Language to the rescue of a battered collective

What the development of science and especially the multiple technical applications it has made possible, is the hope that we can cast off the moorings of our human condition. We are talking beings and, whatever the anti-speciesists say, talking is the specific trait of the human species. And this is far from being without consequences: to speak makes that we do not have any more immediate report with the real, we reach this last only through the words. Talking allows us to make present what is not present; but talking forces us to recognize an absence, a negativity, in ourselves. It is on this impossible to evacuate from ourselves — this limit — that we base our possibilities. But today we are so much at the point of sharing the satisfaction of having got rid of everything that is a limit or constraint. In the name of our individuality finally recognized, we want to free ourselves from all that would come to limit us in the name of the collective. But in doing so, it is the collective, …