ON THE EVENT OF FREEDOM: For the Love of the Finite Animal

It is an ever present thought, albeit seldom confronted, that an abyss severs human and animal. Collapsed, folded in on itself, the finite animal plunged into nonbeing from which it does not turn back, but remains fallen, is not afforded death. It is mere biological life that has ceased to be. To the finite animal to which death is denied, freedom is neither given, since to be free is to approach death as my own most potentiality for being. Yet, what sort of resoluteness towards death can this be if it is not something granted, opened up, in relation to another? Is it not the animal to whom death is denied, the very same so-called animal who calls us to our radical finitude? Such questions are posed in an effort to reorient us towards another stance on freedom; a freedom as mutual letting-become which has not obscured interdependent, entangled, interspecies, coming to presence. By focusing on this jointure as the ever-renewed entanglement of beings, an event through which freedom is won or lost, I hope to give to the animal what makes possible any and all relations, an alliance of love, one that by multiplying our loves, renders us capable of acting against death itself.