Two More Dogs, One Philosopher

Abstract

This chapter begins with a Clarice Lispector's story, of the Mathematics Professor. Lispector was fascinated by animals, or, more broadly, nonhuman species. Her fiction registers their presence in a wide variety of ways. Two of the stories in the volume where Crime appears, Family Ties, are named after animals (a chicken and a buffalo, respectively). The chapter highlights that of the Mathematics Professor gives a powerful, intense enactment of the indissoluble relation between animal and human. In Lispector's idiom, this relation forms the ethical core of human action. In Heidegger's vocabulary, this relation constitutes the ontological center for human agency. Management of animality comes hard. Abandonment proves to be impossible. It remains crucial for man to preserve his own animality as something hidden and undisclosable as well as captivating and open.Keywords: animality; Clarice Lispector; Heidegger; non human species