702021, issue 2

To Be Recognized by the Dog

Vladimir Safatle

It is one of my joys, not to be a house-owner,” wrote Nietzsche as early as

The Gay Science. To this should be added: ethics today means not being at

home in one’s house. (§ 18)

Odysseus nally arrives home dressed by Athena as an old beggar. On the threshold of

his house waited his dog, Argos. At the time of his departure, Argos was a cub. Now, old

and ea-ridden, he doesn’t even have the strength to stand upright, yet when Odysseus

appears, Argos has no doubts. He recognizes him and stands up, unable to even run

towards his master. The tears ow when Odysseus sees him old and weakened. The dog

then “goes into the darkness of death”, as Homer says, a bit like someone who was just

waiting for a re-encounter.

The dog recognizes Odysseus, but his wife does not. Even after having regained

his composure after the battle with the suitors who had taken over her house, Penelope

isn’t certain that it is, in fact, Odysseus standing by her side, the husband she’d been

waiting for. In fact, Penelope needs proof, and therefore tests the memory of he who

claims to be her husband. It is through memory that the moment of recognition will

transpire, deciding what is certain and what is uncertain. Odysseus will have to show

that he knows what his bed is made of. He will have to recount, once more, the

promises of rooting that had constituted the bed he shared with his wife. Recognition

appears here as an acknowledgment that is supported by the capacity of recall.

But to the dog, Odysseus needs to show no such thing. Beyond appearances,

Argos is the only one capable of recognizing something like the “brute being” of

Odysseus. Here’s a detail to which we ought not to be indierent. For it poses the

following question: Is there something in us that is only recognized by the eyes of what

is not human? If not even the love of the woman who had always waited was true, if

only the dog was certain, then we might wonder where such certainty comes from? For,

perhaps, he found his certainty in the trace of the animality that exists in us, that is, in

what for the Greeks is inhuman, in what does not bear the image of man.

It is ironic to think that, after returning home after many years of exile, it is

this inhuman quality that rst indicates the return to the “nostos”. Odysseus nds his

singular belonging in being recognized by an animal, that is, by a creature that is, in a

certain way, “below man.” Here, singularity is linked to precisely not being an attribute

of humanitas.

It is vital to remember this point because we are so caught up in the search

for recognition from other subjects, we so need the assent provided by other subjects

that we forget how often what comforts us, what really tells us we are at home, is

to be recognized by an animal, to be recognized by something that, after all, is not

self-consciousness. Animals perceive the animality that remains within us, they remind

us of the trace of the non-identical from which we have never been able to completely

distance ourselves.

Perhaps this is why we human beings have never been able to completely

712021, issue 2

distance ourselves from other animals. Even when domesticated, other animals remind

us of something that was left behind, though not completely, in the rationalization

process. This trace of otherness is terrifying. For Odysseus would certainly feel the

worst of men if the dog forgot him. It would be an unbearable deterritorialization not

to be recognized even by the dog. Perhaps it is for no other reason that Freud, sick and

broken at the end of his life, realized that his time was up when, due to the repulsive

smell that came from his jaw, even his dog withdrew from him. When this happened,

his reason for living was gone. It was precisely at the moment of his dog’s withdrawal

that Freud died.

Vladimir Safatle, Professor at Universidade de São

Paulo (Department of Philosophy), author of,

among others: Grand Hotel Abyss: Desire, Recognition

and the Restoration of the Subject (Leuven University

Press, 2016).

Biography