the name of a dog

The sight of man now fatigues..We are tired of man.
---Nietzsche.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
---Kant

He would appear at morning assembly [the last Kantian in Nazi Germany] and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men.
---Levinas.

The paragon of animals-and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.

Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar photographs in the US press whenever an initiation rite goes wrong in an army unit or on a high school campus and soldiers die or get injured in the course of performing a stunt, assuming a humiliating pose or undergoing sexual humiliation.
---Zizek, LRB.

The beast. Within or without? You name it, Bob. A history of the Camps, still to be written. When did it start? The British and the Boer War? Even this desire to put things in the framework of thought, the quotes like the parentheses bars of respectability, says what, exactly, about the distance created by distinctions?

The sub-human, without mind or reason: the Red Man (Hugh Brody), women, jews...rat-like, slithering snake-like, the animal frenzy of the irrational disturbs you. Chaos, dirt, chain it up, box it in.

Name? You don't have a name.

Number, then? You have a number, don't you.

Speak, you fucker, isn't that what distinguishes you from the animals. You have a voice. We'll hear it. Rest assured. You're not even a number you sad fuck. Donald was right: "we don't do numbers"

"From the start, Western culture has not considered it evident that animals participate in the plenitude of nature, in its wisdom and its order...In fact, upon close examination it becomes evident that the animal belongs rather to an anti-nature, to a negativity that threatens order and by its frenzy endangers the positive wisdom of nature. It is this frenzy that defined madness in the 17th and 18th centuries: the animality that lends its face to madness in no way stipulates a deterministic nature for its phenomena. On the contrary, it locates madness in an area of unforseeable freedom where frenzy is unchained....

not that the animal is silenced, but man himself is abolished"

Again: the question: the attempt to brutalize the other..does this not speak of the animality-if one wants to put it in those terms-of the oppressor himself?

The great conceit: that one is somehow rational because one possesses sophisticated techniques of oppression or because one has theories of human rights! And always the same defence mechanism: we, the Americans, the Muslims, the Indians, the Zionists..are always on the right side of the purity/danger divide; it's always the other that is subhuman.