness: the origin of art shows this capacity of raising oneself from the natural world by representing it in images, pictures, and even in words (Bataille 2014). Images, pictures, and words, like every work of art, are also a sort of a mirror in which human beings reflect themselves. Through this elevation, this raising, humans add a new dimension to the horizontality of nature and to the mono-dimensionality of the flat ontology. Thanks to this acquired bi-dimensionality, a new coordinate, a new line also inevitably appears: a line that connects the verticality of the upright position to the horizontality of nature. I call this line “diagonal.” This word is not chosen arbitrarily: it represents something irreducible to the coordinates that it ties, just as the diagonal of the square is incommensurable to the side – nature on the one side and culture on the other. I intend this diagonality as representative of the transcendental relation, or, in another framework, of the existential relation; as something that is namely constitutive of the human experience of reality and which express itself as a pre-positive mode of being. The diagonal is the differential trait, the anthropological difference that characterizes the human being in relation to the animal.6 Every ontology that tends to flatten the human being onto the animal, onto the level of nature, a level of immanence and impersonality, has to efface this difference: the oblivion of the anthropological difference, of the diagonal, is the condition of every onticology – that is, of every ontology of the one and of the multiple, of the denumerable. Flat ontologies, as the ontologies of objects, are in their ground digital ontologies. What a transcendental perspective introduces in ontology is precisely a principle that escapes every digitalization, like the diagonal for mathematical thought, as an element of reality that can be effaced only illusionary. The diagonal expresses the possibility of a raising above the mono-dimensionality of flat ontologies: rather, it expresses possibility itself, this strange dimension that is not reducible to the positive without being negative. Thanks to this potentiality, which unfolds in different dispositions, nature is elevated, raised to another dimension: it becomes a world, an augmented reality.

The world is augmented reality. This is the idea that I want to oppose to the platitude of the flat ontologies, in which I include both the naturalist substantialism of Peter Singer and the phenomenological primitivism of Derrida. Augmented reality is an experience of reality in which we not only perceive things in their primitive nakedness, “as they are,” but add to our perception further information through technical dipositives, such as smartphones, computers, glasses, and the like. This web of technical devices aptly expresses the condition of the transcendental representation of the world: not an immediate experience, the alleged experience of a naked animal or of a naked reality, but a mediate experience, an experience, we could say, conceptualized, increased.

The word “dispositive”7 must be therefore understood not only in its technical meaning – as a device – but above all in relation to its ontological meaning, that is, as a disposition: the diagonal expresses the whole of the dispositions that intertwine humans and reality and that unfold in concrete apparatuses, technical equipment, prostheses – that is, pre-positions, as I defined those relations that are constitutive for habitare. The dispositions are pre-positive aspects that convey a potentiality of the being-In. Thanks to such dispositions, the world appears not as a flat surface, nor as a multitude of individuals, but as a field in which every entity and every object are at the center or the end of dispositions and potentialities that tie them to other entities and objects and warp the allegedly flat surface of reality. The space of the human world is not Euclidean, but Riemannian. Such is the structure of what Heidegger calls significance (Bedeutsamkeit), the net of prepositive relations of the world in which Dasein moves and orientates, following sense-directions, with a tropism typical of moving beings. Of course, this is the reality as it is experienced by human beings: the risk of anthropocentrism – the accusation addressed to Kant and to Heidegger – is still there. However, we have to ask: why consider this only an acritical privilege, and not the sign of a real, appropriate, and critical knowledge of reality? Ultimately, it is the human who knows the history of the world and relativity, who builds bridges and makes airplanes, who can destroy but also protect animal life, nature, and the Earth. In other words, only in our world, in our “augmented reality” can we talk about suffering animals and their gaze. Only thanks to this privileged position inside the animal world are we able to generalize our condition analogically and to distance ourselves from it critically. No flat ontology is capable of this precisely because every entity and every gaze is completely equivalent to every other. If we want really to defend and respect animals, and all living beings, we have to do everything but keeping from becoming animals or grass.

In conclusion, by calling the transcendental relation of the human being to reality “diagonal,” I intend to highlight: 1) the irreducibility of this relation to immanence, that is, to the side; 2) its dispositional meaning, since the diagonal represents a dynamis; 3) its capability of exceeding, in this way, the plane of immanence, of reality, by representing it, namely by elevating it to a further dimension. The human world is an augmented reality: as Gadamer would say, it is the world of the imagination and of the image in a broad sense (which encompasses images, language, gestures, symbols, and so on), of the “increase in being,” and therefore of technics and especially of art. Art is augmented reality: reality made into world thanks to the mediation of the diagonal, that is, of human dispositions and consciousness. Hence even nature appears, as it is for Kant in the Critique of Judgement, as a work of art. This as is important: it means an analogical operation, a “seeing-as,” which is very different from the “becoming-something” of the flat ontologies (becoming animal or becoming grass). Here lies one of the basic differences that separate the flat ontologies from transcendentalism: a difference between the multiplicity of senses (that is, of the modes of being), which is at the core of analogical reason, and the multiplicity of entities (that is, of objects), in their flat univocality. As Gilles Deleuze (problematically for his own philosophy) writes: “[a] plane of immanence or univocality [is] opposed to analogy” (Deleuze 2005: 254). It is this very principle of univocality that eventually turns the manifold manifestations of reality into a serial multitude, because univocal multiplicity is not the same as analogical multiplicity.

The unity of the world, just like the unity of experience for Kant, is analogical, as we observed also in the case of the extension of suffering to other living beings: they are like humans, but they are not humans, just as humans are not them. Knowledge, imagination, and above all art, are essentially analogical, since they introduce a principle of comparison, of differentiation and of identification, of similitude, into reality, which does not itself belong to the plane of reality. They tell us that our nature and our world are not at all flat: they are more than mere reality – they are, precisely, augmented reality.

References

Agamben, G. 2009. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by D. Kishik, S. Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bataille, G. 2014. Lascaux ou La naissance de l’art. Paris: L’Echoppe.

Burnyeat, M. 1990. The Theaetetus of Plato, with a translation of Plato’s Theaetetus of M. J. Levett. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0009840x00282024

Carioti, A. 2013. Ma nessun animale è animalista, Il Corriere della sera. Retrieved from: http://lettura.corriere.it/debates/ma-nessun-animale-e-animalista/

Chiurazzi, G. 2017. OCM: Organismos Culturalmente Modificados, Hybris. Revista de Filosofia, 8 (2): 41–53.

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Derrida, J. 2008. The Animal that therefore I Am,.Translated by D. Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.

Glock, H.-J. 2012. The Anthropological Difference: What Can Philosophers Do to Identify the Differences between Human and Non-Human Animals? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 70: 105–131. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1358246112000069

Pico della Mirandola, G. 1942. De hominis dignitate. Edited by E. Garin. Firenze: Vallecchi.

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Volpi, F. 1992. L’esistenza come praxis. Le radici aristoteliche della terminologia di Essere e tempo, Filosofia ’91. Edited by G. Vattimo. Roma–Bari: Laterza: 215–252.

1 Cf. Carioti 2013.

2 I have developed this concept in Chiurazzi 2017: 41–53.

3 “Non ti ho fatto né celeste né terreno, né mortale né immortale, perché di te stesso quasi libero e sovrano artefice ti plasmassi e ti scolpissi nella forma che avresti prescelto” (Pico della Mirandola 1942: 105–109).

4 I think that in other contexts (for instance, in the Voice and Phenomenon), Derrida would have put into question the theme of nakedness itself, in the name, precisely, of what now seems to be put in brackets – the world.

5 Franco Volpi has shown that the conceptuality of these analytics is a translation (reframing?) of the main concepts of Aristotelian practical philosophy: Zuhandenheit corresponds to ποίησις, Vorhandenheit to θεορία, care to ὄρεξις, existence to πρᾶξις. All this contributes to outline the parallelism, which Hans Georg Gadamer has also stressed, between understanding and φρόνησις, i.e., the emotional intelligence that governs the πρᾶξις or the human action. Cf. Volpi 1992: 215–252.

6 On the concept of “anthropological difference” and its critical discussion, in defense of its cultural meaning, see Glock 2012: 105–131.

7 I intend this word as translation of the French word dispositive, which we find in Foucault. Cf. Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, Thaning 2016: 272–298. On this notion, see also Agamben 2009. In a lecture given at the European Graduate School, Agamben admits to being not satisfied with the English translation of dispositive as “apparatus” and to prefer instead “dispositor.” The word “dispositive” is anyway attested and has become more usual.