and are things only a language-using animal would be preoccupied with. We assume that animals and plants are just living and not wondering what they are doing. We may wonder when and for whom the question

in. Life as elsewhere, something we have to get to, or find, or seek out.

That life has to be invaded and subjugated as though it is a foreign country, not somewhere we are already living

that life might get away from him, that it can somehow escape us; that even though we are to all intents and purposes alive, we have to arrange to annex and possess life as though it is something we must colonize, or claim, or appropriate.

‘Life, he logically opined, was what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess.’

If aliveness is an issue for us, then deadness, and all the less binary alternatives to aliveness, must also be exercising us.

aliveness in language, things begin to open up, and aliveness becomes a term of art for him.

we can use language and it can use us, and the point and not the problem is the contradiction.

There is then the language we are possessed by and that possesses us – man is the animal, Lacan writes, with his familiar melodramatic panache, captured and tortured by language