Abstract

It is more and more evident in the sociocultural dynamics the tendency to criticize the would-be substantial superiority of man over animal or even to invert the terms and take the latter as a being endowed with a vitality a lot more powerful than the human, which makes up for the undeniable limitations in rationality that have traditionally been the ground of the right to subject the animals to the human wants. Taking as a thread Herzog’s film, I propose to analyse this vindication of an animal vitality and even “superiority” over man because it implicates in my eyes the return to a totemic approach to existence that is completely incompatible with a historical comprehension of humanity. To proceed orderly, I divide this text into three sections: in the first one, I reflect on animality not as a biological or zoological phenomenon but as an existential determination that explains the complex relations that we have with animals and the undeniable interest that they arouse in us ; in the second section, I reflect upon the subjective approach to the lifeworld such as it appears in Herzog’s work, which contradicts the vindication of a community of being where an animal would be preferable to a person; in the third one, I dwell upon the artistic metamorphosis of some fragmentary shots into a picture with a sense of its own that, instead of showing the fusion of man and animal, shows the odd unbalance of the protagonist. In a colophon, I deal briefly with the questionable sense of all this to deepen our comprehension of animals, of nature and, last but not least, of ourselves.