Ron Broglio and Fredrick Young

An event of foundation cannot simply be understood within the logic of that which it founds. --Derrida

Okay, we have to be honest. There are no animals. Jacques Derrida has remarked on numerous occasions about the question, or really, the question of the question, of the animal, which, lacking a subject (subjectum) can only take the call (being subjected) to/of man. Derrida has often warned (le monster) of a violent inscription of the animal that is at the same time necessary in order for the "progress" and ontological constitution of man, of the human proper. In Geschlect II, Derrida opens up the question of the animal in Heidegger, not only in order to point the conceptual ambiguity and disorder that the animal figures into Sein und Zeit, which he'll also take up elsewhere, but also to open up a critical limit-case between the animal, humanism, technics, technology and nationalism. For Heidegger, the animal is "poor in world" (welt[f]arm), inscribed into such an impossible state by means of sadness. In addition to this misfortune, the animal lacks a hand, which for Heidegger is that which allows thinking. The animal, without a hand, lacks access to tools, and thus to a technics and technology necessary for a politics. No wonder the animal is sad.

Within these preliminary remarks, there is not enough room to fully develop and expose the complex and different ways in which the animal remains on the border of so many critical discourses. Rather, we would like to turn to the question of politics, or perhaps, really, to the question of the political and how a singular ontic case of a so-called animal's death might signal the beginnings of a new spectro-conceptual modality of refiguring the question of animal no longer as that which stands over and against man, to be petted (the present petperfect) nor as that to be simply consumed, though we all need to eat something. Instead, such an ontic death of an animal in the midst of a human revolution signals a far more radical and spectral revolution, not of animals, nor of humans, but of an animality that transforms the political determination of the very ontology (as technology) that would otherwise regulate the animal/human binary in advance. We must move quickly. Modernity and the globalization of capital always lends an advance--always lends a hand. By way of illustration, we would like to examine, to return , to the case of Che in the midst of a revolution in the jungle of the Serria Maetra.

To pick up on a remark of an earlier discussion of Che and Heidegger regarding the question of the animal and revolution, in which the similarities and the limits of both C and H's (pure cane sugar, we mean) conceptualization of the animal was explored, suggested an almost a performative play of Kojeve's earlier observations regarding the left and right wing Hegelians of Hitler and Stalin. Thus, the case of Heidegger and Che was considered as the Same regarding a violent inscription of the animal, in Heidegger's hand, by means of philosophical violence and, in Che's hand, by means of literal violence, the strangulation of a puppy.

In march, along the jungle paths toward revolution, Che ordered his comrade Felix to kill the puppy in their midst before its barking alerted the enemy. In the following passage Che writes of the events that led up to his order to kill the puppy:

The question becomes, in the state of emergency where the stake of the Cuban revolution dictated silence lest they would all be killed, how to read the puppy's death? Any break in silence and the revolution is fucked. On the one hand, had been remarked in an earlier essay, Che assumes and reinscribes the hierarchy between human and animal in which the life of an animal is less than that of his men. And yet, on the other hand, there is an overidentification with the animal in which the puppy is part of the revolution and is one of the revolutionaries. For the puppy's sacrifice is in service of the revolution, and the question must be asked whether Che would not sacrifice one of his men, himself, or even a crying baby in such a critical moment? In this scenario, the hierarchy between human and animal perhaps disappears in the immediacy of death, and yet the event of death exceeds from within the foundation and institutional inscription of a revolutionary programme; one that would lend a hand to humanism. In the midst of any programme or pogrom of death, for that matter, a spectral revolution to come haunts the very foundation of any conservative gesture, of a self-regulating self inter-est of an infrangible philosophic subject. And yet, who can deny, on the one hand, in the overdetermination of identification with the puppy which binds and folds human and animal in a dangerous moment in the jungle, there remains the hierarchy between man and animal to lend itself to an abstract and circular current of equivalences in which to capitalize on the moment, to further subject space to "capital times." Now, neither human nor animal-an exchange of death, of something greater than a singular life. Transcendent ends. Something is afoot, you know: a utilitarianism emerges from ideation. A suggestion creeps along: the overdetermination that formed into an abstract equivalency, like that of money, blended human and animal while sustaining the reactive force of a human-ism. Such a sacrifice necessarily lead to one productive moment of revolution of a future that came, and that such a revolution became (though, not necessarily) for many, human, all to human.