Abstract

A central thesis of Louise Westling’s highly accomplished and provocative The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language is that “human language and aesthetic behaviors emerge from our animality” . What is perhaps most compelling about her thesis is that she supports it by exploring how an evolutionary continuity between an always already languaged world and human being-in-the-world can be understood without having to employ the dangerous logic of social Darwinism or some schools of evolutionary psychology and without having to serve as yet another iteration of a naïve “metaphysics of presence”. Indeed, Derrida’s “fear of continuism” is based in fact on a “false dilemma” . As Westling writes, citing Matthew Calarco and Mary Midgley , “(to say that everything is composed of atoms and molecules is to assert material continuism, but no one would then cl ..